In These Last Days Hebrews 12: 1-4

Transcription

1 In These Last Days Hebrews 12: 1-4 First Presbyterian Church August 9, AD 2015 Baton Rouge, Louisiana Gerrit Scott Dawson With the start of school this week, I thought perhaps we could all show some solidarity with our students and teachers who had to go back to class. By taking a pop quiz! Everybody loves a test, right? The good news is that this is a True/False test. You only have to pick one of two answers and you re guaranteed a 50% chance of success. The better news is that there are only five questions. And the best news about this quiz is that you only have to answer in your mind. No grades! The topic is spiritual beliefs. Ready? OK, here goes. True or false: 1) There is a creator who made the world and looks after things. 2) The creator s purpose for your life is that you be fulfilled and happy. 3) This creator wants people to be good and just, kind and nice to others. 4) You only need to ask for the creator s help when you really need it, and if you do you will find him to be sympathetic to your situation. 5) Good people get to go to heaven. So how d you do? Mostly true answers I d predict. These statements sound very reasonable, very nice, and very safe. There s a creator who wants you to be good and kind to others. He wants you to have a good life, and mostly he leaves you on your own to work it out, but if you need a little extra boost, you can ask him. And of course unless you re really bad, the creator wants you with him in heaven. Sweet. So have you lived according to those five statements? Did that actually prove to be enough? I ve paraphrased these five statements from a landmark study done on the spiritual lives of American teenagers. Researcher Christian Smith led the team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who interviewed more than 3000 teenagers and came up with these five common beliefs among the vast majority of them. The teenagers interviewed are now in their mid to late twenties. I wonder how much their views have solidified or changed over the last ten years. Dr. Smith believes that these views actually express the functional spirituality of most Americans in every age group. He called our national religion Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. i As you recall, Deism is the belief that there is a creator but that he leaves the world pretty much on its own. We add the 1

2 therapeutic part because the creator we prefer does make himself accessible when we need some help making life work out to fulfill our dreams and realize our desires. Along the way, there are certain codes to which we need to adhere. That s the moralistic part. And we are more moralistic as a culture than we ve ever been. The blame and shame game runs at full throttle. We re just moralistic about different things these days. Now, I m going to resist going on a rant about this because, after all, a primary value is being nice. It s a serious offense not to be nice. Unless people hunt lions or don t recycle. You can say anything you want about them. Now these five statements that got gathered up as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are a form of mythology. I m defining mythology as stories that are our best, most interesting guess at what matters in life. Mythology is our guess at describing what s in the unseen realm of spiritual things, the place where God or the gods dwell. Mythology includes the stories we make up to live by in a world of struggle and death. This is how I d like God to be. A big guy who wants me to be happy, and leaves me alone until I need him while I m trying to fulfill my potential as I make my way in the world, being nice and accepting of everyone. In this popular mythology, notice that I make the choices about the stories I like and the beliefs I want. But here s the question: does Moralistic Therapeutic Deism work? Is it true? Am I free to make my own choices about how I want God to be? Because if I have that freedom, then some scary things have to be true about reality. We re on our own. We make up the stories to help us. But the stories didn t come from any place but our minds, or from the imaginations of people we admire. There s no one actually up there speaking something real down to us. And so doesn t that make my happiness, my staying alive, my fulfillment, my worth all up to me? Doesn t that mean, at the very least, that I have pressure to make the exact right choices in order to find maximum fulfillment? And what if I don t have enough money or power to enact my choices? Or what if someone else with competing ideas has more power? What if this God I make up doesn t actually help me get what I think I want? What if he doesn t keep me healthy, pain free and engaged in my work? What if I just get bored with it all? Musician Dave Matthews touches a nerve in our culture with his song Grey Street. Watch a YouTube of this song being performed and you see electricity shoot through the audience. They come to their feet. The song is about a girl who feels trapped in her life. She dreams herself a thousand times around the world but can t get out of where she is. The refrain says, There s an emptiness inside 2

3 her/and she d do anything to fill it in/but all the colors mix together/to grey, and it breaks her heart. The girl in the song prays, but doesn t get an answer. She s pretty sure there s no God listening but she keeps hoping. She just can t shake the lonely emptiness. She s stuck and alone. When the song reaches its sad, dramatic climax, the audience roars out the lyrics they know by heart: She feels like kicking out all the windows/and setting fire to this lonely life./she could change everything about her/using colors bold and bright.but all the colors mix together to grey, and it breaks her heart. The music thunders, even as the heart of this girl shrivels. The music breaks out where she longs to go but cannot, and for the listeners it s a catharsis. For the audience, and for me, Grey Street is a spiritual experience. The song touches a pain in the heart of us. Our national mythology fails us. I can t get the god who exists solely to fulfill me to answer when I call. I can t get out of this depression about life and the world. Sometimes I want to set it all on fire, but I m trapped inside it, and all the bright colors promised to me run to dirty grey. And it breaks our hearts. The god of our culture does not deliver. Suiting myself doesn t satisfy. The truth is, a lot of times, I don t even want to be nice! More questions. What if I m sick of hearing myself talk? What if I want to break out of the continuous loop of thoughts about myself that run in my head? What if the bold declaration that we are free and on our own leaves me just feeling naked and shivering under a black sky? What if the self-absorption of this culture just bores me to tears? A runner bursts into the room. He s a courier with an urgent message. It can t be delivered by or text. It has to be said out loud in person. News breaking in from the world beyond. News from beyond ourselves. Not mythology. But revelation. Long ago, in many times and in many ways, God spoke. God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. The Son of God has entered our world as the visible speech of the one true God. This God has appointed this Son to be the heir of all things. It s all for him. In fact, the one true God created the world in partnership with his Son. So the Son of God in our midst shines with his Father s glory. He is the exact imprint of the nature of the real God. He is the one upholding and running the universe. When he came to us, he had a work to do on our behalf. His work was a catharsis. A cleansing. He had to take up the poignancy and the pain, the dysfunction and the rage of our world as his own. He had to take up the self-curved focus of our lives; he had to take the offensive nature of our lives as his own. He purified humanity. Beyond the pretending to be nice, he made the heart right with God again. And 3

