Knowledge by Inquiry, Knowledge by Faith (1 Corinthians 15:1-5

Sunday, June 12, 2016

(On this Sunday, we baptized J_______).

        As Jeremy went under the water, I pronounced him “dead.”  This is not only about J______.  Recall your baptism.  I or another pastor took you down under the water, dead and buried in sin.  Then you are raised and we say, “Raised to new life in Jesus Christ.”  Sin leads to death, but because of Jesus, his death on the cross and his resurrection, we have new life.  We become new creations. We do not remain buried in the ground to return to ashes.  We are raised.

        For what?  Jeremy has entrusted himself to Jesus.  You and I, if we have put our faith in Christ, also have entrusted ourselves to Him.  We are saved, born again, bound for resurrection.  Our baptism shows this.  What about our lives?  For what are we saved?

        In the 16^th century in Europe, a group of Christians called Anabaptists insisted that babies could not be baptized.  Baptism was for people who were able to consciously choose to follow Jesus and when baptism happened it had to be by immersion.  In the reformation, Protestant Christians separated from the Catholic Church.  Anabaptists, the ones denying the acceptability of infant baptism separated from other Protestants like Lutherans and the Reformed Church.

        As a result, over 1000 Anabaptists were arrested and killed by both Catholics and by other Protestants.  Their main crime was they allowed themselves to be re-baptized.  Women were drowned for this, and men burned at the stake for doing what Jeremy did today, undergoing immersion, believer’s baptism. 

        Dirk Willem was one such Christian, an Anabaptist follower of Jesus.  Imprisoned, awaiting execution in his home town of Asperen, Netherlands, he escaped.  He made a rope of cloths tied together, and fled over the wintry countryside as a guard gave chase.  He risked running right across a frozen pond.  The ice held, but when the guard followed, it gave way dooming him to a certain, frozen death. 

        Raised to new life in Christ.  For what?

        Dirk Willem stopped running, turned around, and helped the man who a moment ago had been chasing him.  Dirk had escaped and was in the clear, but he believed what Jesus said when Jesus said to love our enemies.  He pulled that man from the frigid waters and the man was ready to let him go, but this all took long enough for others to catch up.  For living as a part of new creation, as one who is of the Kingdom of God, Dirk Willem was burned at the stake on May 16, 1569.

        Near the end of his letter to the Corinthian Church, the Apostle Paul zeroed on the core Gospel.  Chapter begins, “Now I would remind you brothers and sisters, of the gospel … [on] which you stand” (15:1).  It all comes down to this.  Paul’s final word for them in this letter is the essential Gospel.

        Competing narratives vie for our soul.  Every one of us lives under the covering of a dominant story.  Maybe it is a national story or a social class story or a race story.  Whatever it is, this was true of the Corinthians; it was true for Dirk Willem which is why he was willing to go to his own death to save the man who represented the powers that killed him; and, it is true for you and me.   Competing stories position themselves to be the dominant story of our lives.  Paul wanted the Gospel to be the dominant story for all who would read this letter.

        Verse 2, we are saved if we believe.  Verse 3, Christ died for our sins, was buried, and raised.  Please note that each portion is equally critical in our story.  There is not more weight on the cross.  The cross is essential.  The burial is and so is the resurrection.  The gospel includes all of it.  Later in this chapter, Paul declares that if Jesus was not raised in a bodily resurrection, it’s all for nothing.  Without the resurrection, the cross is just a torture device.  Without the cross, the resurrection never happens. 

        And in beginning in verse 5 and running through verse 11 is another, equally essential element of the Gospel: the appearances of the risen Lord Jesus.  This testimony is here because Paul wants the original readers of this letter and every subsequent generation of readers to know that there were multiple eye-witnesses who attested to a literal, bodily resurrection. 

        New Testament writers worked to place the resurrection as an event history, something that literally happened.  In the opening verses of his Gospel, Luke asserts that he is writing history.  He took the same approach in the book of Acts.  In John’s gospel, the author claims to be an eye-witness to all that has been described including the resurrection (John 21:24).  A similar claim is made in Second Peter (1:5) and here in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul names several eyewitness. 

