"He's Smarter Than You Think"
Jesus is not nice - he's brilliant
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Text: Colossians 1:9-20
I must say that this morning I feel very religious, because I spent a considerable amount of time this summer walking through churches and old ruins of abbeys. How could you not feel religious after you've spent your time doing that? One day I went to Yorkminster, the great cathedral in the city of York, where there was a wedding taking place. I stood in this magnificent sanctuary and watched the couple come down the aisle in the middle of the afternoon. The glorious, majestic setting was enough to make your heart soar. What an experience! For a moment I just stood in sheer awe of the place and reflected that people had worshipped in that same setting for hundreds of years.
I visited the famous Bolton Abbey, not far from where I was born and brought up. Its grounds encompass the magnificent ruins of a church and a priory that was knocked down by Cromwell and his followers, but the priory church still stands. My wife, Marial and I went in and had a moment of silent prayer and devotion. On the wall there was a plaque saying the building was erected in the 1100s and I realized that for nearly 900 years people of all classes and conditions worshipped in that place. I felt a profound sense of awe.
I went to the home of Sir Walter Scott in Abbottsford, a magnificent place just outside the town where my family live in Galashiel. During my visit. I learned that Scott built a chapel for his family to enjoy. I thought, “Who builds chapels in their mansions today so God can be worshipped?
I went to Edinburgh Castle and saw the tiny, little chapel there and even the cemetery for the dogs of the soldiers who had died. I was overwhelmed as well as a little amused by the latter.
I went to various churches, to the great St. Giles in Edinburgh. I visitied churches in which people have worshipped for 900 or 1,000 years. The churches and monasteries and many of the abbeys still stand, even though they have had to withstand the ravages of time. I felt overwhelmed and awestruck that people have worshipped for that long.
But you know, you come down to earth with a bang. I might have been steeped in church history and in these great, crumbling edifices, but as one writer said not long ago, “The culture in which we live is nevertheless soaked in secularity.” For all the existence of these magnificent monstrosities, these big buildings that have been built to the glory of God, the reality is that there is a flight from worship and the church in the Western world. In a country in which I'd grown up, the birthplace of John Wesley and John Knox, of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayer and many other great Christians, there was a shocking poll in one of the newspapers. It said that more people in Britain buy furniture at a well-known modern furniture store than go to church on a Sunday morning. We are indeed soaked in secularity.
If you think that I am speaking of a phenomenon peculiar to England, it is not so. In fact, this mindset, this attitude has become part of the whole of our western, post-Christian culture. People have just bought into secularism as a way of life and that way of life is now becoming the norm rather than the exception. Now, don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to be all warm and fuzzy and nostalgic about the past. In fact, I read a delightful poem written by a 19th century poet called Altrim who was a Scottish writer who went to hear one of the great preachers in Scotland who had a doctorate and he made this quip about him:
I cannot praise the doctor's eyes;
I never saw his glance divine,
for when he prays he shuts his eyes
and when he preaches, I shut mine.
No, there isn't a time or a place or an era to which you can look back and say, “Ah, the halcyon days.” But it is a strong reality that we are indeed becoming soaked in secularity. The question that arises is, “What do we do about it?” What is the response of Christians, of people of faith in the world? Well, I believe that there is no point in our simply pointing to a society that is changing and adopting other norms of living or worshipping or experiencing its life, if we ourselves haven't done some hard thinking, haven't got a passion ourselves about what we believe to be true.
A need for that passion, of an awakening of some good, solid thinking about our faith needs to take place within the walls, within the chapels, within the sanctuaries - not without, but within. Over the next three weeks I want us to look at the way we think. To start we have to discard a lot of the ways in which the secular society portrays Jesus. Very often, we buy into the particular view of Jesus that is commonplace, that is on the street - the picture of a Jesus who is gentle and kind and inoffensive and benign, not particularly intellectually astute, a peasant from 2,000 years ago, a representative of another age. You know, someone who hung around donkeys and fish and sheep and wandered the hillside and surrounded himself with peasants and with farmers and with fisherfolk who just lived a very sort of naïve and simple existence, but didn't have any knowledge of the complexities of the modern world. Someone who is nice, but no more.
