Sermon – “Hosanna to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-17)

 

It was a dark, stormy and very windy night when disaster struck the cemetery. As a cold rain hammered against the sodden earth, a howling gale overturned tombstones, blew down branches and sent cobwebs flying into the dank night air.

Lying in bed, Paul Hopkins heard the savage roar outside and feared the worst. Sure enough, as dawn broke, the Toronto man realized that his collection of carefully wrought Styrofoam grave markers had been devastated by the tempest. The final toll? About $2,000 in damages.

“I set up my cemetery about three weeks before Halloween to set the mood,” Mr Hopkins explains. “This has never happened before.”

He may now have to extend the week’s vacation he takes every year … before Hallowe’en to prepare his haunted house display, but Mr Hopkins, a purchasing agent for an aluminum smelter, vows he’ll repair the battered props before October 31.

Despite the setback, the bulk of his gear remains unscathed. Mr Hopkins estimates that his collection of talking skeletons, animatronic corpses, zombies and ghosts has cost him about $20,000.[1]

That’s an excerpt from an article I came across in the newspaper several years ago.

Hallowe’en is a multimillion-dollar business in Canada. According to one newspaper report, “Canadians have become so wild about Halloween we now spend more per capita on costumes, candy and décor than our U.S. counterparts do, with holiday-related spending that is second only to Christmas.”[2]

Last year October candy and snack food sales topped the $400 million mark. And if covid didn’t manage to put too much of a damper on things, the estimates were that four million kiddies should have been out on the streets last evening to fill their sacks with Hallowe’en goodies. And if your neighbourhood was anything like mine last evening, it was visited by dozens of strange miniature creatures: witches, ghosts, mummies, aliens, zombies—and perhaps a few little princesses and cuddly animals too!

Some people like to trace our Hallowe’en traditions back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. But since the eighth century it has been for Christians All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day. So it is that today we celebrate what we affirm with our fellow believers around the world in last two phrases of the Apostles’ Creed: the communion of saints and the life everlasting.

If you have a Bible nearby, I’d like you to turn with me now to the passage that was read a few moments ago: Revelation 7:9-17. I know that for many of us the Book of Revelation is strange, if not uncharted, territory. Its array of multi-headed creatures, stars falling from the sky, plagues and fearsome horsemen, make Hallowe’en seem like the child’s play that it is. Yet I want to affirm that a careful reading of Revelation can lead to untold riches. To do that we need to take into account its historical context. And we need to be careful not to be led astray by the false teachings that have plagued the church in almost every century since it was written. So with that in mind let’s turn to Revelation, chapter 7.

The Crowd

As we begin reading, we find that we are surrounded by an enormous crowd—a multitude, John tells us, greater than anyone could number.

Now to put this in context we need to go back into the earlier chapters of Revelation. And as we do, we find that this multitude has been growing. It begins with just four strange creatures that John describes as “living beings”. Day and night they give thanks to the One who sits on the throne in words that are familiar to many of us:

Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come!

The fours are quickly joined by twenty-four others, whom John describes as elders. They too fall down and, laying their crowns before the throne, they cry aloud,

You are worthy, our Lord and God,
 to receive glory and honour and power,
for you created all things,
 and by your will they were created
and have their being.

No sooner have they completed their refrain than John finds himself surrounded by an enormous chorus of angels, “numbering thousands upon thousands”—no, ten thousand times ten thousand. Now the word John uses here is “myriads”. In its literal sense it means ten thousand. But in fact it was the highest number in Greek and I think we could take it as the equivalent of our word “gazillion”. So we might say that what John witnessed around him was a gazillion gazillion angels chanting in unison,

Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honour and glory and praise!

And if all that were not enough, they are joined by every creature on earth, who join in thunderous chorus singing,

To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honour and glory and power,
for ever and ever!

As I read this I am reminded of Jesus’ parables about God’s reign. So many of them have to do with growth, from something as tiny and insignificant as a mustard seed, to a sizeable bush in which birds could even make their nests.

Now John gives us a picture of God’s reign in its fullness. And we find ourselves with him in the midst of a multinational, multiracial, multilingual crowd, all encircling the throne and crying aloud with a single voice,

Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.

Personally, I find it all overwhelming, as I am sure John did. I can never read these verses without finding myself deeply moved.

