Dark Ugly Clouds
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series I, Cycle A
Things are hardly ever the way they appear and certainly not on Calvary's hill. The Passion story from Luke makes the turning tables graphically clear. The king is crucified. The court of law is not legal. Justice is not done. Even the Roman governor can find no crime in this man. The evidence is compromised. Everything points the other way. So why does Jesus have to die?
It's a case of "inside every silver lining there's a big dark ugly cloud." Into every life some rain must fall. Even roses have thorns. Coming to terms with the suffering of Jesus means coming to terms with these reversals in our world, coming to terms with our own suffering.
So we must ask, what has the death of one man on a garbage heap on the other side of the world 2,000 years ago to do with my own dark ugly cloud? What has a mocking crown of thorns thrust on a convicted insurrectionist have to do with the twenty--first century rose bush?
How does a particularly pointless and cruel execution on the edge of the Roman Empire effect people here and now?
If any martyr - a person who dies for a cause - if any martyr will do, we have lots to choose from. Pick any Old Testament prophet: Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, Isaiah. Or, in secular history, the great emperor Julius Caesar whose death on March 15 is celebrated in a Shakespeare play. Or the 6,000 Roman slaves who died on crosses seventy years before Jesus was born when the rebellion of Spartacus failed. Or any number of saints in the church's history from Polycarp and Ignatius to Bonhoeffer and Niemoller.
But there is a difference between "having something to die for" and dying for the world in obedience - giving up the privilege of living for God's purpose.
Isaiah, or his successor, has four servant songs. These songs tell of a faithful servant of God. The servant of God may represent Israel, or maybe Isaiah the prophet, or a disciple of his, or the remnant of Israel that shall return to be faithful after the Exile. The remnant that shall return is so important to Isaiah's message that Isaiah named his son "Remnant." Or failing even a small group as a faithful remnant, the suffering servant may be one true believer, who remains dedicated, who stands firm even in the face of persecution. Just one, willing to undergo punishment and death for the love of God, is enough. Christians know the servant songs are fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ.
Today's reading is the third servant song, suggesting a gentle and sustaining word to the weary, knowing all the while that pain and not appreciation will be the lot of the servant. Yet the song goes on to recount the divine vindication of the Lord's servant. Every day he hears the voice of God and his teachings, which the servant willingly accepts. God strengthens him as he forthrightly faces torture and shame. Then the servant calls his accusers into court. Who can face God? Only his righteous one.
Writing 600 or 700 years before Jesus, Isaiah, or his disciple describes the trial of Jesus. It's uncanny. He's almost as detailed as King David, 1,000 years before Jesus, who describes the crucifixion in Psalm 22, which we will read on Good Friday. David's Psalm sounds as if he is at the foot of the cross describing Jesus on it.
Christ's Passion is not the story of "just another martyr." It was part of God's plan.
Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are the ultimate in true obedience and humility.
None of us chose to be born, nor would we if we knew what pain we must face just to claim life. Pain and suffering are a part of the meaning of life. We see the real meaning of life demonstrated on the cross. Jesus accepts God's will of death because God's will is life. Another reversal. Jesus accepts God's will of death because God's will is life. There is nothing else. This is the bottom line.
Jesus's passion is precisely where suffering, injustice, pain, death, obedience, righteousness, sin, salvation, goodness, and evil meet. It is where God and humanity touch, embrace, become one, even when these seem to be furthest apart.
The passion of Jesus is where we meet God.
God's plan is not that we suffer, but that we love him.
God's plan is not that we die, but that we live beyond death.
God's plan is not that we seek ourselves, but that we seek him.
He has shown this by going to the very deepest pit before we ourselves go there.
Corrie ten Boom was a woman of World War II Holland whose family hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis. She wrote a book about her experiences and it was later made into a movie. She tells about being found out, about being captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Her sister dies there and Corrie is beaten and tortured. But she offers as testimony the lesson she says she learned there: "No pit is so deep that God has not gone there before - and his love is deeper still."
