Grounded in Jesus, we experience the love of God, personal transformation, and friendship with one another (Ephesians 3:14-19; Matthew 28:16-20).
It's an old church joke. And as jokes that have any staying power – it tells the truth but tells it slant. I’ve told it before but the best jokes get told again, and again. A pastor was giving a children sermon and sat with a shoe box littered with punched holes in it. He told the children, “I have something in this box. It’s brown, furry, eats acorns, and lives in tree. What do you think it is?” But before he could even finish, a bright young girl blurts out, “Pastor, pastor, I know the answer is Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.” It’s funny and silly but not far off the mark for us. We are a community, we declare, “grounded in Jesus.” And that word grounded is important. It means to give something a firm theoretical or practical basis (e.g. the study of history must be grounded in a precise exploration of primary source evidence). It can also mean to instruct someone thoroughly in a subject (e.g. the physicians were grounded in anatomy and biology). And even speaks about the flow of electricity and power safely.
And so Jesus is the answer. Jesus is our practical basis, our instruction, our safe and powerful connection to God. And I would like to explore this by looking at who Jesus calls, and then how Jesus calls us through imitation, participation, and revelation.
Jesus grounds us by welcoming and calling us.
We are friends with one another because of Jesus. He’s the one who calls us, joins us, connects and centers us. We aren’t here because of our gender, our nationalism, or our political persuasion. We are here because of Jesus. It’s worth exploring who are these people who stand together in Matthew 28. Well, let’s see. We discover that Peter was a loud-mouth and betrayer and an uneducated fisherman, James and John were braggarts and struggled with anger, Matthew was a political collaborator, Simon was a violent, political revolutionary and Judas, had been greedy and suicidal. Do you think they fought with one another? He even calls quiet ones who never speak or write anything like Thaddaeus, Bartholomew, Simon the Cananean and James the son of Alphaeus. All these were the original 12.
.Before we jump too quickly into what Jesus does, we must talk about ourselves as a community that is formed by Jesus, not by goodness but by Jesus, not by our worship, our piety, our programming, but by Jesus. What makes us a community is not so much who we are but whose we are. And this is best expressed by constantly acknowledging our own frailty and fragility as ones called by Jesus because he wants us (Mark 3:13). By the way, that's not exclusive - Jesus wants everyone.
And the Great Commission, Jesus’ mandate, is often explored and analyzed apart from who it is given to. We often begin with vs. 18 when we should begin in vss. 16-17 which identify Jesus’ followers as doubting worshippers. And they aren’t chastised, punished, or shamed, but welcomed and given something to do. So grounded in Jesus is not some litmus test for moral superiority. Grounded in Jesus means that we can identify ourselves as those desperate for love, anxious for transformation, and longing for friendship. We can be doubters. It upends the false posturing that so often happens in churches, you can be grounded in Jesus, asked to follow, experience divine love, without being your best self. In fact, to be grounded in Jesus is to recognize that you were loved and called before you did anything and even if you doubt.
So that’s the “who” question answered but how are we grounded in Jesus? Well the New Testament speaks of our connection to Jesus in three overlapping but distinct ways. If we’re going to be grounded in Jesus, we need to understand what these three ways are: imitation, participation, and revelation.
We are grounded in Jesus in order to imitate Jesus. To be grounded in Jesus is to pay attention to the teachings and actions of Jesus as one who shows us how to live a God-shaped life. We are instructed on many occasions in the Gospels by Jesus to “follow him, “to be “like” him, to invite others to him so that they can become kingdom builders. That’s Jesus’ point of Matthew 28 to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” He is a flesh and blood example of what it means to be a human being. One of my friends who’s a theologian loves to tell students, “Jesus wasn’t merely human but most human.” That means that who he was and what he teaches ultimately aim to show us how to be human and not merely Christian. We listen to him to learn forgiveness, to understand prayer, to discover how to relate to people in need or enemies. We imitate him to understand who we were actually meant to be as human beings. Imitation is incredibly important because our world needs more Jesus look-alikes, more people who look and sound like him. Imitation is important because we need more people fully human and fully alive. But I also want to remind us that Jesus actually didn’t offer a ton of commands nor did he speak like a drill sergeant shouting directions with extreme specificity. If we’re going to wrap our head around imitation we must always remember that Jesus spoke mostly in parables and invited a conversation. So if we lose the friendship piece of point one we will never be able to fully ground ourselves in imitation because it demands dialogue. Imitation of Jesus is always a team sport. The Apostle Paul will remind us repeatedly that the body of Christ is all of us. So we need each other and we will not have a theological discussion without first grounding ourselves in Jesus and what he has said.
