“Changing Your Tune”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Text: Luke 9:18-24
This week, just like the week before, I received some good news and some bad news. The good news was when I went to my coffee shop for my daily coffee again. I was at the Drive-Thru window, when suddenly the owner of the store came charging out and said, “Don't go anywhere. I have something for you.” She presented me with a large coffee and a card.
I said, “That's wonderful, thank you. How much will this be?”
She said, “Open the card first.”
So there I was, at the window of the Drive-Thru, opening a card, when all the other members of the staff stuck their heads through the window as well to see my reaction. The card said: “Slick: (That is the nickname that only one person has for me.) Good news! Your Double-Double is paid for! The bad news is that you buy your own Boston Cream! Love, Ann, Wilson and Kathryn” These are members of our choir no less and a spouse, who did this to me! Good news and bad news! I want to let you know that I bought the Boston Cream and I gave it to them this morning - so there!
Good news and bad news! Good news and bad news! Even after Easter there is still good news and bad news. There is the good news that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. There is good news that the tomb is empty. There is good news that the disciples witnessed the Risen Christ appearing to them. It is good news that Mary met Jesus in the garden. There is good news that he appeared to the disciples in different places and in different times afterwards. There is lots of good news about the post-Easter period.
There is also, I wouldn't call it bad news, but challenging news: those of us who live after the glory and wonder of Easter have to live our normal daily lives and we want to live them in a faithful way. Jesus anticipated this for all his disciples well before his crucifixion, or the trial that preceded it, or of course the Resurrection that followed it.
Jesus took his disciples to one side. They asked him, “How are we supposed to live?” Then, Peter makes his great confession of faith. He makes his glorious declaration, “You are the Messiah.”
Jesus asks them, “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter answered in the affirmative, “You are the Son of God.”
Jesus also wanted to know what others said of him. And so, there was an account of that.
In the encounter between Jesus and the disciples we have in today's passage from the Gospel of Luke and in the Gospel of Matthew, a common line, a common theme. They have borrowed in this common theme from a common source, from somebody who had observed the life of Jesus from a unique perspective and after the death of Jesus had written about some of the events that had taken place in a unique way. Often, this person, who is unknown, is called by the letter “Q.”
Q has an incredible emphasis in his writings. The emphasis is to pick out moments in Jesus' life that deal with martyrdom, that deal with the challenge of following Christ in the world. He was probably writing to those who, not long after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, had to live a godly life and were suffering for it. Q picked out many of these sources and stories of Jesus' life. Luke and Matthew pick them up: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his Cross daily and follow me. For, whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”
Jesus was anticipating what would follow, not after he said these words, but after The Resurrection. In other words, the disciples would have a cost to bear if they were to follow Jesus even after his resurrection or probably especially because of his resurrection. So, what we have here is a certain degree of objectivity about what Jesus did. We have this kerygmatic theme that Jesus was The Messiah, that he died, that he rose, and that he lived again.
These are the great themes of Christianity. We have Peter's confession, “You are the Christ!” But we also have this challenge to believers, “If you want to follow me, you must follow me daily and take up your Cross; you must be willing to lose your life in order to be able to save it.” These were really challenging words. But they were challenging words that came to us with a great sense of hope and joy as well, because in many ways, the way that we live our Christian life and the way that we walk with Christ require something of us. It is all very well to say, “Christ is risen from the dead! Alleluia! Let the trumpets blow! Let the flowers be seen!” And it is another thing to live that on a daily basis, to make it part of our lives.
I liken it to a story that I read some years ago about a very famous Italian violinist who was known for wonderful performances and for performing in many of the great symphony halls throughout the world. One day, he got up and played magnificently, but after a few minutes of playing and finding that the audience was overwhelmed by him, he took his violin and smashed it to pieces against the chair next to him - a little like Pete Townsend used to do with The Who, if any of you remember The Who!
He just smashed it to pieces against the chair and the audience was aghast. They couldn't believe what he was he was doing. Finally he stopped. He asked for someone to bring him another violin, and when they did he began to play. Then he stopped for a moment and said, “I am sure you are all shocked by what I have just done.” The reason they were shocked was that they knew he played one of the most valuable and one of the most magnificent Stradivarius violins ever made, and they thought that he had destroyed it.
In fact, he had destroyed a copy, a cheap copy and he saved the Stradivarius, playing it afterwards. But the audience was not aware of the change. They weren't sure which was which instrument. Only those with the very finest of ear could hear it. Most people could not make the distinction. He then made this profound declaration: “I want you to know that it is not the instrument that makes the music, it is the player that makes the music.” While the quality of the violin will certainly increase the quality of sound, the real playing of it, the art of it is in the actual player.
