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May 7, 2000
This message was delivered by Pastor Gene Preston at the Service of Word and Sacrament at the Community Church Hong Kong on Sunday, May 7, 2000. The message draws from the assigned texts for the third Sunday of Easter: Acts 3:9-16, l John 3:1-7, and Luke 24:36-43.
One of the interesting things about the text from Acts today is that it comes just after the first reported healing in the New Testament which Jesus personally did not handle. The apostle Peter encounters a crippled beggar laying at the entrance to the temple so he could beg alms. When Peter approaches he begs from him and Peter responds: "I HAVE NO SILVER OR GOLD, BUT WHAT I HAVE I GIVE YOU, IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST OF NAZARETH, STAND UP AND WALK." And he raised up the man who began to jump about. This is the first New Testament healing done in the absence of Jesus, but in the name of Jesus.
Forever after, since this first healing done in the name of Jesus, believers have been taking the name of Jesus to accomplish both miracles and heinous crimes. The same name OF JESUS can be taken in faith to glory or taken in vain to perdition.
Peter apparently was well aware of the danger of misusing or misinterpreting the power of Jesus because in today's text he warns those who stand about gawking with admiration at this first healing by a believer: WHY DO YOU WONDER AT THIS, OR WHY DO YOU STARE AT US, AS THOUGH BY OUR OWN POWER OR PIETY WE HAD MADE HIM WALK? …AND BY FAITH IN HIS NAME, HIS NAME ITSELF HAS MADE THIS MAN STRONG, WHOM YOU SEE AND KNOW AND THE FAITH THAT IS THROUGH JESUS HAS GIVEN HIM THIS PERFECT HEALTH IN THE PRESENCE OF ALL OF YOU.
I read the message of this text as: TAKE THE NAME OF JESUS! BUT TAKE CARE WHEN YOU DO USE THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST!!.
Of the several Resurrection appearances, we heard this morning the most the most material and corporeal one in which Jesus, after having shown his crucifixion wounds to his followers, asks for some breakfast and eats a fish with them. We are informed he did this because his friends believed, at first, they were encountering a ghost. When we misuse the name of Jesus it may be because we are enthralled with the ghost of Jesus, or his spectre, or our perverse imagining about him.
Once these Resurrection appearances ceased, the early church, like the church ever since, no longer had an earthly and historical Jesus present, but only the name of Jesus to motivate them, move them forward, and also to lead them into trouble, good trouble when the witnessing was authentic, bad trouble when the witnessing in the name of Jesus got detoured into perverse channels like persecutions and fanaticism pursued also in the name of Jesus.
Jesus did not leave his followers without some guidelines and standards for experiencing his authentic power. Taking the take authentically has cut across a broad swarth of spirituality. Healing itself is evidence of claiming rightly the name of Jesus.
The little letter of John gives one of the classical Christian standards for taking rightly the name of Jesus. When we act from love and live in loving relationship we are well centered in the presence and power of Jesus. The writer says: SEE WHAT LOVE THE FATHER HAS GIVEN US THAT WE SHOULD BE CALLED CHILDREN OF GOD, AND THAT IS WHAT WE ARE.
But though this guideline of love is powerful and effective, it has not kept Christians from engaging in some barbarous conduct toward non-Christians and toward other Christians and often even in the name of Christian love.
This text in Acts is one of the early indications that belief in Jesus as the Christ was moving away from being based primarily in personal and historical relationship with Jesus and into an appreciation of the power of Jesus as the Risen and Cosmic Christ. The Cosmic Christ is a theological concept implied in much of the thinking of Paul, laid out in the letter to the Hebrews, and dramatised in the final book of Revelations. When we affirm the Cosmic Christ we assert universal and transcendental power into the memory of Jesus, in our celebration of him in reigning in glory in heaven, and as an eternal power or principle which guides history and earthly endeavours toward God's will.
The Cosmic Christ is the image of Jesus Christ you see every time you enter an Orthodox church and crane your eyes toward the dome: there is the Cosmic Christ looking down with all knowing eyes upon all creation.
The Cosmic Christ can be misused: As with the triumphant Christ whose image and cross were splashed upon the banners of the Crusaders. The Cosmic Christ has regularly been the inspiration and impersonal companion of inspired and often fanatical Christians willing to take any risk, go anywhere, endure any challenge or opposition, in order to affirm their stands for truth and justice..
The sense of the Cosmic Christ is implied in much scripture and intellectually it is a wonderfully flexible idea which has allowed the Christian faith to dialogue with with many of the developments, since the earthly life of Jesus, which have come in in intellectual history, science, the arts and the sciences, and spirituality. The Cosmic Christ can deal with Buddha, Islam, and new age spirituality; it can interface with Marx and capitalism. It can stand its ground with evolution, the big bang theory, environmental concerns, and the Jesus Seminar. When we claim THE NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST we can travel almost anywhere and in confidence. But we must take THE NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST with care.
Theologians need to be careful; crusaders need to be careful; militants especially need to take the name of the Cosmic Christ with care. . By careful I mean we need to exercise humility, prudence and perspective when claiming that some healing we are doing, some cause we are undertaking, some point of view we are pushing, some judgement we are pronouncing, is done IN THE NAME OF JESUS, THE COSMIC CHRIST!
