Marion M. Edwards - Sermon Untitled (January 2, 2000)
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Transcript
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- | The gospel lesson is from John 1:10-18. | 0:06 |
"He was in the world, | 0:12 | |
"and the world came into being through Him, | 0:14 | |
"yet the world did not know Him. | 0:17 | |
"He came to what was His own, | 0:21 | |
"and His own people did not accept Him, | 0:23 | |
"but to all who received Him, who believed in His name, | 0:26 | |
"He gave power to become children of God, | 0:30 | |
"who are born not of blood or of the will of the flesh | 0:34 | |
"or of the will of man, but of God. | 0:38 | |
"And the word became flesh, and lived among us. | 0:44 | |
"And we have seen His glory, | 0:47 | |
"the glory as of a father's only son, | 0:49 | |
"full of grace and truth. | 0:52 | |
"John testified to Him and cried out, | 0:55 | |
"'This was He of whom I said, | 0:57 | |
"He who comes after me ranks ahead of me, | 1:00 | |
"because He was before me.' | 1:03 | |
"From His fullness, | 1:06 | |
"we have all received grace upon grace. | 1:06 | |
"The law indeed was given through Moses, | 1:11 | |
"grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. | 1:14 | |
"No one has ever seen God, it is God, the only Son, | 1:19 | |
"who is close to the Father's heart who has made Him known." | 1:24 | |
This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God. | 1:29 | |
- | Greetings to you on this significant Lord's day | 1:54 |
at this hinge point in history, | 1:58 | |
welcome to this place of worship. | 2:02 | |
The scriptures that we have heard from the New Testament | 2:08 | |
focus our attention on this significant day | 2:14 | |
on a theological presentation of who Jesus Christ is. | 2:18 | |
Perhaps it is in John 3:16 | 2:26 | |
that these words from John | 2:29 | |
and Ephesians | 2:33 | |
come into clear focus. | 2:36 | |
For God so loved the world | 2:40 | |
that He gave His only Son | 2:44 | |
so that everyone who believes in Him | 2:47 | |
may not perish but have life eternal. | 2:51 | |
Let us pray. | 2:57 | |
Set us afire, O God, with new understanding | 3:00 | |
of who Jesus Christ is, | 3:05 | |
and His place in our history | 3:09 | |
at this new millennium time. | 3:14 | |
May the words of the scripture | 3:19 | |
become today the word of God | 3:23 | |
in our lives, in our human journey, amen. | 3:27 | |
John Killinger, a noted preacher, | 3:35 | |
tells the story of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt | 3:40 | |
and his longtime friend and confidante Bernard Baruch, | 3:46 | |
talking late into a winter night | 3:52 | |
in the Oval Office of the White House. | 3:56 | |
World War II was raging around most of the globe. | 4:00 | |
Their responsibilities that night were momentous, | 4:06 | |
the decisions that they were making would affect the lives | 4:10 | |
of countless people around the Earth. | 4:15 | |
When their conversation, their business, | 4:21 | |
was finally concluded, | 4:23 | |
President Roosevelt suggested to his friend | 4:26 | |
that they go out into the rose garden | 4:30 | |
and look at the stars before going to bed. | 4:33 | |
They went out and they looked up | 4:38 | |
for what seemed like several long minutes. | 4:41 | |
In silence together, they peered into the sky | 4:45 | |
at the thousands of stars, | 4:51 | |
beaming so brightly on that cold winter night. | 4:54 | |
Then the president turned to his friend and said, | 5:01 | |
"All right, | 5:08 | |
I think we are now small enough | 5:10 | |
"to go in and go to sleep. | 5:15 | |
"I think we are now small enough | 5:19 | |
"to go in and go to sleep." | 5:23 | |
In this year of our Lord, | 5:28 | |
January 2, 2000, | 5:32 | |
oh, how we need in our time | 5:36 | |
to sense the wonder, the reverence, | 5:41 | |
the mystery, the humility, | 5:46 | |
that President Roosevelt shared that night, | 5:49 | |
especially do we need it as we launch | 5:54 | |
into this new year, this new century, | 5:58 | |
this new millennium. | 6:02 | |
However, many of us are simply | 6:05 | |
