Sermons for the Month

Deserving Our Warning Sign
DATE: April 9, 2000
SERVICE: Lent V
TEXT: John 12:20-33
“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

A book review in the Beacon Journal awhile back caught my eye. The headline read: "Why are there so many warning signs?" It was a chapter heading from a book by David Feldman entitled When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? [New York: Harper Collins, 1992]). The quote came from a traffic engineer who submitted this question to Feldman complaining about the proliferation of warning signs everywhere. There are warning signs for Speed Zone, Deer Crossing, Ice on Bridge, Curve, Slow Children (why would anyone advertise that their children are slow?), Falling Rocks (why not Fallen Rocks?), Bump Ahead, Railroad Crossing, Church ....
Wait a minute! "Church"? Why would a church need a warning sign? We have parking signs for Visitors, Handicapped, Pregnant Mothers. We have direction signs and welcome signs and banner signs. Should our church have a warning sign too? Maybe we should? Isn't that the nature of baptized and ordained ministries today -- to build communities that deserve warning signs? There is only one kind of church that deserves a warning sign. It's a church that's "ON FIRE."
Oh, we have a lot of churches "on fire" -- but they're burning down, not fired up. They're burning down from fear, from status quoism, from cultism. Or they're incandescent with anger, not fire. Or they've been ignited by the "unholy fire" of the ideologies and idolatries Leviticus 10:1 refers to.
This week's familiar words from Jeremiah 31:31-34 proclaim a sweet promise to the exiled people of Israel. Driven from their homeland, helpless and afraid, Jeremiah reminds Israel that not only is God still with them -- God promises a brilliant future for them. A new covenant will be forged between God and Israel -- a covenant written not just in stone, but a covenant seared and sealed upon the heart.
Jeremiah had tasted God's word; it had become for him "a raging fire, shut up in my bones." Jeremiah knows that his inner fire is unquenchable and eternally warming. That is why the power God promised in the coming new covenant is internalized, written, perhaps even burned onto the hearts of God's people.
We need that fire. From Moses at the burning bush to the Pentecost tongues of fire in the Bible, fire is a symbol of the incandescent presence of God. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29), and God shares that fire with us. Can we find that fire in the bones again? Can we feel the reality of God's covenant seared and sealed into our hearts?
These Greeks in our gospel who came to see Jesus came with new eyes -- the eyes of God. They came hoping to see Jesus, not some reflection of their own desires.
More than anything else, faith in Jesus Christ entails changing the way we see. Jesus said (John 3:3) that "no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." The reason we need to be born again is to be able to see, to have our vision cleared up, our imagination opened and sight enlarged. It is our ability to see that releases power in our life. The wrong perspective is imprisonment; the right perspective is empowerment. Spirituality is, more than anything else, the art of seeing -- first, seeing things "as they are," and second, seeing things as they can be. Before we can "Show and Tell," we first must "See and Tell." But see what? See Christ.
Seeing involves two kinds of sight which may be called the experimental and the experiential; the cerebral and the celebratory; the rational and the revelatory; the scientific and the spiritual. The claims and techniques of science are not the only valid methods of acquiring knowledge about the world. Both are true.
In the experimental you keep something at arm's-length distance - - it's called critical detachment; in the experiential you put your arms around something. It's called loving embrace.
Jesus said: "Consider the lilies of the field." One way of considering this flower is to be full of yourself; the other way is to be empty of yourself. According to the scientific epistemology, to examine this flower we must stand at a distance and experiment with it, pick it apart, exegete it. To know this flower experimentally, one must be full of oneself, one's wits and wisdom. To the extent that we experience this flower at all experimentally, it must be separated from us, and we are separated from the natural world of which it is a part.
According to the spiritual epistemology, to consider the lily we don't experiment with it, but experience it. There is no understanding without standing under. Rather than stand back, we must stand under, enter in, participate in its beauty, empty ourselves of all preconceptions and let the flower reveal itself as it is. As A. E. Housman said,
... to look at things in bloom
Fifty Springs are little room.
The analytical takes apart; the synthetic puts together. In one, we are rich -- full of ourselves. In the other, we are poor -- empty of ourselves.
In one, we are a distant observer or critic. In the other, we are an intimate lover.
Love is as much a mode of knowledge as scientific criticism. The predominant language of knowing Christ is the language of love.
"Jesus loves me, this I know." How do you know Jesus loves you?
Yes, through "the-Bible-tells-me-so" scientific study of the Scriptures, tradition and reason. But also through spiritual experience.
Yet, while experimental knowledge is honored and heeded, experiential knowledge is usually considered suspect and faulty. The modern scientific world view has achieved idolatrous status in the church. It has become almost the only way we've taught people to know God: through science, under glass, until the suffocating bell jar of a church brings no air and little fire to people's lives. But Jeremiah reminds us that life-sustaining knowledge of God must come through experience -- through feeling the fire shut up in your bones or burned into our hearts. Tired of all the rational philosophies and salvation systems Greek culture offered them, John's God-fearing Greeks described in this week's gospel text asked for a direct encounter with experiential knowledge -- "Sir, we wish to see Jesus!" People today want to see Jesus. They want to feel the covenant burning in their hearts.
Experiential knowledge does not just inform, it transforms. That is why the message Jesus preached to the crowd was one that proclaimed he would be "lifted up" and would "draw all people to myself" (John 12:32).
Christ's story is not yet finished. We are called to complete the story of Christ by spreading the gospel. We are called to help lift Christ up before the rest of the world. The living experience of "seeing Christ" must ignite a fire in us that compels us to make Christ known to others. We "keep the faith" by "spreading the faith."
But how do we make Christ known?
Experiencing Christ, knowing Christ, demands that we relinquish the control we pretend we have over our lives.
A graduating student at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, had just received his appointment from the bishop. He was grousing because the appointment didn't fit what he felt he deserved. Another United student, loving but unsympathetic, patted him on the back and said, "You know the world is a better place because Michelangelo didn't say, 'I don't do ceilings.'"
That's it! The world is a better place because a German monk named Martin Luther didn't say, "I don't do doors."
Go from the beginning of the Bible to the end, and you will see over and over again the story of men and women who have this fire burning in their bones, this fire seared and sealed upon their hearts.
The world is a better place, because:
-Moses didn't say, "I don't do rivers."
-Noah didn't say, "I don't do arks."
-Jeremiah didn't say, "I don't do weeping."
-Amos didn't say, "I don't do speeches."
-Rahab didn't say, "I don't do carpets."
-Ruth didn't say, "I don't do mothers-in-law."
-David didn't say, "I don't do giants."
-Peter didn't say, "I don't do Gentiles."
-Mary didn't say, "I don't do virgin births."
-Mary Magdalene didn't say, "I don't do feet."
-John didn't say, "I don't do deserts."
-Paul didn't say, "I don't do letters."
-Jesus didn't say, "I don't do crosses."
-You don't say, "I don't do ....

