Liar, Lunatic or Lord?

Philippians 2:1-11

July 19, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC

When the kids were little, there were several different games we would play together, probably like most of you have done with your kids and grandkids. We had a big backyard in those days, so if the weather was nice, we would go out and play kickball. Somehow I was always the pitcher and was never able to get either one of them “out.” And if the weather wasn’t so nice, we would play “hide and seek” in our house, except Rachel would usually tell me, “I’m going to go hide in the upstairs bedroom, then you come and find me.” Even so, I seemed to have a hard time finding her! And then there was that perennial favorite that we didn’t so much play with the kids as we watched them play with their friends—you know the game, “Follow the Leader.” Whatever the leader does and wherever the leader goes, that’s what everyone in the line is supposed to do. A similar game kids love to play is “Simon Says,” and no one ever stops to ask who Simon is and why what he says is so important!

We may (try to) make jokes about Simon, but in the world we find ourselves in, it’s important to ask who we are following and who we are listening to. Whose instructions are guiding our lives? That’s a big part of the reason we’re taking these weeks at the beginning of a new year to look at this historic statement of faith known as the Apostle’s Creed. We’re calling this series “The Big C: Core Beliefs to Change a Community,” because I believe more than ever, if we’re going to be Christian disciples who transform the world, we need to be certain we know what we believe. So last week we began by looking at what it means and why it matters that we believe in God, the Father Almighty. In many ways, the story of the Bible is the story of God creating, pursuing and redeeming people who seem bent on keeping our distance. In the Old Testament, God gave the people laws and rules and structure for their lives, with a promise that if they walked with him and kept his commands, they would be his people. All along, though, God was preparing something better. He was going to send someone who would perfectly keep the laws and rules and commands and who would, in the end, give his life for our sake. This belief is the dividing line between Christianity and what passes for many as “civil religion” today. Last Sunday, I reminded you of the fact that the Gallup Poll has, since 1944, found pretty consistently that 89% of Americans say they believe in God. In all twelve-step recovery groups, you’re expected to put your faith in a “higher power.” Our politicians routinely close their speeches by saying something like, “God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.” But the God we say we believe in as a culture is not necessarily the God found in the Bible. It’s one thing to profess belief in God, but Christianity say that’s not where our faith stops. The Christian faith is not placed in some sort of nebulous civil god. In the second paragraph of this creed, we proclaim our belief in Jesus as God’s son. Join me in saying this part of the creed, won’t you? The words will be on the screen.

I believe…in Jesus Christ, [God’s] only son, our Lord

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried.

He descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again.

He ascended into heaven,

he is seated at the right hand of the Father

and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

There is a lot in that section of the creed, as it tries to summarize Jesus’ life, death and resurrection in just a few short lines. Paul does the same thing, in a slightly different way, when he either writes or quotes an ancient hymn in the second chapter of Philippians, a hymn which we read this morning. The church at Philippi was one Paul dearly loved, and there is a reason it’s called the letter of joy. Joy practically oozes off the pages as you read these words. Paul is in prison, and he doesn’t know if he will live or die. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for joy, but here’s what makes Paul different. He tells the Philippians that no matter what happens, he wants them to stay focused on the main thing. “Whatever happens,” he tells them, “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (1:27). Stay faithful. Don’t waver, because it’s their faithfulness that is bringing joy to his heart even in prison. And then, in chapter two, he urges them to adopt the same mindset as Jesus Christ; this would make his joy absolutely complete. Above anything else, Paul longs for the people to become more and more like Jesus.

But to be like someone, you have to know what they are like. In the “follow the leader” game, you have to be able to see what the leader is doing if you’re going to follow. You keep your eyes focused on the leader. For Christians, we keep our eyes focused on Jesus, because, by very definition, we are followers of Christ—followers of Jesus. So Paul launches into a very poetic description of the life and character of Jesus, and in this ancient hymn (verses 6-11), there are some critical ideas about Jesus Paul wants us to take away.

The first thing both Paul and the creed affirm is this: Jesus is God. The creed describes Jesus as God in several ways, first by calling him “God’s only son” and saying he was “conceived by the Holy Spirit.” According to Paul, Jesus was “in very nature God” (2:6). Jesus is God. This is a hard idea to grasp, and it wasn’t any easier for those first believers who were strict monotheists. What did it mean that Jesus was God, in “very nature God,” as Paul put it? The word he uses there is not the common word for “nature” or “being.” Rather, Paul uses a word that describes a person’s essence, something which cannot be changed about a person. “It describes that part of a [person] which, in any circumstances, remains the same.” Jesus is “unalterably” God (Barclay, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, pg. 35).

