May 7,
2000
This message was delivered by
Pastor Gene Preston at the Service of Word and Sacrament
at the Community Church Hong Kong on Sunday, May 7, 2000.
The message draws from the assigned texts for the third
Sunday of Easter: Acts 3:9-16, l John 3:1-7, and Luke
24:36-43.
"IN THE NAME
OF JESUS! BUT TAKE CARE!!"
One of the interesting things
about the text from Acts today is that it comes just
after the first reported healing in the New Testament
which Jesus personally did not handle. The apostle Peter
encounters a crippled beggar laying at the entrance to
the temple so he could beg alms. When Peter approaches he
begs from him and Peter responds: "I HAVE NO SILVER OR
GOLD, BUT WHAT I HAVE I GIVE YOU, IN THE NAME OF JESUS
CHRIST OF NAZARETH, STAND UP AND WALK." And he raised up
the man who began to jump about. This is the first New
Testament healing done in the absence of Jesus, but in
the name of Jesus.
Forever after, since this first
healing done in the name of Jesus, believers have been
taking the name of Jesus to accomplish both miracles and
heinous crimes. The same name OF JESUS can be taken in
faith to glory or taken in vain to perdition.
Peter apparently was well aware
of the danger of misusing or misinterpreting the power
of Jesus because in today's text he warns those who stand
about gawking with admiration at this first healing by a
believer: WHY DO YOU WONDER AT THIS, OR WHY DO YOU STARE
AT US, AS THOUGH BY OUR OWN POWER OR PIETY WE HAD MADE
HIM WALK? …AND BY FAITH IN HIS NAME, HIS NAME ITSELF
HAS MADE THIS MAN STRONG, WHOM YOU SEE AND KNOW AND THE
FAITH THAT IS THROUGH JESUS HAS GIVEN HIM THIS PERFECT
HEALTH IN THE PRESENCE OF ALL OF YOU.
I read the message of this text
as: TAKE THE NAME OF JESUS! BUT TAKE CARE WHEN YOU DO
USE THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST!!.
Of the several Resurrection
appearances, we heard this morning the most the most
material and corporeal one in which Jesus, after having
shown his crucifixion wounds to his followers, asks for
some breakfast and eats a fish with them. We are
informed he did this because his friends believed, at
first, they were encountering a ghost. When we misuse the
name of Jesus it may be because we are enthralled with
the ghost of Jesus, or his spectre, or our perverse
imagining about him.
Once these Resurrection
appearances ceased, the early church, like the church
ever since, no longer had an earthly and historical Jesus
present, but only the name of Jesus to motivate them,
move them forward, and also to lead them into trouble,
good trouble when the witnessing was authentic, bad
trouble when the witnessing in the name of Jesus got
detoured into perverse channels like persecutions and
fanaticism pursued also in the name of Jesus.
Jesus did not leave his
followers without some guidelines and standards for
experiencing his authentic power. Taking the take
authentically has cut across a broad swarth of
spirituality. Healing itself is evidence of claiming
rightly the name of Jesus.
The little letter of John gives
one of the classical Christian standards for taking
rightly the name of Jesus. When we act from love and
live in loving relationship we are well centered in the
presence and power of Jesus. The writer says: SEE WHAT
LOVE THE FATHER HAS GIVEN US THAT WE SHOULD BE CALLED
CHILDREN OF GOD, AND THAT IS WHAT WE ARE.
But though this guideline of
love is powerful and effective, it has not kept
Christians from engaging in some barbarous conduct toward
non-Christians and toward other Christians and often even
in the name of Christian love.
*****
This text in Acts is one of the
early indications that belief in Jesus as the Christ was
moving away from being based primarily in personal and
historical relationship with Jesus and into an
appreciation of the power of Jesus as the Risen and
Cosmic Christ. The Cosmic Christ is a theological concept
implied in much of the thinking of Paul, laid out in the
letter to the Hebrews, and dramatised in the final book
of Revelations.