not given to star watching, are we? | 6:09 | |
We take ourselves far too seriously to watch stars | 6:13 | |
and to feel our smallness. | 6:19 | |
We are prone instead to watch TV, | 6:22 | |
the bowl games, the upcoming ACC basketball, | 6:27 | |
the computer as we surf the net, | 6:32 | |
the stock markets, especially NASDAQ, | 6:36 | |
the want ads, the post Christmas sales, | 6:40 | |
we live among so much wonderful technology | 6:46 | |
that we have created, | 6:50 | |
that we tend to take our own little creations so seriously | 6:52 | |
that we are lulled into a fantasy | 6:58 | |
of assuming that we are the creator | 7:01 | |
instead of the creature. | 7:05 | |
And many of us live with a kind of pre-Copernicus mentality | 7:08 | |
as we see the world and all of it we are doing | 7:13 | |
and all that we have created | 7:16 | |
as the center of all reality and all truth. | 7:18 | |
There is indeed for many of us | 7:24 | |
little time for star watching and for feeling our smallness. | 7:27 | |
In fact, star watching in the metropolitan areas | 7:34 | |
of this whole Earth, like the triangle, | 7:39 | |
has been made very difficult by our creations. | 7:42 | |
The defused light of our cities | 7:48 | |
make it hard to see the stars. | 7:51 | |
The sky clutter that we have created and put aloft | 7:54 | |
makes it hard to see the stars. | 7:58 | |
Even when we can see the sky clearly, | 8:03 | |
we tend to mistake moving airplanes and satellites | 8:06 | |
and helicopters and signal towers | 8:11 | |
for heavenly bodies. | 8:14 | |
I grew up in a small southeast Georgia town | 8:18 | |
where the tallest building was two stories, | 8:21 | |
and I went many a night with my father | 8:25 | |
on cold winter nights to look at the stars. | 8:27 | |
It became sort of a hobby, | 8:32 | |
a hobby that I like to pursue even today, | 8:33 | |
but I confess that when I step outside | 8:35 | |
on the deck of my home in Raleigh, | 8:38 | |
that I have a hard time on some nights | 8:42 | |
distinguishing between the flight pattern | 8:44 | |
of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport | 8:46 | |
and helicopters and all other moving things | 8:50 | |
to see the stars. | 8:56 | |
But I confess to you | 8:57 | |
that at this hinge point in our history, | 9:01 | |
I believe a lot of us need to do some star watching | 9:05 | |
in order to get the perspective on this new year, | 9:09 | |
this new century, this new millennium. | 9:12 | |
After all, the Bible tells us very clearly | 9:16 | |
that God approved the star watching of the wise men. | 9:20 | |
Their sense of wonder and mystery | 9:25 | |
that led them to follow a star | 9:27 | |
in fact was the source for God revealing | 9:31 | |
the greatest mystery of human history, | 9:35 | |
it was in the star that finally came to stand | 9:37 | |
over Bethlehem's manger | 9:41 | |
that we are finally told | 9:46 | |
who we are and whose we are, | 9:49 | |
that we are not the creator, | 9:52 | |
we are, in fact, creatures | 9:56 | |
in need of the creator. | 9:59 | |
So may I suggest to you on this first Sunday of a new era, | 10:05 | |
that as we journey into the new millennium, | 10:12 | |
perhaps we too would be wise | 10:14 | |
if we stopped off with the wise men | 10:19 | |
for a visit at Bethlehem's manger | 10:23 | |
to see that thing which God has done. | 10:27 | |
Our New Testament lectionary scriptures | 10:31 | |
describe it in beautiful theological language, | 10:33 | |
but it is left to John 3:16 | 10:38 | |
to put it in a language | 10:40 | |
that we can touch and feel and see with great clarity, | 10:42 | |
for God so loved the world | 10:46 | |
that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him | 10:50 | |
may not perish but have eternal life. | 10:54 | |
It is a beautiful thing | 10:59 | |
that we see in this verse of scripture. | 11:00 | |
We are told something quite phenomenal in this passage, | 11:05 | |
where the star stood over Bethlehem, | 11:10 | |
we are told that God has performed heart surgery | 11:14 | |
on the human condition, | 11:20 | |
and He has inserted a divine pacemaker | 11:23 | |