Paul goes on to say that Jesus was also human. He was “made in human likeness” (2:6) and was “found in appearance as a man” (2:7). The creed describes his suffering and death; those are things that happen to a human being, not to a god. Here, the language used by Paul indicates two things. First of all, Jesus was not like a Greek god. The stories told about them said they sometimes pretended to be human but kept all of their divine power and privilege. What Jesus did was not playacting; he really, fully became human. He did not just “seem” to be human, as some early heretics proposed. He was fully human. The second thing Paul says, though, is that Jesus’ humanity was not a permanent state. He became human, really human, but it was a passing state, not who he essentially was. Paul says he took on the nature of a servant; it was something added on. He didn’t lay his status as God aside; rather, he took on humanity in addition to his divinity (Barclay 37; Kent, “Philippians,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 11, pg. 123). 

This is the question that has perplexed and puzzled Christians throughout the centuries. How could Jesus be, as a later creed put it, “truly God and truly man” (qtd. in Hamilton, Creed, pg. 177)? The Christian faith uses the word “trinity” to describe our belief about God, that God himself is one God in three persons. God is community within himself—Father, Son and Holy Spirit (whom we will talk about more next week). Jesus is God, and the best human term we have to describe him so we can sort of understand is “son.” As the letter to the Hebrews puts it, Jesus is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of [God’s] being” (1:3). In other words, Jesus is God in a form we could understand and pay attention to. For centuries before the birth of Jesus, God had spoken to his people through prophets and laws, through preachers and kings. But finally he came himself, in the form of Jesus, to speak directly to us. He came to show us directly what God is like. Jesus himself said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father…Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” (John 14:9-10). Jesus is God in the flesh. We call that the “incarnation,” God becoming flesh. Again, quoting a later creed, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human” (qtd. in Hamilton 175).

And this is exactly where a lot of people have trouble with Jesus today. No reasonable historian will deny that Jesus of Nazareth existed; there is ample historical evidence outside of the New Testament that a teacher and worker of miracles traveled the countryside in the first century and that a movement—what we now call Christianity—sprung up out of his teachings led by his followers after his death. Even the most hardened agnostic has to admit, “Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not” (Bart Ehrman qtd. in Hamilton 39). And a lot of folks today have no problem with Jesus, at least as long as he is just an ethical teacher. There are folks today who admire Jesus as a “great moral teacher.” The problem some folks have with Jesus today is when we, as Christians, claim he is more than that. Just before Christmas, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, sat down with Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City for an interview. Kristof, himself not a Christian, said he admired Jesus and the things he taught. Couldn’t people just believe in the message and not have to accept the miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection and so on? In other words, can we just like Jesus without all this stuff about him being God? Keller’s response was, in part, that you can’t just pick and choose what you like about Jesus. “A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be,” Keller told Kristof, and he went on to say that Jesus’ teaching was, in reality, not about nice things but about a message from God because Jesus was and is God. Keller then quoted Paul from 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says that if Christ is not raised, we are to be pitied above all people (BreakPoint commentary, 1/12/2017). Either it’s all true or none of it is true.

In a lot of ways, Keller was reflecting the writing of C. S. Lewis from a half-century ago. In Lewis’ most famous work, Mere Christianity, he said that to try to make Jesus into a great moral teacher who is not God is “patronizing nonsense.” I love this quote from Lewis (so if you’re around here for a while, you’re likely to hear it a lot), as it puts the choice clearly: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” These are the choices, based on the evidence: Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic or he is Lord. “Apart from the historic belief that Jesus is God and man, born of a virgin, that He died for our sins, was buried, and rose from the dead on the third day, Lewis could see no future for Christianity” (BreakPoint).

This is exactly where historic Christianity comes down and what the creed says. Jesus is “our Lord.” The word “Lord” is used 537 times in the New Testament, and it originally meant someone who controls a particular area, someone who has absolute sway over the persons or property in that area. When the New Testament writers and early church sought to describe the way Jesus fits into our lives, they chose the same title that had been used for God himself throughout the Old Testament: “Lord.” The earliest creed of the church, as I said last week, was “Jesus is Lord,” and that was in a culture where, for most people, the prevailing creed was “Caesar is Lord” (cf. Hamilton 66). Christians believed they owed allegiance to someone even higher than Caesar. And he has the right to be Lord because, as Paul asserts, he was obedient unto death—even death on a cross (2:8). Jesus gave his life away in obedience to the heavenly Father, and he died as the perfect sacrifice for us. The Bible says that we each deserve death because of the ways, the many ways, we have broken God’s law. God doesn’t have to put up with us because we have rejected him so often. But he loves us still. Jesus came because there was no one who could fulfill the law, who could live a perfect life on their own. He came to show us the way and then to become the way for us to reach God the Father.

