Passionate Jesus - Till the End of Time

Preached on Sunday, April 8, 2018

Scripture readings: 1 Peter 4:7-19; Mark 13:14-37

Walking along the Columbia River
Desert Aire/ Mattawa, WA
March 2018

There was a little boy who constantly begged his parents to let him have a dog. Their answer was always the same: he was too young.

Finally, they told him that he was responsible enough to get his dog. So, they all went to the pet store, and his parents turned him loose to choose his own puppy.

It was hard for him to make up his mind. There were Labrador puppies, Dalmatian puppies, beagle puppies, and dachshund puppies. Finally, the boy chose one little mutt-puppy who was wagging and wagging his tail like crazy.

When his parents asked him why he wanted that mutt-puppy, he explained that he liked the way the puppy wagged his tail, “I want the dog with the happy ending.”

The story Jesus tells in chapter 13 of Mark is a story with a happy ending. It just happens that it is a scary story with a happy ending. The scary part takes up most of the story, and the happy part almost doesn’t get told before Jesus closes the book. But we will look at that later.

Jesus told the story in answer to a question his disciples had. They had all been wandering together around the buildings and courtyards of the great Temple in Jerusalem.

It was a wonder of the ancient world. Enormous wealth had been committed to rebuilding the ancient place and making it as overwhelming and inspiring as possible. The complex was huge: forests of columns, the whitest marble, gold leaf and gold plate. The first century historian Flavius Josephus reported that some of the stones were a large as 37 feet long, 12 feet high, and 18 feet wide.

Naturally, the disciples were in awe. “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” And Jesus said, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Later, Peter, James, John, and Andrew came to him, on the Mount of Olives, and they asked, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”

Jesus never really answers this question. They ask Jesus: “When?” Jesus doesn’t answer that question. He confesses that he doesn’t know when. He says: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” 

Our problem with this is that we are human beings and we really want to know the answer to questions like this. We want to know the future. And we want to know the future because we want to be in control.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the “Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” because they wanted to be in control. They wanted to be their own little gods.

Even Christians are tempted to try to be our own little gods, and so Christians for the past 2,000 years have tried to figure out the answer to the question Jesus said that even he didn’t know the answer to. In other words, Christians have spent the past 2,000 years trying to be smarter than Jesus.

That’s just part of our problem. Can anything good ever come of that?

I’ll share my theory of why Jesus didn’t know when the last days would come, and why it may be better for us not to know. My theory (and I don’t know where my theory comes from) is based on 1 John 4:8: “God is love.” We believe that God is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I believe it is the nature of the Father to plan and provide. Love requires that as an ingredient. I believe it is the nature of the Son to trust and serve. I believe that this is also a necessary ingredient of love. And I believe it is the nature of the Spirit to honor and connect, because this is also part of love.

This is the pattern I see in how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other.

But the Son is about trust and servanthood. When Peter first heard Jesus predicting his death on the cross (8:31-33) he rebuked Jesus, and Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan. You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of man.” Peter did a devilish thing by attacking the trust the Son in the Father.

Later (10:43-45) Jesus said: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Jesus didn’t know the time of his return because it is his special nature, as the Son, to trust and serve. His Father knows the time, and that is enough. The Son may know the time now. But I don’t believe we know that for sure.

It’s especially in trusting and serving that Jesus gave us our salvation. It must be in trusting and serving, as the Son, that enables him, even now, to give us life in God.

Since Jesus, the trusting and serving Son, is the one who makes us sons and daughters of God, the pattern of his relationship goes on through us. So, our own trusting and serving, without our knowing the Father’s schedule, is the way we now have life in Jesus the Son.

We can’t have life in Jesus and contradict him at the same time. Jesus didn’t need to know the time of his own returning. Neither do we.

The purpose of God for our lives is for us to be like Jesus. It is good to know things, but it is not always necessary.

What is necessary is for us to trust and serve. And that is what Jesus’ story is about. Jesus answers the question, not of “When will these things happen,” but of “What will it mean to trust and serve till these things happen?”

Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” (8:34) Part of the work of Jesus on the cross, beyond the forgiveness of our sins, was to carry on his own shoulders the world’s troubles and sorrows: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” (Isaiah 53:4)

Jesus never leaves us, not even in our worst times. Now we are his hands and feet in the world, and Jesus will not have his hands and feet be absent from this world even in its worst times, even when those times are called the Great Tribulation.