Theologian Paul Fiddes labels this approach to knowledge of Jesus as ‘scientific,’ affixing to the discipline of historical research the same standards of inquiry used in science (see Past Event and Present Salvation, chapter 3).  Fiddes thinks the resurrection cannot be determined by means of scientific inquiry because it is an event that cannot be reproduced within the boundaries of the laws of nature.  It is a supernatural event so the fact that it happened cannot be established by historical research.  Fiddes is not denying a bodily resurrection.  He just denies that we can prove it by the conventions historians use.  Rather, we know the resurrection happened because we know it by faith.  Fiddes believes this approach to knowing is as valid and as important as the knowledge we gain by scientific inquire.  In dealing with salvation, he feels both ways of knowing – by faith and by scientific inquiry - are essential.

While he doesn’t delve into how we know, theologian James McClendon accepts the resurrection as an event in history.  Two theologian-historians, N.T. Wright and Mike Licona, have written lengthy volumes explaining why the best conclusion to be drawn from the available evidence is that Jesus actually did rise from the grave.  Whether that is enough to say that inquiry can establish the historicity of the resurrection, I cannot say.  But all the scholars I mentioned, Fiddes, Wright, Licona, and McClendon along with many others would agree that scientific inquiry cannot establish what the original followers of Jesus thought the cross and resurrection meant.

To understand meaning, we have to live in that other sphere of understanding Fiddes name – knowledge that comes by faith.  Fiddes says, “the living and incomparable Lord cannot be pinned down under the microscope of scientific investigation.  [We] need the eye of faith, and the power of the Holy Spirit to bring matters into focus before we can say [and believe] that ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’” (p.37).  Paul and the other New Testament writers always operated with the eye of faith.  Even when they tried to establish hard, objective facts by way of insisting upon the eye-witness nature of their reports, those reports were packaged persuasively in an attempt to lead the reader to faith.  The apostle was at the same time objective, faith-based, and evangelistic. 

We understand the events of salvation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the appearances of the risen Lord Jesus both by science and by faith.  I have spent a bit time explaining both ways of understanding specifically because we live in a post-enlightenment era.  We are science and technology dependent.  There are individuals who are happy to let science take care of our healing at the hospital and our entertainment with 1000 devices and our banking and our shopping and our military defense.  In all these ways, some individuals trust in technology, but when it comes to heaven, then switch and trust in God.  And never do the science and the faith meet. 

For others, that won’t do.  When everything rides on the next scientific advance, to then rely on something outside of science for the afterlife is just superstition.  Science has to have a say in our faith understanding.  However, science (including historical proof as science) cannot have the final say.  The resurrection is outside the parameters of science.  God is outside the parameters of science.  So is meaning.  Thus when we, as followers of the crucified/risen Lord who come from the scientific age, express our faith we need to do so in a way that is rooted in faith but understood by those rooted in science.  We have to talk about salvation in a way makes that makes sense to people today.

Jesus lived in first century Palestine.  Fact.

He was crucified when Jewish leaders collaborated with Romans leaders.  He was crucified, dead, and buried.  Fact.

He rose from death and appeared to his followers.  Call this fact or belief, but it happened.  Jesus literally rose in a bodily resurrection and first century people saw him. 

What we believe about God and salvation rest on these facts which we declare to be irrefutable. What these things mean has to do with the relationship that comes when the Holy Spirit reaches out to us and we respond.  This is faith knowledge and faith-living.  We declare both, what we know and the life we will commit to live in believer’s baptism by immersion. 

