Note: the video begins with a dramatic reading of John 9 and concludes with the Lord’s Supper, with the words of institution; the sermon begins around 5:56.
The lectionary this morning brings us to John 9, in a season when we are looking at God’s word through the lens of calling and mission. Left to my own devices I would probably never have put these two things together; but I was not left to my own devices. It’s a great gift to have good colleagues, and this year I’ve been pondering the words of one of the wise pastors I know. Those words were in the back of my mind as I began preparing this message, and they quickly became my guide to see John 9 from a new angle. Let me show you:
[play sermon snippet, Emily Cash, VSF, 1/29/23]
When we talk about the ways God calls us to be and do what he wills, we have to face the fact that his calling is rarely obvious or explicitly spelled out. Given that reality, there are two profoundly important truths in Emily’s words.Read more→
Roughly seventeen years and two churches ago, I started off with a five-week series on this passage. Since it was the beginning of the year, one of those services included the ordination and installation of a new elder. That got me thinking about Jesus as a human leader of a group of oddly-assorted people on a trying journey through challenging circumstances. It’s not a new idea, to be sure, but it wasn’t an angle I had spent a lot of time considering; and the more I thought about it in the light of Matthew 4, the more I came to think that if we want to learn about leadership from Jesus, our passage this morning is where we must begin.
When I say that, you might be looking back down at the text and wondering where I’m getting that, and the answer is: not in the text. It’s in the context. Look what comes next in this chapter. First, John the Baptist gets thrown in prison, prompting Jesus to move to the cities around the Sea of Galilee, start his preaching career, and recruit his first disciples. Then we see the early success—at least as those disciples probably saw it—of Jesus’ preaching career, as he starts drawing large, adoring crowds. That is followed in turn by the first great act of leadership of Jesus’ career, the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed in part to force those adoring crowds to make a choice: either follow Jesus as committed disciples, or abandon him. People following him for the sake of the stuff he’s doing doesn’t serve his purpose at all.Read more→
The calling to preach the word of God is a series of opportunities to get yourself into trouble. On the one hand, there is the recurring invitation from the Spirit of God to, as the late Representative John Lewis put it, “get into good trouble”; on the other, there are myriad chances to put your foot in your mouth and start chewing on your ankle. This is one reason why the wise preacher goes forth only with much prayer, in a spirit of dependence. Let’s pray.
As many of you know, we came to Indiana from Colorado, where I pastored a church in a small mountain resort community. The church was pretty thin on the ground in the county, but I had a few colleagues whom I really appreciated. One was Doug Stevenson, a New Zealander who had come to the US a few years before to pastor an independent congregation out in Kremmling, in the western part of the county. One day, somewhat pensively, Doug told our pastors’ group his daughter was coming to visit from New Zealand. He and his wife Ethel were eager to see her, but there was a complicating factor: she was bringing her girlfriend along. Unsure how to respond to the situation, he had reached out to a friend for guidance. His friend listened, then told Doug to put a double bed in his daughter’s room, set everything up as nicely as he could, and leave chocolates on the pillows. “Make your daughter welcome,” was the message, which meant making her girlfriend welcome too.
I learned at Regent to take hospitality seriously, both from the way the Regent community valued it and from my introduction to the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught me the great importance of hospitality in the world in which Jesus lived; but I still saw it primarily in practical terms, as one of the small graces in which and by which we’re called to live. That conversation with Doug widened my perspective, because his friend wasn’t talking about hospitality as a practical response to human need but as a theological response to the human condition.Read more→
This morning we’re starting a sermon series from the Psalms. I say from the Psalms rather than on the Psalms because there are 150 of them and we don’t want to spend three years on this; but that very fact that there are 150 makes it a challenge to figure out where to look. When starting anything, I tend to defer to the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who instructed the White Rabbit, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” But does that really matter here? Stories have beginnings, and essays—like the ones our middle-school English teachers have to pound their students through—but the book of Psalms?
Thing is, though it doesn’t have the same sort of throughline as a story or an essay, the book of Psalms does have an introduction and a conclusion. In fact, it has a two-part introduction—that’s why some ancient manuscripts of the Psalter combined the first two psalms into one. Psalm 1 operates at the level of the individual, and then Psalm 2 speaks of the community of faith among the godless nations. Both areas of focus are important throughout the book; but you can’t really do both in one sermon, so we’re just doing the first part this morning.Read more→
Oh, the sun runs its course from the east to the west
With the best of our motives illumined,
Then it sinks with a sigh in the dusk of the heart
And our virtue lies worthless as rumor.
You can be what you like if you like what you are—
We reflect but the sum of our creeds;
But we don’t seem to seize on the tenets we hold,
And they slip through the sieve of our deeds.
When we see our mistakes, we ache with regret
And the pain makes a lasting impression,
But we are stoics at heart when the time is at hand
To beat our breasts and make a true confession.
