You Are My Witness
Sermon
Which Way to Jesus?
Sermons For Lent and Easter, Cycle B
The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of the Republic of South Africa goes down in the annals of history as a most memorable moment. Imagine historians a hundred years from now trying to recreate the excitement and the significance of what took place in Pretoria and Capetown in 1994. Three centuries of bitter and harsh white rule were brought to a close as Mandela was elected the first black president by its first all-race parliament. What dramatized that election was the fact that Mr. Mandela had patiently endured 27 years of imprisonment because he protested the system of apartheid. He had refused freedom when he was offered the opportunity to return to his home province without the opportunity to actively continue his protest. His patience and hope were rewarded by those who saw fit to remove the racial barriers in order to create a truly democratic election for all the peoples of South Africa.
President Mandela is hopeful that ethnicity shall never again create oppression for any of the peoples of South Africa. Time will tell how the hoped-for ideals of the new regime will succeed in the future. However, history has very few parallels to match the experience of Mandela. To be sure, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Socialist Republics was historic, but no one emerged in quite the same way as Mr. Mandela. We can go on rummaging through history for those individuals who left dramatic impact upon their society, people, or nations, but none will match the accomplishment of the One whom we honor on this day. The ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ marked his coronation as the King of kings and Lord of lords, by which he made it possible for all peoples to know the joys of God's kingdom.
A Fulfillment
The evangelist Luke, both in his gospel and the Book of Acts, indicates how our Lord prepared his followers for the moment of his ascension. What was to take place in that instant when Jesus would be taken from the disciples was not happenstance, a sudden but happy occurrence that took place just because things fell into place. What was to transpire was a fulfillment of everything that had been written in the Hebrew Scriptures.
It was not a fulfillment just to say the ascension had been predicted. It was fulfillment in the sense that all the writings came together in him. Jesus said, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you -- that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." What God had been revealing in all those writings squared with what God did in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. All the writings about what happened to the children of Israel and the patriarchs were about Jesus. There were not just promises about a Messiah-to-come. God was being messianic toward these people all along. Jesus personified the saving acts of God.
A Completion
Jesus explained to the disciples how it was that the scriptures were really an account about him. Luke reports, "He opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise on the third day.' " Jesus gave the disciples a key to the reading of the scriptures in the light of his suffering and death. The life, death, and resurrection of our Lord were to be the means of being able to interpret what the scriptures are about. Their minds were opened by this process. This is what theologians have named the "analogy of faith." That is to say, that we test, measure, and relate the interpretation of the scriptures to what God has revealed in the Person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Of late there has been a rash of materials concerning the quest of the historical Jesus.
There are books, journals, and popular articles which are upsetting for many good Christian folk because they challenge how much we can really know about the historical Jesus in the way that we keep historical records today. However, that should not be upsetting for us when we recognize how the writers of the scriptures themselves indicate to us that they are not writing biographies or historical records in the usual sense. They overtly indicate that they are recording for us that God is going to work out our salvation. Here Luke indicates that our Lord himself taught the disciples how they are to read scriptures from this point of view. What is more, Jesus was thereby indicating that this work had now been completed. Jesus had broken through the barriers to life, in breaking the spell of death on our lives, by his resurrection from the dead. The work of salvation was fulfilled and completed.
For Repentance
The purpose of the revelation which God has made in the Person of Jesus Christ was to call people to repentance. Jesus said that the Messiah was to suffer death and rise on the third day "that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations." What God has revealed makes repentance possible. We can face up to how life really is and we can confess our part in how sinful and flawed the human condition is. We do not have to suppress how bad it is with us. We do not have to play games about how bad it can be. All that calls to mind a work by Helmut Thielicke, Death and Life.
Like Luther, Thielicke urged that we not set aside the contemplation of death and its reality. Luther would even say that we should be haunted by death in order to recognize it as a true judgment for sin. At the same time, Luther would help us to understand what Christ has done to overcome death for us. So Thielicke also examined the ways in which people try to repress or ignore the questions that death poses for them. He tackled the philosophers who try to make us divine, heroic, or totally pessimistic about death. However, Thielicke also attacks the way in which common people daily ignore the need of repentance in the face of death. We even have round faces on our clocks, because we know time will go around and around for us. We need to stop and think about life and death as occasions for repentance.
