Transcript

Gospel Lesson is Luke 24 verses 44 through 53. Then he said to them, these are my words which I spoke to you, all I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sin should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven, and they returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God. This is the word of the Lord. My pleasure to be invited to this occasion to be with you. I think I appreciate the Dean's introduction. A strange compliment. When I think of treasures, I think of things on earth and mummies and all that, and I have a feeling that he did too. That's why he said that. All of us, I think all of us, yeah, all of us are welcome, enjoy, disturbances. Ever since we were babies, I think it's true. Most parents spend a lot of their time sneaking up on the child, just a few months old, in the crib, looking around doors and over the corner of the bed saying, Boo! And the child grins and likes it, and you do it over and over a few thousand times, and it's enjoyed every time. We like that. Ghost stories. When we were younger, we enjoyed ghost stories. We enjoyed being disturbed, enjoyed being scared. We enjoy disturbances in sanctuaries. Dog comes down the aisle, curls up at the feet of the pastor during the sermon. What happened at church today? Well, yeah, this dog came in and came down the aisle. We enjoyed in classrooms, faulty systems. That's off the far alarm three times in one day. Everybody goes out in the yard and comes back when the principal says, let's go back inside. What happened at school today? Oh, nothing. Well, yeah, we did have three false alarms. Had to go out in the yard, disturbed our social studies real bad. Didn't get to it. We like disturbances. Up to a point. And then they're not fun anymore if these disturbances upset relationships very important to us. Convictions firmly held. Viewpoints well established. Beliefs well grounded. When these are disturbed, when values are disturbed, it's not fun anymore. Now, we may later look back on it and laugh as I do sometimes at some of the silly and narrow and provincial things of my own life. But at the time, extremely, extremely painful. I recall when I heard the news, the disturbing news about Catherine, we called her then. I was a fourth grader. We called her Miss Catherine. I don't know what you called your teachers then. Miss Catherine. She was beautiful, intelligent, gave a lot of attention to all of us, helped us with arithmetic and everything. All the boys in the class had a crush on her. So it's absolutely devastating when I heard about her. In fact, I didn't believe it. It was all over town. I might have been the only one. I simply refused to believe it. The word was that Miss Catherine had had her ears pierced. Well, it couldn't be true because we knew in that little village in West Tennessee what it meant when a woman had her ears pierced. Like if there was anything revelatory of character, it was having your ears pierced. She had her ears pierced, they said. My older sister said, Catherine had her ears pierced. I said, she did not. Because you see that meant that she was a wanton woman. I just couldn't believe my teacher, my teacher, had her ears pierced. It hurts me now to think about it. She had her ears pierced. To have her ears pierced meant we all knew what kind of person she really was. We knew what she did when she went to town. We knew what kind of interest she put in her diary. We knew what she slept in, if anything, as rough when you're in the fourth grade. Going to see a painting of Christ, widely publicized on tour. I went in this booth. There was a long line. I went in this booth. There was this painting, I suppose, five feet tall. However, it's probably life-size. Jesus was about five feet tall. There was this painting in color. Grotesque, ugly, ugly person. I had always had Sunday school in a room that had Solomon's head of Christ. I knew how pretty he was. And this grotesque creature, and everybody was pouncing on the painter. Why in the world? And she said, haven't you read? Haven't we read what? He had no calmliness or beauty that we should desire him. He was one from whom people hide their face. From him they turn away, a man acquainted with sorrow, rejected, despised. Didn't you know? That's rough. When you have recently given your life to Christ and beginning to hear the first stirrings that soon would be the thundering of a call to ministry, that super intense seriousness, and then to be invited to a party, you can already hear the music. And strange enough, as I approached the door, the music was just a closer walk with you. And I thought, well, this is going to be really something. Just a closer walk with you. I opened the door. Everybody was dancing, cheek to cheek. Just a closer walk with you. Granted, Jesus, if you please, absolutely devastating. Dancing? Disturbances are fun until they upset a conviction, a belief, a value, an image, an idea. Then they're painful indeed. Those first beginnings of reading the Bible seriously and reading Matthew, and they brought to