As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Loving God, you spoke through the prophets. While it is difficult for your children to hear your Word when they don’t agree, you continue to work for understanding and mutual respect of different beliefs. Reside with and in us now, so that we might grow in our understanding of our heritage, and appreciation for those who have gone before us and brought us where we are. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Prophetic sermon. Those two words can strike fear in the most accomplished homelitician. We don’t want to preach prophetic sermons, because most people in the pew don’t want to hear them, and can tend to get frustrated when they do. The Old Testament is riddled with prophets who told God’s truth and got run out of town for it. Run out of town is the better option, some of them were never let to escape town. All of that is to say, I’m more nervous here than I have been for any sermon I’ve preached to you. I want you to remember that I preach this to you because I am sure you can handle it, and because I love you enough, and trust in your love for me enough, feeling safe that you won’t ride me out on a rail.

Also, I trust that you have a good theology of homiletics as well. Which is to say, I trust that you don’t think that anything that is said in a sermon is therefore gospel truth. I encourage all hearers of sermons, you especially, to consider what they think of what is being said, and to decide to disagree or agree as is fit. I don’t think that a sermon is meant to be a final word. The sermon is not supposed to be the word that closes off conversation. Instead, a good sermon opens up conversation, is a conversation starter, and in doing so lasts more than the 15 minutes allotted to it, but lasts a week, as it prompts discussion over the dinner table, or over coffee, or in Bible studies, or in prayer. So, feel free to disagree with me. If you do, I encourage you to talk to me, and open up a conversation from which we can both benefit. And remember how I always pray in the prayer for illumination. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be.

With that said, hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in the gospel of John. Listen. John 14.6-7, 18. The Grass withers, the Flower falls, but the Word of the Lord endures forever…Thanks be to God. And hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Colossians. Listen to God’s Word for you Today. Colossians 1.15-20. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

One of the difficult things to deal with as a Protestant, and as a Christian, is how do we deal with Christ. As part of the triune God, we have long held, that if you want to fully know God, understanding Christ’s place as the eternal Word is imperative. To know more of God, you’ve got to understand who Christ is, and believe in him. To not do so would be similar to knowing a friend really well, but not knowing a part of that person. Which is to say this, I am three things, mainly. One, I am a husband. Two, I am a father. Three, I am a pastor. I have several friends who know me as just one of those; meaning they know me only as deep as one of the categories. They are essentially acquaintances, folks at Presbytery meetings, or people in the neighborhood that wave when we drive by. They are nice folk, good and interesting to talk to, and I consider them friends. There are those who know me better, who know me as two of the aspects. They know what kind of parent I am, how I interact with my girls, what I am like as a spouse, what kinds of jokes I make or like, ect. They are more than acquaintances, and are closer friends. But there are folks who know how I am in all three of those aspects of my life. They know how I stand when I preach, what nicknames I call my girls, and the preferred manner in which I hold my wife’s hand. They have moved past friends into family. Many of you here qualify. To know God most fully, you’ve got to know the whole picture, Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

On the flip side, you can’t just worship Jesus. We carry a Christ centered theology, not Christ alone. Meaning, we believe in Jesus, so that we can better know God. We don’t worship just Jesus. There is a lot of that theology around the country these days. “It’s just me and Jesus, we can get through anything.” That’s not enough. That is Christ alone, and is a non-Trinitarian view of God. We worship Jesus because we learn about God, because Jesus is the visible expression of the invisible God. But as we worship God the Son we do not forget God the Parent or God the Spirit.

We have long held that Jesus is an integral part of the trinity, but not the only part that we deal with. There is a tendency to think of the trinity as a hierarchy. God the Parent is over Jesus the Son is over the Holy Spirit. But that is not the way it is. The trinity is who God is, we just interact with God in different manners. To worship only Jesus is to make yourself relate to God in only the acquaintance mode, and your not even a real friend, and certainly not family.

Here’s the part that will open up some conversation, hopefully. In the Word of God, in the part that we call the Old Testament, God makes promises over and again to Israel, to the Jewish people to be in covenant with them, often saying that, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”² God does not say, “If you accept the Messiah, then I will be your God,” or “If you follow all of the law, then I will be your God,” or any if then statement. Just, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” In fact, God says to Israel, “I will never break my covenant with you.”³ This is not a qualified statement. It is an, “I will be with you in good times and in bad, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, and not even death will part us,” statement.

So, that said, we do not believe in a God who makes and brakes promises. If we believed in a God who would make a covenant with a people, and then up and desert them after changing the covenant, what ground would we stand on to think that God wouldn’t do the same to us? So, when our tradition has been sound theologically, it has said something like this. Take that verse in John, “No one comes to the Father but through me,” and understand this. Jewish people ought not to be cut out by that. They don’t need a way to the Father. They already reside there. Which is to say, when I was in high school, I was involved in Young Life. Again, something to think about, and hopefully to talk about.

The other thing that we have long held, that is in contrast to the theology that is being pushed, is the Priority of grace over Religious Determinism. You’ve heard me preach over and again about this. We are not saved by our merits. We cannot make God love us any more than God already does. Our good deeds are good, but they don’t make us acceptable to God. What makes us acceptable to God is that God has decided that we are acceptable, not on our merits, but on the gift of Jesus Christ. I may have told this story before, so stay with me, but it bears repeating. 100 points.

Thinking that you could earn some of your salvation, that you need to, is NOT good news. It is not the way of life. It is the dark road of death and destruction. When Martin Luther began to oppose the church at the time, it was because grace was not a gift freely given, but one that was bought with a price. Literally, bought. When you had a relative die, if there were unforgiven sins, you could buy their way from purgatory into heaven with a donation to the church. The size of the donation related not to the sin, but to how much the sinner’s family was worth. Perhaps if you had children who would not think to take care of you after you die, you may want to go ahead and buy your indulgences now. That way, when you sin in the future, you’ll still be covered. Do I need to explain the problem with this?

Now, today we have the indulgence system still in place, just a little altered for our time. Instead of buying your way into heaven with money, you can get there with works. If you’ve sinned, just make right by it. If you’ve fallen short of the glory of God, train yourself to 1) not do it again, and 2) train yourself to make up for it by working for the church, volunteering your time, perhaps something for the kids. And the sad thing is, that is how we humans want it. Instead of admitting our fault, and admitting that we need, need God to be gracious to us, we’d rather continue to work at it, continue to quote “be good people”. That way we don’t have to realize that we aren’t good enough, and get a bonus, because we get to look down our noses at those who aren’t as far along as we are.

The aggregate that wants to enter the kingdom on its own merits, and make no mistake, it is a large collection of people that want to enter in their own merits, need us. They need us to remind them that it is God’s goodness, not their own, that guarantees salvation. They need us to remind them of Ephesians 2.8 and 9. “For by grace you have been save through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Were it up to us, we would all fail. Vast numbers of people whom God loves would be left out of the kingdom of heaven, and the sign outside the gates would read, “Heaven, Population Zero.” Its not good news to think you can earn salvation by doing this or being that. The good news is that it is a gift given to you, freely, by a gracious God. If the world loses that, we’re all lost. So, in part, it is our job to save the world from itself. May we have the strength. Amen.

1. This sermon series is informed by a discussion with Douglas John Hall, and lecture at the Reclaiming the Text event in Montreat, North Carolina in May 2004. Douglas John Hall is emeritus Professor of Theology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.