Materials
What We Believe
#2
We Believe In Jesus Christ
by R. Todd Bouldin
Today we continue our series called What We Believe: Rediscovering
Our Ancient Story. There is so much confusion in today’s
world about what to believe, and if it even matters. Many of us have
been around church all of our lives but yet we still have difficulty
articulating exactly what we believe. Scholarship and pop culture
are raising new questions about the person and meaning of Jesus Christ
too. Millions have read The Da Vinci Code, and they are questioning
everything that they have been told about Jesus Christ. There is so
much confusion and so little clarity. So much of that confusion is
met with statements of faith and long books to refute it. We all have
questions about Jesus Christ. I think that maybe the best way to help
us understand Him is not to preach some doctrines but to do what the
church has done for centuries: to tell you a story.
The Gospel Story
It was all good in the beginning. In the beginning God spoke a word,
and planets formed, stars burst forth, and a universe came into being.
The One who existed before all created the heavens and the earth.
And He did it with such order, intelligence, beauty that it reflected
the love He had for it. He created the whole cosmos, the earth and
the oceans, the trees and the animals, and even human beings. When
He had made it all, He stepped back and looked at it, and said, “Wow!
Now that is good!” And it was. You know how it feels when everything
is working just the way that it should, when all seems right with
the world. That is the way it was on that seventh day in which God
took great delight in all that He made.
Among the creatures He made was a human being, male and female, and
these together He said would be a representative of God in the world.
They would bear His DNA, they would have His image imprinted upon
them. Their whole essence was one of peace, holiness, wholeness, and
harmony with their Creator and each other. There were no hierarchies
or power structures. There was complete freedom. And they had the
perfect marriage. Sex and the body wasn’t dirty or forbidden
but were part of the good creation of God between the first man and
the first woman. Life wasn’t hard either. There was no pain
in childbirth for the mother. They carried out their role in the world
without back-breaking labor. It just couldn’t get any better
in that beautiful place. It was called a Garden because it was so
perfect and full of the presence of God and all that He wanted. It
was just good. Everything in the Universe showed the artistic work
of God who loved its every detail.
But then things took a turn for the worse. A Dark Force entered the
world and it took advantage of our human freedom. It seems like we
have a hard time loving and appreciating good things without wanting
to control and possess them. Instead of holding to them lightly while
worshiping the God who gave them to us, we so desire to cling to them
that we end up worshiping them. So craving became our way of existence
in a world which was given to us but not ours to possess. But because
we could not possess it, we wanted it even more. We so wanted to “own”
its beauty for ourselves.
So one day we reached for what we could not have and we devoured it,
thinking that it would satisfy our hunger to possess beauty and all
that is good. But it did not satisfy us. In fact, it made us feel
empty inside. We felt guilty, nasty, and ashamed. And it wasn’t
just us that was affected by the Dark Force. The perfect creation
God had made began to show signs of destruction and greed. We even
became ashamed of the good things God had made like our bodies because
now they were compromised by our cravings and our futile attempt to
satisfy them. As soon as we had eaten, we knew that something was
broken. Things were not as they were. Life felt compromised, thirsty,
lonely and dark. And then the most shocking reality of all came over
us: we realized we were so limited, so human, and so mortal. We feared
that life would one day end. Before there was such a sense of beauty
and life all around us in the presence of God and each other. Then
Death came knocking, and we feared living like never before because
we knew that we were dying.
You have been there. That’s the time when you come to an awareness
that you and everything around you is so desperately broken. You sense
how wounded and scarred people are, how hopeless and powerless many
feel; how tortured and twisted our relationships often are; how we
have hurt those whom we love including our kids; how out of control
our sexuality sometimes is; how lonely we can be; how fragile our
families are; how deeply almost everyone hurts.
The truth is, we are all so needy. So hungry. Songs are written and
sung about it. Movies are made of it. Romance and sexual ecstasy is
an attempt to heal it. Refrigerator doors swing open late at night
because of it, and one beer or wine after another is consumed to get
rid of it. It is such a deep sense of craving and desire for something
more. Something that we know we are supposed to have but know that
it is out of our reach. All of us are fallen, desperate and broken.
