March 20, 2005 (Jimmie Johnson)


Scripture Lessons for Sunday, March 20, 2005

Philippians 2:5-11

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew 27:27-37

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; then they sat down there and kept watch over him. Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A year ago at this time, Hollywood and popular Christianity seemed fascinated with Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of The Christ. The movie was promoted by some churches and ministers as if the world were about to be changed forever.

I found it fascinating that, given our idolatry of technology, we seemed to believe that God’s kingdom was about to be revealed to us more effectively through film and images than by a real human being. Christianity, at least the evangelical flavor, was going to be coronated King Religion. The only thing that seems to have happened though is that Mr. Gibson became richer than he already was.

Hey, I believe God is a bloody warrior, don’t get me wrong. But I also believe God is the warrior who’s only weapon is love. The strength of God’s love is God’s true honor. I don’t think we believe it yet—this news of the loveliness of God. We don’t believe it because we have never, as human beings, experienced such love.

All loves we have known eventually hurt us or, at the very least, leave us. Even the rare and beautiful ones we have known. How often I have heard someone say finally in a breakthrough moment of honesty, “I am angry because she died and left me.” A part of us wants to trust God’s love and shout hooray, but we are fearful of that love’s ability to live up to its promise. Nevertheless, it is the big news of this assembly every Lord’s Day.

This architecture, this pattern of worship, this furniture called the table, the font, the pulpit, and the lectern, this sacred text, the Bible, are all glitters of God’s love for us made flesh in Jesus. They are sacramental signs of the Holy touching the human, the invisible becoming visible. A baby born among the least and to the least who would one day die as the least becomes God’s instrument of salvation. And what it cost God, we will never know; God isn’t running a tab to later present us with the bill. In Jesus, God is joining us human beings as one of us.

“God never began to love us,” wise woman Julian of Norwich preached. She understood that the joy of heaven didn’t originate on earth as if Jesus had done something to change God’s mind. She believed God’s love had no beginning, and that our beginning originated in the eternality of this love. Jesus’ death doesn’t somehow permit God to love and forgive. Rather, Jesus is God’s forgiveness and love and hope made human. This is the great and only true miracle: Jesus given to all of creation and to you and me so that God could have a human face.

I want to be very clear this morning. This week we call Holy is holy in that it is the news of a God who fuses God’s holiness to our humanity by identifying with us in the human experience of Jesus. Jesus, whom we believe is the Christ of God, didn’t come primarily to die. He came to enflesh God into the human experience. He came to make God’s love flesh and blood, to bring God’s love into the human experience of birth, risk, love, loneliness, fear, trust, hope, creativity, and yes, betrayal and even death. What I am saying is that Jesus lived and died as a human being because that’s the way you and I live and die. And the news of Christianity is that God’s robust experience of our flesh in Jesus has altered God forever in the same way love alters us forever. When we say metaphorically “he sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” we are saying that God will never forget you and your fears, you and your pain, you and your death. Because God has taken it all into God’s heart. We see that the parade that ends in a cross is the only way a true Christmas can conclude. It is the only way God can gain a human heart and face.

God’s love has no beginning. God’s love is the context of our existence. God’s love is the hope of our lives and the hope of our deaths, and the hope to which we cling in the midst of all suffering, when every parade grinds to a halt and shouts of hooray turn to boos and hisses.

I am going into Holy Week with you for the twenty-third year, fascinated by God’s imaginative love. A love so imaginative that God would come among us as the warrior armed only with love. Jesus was killed; this is a historical fact beyond dispute. But what is up for grabs is why he was killed. We, as Christians, participate in the only major religious tradition whose founder was executed by established authority. What does this week mean? This week that begins with his parade and ends with his death?

Mel Gibson’s film thought it meant only that Jesus died for our sins so that God could forgive if we could believe. Forgiveness earned by belief. But a closer look at the New Testament shows it to be far more imaginative, presenting multiple metaphorical meanings of Jesus’ death. That he died for forgiveness, yes, but maybe for God’s as well as ours. And he died for a whole lot more. He died so that there can be nothing that can happen to us that God does not understand through hands-on experience.

Here’s what his death means to me: Just as there is no joy bereft of God’s delightful presence, so there is no suffering or disease or death bereft of God’s compassionate presence. God agonizes with us; God is unwilling to exempt holiness from our creaturely pain. Jesus’ parade ground to a halt because every one of ours will too, and the only way I can trust God to get me through it is to know that God never gets over the loss of his Son, either, as long as any one of us is lost in grief and fear. Jesus is there reminding Heaven to keep watch over us.

I am going into Holy Week not with a God far away and removed from my humanity and yours, but rather a God baptized, immersed with our human experience, at the center of God’s life, heart, and memory. Wherever love is banished, wherever love is brutalized, wherever love is betrayed, wherever love is broken, wherever love has an enemy, there is God in the flesh, absorbing the pain and us until the day there is nothing but the sound of God’s loving laughter, not mocking but rejoicing in having overcome all that would separate us.

Was the cross the will of God? No, not in my thinking and believing. My belief is in God’s willingly enduring the cross armed only with love. Refusing retaliation. We can kill God’s love for that reason. The shocker is we just can’t keep it dead and buried. Where you or your loved one or your enemy is being crossed, there is Jesus. God’s love doesn’t cause the cross; God’s love empties itself through the cross into our crosses and losses and betrayals, turning his own cross into the instrument through which God absorbs any and all that would separate us from God’s love.

I trust God really for one reason. God didn’t give God’s self an exemption from a broken human heart. God’s Son didn’t play a part in a movie; God’s Son joined us all in real life and death. And that’s why this week is called Holy.

Sermon: Jimmie Johnson
Edited for the website: Georgia Brady

 

 

 


First Presbyterian Church • 1100 Austin Avenue • Waco, TX 76701 • (254)752-1665

Questions, comments, or broken links? Please email the webmaster at bgilliam@firstpreswaco.org.

Unless otherwise stated, all material contained in this web site is Copyright © 1999-2005 First Presbyterian Church of Waco, Texas. Right is hereby granted for any congregation or governing body of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to copy and use this material only as long as proper credit is given as to its source. The scripture quotations contained within are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All quotations from the Book of Confessions are reprinted by permission and are Copyright ©1996 by the Office of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (USA).