The Chorus

One of the great privileges of Christian faith is that it unites us with people from every corner of the globe. John was given this great vision that he recounts in the Book of Revelation in the final years of the first century. He was writing from the little island of Patmos off the Turkish coast. In the course of his lifetime he had witnessed the Christian faith fan outwards from Jerusalem to most of the Roman world, and possibly even as far away as India.

In our own day it is estimated that as much as half the world’s population has still to hear the good news of Jesus. At the same time, as the church appears to be in decline throughout much of western society, there is an explosive growth of Christian faith in other parts of the world, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia.

One of the highlights of my years in Minnesota was to welcome more than a hundred refugees from Burma into our congregation. When they arrived, there were no more than a handful who could speak even a few words of English. Yet in spite of our inability to communicate, there was no question that we all shared a deep bond in Christ. Moreover, as we came to know them and to hear their stories, we discovered that they had a faith in Jesus that had sustained them through years of indescribable deprivation and persecution. Theirs was a faith that made ours seem shallow in comparison. And what a thrill it was last Sunday morning to hear from David Kromminga of a Kurdish immigrant inviting people into his Christian community!

Yet this is only one perspective of what the creed describes as “the communion of saints”—and it is a two-dimensional one at best. For our fellowship with other believers is not confined horizontally to the present. Rather, it is three-dimensional in that it also stretches vertically through history.

We must never lose sight of the fact that we share in faith—even more than that, we owe our faith—to women and men who over the course of years past have discovered in Jesus their hope and their salvation: to Bishop Walsham Howe and Edward Perronet and Edward Caswall, who wrote and translated the hymns of this morning’s service; to great Christian leaders and thinkers such as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, C.S. Lewis, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Gregory the Great, Augustine, Athanasius, Irenaeus and Polycarp (to name but a few); to the millions over the years who chose to surrender their lives rather than surrender their faith in Jesus; and to the countless more whose names we may never know but who are known to Jesus. Indeed, they are engraved on the palm of his hand.

The Cross

Before we leave them, though, we need to take another look at John’s description of this vast, innumerable crowd. John tells us that they were holding palm branches in their hands. Throughout ancient Middle Eastern society palm branches were commonly used as a symbol of victory, joy, peace and eternal life.

But I don’t need to remind you that this is not the first time we see people waving branches of palm. There had been a previous occasion, which John would have remembered with vividness. For he himself had been there, accompanying Jesus as he travelled the road into Jerusalem for what would be the last time. And we all know how the crowds waved their branches of palm, exuberantly shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Now when you translate “Hosanna!” from Hebrew, it means something like “Save us, we pray!” But turn back to our passage from Revelation this morning. Notice that this time the crowd does not cry, “Hosanna!” (“Save us!”) but, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

Do you see the difference? It may seem small, but I think it’s significant. For those white-robed saints standing around the throne salvation is not a hope. It is not a prayer. It is a present reality. For God has accomplished their salvation, and he has done it through the sacrificial blood of the Lamb.

So it is that with them we are brought to the foot of the cross—not as a place of sadness and defeat, but as one of joy and victory. Not as a place of darkness and gloom, but where all the radiance of God’s eternal glory shines forth.

For the Lamb at the centre of the throne
will be our shepherd;
he will lead us to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

What we have read in these verses from the Bible this morning is but a snapshot of the mighty chorus among whom John stood, gathered around the throne of the Lamb. And the victory they shared is what we celebrate as we observe this festival of All Saints. As we do so, we find that our focus is not so much on the “saints” (and I suspect that is the last thing they themselves would want!). Rather, with them we fix our eyes on the one who sits on the throne in their midst—on the Lamb around whom we gather in unending praise. In the words of one of this morning’s hymns,

O that with yonder sacred throng
We at his feet may fall,
Join in the universal song,
And crown him Lord of all!