into the human reality. | 11:27 | |
The pacemaker is Jesus Christ. | 11:31 | |
He has a heartbeat of love, | 11:34 | |
and He comes announcing to all the world | 11:37 | |
that at the heart of the universe | 11:44 | |
is not something, but someone, | 11:47 | |
and His name is love. | 11:51 | |
If we can come to grapple with that love, | 11:54 | |
we can enter the new millennium with hope | 11:57 | |
and confidence and joy and peace. | 12:00 | |
But what kind of love is this? | 12:04 | |
How can we describe it in human categories | 12:08 | |
that are so limited? | 12:12 | |
To be loved like this implies a height and a depth | 12:14 | |
and a width of love beyond our human experience. | 12:18 | |
I dare not, you dare not today | 12:24 | |
confuse this divine love | 12:26 | |
with the counterfeit love that some of us | 12:30 | |
have been trafficking in that claims so much | 12:32 | |
and delivers so little. | 12:36 | |
It is this counterfeit love | 12:39 | |
that many of us have been living with | 12:42 | |
that has left us at this moment in history empty, | 12:45 | |
fearful, some of us hopeless, | 12:51 | |
some of us looking into the darkness | 12:55 | |
of an unknown era apprehensive and frightened. | 12:57 | |
Maybe it's a good time to examine this love of God | 13:03 | |
described in Ephesians and in John's gospel, | 13:07 | |
how dare we grasp it? | 13:11 | |
It's so overwhelming, | 13:14 | |
how dare we take it with us into the 21st century? | 13:17 | |
I have a simple sermon outline that is not mine, | 13:24 | |
it belongs to the 20th century period | 13:28 | |
of history and preaching. | 13:32 | |
It came from a very insignificant man | 13:34 | |
as the way we measure men, | 13:38 | |
his name was Gance Little, | 13:40 | |
and he wrote it as a wonderful commentary on John 3:16, | 13:43 | |
he was a mailman. | 13:47 | |
He had delivered so many Christmas cards | 13:49 | |
til finally he tried to reduce it down to one sentence, | 13:52 | |
and in so doing, | 13:56 | |
he reduced it down to a commentary on John 3:16. | 13:57 | |
And he wrote, | 14:02 | |
"God's love is the kind of love that will not let us go. | 14:03 | |
"It is the kind of love that will not let us down. | 14:10 | |
"It is the kind of love that will not let us off." | 14:15 | |
I think if we can grasp that simple outline | 14:19 | |
and take it into our heart and our soul and our mind, | 14:24 | |
it might be that which we need to journey | 14:28 | |
hopefully into a new millennium. | 14:31 | |
It's a love, he suggested, that will not let us go. | 14:34 | |
Well, turn in our Methodist hymnal | 14:40 | |
and find George Matheson's great hymn, | 14:42 | |
and you discover that Matheson was already groping | 14:44 | |
with that love, "O love that will not let me go, | 14:48 | |
"I rest my weary soul in thee, | 14:52 | |
"I give thee back the life I owe, | 14:55 | |
"that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be." | 14:58 | |
This is God's love. | 15:04 | |
He is a God who pursues us, | 15:08 | |
who tenaciously searches and holds onto us, | 15:11 | |
and who, despite all the rages of history, | 15:16 | |
and personal tragedy that might be in your life, | 15:20 | |
He will never let us go. | 15:23 | |
So what does it mean to be loved | 15:26 | |
by a God like this? | 15:29 | |
It means that He is not a spectator God, | 15:32 | |
He is not just sitting back, | 15:36 | |
watching us play out the little games of life, | 15:38 | |
He is not what Aristotle suggested | 15:42 | |
and called a moveless mover | 15:44 | |
that fed the deist philosophy of the 18th century. | 15:47 | |
God is more than a benign spectator | 15:50 | |
according to John 3:16. | 15:54 | |
Our God is instead what the poet Francis Thompson | 15:58 | |
called the hound of heaven, | 16:02 | |
relentlessly seeking us and wooing us, | 16:05 | |
searching for us, never letting us go. | 16:08 | |
He is the God of the 139th Psalm | 16:12 | |
who plunges into the uttermost parts of the sea | 16:15 | |
to rescue us. | 16:19 | |
Who, when we make our bed in hell, | 16:21 | |
descends even there according to the apostle's creed, | 16:24 | |
