Dealing with Davinci

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West Side Church of Christ

Why Christianity Works-1.



I began this series on the Power point presentations with a presentation of a peculiar Christian problem. Christians believe and live their lives based on a story that is the most magnificent and incredible story ever told. We believe that the God who created the world sent His Son into the world as a human and that Son lived like the rest of us lived but died on a cross so our sins could be forgiven and three days later rose from the dead and now lives as King of all and one day will return to judge the world and live with the redeemed.
This story with its obvious conclusions in relation to our responsibility towards Jesus is under attack constantly and at times it might just seem easier to not believe.
The other part of the problem is that we are attempting to follow a standard of living that is very difficult to follow and this in turn might make it easier not to believe. At times it is a real struggle to live as Jesus calls us to live.

The movie edition of the Da vinci Code has changed a little from the book and in the end of the movie when it is discovered that the character Sophie is the great descendant of Jesus Christ and she has a choice on whether or not to reveal the truth, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks’ character) asks here: would Jesus Christ’s descendant destroy faith or preserve it? His basic theory is that faith works even if it is false.

I want to explore the question this last lesson on why Christianity works! I want us to look at this in two ways:
  1. a way that counters the many ideas that are out there in today’s culture of which the Davinci Code capitalizes on and
  2. a way that counters an idea of God as someone who has to be bribed or somehow have his fancy tickled!
A Jewish rabbi named Jonathan Sachs was speaking about the problem of negotiating our way through contemporary culture and you know there are so many pressures and forces in our culture that finding our way can be very difficult—too many choices make us look a lot longer at the menu and we can end up frustrating everyone in line including ourselves!
One of the things he brought up he likened us to the children of Israel wandering through the desert where God had done great things for them in Israel and had promised good to them in the future and that He would be with them in the present but they didn’t always want to go the way God told them to and he compared that to a modern day GPS system.
The system says turn left a block ahead but you think you know best and so you say I will turn right instead of left and there is a little pause with the GPS system and it comes back, since you did that we’ll now do this.
God did this often in the desert and He does this often throughout history and He is still doing that today. After Israel had gotten its way in the desert and got it all messed up, God says we’ll now have to do it this way and that.
Ever since the Garden of Eden we have gotten ourselves in a mess by going our own way. We are now asking as a culture where do we go from here?
The danger is we will not always have a wise voice to guide us.
Bugs life—the ants are preparing for the fall harvest and a leaf comes down and breaks the line, panic spreads and soon there is no one to follow until a wiser ant comes and leads them safely.
Ants who are lost will follow the one ahead of them, that’s okay but the one ahead of them has to know where they are going and if you have ever seen this, some can simply go in a circle and they will die!
We have to ask in our culture if we are simply blindly following a voice and is that voice wise enough to guide us?
John 10:27,28—my sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me…