him the ass and the cold of the triumphal entry, you remember? They brought to him the ass and the cold and they put their garments on them and he sat on them. He sat on them, on the animals, two animals. He didn't sit on two animals. I got another translation and another translation. And finally I was motivated even to study Greek to get rid of one of those animals. Not the highest motivation, but it'll get you through. The animals are still there, but I've grown some in my understanding of the nature of Scripture. Disturbances are fun until they upset something very, very important, then it's painful and difficult. And now and then there is a disturbance that is so radical in its nature that we can't handle it by ourselves. Now I don't mean something so sudden that shocking just throws us into shock. Those things do occur just since our vacation. No, it was during the last school year, as I recall, being present in the airport at Portland, Oregon, just visiting in a casual way with a couple there in their 70s, I guess. Been to Hawaii, brown as gingerbread. He still had to lay around his neck, big straw hat, gifts for all the grandchildren, waiting as I was for a plane back to Atlanta. He fell over in the floor. Medics were there, paramedics were there, I suppose in two minutes, just like that, they were there. Nothing they could do. When he fell, he broke his glasses. I was visiting with her. This is her part of the conversation. And I didn't bring another pair of glasses, she said. He had another pair and he put them out and told me, remember to take another pair of glasses, and I forgot I left those glasses. That's the only pair of glasses they had. Now what are we going to... And she talked about those glasses while he lay there dead. She was in shock, which is a providential way of protecting us from death until we are able to make sense out of the nonsensical. Now I don't mean disturbing in the sense of certain shock. I mean disturbing in the sense of the profundity of its importance. What if something happens to you that forces you to return to the quarry from which you were mined and rethink? Values, loyalties, commitments, ideas. It can happen. It happened to the disciples. They had that radical experience, the like of which no one could possibly equate, the death and the resurrection of Jesus. They couldn't handle it. None of the gospels are so glossy as to say they all handled it well. Matthew says, then they worshipped him, but some doubted. John's closing scene is Thomas saying, I won't believe it till I touch him. Mark says the women just ran out, silent and scared to death. Luke says they disbelieved for joy. What else can you say? The most radical experience they possibly could have, the death and resurrection of Jesus, which now impacts upon all that they've ever believed, all that they've ever heard, all that they have ever imagined. What does this mean? What can they do with it? What can one do with an experience like that? There's no antecedent. There's no precedent. There is no analogy. You can't go around and say, well, it was sort of like. It's not sort of like anything. It's unique. What could they do with it? Well, they could run from it, of course, go back to the past. After all, they were not pagans. They had a marvelous religion when they came to Jesus. They had tradition. They had scripture, had hymns, worship services, marvelous community, had moral and upright standards. The Jewish community and the synagogue was worthy of their full attention. Who needs this anyway? Deaths and resurrections. They could return to the other. The warm circle of the familiar is always inviting. And the people who leave it are very, very few. They could recite as they walked away Psalm 131. My face is not lifted up. My heart is not too high. I have not devoted myself to things too great and marvelous for me. I have calmed and quieted my soul like a child on its mother's breast. That's all I want. Just a little peace and quiet. Who needs radical experience? I could do that. Or they could modify the new experience, trim it down and trim it down and reduce it so that they can handle it. Just add it to what they already believe. Just add it to your present loyalties, life pattern, viewpoint, everything else. Just add Jesus. Just add Jesus. Keep everything the same. Just add Jesus. Or they could embrace the new so radically that they rejected and spat upon the past. More you know how they used to tell us back in the synagogue. So on, so on, so on, so on. But now they'll have Jesus. Go around proving how fully and completely I have embraced Jesus by speaking cynically and sarcastically about my old synagogue. I could, you know. But what they did, says Lou, in what the gospel demanded of them, I think, was that the new experience forced them to go back, to rethink, reinterpret and reappropriate their past. That is tough. It's really tough. I do not think that new ideas and new experiences impact so much on our future. The most pressure is at the point of the past. Because your past and my past, that's