Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

When God Hangs Tough

by Dave Wilkinson

Philippians 2:5-10 Hebrews 2:10

December 13, 1998

The snow was always dirty on Trent Street. Maybe it was the closeness of Spokane's train yards or maybe it was something that spread from the doorways of the cheap bars, flophouses, and pool halls that lined tile dark sidewalk. Maybe it came from the feet of the bums who shuffled endlessly through the alleys; clutching their paper-bag covered bottles of apple wine. But there was a stain on Trent Street which could not be covered by the whiteness of the snow.

I first met Bob Moore in early December. A few friends and I were at the Full Gospel Rescue Mission at the corner of Trent and Brown -- helping with the service and serving stew to the men who had sat through it. I talked with Bob for a few minutes but he wasn't sober enough to be allowed to stay at the Mission and sleep on one of the mattresses on the floor upstairs. About 10:00, Bob went back to the sidewalk and we got in the car and drove back to our dorms at the college.

The next time I met Bob I wasn't looking for him. Another student and I left the Mission to look for Rex, an Indian off the Colville Reservation who had started drinking and had ended up on Spokane's skid row.

We found Rex and we found Bob -- fighting over a bottle of whiskey in the alley behind the Phoenix Hotel.

After a lot of talking and cajoling, both men came with us to the Rescue Mission. That night, in the small room next to the kitchen, Bob allowed God to begin working in his life. We said "Praise the Lord" together. Bob slept on the mattresses upstairs, and we got in our car and drove back to our room at the college.

I saw Bob fairly often after that. He stayed around the Mission helping control the audience with his fists and staying off the bottle Plans were made for him to take a job with a trucking firm that was owned by one of the businessmen sponsors of the Mission.

Then there came a time that we didn't go back to Trent Street for a couple of weeks because of final exams and social activities at the college. When we drove back to the Mission in early February, we were looking forward to seeing how much progress Bob had made. When we got to the Mission, however, Bob was gone.. The evangelist in charge said that he hadn't been around for about three days so Jon and I went out to look for him.

We looked in Jim's Liquor Store, the Two Duces Bar and the Union Rescue Mission without success. Finally, on a hunch, we looked and we found him in the alley behind the Phoenix Hotel. He was lying on the dirty snow -- almost passed out drunk.

We were able to wake him up, walk him around for awhile, and pour a lot of coffee down his throat. When we were finally able to talk to him we asked him what had happened. He said, "I was lonely. A guy I know offered me a drink from his own bottle and I took it. I didn't need the drink but I needed the friend."

That night we left Bob on the sidewalk because he was too drunk to sleep on the mattresses at the Mission. We got in our car and drove back out to the college wondering what had gone wrong with Bob.

I don't wonder what happened to Bob any more. I know. We were willing to talk to Bob about Jesus and the love of God and give him words of encouragement for his growth, but we weren’t willing to give him what he needed -- the kind of faithful friendship and support which would sacrifice other things to spend time with him, and the kind of love that wouldn't always drive back to the safety and warmth of the college but would stay with him at the Mission or on the sidewalk.

In Jesus we see something that is very different.

Some time ago a student came to me and asked: "How is Jesus meaningful to my life today?"

It was a very sincere question and, let's face it, a very legitimate question. After all, what relevance to today, our high-tech, world wide web, space age, is a sandal-wearing peasant from an obscure village located about eight thousand miles from here? He never wrote a book. He never went to college. He never traveled very far from his home. He never saw a computer. What connection is there between Him and us in the midst of our twentieth-century human predicament?

One reason Jesus is supremely relevant for our lives -- and not just for our life after death -- is because He is the model of what humanity is to be. Jesus' great mission was not to be God, for he was God by nature. His mission was to be human -- to take upon himself the garb of flesh and to show us, in the purest possible way, what it really is to be a human being. No matter what time or place you live in, the very highest demonstration of God’s desire for life is to be found in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

This is why I am teaching the class we just started on "The Life of Jesus." In Jesus we see God Himself put into our own language. God wants us to know Him. He wants us to look and learn and grow. If you aren’t involved in a Sunday morning class I urge you to come take part.

