02-29-94

"The Passion of God"

February 29, 2004 The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Sometimes when Jesus talks to us, He does so in a way to get our attention. It's like being slapped upside the face. That's the case of the Scripture lesson in the New Testament today, when Jesus tells us about true commitment. First let me read to you from the familiar passage of Isaiah 53, one through six. Then from Luke, in the fourteenth chapter.

Who has believed what we have heard?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant,

and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities

and carried our diseases;

and yet we accounted him stricken,

struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

and by his bruises we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have all turned to our own way,

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

And from Luke 14, a slight change of the verses. I'm going to read beginning at verses 25 through 34:

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

"Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; they throw it away. Let anyone with ears to hear, let him listen!"

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Well, I went to see it. And by "it," of course, I mean "The Passion." I couldn't go on Tuesday, but I did go on Friday night with Cindy and saw the movie. I have to admit, it is incredibly powerful. It's hard to sit through. The word I thought of was "relentless." It's relentless in lots of ways. The Jews are relentless in their hatred of Jesus. The Romans are relentless in their hatred and their cruelty to Jesus. But the movie is relentless, because it just never ends. Not far into the movie, the beatings begin and it continues, and continues, and continues. And on and on it goes. And yet, as I watched the movie, I thought that it was very appropriate for what Gibson was trying to do, especially this time of year. I don't know if it was planned (I'm sure it was) to start in Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday. As we begin this season of Lent and we also talk about the movie in our series that we're going to do in the coming weeks, and talk about what Lent means, it is a time for us to think about our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Because I think that's what it did for me. As I began to think, I discovered that, you know, this is what God has done for me. And I decided I would never do the Communion service quite the same again in recalling the suffering of our Lord.

So I want to reflect a little bit on Lent, and the movie, and what it means for us as Christians. What is Lent? As Protestants, it's really hard to know, because we don't usually celebrate it too much, or go through it. But it is that time set aside for Christians to think about our relationship with God and to reflect on that relationship and our own selves. I think sometimes it's totally misunderstood, and you see that in the culture. You know, it has become so popular to have these parties, like Mardi Gras. It seems like every town is starting a Mardi Gras of some kind. They started one in Galveston a few years ago, kind of in reaction to the one in New Orleans. And, actually, they had one in Mobile long before they had one in New Orleans, but a lot of towns are doing it. And, of course, it's kind of like this big drunken brawl, but it's just a big party. But the whole ideas is "we've got to have fun before we get serious," because it ends at Ash Wednesday. So "we've got to get all the sinning in we can before we have to be serious and not sin any more." That's really the idea. But that's not the idea of Lent, really. Lent is a time when we reflect on what God has done for us. Yes, we think about our sinfulness. We should. But it's so much more than that.

That's a wrong view of God. It's like the old stereotype of the guy who thought he was going to get serious with God so he got up really early in the morning to pray and just to make it good, he would put rice on the floor and he knelt on it for two hours. I remember a story by Mark Lowrey, who's a Christian comedian. His friends were getting after him about a prayer meeting they were having at like 5:30 in the morning. Mark said he was not a morning person, so he kept putting the guy off and putting him off. The guy was just so persistent about it he finally came up with a solution: He named his bed "The Word" and he would say to his friend, "I can't come to your prayer meeting. I'm in The Word" (you know, reading the Bible . . . oh, well . . .).

But what does Lent mean? It means a lot of things, but I want to reflect on a few things. I think it reminds us that God is a passionate God. Now, of course, I'm using this word "passion" deliberately in another kind of way. "The passion" as we know it in the movie and in the traditional sense, is the Latin word for "suffering." But the way I'm using it is also, when we talk about God, is that God is passionate in everything He does--with emotion, with fervor, with love, with energy. And I think Lent and the movie teach us that God is passionate about many things.

And first and foremost, God is passionate about justice. God is passionate about justice. You know, a lot has been made about the movie being anti-Semitic and those kinds of things. And I believe that it is not anti-Semitic. I think that if you were looking for that, you would find it. But it would miss the point of the movie. It would miss the point of what is being talked about here. What is being talked about is the fact that Christ died a death for us. And He did so to satisfy the justice of God. And it may be troubling to see a crowd of Jewish people ranting and raving. It may be troubling to see the Romans do what they do in the movie. But what we ought to be thinking about is why the sacrifice happened at all. It isn't just about beatings, and blood and crosses. It is about satisfying the justice of God. And that's hard for us as modern people, because we don't think of God that way enough.

The modern view of God (and it's not all wrong) is that God, of course, is a God of love. God is kind. God is one who loves us and almost cuddles us like children. And there's some sense to that. But not only is God a God of love; He is a God of holiness and justice.

We all want justice, don't we? When we are little kids--you know, have you ever watched your little children say, "It's not fair!"? I don't think I ever taught my children to say that. I think it just came out because we have an innate sense of justice, don't we? And we know that the world's not fair and we want justice. That emotion comes from God because we are made in God's image. But the problem is, if we want justice, we better want justice. And the problem is, if justice is to come to any one of us, we would all die, because we deserve it. "We have all like sheep gone astray." All of us. "There is none righteous, no, not one" in God's sight. And all that blood, and all that pain, was for us, in our place. God is passionate about justice.

