Uncle Jim lived in Blackstone, Virginia and he was a preacher and a teacher, among other things. By the time I got to know him, though, he was retired and living in a house on one of the main streets of town. According to these newspaper clippings he was well-known to the neighborhood because he would sit out on the front porch of the house and greet people passing by on the sidewalk. He had a long, snow-white beard that had tobacco stains in it. And he was generally pretty unkempt, which befitted an old preacher living on his own.
Inside, his house was a maze of old books and papers stacked floor to ceiling with a narrow path through them. It was a good representation of what his mind was like, too, a treasure trove of stories and biblical reflections and family history, all kind of strewn about in no particular order. As a child, I used to love to go to family reunions and talk to Uncle Jim for exactly that reason, but I don’t think many folks knew how to take him. He was part of our family, and a glorious part, but not many of my family members would have chosen him to be our representative to the rest of the world.
So what does the Christian family do with Jesus Christ? I get the feeling that we’re not really sure what to say about Jesus. We’re comfortable with Jesus being the great teacher who welcomes children and tells wonderful parables. We like what he does with the disciples and the way he tweaks the sanctimonious religious leaders for their hypocrisy.
That we can deal with. But when we make exalted claims for who Jesus is…when we talk about him as someone more than just a human being who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine…when we talk about him as the Son of God…then it can start to make us nervous. Because this Jesus starts to make a claim on us and on the world. To believe in this Jesus is not to just admire a great person from the past; to believe in this Jesus means to change and to be different and to be transformed. What will the neighbors think if we believe in this kind of Jesus?
The book of Hebrews in the Bible will not let us get away with a Jesus who isn’t divine. Jesus may be modest about his claims about himself in the first gospels. He may tell people who know who he is not to tell anyone else. He may treat his identity as a secret at times, but the Christians community that followed Jesus couldn’t say that. After walking through the death and the resurrection they knew that Jesus was more than another figure on the scene of history. Jesus was the one that all Israel had been waiting on. Jesus was the one the whole earth had desired.
So Hebrews uses some very exalted language to describe Jesus. It starts out with the note that in former times God spoke to us through the prophets, and the people of Israel could name them off – Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah – they had all tried to bring a word from God to tell the people that God had not forgotten the covenant with Israel…that God had not forgotten what he had called them to do…that God was expecting them to live up to the covenant and that a new day was coming. Now, however, God had spoken in a new way. Now God has spoken through a son.
This is when Hebrews starts piling on the titles so you can’t miss that Jesus Christ was different. “Christ is the appointed heir of all things.” An heir inherits all that a parent has and has authority over it. That’s what Jesus does.
Christ is the one through whom God made creation. Imagine that. At the beginning of all things, Jesus was there and everything was being made through him. It’s not that he just appeared on the scene in 1st century Palestine. His history is as long as God’s history. This reminds us of the opening to the gospel of John where it says that “he was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” [John 1:2-3]. We may have seen God in a new way in Jesus, but Jesus was there at the beginning.
“He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being.” Another way to put that is that Christ is the exact representation of God's essential nature, the one who most reveals God. Christ sits at the right hand of God, above even the angels. Christ is the pioneer of salvation. He’s the one who went there first, who blazed the trail that leads to our salvation.
These are incredible titles we have placed on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. They point to a figure so unique and so powerful that the only proper response is worship and praise. Christ is at the center of what our life in the Church is all about. Yet people can live without Christ. And they do. I’m beginning to think that even the Church feels like it can live without Christ.
If it’s true that we can’t believe in a Jesus like this without changing then maybe that’s our biggest stumbling block. Because we are beginning to despair that we have the power to change. We can't even change ourselves, much less this messy world that we live in. We find ourselves wrapped in a complex web of turbulent issues where Congress can't even seem to agree on the colors of the flag, much less a way out of our health care crisis. We find ourselves trapped in personal disasters where our relationships and our jobs and our health all seem to be spinning out of control. We wonder where we’ll find the power to change and we certainly don't see what Christ has to do with it.
If Jesus is just a man, then why worship him? On the other hand, if he’s so exalted and raised up above us, who are we to him? We might say with the psalmist that Hebrews quotes here, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you should care for them?” [Psalm 8].
The author of Hebrews goes on and reminds the readers that Christ, even though he was raised to glory, also knew the suffering of death and the reality of human life. Hebrews continues to point to Christ's incarnation as a sign that God really wanted to enter our limited lives and for that reason we can call Christ "Brother" as well as "Savior."
