SPECIAL DAYS: March 5, First Sunday in Lent

Lesson: Matthew 24.32-35

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INTRODUCTION:

1. Wednesday I will be traveling to the Congregational Home in Brookfield to speak to my colleagues about developing a biblical world view.

1. I have developed a number of resources to use.

2. Please let me share some of them with you.

MAIN BODY:

1. Resources

1. M. Scott Peck, Transference: The Outdated Map ⁽¹⁾offers his definition and observations. This is from his book written in 1978

"My own definition is: Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.

"The problem of transference...is a problem between parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees, between friends, between groups, and even between nations...What map was Hitler following, and where did it come from? What map were American leaders following in initiating, executing and maintaining the war in Vietnam? Clearly it was a map very different from that of the generation that succeeded theirs. In what ways did the national experience of the Depression years contribute to their map, and the experience of the fifties and sixties contribute to the map of the younger generation? If the national experience of the thirties and forties contributed to the behavior of American leaders in waging war in Vietnam, how appropriate was that experience to the realities of the sixties and seventies? How can we revise our maps more rapidly?

"Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs."

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2. Walter Brueggemann, ⁽²⁾ Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, sees life as a script by which we live, much like the script of a play or movie.

I have been thinking about the ways in which the Bible is a critical alternative to the enmeshments (entanglements, the fish nets, or people nets that entrap us) in which we find ourselves in the church and in society. I have not, of course, escaped these enmeshments myself, but in any case I offer a series of 19 theses about the Bible in the church.

1. Everybody has a script. People live their lives by a script that is sometimes explicit but often implicit. That script may be one of the great meta-narratives created by Karl Marx or Adam Smith or it may be an unrecognized tribal mantra like, "My dad always said ..."The practice of the script evokes a self, yields a sense of purpose and provides security. When one engages in psychotherapy, the therapy often has to do with reexamining the script--or completely scuttling the script in favor of a new one, a process that we call conversion.

As the self is organized by a script, so are communities. And leaders of a community are skilled in appealing to that script.

2. We are scripted by a process of nurture, formation and socialization that might go under the rubric of liturgy. Some of the liturgy is intentional work, much of it is incidental; but all of it, especially for the young and especially for the family, involves modeling the way the world "really is." The script is inhaled along with every utterance and every gesture, because the script-bestowing community is engaged in the social construction of a distinct reality. A case in point is the observation of Mark Douglas that regular table prayers of thanksgiving are a primal way in which to challenge the market view of the supply and movement of valuable goods (see his book Confessing Christ in the 21st Century).

3. The dominant script of both selves and communities in our society, for both liberals and conservatives, is the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life.

1. I use the term therapeutic to refer to the assumption that there is a product or a treatment or a process to counteract every ache and pain and discomfort and trouble, so that life may be lived without inconvenience.

2. I use the term technological, following Jacques Ellul, to refer to the assumption that everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity; there is no issue so complex or so remote that it cannot be solved.

3. I say consumerist, because we live in a culture that believes that the whole world and all its resources are available to us without regard to the neighbor, that assumes more is better and that "if you want it, you need it." Thus there is now an advertisement that says: "It is not something you don't need; it is just that you haven't thought of it."

4. The militarism that pervades our society exists to protect and maintain the system and to deliver and guarantee all that is needed for therapeutic technological consumerism. This militarism occupies much of the church, much of the national budget and much of the research program of universities.

It is difficult to imagine life in our society outside the reach of this script; it is everywhere reiterated and legitimated.

4. This script--enacted through advertising, propaganda and ideology, especially in the several liturgies of television--promises to make us safe and happy. Therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism pervades our public life and promises us security and immunity from every threat. And if we shall be safe, then we shall be happy, for who could watch the ads for cars and beers and deodorants and give thought to such matters as the trade deficit or homelessness or the residue of anger and insanity left by the war or by destruction of the environment? This script, with its illusion of safety and happiness, invites life in a bubble that is absent of critical reflection.

5. That script has failed. I know this is not the conclusion that all would draw. It is, however, a lesson that is learned by the nations over and over again. It is clear to all but the right-wing radio talk people and the sponsoring neoconservatives that the reach of the American military in global ambition has served only to destabilize and to produce new and deep threats to our society. The charade of a national security state has left us completely vulnerable to the whim of the very enemies that our security posture has itself evoked. A by-product of such attempts at security, moreover, has served in astonishing ways to evoke acrimony in the body politic that makes our democratic decision making processes nearly unworkable.

We are not safe, and we are not happy. The script is guaranteed to produce new depths of insecurity and new waves of unhappiness. And in response to new depths of insecurity and new waves of unhappiness, a greater resolve arises to close the deal according to the script, which produces ever new waves and new depths.

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2. We need a source of sound information if we are to revise our road maps of living

1. We need a reliable script to develop a biblical world view.

2. George Barna, in his book, Think Like Jesus ⁽³⁾ define what he means by a biblical world view and seven steps that one may take to achieve it.

"'A biblical world view is thinking like Jesus. It is a way of making our faith practical to every situation we face each day. A biblical world view is a way of dealing with the world such that we act like Jesus twenty-four hours a day because we think like Jesus.'

"I offered an analogy: 'It's like having a pair of special eyeglasses we wear that enables us to see things differently, to see things from God's point of view, and to respond to those perceptions in the way He would prescribe if He were to provide us with direct and personal revelation.'