We each need to be wrapped up in a love we can trust, a love that
heals us, comforts us, assures us, and adores us. You can picture
a loving parent nurturing, protecting, and affirming; but many children
never got that, and even the best parents could only do it imperfectly.
They too were wounded.
So we spend the rest of our lives looking for it. Maybe we marry,
and now we expect this perfect love from our husband or wife. Or maybe
we've found the perfect friend, a dream friend. Now we will be loved.
But guess what? It doesn't happen, because they're as hurt and hungry
and needy as we are. And so we end up disappointed, angry and bitter,
or more likely guarded and protective. Maybe we look to be filled
up at work, or by the guys at the bar or the girls at the club, or
by our last favorite hobby. But it never happens; so we build walls
around ourselves, or we find some way to numb ourselves, or we self-destruct.
Meanwhile a Dark Force seeps into our souls, telling us that we are
somehow by someone accused. The consequences of our decisions and
actions are piling up against us. In the scales of justice, we owe
a debt and our wrongness overwhelms us and begins to immobilize us.
We stand accused. We try to forget it. We settle for making it through
the day or making it through the night or making it to the weekend.
But every time we stop and look - stop and really feel - the darkness
and hunger are still there.
It isn’t just our cravings that long for Eden. The craving and
the brokenness are everywhere around us. The beauty of God’s
creation is marred by destructive forces and decay. Our political
institutions and corporate structures are inefficient, broken and
ineffective. Suicide bombers kill innocent people in Iraqi streets
and London subways in the name of religion. Famine, disease, and natural
disasters are all signs that we no longer live in God’s Garden
anymore. Even religion and our churches seem so mired down by cultural
baggage, moral compromise, generational divides and political maneuvering.
Nothing seems right anymore.
So how do we find our way back home to the good place? How can such
a disordered and broken world put the pieces back together again?
Well, laws are our human attempts to make it all work again, or to
at least try. But laws are only as good as the people who agree to
follow them, and too often the Dark Force and the cravings are just
too overwhelming and tempting so that people break the law. God once
called out a people that would be His microcosm of a world put back
together again. They were to live out values of justice, peace, righteousness,
respect for the earth, and love of neighbor in all that they did.
God even gave them a Law to enforce God’s order on them. But
the Law didn’t work too well. Laws are only a base line, least
common denominator attempt to define behavior and to reward and punish
people into following it. But often the heart never changes, the cravings
never go away, and the Dark Force still gets the best of us. That’s
what happened to God’s chosen people too.
There was only one way for God to return the world to the perfection
and good He intended for it. God had to become part of the creation
He had made so that He could bring it back to its real purpose, order
and life. So God came to earth and took on all of our limitations,
weaknesses, brokenness, and humanity. By the Holy Spirit’s work
which we cannot comprehend and which is a mystery, God became a human
being in the womb of a poor virgin woman named Mary. God entered the
world in a manger in a remote town called Bethlehem in Israel, and
the parents of this baby called him “Jesus”, just a common
name in his day like Bob, John or Joe. This child became a man, the
One True Human Being, the one who was so fully bore the image of God
(the image that we were intended to bear) that He called himself the
“Son of God.” That’s the only way that people could
understand Him. To know Him as God would have been too much, so He
chose names like the Son of God, the Son of Man, or Messiah. But everyone
who came to know him sensed that there was something more, something
different about this man, something about him that drew everyone to
him because the cravings seemed to find go away when He was around,
the search seemed to end, and the world seemed right when He was in
it. Everywhere He went, He started reversing the effects of the Dark
Force. He healed disease, He reversed the curse of death by raising
people from their deathbeds, and He called out the Dark Force that
had taken over the lives of people. So some men and women began to
follow Him and they listened to His teachings.
Jesus taught that love was the essence of what it means to be human.