---

[1] National Post, 18 Oct 2003

[2] National Post, 25 Oct 2014

Sermon – “In the Meantime…” (2 Corinthians 5:1-21)

Years ago (in fact it was the first summer after we were married), Karen and I decided that we would spend our summer vacation visiting her relatives and my birthplace here in Nova Scotia. We didn’t have a large salary between us, and we were young and adventuresome, so we decided that it would be a camping holiday. Everything went wonderfully smoothly until we were in Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. It was there that, around two in the morning, the heavens broke loose with a torrential rain. The downpour was unremitting. Pools of water began to develop on the roof of our old canvas tent and the whole structure began to sag. I ran around the outside tightening the guy ropes, but my efforts were of no avail. We rearranged things inside the tent to protect them from the drip-drip-drip that had begun to develop. But by five o’clock and not having slept a wink, we decided that it was time to pack up and abandon ship, so to speak. So, we hopped into the car, drove the two hours to Sydney and waited in the parking lot outside Canadian Tire until opening time. (Needless to say, the sky had already begun to clear, and I don’t think we had another drop of rain for the rest of our time in Nova Scotia!)

Well, I hope my little tale of woe doesn’t discourage any of you who might be thinking of camping this summer! It’s really an attempt to help us dig into the apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 2 Corinthians this morning, where Paul begins by writing about tents: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven…”

I probably don’t have to remind you that Paul was a tentmaker by profession. That was how he made his living. And I suspect that he worked hard to make good, quality tents. Although in the climate where he lived, they would have been more to shield from the sun than from the rain. Yet Paul knew that, no matter what kind of material you stitched a tent from, it was not going to last for ever. It might stand up for years, with special care perhaps even a decade or two. But the ravages of the hot Middle Eastern sun would eventually reduce it to worthless rags.

For Paul the tents that he carefully cut and sewed together were a reminder of his own mortality. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament put it much more grimly when he mused,

Honour and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young,
Before the years take their toll and your vigour wanes,
Before your vision dims and the world blurs
And the winter years keep you close to the fire.
In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.
Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.
The shades are pulled down on the world.
You can’t come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.
The hum of the household fades away.
You are wakened now by bird song.
Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.
Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.
Your hair turns apple-blossom white,
Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.
Yes, you’re well on your way to eternal rest,
While your friends make plans for your funeral.
Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.
Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.
The body is put back in the same ground it came from.
The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.
It’s all smoke, nothing but smoke…
Everything’s smoke. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, The Message)

Well, if that doesn’t get you down, in recent months the fragility of life and health has been made much more real for us with the advent of covid. Who would have thought less than half a year ago that we would all be attending church on YouTube, followed by a fellowship hour on Zoom, and shopping at stores dressed like bandits?

Promised (1-8)

Well, it wasn’t my intention to put you into a depression this morning! Nor was it Paul’s when he wrote to his friends in Corinth. Because Paul wanted to assure them that this tent, that is our bodies, is not all there is to life—that they will be replaced with something far greater and far more glorious than anything you or I can ever begin to imagine. In Paul’s words, it is “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands”.

Now the biblical authors in their wisdom (and that includes Paul) do not tell us in any detail what that resurrection life will be like. Suffice it to say that it will surpass anything we have experienced in the here and now. The prophets offer us glimpses in the language of poetry of a place where “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food,” where there is no harm or destruction (Isaiah 65:25). The book of Revelation gives us that remarkable picture of a numberless crowd of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” standing around the throne of the Lamb, while the angels and the heavenly beings cry aloud,

Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honour
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen! (Revelation 7:12)

But it seems to me that apart from a few other images here and there, that is about as specific as the Bible gets. C.S. Lewis was able to put a lot of these biblical pictures together in what I think is a very original way, in a little book entitled The Great Divorce. It is the imaginative story of a group of people who are transported from this world into the next. To his surprise, Lewis finds that the world as he had known it had in reality been little more than shadows and that life in the world to come was far more real and far more solid than anything he might have envisioned even in his wildest dreams.

After he gets out of the bus, he senses that he is in a space with a vastness far greater than anything he has ever experienced before. Even the solar system seems like nothing more than the inside of a room. As his gaze turns to his fellow passengers, he observes that they are transparent like ghosts, that the grass does not bend underneath them when they tread on it. He stoops down to pluck a daisy growing at his feet and, although he tugs at it until sweat pours from his forehead, the stalk refuses to break or even twist. The story goes on and I’ll leave it to you to read it. But the point that Lewis was seeking to make is that the world that awaits us is immeasurably more substantial than anything we have experienced or can even imagine in the here and now.