In Jesus’ telling of the story of the beginning of a new world, at his return, it is not until the human beings on earth actually see “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory;” not until then is it that Christians will be gathered from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens to come down with Jesus.

We are like Christ, the Son of the Father, in this world. And, just like him, God’s people will never be absent from what goes on in the world he loves. Jesus promised to be with us always, even to the end of the world. Surely he meant that he and we would be present together, in this world, to the very end.

The average Christian, today, does not live in North America, or Europe. The average Christian lives in China, or Laos, or Indonesia, or Pakistan, or India, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Syria, or Zimbabwe, or Nigeria, or Venezuela, or Cuba.

The average Christian today lives in harm’s way. The average Christian today lives in a present or an anticipated Tribulation. This was the normal Christian life in the first century and this has not changed.

Even in the safety of America we face the very same troubles and fears that any of our uncommitted neighbors face. Only we face those troubles in fellowship with Jesus. We may be blessed, but we are not immune to anything in this world; not now, not never. This is what Jesus is saying.

The disciples wanted to know when to be ready. Jesus’ answer was “always.” Always be ready.

When they asked about signs, the disciples wanted to know what the things were that they would have to be ready to face. Jesus’ answer was that the signs were everything. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant), and do this in the face of everything: in the face of conflict; in the face of sickness; in the face of disaster. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant); even when governments and churches turn against you. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant) when everyone turns against you, even those you love.

Jesus says that there will come a time when all human powers will work together and try to put an end to the faith of God’s people; or put an end to their very lives. When that happens, Jesus says you can run, but try to run in the right direction. And even at that, don’t be afraid.

What if the disciples had asked: “What should we be afraid of?”

Jesus’ answer would be, “Don’t be afraid of anything. Whatever comes, you and your brothers and sisters will be able to outlast it, because the Lord rules. The Lord controls the clock. The Lord is stronger than anything that can come against you.”

Jesus said, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) “So, don’t be afraid of anything.”

But wait! There is one thing that Jesus warns us to be afraid of. Maybe Jesus should have said this more clearly: “Fear only one thing. Fear sleep. Fear taking things for granted. Watch! Be alert!”

Jesus says that we are like servants who have been given assigned tasks in our master’s house. Our assigned task is to follow Jesus by being the same kind of servant that he always is. Trust and serve, and don’t stop.

Do Jesus’ work. Speak his words. Be his hands and feet. Be his mouth. Every day we have choices that challenge our alertness to Jesus.

We are asleep if we don’t see the meaning of our choices. Our choices are all either for or against Jesus, whether we are on trial before an emperor, or on trial before our friends and neighbors. We decide from day to day what we shall be in eternity.

This would be scary, except for one thing.

The truth is that we are waiting for Jesus. The Son of Man, coming in clouds with great power and glory, is Jesus who died for our sins, and for the sins of the world on the cross. Jesus loves us. He is planning a reunion of all God’s people in earth and heaven, including us. The Lord is planning a celebration with us.

Jesus compares the end of the story to the end of spring, and how you feel when you see the trees in bud. This time of year, we know how good that makes us feel.

The good news is that, as serious as Jesus is about our choices, he is also serious about giving us the right things to be serious about. Jesus is giving us a special kind of freedom. Those who follow Jesus don’t hide from what’s going on in the world. The people of Jesus can live in the real world without fear, without anger, without self-righteousness, and without any false sense of security.

What Jesus gives us is the call to trust and serve. This is the way to love with an open heart. This is the way to be loved till the end of time.

Passionate Jesus - Blowing Our Minds

Preached on the Sunday of The Resurrection of Our Lord (Easter Sunday), April 1, 2018

Scripture readings: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Mark 15:1-8

Spring Walks and Gardens of  My Past

One of the greatest events ever to happen in the history of the universe happened around the dawning of the first day of the week, almost two thousand years ago. The first people who discovered this greatest thing were three women carrying armloads of funeral spices. They were on their way to a stone tomb carved into the side of a hill, just outside the walls of Jerusalem.

They were on their way to give a very sad and tragic gift to their dear, dead friend and hero, whom they had lain to rest in that tomb.  They were on a mission to complete the embalming of his crucified corpse. They had loved Jesus, and they had hoped great things of him, but Jesus had led them straight into a fatal ambush, and a dead end to their love and to their hopes.

