Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

graphic by Lena Watts

I’m starting a new sermon series today. I have this sense that’s there is someone I want you to meet during this season of Lent. There is someone I want to meet. And it’s not even as though you haven’t met him before. I’m talking about Jesus. I want you to meet Jesus. I want to meet Jesus.

Through these next six weeks as we head toward Holy Week and Easter we’re going to have a lot of opportunities to see Jesus from a lot of different angles. We’re going to be adding to our collection of Jesus pictures each week. The point is to give us a lot of different windows for seeing this person who is at the heart of who we are. As Christians, we all bear his name. But there is always more to learn from Jesus and always more of us that needs to be transformed by him. So I want to invite you to go on a Lenten journey with me to meet Jesus again for the first time.

Today I want to talk about Jesus and begin by talking about comedy. Comedy is built on the idea that the misfortunes of someone else, worked out in a play or a movie or a camp skit, can help us safely deal with our own sense that all is not right with the world or with us. I have to admit that I am a sucker for slapstick comedy. Joel calls me in to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos all the time because he knows something will have me rolling on the floor in no time. Somebody slips on a banana peel or gets hit in the head with a ball and we know we wouldn’t want it to happen to us because the person on screen or on stage looks so ridiculous, but we laugh…I laugh…because we know that we HAVE looked that ridiculous from time to time.

Situation comedies? They work because they take a situation which can seem overwhelming in real life and they can work it out with humor and perhaps a little truth telling. We laugh at situations like this because, even when they’re outlandish, they have a way of hitting close to home. We can do two things with the truth--we can laugh or we can cry.

Paul, who wrote the letter to Romans that we read earlier, had a way of speaking the uncomfortable truth about who we are. This letter starts out as a real downer. Paul sends his greetings along to the Christians in Rome, says that he wants to visit them there, and then, before he even gets around to asking about the weather, he launches into a long litany of how God’s wrath was going to poured out on all the people. He talks about idol worship, sexual immorality, greed, murder, malice, envy, gossiping, strife, disobeying parents…before the end you expect him to throw in being late in returning your library books! You can just imagine the Romans nodding their heads as he mentions the big sins…murder? O.K., I haven’t done that. Greed? Think I’m doing alright with that. Strife? Uh-oh. By the end no one could imagine that they had been good enough to escape God’s wrath.

That’s just the point for Paul. He himself had done many of the things he condemned and in his old life he had been the one who was charged with enforcing the Jewish law! Paul knew that none of the people he was writing to could hold themselves up as blameless in the face of this and he wanted to get their attention. The book starts by saying that if you think you’re good enough to be perfect by your own power, think again!

The problem is not new. It’s not new for us and it wasn’t new for the Roman Christians. We have known for millennia that something is not right with the world and that something is not right with our lives. When people strap on suicide bombs and blow themselves up in a crowded market, something is not right. When our children study how we overcame segregation in Virginia and see that it still exists in their lunchrooms and in the worlds their parents live in, something is not right. When we fail a friend, or neglect our bodies, or ignore the needs of our soul, or distract ourselves into thinking that being busy is an acceptable substitute for being right, in all of these cases, something is not right. When we think too much of ourselves or too little, something is not right.

Paul knew that. Paul knew that we live with a sneaking suspicion that damnation may be what we deserve. Paul knew that there are some things we just can’t seem to let go of no matter how hard we try. Sin is not just an option we can take or leave. It’s in our DNA.

The image Paul used to talk about this was the figure of Adam. “Sin, he said, “came into the world in the person of Adam.” (Eve gets off the hook in this retelling of the story, but that’s only fair since she has taken most of the blame in most of the other retellings). “And with sin came death and death has been with us ever since. Even when we didn’t know what sin was, because it’s only the law that brings the awareness of sin, even then it had its effect. It’s not transmitted by any means we can tell. But it is a part of all of our lives and when we sense that all is not right we know its effects.

“There was this person,” Paul says, “whose name was Adam, but there was also this person, whose name was Jesus and because of him all the terrors of God’s wrath that I talked about in chapter one are not our inheritance.” The good news in Paul’s bad news is that God has interrupted the cycle that leads from sin to death. The merry-go-round that we have all experienced that takes us right back to the same old pains, same old wounds, same old guilt, over and over, again and again, does not have to be the final word. That cycle only works if the thing that the universe runs on is God’s wrath, which determines that we are eternally guilty. There is a different force at work in the universe, Paul says. It’s more powerful. It’s love.

How do we know that it’s love that makes the world go ‘round? Because we’ve seen it. We’ve lived with it. We’ve touched it. We’ve watched it die with us and for us. The love that interrupts the merry-go-round, that shortchanges the wages of sin, that redeems us from our failures, that heals our wounds, that opens the door to new life, is the love we’ve known in Jesus. And God did not wait until we “got it” and lived up to our end of the love connection before coming to us. God did not wait until we proved ourselves worthy. While we were still sinners, Paul says, Christ came and died for us. You probably didn’t even notice it, but while we were living, God was reconciling us to God’s own self. When someone asks you when you were saved, you can say, “I remember it well. It was a Friday on a hill outside of Jerusalem.” When did God make the move toward us? Before we could ever imagine making the move toward God.

What Paul is saying is that the most powerful thing we have to say as Christians is the truth about ourselves and the world. But the truth is more than “Jesus Christ came and therefore we can ignore the hurts and pains and sin of this world.” The truth is deeper.