Practised (9-17)

At this point we need to be clear what Paul (and for that matter the whole Bible) is talking about. It is not just some future experience that awaits us, the proverbial “pie in the sky when I die”. For those of us who have entered a relationship with Jesus Christ it is a present reality. Paul puts it this way in verse 17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

So there is a sense in which, through our faith in Jesus Christ, you and I have already begun to set foot in that new creation. To be sure, we are still fallible, sinful and as prone as ever to mess things up (and here I speak from my own experience!). Yet at the same time we are called both as a church and as individual believers to live as inhabitants of that new creation.

“So,” says Paul in verse 16, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” That is, when we enter a relationship with Jesus, everything takes on a new perspective—particularly the categories by which we are so inclined to define ourselves and other people, whether they be social status or education or looks or sex or race or whatever else.

As I was preparing for this morning’s sermon, I came across some profound words on this subject by James Denney, a Scottish Bible scholar who taught with remarkable clarity. Here is a little of what he wrote more than 125 years ago:

Those who are in Christ have died to the whole order of life in which [people] are judged ‘after the flesh’. Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, … of race, [all of] which is not Christian… These distinctions … are meaningless in relation to Christ, and ought not to be made… If [these] distinctions … are lost in the common relation to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all things are ours, because we are his. To make them narrows and impoverishes the soul. To be guided by worldly distinctions is to know … people by what is superficial in their nature; but … to look at [them] in relation to him who is Redeemer and Lord of all, is to know all our [brothers and sisters], and to know them not on the surface, but to the heart.[1]

This was the point that Paul was at pains to get across again and again in his two letters to the church in Corinth. For tragically it was a congregation where social status was still all too important for some, where others had not let go of pagan practices, and still others had allowed themselves to slide into immorality.

In contrast to this, Paul writes elsewhere that in the Christian community “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And in the book of Acts Paul’s companion Luke tells us of the earliest Christian community, where

they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)

Now I’m not saying that we need to mimic that church in every detail, but clearly it was a community in which Jesus was present, where the world to come was visible in the things that are, where God’s new creation was erupting amid the old. And that is what God in Christ is calling you and me to be today. To put it in Paul’s words, we are Christ’s ambassadors.

Purchased (18-21)

But how is all this possible? Paul summarizes it for us in what for me is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It was on the cross that Jesus absorbed into himself all the anger, pain, bitterness and division, all the injustice, prejudice, conflict, hatred and evil that have so poisoned and corrupted God’s creation. It was at the cross that God pronounced his definitive “No!” to all that is wrong with the world. And through that cross God has opened the way to the new creation, to our home in eternity.

The day will surely come when you and I will shed this tent of our earthly bodies—when we shall be gathered in that new creation to stand in awe around the throne of the Lamb. But between that time and this God has redeemed us and called us and empowers us to be agents and representatives of that world that is to come—a community where Christ is present and seen and believed through the witness of our lives. May God the Holy Spirit make us equal to that task!

---

[1]       Denney, 2 Corinthians, 1894, p. 208

Sermon – “No Condemnation!” (Romans 8:1-11)

Allow me to begin by saying what tremendous joy it gives me to be worshiping with you “at” Messiah once again. Even though we can’t be with one another physically, it has been a joy for Karen and me to be able to join with you virtually for your online services.

At the same time, I have to say that my heart has bled for you all over the events of recent weeks. Your experience of the novel corona virus has been far more severe than ours out here on the edge of the continent. But in your case to the fear and isolation associated with covid19 have been multiplied several-fold by the brutal death of George Floyd and then by the rioting and destruction that followed it. The sight of familiar and much-loved places lying in ruins has been heartbreaking. Needless to say, you are in my prayers regularly, but how much more in the wake of these dreadful events!

Here at our church in Halifax we have been making our way through the book of Job in recent weeks. In the midst of indescribable suffering—after the loss of property, family, and finally his health, plagued by constant, unabating pain, Job cried aloud to God, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” Perhaps there have been times when you have found yourself asking the same question.

Last week we heard a powerful sermon from Dave on the apostle Paul’s discussion of the power and inescapability of sin in Romans, chapter 7. As he concludes the chapter, Paul utters what seems his own cry of desperation: “Wretched man that I am!” he exclaims. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

By contrast, our passage this morning from Romans 8 begins with one of the most positive affirmations in all of Scripture: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

What Paul gives us here is not a suggestion. It is not a speculation or a theory or an idea. It is an unequivocal statement of absolute fact. I don’t know how to state it more emphatically! I love the way Eugene Peterson translated Paul’s words in The Message: “Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.”

