Edges
A sermon
delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson
April 12, 2015
at Gordonsville
Presbyterian Church, Gordonsville, Virginia
John 5: 37-47
Deuteronomy 4: 1-20
Let us pray,
Help us to see despite our eyes
Help us to think outside of our minds
Help us to be more than our lives
For your eyes show the way
Your
mind knows the truth
Your
being is the life.
Amen.
37 And the
Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You have never heard his
voice or seen his form, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in
you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.
39 “You
search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and
it is they that testify on my behalf. 40 Yet you refuse to come to
me to have life. 41 I do not accept glory from human beings. 42
But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. 43 I
have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in
his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe when you
accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one
who alone is God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you before the
Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 If
you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But
if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?” [1]
One thing that I have noticed in my life time
is that people these days have trouble with edges, we have trouble with
borders, we have trouble with things that provide dividing lines between things,
admitting that some issues are actually quite black and white. I used to not
like, Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," but have since grown to
really love it and enjoy it. . . he poses in the poem two major ideas, and puts
them at tension with each other, and then beautifully does not relieve the
tension, but lets it just linger, and marinate within the readers' minds. He
writes, on one hand, "Good Fences make good neighbors" and he is
saying how he and his neighbor walk the wall each spring to fix it, to replace
the stones that have fallen out during the year, but the other line he throws
out it, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" . . . which
literally refers to the forces of nature that cause the rocks and stones that
make the wall to need to be put back in place. . . it is as if something in
nature, some force seeks to tear down the walls. It's a good tension between
our desire from old truisms like "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" and
some more free and natural urge to tear them down. But whatever the metaphor we
want to use, I think that we are often afraid to go near the dividing lines
that separate us. . . or we are subconsciously nervous, or unconfident, and
therefore self conscious about our own "edges" and so seek to round
them and sand them down, so as to make social settings all the much less tense.
We especially are that way about Religion. . . and that is what I want to speak
about this morning because I think that is what Jesus is speaking about in this
passage.
If I were to ask my students what the
differences between the great religions of the world are at the beginning of
the school year, before studying world lit at all, they would and usually do
say that basically all the world religions are the same. There are a few small
differences, but all in all they are all about moral teaching. . . they all in
some way shape or form, instruct their members as to how to treat each other,
their neighbors, those around them with kindness, respect, dignity, and love.
In a diverse and multicultural society like ours such teachings, that all
religions are the same, are taught to seek to minimize the conflict that could
arise between religions, focusing on the commonalities, and it all seeks to
tear down the walls that divide, those edges where we are uncomfortable, where
we flee from discussion in hopes that we will not offend, that like the famous
"Coexist" bumper stickers promote, with their multi religious
symbols, we could just get along and forget our differences, but in passages
like the one we have today Jesus does not allow us to wish away those edges
because they do exist, and when push comes to shove they really do matter
because they are at the heart of why. . . the what's may be similar, what we
do, how we do, but the why's really shape the fine tuning of the what. . . like
the differences between diseases and symptoms.
There is a great story from the Arabian
Night's stories called "The Fisherman and the Jinnee" and it shows a real
truth concerning the tradition out of which the faith of Islam is formed. In
the story a fisherman is out in the waves and he is fishing, and catching
nothing, but then on the third cast, he casts further out, and is just about to
quit if he doesn't catch anything. On this third cast he doesn't catch a fish
either, but he does catch an lamp, and as he is cleaning off the lamp, rubbing
the side, a jinnee comes out. . . and when he comes out his first words are,
the pious words of faith, "There is no God but Allah. . . and you would
expect him to say, and Mohammad is his prophet. . . . like the first pillar of
Islam states, but he does not. . . instead he says, "There is no god but
Allah, and Solomon is his prophet." That is a really packed statement about
the religion of Islam and where it comes from, and just exactly who
"Allah" is, or who they see Allah to be. . . by saying Solomon is his
prophet, they are suggesting that Prophets come and go based in historical
reality and circumstances, but Allah does not change. . . and Allah was the God
of Solomon in the Bible. In the story the lamp and the Jinnee work as a time
capsule. The Jinnee was imprisoned in the lamp during the time of Solomon, so
he is the prophet of God. . . had it been 40 years earlier, the Jinnee would
have said, there is no God but Allah and David is his prophet, before that,
Samuel is his prophet, Gideon, Deborah, Joshua, Moses, There is not God but
Allah and Abraham is his prophet. Packed in that one line is the claim that the
God of Islam is the very same God that is in the Bible, that Allah is Yahweh,
is Jehovah, the God of Moses, Jacob, Abraham. All one in the same. . . so if
that is true, then why the struggle, why the conflict, what is the edge of
Islam and Christianity, and well Judaism. . . it would seem in today's world that knowing the edge would
help us because ignoring the edge has not staved off conflict. . . so what is
the edge, if the claim of Muslims is that Allah is the very same God as the God
of the Bible? Why the problem? Do you know?
