1-24-10

Text: Luke 2:41-52

● Admittedly, there is “God”, and then there are our “images of God”. Unfortunately, often the (2) are not complimentary.

            Without an accurate image of God, we will never offer our devotion, and in the absence of a god worthy of our devotion, we will be forced to look for a suitable alternative to which we might attach our hearts. After all, we were all created to worship so “not worshipping” is apparently not an option.

● Maybe the place to start would be, “What do you mean by the word God?” We are becoming increasingly aware that when people use the word ‘God’, they are not necessarily using it to describe the God of historic- Christianity.

            Some theologies [Epicureanism and modern Deism] believe in a ‘god’, or ‘gods’, which have nothing much to do with the world in which we live. They don’t intervene, they don’t involve themselves in any way; they are fairly indifferent to what happens here and certainly not affected by what affects us.

            So, we would somehow pay them our respects from a distance. This type of god becomes so distant and uninvolved as to become unapproachable… we just kind of lose sight of him.

● Others [Stoicism] believe that god, or “the divine”, or “the sacred” is simply another dimension or extension of our world, so that “god” and your cat or the tree stump in the yard end up being pretty much the same thing.

● In this view, God becomes so ordinary, so much like everything that’s just laying around at our feet, that he evokes no sense of awe or wonder… he’s not compelling enough to induce worship.

● These approaches lead to practical atheism or, at best, agnosticism: either living as if there is no God or living as if there might be (who could know for sure), and even if there is, he would not have much to do with us or have much to say about our current existence.

● I said last week that from everything that we know historically about Jesus, he was a young man who was immersed in the Jewish story. It was this story that both informed and formed him.

● We can probably summarize what Jesus believed in terms of the most fundamental of Jewish beliefs:

            - He believed that there was one, Creator-God who was present and active with the world. This God was not limited to or defined by his creation, but was sovereign over it and somehow distinct from it (mono-theism).

            - Jesus also believed that out of all of his creation, God had chosen the nation of Israel to be ministers (servants) of his reconciliation project. That God was going to act, not apart from his creation, but from within it, in order to rescue and heal the world; to reconcile humanity back to himself.

            - Finally, Jesus believed that God would one day return to his Temple, to Zion (temple mount), to establish his Kingdom and bring about the final defeat of evil.

● In the first century, the Jewish people used several symbols as means of thinking about and speaking about their God. One such symbol was the “Temple”.

● Temple was the place where heaven and earth intersected; where God lived among his people. It was the place from which he would rule among them.

● The Temple was clearly one of the focal points of Jesus’ public action, not in the sense that he was always going there to worship, but in the sense that it had come to represent all that had gone wrong in Judaism and all that seemed to resist the breaking in of the Kingdom of God.

● So, when we say, “Did Jesus really think he was God?”, we would have to say, among other things, that Jesus believed, at the core of his being, that it was his destiny, his vocation, to be and do for Israel only what God could be or do.

● Jesus spoke and acted as if he was Israel’s true-Messiah; he was hooking into all of the ways that the Jewish people spoke about the presence and restorative actions of God in order to explain what he was about.

Here’s what we might say…

In Jesus, we see  God in 3-D.

“No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known”. John 1:18

● We don’t start with trying to understand what the word “God” means and then try to fit Jesus into it, we start with Jesus in order to get a glimpse of what God is like.

            We start by thinking about a young boy, thoroughly saturated in the Jewish story, talking and behaving in ways that left many thinking he was crazy, but many identifying in his actions all of the symbols and similarities regarding God’s dealings with them historically.

In Jesus, God loses something of his abstractness.

            Jesus refuses to allow us to think that life is about philosophies and ideals which end up having no significant impact on the way you actually live your life.

● He is “God with us”--- acting, speaking, helping, saving. “God saves” (what his name means) is not some sentiment which can be disconnected from reality. It’s why we have a record of God entering time and space; being born in a specific place, at a historical time, into a particular culture, worshipping with real people, eating with friends and dying in a recognizable way and place.

“…the Word became flesh, John says, “ and lived among us…” (1:14: tabernacled in our midst). It is, of course, an image of the Temple.

            God chose to live/dwell in the Temple, but it was never ‘home’. Home was always with us.

When we look at Jesus, we are not only to conclude that this is what it means to be God, but this is what it means to be human.

                What we mean is: Jesus is everything that God is and everything that we were meant to be.

            Life was never meant to be the product of our own devices and conclusions: we need a way, someone to demonstrate how we were meant to live.

The incarnation is the genius of God.

            In Jesus, we find the ‘de-centralization’ of God; removing all of the barriers and maximizing accessibility.

Jesus was deliberately acting in such a way as to say that where he and his disciples were, God was present and active the same way that he normally was in the Temple (i.e. healing people, forgiving sins, restoring people into fellowship with God, etc.

Philippians 2:1-8 (read)

Nothing Jesus ever did was out of character for God.

                There was never anything contradictory about what Jesus said or did and who God is.

Jesus didn’t do the things he did “in spite of” the fact that he was God, but “because” he was God.

                Jesus didn’t humble himself and set aside his rights in spite of the fact that he was God, he did it because that’s the kind of things you should expect from God!

● When it comes to his “Godness’…

Jesus forever dispels the notion of some “needy, ego-centric deity” who creates in order to have humanity cater to his every whim, but actually offers us a God who comes to serve his creation.

Jesus refused to use his rights as leverage or in order to exploit our weakness or gain some advantage over us. He refused to use his rights as a means of insulating himself from all that limited us or that causes us pain (to only get “so close”).

● We use/claim our rights as a means of protecting our own self-interests (i.e. our right to be silent when we might incriminate ourselves; our right to bear arms when we feel our safety is threatened, etc.)

We speak about our “rights” in terms of ‘loss’ or ‘forfeit’--- how we will be at risk. Jesus viewed them as something to gladly be set aside for the greater good.

● Jesus viewed his rights as a means of allowing for optimum advantage. He would never have dreamed of claiming his rights if doing so meant jeopardizing the common good.

Rights provide the opportunity to be truly selfless; to consciously choose the path of self-giving love.

In some way, what Jesus did was actually shatter the limitations of our humanity and broaden the scope of possibility by not only demonstrating what it was like, but by making that kind of life available to us.

            You now have the right to give freely without feeling there won’t be enough left for you; you now have the right to enter another’s world for the sake of mutual-restoration; you now have the right to forgive and the right to love without limits. You have the right to no longer live for empty self-satisfaction, but are now empowered to have your heart and your desires re-directed and re-shaped in accordance with creative-design.

● This is what it means to be “equal with God”--- not to be pompous and grandiose, exploiting power for your own advantage; but it is to be found in the self-emptying love of God: extreme love demonstrated in extreme measures. This is the God you have been looking for.