"There are literally hundreds of questions we could ask that would help us develop a useful and biblically consistent world view--or that might create the same kind of ambiguity and confusion that most of us now possess regarding the grand themes of the Bible. It only takes a few pointed questions--seven related but discrete queries--to facilitate a practical and sufficiently comprehensive understanding of God's truths and principles.

"Here are the seven questions:

1. Does God exist?

2. What is the character and nature of God?

3. How and why was the world created?

4. What is the nature and purpose of humanity?

5. What happens after we die on earth?

6. What spiritual authorities exist?

7. What is truth?"

3. Jesus offers us a dependable source of information and his assistance in understanding and applying it that enables us to answer the seven questions.

1. We grasp this by contemplating what he says in Matthew 24:32-35 (NRSVA)

2. Each section of this passage is of enormous help.

4. So what does he have to say?

1. ³²"From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

1. We could use any tree.

2. These signs which I have given you will be as reliable a proof of the approaching ruin of the Jewish state as the budding of the trees is a proof of the coming summer.

2. ³³So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates.

1. All the things that Jesus has mentioned up to this point.

2. They refer to the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the age.

3. There is a large time gap between the first and the second event.

3. ³⁴Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

1. Use the events of history to develop confidence in the future predictions.

2. The end of Jerusalem happened just as Jesus said that it would.

3. In 70 AD, the armies of Titus laid siege to Jerusalem and after a bitter struggle destroyed the temple and the city.

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4. ³⁵Heaven and earth will pass away,

1. It is not the literal heaven and earth that are passing away.

2. It is the corrupted version of heaven and earth that are passing to be replaced by the new heaven and the new earth.

3. In Revelation 21:1-4 (NRSVA) John saw a new heavens and a new earth.

¹Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ²And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

"See, the home of God is among mortals.
    He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
    and God himself will be with them;
⁴ he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
    Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
    for the first things have passed away."

5. Finally Jesus asserts, "but my words will not pass away."

1. C. S. Lewis, in God in the Dock writes:

"The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits was, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the dock." ⁽⁴⁾

2. What kind of a defense would Jesus offer?

3. What could he say to us?

1. In John 15, Jesus tells the parable of the vine and the branches.

2. He goes on to say in John 15.18-25, NEB

¹⁸'If the world hates you, it hated me first, as you know well. ¹⁹If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, because I have chosen you out of the world, for that reason the world hates you. ²⁰Remember what I said: "A servant is not greater than his master." As they persecuted me, they will persecute you; they will follow your teaching as little as they have followed mine. ²¹It is on my account that they will treat you thus, because they do not know the One who sent me.

²²'If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin: ²³he who hates me, hates my Father. ²⁴If I had not worked among them and accomplished what no other man has done, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. ²⁵However, this text in their Law had to come true "They hated me without reason."

3. In John 12:44-50 (NRSVA) Jesus again says:

⁴⁴Then Jesus cried aloud: "Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. ⁴⁵And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. ⁴⁶I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness. ⁴⁷I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. ⁴⁸The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge, ⁴⁹for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. ⁵⁰And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me."

4. The words are Jesus' but they come from the divine source of life and truth.

5. Had we better heed what is said. or should we go be an old map or script and refuse to listen to what is being revealed?

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CONCLUSION

1. "In his memoir A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, lay Episcopal minister Garret Keizer describes a Holy Saturday vigil held in his tiny Vermont parish. ⁽⁵⁾

When Keizer arrived at the church, he found that only two other people, a husband and wife, had come for the service. As the three of them huddled together in the old church, Keizer lit the Paschal candle and extinguished the other lights, a symbol of hearing Gods great promise of hope 'in darkness, longing to hear it in the light of day.'

"Together they prayed: 'Grant that in this Paschal Feast we may so burn with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may attain to the festival of everlasting light.'

"The Paschal candle sputtered in the dimness. As they prayed, the worshipers could hear cars passing by outside, travelers in a secular age oblivious to the ancient hopes being spoken in the little chapel. 'There we are,' Keizer wrote, 'three people and a flickering light.' This act of worship was, he said, 'so ambiguous because its terms are so extreme: the Lord is with us, or we are pathetic fools.'

"That says it well. Either the Lord is with us or we are pathetic fools. Down in the valley, with our faith buffeted by storms of disregard, doubt and disdain, our eyes can tell us only one thing: we are pathetic fools."

1. Are we pathetic fools?

2. Not on your life!

1. So what are you going to do this week to advance in the light of Jesus love and teachings?

1. Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus.

Words & Music: Helen H. Lemmel, 1922

This hymn was first published in Glad Songs, by the British National Sunday School Union. Its lyrics were inspired by the Gospel tract Focused, by Lillian Trotter, which included these words:

So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness.

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There''s a light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free!

Refrain

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

Through death into life everlasting
He passed, and we follow Him there;
Over us sin no more hath dominion--
For more than conquerors we are!

Refrain

His Word shall not fail you--He promised;
Believe Him, and all will be well:
Then go to a world that is dying,
His perfect salvation to tell!

Refrain

Amen!

1.Peck, M Scott, The Road Less Traveled "Transference: The Outdated Map," New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, pp 46-47, 50-51

2. Counterscript: living with the elusive God Christian Century, Nov. 29, 2005

3. Barna, George, Think Like Jesus, Brentwood, TN, Integrity Publishers, 2003, pp 3-5, 48

4. Lewis, C. S., God In the Dock, Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1970) p. 244

5. Quoted in Thomas G. Long, Reality Show, "Living By the Word," The Christian Century, March 7, 2006, p 16.

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