There's an old story you've probably heard before about the farmer out in the Kansas prairie. One day he looked out and saw danger coming. It was a wild fire coming toward his place. He got his family together and he set another fire around his barn and around his house and burned that area around it so that when the wild fire came by, it went around him. The fire that was coming was judgment, if you will, but it didn't touch the already-burned-out place. And Jesus' death on the cross for us is a burned-out place of safety for you and me when the judgment of God will come--and it will--and the wrath of God is revealed.

God is also a God that is passionate about suffering. And I don't mean that He likes it, but He's passionate about it. You know, all of us have questions. We have questions not just about the suffering of the world, but right here in this congregation. Why does so-and-so get cancer? Why does this child die? Why is this person sick? We don't know the answers to that, and it's too simple just to say, "Oh, they got sick because God's judging them." Well, that's not necessarily true. We get sick because we get sick. We get sick, get cancer, because we're in life and there are things that happen in this world that we don't like to think about, but it happens all the time. "Why, God?" And we don't know the answer to that all the time. But we know that God enters into this world.

You see, again, it's so very clear--Gibson does a good job of saying who Jesus really is. And we believe that Jesus is not only a human being, but He is God in the flesh. And this God of ours enters into our world and suffers a terrible death. He enters into our suffering and redeems it in a very mysterious sort of way. But He does. We need to reflect on that. There's power in that--there's power in that.

But God is also passionate about the idea that He's going to win in the end. I had some other things about the movie that I'm still thinking about, but one of the things at the end I wish he had done a little bit more was have Jesus be raised a little longer. It was like a 30-second scene. And it's there--you know, the graveclothes are there, and Jesus is there. He has been raised from the dead. Hallelujah! But it's only 30 seconds! And our theology says the death of Christ and the resurrection go together and you can't have one without the other. And I just wanted a little bit more. But maybe I was so tired of the beatings by then I needed it. And the cruelty. But God is going to win in the end. God is going to win in the end.

I've told you about the Mardi Gras. You know, I don't think secular people really know how to party. My wife and I went to New Orleans a few years ago about a week after Mardi Gras had ended. My second daughter had sung with her school choir in New Orleans, so we decided to take the opportunity to go down and walk around all the places where the Mardi Gras had ended. Of course, it wasn't the big crowds and all those different things. But I was just struck by the idea that the whole place smelled like old beer! And old beer doesn't smell very good. I'm going--it's like the old Bill Cosby routine, "This is fun?" This is fun? No.

You know, in the end we're promised a big party, and God's going to throw it. And it's going to be the biggest party in the universe, and it's going to be a great party. God knows how to celebrate.

In the mean time, we celebrate as we can. And we remember during this time, that God is also passionate about commitment in our faith. You see, our faith is not just about believing something in our heads. It's about putting our trust in Someone. It's about commitment. And that's why Jesus says what He says. He says, "If you don't hate your mother and father, your brother and sister, your very life . . ." Now what is Jesus saying there? Well, I don't think He's literally saying I need to hate my wife, or my brother, or my mother, or anything like that. But it's a matter of perspective of what is first. Faith is putting our trust in Him.

The best analogy I have is getting married. When you get married in the old-fashioned way, you say to your wife or your husband, "I forsake all others for you." And, in a sense, I am to hate anyone else, any other temptation, that comes along. It's not true hate, but it's the idea that I have forsaken all others for her and I am committed to her (or to him).

And that's what it's like for us with Christ. It's this commitment in which we give of ourselves to the Lord. He is first. He's not second. And that's what I think Lent teaches us most of all. It's that Jesus Christ is first. And that's what I would like you to reflect on. And I would like you to think about making a commitment, or at least looking at this one. There was a missionary, Thomas Barclay, who was in Formosa. A famous man who, when he died, they found this commitment in his papers. He had signed this at age 16 and every year after that until he was 85. When he got married, his wife's signature was next to his. And it goes like this:

This day do I, with the utmost seriousness, surrender myself to You. I renounce all former lords that have had jurisdiction over me; and I consecrate to you all that I am and all that I have: the powers of my mind, the members of my body, my worldly possessions, my time, and my influence over others; all to be used entirely to your glory, and resolutely employed in obedience to your commands, as long as you continue me in life. To your direction I surrender myself, to be used by you in such way as you in your infinite wisdom shall judge most subservient to the purpose of your glory. To you I leave the management of all events, and say, without reserve, "Not my will, but yours be done."

I like the fact that he had to do this every year because, like all of us, we all go astray. And Lent is a time to renew commitments. This can be a model for you, if you like. I would ask you simply to meditate on it and think about it during the next few weeks--maybe during the Communion time, as we partake together. It's a wonderful time to come before the Lord and renew commitments. Think about your place and your relationship with God. Don't come wanting to suffer for suffering's sake. But come in love, and devotion, and commitment.

Let us pray together. Father in heaven, thank you for loving us so much that you came to this earth, and lived, and suffered, and died. And for all that means. We pray, Lord, that you would help us each, as individuals, commit ourselves to you and renew that commitment from time to time. We ask you to please bless us in the next few weeks as we lead up to Easter. We give you the honor and the glory. In Jesus' name. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Senior Pastor

Faith Presbyterian Church

Minnetonka, Minnesota

[Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. worship service on February 29, 2004.]

A LENTEN COMMITMENT