One of my vivid recollections of our years in the Midwest is of those enormous thunderclouds that would gather and seemingly within minutes could turn a sunny, bright, warm day into the darkness of night—sometimes to the point where the streetlights would go on. Some of you may remember camping one year at William O’Brien Park when there was a tornado warning. We were all instructed to leave our campsites and gather in the restrooms until the storm had passed—hopefully without taking us with it!

What a relief it was when, after some pretty fierce winds and torrential rain and more than a few resounding claps of thunder, the clouds parted and we were able to go back to our tents! Maybe that gives us something of the picture that Paul wants to paint for us here, when he declares, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The clouds have passed. The rumbles of thunder have receded into the distance. The birds have begun to resume their evening chorus.

The cross of Christ rescues us
from the penalty of sin

But we need to ask ourselves, how is all this possible? If we are incapable of rescuing ourselves (and this was the point that Paul was at pains to get across in Romans 7) what has happened to make the difference? I want to say that there are two things.

The first is that Jesus Christ through his death on the cross has rescued us from the penalty of sin. The story goes all the way back to the second chapter of the Bible, to the day when the Lord God brought Adam and Eve into the garden of Eden. As they gazed on its splendor and beauty, God told them that all this was theirs to tend and to reap. “But,” he warned them, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 1:17).

Well, we all know what happens in the next episode in the story. Adam and Eve chose not to put their trust in God’s word. Instead they chose to doubt his fatherly care and good purposes for them. And no sooner had they made that decision than the dark cloud of death began to overshadow them.

The letter of James speaks of the Bible as a mirror that gives us a true reflection of ourselves. As with so many of the stories in the Bible, we fail to see the meaning of the account of Adam and Eve if we do not see ourselves in it. Adam is me. Eve is me. And Adam is you and Eve is you. And the dark cloud that hung over them hangs over me and hangs over you to this day.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was first ordained, there was a prayer we recited at funeral services that went back to the tenth century. It began like this: “In the midst of life we are in death…” “In the midst of life we are in death…” That is the tragic reality for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. So it is that we heard the apostle Paul cry out in chapter 7, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

The answer (like the answer always is in church, it seems!) is Jesus. When Jesus hung on the cross and uttered those words, “It is finished,” it was not that his life was ending. No, it was because in offering himself up in that one perfect act of sacrifice, he had vanquished sin and death once and for all. His was a cry not of defeat but of triumph. As Paul wrote elsewhere,

‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! (1 Corinthians 15:54b-57)

So it is that, because of what Jesus has done for us on his cross, a shaft of bright sunshine cuts through the clouds that have hung over the world since the days of Eden. Sin and death are defeated enemies.

The Spirit of Christ rescues us
from the power of sin

“Well, John,” you might want to say in reply. “Perhaps that is so. But the fact is that we still sin and we still die. So how have things changed?” Allow me to respond by offering what has been for me a very helpful illustration. It comes from an author and theologian named Oscar Cullmann, who lived at the time of the Second World War.

On 6^th June 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the shores of France. By dawn on that same day thousands of paratroopers had also touched down behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history and the cost in lives was enormous. Yet by the end of the day, all knew for sure that the Nazi hold on Europe had been broken.

However, the Nazi powers did not finally capitulate until eleven months later, on 8^th May 1945, the day we call VE Day (whose 75^th anniversary was celebrated just a couple of months ago). During those eleven months the warfare continued to rage fiercely and the fatality count continued to rise. Yet all along the Allies were certain that victory was in their hands.

That, said Cullmann, gives us something of a picture (albeit very imperfect in many ways) of where we stand as Christians today. Our victory over sin and evil and death was assured at Golgotha. But we still await VE Day—the day when Jesus will return and all creation will be renewed. Between those two days the warfare continues to rage. We witness it all around us in our society today in what can only be seen as a mounting, almost frenzied, opposition to the Christian message.

Yet in spite of all that is going on around us, I want to affirm, both from Scripture and my own experience, that the primary battleground has been and always will be within the confines of each of our own hearts.

In this regard I have often found myself falling back to the words of the celebrated Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As many of you probably know, he spent eight years living amid the horror and brutality of a Communist prison camp in the Soviet Union. It was out of that experience that he reflected with these words:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

And this is where Paul’s second point comes in.

