May 16, l999
SIGNIFICANT PAUSES IN LIFE - What to do?
Luke 24:44-53
As members of the human race we experience similar
significant experiences: everyone must know of a birth if
not remember a birthday; most people remember their first
love and a lost love; everyone knows how to behave at a
wedding or a funeral; most of us remember our first job.
Our problem is that the good times don't last forever
and our lives unfold in ordinary days, routine events,
and repetitious actions.
Let us, therefore, turn to today's scriptures for some
guidance about how to discover significance in the long
pauses which add up to our lives. How to find the
extraordinary in the ordinary. How to encounter God in
the mundane.
********
Our reading from Acts alerts us to a significant event
for the church and believers: The Ascension of
Jesus
his final departure from his earthly role to
his eternal existence. He left them, but he had promised
he would return so his friends expected him to return and
soon. But the Church has now waited close to 2,000 years.
It has been a long pause between Jesuses.
What did the writer of Luke Acts think the friends of
Jesus should do while they waited for his return? They
were not to do nothing. They were stupid to stare into a
sky now empty. Get on with it. But with what?
*****
At the climactic event told to us in Luke 24, Jesus
delays his departure to conduct a bible study with his
disciples. Hear again this portion of Luke 24:
EVERYTHING MUST BE FULFILLED THAT IS WRITTEN ABOUT ME
IN THE LAW OF MOSES, THE PROPHETS AND THE PSALMS. THEN HE
OPENED THEIR MINDS SO THEY COULD UNDERSTAND THE
SCRIPTURES.
For Jesus the deliberate and common pursuit of
understanding from the scriptures was the first task of
those in the long pause. The interpretation of Luke 24
hangs on our acceptance of Jesus' insight that only those
who understand the scriptures will believe in him and
his resurrection.
The interpretation of Luke 24 turns on this
discernment: those who understand the scriptures rightly
will understand the meaning and power of the Resurrected
One.
Earlier at Luke l6, Jesus made the same point.
Remember how he told the parable of Lazarus and the rich
man (Luke l6:l9-3l). This parable is usually received as
an ethical teaching about the imperative of the rich to
be generous or end up you know where. But it is also a
reminder from Jesus on the need to study and discern the
scriptures in order to find meaningful truth. When the
rich man, already tormented in hell, begged Father
Abraham to warn his rich brothers away from their greed,
Abraham replied: "If they do not listen to Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone
rises from the dead."
Now the scriptures which Jesus referred to were, of
course, not our present bible since none of the New
Testament had been composed. He was speaking of the
Jewish scriptures of the Torah, the prophets, the psalms
and wisdom literature. On June 7 (Nury, Margie Long,
Richard Lee) several of us will take our new
confirmation class to the Jewish synagogue to meet with
Rabbi Daniel Cohen and his own Jewish confirmation class.
Why? Because Christian confirmands need understanding
that our faith unfolds from Jewish scriptures, the very
scriptures which Jesus knew and taught.
Jesus did what all of us when we turn to the
scriptures: he read and interpreted the scriptures
selectively emphasizing those portions which pointed to
his own understanding and faith in God, and ignoring or
reinterpreting scriptures which narrowed and dogmatized
knowledge of God. Jesus liked the great stories from
Genesis and Exodus; he knew, loved and interpreted the
prophets so as to reveal the righteous fullness of God as
Our Heavenly Father; Jesus emphasized the texts that
focus on divine love and compassion and was largely
indifferent to, or even put off, by those scriptures
which judge, categorize and condemn others. The
prophecies about the true Messiah engaged him and Jesus
put a unique spin on the relatively few prophecies about
the Suffering Servant as the key to his messiahship and
the appropriate symbol for those who would take up His
Cross to follow him; and he relied totally upon those
texts pointing to the Resurrection as the ultimate
revelation and confirmation of who God is.
In Luke 24 Jesus mentions specific scriptural themes
which address his identify: Did you hear those words:
suffering, death, repentance and forgiveness of sins, and
witnessing. I believe many people, both within His Church
and outside of it, feel put off by these scriptural
emphases of Jesus.