How we are going to begin this looking for a voice is to recognize there are some built in voices that all humans everywhere do in fact hear:
(These are not mystical voices that some people claiming spirituality force to be heard, but they are a part of the created order)
  1. Voice for justice!
    C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says if you see 4,5 children playing a game in a playground it is not to long to hear one of them say ‘that’s not fair’. Children do not have to be taught laws about fairness, but it is something they just know! We all hear the voice for justice! Some of us can treat others unjustly, but we all know fairness. Everyone knows the world is messed up and needs to be put right. We hear this call and the puzzle is that even though we hear that we need to do justice, we need to make it right we simply cannot do it. We want to, but we can’t, not by ourselves.
    Economically, racially, criminally, internationally—we are very busy, but we’re not making the world right! The world is like what the Psalmist described in 120—I am for peace they are for war.
  2. Voice for spirituality!
    Secularism has been tried and found wanting, it has cracked and broken. There are some secularists, but for the most part we do not live in a secular society. A great majority of us know we live in a multi-dimensional world and what we see and what we hear and the material objects we can observe is only the beginning of what we live in. The puzzle again is that though we know there is a multi-dimensional world how do we get in touch? The discovery of spirituality is at times a difficult thing. This is the meaning of Lucy Pevensie’s discovery of Narnia—she hides in the wardrobe and all of a sudden finds herself in a new world and this is how Lewis said spirituality was often discovered that we find ourselves suddenly open to possibilities but then she goes back and all the children want to go see and they can’t.
    It doesn’t work for them. We say God is found in church, so we go to church and it doesn’t connect with us, He’s found in prayer and we go and pray but it doesn’t work. So, often people will force it, we need God to be present and so we pray and look for a sign and anything eventually will do that this is a sign that God has heard my prayer and we don’t really find spirituality. God is often absent when wanted and interfering when unwanted. Jesus offers the greatest sacrifice of all and cries out ‘why have you forsaken me?’ Where are you?
  3. Voice for human relationships!
    We live in a world where we know we need family & friends and yet the puzzle is that they are so difficult to maintain. Friendship is hard not easy, especially long ones and it takes a lot of work. Family is more so. There are so many problems of family life, marriages, in-laws, siblings and so on. Many people find it easier when the going gets tough to drift apart. Even the deeper ones that take greater work but last there is still a shadow over each and every one of our relationships and that is the shadow of death that one of us will go first and at times both of us, but mostly one goes first.
  4. Voice of beauty!
    We live in a world that causes us to stop and wonder at it all.
    ‘the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1),
    ‘when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.’ (Psalm 8:3).
    We see flowers and moons, and oceans, and beautiful people but then beauty fades. People get so caught up in beauty that they will analyze it and get bored with it. Beauty that captivated them is gone.
In all the religions of the world there are answers to why do we hear those voices?
In the Christian religion we have an explanation of why we hear and how to get in touch with the One who can bring us there!

We have to understand a couple of things:
  1. What do we mean by the word/name God?
    What are you talking about when you say God?
    Sometimes people will say well God is One who is way up and way away from the world who looks down at the way things are and is very upset and He has revealed a way of escape and when that day dawns, some of us will make it. Well, is that what Christians mean when they say God?
    Others say gods—this is paganism, there are gods of fertility and gods of weather and such and these kinds of gods need to be sacrificed to so good can come. Well, is that what Christians mean when they say God?
    Others are claiming that god is in everything around us, there is divinity in everything, the problem here is then that there is no real injustice in the world if God is in everything. Is that what Christians mean when they say God?
  2. To answer that we have to understand what Christians are saying when they say Jesus has risen from the dead and is Lord!
    We don’t believe God is accurately described by any of those things but we believe in the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth!
This is important here:
Ephesians 1:9,10—to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth!
We don’t see God as being a distant way up and way away God anymore, but Christianity claims that heaven and earth are not so separated because of Jesus Christ! Heaven is God’s sphere of the world and the earth is man’s!
But Jesus was fully divine and fully human and heaven and earth do intersect each other and they often overlap.
Our message is not we know who God is and Jesus fits the picture, but our message is we really don’t know who God is until we discover Jesus.

This is why Christianity works today:
Didn’t Jesus come to show us an example?
Jesus is a great example but that is not why he has come.
Didn’t Jesus come to give us great moral teaching?
Jesus is a great moral teacher but that is not the emphasis of his coming.
Didn’t Jesus come to show us the way to heaven?
Jesus is certainly concerned with ultimate judgment, but that is not the emphasis of his coming.

The Christian faith declares that something happened in history and because it happened the world is now a different place!
2 Corinthians 5:14-17—
The Christian faith got going in the first place and it spread like wildfire even though the 'powers that be' were persecuting it and trying to stamp it out because Christianity was attractive and it was attractive because it transformed people’s lives, it changed their views, it gave them fresh insights into the issues of justice, spirituality, relationships and beauty because Christians had heard the voice of the One who broke through the barrier and opened up the new way for the world to be. The old has passed away; behold the new has come!

The hinge on which this great door of human history swings open and will never again be shut and that allows new creation to happen is the death and resurrection of Jesus.
With Jesus’ death evil has now been dealt with.
All forces that cause evil and injustice have been put on notice that their time is up.
With Jesus’ resurrection God’s new world has started!