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting in a cell in Nazi Germany in the final year of World War II, he started to write a series of letters wondering what Christianity would look like in years to come. Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and theologian who had worked underground during the rise of Nazi power. He had been very discouraged and disillusioned by the response of the churches during this period. When the Nazis demanded that the Christians put Nazi emblems up in the churches, they did it. When they demanded that the churches preach the racial superiority of the Aryan nation, they did it. When the Nazis demanded that the churches swear allegiance to Hitler, they did it. Bonhoeffer looked at the scene and to him it was confirmation that the churches didn’t believe what they preached. If they had really believed that the things Hebrews says about Jesus were true that would not have been able to live as if they weren’t…as if allegiance to Hitler were more important than allegiance to Jesus…as if salvation came through the Nazi party than through the cross of Jesus.
Writing to a friend, Bonhoeffer said, “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”[i]
So Bonhoeffer began to believe that maybe it wasn’t true that people couldn’t live without God. The world around him certainly seemed to have developed without any real reference to God. They had effectively sent God to the sidelines. Science had explained away a lot of the things that people used to turn to God for. Secular theories of government had taken God out of politics. People related to one another apart from any religious moral code.
So what was Christian belief going to look like? Bonhoeffer said that it wasn’t enough for religion just to be brought in when people talked about death or sin – those troubling areas where society is a little more open to a religious explanation. “It always seems to me,” says Bonhoeffer, “that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not only on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.”[ii]
So how do we put God in the center? How do we proclaim Christ in a world that seems to have no need of him? What do we do to say that Jesus is not just hanging out on the edges waiting for us to trip over something that makes no sense and then looking for divine guidance? What do we do to say that Christ changes everything?
Maybe the answer is in creating Christ-shaped places in which to welcome the change God wants to bring about. When we were in England it seemed like everywhere we went there were ruins of abbeys and monasteries. And they were all designed exactly alike. After awhile we got really good at walking into a ruin and saying, "OK. The altar was over there, the dining hall up there, the bathrooms were over here and the dormitories were here. Great let's go."
But one of the most affecting monasteries we saw was one near York, where we lived, called Fountains Abbey. A lot of it had survived including one place that really told me what monastic life was like. Near the dining hall, or refectory as it was called, there was a huge fireplace, large enough to place a tree for burning. It was the only place in the entire abbey that was heated and the monks were not allowed to be in this room except for a small portion of the day unless they were ill.
Now this is a stone building and England is cold in the winter. I can see in my mind's eye a young monk entering the abbey and facing that first cold winter. I see him in his rough wool habit huddled by the stone wall separating him from that warm, glowing fire - trying to soak up the little warmth that seeped through. I can imagine him trying to cope with the monastic schedule which would have him waking up at 2 in the morning for worship, followed by study in the cloister and work in the gardens before a simple breakfast. I can see him wondering about the possessions and family he left behind.
Yet in this new world, so different from the one he left behind, the monk encountered one figure in a very dramatic way, and that is the figure of Christ. The world of the monasteries was a Christ-shaped world that offered the power to change lives, both for those few who could take the vows and for those many who depended on the hospitality and service the monastics could provide.
In the Methodist Church we're not in the business of monasteries anymore, but we do have a calling to create a space in which people can find transformation. Even though we live in a world that thinks it can get along just find without Christ it is not true that we live in a world that is satisfied with itself. As my old Christian Education professor, Dick Murray, used to say, "A high-tech world demands a high-touch Church."
We are called to create a "touching place" where the castaways of a throwaway society can come to touch and be touched and to find the power to change. The Church can be a different space, a unique space in a world that values style over substance. But we can only be unique if we believe that we are, and we are only unique in what we have to offer for healing - and that is Jesus Christ, who is all of those fantastic things that Hebrews says he is, pioneer of salvation, representative of God, and heir of all things, yet who is also one thing more - our brother, who knows firsthand the lives we live and the deaths we die, who endured the suffering of crucifixion and death, to show us that God is not just above us but also with us.
This meal we come to share today is an invitation. It is an invitation from Christ himself to discover that Christ-shaped space where we can be transformed. We come to remember this Jesus of Nazareth who was one like us and yet like no other. We come to celebrate what God did through him then and what God continues to do now. We come to share with people of all times and all places who also eat this meal - saints who once walked this path and those in many different countries who walk it with us today. Thanks be to God.
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
In former times God spoke in many and various ways through the prophets, but in these last days God has spoken to us through a son, whom God appointed heir of all things, through whom God also made the worlds; he is the radiance of God's glory and the representation of God's essential nature and he sustains all things by his powerful word. Having made purification for sins, he was seated at the right hand of the Majesty in the high places, having become so much superior to the angels as he inherited a name more excellent than theirs.
For God did not subject the order which is coming, about which we are speaking, to angels. Now someone has testified somewhere,
"What are human beings that you remember them,
or the children of humanity that you visit them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
with glory and honor you have crowned them,
subjecting all things beneath their feet."
For in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As for now we do not see all things under their subjection, but we do see Jesus, who was made for a little while lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honor through the suffering of death, in order that, by the grace of God, he might know something of the death we all face.
For it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should perfect the pioneer of their salvation through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one, and for this reason he is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,
"I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you."
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