The last two Sundays I had conversations with two men
who were visitors to our worship. They came from opposite
religious directions: one identified himself to me as a
lapsed Christian; the other declared he became a born
again Christian only two years ago. It turned out that
neither was touched by our worship including the
scriptures read.
The lapsed Christian visited us on Easter Sunday and
he told me: "Pastor, it's nothing against you, but I
didn't like coming to church for the first time in l5
years and being asked to make a confession of sin. I was
feeling down enough without your mentioning sin to
me."
I marvelled that a minute and half prayer of
confession before Communion was what he remembered rather
than the glorious scriptures of that day. Peter's
embracing statement read from Acts 7 that the reach of
Jesus is to all peoples and nations. Paul's challenge to
the early church from I Corinthians to throw out the old
yeast and celebrate Christ with the new yeast of
sincerity and truth? And that Sunday we heard John 20 and
the Resurrection story of the Fourth Gospel.
The other visitor came last Sunday and over lunch he
pretty well indicated that while the worship was okay it
did speak to his personal spirituality. He remembered
most intensely the day of his conversion and he measured
everything else in terms of whether it affirmed his
significant experience or not. I surmised that only
selected scriptures and certain styles of worship did
that for him.
Self-absorption is the quality both men had. One was
self-absorbed in self-pity; the other self-absorbed in
self-confidence. But aren't they representative of many
whom we would like to help through their
self-centeredness to a fuller understanding of Christ in
the scriptures?
Those kinds of people rushed to Jesus. He attracted
and dealt with the lonely, the victims, and the cocky.
Why do they flee from us?
How do we help those with a broken but not contrite
heart move beyond victimhood to a humble and receptive
attitude toward the scriptures and other aspects of
Christian discipleship like prayer and worship?
How do we assist those with one or another simple
understanding of discipleship - whether it be their born
again credentials or their absorption in tongues or their
Pharaisaism of the Christian Right or Left - to some
deeper, more profound discernment of the God and Christ
of the scriptures?
Exclusive claims about one's faith arise from
selective readings of the scriptures inclined toward
Pharisaic self-confidence, whether of the Religious Right
or the Religious Left, which Jesus understood was the
enemy of authentic spirituality. And so I heard in the
skeptical voice of the lapsed believer sunk in his
loneliness and suffocating in his own victimhood, as I
heard in the assertive pre-occupation with having caught
Jesus in his heart, the kinds of unhelpful ways to live
the ordinary days and the evangelical challenge to
non-dogmatic and open-minded congregations: how can we
get through their, and often our own self-centredness to
the marvelous, surprising and gracious God of the
scriptures?
We are trying to do just that in our current DISCIPLE
program and in our Sunday seminar on SPIRITUAL LITERACY.
And amazingly these groups are both serious and fun!
When we study knowledge about God in the scriptures
what we really want is knowledge of God. I believe Jesus
felt that knowledge about God often comes before
experience of God.
Luke 24 tells us that once the disciples minds were
opened to understand the Scriptures things started to
make sense. And when things made sense, Jesus could
charge his disciples to become witnesses. And they
become effective witnesses in the many ordinary years of
their lives which followed.
In my own spiritual journey I have never seen Christ
in the skies and I would be rather upset if I thought I
had capture Christ in my heart. I do find Christ in the
bible, I find Christ in the instruction and fellowship
and loving work of the Church, I do find Christ in other
people; I do find Christ in worship; I do find Christ in
the ordinary, routine and long intervals of my life when
my heart goes with God.
The counsel of Jesus is clear and trustworthy here.
We need to study and know the scriptures and seek to
interpret them rightly.
Those you who reject any serious commitment to the
scriptures as part of their spiritual journey will in all
probability be in the attitude of those who stood gazing
into an empty sky. They will not understand, believe in,
nor experience the truth and power of the Resurrection in
their own lives.
Those who seek the Lord both in their hearts and in
the scriptures are ready to receive what comes next:
Pentecost and the mission Jesus gives those who believe
in him through the scriptures.
Pastor Gene Preston
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