So it is with our relationship with Easter. It is all very well to have the great instruments, to have the great joy, to be able to make all the great decorations, but it has to become part of us. We have to be able to sing the tune of Easter in our daily lives for it really to have meaning and purpose in our daily existence. I want to look at that this morning. How do we play that great tune of Easter? How we keep alive the great sounds of The Resurrection? How do we live it?
We have to become new instruments in the hands of the divine Lord. The reason being, that we live in a world full of disharmony and discord. This is one of the great themes of the Bethel series, if any of you have had the privilege of taking it. It is because of sin, it is because of mortality, it is because of our inability to live up to God's will and purpose, that there is disharmony in the world and discordant sounds.
We all know that we live in a world of discordant sounds. I don't need to tell you what those discordant sounds are. Many of us are victims of the discordant sounds. Who of us here this morning, if we are absolutely honest, have not at some point suffered as a result of discordant sounds? Who of us have not experienced disharmony in our own lives? Who of us have not felt the frailty of the fleshliness of being human beings, either in our relationships or in our physical bodies? We experience disharmony. We see it every day in the world. We see it in ourselves.
One of the ways we have become enlightened people to handle disharmony is to educate ourselves and to surround ourselves with teachers and to be able to learn reasonableness and to be able to control the disharmony in our lives. Ever since The Enlightenment, there has been a great liberal, democratic experiment that has been based on learning and on having knowledge of things in order to be able to control the disharmony that surrounds us with reason and reasonableness. Yet, you and I know that despite all attempts to educate ourselves, and education is a worthy, worthy goal, it is not sufficient to have harmony; it is not sufficient to break down the barriers between people; it is not sufficient to give meaning and purpose to life.
We not only need teachers who teach us reasonableness, we need teachers who teach us how to live in harmony with God. The person who does that is the risen Christ. The message of Easter is that Christ is risen. The message of Easter continues that Christ is here with us. It is not as if somehow Christ has evaporated into the heavens and is no more. Grace is alive through the power of his Spirit encountering us in everyday life.
We need to become new instruments in the hands of the divine by doing something else: by becoming apprentices. We need to have an apprentice relationship with Jesus Christ. We need to learn the notes that make for the harmonious life and to give us a sense of purpose and of peace. Yet, many of us in this post-Easter period are woefully lacking in the knowledge of what Jesus ever taught or what Jesus ever said. Every now and again we pull a few plums from the pie as if we somehow think they are sufficient to live a life in faithfulness to Christ, but rather we need to immerse ourselves as apprentices learning from Him on a daily basis and living with Him.
Dallas Willard who wrote the great book, The Divine Conspiracy, says that this is one of the great failings of the Church. We celebrate the high moments, the Easters and the Christmases, but we do not take from them a daily walk with Christ to learn from him. This does not mean that we have to become religious. It does not mean that we have to become so pious that we are unbearable. It doesn't mean that every five minutes we are on our knees in prayer making a big show of things. On the contrary, I love what Brother Lawrence said:
Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing for God's sake what we commonly do for our own. It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.
He is absolutely right. What Brother Lawrence is talking about is living with Christ on a daily basis as a student lives with the Master in an apprenticeship. It means learning from him, living with him, being with him in his risen presence. That means that living with him as an apprentice, we have to do something else, and that is that we have to become players. By players, I mean that we have to actively embrace our faith, not passively embrace it.
I remember when I started to learn the piano I had the most tyrannical piano teacher you have ever met in your life. Her name was Miss Jones. I don't think she liked me very much. I don't know why! I can't imagine why! But, anyway, she didn't like me and she would try to get me to play the proper notes, and this is what she did when I didn't: she would take out a ruler and would slap my fingers when I played a wrong note.
Talk about learning to play by terror! That is how I learned! She made me keep my wrists up by grabbing me by my elbows and hauling me up off the chair! Not the nicest person by any stretch of the imagination! What I did learn positively from her and it is the only positive thing I learned from her, because I stopped playing the piano and that is why I play the guitar, by the way, I want you to know, my guitar teacher was kind with me.
What I did learn, though, was that there is a need for a degree of commitment. If any of you have been a performer or a musician - I look around the congregation and I know some of you are very fine musicians - you know the level of dedication, do you not, of using the instrument of our voice or the instruments that we play? Dedication is needed and there is a cost to be borne in doing that. Miss Jones bullied me into it, but Christ doesn't bully us into it. Christ calls us into a life of holy dedication to him. He says, and I want to quote him again: “If anyone comes after me, he must deny himself and take up his Cross daily and follow me. For, whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Jesus knew that even after the glory of Easter his followers must take up the Cross.