I was speaking not long ago to somebody who is not a Christian. Very nicely and very gently he said to me, “You know, I really like your Jesus and I think he's a great guy, but you know this bit about turning the other cheek? I think that's just going a little too far, don't you think?”
A nice, gentle, rather unobtrusive Jesus. So often, my friends, we adopt the same attitudes. It's not surprising, cultural norms are powerful. It is easy for us to see Jesus in exactly the same way and with the same images, but when we do that and when we buy into that mindset and that way of thinking, then his teachings become optional, his presence becomes nominal and our devotion becomes partial. I would suggest that the problem and the challenge that we face today is not a problem that actually resides so much in the secular-soaked society as it does reside in our own hearts and minds a lack of devotion.
I would like to suggest, as Dallas Willard put it in a wonderful book that he wrote not long ago called, The Divine Conspiracy, that, “We need to change our thinking and realize that Jesus is not just nice, he's brilliant.” Today's text from Colossians makes this abundantly clear. It tells us in very clear and categorical terms that this Jesus is the one who intimately knows our lives, that through the power of the Holy Spirit that is ever around us, this spiritual realm that is always there, Christ knows, intimately, our lives and the lives of humanity. He know this precisely because, as the writer of Colossians says, “This Jesus was from the beginning of time.” This Jesus was there at the creation of the world and because he is a pre-existent Christ, he's not just a man who appeared in Galilee by accident 2,000 years ago and had some nice, inoffensive things to say. He is the incarnate Son of God. And because he is the incarnate Son of God this universe is held together by him.
Paul uses a word, “synestecane,” which literally means that this Jesus holds together the universe. This is a cosmic Christ and not just somebody in a particular setting and time. This is somebody who holds the very universe together by the power of the Spirit. Now, my friends, if Paul is right in what he is saying, if there is truth to what he is saying, then Christ's teachings, Christ's miracles are not a surprise, they are not an abnormality, they are not something that has no authority. Rather they are a powerful testimony that this is God's word for us, and God's word for us not only 2,000 years ago but for all time. I believe that to be true, but so often we like to think that we can improve on the teachings of Christ, that we can create an alternate universe, a secular universe, a universe of our own making that somehow is going to be superior.
I read a delightful story of a man called Frank Sheed, a Roman Catholic writer and speaker who used to go to Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park in London. He would stand up there in the 1940s and 50s and he would talk to people and preach to people. Now, there were hecklers there and the hecklers kept him bright and alert. (I'm not recommending hecklers here on a Sunday morning to keep me alert and bright, just so you know.) He loved the heckling and one day, when he was saying that God created this magnificent universe and that there was an order to the universe and God holds this universe together by the power of his Spirit, one man said, “But look at all the problems in the universe. Look at all the things that are wrong, look at all the wars, look at all the environmental problems. I could make a better universe than this God.”
Frank Sheed responded to him and said, “No, it's okay, you don't have to make a new universe. Why don't you just make a rabbit to establish some confidence. Then we will listen to you.”
We always think that we can improve, that we can create a universe that's better than the one that God makes, but part of our problem is that we think that Jesus is just nice, we don't think he's brilliant. When we see the brokenness in the world, we don't think that God's word can solve, heal and mend it. We don't think that listening to what Jesus has to say about human nature and human relations and the relationship with God will give us a powerful message that can change the world. But if we take Paul at his word, then we do. He's not just nice, he's brilliant and his brilliance becomes our hope.
Paul was addressing the same problem that we have today. Then, it came from the philosophers. The philosophers believed that Christianity was intellectually weak, that it didn't have substance and they felt that by adding their philosophical wisdom they could improve Christianity. Many of them believed that there was a god who created the world, but the world itself was evil. God had made it but it wasn't good, it was bad and because it was evil the only way that the good god could relate to this evil world was through a series of what were known as emanations.