Think of Moses, at the summit of his sorrow, climbing the mountains of Moab to die, and there he catches a glimpse of the Promised Land. Torn and weary from the hardest tasks God had ever given man or woman, there he sees the lovely prospects of the nation he has led for forty years.
God's plan is this: When a person has reached the place of his anguish, there God rolls away the mists and the very pit of his tears becomes the height of his rapture.
Christ's passion is not just another story of just another martyr, but it reveals the ultimate in true obedience and humility, where the plan of God for life in the world conquers death, suffering, and pain. That changes the meaning of all other suffering and pain; yours and mine included.
At Easter we will celebrate the resurrection - the promise of God that we will rise from death to new life, a promise that comes in the resurrection of one man, Jesus Christ, our suffering servant. That resurrection comes through the cross.
Ann Morrow Lindbergh once wrote: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."
Where does God become most vulnerable? Where his love for the world becomes most personal, on the cross, in the death of his Son for you and me.
The prophet is saying here that the important thing is to cultivate a close personal relationship with God in Christ, to listen so closely that he wakens you to hear. There is something inside you that is tuned in to God, or if it's not, with some practice, it can be.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, perhaps the best and most sincere television evangelist ever, reflected once on the shape of the human heart:
The human heart is not shaped like a valentine heart, perfect and regular in contour; it is slightly irregular in shape as if a small piece of it were missing out of its side. That missing part may very well symbolize a piece that a spear tore out of the universal heart of humanity on the cross, but it probably symbolizes something more. It may very well mean that when God created each human heart, he kept a small sample of it in heaven, and sent the rest of it into the world of time where it would each day learn the lesson that it could never be really happy, never be really wholly in love, and never be really wholehearted until it went back again to the timeless to recover the sample which God had kept for all eternity.1
A piece of your heart is in the heart of God, and in tune with what God is trying to tell you, among the thorns, under the dark ugly clouds. You can hear it, and know, but you need to know that you can hear it, like the suffering servant.
____________
1. Fulton J. Sheen, quoted in The Minister's Manual, 1987 Edition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 189.
It's a case of "inside every silver lining there's a big dark ugly cloud." Into every life some rain must fall. Even roses have thorns. Coming to terms with the suffering of Jesus means coming to terms with these reversals in our world, coming to terms with our own suffering.
So we must ask, what has the death of one man on a garbage heap on the other side of the world 2,000 years ago to do with my own dark ugly cloud? What has a mocking crown of thorns thrust on a convicted insurrectionist have to do with the twenty--first century rose bush?
How does a particularly pointless and cruel execution on the edge of the Roman Empire effect people here and now?
If any martyr - a person who dies for a cause - if any martyr will do, we have lots to choose from. Pick any Old Testament prophet: Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, Isaiah. Or, in secular history, the great emperor Julius Caesar whose death on March 15 is celebrated in a Shakespeare play. Or the 6,000 Roman slaves who died on crosses seventy years before Jesus was born when the rebellion of Spartacus failed. Or any number of saints in the church's history from Polycarp and Ignatius to Bonhoeffer and Niemoller.
But there is a difference between "having something to die for" and dying for the world in obedience - giving up the privilege of living for God's purpose.
Isaiah, or his successor, has four servant songs. These songs tell of a faithful servant of God. The servant of God may represent Israel, or maybe Isaiah the prophet, or a disciple of his, or the remnant of Israel that shall return to be faithful after the Exile. The remnant that shall return is so important to Isaiah's message that Isaiah named his son "Remnant." Or failing even a small group as a faithful remnant, the suffering servant may be one true believer, who remains dedicated, who stands firm even in the face of persecution. Just one, willing to undergo punishment and death for the love of God, is enough. Christians know the servant songs are fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ.