Mark Heard for the win, as usual. The poet laureate of the Christian struggle knew well that human beings are desperately in need of grace, because left to our own efforts and strength, even our best starts will not end well. This is the problem that all human religions try to solve with rules and structures and authorities and consequences; but they cannot solve it, only lessen it, because none of those things can touch the heart. Only God’s scandalous solution can do that.Read more→
Doubt’s an odd thing. It’s a grey area between belief and unbelief—between two different kinds of certainty. It can be paralyzing, leaving us unable to act because we don’t know what to do. It can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one. It can be unhealthy, especially if it becomes obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we might not know quite as much as we think we do. It can be dishonest, a pretense to disguise a determination not to believe something—sometimes, to disguise that even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt, and doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding can be an important prelude to true faith.
The problem is, true doubt is uncomfortable, like jogging in place on a waterbed. We want a solid place to stand. That’s why some churches treat doubt as a sin, as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy—which they aren’t. I think that’s also why, when kids who grow up in the church have their faith challenged hard for the first time, they so often slide into disbelief like Jell-O off a steep metal roof. Doubt is uncomfortable, so our instinctive reaction is not to engage with it but to protect ourselves against it.Read more→
After healing the man born blind, Jesus said, “I have come into this world for judgment, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” In saying that, he was playing a variation on a theme which appears in a number of places in Scripture—the section often called “Second Isaiah,” chapters 40-55, is one prominent example—but nowhere more importantly than in two psalms, 115 and 135. These are, I believe, the key for us in understanding the language of blindness and sight in the word of God. Listen—this is Psalm 115:2-11.
Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens;
he does whatever he pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak;
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear;
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel;
feet, but cannot walk;
nor can they make a sound with their throats.
Those who make them become like them,
and so do all who trust in them.
O house of Israel, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
Do you see? We become like what we worship. Idolatry produces spiritual blindness. This is what Jesus is on about: simply by being who and what he was, he revealed the truth of people’s hearts as they either drew near to him or clung hard to their idols. We don’t think of the Pharisees as idolaters, but they were; their religion—and their place in it—was their idol, and they unhesitatingly chose it over God, and so they were blinded to what was happening right in front of them.
That same reality underlies the story of Elisha and the Syrian army and God’s most remarkable act of deliverance. Please open your Bibles to 2 Kings 6, and let’s walk through that passage this morning; we’ll be looking at verses 8-23. Read more→
That’s the scale and scope of God’s plan. That’s the size of his purpose: the redemption of nothing less than everything. As we saw last week, God has been a God of deliverance from the moment our first parents sinned. There’s a popular idea that “the God of the Old Testament” is all about fire and brimstone and judgment and wrath, while Jesus and the New Testament give us a God who’s all about love and mercy and forgiveness—don’t believe it, it’s bunk. Pure tripe. Right from the first, God has been on about redemption and deliverance for those who are enslaved by sin and oppressed by death. Yes, his wrath is a real thing: it’s the wrath of the lover against anyone and anything that hurts the beloved. His wrath is against sin and death. If we cling to our sin kicking and screaming, then his wrath falls on us as well as a consequence; but if we let him work, it becomes the surgeon’s scalpel to cut us free from the power of sin and death. God is in the deliverance business—all in, full stop.
Note: the video is longer than the audio as it includes a bit more than just the sermon proper.
This is the hinge of the gospel of Luke. To this point, Jesus has had a spectacular ministry career. He has established himself as a teacher who speaks with authority, he’s done spectacular miracles—everything is rolling along beautifully. And then, instead of capitalizing on his success as any smart preacher would, Jesus tossed it all aside and—as Rich Mullins put it—“set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.” Everything that happens in Luke from now into chapter 19, in what’s commonly called the Travel Narrative, happens on the way to the cross.
In Teaching a Stone to Talk, in one of my favorite paragraphs ever written by anybody anywhere, Annie Dillard writes,
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
It’s in that spirit, I think, that we should come before this passage, because it’s at this point in the Gospel of John that things really start getting bumpy. The gospels tell a story of increasing division between Jesus and the religious folk as they move from skeptical curiosity through entrenched opposition to murderous fury—a division that Jesus doesn’t desire but also doesn’t try to prevent. In John, the major shift happens in chapters 9 through 11. The healing of the blind man in chapter 9, as Deborah showed us two weeks ago, ups the ante for the Pharisees, making him a much more alarming threat to them than he had been. The raising of Lazarus in chapter 11, which Tom will talk about in two weeks, brings the chief priests fully on board with the conviction that Jesus must be killed. And in between? In our passage this morning, we see Jesus put a wedge in the crack between himself and the Jewish leadership and bring the splitting maul down hard.
It’s important to be clear about something here: there’s a difference between being a divisive figure and being a divider. For dividers, turning people against each other is the point—it’s a means to an end, a tactic or strategy in the service of their agenda. Think Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove. Jesus didn’t desire division; he wasn’t dividing people in order to conquer them. But anyone who stands strongly for truth will be a divisive figure, both loved and hated—and sometimes by the same people at the same time. Dr. King was a divisive figure, because—like Jesus—he spoke truths that many people didn’t want to hear. Great unifiers are great compromisers; and sometimes, as with the Constitution, they compromise not only their principles but their integrity for the sake of unity.
Jesus is the light of the world, and—as John makes very clear—light divides the world into those who love the light and those who love the darkness, just by existing. Read more→