These spirits were not physical - they couldn't be physical, because everything that was physical was evil. They believed that Jesus was one of these emanations and that he had something to say to us spiritually, but he had nothing concrete to say to us about how we should live. Therefore, this Jesus could not have come in bodily form, this Jesus and his teachings were purely at a spiritual level, not a real human level. This Jesus could then be compartmentalized and dismissed along with all the other emanations over time. Paul says, “No. Jesus is the fullness of God in bodily form.” He said that this Jesus has come in the flesh, that God has become present in the flesh and has come among us. The Greek word that he uses to describe this is the word “eikon,” Jesus is the icon, the representation of God, the very presence of God and therefore his miracles and his teachings, everything he said and did is not just a nice idea, it is the revelation of God's will and purpose for humanity. It is an icon.
Now, we use that word these days as if it is a bouncing ball that we just throw into any sentence - everything is iconic, have you noticed that? It doesn't matter what it is, everything is an icon or iconic. Everybody, every celebrity, every sports star is an icon. Last night, I couldn't get away from people using this word. I watched the U.S. Open final between Sharapova and Henin-Hardenne (great match, I loved it), but during one of the breaks one of the commentators described Maria Sharapova as an icon.
Now, she's six-foot-three and one heck of a ball striker, but an icon? Then they went on to comment on all the different bottles of water she was drinking from, each from a different company. She picked up three different bottles of water. Why? Because she had to show her sponsors that she was using what they'd given her. So, the poor girl is drinking three different kinds of water and fruit juice just so she can be the representative of the company. Whether she won the U.S. Open or not at that point didn't matter one iota. She was there to represent the companies and she was part of their marketing strategy.
Well, I was flabbergasted over this. Then, of course, they said that she was an icon. I thought to myself, “I love this woman and wanted her to win, I really did, but to be an icon is a very, very powerful term; you don't just throw this around.” Jesus is like Maria Sharapova in a way, he is the icon, he is the representation of God and when people ask, “But what does God really think about something? What does he think about peace? What does God think about justice? What does God say about truth? What does God say about fidelity or holiness or marriage or life of war,” we don't have to speculate like the philosophers do. We need to turn to Christ, see what he had to say.
There's been a fuzzy ball thrown around in the midst of all this discussion. It's the fuzzy ball about who wrote what about Jesus' life. Look, the fact is that we have the scriptural text about Jesus. This is what we have about his life and we can speculate all we want about what he might have said or might not have said, but we have texts that give us an idea of what he said, and it's clear. So often, we just want the fuzzy, nice Jesus and we run away from his hard teachings, but I believe it is those hard teachings that are our source of hope. His brilliance is our hope and our hope is needed in a broken world.
At the far end of Bolton Abbey, down by the river, most of the building had been destroyed and the monks, hundreds of years ago had had to flee, but in all the ruins and rubble, with the nave destroyed and the chancel knocked down and the windows crushed and beaten and the fonts cracked, at the far end a symbol remains. Cromwell and his henchmen did not touch it. It is the cross. And when you stand by the river and see the crumbling edifice, you can still see the cross clearly.
Therefore, my friends, its seems to me that this is a symbol of the world. In our brokenness and crumbling, in a universe that seems like it is doing anything but holding together, the cross is a reminder of God's word to it. Oh my, this is a broken world, is it not? When you see the young men and women from Afghanistan coming home in coffins draped in flags, or you see the desperate people of Ethiopia starving because of floods, or you realize the tensions that exist in the world, you realize that it's broken.
I flew out of England the day after the terrorist threat this summer about all the different planes that were going to be bombed. For four-and-a-half hours, Marial and I had to line up in the airport just to go through security. I was stunned by a number of things: I wasn't able to take a crossword puzzle book on board, Marial wasn't allowed to take her makeup. But everyone was lining up and nobody was getting upset. There were two Americans behind us, entertainers from Los Angeles, and they were saying to another man who was standing behind them, “You know, since 9/11 we don't get upset about these things anymore. We're just happy if we can make it home safely.” But the tension in that building that morning was excruciatingly painful. You could see it as a Muslim couple came by, dressed in their tradition. You could see the dagger looks towards them and how they were looking away, and you realized that this is a broken world.
I think that for all our secularity, for all our so-called progress, human nature is human nature. Not much has changed in 2,000 years. Jesus' words still ring true. They ring true as God's word to the world. I think as Christians we have to recognize in faith that those words, and Jesus himself, are not just nice, they are brilliant. Over the next couple of weeks you'll see what I mean. In a broken world they are our hope. He's smarter than you think. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.