I am very much aware of our brothers and sisters in Christ throughout the world who often bear the Cross this very day by holding on to their faith. I am not going to mention the countries involved for fear of offending anyone, but I am telling you the truth when I say that even right now in one country in the world there is a new blasphemous law being considered that suggests that if you declare that Jesus Christ is the Son of God you will be punished under the law.
In another country, if you decide to travel to another place, such as Jerusalem or Bethlehem or to celebrate the birth place of Christ or to witness the place of Christ's Resurrection, you could be imprisoned upon your return to that country. In another country in North Africa, if you celebrate Communion in the southern part of the country, you could have your hands chopped off for taking part in something that is blasphemous.
I know that such practices occur across all religious lines. Christians are not the only ones who suffer for their faith. But let me tell you, there are brothers and sisters this very day in countries throughout the world who suffer for proclaiming Christ and enacting the Christian faith and living it.
This past week, on Good Friday, I listened to someone I respect, Dion Oxford, who is in charge of the Gateway Homeless Shelter for men. He went on YouTube and talked about how people suffer homelessness in this city, and how homeless people and the poor from the central core are being driven out only to find it harder to come back into the city core for work. Why? It is because so much of the housing is being consumed around them, and they haven't got the opportunities to find proper housing.
Then, he did something dramatic. He actually then took three crosses and placed them in the middle of a courtyard. He got three men to carry those crosses - homeless men - out of the courtyard and out of the sight of all the people who were gathered there. He said that even to this day there is still a sense in which it is convenient to drive people out so you no longer see them in the same way as the powers that be took Jesus and drove him out of Jerusalem outside the city wall where he could not be seen.
I thought about what courage it took for Dion to do that. What cost he might have to bear for doing that! But I admire the courage he has for standing up for those who really are the ones who have no voice in society and in the world, and doing it as a Christian, and making use of the Cross of Christ as a symbol of it all. I think, my friends, that bearing the Cross of Christ daily is one of the great privileges of following Christ. When we walk with him, when we have him in our lives, believe-you-me, it is a privilege… but it is a cross to bear his word!
We need to become true disciples by having a beginning. Very often we put the whole notion of discipleship and following the Christian faith off to some other day or some other time. For those of you, particularly those of you listening on the radio this day, and you say, “I am not sure that I am really and truly a committed Christian” then I say to you, “Decide this day which note, which tune, which chord of the kingdom you are going to play.”
A number of years ago, I went to a wonderful concert in a small concert hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I went to hear the great Yo-Yo Ma play the cello. Yo-Yo Ma lives not very far from where that place is in Cambridge and he put on a solo performance - no orchestra - just him and the cello. It was a most incredible experience to hear him play! Afterwards, there was a question and answer period. One of the people in the audience asked him, “Do you ever get nervous before you play?”
He said, “Of course, I get nervous. After all, people have paid to come and hear me. Of course I get nervous, because I always want to do my best. Yes, I always get nervous before I play.”
Then, there was a follow up question, “Does the nervousness ever go away?”
He said, “Yes. My nervousness goes away when I hear the first note. Once that first note is played, then I become immersed in the music and the music becomes immersed in me. That first note, that first sound, makes me feel that what I am doing is complete.”
I think that goes for following Christ. It is the first moment of decision. It is the first acceptance of the tone. It is the first recognition of Christ's living presence. It is that first moment by faith when you say, “I am going to be your apprentice. I am going to learn from you. I am going to follow you. It is only then that the true wonder of his resurrection has meaning and power in our lives. ”
From that first note, from that first sound, from that first beat, comes the greatness of living with Christ. But so often we try to put that off and wait for another day. We treat the Gospel as if it is an RRSP. But some day down the road we will check in with it and hope that it will be there for us.
It is like a story that I heard about a minister who decided that he wanted to encourage his congregation in a heartless and a cold and insensitive world to greet one another warmly so he made an announcement. “Next Sunday,” he said, “I want everyone in this congregation in a quiet moment to be able to greet one another and say 'Hello' to the person sitting beside you and wish them a very warm welcome to the church.”
After the service, a man stood up in one of the pews and said to the woman in front, “Good morning, I want to let you know how delighted I am to meet you. My name is Bob.”
She said to him, “We are supposed to do this next week, not this.”
Does that sound a little familiar? It is putting things off. Let the tune be heard another time. Let's just wait.
Listen to the words of Jesus: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Let me tell you, when you do that, when you hear that first note of the tune and the harmony of the kingdom, you will then know the power of Easter in Christ's divine presence in your life. Like the disciples, you will never look back. Amen.