For Forgiveness
The death and resurrection of Jesus enable us to see that God is serious about dealing with the plight of the human condition. Jesus did not come to be a Pied Piper who could cheerily lead us through life. Nor did he come with a new prescription for better achievement for improving the world. Jesus came to deal head-on with our real problem of sin and death. He suffered the judgment of death and rose again to make it possible to believe that God is willing to set aside our sin and raise us to life eternal. That is the good news of the resurrection. The hope that we have because of the resurrection unto new life gives us new possibilities in dealing with this life. We do not have to spend time in this life fretting about the limitations of death. Nor, on the other hand, do we have to live a life of sham and hoax trying to pretend that death will not happen. God makes honest people out of us. We can deal with life as it really is and confess our sins. As repentant people we also can freely lean upon the grace and mercy of God and face up to our total dependence upon God in all that we do in this life.
Repentance and forgiveness spell freedom for us. The offer of this freedom is held out to "all nations beginning in Jerusalem," said Jesus. It was Thomas Merton who recalled for us John Donne's maxim, "No man is an island." He notes that what really binds all people together is our common search for salvation. However, he also noted that this common search is what made the French writer Sarte say, "Other people are hell." It is because people push in their own way to create their own salvation in their sinful state that they are greedy, contentious, and even warlike. People are not only divided from one another, but also divided in themselves. The only possible out we have from this condition is the offer that our Lord makes by grace that the solution comes through repentance and the forgiveness of sin.
You Are Witnesses
Jesus told the disciples that they were to be "witnesses of these things." They had been very much a part of our Lord's scene. They had been involved in his ministry. They had witnessed his death. Now they were partners with the Risen Christ in sharing the good news. Now they would be involved in a new way. He would depart from them to be with the Father. Yet he would be present with them in a new and remarkable way. They should remain in Jerusalem to receive from him the gift of the Spirit. To be sure, they had been prompted by the Spirit of God to be in his entourage to begin with.
However, now Jesus said the disciples would be "clothed with power from on high." What would happen is that all they had experienced with him and learned from him would become a part of them in a new way. They literally would be identified with all that Jesus had accomplished in such a way that they could share with others what he had shared with them. As young adults become parents they suddenly realize the powers and techniques their parents had shared with them when they were children. The new parents discover themselves to be clones of their parents saying some of the same things and attacking parental problems much the same way.
The Way is Paved
The disciples did not fail in the commission our Lord laid upon them. The fact that there is a Christian community today is testimony that they passed on what they had received. What they passed on, they did through their preaching and teaching. C. H. Dodd, a British New Testament scholar of yesteryear, surveyed their preaching in a study titled Apostolic Preaching. What Dodd discovered was a consistent outlining of why it was necessary for God to promise and then send God's Son among us. Then a summary of the life, death, and resurrection followed with a promise of the Holy Spirit. Beginning with the preaching of Peter in Jerusalem through the preaching and epistles of Paul, Dodd found these emphases as the heart of the apostolic message. This consistent phenomenon of itself suggested that all Christian preaching in some form should follow this pattern.
What is also obvious about the apostolic witness is that the apostles carried this message to every public forum they could. Beginning at Jerusalem where there was considerable resistance at the outset Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, preached the same message in the public arenas of the major cities of the Mediterranean world until he finally had to address the world from prison in the imperial capital city of Rome. Now, the commission to be witnesses to this Gospel of Jesus Christ has fallen upon us. In a lecture about religion and culture, the noted author John Updike observed that one of the problems for Christianity today is that it is not seriously challenged in the public arena. If religion has gone private, it has done so to the degree that people no longer challenge it as a major threat to the culture.
Celebrate!
The Feast of the Ascension of our Lord is occasion for us to celebrate with joy and great enthusiasm. We rejoice that our Lord has taken his place with the Father to rule over the world as King of kings and Lord of lords. For us that means that our Lord has blazed the trail to eternity for us. He is the pioneer of our faith as the one who guarantees us a place with the Father. That he has entered into his glory means that he is present with us from here to eternity. All of that should mean for us that, as witnesses to his complete victory and his glory, we should engage ourselves in bold witness as to what our Lord means to us.