Just as Jesus gave his life for us on the cross to rescue us from the penalty of sin, so he now gives us his Holy Spirit to rescue us from the power of sin. Paul will have a good deal more to say about the Holy Spirit in next week’s verses from Romans—and I certainly don’t want to steal from next Sunday’s preacher! But in this morning’s verses Paul sets before us a choice. And the options are clear.

In Paul’s own words in verses 4 through 8, we can choose to live according to the flesh; or we can choose to live according to the Spirit. How do live according to the Spirit? Paul gives us three picture-words to make what he is saying clear. The first is to walk—to walk according to the Spirit or, as he puts it elsewhere, to walk in the Spirit. What does it mean to walk in the Spirit? Surely it means having the Holy Spirit as our constant companion moment by moment in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It is what 17^th-century monk Brother Lawrence called the practice of the presence of Christ—consciously seeking him and keeping him in our company throughout the day.

The second expression Paul uses is to live in the Spirit. That is, to allow the Holy Spirit to be the one who dwells at the center of our lives; the one who gives meaning, joy and purpose to our life; the one who stirs deep within us at the very core of our being, who animates us, who shape our character and makes us who we are.

Thirdly, we are to set our minds on the Holy Spirit: to allow him to guide our thinking. I don’t know about you, but it is very easy for my thoughts to go in all the wrong directions—to think in ways that are selfish, uncharitable, impure and unworthy. How much we need the Holy Spirit to take our thought lives—to purify them and to raise our sights to look upon Jesus, day by day!

Well, Paul has taken us over a lot of ground in this brief passage. One author has said, “It is no exaggeration to say that [these verses] contain a complete picture of the Christian life as Paul understood it.” May God bless you as you seek to live that life and to share fully in Jesus’ victory over sin and death—trusting in his sacrifice on the cross and living day by day in the power of his Holy Spirit!

Sermon – “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:32-52)

By his own profession H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer of a century ago, was not a Christian believer. However, in 1930 he wrote a short anecdote about an archbishop who found himself bothered by some niggling problem that had been eating away at him and that that he was unable to identify or explain. “Maybe the shadow of age was falling upon him, he thought, maybe he had been overworking… Or had he done something wrong or acted in a mistaken spirit?”

It troubled him to the point where he was unable to perform even the simplest, most routine functions. What was he to do about it, he pondered? At last the solution came to him. He would do what he was always telling everybody else to do who came to him with a dilemma: Pray!

Yes, he would pray.
Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.
He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.
It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small
“Yes,” said the voice. “What is it?”
They found His Grace in the morning… Plainly his death had been instantaneous…[1]

I don’t know about you. But speaking for myself I can say I’m grateful for the times when God hasn’t answered my prayers. That is not to say that there haven’t been occasions when God has graciously intervened in my life—when he has answered my prayers sometimes in ways far more wonderfully than I had even expected. But rather, I’m thinking of those times when my prayer has been selfish or short-sighted or half-hearted. Perhaps you don’t have those times, but I know I do—and more often than I care to admit.

Along the Way…

It seems to me that we have a classic example of that in our reading from the Gospel of Mark this morning. Mark tells us that it occurred as Jesus and his disciples were “on their way up to Jerusalem”. Now that word “way” in Greek is hodos, and it is a significant one—both for Mark, who uses it sixteen times, and for the entire New Testament, where you’ll find it more than a hundred times. In fact, long before they were ever called Christians, the earliest believers referred to themselves as those who belonged to “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9,23).

For Mark that way begins with John the Baptist who has come to “prepare the way of the Lord” (1:2-3). Some chapters later, after teaching a crowd of four thousand people for a full three days, Jesus was concerned that as they journeyed on the long walk towards home they might collapse along the way (8:3). Two weeks ago, we read of how Jesus and his followers were heading towards Cæsarea Philippi. Mark tells us that it was as they were on the way that Jesus asked them, “Who do you say I am?” To which Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.” Again, in last Sunday’s reading, Mark tells us that it was as Jesus was “on his way” that a man ran up to him to ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:17).