searching for us, and never letting us go. | 16:27 | |
His love constantly pursues us, | 16:31 | |
He is one who ever searches for us. | 16:34 | |
John Wesley, the theological foreparent | 16:37 | |
of people called Methodists, | 16:40 | |
had a wonderful part of his theological structure, | 16:42 | |
he called it God's prevenient grace, | 16:46 | |
a grace that searches for us | 16:50 | |
and knocks on our heart's door, | 16:53 | |
and will never quit searching, yearning, and hoping | 16:55 | |
that one day we will say yes to that love. | 17:01 | |
I love the story about the little daughter | 17:06 | |
who was told by her father | 17:10 | |
when she had done something exceptionally good, | 17:12 | |
he said to her, "I love you when you are good." | 17:15 | |
And it was the child who responded | 17:19 | |
with a godlike understanding, | 17:21 | |
"I love you all the time, Daddy." | 17:23 | |
And so it is with God's love, | 17:27 | |
He never stops loving us, | 17:29 | |
He never lets us go. | 17:32 | |
Well, that's what it means to be loved by a God like that. | 17:36 | |
I love you all the time, | 17:42 | |
and I will never let you go. | 17:45 | |
Let's go to point two of this simple sermon outline, | 17:48 | |
it's a love also that will not let us down. | 17:52 | |
Psychologists tell us that one of the greatest fears | 17:58 | |
that we live with all of our lives, | 18:00 | |
maybe even from time in our mother's womb, | 18:04 | |
is the fear of being let down, | 18:08 | |
of falling, of jumping into the hands of someone | 18:11 | |
that is not there, who will not catch us. | 18:15 | |
We are fearful that somebody will leave us, | 18:19 | |
somebody will die. | 18:22 | |
We are fearful of being abandoned, | 18:24 | |
of being rejected, of being humiliated, | 18:26 | |
of being excluded, of being shut out, | 18:29 | |
of being prejudiced against. | 18:32 | |
But God's love promises us | 18:35 | |
that He will never do that to you and me, | 18:39 | |
He will never leave us desolate, | 18:42 | |
He will never abandon us, He will never desert us. | 18:44 | |
Even when we let ourselves down, | 18:48 | |
and even when others let us down, | 18:51 | |
it is God's love that will never let us down. | 18:53 | |
Someone has observed that it would be great | 18:58 | |
if every human being had a tape in his or her brain | 19:02 | |
that we could switch on when we feel | 19:07 | |
that we are being let down, | 19:11 | |
and it would simply play love lifted me, | 19:13 | |
love lifted me, | 19:17 | |
when nothing else could help, | 19:20 | |
love lifted me. | 19:23 | |
That's what John 3:16 is telling us. | 19:26 | |
I love the story about Duke Ellington | 19:29 | |
when he was being interviewed, the great jazz man, | 19:31 | |
he said in the interview, | 19:35 | |
"When I was a little boy, | 19:37 | |
"I was loved so much and held so much | 19:39 | |
"that I don't think my feet hit the ground | 19:43 | |
"until I was seven years old." | 19:46 | |
Well, I wanna tell you today as we enter a new era, | 19:50 | |
that's who we are, | 19:53 | |
we are loved by a God | 19:55 | |
that will never let us down. | 19:58 | |
And we are in the arms of that great and wise God, | 20:01 | |
and He holds us and sustains us, | 20:04 | |
but listen, there's more in this scripture, | 20:07 | |
according to Gance Little. | 20:10 | |
If you listen to John 3:16, | 20:13 | |
you hear God saying something else about His love, | 20:15 | |
it's a love that will not let us off. | 20:19 | |
He will not let us off. | 20:24 | |
God so loved, what does it say? | 20:28 | |
The world, the world, | 20:32 | |
not just you and me. | 20:34 | |
I was told in earlier years | 20:38 | |
that we could translate that scripture | 20:39 | |
God so loved Marian Edwards, | 20:41 | |
well, we can do that, | 20:43 | |
but we'd better quickly add and the world, | 20:44 | |
because that's what God came to save. | 20:48 | |
We don't have just a private religion, | 20:52 | |
a personal religion, | 20:54 | |
a religion that makes us feel good | 20:56 | |
and we can satisfy by going to worship on Sunday | 20:57 | |