We are grounded in Jesus because we participate in Jesus. To be grounded in Jesus, however, isn’t just about learning Jesus’ teachings. The New Testament also talks about being “in Christ or Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith . . . being rooted and established in love.” The orientation is that Jesus also came to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and while we are called to follow Jesus we will never actually be Jesus. Our transformation comes joining ourselves to Jesus much like the reception of things when one becomes married. When I married Marianne I came with very little financially other than debt. But then something miraculous happened. When we each said I do, I suddenly had a house, greater income, another vehicle, none of which I had purchased. These were mine by union and Marianne, also took on my debt. That’s what it means to participate in Jesus. It’s not simply trying to act like Jesus but joining ourselves to Jesus and him actively working in our lives, giving us what we didn’t have before and couldn’t acquire on our own. The agent of transformation is not our own will, Paul tells in Ephesians, but power in our inner being. We participate in Jesus, inside and out, in order to be transformed by Jesus. The personal transformation that we speak of in our missional statement reminds us that transformation is possible and assured because the one responsible is the Lord of the universe. Your transformation is possible because Jesus is “all,” has “all”, “all power and authority.” The New Testament signals this element of participation through the most beautiful participle phrase, “in Christ.” Do you know how many times that phrase is used? 90 times!
Finally, we are grounded in Jesus because he is the revelation of God. The New Testament scholar, Tom Wright, tells a funny story about his time as a chaplain at Oxford. He would often try to meet with each first-year student to welcome them to the college. Most, he says, were happy to meet him but would often say, a bit embarrassed, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in God.” He would often respond, “Oh, that’s interesting. Which god do you not believe in?” This response would catch the student off guard. They believed that the term “god” always meant the same thing to everyone and would stumble off a few phrases about the god they didn’t believe in: an old man who lived up in the sky, ready to smite at a moment’s notice, sending bad people to hell and good people to heaven. Wright would respond, “O good. I don’t believe in that god either.” Wright acknowledges that the pressing question is not, “Is there a God?” but “What kind of God is there?” And the answer to that question, for those of us who are grounded in bedrock Christian faith is Jesus. The Apostle Paul, in ways shocking for a Jewish believer of his credentials, will say in Colossians: “In Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). Or as one theologian puts it: “God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all.” Friends to be grounded in Jesus, in other words, is to say this is who God is, this what God wants, this is how God wants it. This is the love of God personified. And that God loves you so much that he came lived among us full of grace and truth. He died for us and rose again and calls everyone of us to live a human life fully alive, to be transformed, to befriend one another. You probably noticed that this sermon has me pulling from a lot of what I have said to you many times. It’s sort of my greatest hits and I’ve used a number of stories that you’ve heard more than once. And friends, that’s because the best stories, the most beautiful truths, the most exciting things, are the ones we tell again and again and again. We are grounded in Jesus – offered transformation, know the love of God, and brought together as friends. I pray that the joke that started this service tells about us in reverse. I want people to say, “Well, they look like Trinity Covenant Church but they sound like Jesus to me. They’ve got an After School Care program for the neighborhood but it looks like Jesus to me. They engage in authentic worship because it feels like Jesus to me. They are Jesus look-alikes.”
1 comment:
Thank you, Pastor Jon. Beautifully said.
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