Crooklyn was Spike Lee's earnest attempt to relate the culture of an African-American family in Brooklyn. He portrayed the warmth, the pain, the laughter, and the heartache of a family living with the pressures of the crowded city. It is a rewarding effort to help us appreciate the strength of such a family. It is for us to apply the same kind of diligence to share with the world the gospel that enables people to transform the culture that entraps them. That is how it was for our Lord. The group of people who had been defeated and depressed by what their culture had done to them 42 days before went out with our Lord to hear his farewell. When he departed from them in the ascension into heaven, "they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God." They knew what they had to do.
President Mandela is hopeful that ethnicity shall never again create oppression for any of the peoples of South Africa. Time will tell how the hoped-for ideals of the new regime will succeed in the future. However, history has very few parallels to match the experience of Mandela. To be sure, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Socialist Republics was historic, but no one emerged in quite the same way as Mr. Mandela. We can go on rummaging through history for those individuals who left dramatic impact upon their society, people, or nations, but none will match the accomplishment of the One whom we honor on this day. The ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ marked his coronation as the King of kings and Lord of lords, by which he made it possible for all peoples to know the joys of God's kingdom.
A Fulfillment
The evangelist Luke, both in his gospel and the Book of Acts, indicates how our Lord prepared his followers for the moment of his ascension. What was to take place in that instant when Jesus would be taken from the disciples was not happenstance, a sudden but happy occurrence that took place just because things fell into place. What was to transpire was a fulfillment of everything that had been written in the Hebrew Scriptures.
It was not a fulfillment just to say the ascension had been predicted. It was fulfillment in the sense that all the writings came together in him. Jesus said, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you -- that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." What God had been revealing in all those writings squared with what God did in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. All the writings about what happened to the children of Israel and the patriarchs were about Jesus. There were not just promises about a Messiah-to-come. God was being messianic toward these people all along. Jesus personified the saving acts of God.
A Completion
Jesus explained to the disciples how it was that the scriptures were really an account about him. Luke reports, "He opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise on the third day.' " Jesus gave the disciples a key to the reading of the scriptures in the light of his suffering and death. The life, death, and resurrection of our Lord were to be the means of being able to interpret what the scriptures are about. Their minds were opened by this process. This is what theologians have named the "analogy of faith." That is to say, that we test, measure, and relate the interpretation of the scriptures to what God has revealed in the Person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Of late there has been a rash of materials concerning the quest of the historical Jesus.
There are books, journals, and popular articles which are upsetting for many good Christian folk because they challenge how much we can really know about the historical Jesus in the way that we keep historical records today. However, that should not be upsetting for us when we recognize how the writers of the scriptures themselves indicate to us that they are not writing biographies or historical records in the usual sense. They overtly indicate that they are recording for us that God is going to work out our salvation. Here Luke indicates that our Lord himself taught the disciples how they are to read scriptures from this point of view. What is more, Jesus was thereby indicating that this work had now been completed. Jesus had broken through the barriers to life, in breaking the spell of death on our lives, by his resurrection from the dead. The work of salvation was fulfilled and completed.
For Repentance
The purpose of the revelation which God has made in the Person of Jesus Christ was to call people to repentance. Jesus said that the Messiah was to suffer death and rise on the third day "that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations." What God has revealed makes repentance possible. We can face up to how life really is and we can confess our part in how sinful and flawed the human condition is. We do not have to suppress how bad it is with us. We do not have to play games about how bad it can be. All that calls to mind a work by Helmut Thielicke, Death and Life.
Like Luther, Thielicke urged that we not set aside the contemplation of death and its reality. Luther would even say that we should be haunted by death in order to recognize it as a true judgment for sin. At the same time, Luther would help us to understand what Christ has done to overcome death for us. So Thielicke also examined the ways in which people try to repress or ignore the questions that death poses for them. He tackled the philosophers who try to make us divine, heroic, or totally pessimistic about death. However, Thielicke also attacks the way in which common people daily ignore the need of repentance in the face of death. We even have round faces on our clocks, because we know time will go around and around for us. We need to stop and think about life and death as occasions for repentance.