Today's reading is the third servant song, suggesting a gentle and sustaining word to the weary, knowing all the while that pain and not appreciation will be the lot of the servant. Yet the song goes on to recount the divine vindication of the Lord's servant. Every day he hears the voice of God and his teachings, which the servant willingly accepts. God strengthens him as he forthrightly faces torture and shame. Then the servant calls his accusers into court. Who can face God? Only his righteous one.
Writing 600 or 700 years before Jesus, Isaiah, or his disciple describes the trial of Jesus. It's uncanny. He's almost as detailed as King David, 1,000 years before Jesus, who describes the crucifixion in Psalm 22, which we will read on Good Friday. David's Psalm sounds as if he is at the foot of the cross describing Jesus on it.
Christ's Passion is not the story of "just another martyr." It was part of God's plan.
Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are the ultimate in true obedience and humility.
None of us chose to be born, nor would we if we knew what pain we must face just to claim life. Pain and suffering are a part of the meaning of life. We see the real meaning of life demonstrated on the cross. Jesus accepts God's will of death because God's will is life. Another reversal. Jesus accepts God's will of death because God's will is life. There is nothing else. This is the bottom line.
Jesus's passion is precisely where suffering, injustice, pain, death, obedience, righteousness, sin, salvation, goodness, and evil meet. It is where God and humanity touch, embrace, become one, even when these seem to be furthest apart.
The passion of Jesus is where we meet God.
God's plan is not that we suffer, but that we love him.
God's plan is not that we die, but that we live beyond death.
God's plan is not that we seek ourselves, but that we seek him.
He has shown this by going to the very deepest pit before we ourselves go there.
Corrie ten Boom was a woman of World War II Holland whose family hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis. She wrote a book about her experiences and it was later made into a movie. She tells about being found out, about being captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Her sister dies there and Corrie is beaten and tortured. But she offers as testimony the lesson she says she learned there: "No pit is so deep that God has not gone there before - and his love is deeper still."
Think of Moses, at the summit of his sorrow, climbing the mountains of Moab to die, and there he catches a glimpse of the Promised Land. Torn and weary from the hardest tasks God had ever given man or woman, there he sees the lovely prospects of the nation he has led for forty years.
God's plan is this: When a person has reached the place of his anguish, there God rolls away the mists and the very pit of his tears becomes the height of his rapture.
Christ's passion is not just another story of just another martyr, but it reveals the ultimate in true obedience and humility, where the plan of God for life in the world conquers death, suffering, and pain. That changes the meaning of all other suffering and pain; yours and mine included.
At Easter we will celebrate the resurrection - the promise of God that we will rise from death to new life, a promise that comes in the resurrection of one man, Jesus Christ, our suffering servant. That resurrection comes through the cross.
Ann Morrow Lindbergh once wrote: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."
Where does God become most vulnerable? Where his love for the world becomes most personal, on the cross, in the death of his Son for you and me.
The prophet is saying here that the important thing is to cultivate a close personal relationship with God in Christ, to listen so closely that he wakens you to hear. There is something inside you that is tuned in to God, or if it's not, with some practice, it can be.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, perhaps the best and most sincere television evangelist ever, reflected once on the shape of the human heart:
The human heart is not shaped like a valentine heart, perfect and regular in contour; it is slightly irregular in shape as if a small piece of it were missing out of its side. That missing part may very well symbolize a piece that a spear tore out of the universal heart of humanity on the cross, but it probably symbolizes something more. It may very well mean that when God created each human heart, he kept a small sample of it in heaven, and sent the rest of it into the world of time where it would each day learn the lesson that it could never be really happy, never be really wholly in love, and never be really wholehearted until it went back again to the timeless to recover the sample which God had kept for all eternity.1
A piece of your heart is in the heart of God, and in tune with what God is trying to tell you, among the thorns, under the dark ugly clouds. You can hear it, and know, but you need to know that you can hear it, like the suffering servant.
____________
1. Fulton J. Sheen, quoted in The Minister's Manual, 1987 Edition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 189.
