The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
2nd Sunday of Advent
December 5, 2010
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Colossians 1:11-20
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes
from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with
patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to
share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness
and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have
redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of
all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things
visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all
things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him
all things hold together. He is the head
of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so
that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was
pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his
cross.
Sermon:
There is a great New Yorker cartoon that has a clergyman standing at a crossroads where he is clearly struggling with which signpost to follow. One has an arrow and points to “Heaven.” The other has an arrow that points to “Discussion About Heaven.” And he is clearly anguished about which to choose.
Sometimes, I think we in the church stand at the same crossroads, stuck between “Jesus” and “Discussion About Jesus.” This is particularly true of thoughtful, intelligent people who are not afraid to ask questions about the Bible and the history and culture of Jesus’ day. We are so comfortable that we are better at articulating what we do not believe about Jesus intellectually than saying what we do believe about him personally.
But also stuck are the people who claim to know exactly who Jesus is, and then use that as a test to see if everyone else is saved or unsaved. I used to get really anxious around these intense people when they asked me “Do you know Jesus? Are you saved?” I knew they had a particular definition of being saved that was not my definition. I felt I had to explain that and then add that indeed I was saved, if by that you could include salvation for good people of other religions, and that then they would look at me like I was either crazy or doomed. We’ve all had these conversations, and some of them have garnered us a free magazine. But now, when asked about salvation, I just say, “Yes,” and leave it at that. I’m choosing the arrow that puts me on the path toward Jesus, rather than taking the road to the discussion about him.
“Jesus has been victorious!” yelled out the televangelist. “Jesus means you have the victory. You can be victorious.”
“Tell that to the mother whose child is suffering from malnutrition,” I say back to the television screen. “Tell that to the person whose livelihood has been destroyed by oil spills, expecting that God will clean it all up in eternity.”
Alone, watching people on television who I disagree with, I am always extremely articulate. You will have to trust me on this.
“Jesus wants you to be prosperous,” the preacher tells us. “The money is there for you, He just wants you to find it.”
“Oh no, he doesn’t,” I explain back to the televangelist, pointing the TV remote at him like a light saber of truth. I do this with such moral and physical force that my small dog is temporarily unbalanced on my lap. Lucky, the pinheaded rat terrier looks up at me confused. Why am I getting so worked up?
Since the televangelist is clearly not listening to me, I take the dog as my theological student, and point the remote of truth at him. “Now Lucky,” I explain, “You and I both know Jesus didn’t want us to invest in material things. That’s just not who Jesus was.”
At which point, Lucky looks up at me as if to say, “So who is exactly is Jesus?” pulling me out of the intellectual past, and into the personal present tense, as dogs will do.
Now when people tell you that their dogs look at them “as if to say,” it means they are psychic, unbalanced or better off lecturing their pet in theology than teaching your small children. But doesn’t your dog ever look at you “as if to say” some deep question that is already on your mind? If not, you probably don’t think that televangelist could hear me either.
So who am I talking to in those conversations, if not my dog or the people on television? Who are any of us talking to when we rant in our heads in passionate debate? In my mind, I am talking to Jesus who sits beside me in the family room, or in the next seat over on the bumpy airplane or rides shotgun with me in a traffic jam and particularly delights in me when I listen to talk radio. It’s Jesus, my constant companion, who knows me exactly as I am.
But there’s another Jesus I also believe in, one who I would not wave the television remote at, but would fall prostrate before in the presence of His unimaginable beauty. This is the resurrected Christ, the Lord of all things in heaven and earth, the one who inspires the music, architecture and art that make us shiver with recognition that we have, through such things, brushed up against the divine.
This is the Jesus I want to let Paul describe. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all
creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things
visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all
things have been created through him and for him.” (1 Col 1:15-16) Here, Jesus the Christ is bigger than time and
space. All things were created through him. He preceded his human self. This is
not someone you yell at while listening to talk radio, but one who inspires you
to be silent, humble and awestruck.
We can have endless debates about
who Jesus is. Is he the risen Christ who made my forgiveness possible through
his blood on the cross? The one who exists outside time and space and was there
at the creation of the universe? Is he the spiritual teacher who lived a human
life from which we can gain wisdom and courage?
The debate sounds to me like being
presented with an amazing banquet and then being told to pick only one
adjective to describe it. So one person says it was salty and another says it
was sweet, and they argue as to who is right.
But if you know anything about the
human tongue it was created to have spots that pick up on sweet and salty, and
even sour. Tastes are complex, beautifully so. So sometimes you react to one
flavor more strongly than another. You taste different things in the same dish.
But none of that affects the dish itself. Its taste changes in everyone’s
mouth.
Is it wishy-washy to perceive
Jesus in many different ways? To experience him at one moment as your best
friend and another moment as the mysterious peace that passes all human
understanding? To picture him reigning on the throne of heaven triumphant over
evil at the day of reckoning? Or to picture him screaming out in anger at God
from the cross? Which one of these gets it right?
I don’t want to choose. The church
has plenty of tents staked out on the battlegrounds of who Jesus is, and why it
matters. I pitch my tent in the field of mystery, and have yet to nail it down.
In a life changing moment when I
was twenty-one years old, fearing for my father’s life, alone and weeping in
the chapel at the hospital, it was Jesus, the personal savior, who put his
hands on my shoulders and asked me to surrender to him completely. I did, and felt a lightness I had never felt
before in my life, a light I still carry with me.
And it is Christ the King on the
throne of heaven who came to my heart when I saw the glaciers in Montana. The view
from the mountains seemed to be from another universe, so stunning and strange,
I wanted to sink to the ground and avert my eyes. Or was that carsickness?
And it was the Jesus who said he
wanted to gather us up like a hen gathers her chicks who accompanies me on the
heart-wrenching work of parenting, who gathers me up from the crumpled heap of
failure that every parent has known, and that only a mothering savior can see.
And it was Jesus who gathered so
many sinning misfits together at the table that I can picture myself belonging
there, too. And it’s that same welcoming Jesus that makes me long to share a table
with Jews, Muslims and Buddhists as a foretaste of a heavenly banquet where
there will be room for us all.
And it is in the teachings and
sayings of Jesus that I find myself so directly spoken to that I cannot imagine
finding a spiritual home where He was not the absolute center of it all.
When it comes to Jesus, I am
inconsistent. But I come by it naturally.
The same God who created human
beings to be idiosyncratic and inconsistent decided to come to earth in that
same idiosyncratic and inconsistent human form. It’s like God was trying to get
a ten-pound sausage into a five-pound bag. No wonder we are confused as to what
we have been served.
We human beings tried nailing down
Jesus, on the cross, and he refused to cooperate. Instead of dying, he rose
from the dead.
And now, he is seated at the right
hand of the Father, right next to me and my dog Lucky on the couch, where, from
the throne of heaven, he wields the remote, hears our intimate complaints,
takes out the splinters from the wounded hands of the world and somehow rules
the cosmos that He created in the first place.
Talk about inconsistent. Thank God
for it.