But then, what this all means, is only seen in how we live.  Prior to the resurrection, it was hard.  Jesus repeatedly told his followers that like him, they needed to walk the hard road, persevere through persecution, and endure in godliness and faith.  They just wanted to jump ahead straight to the New Age, bypassing hardship.  McClendon observes that if the disciples had had their way, there would have been no cross.  If Jesus had his way, there would have been 13 crosses (McClendon, p.235).  And we have to take up our cross and follow Him.  When we do that, when we’ve evaluated the evidence and responded to the Holy Spirit and we decide that because of what we’ve found and what we’ve felt we should then walk the footsteps of Jesus, then we have a full-bodied, lived salvation.

So, we study and pray. We think and feel.  We calculate, evaluate, and meditate.  All of it is done in hope and trust, believing that God will make us ready when our moment comes and our pursuer is about to fall through the ice.

Remember the opening story of the Dirk Willem who stop his escape to rescue the guard falling through thin ice.  In that moment, he was not engaged in deep theological analysis.  He was not moved by a deep warmth from God, I don’t think.  He was scared and running for his life.  But he stopped because deep inside himself he could hear the voice of Jesus telling him to love his enemy.  This enemy would drag him to the stake where he would be slow-roasted to death. 

When we are attacked verbally or relationally or maybe physically, when we are hit, do we hear Jesus telling us to love our enemies and do we obey?

When it gets really hard, do we run as fast as we can to safer ground, or do we stand and point to the crucified, risen Lord and declare, I am standing with Him and trusting in Him, no matter what?

When being a Christ-follower is costly, do we backtrack and settle for a watered down faith indistinguishable from any other worldview, or do we pay the cost, carry our cross, and follow Him?

The gospel is salvation: through the cross and the resurrection, Jesus saves us from sin and death and saves us to life eternal in His kingdom.  We know this salvation that we have through measured, reasoned study of the facts.  We know this salvation that we have through our deeply personal, emotional response to the Holy Spirit who whispers to our hearts that we are forgiven and beloved.  And our salvation is known when the watching world sees our lives and sees Jesus.

AMEN

First Sunday of Lent, 2013

Letting God Work (Romans 3:21-26)

I__, what are you working on there?  Bring that up here.

(Preplanned: my son I__ brings up on the platform a Lego house he has built.  He hands it to me and I look at it. And then I begin the Sermon.)

            This is a good Lego house.  For at least three years now, I__'s abilities in Lego-construction have far surpassed my own. 

Imagine this house represents a human being, maybe you.   Imagine a human created in the image of God – not perfect, but good, very, very good.  You and I are God’s image-bearers. 

            This week in our Ash Wednesday service, we were invited to take up the Spiritual practices of confession and acknowledgement.  We confess that we, God’s image-bearers, have sinned.  We are sinners.  And we acknowledge that sin has a destructive impact on us and on humanity.  Sin pollutes God’s good creation and there is nothing you or I can do to overcome it.  Sin is more powerful than we are.

            Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned” (throw I__’s Lego house into the air), “and fall short of the glory of God.”  All we who are God’s image bearers are nothing more than smashed Lego houses, pathetically small pieces of plastic scattered about without purpose.

            (It is important at this point that I__ shows no emotional reaction.  He simply begins putting the house back together.  His only focus is reconstructing the house.  It is as if no one else is present.)

            All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  This belief about sin is fundamental to the entire Jesus story.  God became human because humans, in their sins, were and are cut-off from God.  God detests evil.  God wipes out that which rebels against Him.  Our sins put us in rebellion against God.  We are thus in the direct path of God’s fierce wrath.  In Genesis the story of Sodom and Gomorrah depicts how God feels about sin.  Those cities were full of perverted people and corrupt practices.  God annihilated both cities in avalanche of consuming flames.  That picture of God’s wrath is also a predictor of the fate of anyone who sins.  We all sin.

            On Ash Wednesday we heard two things. First our grand spiritual goal is to live in relationship with God.  Second, Sin makes the achievement of our goal impossible. 

            The good news is Jesus came to take care of sin.  So, we were invited and I invited every one this morning to spend time in prayer contemplating sin.  Think about your own specific sins.  And think about the way sin, in the big picture of your life and the even bigger picture of human history, has distorted the beautiful relationship God wants with each one of us. 