He said that the way you treat the lowest of people is the test of
your righteousness, not your piety. He taught that forgiveness is
the only way to approximate the world God intended when you live in
a broken world. He got into lots of disagreements with religious people
because He said that faith was about more than religious institutions
and formulas and rules but mainly consisted of a dynamic and living
relationship with the Creator God. He welcomed drunks, and whores,
and despised people, and women, and children, and the poor. He never
condemned people but He inspired them to live out of their identity
as God’s children with God’s image, and not out of their
brokenness and fallenness. He spoke of a new day and a revolutionary
time when God was going to set things right again. He called it the
“good news of the Reign of God.” And He said that this
Kingdom was coming. People hung on every word that He said because
He seemed to understand the rhythms of creation, the darkness of the
human heart, and our craving for goodness. What He said just rang
True.
He once told a parable about a son who wandered far from the home
of his father, and he became so hungry and desperate that He longed
for home. So the son came back home, and before He could even get
there, the Father ran out to meet him, embraced him, and threw a party
for him. Jesus said that this is how God wants to treat you. He wants
to welcome you home again to the place of His intentions. And as you
turn again homeward, God will wrap you up in love. He will run to
you when you are still a long way off. When you are feeling lost,
all alone out in the wilderness, He is out looking for you. He is
delighted by you. We just keep coming back to that story, we keep
making movies about it, we keep writing stories that enact it. It’s
the story our hungry souls so long to hear.
But God could not welcome us until the curse of the Dark Force was
ended and we were again what He made us to be. The only way this was
possible was to defeat the ultimate effect of the Dark Force upon
us and the whole cosmos, Death. God could not redeem His world from
all of its addictions and cravings and fear until He took death upon
Himself. Once in human history, God died by the most excruciating
death imaginable – crucifixion. God experienced every Hell imaginable
and finally even our death. In this, He took upon himself every effect
of our fallenness and brokenness. The Creator identified with every
hardship and suffering of His creation. All this happened so that
we could know deep down inside - as bedrock certainty - that at the
heart of the universe there is forgiveness and sacrificial love rather
than accusation. And the Dark Force of accusation, fear, and doubt
began to recede.
What God now offers you is forgiveness, the feeling you had as a child
when you woke up each morning feeling fully alive and innocent. The
feeling you had in the Garden in the first place. It can be that way
again. Whoever you are, whatever you've done, you can start over.
You can go home again. You can return to the Garden.
Astonishingly, however, there is even more to this good news. Jesus
did not stay dead. He was resurrected, confirming within history what
thoughtful people have always known. Death is not the end. There is
so much more to being alive. And now Jesus offers to us the sure confidence
of resurrection beginning in our lives here and now. Lives are resurrected.
Families are resurrected. Friendships are resurrected. Communities
are resurrected. Trust and hope and love are resurrected. God is putting
everything back together again as He intended it on the first day
of creation. The Dark Force is going away, and the Garden is growing
again. The earth and the universe are again becoming the theater of
God’s glory and beauty. Some days it seems so far away and so
impossible to believe. But this new order is starting to take shape,
and it’s first happening in communities that are learning to
no longer live in fear but in trust. We call those communities “churches”.
They are just communities of people trying to grow the Garden again
and to become people who are again the image of God in the world.
They got this way by admitting that the Dark Force has gotten the
best of them, by trusting that it is only what God has done in Jesus
Christ that can put the pieces of their lives back together again,
and by being immersed in water and coming out of it so that they can
show that they identify with the death and resurrection of Jesus.
They are recovering their purpose again as they learn to live lives
of peace, forgiveness and love. They do this not by their own effort
and power, but by God’s grace and by the Presence of God that
lives in them. Furthermore, they believe that it’s all coming
together again, so they just can’t help letting you know the
good news. The universe does have a purpose. Life does have meaning
and a destiny. Your cravings have a home. The One who can satisfy
every desire of your heart calls you back Home again to the place
where you are loved and not accused, to the place where everything
finds its beginning and end, to the Garden where God looks at everything
He made, including You, and He will say to you in His presence, “Wow!
That is good!”
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
August 14, 2005
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