4 now he reigns on the throne at his Father s side. By him, all people may be saved. By him, all people shall be judged. His name is Christ Jesus, and he is the Lord of heaven and earth. In four verses, the introduction to Hebrews blows apart our national religion. Simply shreds it. The book speaks in words that awaken hope. The books speaks in words we can scarcely grasp. They stagger us with their confidence: this is the way God is, and not another way. All the myriad choices of mythology are shrunk to one narrow passage: through this way alone lie the wide open pastures of God s mercy and love. Everything is a paradox. On the one hand, I hate this. On the other I crave it. The words offend our self-sovereignty. And yet, they thrill our lonely hearts with the hope of relationship. The lie is put to my fantasies that there could be a god who simply exists to serve my ambitions and dreams. And yet, the hope is given that my life can be about something much more significant. The lie is put to my fantasy that whatever I do sincerely has to be ok. And yet. The hope is given that I can find forgiveness for what I have done wrong. The lie is put to my offense at the word sin even as hope is given that, should I admit sin, I can partake of the purification Jesus made. So let s re-write the five statements of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to be about the Triune God. Let s look at life in terms of the God who has spoken through his Son Jesus Christ. 1) The world was created out of the love between the Father and the Son. So, the relationship between God the Father and God the Son is the heart of who God is. 2) The purpose of my life is to participate in the love between the Father and the Son. 3) So God wants me to be loving and just toward others to reflect who he is. 4) You have to live in constant relationship to God. This God is the point of everything, so he does not exist first to serve me in my ambitions, but to shape me to be like himself. Hence, he only answers us in need when have yielded our lives to him and are in a relationship. 5) Heaven is for participators in the love of the Father and the Son as it includes all who are joined to him, so you have to be joined to the Son of God to get there. 4

5 When we get trapped in making up a god who exists mainly to assist us in living our dreams and being nice to people, we can reach a point of desperation. Like we want to blow up our routines. Shatter the shiny, shallow surface of the good lives we lead. We want to set it all on our fire and we don t even know why. When we enter a relationship with the God who has spoken to us through his Son, though, he sets our lives on fire. His fire, however, doesn t destroy us. Rather, he burns up our fantasies of self-determination. He incinerates the idols of ourselves. And then places the flame of his love inside our hearts. He lights us with a purpose bigger than ourselves. He shines through us. We so often fear that if there is more of God in our lives, there will be less of us. We can think that Christians are people whose lives get shrunk by the narrow constraints of a tight definition of God and strict rules about behavior. We hold on tight to our will and way. But actually the exact opposite is true. The life that revolves around a great big self-centered ego is actually a tiny shriveled life. Keeping all my options open about God and life actually keeps me from going anywhere. The enthroned I of my desire to stay in control makes me a spiritual pygmy. There s so much more to the universe than all the tired stories with me as the lead character. There s so much more to the real God than the designer gods I imagine to exist for my enhancement. The real flowering of the intellect occurs when someone gets captivated by the one who upholds all things by the word of his power. Imagination ignites when we fall under the power of the God who speaks to us by his Son, through whom he created the earth. Fulfillment deepens as we live in the way of Jesus who is the exact imprint of his Father s nature, the very likeness of God. We step out of mythology, the ideas and stories we make up and pick according to our tastes. We step into revelation, taking the risk that the voice we hear in Scripture is the voice of God. We gaze upon the Jesus depicted there and recognize that this man is the creator in flesh. This man is the heir of all things who walked among us. This man upholds the universe even now by his power. It is only with him that we have to do. It is only to him that we are accountable. It is only before him and by him that we will be judged. It is only in him that we can be saved. Saved from our sins. Saved from our mythology. Saved from ourselves. This is the heart of real life, and his life courses through us as we yield our wills to his, as we loose our tongues in praise to him, and we open our hands to love others in his name. In these last days, God has cracked through all the 5

6 barriers between us. He has spoken to us by his Son. Jesus who made atonement for our sins. Jesus who reigns at the right hand of the Majesty on high. i 6