            How you specifically enter this spiritual practice of confession & acknowledgement will surely differ from how your neighbor does it.  Maybe you write down mistakes you’ve made, thing you’ve done that fill you with shame.  Then, you remember your forgiveness and you light the piece paper and burn it up, knowing you are forgiven. 

            Maybe, thinking big picture, you read a book about the holocaust.  That could be a Lenten discipline.  You read and you pray as your read.  The reading is informative, filling your mind with knowledge of a very dark chapter of human history, but it also is a call to prayer.  You ask the Holy Spirit of God to be at work in the world, healing and redeeming. 

            The spiritual practice of confession of sin and acknowledgement of the sin problem can take many forms.   My prayer is this work of confession and acknowledgement will enter our minds and our hearts and our daily thinking throughout Lent.  In raising our consciousness of sin, we become intensely aware of our need for Jesus. 

            Our spiritual goal is to be in relationship with Jesus – a relationship that is present and real and felt and even tangible in every part of our lives.  A new understanding of relationship with God: that’s the Lenten program at HillSong in 2013. 

            A goal within that goal is to shed the sin.  We talked about confessing and acknowledging on Wednesday and I hope you find in the rhythms of your life an intentional process of prayer in which you confess and acknowledge.  I strongly encourage you to do this throughout Lent.  But it can’t stop there.  That would not be good news – ending the story saying, “Yep, we’re sinners, cut off from God.”

            We want to be cleared.  The problem is we can’t.  We cannot on our own power erase our sins or the damages of sin.  We cannot make up for sin.  We cannot do away with it.  We cannot make amends that will make it all better.  And worst of all, we cannot stop sinning.  We want to, but we don’t have the power.  Paul says, “I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.  I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:14b-15).  Sin gets in the way.  We long to walk with God, but we look at our lives and see pain and mistakes repeated and hurt.  It is not good.

            For the goal of relationship with God to be realized, sin has to be removed.  Thus innocence is a spiritual goal.  Every one of us needs to be able to stand before God and be declared innocent of sin and cleared of all sin’s damages.

            This is where Jesus goes to work.  In re-creating us so that we become new creations, sons and daughters of God, Jesus has clean-up work to do.  In Romans 3, Paul illustrates this through three metaphors.  His writing here, thanks to the influence of people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, is at the very core of what we believe as Christ-followers.  For the most part, we aren’t even aware of how much Luther’s thought was shaped by Augustine and Augustine’s thought was formed in his reading of Paul and specifically Romans.

            I say that just to point out that the metaphors in Romans 3 are extremely helpful in showing what Jesus has done.  But the story is not the terminology.  The story is Jesus at work making a way for us sinners to be declared innocent of sin and free of sin.  The real spiritual work is accomplished by Jesus.  Paul’s metaphors illustrate something Jesus is getting done.  McClendon, a theologian I referred to on Ash Wednesday describes Paul’s use of metaphor.  “Metaphors are not the furniture of some fairyland of unreal or pretended existence; metaphor is not an alternative to true utterance or a way of avoiding the (literal) truth.  [Metaphor is] a native device for speaking the truth in as plain and helpful as way as can be” (Systematic Theology: Doctrine, p.216).

            Thus Paul offers a legal metaphor.  “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift” (Rom. 3:24).  Thousands of pages of ink have been spilled by some of the greatest thinkers in Christian history debating what ‘justification’ means.  I find value in the conversation, but for our purposes, striving after relationship with God, the key truth is that justification renders us innocent even though we are sinners.  In this courtroom metaphor, we stand trial, accused of sin.  God sees what Jesus has done on the cross for us, God looks at us, and declares, “Innocent.”  Remember all the awful things said about sin?  They’re all true.   But we are innocent because of Jesus.

            Paul also offers a crass economic metaphor.  We are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  Redemption refers to slavery.  A slave is freed when his freedom, his manumission, is purchased.  We’ve already referred to Romans 7.  Slavery is the master and we are in chains forever.  But Jesus has crushed the cruel taskmaster.  Jesus has redeemed us.  We are slaves no more because what he has done. 