Now in this morning’s passage we encounter it three times. Indeed, it is here in these verses that we begin to discover why the word “way” is so important for Mark. In the opening verses of our reading this morning Jesus himself makes it crystal clear: “We are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”

In fact, this is the third time Jesus has given this warning to his disciples. The way is the way to Jerusalem, the way to Jesus offering up himself in death for the sins of the world. Already the shadow of the cross looms ever darker over all that happens. And that is the context in which James and John approach Jesus with their brash request: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

A Bold Request

Now we all know that there are other places in the gospels where Jesus assures us that our prayers will be answered. In John’s gospel, for example, we hear Jesus make the promise, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:14). Or again, in Matthew, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matthew 21:22). But notice that in each case there is a condition. We are to ask in Jesus’ name. We are to ask believing—not just believing that God can do anything or formulaically tacking the words “in Jesus’ name” onto the end of our prayers, but conforming our minds to the mind of Christ, our hearts to the heart of Christ, our wills to the will of Christ.

But the disciples’ request comes without any qualifications: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” And then comes the request itself: “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” If only the two brothers had known what they were asking! If they had, I imagine they would never have spoken as they did. They could be grateful that Jesus did not comply with their demand. For in the space of a few short days they would learn that Jesus’ glory would be revealed on a wooden cross and that the places they so desired on Jesus’ right and left would be occupied by two criminals.

The problem with James’ and John’s request (or prayer, if we may call it that) was that it revolved around them. Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul was one of many who have written about the false understanding of God as a celestial bellhop, a God whose very reason for existence is to do our bidding, one “who is on call every time we press the button, just waiting to serve us our every request”.[2] Of course that is a caricature.

This winter Karen and I have been attending a course on amateur astronomy. During the first couple of sessions our instructor dwelt on the way people largely understood the universe before the time of Copernicus in the early sixteenth century. Observers looked up at the movement of the stars and the planets and they assumed that everything revolved around the earth. In the face of considerable opposition Copernicus insisted that the sun was the centre of the solar system and it took more than a century for his observations to gain acceptance. Today we call that change in our understanding the Copernican revolution.

In the same way James and John needed a spiritual revolution—to move from a me-centred life to a God-centred life. We find it encapsulated in Jesus’ response to their request: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all”—and they would find a model for that as they travelled a little farther along the way.

True Prayer

They had just passed through Jericho, about fifty kilometers from Jerusalem, when their journey was interrupted by what I can only imagine were the piercing shouts of a desperate man. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Some of the people in the crowd tried to get him to shut up. But that only prompted him to cry out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

I can’t imagine that Bartimaeus was schooled in theology. And maybe his crying out from the roadside was a rather crude way of getting attention. But those shouts of desperation showed a far more profound grasp of what prayer is all about than James and John had displayed earlier that day. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

His words echoed a prayer uttered centuries before by the prophet Daniel. With his people living in exile, their capital city of Jerusalem and its temple in ruins, Daniel dressed himself in sackcloth and covered himself in ashes as he made his plea on their behalf before God. At the heart of his petition we find these words: “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy” (Daniel 9:18).

At the heart of both Bartimaeus’ and Daniel’s prayers was the conviction that the God to whom we bring our petitions is one who delights to show mercy and that this is the only basis on which we come before him. This was how God revealed himself to Moses atop Mount Sinai: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness …” (Exodus 34:6). And those words to Moses become a chorus that we find repeated again and again through the Old Testament.

In the original Greek of Mark’s gospel Bartimaeus’ words are these: Huie Dauid Iésou, eleéson me. It did not take long for the early church to recognize the profound meaning in Bartimaeus’ prayer and to adopt it into its worship. We know it as the Kyrie eleison, the threefold cry, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We can trace it back at least to the middle of the fourth century, to some of the most ancient Christian liturgies.

“Lord, have mercy.” I believe that these words—and Bartimaeus’ cry—are an expression of what true, God-centred, prayer is all about. For we come to God and we bring our needs before him not because of any deserving in ourselves—not because we’ve served him with our lives or because we’ve prayed faithfully over the years or because we’ve managed to get our doctrine right, no, none of these things—but because he is merciful.

And the depth of that mercy would become clear as it compelled the Son of God to continue along the road—the way that would lead to his own sacrificial death and to offer up his life as a ransom for many.

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[1] H.G. Wells, “An Answer to Prayer”

[2]     https://www.ligonier.org/blog/rc-sproul-warning-prayer/