For any church to be worth its warning sign, it has to be turned on. It has to be on fire.
Hal Brady dusts off another old gem and brings it alive again: "An old man and a young man were on the same platform before a vast audience. A special program was being presented. As part of the program, each was to repeat from memory the words of the 23rd Psalm. The young man, trained in the best speech techniques and drama, gave, in the language of the silver-tongued orator, the words of the Psalm: 'The Lord is my Shepherd ....' When he had finished, the audience clapped their hands and cheered, asking him for an encore so that they might hear again his wonderful voice. Then the old gentleman, leaning heavily on his cane, stepped to the front of the same platform and in feeble, shaking voice repeated the same words: 'The Lord is my Shepherd ....'
"But when he was seated, no sound came from the listeners. Folks seemed to pray. In the silence, the young man stood to make the following statement: 'Friends,' he said, 'I wish to make one explanation. You asked me to come back and repeat the Psalm. But you remained silent when my friend here was seated. The difference? I shall tell you. I know the Psalm, but he knows the Shepherd.'
One of my favorite stories from Henri Nouwen on the Desert Fathers is this one: "Abbot Lot went to see Abbot Joseph and said: 'Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of bad thoughts. Now what more should I do?' The elder stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like lamps of fire. He said: 'Why not become all flame?'" (As retold by Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993).
Why don't we as a church become a flaming torch of Spirit/Energy/Faith /Firepower for all the world to see and feel? When that happens we will need to put up our warning sign on West Market.
AMEN