For Forgiveness
The death and resurrection of Jesus enable us to see that God is serious about dealing with the plight of the human condition. Jesus did not come to be a Pied Piper who could cheerily lead us through life. Nor did he come with a new prescription for better achievement for improving the world. Jesus came to deal head-on with our real problem of sin and death. He suffered the judgment of death and rose again to make it possible to believe that God is willing to set aside our sin and raise us to life eternal. That is the good news of the resurrection. The hope that we have because of the resurrection unto new life gives us new possibilities in dealing with this life. We do not have to spend time in this life fretting about the limitations of death. Nor, on the other hand, do we have to live a life of sham and hoax trying to pretend that death will not happen. God makes honest people out of us. We can deal with life as it really is and confess our sins. As repentant people we also can freely lean upon the grace and mercy of God and face up to our total dependence upon God in all that we do in this life.
Repentance and forgiveness spell freedom for us. The offer of this freedom is held out to "all nations beginning in Jerusalem," said Jesus. It was Thomas Merton who recalled for us John Donne's maxim, "No man is an island." He notes that what really binds all people together is our common search for salvation. However, he also noted that this common search is what made the French writer Sarte say, "Other people are hell." It is because people push in their own way to create their own salvation in their sinful state that they are greedy, contentious, and even warlike. People are not only divided from one another, but also divided in themselves. The only possible out we have from this condition is the offer that our Lord makes by grace that the solution comes through repentance and the forgiveness of sin.
You Are Witnesses
Jesus told the disciples that they were to be "witnesses of these things." They had been very much a part of our Lord's scene. They had been involved in his ministry. They had witnessed his death. Now they were partners with the Risen Christ in sharing the good news. Now they would be involved in a new way. He would depart from them to be with the Father. Yet he would be present with them in a new and remarkable way. They should remain in Jerusalem to receive from him the gift of the Spirit. To be sure, they had been prompted by the Spirit of God to be in his entourage to begin with.
However, now Jesus said the disciples would be "clothed with power from on high." What would happen is that all they had experienced with him and learned from him would become a part of them in a new way. They literally would be identified with all that Jesus had accomplished in such a way that they could share with others what he had shared with them. As young adults become parents they suddenly realize the powers and techniques their parents had shared with them when they were children. The new parents discover themselves to be clones of their parents saying some of the same things and attacking parental problems much the same way.
The Way is Paved
The disciples did not fail in the commission our Lord laid upon them. The fact that there is a Christian community today is testimony that they passed on what they had received. What they passed on, they did through their preaching and teaching. C. H. Dodd, a British New Testament scholar of yesteryear, surveyed their preaching in a study titled Apostolic Preaching. What Dodd discovered was a consistent outlining of why it was necessary for God to promise and then send God's Son among us. Then a summary of the life, death, and resurrection followed with a promise of the Holy Spirit. Beginning with the preaching of Peter in Jerusalem through the preaching and epistles of Paul, Dodd found these emphases as the heart of the apostolic message. This consistent phenomenon of itself suggested that all Christian preaching in some form should follow this pattern.
What is also obvious about the apostolic witness is that the apostles carried this message to every public forum they could. Beginning at Jerusalem where there was considerable resistance at the outset Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, preached the same message in the public arenas of the major cities of the Mediterranean world until he finally had to address the world from prison in the imperial capital city of Rome. Now, the commission to be witnesses to this Gospel of Jesus Christ has fallen upon us. In a lecture about religion and culture, the noted author John Updike observed that one of the problems for Christianity today is that it is not seriously challenged in the public arena. If religion has gone private, it has done so to the degree that people no longer challenge it as a major threat to the culture.
Celebrate!
The Feast of the Ascension of our Lord is occasion for us to celebrate with joy and great enthusiasm. We rejoice that our Lord has taken his place with the Father to rule over the world as King of kings and Lord of lords. For us that means that our Lord has blazed the trail to eternity for us. He is the pioneer of our faith as the one who guarantees us a place with the Father. That he has entered into his glory means that he is present with us from here to eternity. All of that should mean for us that, as witnesses to his complete victory and his glory, we should engage ourselves in bold witness as to what our Lord means to us.
Crooklyn was Spike Lee's earnest attempt to relate the culture of an African-American family in Brooklyn. He portrayed the warmth, the pain, the laughter, and the heartache of a family living with the pressures of the crowded city. It is a rewarding effort to help us appreciate the strength of such a family. It is for us to apply the same kind of diligence to share with the world the gospel that enables people to transform the culture that entraps them. That is how it was for our Lord. The group of people who had been defeated and depressed by what their culture had done to them 42 days before went out with our Lord to hear his farewell. When he departed from them in the ascension into heaven, "they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God." They knew what they had to do.