all we have. That's what brought us here. If you have any new idea, you lay it gently against my past. Don't make fun of it. Don't be cynical. Don't put it down. That's who I am. That's what I brought. And that's what brought me here. Therefore it could not possibly be. They simply just discard the past. They return to it to rethink it. What does this mean in the light of what Jesus taught? What does this mean in the light of our own scriptures, Moses, the law and the prophets? What does this new experience mean? That's the honest thing to do. No one genuine deeply becomes an overnight conservative or an overnight liberal. The real genuine man or woman of God works it through late at night, over and over again. And so the risen Christ, the risen Christ as Luke came to them, and the risen living Christ, the Holy Spirit if you want to, the presence of God if you want to, the living risen Christ said to them, what has happened to you in my death and resurrection is what I talked to you about. There's continuity there. And it's what the scriptures, Moses, the law and the prophets talked about. There's continuity there. And he opened their minds to understand it, to understand the two most critical thoughts that the early church had to deal with. One was the death of Jesus, and the other was the mission to the Gentiles. The Christ must suffer. The Messiah must suffer. But I thought when the Messiah came, the Messiah must suffer. And you are to preach repentance and forgiveness of sin to all people everywhere. All people everywhere, but I thought we alone of all the nations of the earth, all people everywhere, it was critical, it was painful. And the living Christ, the voice of the risen Christ said to them, this is what I talked to you about. This is what your own scripture teaches you, and Christ opened their minds to understand, and what was it they were to understand, that the very past that you feel is threatened by this new experience is the past that has prepared you for this new experience. The Sunday school teachers that taught me Bible verses, in Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, born nor free, male nor female, did not possibly understand all the implications of what they taught. It would have scared them to death. Miss Emma, who taught me to recite, go into all the world and preach the gospel to all people would have been absolutely frightened if that had happened. I don't say this in criticism of her. It's just that the living voice of Christ in the church says, go back and work it through again, and you'll discover that the past you thought was threatening, threatened, is actually the past that brought you and nourished you to this moment, and now you have a new aha. Now, disturbances will come while you're here. Maybe not enough, maybe too many. Some of them will come by exposure in classrooms, things you hear, things you read in books, maybe disturbing, very disturbing, especially if it's from a professor whom you trust and admire very much, and you say, mmm, really keeps you awake at night. There will be disturbances in your supervised ministry. Some of you will go to places that maybe you will learn for the first time how violent people can be, how cruel people can be to those they love. Some of you will go to an institution of retarded adults and will absolutely erase your board. Just can't handle it. I don't have any antecedents. I don't have any place for this. I don't have any analogies for this. Some of you may, for the first time, discover the empty hollow eyes of poverty. Some of you may discover the first time what a dark shadow, prosperity, can put over a city like Atlanta. These are shocking things. Some of you who are laid back in mellow and cool and exploratory and casual, and everything is now about that, may be absolutely shocked at the intense, committed 100% devotion of some of your classmates. And some of you who are absolutely 100% intense, your family already paying a price for you to be here, it had to be 100%. You will be disturbed by how laid back and cool some of the other... ...quantum. It's disturbing and it's shocking. And the living Christ came to them and said, What I'm saying to you now, I said to you before. You remember? And what I said to you before, I was just really taking out the Old Testament. Do you remember? Surely you remember. When these disturbances come in candler, I hope you'll take them to the classroom and hammer them out. I hope you'll take them to the library. Others have wrestled with the same thing, I'm sure, somewhere, and the book is there. But may I urge you to bring those disturbances to the chapel? Not because you're anti-intellectual or non -intellectual, or some sort of spooky gnostic that thinks it'll all melt. But you bring them to the chapel because you believe that the scripture is alive, a living voice in the church, and the Holy Spirit, the living Christ, will open your minds. And the past that you thought was threatened, you will reclaim as the very past that brought you here. God bless you. [Applause] [Music]