            We are innocent.  We are free.  The third metaphor is a worship metaphor.  We are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (3:24-25b).  I am severely limited in explaining this third metaphor.  For me personally, this sacrifice metaphor – the blood atonement – does not unveil truth in native speech in a “plain and helpful way,” to use McClendon’s terms.

            But it was very much in common vernacular when Paul wrote it.  In first century Rome, pagan worship involved shedding of animal blood to cover human sins.  In Jewish worship in the temple, the same thing happened.  There is a scene in the movie the Nativity, about the birth of Jesus.  Herod is in the temple and the priest says, “Transfer your sins to the animal.”  Herod leans over and touches his forehead to the cow’s head.  Then the cow is slaughtered.  Paul is saying that when Jesus’ blood was shed, that was the last blood sacrifice ever needed for the sins of all people of all time.  And his first century readers might be surprised by such an audacious claim.  They certainly understood it.

            Is there literally a courtroom where we stand accused and God sits at the judge’s bench?  Are we literally in chains on the auction block and Jesus comes along and buys our freedom?  Is Jesus literally the perfect blood sacrifice?  I am not even trying to answer these question and I am not Paul was either.  Paul was saying, we humans have this serious sin problem.  Jesus’ death on the cross eliminates it completely, forever.  We believe in him and what he did become effective for us.  Paul uses the legal, economic, and worship metaphors to point to Jesus, his death on the cross, and our status before God.  That which would prevent us from being sons and daughters of God is gone.  The path is clear.

            In the debates about what exactly justification means, one things is agreed upon.  Jesus is the one who accomplishes it, not us.  So what then do we do?  If the spiritual goal is innocence and the means of achieving that goal are entirely in Jesus’ hands and he’s already done it, where does that leave us? 

            A spiritual practice for us in Lent in 2013 is to receive.  Receive the grace God gives.  He’s working. We need to receive what he’s doing for us and giving to us.

            What I mentioned Wednesday related to sin, confess and acknowledge, sounded a bit less than specific.  It’s not a guided discipline like fasting every Wednesday throughout Lent.  Maybe fasting helps us acknowledge and confess, but I wasn’t suggesting fasting.  I was prescribing the work of acknowledging and confessing.  Now I am prescribing even more strongly the work of receiving, paradoxical as they may sound.  I had a brief conversation with someone this week.  She said she needed something more concrete.  I understand, but this is where each of us has to take responsibility in our personal Lenten practice. 

            To receive the grace God is giving in Jesus Christ sounds vague.  It is not vague.  It is abstract to an extent, and it might be general, but not vague.  Receiving demands that we slow down.  We take in less input, less stimuli.  We spend time in quiet and solitude joyfully contemplating that no matter what has happened or what will happen, we are innocent, free, and sin is covered forever.  Jesus has done this and is doing this for us and in us constantly. 

I find it helpful to walk and pray.  Prayer walking is a way to set ourselves to receive God’s grace.  Perhaps praying in the early morning, before the world is awake when all else is quiet will help us be quiet and hear from and receive from God.  Maybe in the middle of Lent a silent retreat is in order.  These are a few suggestions.  The key is recognizing that Jesus is the one working.  And God is at work.  As Paul says, “He justifies the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:26).  This is hard for highly successful, determined people to grasp.  It you have accomplished a lot in your life, you surely hear the faith story at church and think, ‘what do I have to do.’  What you and I have to do is quiet down and slow down and let God be at work in us, cleansing us, remaking us. 

(Call I__ up and hold up the repaired house).  In his hands, with Him working on us, we become the new creations God wants us to.  So, we are in Lent.  Find a way that works in your life that is affective for you, to slow down and quiet down.  Set yourself to receive what God is giving.  When it comes to sin, don’t strive to overcome it.  Rather we turn to God and in faith, let Him be about His work in our lives.

AMEN