The church has always emphasized the humanity of Jesus as well as the divinity. In its creeds and in its symbols, the church constantly uses words representative of his humanity. In the Apostles' Creed, for example, it says that he "suffered under Pontius Pilate," that "he was crucified, dead, and buried." Only a real person can suffer. Only a person can be crucified. Jesus was not God pretending to be human. When Jesus heard, He heard as we hear. When Jesus saw, He saw as we see. When He took one hand and hit it against the other hand, the sound was exactly the same as when you and I do it. When He was thirsty, He was thirsty as we are thirsty. When taking up a great weight, he fell -- so we, in carrying weights that are too heavy for us, fall. And when He went to the funeral of a friend, He did what we would do in exactly that same place -- Jesus wept.

Do you realize how amazing the Christmas message is?

The Christian idea of God as a loving Father is interwoven into the very fabric of our mind and heart. But it was a new idea when Jesus came.

To the Jew the basic idea of God was that He was holy in the sense of being completely different. In no sense did God share our human experience and was in fact incapable of sharing it just because He was God.

It was even more so with the Greeks. The Stoics, the highest Greek thinkers, said the primary attribute of God was apatheia, by which they meant an essential inability to feel anything at all. They argued that if a person can feel sorrow or joy it means that some other person is able to influence him. If so, that other person must, at least for that moment, be greater than he. No one, therefore, must be able in any sense to affect God for that would make him greater than God; and so God had to be completely beyond all feeling.

The other Greek school was the Epicureans. They held that the gods lived in perfect happiness and blessedness. They lived in what they called the intermundia, the spaces between the worlds; and they were not even aware of the world.

The Jews had their different God; the Stoics, their feelingless gods; the Epicureans, their completely detached gods. Into that world came the Christian revelation with its incredible concept of a God who had deliberately undergone every human experience. He was not a Greek deity floating on a cloud. He was not a pagan god utterly disinterested with the affairs of people. He was not some vague Eastern idea unrelated to the human predicament. Instead, He was a carpenter, who loved flowers and little children, who talked about sowing seed and buying some sparrows for a penny.

He entered as a fetus into the womb of his mother and grew there for nine months. He was born as we are born, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and placed in a manger. At the end of his life, He died and was placed into a tomb. His body began to decay, and were it not for the resurrection, it would have decayed and returned to the inorganic, just as our bodies do. His body was woven of exactly that of which our bodies are woven: the same blood, the same sweat, the same tears.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews declares that this Jesus is "the author of our salvation." The Greek word for author, archegos, is fascinating. It could describe a mountain climber who goes ahead of the others, chipping away footholds, inserting pitons, and extending the rope to her partners. It can mean a founder or originator. It was used of the founder of a city or of a family. It can be used in the sense of source or origin. So a good governor is said to be the archegos of peace and a bad governor the archegos of confusion.

One basic idea clings to the word in all these uses. An archegos is one who begins something in order that others may enter into it. An archegos is one who blazes a trail for others to follow.

The Son of God is our pioneer of salvation. But there is something more. We are told that Jesus is the pioneer of our salvation made "perfect through suffering."'

The writer of Hebrews declares in verse 10 that it was "fitting" that Jesus should experience suffering. The term "fitting" borders on dark humor. It is the language of etiquette and civility, something like Emily Post deeming the placement of silverware to be "fitting".

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1 that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks. The last thing a cultured Greek would call "fitting" is the notion of God being roughed up, sweltering in human pain. There are many possible reactions to the news that the "heir of 'all things," the Son who "sustains all things by his powerful word" was bullied around by a weak and vacillating Roman puppet and sent packing like a criminal up Golgotha to a brutal execution, but "fitting" would not be among them.

Taken in the abstract, the idea of"God" is incompatible with the experience of suffering. Only in the light of the gospel narrative, only in the context of the story of Christmas does the unthinkable become the necessary, the unimaginable become that which is "fitting," the incredible become the indispensable, and the foolishness of the incarnate Son, crucified, dead, and buried, become the very wisdom of God.