When we affirm the Cosmic Christ
we assert universal and transcendental power into the
memory of Jesus, in our celebration of him in reigning
in glory in heaven, and as an eternal power or principle
which guides history and earthly endeavours toward God's
will.
The Cosmic Christ is the image
of Jesus Christ you see every time you enter an Orthodox
church and crane your eyes toward the dome: there is the
Cosmic Christ looking down with all knowing eyes upon all
creation.
The Cosmic Christ can be
misused: As with the triumphant Christ whose image and
cross were splashed upon the banners of the Crusaders.
The Cosmic Christ has regularly been the inspiration and
impersonal companion of inspired and often fanatical
Christians willing to take any risk, go anywhere, endure
any challenge or opposition, in order to affirm their
stands for truth and justice..
The sense of the Cosmic Christ
is implied in much scripture and intellectually it is a
wonderfully flexible idea which has allowed the Christian
faith to dialogue with with many of the developments,
since the earthly life of Jesus, which have come in
in intellectual history,
science, the arts and the sciences, and spirituality.
The Cosmic Christ can deal with Buddha, Islam, and new
age spirituality; it can interface with Marx and
capitalism. It can stand its ground with evolution, the
big bang theory, environmental concerns, and the Jesus
Seminar. When we claim THE NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST we
can travel almost anywhere and in confidence. But we must
take THE NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST with care.
Theologians need to be careful;
crusaders need to be careful; militants especially need
to take the name of the Cosmic Christ with care. . By
careful I mean we need to exercise humility, prudence and
perspective when claiming that some healing we are doing,
some cause we are undertaking, some point of view we are
pushing, some judgement we are pronouncing, is done IN
THE NAME OF JESUS, THE COSMIC CHRIST!
*******
The bible faith and our own
spiritual experience give us the other primary sense of
Jesus Christ and that is the personal Jesus. The
personal Jesus complements and often balances the
intellectual breadth and reach of the COSMIC CHRIST. The
personal Jesus brings the Cosmic Christ back to earth and
asking: Do we know Jesus in our own lives and, if we
claim so, what difference does he make in our
lives?
This is the experience of
millions of believers, who have never seen Jesus in the
flesh, who never got to see him eat a fish in his
resurrection form, or touch his wounds, or walk with him
toward Emmaus, and who may not be too concerned with the
cosmic implications of belief in Jesus Christ. But these
are greatly blessed as Jesus said those who believe in
him without having seen him would be blessed.
Both the Personal Jesus like the
Cosmic Christ has been more real in some eras than in
others. Late medieval mysticism was a profoundly rich
time when monks and nuns, some of whom subsequently
became saints because of the intimacy of their
relationship with a personal Jesus, enjoyed existential,
palpable, and often quite sensual personal relationships
with the Jesus of their prayer and meditation life. The
diaries of a nun like St. Teresa of Avila reveal that she
lived with an almost minute by minute sense of the
presence of Jesus. Jesus was with her in the kitchen, in
the garden, she even took Jesus to bed with
her!.
Nineteenth century revivalist
Christianity, especially in North American evangelical
Protestantism, rose to tremendous heights of enthusiasm
and euphoria on the sense that every believer could have
an intimate, powerful, personal relationship with Jesus.
A thousand gospel songs captured that personal
relationship. One will serve as illustration:
The Gospel hymn of a century ago
IN THE GARDEN expresses this upsurge in Jesus
personalism at that time:
''I come to the garden alone,
while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear
falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And he
walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am
his own; and the joy we share as we tarry there, none
other has ever known." This hits many of the important
notes of taking the name of Jesus right into one's
private life: it is private, it is intimate; and many
would say this Jesus is overly sentimental and that human
subjectivism changes the divine Saviour into a kind of
daily buddy.