Jesus had seemed to have what it would take to open up a new world that they had all learned to call “the kingdom of God.” Jesus had freely owned-up to being the rightful king of the kingdom of God.

This was surprising because, although Jesus was a descendant of the famous David, the greatest of the kings of Israel, he had long worked as a carpenter, just like his father Joseph. The clan of David had been poor and struggling for so long that they had made a sort of mockery of the whole idea of their family producing anything like a Messiah. It just looked totally impossible for any of them to be a king raised up by God to conquer the world and put all nations under the power of the kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of God.

But, when Jesus was with his friends and followers, anything seemed possible. With God’s help their possibilities looked unlimited. And God was definitely with Jesus, making the impossible things possible: the dead rising at one touch of Jesus’ hand, or the mere sound of his voice. The wind and the waves of the sea stopped at his command and they became a place where a man might walk, if he had the faith to do so. People of wealth and influence were becoming beholden to Jesus for his healing of their loved ones and servants. Yes, with Jesus the possibilities looked endless.

Then Jesus was arrested less than a week after his triumphant, royal parade into the capital. The Passover crowds claimed his as their king under the noses of the Roman army and the Temple police. No one raised a hand against him.

Then, Jesus was seized by a joint action of the Roman Army and the Temple Police. Jesus was beaten, and scourged, and nailed on that cross; heckled, and bleeding, and suffocating to death, defeated for all the world to see.

He was clearly done with and finished for all time. Jesus had even yelled, “It is finished.” But he shouted those last words as if he didn’t mean them. Or else he meant something completely different from the way they felt, and from the way they were feeling now.

They were all finished now.

They and their friends would be lucky to survive much longer. The world had turned out to be much worse, and much darker, and more hopeless than they had ever imagined before Jesus had come to them, and called them, and raised their expectations.

They knew, now, that they lived in such a world where even someone as remarkable as Jesus could come and never make any difference at all. They had good reasons for being afraid but, somehow, their sense of fear was very low compared to their mountains of disappointment.

They and their friends had felt all of this for three days, but they had lost their sense of time. Their feelings were immeasurable. There is a modern British poet named T. S. Eliot. He was a great poet, really, and a Christian but, looking at the world and where most people’s ambitions were taking them, he wrote one of the bleakest and most depressing poems ever written, and it ends with these lines. I think it gives us the picture of life in this world as the disciples of Jesus were seeing it in their own time. Here it is:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

                                                                        (“The Hollow Men”)

I’m sorry to talk like this. Even on the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord we can’t understand the greatest things that have ever happened in the universe unless we see how Jesus had actually judged his own accomplishment when he shouted that it was finished.

There’s nothing good about any cross, and there’s nothing good about the cross of Jesus, unless it leads from something bad to something good. In a world like ours, the best possible good would be to produce the end of all crosses (or anything like a cross). The best possible great thing would bring an end to everything that could be woven into a world where crosses exist. The cross of Jesus exists to put an end to all other crosses, someday.

There’s nothing outstandingly good about the resurrection of Jesus except for the fact that it follows something evil. The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate cure for all evil and sin. We share in that cure when we die with Jesus by faith, on the cross, and rise with Jesus by faith from the darkness of our living tomb. The resurrection of Jesus creates a new world that is going to destroy the old world of crosses.

The Cross is the picture of death and evil completely defeated and completely destroyed. This is why we talk about that Old Rugged Cross and cling to it. The gift of the old rugged cross is to exchange itself for a crown on everyone’s head.

If we truly understood this, in all its weight and glory, it would blow our minds.

Where the cross and the resurrection are not understood, they seem foolish and perhaps even evil. Some people who are much too modern for their own good, or anybody else’s good, say that a father who sends his son to die on a cross is an abusive father. That’s what some people say.

The ancient Greeks and Romans thought the same way. This is why Paul wrote about the foolishness of God in the cross and, by extension, in the resurrection. What God knows is wise and what we humans think is wise are at odds with each other, and who will you listen to?

Paul wrote: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) In his own time Jesus also knew that most people wouldn’t understand him and wouldn’t believe that he was who he claimed to be. (Luke 7:33-35) Jesus knew that few of his own people (God’s people) would appreciate how his death on the cross would explain the old laws and prophets, and the perpetually unsolved conflicts between God and his people.