Do you want to see the character and power of God? Look at the cosmos. Let your mind go 600 trillion miles to the edge of our galaxy and visit its neighboring galaxy, the first of some hundred thousand million more "neighbors." Then you will see something of Jesus "for whom and through whom everything exists." Do you want to see even more of God's character and power? Then look to the manger and the cross, for in Jesus you have an even greater display of his power and moral character.

Hebrews says that what God did through his Son fits with His eternal power. "It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering"

But this raises a question. How could Jesus, the eternal Son of God who has always existed in perfection, who "is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being," be made perfect? How do you make the perfect more perfect?

Hebrews 4:15 declares Jesus to have been totally "without sin," so there is no idea here of an impure Jesus being morally perfected. Rather, the idea is that Jesus was made "fit" vocationally and functionally, not morally.

It is like a machinist fabricating a part -- fashioning it to fit perfectly and to perform its function. When the metal is shaped just right and the edges smoothed just so, the machinist can exclaim, "Perfect!" What is meant is the part not only fits just right, it will also perform its job to specifications.

Hebrews says that it was through suffering that Jesus was shaped and fashioned to perform his task in the drama of redemption. His purpose was to serve as the redeemer, the one who comes from God and rescues humanity from death. He is the mediator, the one who makes peace between a defiant humanity and God.

So the incarnate Christ underwent a series of perfections. Hebrews 5:8-9 tells us, "Although He was a Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him." Jesus was, of course, already obedient or Christmas would not have happened. But Jesus became perfect in experiencing obedience in human flesh -- flesh from which he swept drops of blood during His agony in the garden of Gesthamane when he prayed, "If it is possible let this cup pass away from me -- nevertheless not my will but your will be done."

What does Christmas say to us? What does it mean that Jesus experienced life as we experience it? It means that he knows what it means for us to to us.

Hebrews 4:15-16 says: "We have not a high priest who is such that he cannot feel with us in our weaknesses; but one who has gone through every temptation, just in the same way as we have, and who is without sin. Let us then confidently approach His throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help as need demands."

John Foster in one of his books tells how he came into his home in this country one day in the 1930's to find his daughter in tears before the radio set. He asked her why and found that the news bulletin had contained the sentence--"Japanese tanks entered Canton today." Most people would hear that with at the most a faint feeling of regret. Statesmen may have heard it with grim foreboding; but to most people it did not make so very much difference. Why then was John Foster's daughter in tears? Because she had been born in Canton. To her Canton meant a home, a nurse, a school, friends. The difference was that she had been there. When you have been there it makes all the difference. And there is no part of human experience of which God cannot say: "I have been there." When we have a sad story to tell, when life has drenched us with tears, we do not go to a God who is incapable of understanding what has happened; we go to a God who has been there

If you have two pianos in the same room and a note is struck on one, the same note will gently respond on the other, though not touched by another's hand. This is called "sympathetic resonance:'

In the same way, Christ's instrument was just like ours in every way. And Hebrews declares that He took that instrument, that body, to Heaven with him. It is his priestly body. And when a chord is struck today in the weakness of our human instrument, it resonates in His! There is no note of human experience that does not play on Christ's exalted human instrument. "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses."

Jesus, our high priest, has an unequaled capacity for sympathy. It goes far beyond the intellectual, because it is truly experiential. Jesus does not just imagine how we feel -- he feels it! Whatever we may be going through, there is not a note we can play that does not evoke a "sympathetic resonance" in Jesus. He mastered the instrument while he was here on earth, and he wears it in Heaven. The word for "sympathize" means "to share the feeling of another -- to sympathize through common experience. The most sensitive person who ever lived feels with us.

The skid row on Trent Street is gone now. It long ago was bulldozed and covered over by the shiny chrome and glass of the Spokane World's fair. Bob Moore is gone too. We would not stay with him but, by the grace of God, there was one who would. As far as I know, Bob now lives in Arizona, has been reunited with the wife that none of us knew he had, holds down a regular job and is regular in his worship of God. God was able to work through someone who was willing to be there.

Our trouble in Spokane was that we were willing to give words encouragement to Bob but we weren’t willing to really commit ourselves to him in an expensive, time-consuming way. That is not the way of Jesus. The commitment he makes to us is forever and is complete. And he has promised, "I will never fail you or forsake you."