This hymn was written after the
rationalist Enlightenment and after the first scientific
revolutions but it's faith in and experience of a
personal Jesus is not impacted by these profound
intellectual trends. The Cosmic Christ might be able to
accommodate them; personalistic faith need not even worry
about them.
Just as in the mystical
experience of Teresa of Avila centuries earlier, the
sentimental experience of Jesus is palpable, personal,
intimate, and generally withstands any assaults from
without.
This personal experience of
Jesus is also traditionally powerful in those eras in
which the presence of the Holy Spirit is welcomed,
invoked and received. This is because the Holy Spirit,
when authentically present, is Jesus Christ with
us.
Taking the NAME OF JESUS in this
tradition of the personal Jesus has also been a powerful
witness and shaper of our spiritual and secular history.
Many missionaries of the last two centuries were
undoubtedly prompted by a cosmic and visionary sense that
they were going forth with the Cosmic Christ to
evangelise the heathen, defeat the devil, and bring in
the Kingdom.
Other equally bold missionaries
were motivated by their personal relationship with Jesus
as their Lord and Savior always with them to guide and
support them. And many, I presume, were prompted to live
and dare and die both IN THE NAME OF JESUS and IN THE
NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST.
But taking the NAME OF JESUS IN
this personal sense also needs to be taken with care.
Turned-on personalistic Christians have often been just
as misguided, intolerant, and judgmental as turned on
cosmic thinkers about Christ. We know from the
biographies of many Christians, and perhaps from our own
stories, that you can have a powerful personal sense of
Jesus in your lives, and still sin.
*******
There have been incredibly long
periods in the history of Christianity when it would seem
that folks were sustained spiritually neither by a
profound understanding of the Cosmic Christ, nor by a
personalistic experience of Jesus in their lives. I would
guess that the Dark Ages which lasted from the collapse
of the Christian Roman Empire in the fifth century for at
least 600 years until the high Middle Ages was such a
time.
What sustained the illiterate
serfs of Europe who were too ignorant to entertain any
theological concept of the Cosmic Christ and who were
probably too exhausted by the drudgery of their sunup to
sunrise toiling to have much time to muse in the garden
with a personal Jesus? I suppose it was the Church and
the church's traditions of symbols in paintings,
sculptures and stained glass windows all there to
continue the Christian story, and most especially in
Christian baptism and Christian burial and most of all,
in the sacrament of communion. At the mass even the most
ignorant peasant could capture some sense that he and she
were in the presence of Jesus Christ because they were
witnessing and partaking in a colorful, dramatic and
mystical ceremony which Jesus Christ had
instituted.
And so we come once again to our
Communion though we are not serfs and peasants but
educated modern believers. We can approach the sacrament
with an elevated appreciation and wonder that the Christ
who hosts us today hosts a parallel communion in heaven;
we may also approach this table with a personal welcoming
of Jesus into our lives because he has promised that when
we gather in his name he will be with us.
We claim and cling to both the
Cosmic Christ and the personal Jesus. Our several ways
of addressing God and Christ in prayer show both
approaches. We often address as the Divine as Thee and
use its spinoffs of Thou and Thine. This old English
still retains a sense of reverence in the presence of the
transcendent One. Other times we pray to God and Jesus as
You and thereby assume an intimacy with the
divine.
Whatever the ideas, attitudes
and personal experience of Jesus Christ we have today, we
should come to his table with awareness that we are
welcomed to his table neither with perfect understanding
nor perfect behavior because we come in the promise
delivered in today reading from First John's letter:
BELOVED, WE ARE GOD'S CHILDREN NOW; WHAT WE WILL BE HAS
NOT YET BEEN REVEALED. WHAT WE DO KNOW IS THIS; WHEN HE
IS REVEALED WE WILL BE LIKE HIM, FOR WE WILL SEE HIM AS
HE IS. AND ALL WHO HAVE THIS HOPE IN HIM PURIFY
THEMSELVES, JUST AS HE IS PURE.
Pastor Gene
Preston
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