The word for “sin” in the New Testament means “to miss the mark.” It’s an archery word, indicating that when we sin, we miss the goal that God has set for us. It doesn’t matter if you miss the target by a little or a lot, you’re still off from dead center where you’re supposed to be. When I was in Boy Scouts, I went one summer to camp because there we were supposed to be able to earn several merit badges. One of the workshops I signed up for was archery. I thought it would be cool to learn to shoot a bow and arrow, and so on the appointed day, they took us out to the range. Several boys went and did well and then it was my turn. I listened carefully how to aim, how to hold the bow and the arrow, how to let it go and so on. And then I stepped up to shooting range. I could see the target on the hillside a ways away, clear as day. I knew where the target was. I lined up my arrow with the target, doing everything I was told to do, and then I let the arrow fly—and it missed. So I tried again—and missed. I don’t know how many times I tried that afternoon, but suffice it to say that “archery” was not a merit badge I earned at that camp—or ever. I’m fairly sure there were some arrows I shot that they never found—because I missed the mark so badly. That’s what sin looks like. We miss God’s mark; I do it daily, and so do you. Now, every analogy breaks down, but here’s the point: Jesus came to save us from missing the mark. Jesus came to be the one who stands in our place, who takes the punishment we deserve for the ways we sin in thought, word and deed. Jesus gave his life in our place. He came to deliver us from the power and lure of sin. When we look at his death on the cross and realize he’s there because of the sin I have done and you have done, we’re meant to be overwhelmed with love for him, with gratitude for what he did. Jesus on the cross calls us to live life in response to his sacrifice, his love for us that caused him to be obedient even unto death.

But if that were the end of the story, honestly, I don’t think the Christian movement would have lasted very long. Thankfully, it’s not the end; Paul goes on: “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name” (2:9). He did this by raising Jesus from the dead, as the creed asserts. On the third day, Jesus rose from the dead. All four of the Gospels report this miracle, and we know that this event changed those first disciples from cowards, hiding for their lives, into bold witnesses who gave the rest of the lives to the preaching of the Gospel. All but one of them were killed because of their faith. We don’t have time this morning to go into all the evidence for the resurrection, but for me, the fact that these men knew it to be true so deeply that they gave their lives, and often died horrible deaths, to proclaim this message. The promise and truth of the resurrection gives us hope and tells us that this life is not all there is, that the worst thing is never the last thing. Especially over the last couple of weeks, in our own community where there have been some tragic deaths and other difficult circumstances in various families, the hope of the resurrection is sometimes the only thing that can keep us going. Even children recognize this, maybe best of all. I’ll never forget reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Christopher for the first time—before the movie came out—and when we got to the point where [SPOILER ALERT] Aslan, the lion, the Christ figure, is killed and then comes back to life, Christopher sat straight up and said, “That’s Jesus!” Yes, it is. And he is Lord of all because he gave his life for us and was raised from the dead so that we can have hope. As I mentioned earlier, Paul said if Christ has not been raised, then we are to be pitied above all people because our hope is in vain. But Paul goes on to triumphantly say this: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Our hope is not in vain! Thanks be to God for this incredible hope, a hope that flows out of our creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord.”

So why does all of this matter? And I realize I have gone rather quickly through what we believe about Jesus; I can’t begin to cover it all in just thirty minutes or so. But the question we want to ask with each of these messages is this: if this is what we believe, so what? Why does it matter? What difference will this belief make in our lives now, in 2017? One immediate way it matters is related to an event that happened this past Friday. Our country once again participated in a peaceful transfer of power, but the road to the inauguration has been a rocky one at best. The country is still very deeply divided, and while many are happy about the election results, many are also upset and angry. Now, we can have arguments on both sides of the political aisle, and we do on Facebook! Because of that, I know there are brothers and sisters in Christ in this room who have differing views from each other. But here’s where this part of the creed matters: the politics that happen here and now are only for a while. Jesus is Lord forever, and he is Lord of Democrats and he is Lord of Republicans and he is Lord of Independents. When we give our lives to Jesus, our primary citizenship is no longer in the here and now. We are not first of all citizens of the United States of America. We are first and foremost citizens of the kingdom of God which Jesus preached about. So, though we will continue to have political battles and discussions, we’ll continue to disagree about how this should happen or what policies should be put in place, in this place there is only one Lord, and that’s Jesus Christ, God’s only son. All are welcome in this kingdom, and none are excluded because we disagree with them. Paul put it this way in words that had to be shocking for those first believers to hear: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Jesus is Lord, and Caesar (or whoever is in the top position in any given country) is not. Come what may, Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is also our defining story; in fact, he is the world’s defining story. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan put it this way: “Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of the history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?” (qtd. in Hamilton 76). We’re going to talk more about this idea during the coming Lenten season, but Jesus has defined our world in more ways than we can realize. His influence in the lives of his followers has led to the founding of innumerable hospitals, schools, universities, homeless shelters, and other agencies meeting human need because we believe that human life matters, that Jesus redeemed humanity and there is no single person who is without value. Every person reflects God’s image, and so every person matters. That’s what motivates the followers of Jesus to meet human need; his way of life is the world’s defining story.