The heart of the Christian message and the heart of why Christianity works is that it is not just as escape from the world but that the old world of which we are accustomed to will eventually die and is dying already and the new world that has begun in the resurrection of Jesus will all that will be left—Revelation 21:1-4

With Jesus it has begun and the message of Jesus goes out and we submit and while living under his lordship we live out the new world’s realities.

What does it mean to be a Christian?
  1. Worship!
    This is the centre of everything. Jews and Christians declare that humans have been made in the image of God. This is very important on what it means to be truly human—like God! A basic spiritual law is you become what you worship. That is challenging—if we dare to truly worship God we will become more and more like Him—this is not just assembly (important part of it) but a real giving of our heart to Him—we will become more like Him which means we will become more genuinely what we were created to be!
    When we worship we reflect God’s image not just back to Him but to all of creation to see and what will they see?
    God’s overwhelmingly generous love that caused us all to be created in the first place—His self-giving love. It is God Himself that is the call for justice—He wants to put the world right and to do that we must know Him and discover a depth of spirituality that is offered nowhere else.
  2. Prayer!
    Remember God is often interfering when unwanted and absent when wanted but we gloriously call Him Father through Jesus Christ. This idea of prayer is rooted in Jesus himself. We have an intimacy with the One he called Father and in prayer we express this intimacy and we receive a challenge to follow Him. Christianity makes sense, because I am not trying to bribe God into performing but I get reminded that I am deeply loved by Him and I return that love in prayer.
  3. Bible!
    We will read the Bible as it is God’s voice to us. We follow the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings and we see how the old world is confronted by the new world ushered in by Jesus and it attempts to destroy the new world but in the end victory belongs to God through Jesus.
    This is important, this is the voice that is trustworthy for us ants to follow. It knows where it is going.
  4. Who the people of God are!
    How do we live as the people of God?
    We live differently because of the resurrection of Jesus. The worries of life aren’t so worrisome to the people of God because they belong to the old world and not the new one that is void of death and illness and sadness and all those other horrible things. We are people primarily concerned with injustice, non-spirituality, broken relationships and a lack of true beauty.
  5. Look ahead to the future and allow that to form who we are in the present.
    This is the challenge: if we follow Jesus what does that mean?
    In a sense we are as Paul says ‘God’s fellow workers.’ (1 Cor.3:9).
    We are helping to recreate our culture. If God has done the great thing in Jesus by dealing with evil and beginning His new creation and if God has promised that in the end He will unite all things in heaven and earth then those of us who live in between the one event of the past and the one event of the future are invited to become not just beneficiaries of this but agents of this…
    we don’t just listen to the voices of justice, spirituality, relationships and beauty but we become the voices that can speak them fresh into our world by listening to the voice of the One from whom they come in the first place and by going out as agents of justice, spirituality, relationships and beauty.
Many have forgotten in our world how to live in peace and hope, many have forgotten that there are such things as peace and hope but Christianity works because we get in touch with the One who brings us to the place of justice, spirituality, relationships and beauty and we marvel at the beauty and wonder of God and His handiwork & creation and wonders.

Isaiah 11:1-9—

Christianity would not work if Jesus Christ were not the risen Son of God, everything that is Christian would be destroyed and it would not be appropriate for Christians to cling to something so horribly false!
We were made for spirituality but we wallow in introspection. We were made for joy we settle for pleasure. We were made for justice we clamour for vengeance. We were made for relationship we insist on our own way. We were made for beauty we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun had begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind in the tomb of Jesus Christ all that belongs to the brokenness of our present world. It is time in the power of the Spirit to take up our proper role, our fully human role as agents and heralds & stewards of the new day that is dawning. And that simply is what it means to be a Christian to follow Jesus Christ into God’s new world which He has thrown open before us!

1. The majority of this sermon is taken from a sermon by N.T. Wright based on his book , Simply Christian.

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