and then going home and living however we want | 21:00 | |
the rest of the week, | 21:04 | |
passing by people going to hell in a hand basket, | 21:05 | |
with little vision and compassion | 21:09 | |
for a society that yearns for this love. | 21:10 | |
God won't let us off with just a private faith, | 21:14 | |
so it was that John Wesley said | 21:18 | |
that there is personal faith and social faith, | 21:21 | |
and until they are both linked together, | 21:25 | |
neither is real faith. | 21:27 | |
God will not let us off with pious, pious, empty religion. | 21:31 | |
He loved the world, He has a plan for the world, | 21:38 | |
and He calls you and me to be a part | 21:41 | |
of that redeeming, transforming plan, | 21:44 | |
such a love given to us must be shared, | 21:46 | |
it propels us out into a society | 21:50 | |
that needs to hear a word of hope. | 21:53 | |
God so loved the world that He made you and me | 21:56 | |
a part of that plan, | 22:00 | |
and He will not let us off in our mediocrity | 22:01 | |
and our emptiness and our littleness, | 22:06 | |
we see the world just through | 22:08 | |
our own personal, selfish eyes. | 22:10 | |
If God so loved the world, | 22:14 | |
He calls you and me to reach that world. | 22:17 | |
Maybe we need to go back to the wise men | 22:20 | |
and note something very significantly | 22:22 | |
that happened to them. | 22:24 | |
When they had come to that place | 22:25 | |
where they saw Bethlehem's love, | 22:27 | |
the scripture tells us they went back another way. | 22:30 | |
They went back another way. | 22:34 | |
That love propelled them out, | 22:37 | |
never to be like they were before, | 22:40 | |
but to send them out with a hope for a new world. | 22:43 | |
We've experienced some of that in eastern North Carolina | 22:48 | |
in this fall season. | 22:51 | |
My wife Linda and I have journeyed | 22:54 | |
into almost every place where that flood hit | 22:57 | |
and hurt and destroyed. | 23:00 | |
We have seen the eyes of those who were homeless. | 23:03 | |
At the same time, we've seen the marvelous response | 23:08 | |
of North Carolina people and folks around the whole nation | 23:12 | |
who have decided that they can't go back the same way. | 23:17 | |
The most haunting line of that experience | 23:22 | |
was a young pastor that stood | 23:25 | |
when we gathered in his church, | 23:27 | |
and he said, "We've discovered something, | 23:31 | |
"we've discovered that the poor | 23:34 | |
"and the at risk children and the destitute | 23:38 | |
"were already there before the flood, | 23:42 | |
"and we never saw it. | 23:46 | |
"We were riding down our safe roads | 23:49 | |
"and into our luxurious homes and our safe harbors, | 23:52 | |
"and we were not seeing the world as God sees it." | 23:57 | |
So it is that we cannot experience this love | 24:03 | |
and go into a new millennium | 24:07 | |
going back the same way. | 24:11 | |
God calls us, a love that will not let us off, | 24:15 | |
and if we have that love, | 24:21 | |
and if we have the love that will not let us go | 24:24 | |
and not let us down, | 24:26 | |
we have the equipment, the resources, | 24:28 | |
a theology of faith that can go with us | 24:31 | |
into a new millennium. | 24:36 | |
May I paraphrase the point? | 24:39 | |
And I said to the person who stood at the gate | 24:42 | |
of the new millennium, "Give me a light, | 24:46 | |
"that I may tread safely into the unknown." | 24:49 | |
And he replied, "Go out into the darkness, | 24:53 | |
"and put your hand in the hand of God. | 24:58 | |
"That shall be unto you better than a light, | 25:02 | |
"and safer than a known way." | 25:06 | |
So I went forth, and finding the hand of God, | 25:09 | |
trod gladly into the darkness, | 25:14 | |
and He led me toward the hills | 25:17 | |
and the breaking of day in the new millennium. | 25:21 | |
So heart be still, | 25:26 | |
what need our life, our little life, to fear, | 25:30 | |
if God hath comprehension | 25:34 | |
in the new millennium? | 25:39 | |
In the name of the Father, | 25:42 | |
and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. | 25:45 | |
(organ music) | 25:53 |