The bible faith and our own spiritual experience give us the other primary sense of Jesus Christ and that is the personal Jesus. The personal Jesus complements and often balances the intellectual breadth and reach of the COSMIC CHRIST. The personal Jesus brings the Cosmic Christ back to earth and asking: Do we know Jesus in our own lives and, if we claim so, what difference does he make in our lives?
This is the experience of millions of believers, who have never seen Jesus in the flesh, who never got to see him eat a fish in his resurrection form, or touch his wounds, or walk with him toward Emmaus, and who may not be too concerned with the cosmic implications of belief in Jesus Christ. But these are greatly blessed as Jesus said those who believe in him without having seen him would be blessed.
Both the Personal Jesus like the Cosmic Christ has been more real in some eras than in others. Late medieval mysticism was a profoundly rich time when monks and nuns, some of whom subsequently became saints because of the intimacy of their relationship with a personal Jesus, enjoyed existential, palpable, and often quite sensual personal relationships with the Jesus of their prayer and meditation life. The diaries of a nun like St. Teresa of Avila reveal that she lived with an almost minute by minute sense of the presence of Jesus. Jesus was with her in the kitchen, in the garden, she even took Jesus to bed with her!.
Nineteenth century revivalist Christianity, especially in North American evangelical Protestantism, rose to tremendous heights of enthusiasm and euphoria on the sense that every believer could have an intimate, powerful, personal relationship with Jesus. A thousand gospel songs captured that personal relationship. One will serve as illustration:
The Gospel hymn of a century ago IN THE GARDEN expresses this upsurge in Jesus personalism at that time:
''I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own; and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known." This hits many of the important notes of taking the name of Jesus right into one's private life: it is private, it is intimate; and many would say this Jesus is overly sentimental and that human subjectivism changes the divine Saviour into a kind of daily buddy.
This hymn was written after the rationalist Enlightenment and after the first scientific revolutions but it's faith in and experience of a personal Jesus is not impacted by these profound intellectual trends. The Cosmic Christ might be able to accommodate them; personalistic faith need not even worry about them.
Just as in the mystical experience of Teresa of Avila centuries earlier, the sentimental experience of Jesus is palpable, personal, intimate, and generally withstands any assaults from without.
This personal experience of Jesus is also traditionally powerful in those eras in which the presence of the Holy Spirit is welcomed, invoked and received. This is because the Holy Spirit, when authentically present, is Jesus Christ with us.
Taking the NAME OF JESUS in this tradition of the personal Jesus has also been a powerful witness and shaper of our spiritual and secular history. Many missionaries of the last two centuries were undoubtedly prompted by a cosmic and visionary sense that they were going forth with the Cosmic Christ to evangelise the heathen, defeat the devil, and bring in the Kingdom.
Other equally bold missionaries were motivated by their personal relationship with Jesus as their Lord and Savior always with them to guide and support them. And many, I presume, were prompted to live and dare and die both IN THE NAME OF JESUS and IN THE NAME OF THE COSMIC CHRIST.
But taking the NAME OF JESUS IN this personal sense also needs to be taken with care. Turned-on personalistic Christians have often been just as misguided, intolerant, and judgmental as turned on cosmic thinkers about Christ. We know from the biographies of many Christians, and perhaps from our own stories, that you can have a powerful personal sense of Jesus in your lives, and still sin.
There have been incredibly long periods in the history of Christianity when it would seem that folks were sustained spiritually neither by a profound understanding of the Cosmic Christ, nor by a personalistic experience of Jesus in their lives. I would guess that the Dark Ages which lasted from the collapse of the Christian Roman Empire in the fifth century for at least 600 years until the high Middle Ages was such a time.
What sustained the illiterate serfs of Europe who were too ignorant to entertain any theological concept of the Cosmic Christ and who were probably too exhausted by the drudgery of their sunup to sunrise toiling to have much time to muse in the garden with a personal Jesus? I suppose it was the Church and the church's traditions of symbols in paintings, sculptures and stained glass windows all there to continue the Christian story, and most especially in Christian baptism and Christian burial and most of all, in the sacrament of communion. At the mass even the most ignorant peasant could capture some sense that he and she were in the presence of Jesus Christ because they were witnessing and partaking in a colorful, dramatic and mystical ceremony which Jesus Christ had instituted.
And so we come once again to our Communion though we are not serfs and peasants but educated modern believers. We can approach the sacrament with an elevated appreciation and wonder that the Christ who hosts us today hosts a parallel communion in heaven; we may also approach this table with a personal welcoming of Jesus into our lives because he has promised that when we gather in his name he will be with us.
We claim and cling to both the Cosmic Christ and the personal Jesus. Our several ways of addressing God and Christ in prayer show both approaches. We often address as the Divine as Thee and use its spinoffs of Thou and Thine. This old English still retains a sense of reverence in the presence of the transcendent One. Other times we pray to God and Jesus as You and thereby assume an intimacy with the divine.
Whatever the ideas, attitudes and personal experience of Jesus Christ we have today, we should come to his table with awareness that we are welcomed to his table neither with perfect understanding nor perfect behavior because we come in the promise delivered in today reading from First John's letter: BELOVED, WE ARE GOD'S CHILDREN NOW; WHAT WE WILL BE HAS NOT YET BEEN REVEALED. WHAT WE DO KNOW IS THIS; WHEN HE IS REVEALED WE WILL BE LIKE HIM, FOR WE WILL SEE HIM AS HE IS. AND ALL WHO HAVE THIS HOPE IN HIM PURIFY THEMSELVES, JUST AS HE IS PURE.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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