It is a shock to the system to go from seeing things the way they normally make sense to us to seeing things the way God sees them. It’s a shock to go from what you thought made sense of your life, to what God sees as sense: from what you think is wise to what God knows is wise, from what you think is powerful and possible to what God knows is powerful and possible.

In the early morning hours of the resurrection, the women, who had just been confronted by God’s wisdom and power, were scared by what they found. When the women did their appointed job to share this frightening good news with the other disciples, those others found God’s wisdom and power not to be scary but to be impossible, something not to be believed.

That first Easter dawning, the whole church as it was, or the whole family of Jesus was in two locations. One small group stood at the empty tomb and talked with angels. They were given a calling, or a mission, to help people believe what seems, at first, to be impossible.

They had an impossible mission even though they believed that the truth they served was true. The other disciples were called to believe what seemed impossible and foolish.

We have been given both callings; both jobs. The women couldn’t reach inside the doubting men and push the faith button. They had an impossible task; an impossible job to do. The men had to believe the impossible. In the end, only Jesus could make their calling work.

Our job together, like all of those apostles combined, is to believe the impossible and to do the impossible.

In the end, they did both. In the end, we can too.

It must be said here, that having this twin calling of believing and doing the impossible doesn’t make you special. It only makes you very, very needy. And that’s the only place where the impossible becomes possible. This is the foolishness of what we preach: the foolishness of our message. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)

In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote some of my favorite words. He wrote of a time in his life when he prayed and prayed for God to mend some desperate situation and the Lord gave him this solution: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul wrote how the solution worked for him in his mission impossible: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

Working together, and working each in our own way, we are called to something that the world and the people around us would regard as foolish, irrelevant, a waste of time and effort: an impossible faith for an impossible mission.

For the disciples at the tomb and the disciples in hiding, two of the best things the world could offer (the Roman peace and the Jerusalem Temple) were bad enough and strong enough to kill Jesus, the Son of God, God incarnate. It was a horrible thing think this way. It was even more horrible to watch it happen. And it was a horrible thing for Jesus to go through. Therefore, the only valid, logical option left was for Jesus to rise from the dead.

Jesus died on the cross, bearing the weight of the attack of the world on his own shoulders. It’s a weight that we all must carry, either with Jesus or without him. It’s a weight that seemed to defeat him because it killed him.

Then Jesus did the impossible thing. He defeated the power of defeat. Jesus defeated the power of evil to defeat, or corrupt, or ultimately co-opt goodness.

Afterwards, the world didn’t seem any different as a result, but God was beginning a long impossible victory. This victory would challenge and inspire those who came to him for all the centuries that have followed. It was the victory of having faith in a future new world: a whole new creation.

The cross and the resurrection are things that seem impossible but they make everything else possible. They are the victory in Jesus that becomes our victory: the cross and the resurrection of Jesus.

What’s possible or impossible is a matter of perspective. In the spring of my twenty-first year, when I was in college, I was helping a bunch of friends pre-fabricate a log cabin. I didn’t know what I was doing, of course, but I did as I was told.

I found myself standing on the eaves, above the loft, when I fell. I fell as far as most people fall when they fall off the eaves of a house.

Amazingly, I landed on my feet. I also landed on a nice wide board that was steady enough for me to keep standing on my feet, when I hit the ground. And that board had a fair-sized construction nail pointing up through the board at the point where my right foot landed.

That nail went through the sole of my right shoe and up between my second and third toe. I felt it go between my toes and it came out the top of my shoe. I saw it sticking out, about two or three inches, above the top of my tennis shoe.

I was fine. I was untouched. There was not a scratch: not one scratch, or mark, or bruise. It seemed impossible, but many such things happen.

I don’t know if that would be a miracle or not. It’s within the realm of remote mathematical possibility. But perhaps God’s miracles are just his input into our universe with its laws of nature and physics. We have our input, and God has his. And the two sources of input are not worth comparing. But they work together.

Paul wrote about this in his letter to the church in Rome: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

With God there are possible impossibilities that work, that have power, that change everything. These possible impossibilities change us.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus give us a foolish message as far as this world’s wisdom goes. It’s an impossible message, and sometimes we are tempted to rejoin the world in our opinions.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus call us to walk into the impossible where we take up our cross and follow Jesus. We can love and serve our Savior, and we can love and serve the world, and our neighbors for whom Christ died and rose from the dead, even when it all seems impossible.

With our minds properly blown by our Jesus, this will surely take us through whatever comes next.