It comes down to this. . . and is capsulated
in the first statement of pillar of Islam, there is no God but Allah, and
Mohammad is his prophet. Christians may agree about the first half of that
statement, but not the second, at least not traditionally. Mohammad claimed to
have had the Word of God revealed to him in the cave outside of Mecca, that the
Angel Gabriel came to him and told him to Recite. . . and what he recited, is
or became eventually the Koran. . . which means Recite in Arabic. . . now this is
a huge edge. . .for a Muslim the Koran is the perfect word of God. . . that it
is Revelation, and that it is perfect. . . and it is then in the same tradition
as the revealed laws to Moses and other revealed teachings out of Jewish and
Christian scripture, however the reason for the need of another prophet of God,
that is the need for Mohammad is that the revealed Word of God had been
corrupted over time by human teachers, translation, time, misreadings, mistakes
made by scribes in copying, basically the instructions that Yahweh, or Allah
had given to human beings had been altered and God was using Mohammad to set
things straight, in that way Moses and Jesus, and the other men of God were
prophets like Mohammad, but the perfect word of God they brought or relayed had
been damaged.
So that becomes the edge, or at least the
source of the edges. Christians and Jews do not believe that Mohammad is a
prophet of God, and therefore the Koran has no real authority as the "Word
of God." It becomes an edge, you either believe that Mohammad was visited
by Gabriel or you don't. He is either a messenger of God, or he is a crazy
claiming to have talked to God and having such delusions of grandeur, or he is
using and experience to manipulate others. There is a source, and it divides.
Now look at what Jesus says to the Jews that
he is talking to in this chapter. Remember the context as well. . . Jesus has
healed that man in the pools on the Sabbath, and has claimed to be doing what
the Father has told him to do. The Jews there have gotten angry because he has
broken the Sabbath rule, and has claimed to be the Son of God. They are looking
at him like he is a blasphemer, or he is crazy. . . sound familiar? Jesus says
to them. . .
39 “You
search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and
it is they that testify on my behalf. 40 Yet you refuse to come to
me to have life. 41 I do not accept glory from human beings. 42
But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. 43 I
have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in
his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe when you
accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one
who alone is God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you before the
Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 If
you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But
if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?” [2]
Think about this situation. You are a good and pious Jew, a Pharisee
even, and you are taking scripture and leading a life based on the book, and
now all of a sudden there is a man, standing in your midst, and claiming to be
the one the scriptures are pointing too, claiming to be the fulfillment of the promises
of scripture, but he is breaking those rules
you have based your entire life on. What do you do? What would it take
for you to believe in him instead of what you've been told? We are the products
of such decisions and such faith, the descendants of the people who made that
decision throughout the years, who saw the edge and chose. It is an interesting
question still about what we follow, do we follow Jesus or do we follow the
book? are they the same thing, or are they slightly different? Where is the
line, where is the edge?
These questions are front and center in the
world today, and create many edges of belief between the different
denominations within Christianity, and in some cases are creating more edges
and dividers even within denominations. One thing that this passage shows is
that the answer to the question is not easy, and it is not simple, and is not
clear. It is more proof that the Bible is a very complicated book of voices,
rather than one clear cut contiguous point of view, because here is Jesus
interpreting scripture in a very new and different way than the trained
religious teachers of his time. . . what would Jesus say about our struggles
today? What side would Jesus be on? Would we be on his? It is so very hard to
answer these questions. . . one thing though is the case. . . Jesus does not
allow it to be simple for us. He does not make it easy. He challenges us to see
him in a very real way, to see God in a real present way. . . and in a rule
shifting, way, where everything we thought we knew about life, death, and God
is challenged. . . or it isn't, the claim of change comes from Jesus himself. .
. salvation comes from Jesus himself, the authority from the Father comes from
Jesus himself. . . I put the famous quote from C.S. Lewis in your bulletin. . .
and it seems to really be magnified by this passage, Lewis wrote:
“I
am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people
often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I
don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man
who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a
great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man
who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must
make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman
or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and
kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but
let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
We may like to live in the safety of shaving
off edges like that, but Jesus is an edgy kinda cat. . . and is not safe. . .
to quote another of C.S. Lewis book's describing his Christlike metaphorical
character the Lion, Aslan. . .
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what
Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But
he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Jesus may
not be safe. Jesus may not be Politically Correct. Jesus may not fit into our
secure categories. Jesus challenges what we know and think about the world,
even what we thought we knew about God. It is not easy to follow Jesus, nor
simple. . . but he claims to be The Way, the Truth, and the Life. . . and He is
not Dead but Risen. . . will we follow where he goes? Is he the Son of God, or
just another mad man claiming to be. . . that was the edge then. . . and is still an edge today? Something there is that doesn't love a wall. . .
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