Then, the third (and most important) way a belief in Jesus makes a difference is the fact that this Jesus is the way God has provided for us to find salvation and eternal life. Another word used in the New Testament is “redemption,” which means being bought back. Among Christians in Africa, when missionaries wanted to convey a sense of the hope we have in Jesus, the word they chose to translate “redemption” literally means “God took our heads out.” It’s a strange metaphor, but the missionaries discovered that the best image they could use to describe what Jesus did for us was rooted in the people’s memory of slavery. When persons were captured in Africa and taken away for a life of slavery, there was an iron collar that was buckled around each person and then they were chained together in a long line so they could be marched to the waiting slave ship. From time to time, as the line of slaves would make their way to the coast, a relative or loved one or a friend would recognize someone they knew who had been captured as a slave and, if they had the means, they would offer a ransom for that person. If the ransom was accepted, the captor would unlock the collar and take the person’s head out of it. And so that became the image of redemption for African Christians: “God took our heads out” (Dunnam, This is Christianity, pg. 49). Redemption, salvation—accepting Jesus into our lives makes us right with God, reconciles us with God, allows us to become friends with God. All of these images (and more) are in the Bible as the authors seek to describe just what it was Jesus did through his death on the cross. He made a way for us to overcome sin and make our relationship with God right. And when he rose from the dead, he provided a way and a promise that those who trust in him might rise and live forever as well.

Now, I’ve heard people say, and maybe you have too, that they don’t like the way God chose to save us. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t need anyone to die for me” or “I haven’t done anything that needs forgiven.” But rather than quibble with God over how he chose to do it, I instead choose to be thankful that he chose to do it at all, that he provided a way for me to come back to God, that he made a path for me to follow in order to be redeemed. There is a beautiful story in the Old Testament that you will read this week if you’re following the weekly readings. It’s the story of Hosea, a prophet, who is given a strange task by God: marry a prostitute, or a “promiscuous woman,” as the Bible puts it. He’s told to do this because that’s the way Israel was acting toward God; they were “prostituting” themselves to other gods. The woman’s name is Gomer, and together she and Hosea have three children. But something happens in Gomer, and she runs away from Hosea. Long story short, she ends up back in the slave market, her body once again for sale. And, at a point when most of us would have given up, Hosea goes to the slave market and buys her back. His undying love for Gomer is meant to demonstrate the way God loves his people, the way God loves us. There isn’t anything he wouldn't do to win us back. Whether we approve of or like the method is not the point. God is doing what is necessary to buy us back from the slave market of sin, death and the grave. Rather than grumbling about what I don’t like or what I don’t understand, I give thanks that Jesus came to be the way, the truth and the life (cf. John 14:6).

In the end, Paul says, every knee will bow before Jesus and every tongue will confess him as Lord (2:10-11). When all is said and done, every single person will acknowledge what we affirm in the creed, that Jesus is Lord over all the earth and the universe. All will recognize what is already true, that, as author Abraham Kuyper put it, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” So the question is: will you confess him as Lord now or later? And the way we make that confession is two-fold. We ask him to come into our lives and re-make us into his likeness, to have the “same mindset” as he does (2:4), and as he does that, then, our lives begin to look like his. Biblical scholar William Barclay sums up this great hymn in Philippians 2 this way: “The great characteristics of Jesus’ life were humility, obedience and self-renunciation” (Barclay 38). Humility. Obedience. Self-renunciation, or putting ourselves aside for the sake of Christ—sort of like we pray in the Wesley Covenant prayer, “I am no longer my own, but thine.” Jesus abandons his rights for the sake of the world (Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, pg. 104). Are those the hallmarks of my life? Or your life? Do we look more like Jesus than we did a year ago, a week ago? Are we confessing Christ to the world around us? It’s never just in the words we say or the creeds we repeat. The way we confess Jesus as Lord is found in the way we live. So will you confess Jesus today, tomorrow and every day after that as Lord of your life? Will you allow him to rule over your life and change you from the inside out? Will others see him living in you?

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only son, our Lord. Let’s pray.