Which brings me back to comedy. Do you remember the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes? In Hans Christian Anderson’s telling, an emperor, who always insists on being seen in the finest clothes and with all of the greatest trappings of wealth and power, hires two tailors to outfit him with a brand new set of clothes. The tailors are really scoundrels who convince the emperor that they will make him a set of clothes that will seem invisible to all those who are too stupid or incompetent to appreciate its quality. Of course the emperor is intrigued and he gives the tailors two bags of gold to begin work.

The tailors come back with the invisible clothes and the emperor panics because he can’t see the cloth or feel it. But he doesn’t want to seem stupid or incompetent so he pretends that he does see it. And since the emperor has said that HE sees the cloth, all the people in his court also admire the non-existent clothes. They didn’t want to be thought of as stupid or incompetent either.

The people in the kingdom have heard of this marvelous cloth and they want to see it, so the emperor agrees to parade through the streets wearing his new clothes. A page followed behind holding the invisible train of his robe. All of the people along the way join in the delusion by complimenting the emperor’s choice of cloth and the splendor of his garments. But a little boy sees the ruler pass and says simply, “The emperor is naked.” His father shushes him but others hear him and know that he has spoken the truth. Soon everyone is saying, “The emperor has no clothes.” And the emperor went home very embarrassed indeed.

That is comedy. By telling the truth, the child had exposed the king and all his subjects for who they truly were and a dangerous fiction had been punctured. And the truth is about more than just the emperor. We recognize ourselves and the fictions we cling to in that story as well.

What Paul wants to tell us in Romans is high comedy. Paul wants to tell the truth, too. Paul wants to expose the lies by which we all live. Paul wants to tell us that the pretensions we live under are dangerous. Paul also wants to tell us that the despair we are prone to is also unfounded. Because if there is one thing truer than the fact that we are all sinners deserving of condemnation it is that we are loved by God and seen through the lens of Jesus Christ.

Why do we preachers talk so much about Jesus? It’s not just that Jesus is a good example. Yes, that’s true, but there are many good people whose lives we could imitate and what Jesus did in his life and death and resurrection was unique. “What would Jesus do?” may be a helpful question but it’s not the basic question. The basic question is “What IS Jesus doing?”

Jesus is reconciling the world to God. Jesus is healing the sick. Jesus is comforting the grieving. Jesus is walking with the weak. Jesus is empowering the poor. Jesus is lifting up the lonely. Jesus is challenging the rich. Jesus is confronting the hard-hearted. Jesus is raising the dead, welcoming the children, feeding the hungry. Jesus is opening the door to a new realm and a new reign where death has lost its sting and sin has lost its power.

We know this because the work of Christ did not end with his death on a cross in 1st century Palestine. The work of Christ continues wherever people are confronting the bad news of the world with the good news of God’s love. The work of Christ continues when we lift up his story, the story of Jesus, and say that Jesus changes everything. Not because there are no other stories to tell, but because in this story we hear the truth. And the truth is that we are Adam’s but we are also God’s children.

One last story. I once worked as a youth coordinator at a church-run community center in West Dallas. It was the inner city and there were days when I was overwhelmed by the poverty and despair I saw all around me. One day I went to visit the probation officer for one of the youth I was working with. I told the officer the name of the teenager, Timothy, and he nodded his head. “Oh, yes. He’s been abandoned to the streets by his family. He’s one of those we call a ‘throwaway.’”

I’ve lost track of Timothy. I don’t know what the end of his story will be, but I do know that a lot of those youth got a new identity and a new vision for what they could be because of the presence of the church and people who cared in their lives. Today kids from that community center are going on to college and coming back to work with other kids. Karen Hatch, our youth pastor, and Kristen Webb and several others here in our congregation have been talking about mentoring programs to work with the children in our schools because we know that children flourish when they know they are cared for. And as many troubles as some of our children have on the Shore, none of them is a throwaway. Not one child of God is a throwaway.

Now I don’t know what you need to hear today. Maybe you need to hear that the truth about you and the world is that you can’t do it on your own. You can’t make your way to perfection under your own power. You need to hear that you have the same limits that every child of the first human parents has. Then you can hear about the grace that saves us anyway.

Or maybe you need to hear that you and the world are not, cannot be, and will never be a throwaway in God’s eyes. You are more, much more, than the worst thing you have ever done. And even though there are old wounds and persistent problems that plague your life, this cannot separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Despite the fact that this world is not the best world we can imagine...Despite the fact that we are not the best selves we can hope for…despite, despite, despite…God has come among us. God has lived among us. God has opened the door to a new day. And God invites us to grab hold of the abundance of grace, the free gift we have been given that was revealed in Jesus.

Comedy helps us laugh at the characters who are so close to who we truly are. They bumble and stumble and fall and say things they can’t ever fully understand the meaning of. And so do we. And God laughs because God knows that the ending will be a good one. Because of Jesus, the ending is always in God’s hands. Thanks be to God.

Romans 5:12-19
Therefore, just as sin came into the created order through one person, and death through sin, and thus death spread to every person because all have sinned--for sin was in the created order before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Even so, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the same manner as the transgressions of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come.
But the free gift is not like the transgression, for if, through the transgression of one, many died, the grace of God and the gift of the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, has been given , overflowing for the many.
And the free gift is not like what came of the one man’s sin. For the judgment of the one is condemnation, but the free gift leads to the removal of guilt following many trespasses.
For if death rules through that one, through one person’s trespass, those who take hold of the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness will rule in life through the one person, Jesus Christ.
Therefore, now, as all people are led to judgment through one person’s trespass, so also one person’s act of justification leads to righteousness and life for all people. For just as the many were made sinners by the one man’s disobedience, so also the many will be made righteous by the obedience of one.