“Understanding Christianity”                                               January 30, 2011

John 3: 1–17                                                                      The Rev. Dr. Beth Braxton

I want to thank you for journeying with me here in January through this sermon series. I have learned a great deal and it has strengthened my own beliefs and I hope for you too. Today we end the World Religion sermon series with Christianity. I have said all along that Christianity is the lens through which I see the world. I am passionate about the faith and I will tell you why in just a bit. I have also given a disclaimer at the beginning of each sermon to remind you that I am not an expert in the particular religion. Well today that is particularly true with Christianity, because the more you know the more you know you don’t know! I have shelves of books on Bible, theology, church history, etc. that I was at first overwhelmed by what to include in this message. But God’s grace was sufficient, so here we go.

Just as Buddhism began with a person coming out of the faith of Hinduism, so Christianity begins with a person who comes out of the Jewish faith – Jesus. Those who identified Jesus as the Christ, or Messiah, looked upon his life as the fulfillment of Jewish expectations revealed in the Hebrew scriptures. One of the earliest formulations of Christian belief comes from Paul a Jew, who persecuted the early Christian church, until his dramatic conversion when he became its greatest missionary. Writing to a congregation at Corinth about A.D. 50, some 20 years after Jesus’ death, he notes the central points of the faith, “…that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas (Peter), then of the twelve.” (I Corinthians 15:3–5)

Faith in the resurrected Christ has influenced the course of Western civilization; it has inspired cathedrals, art, music, the building of hospitals and universities, as well as religious wars, crusades, and a proliferation of sects. Across two millenniums, Christ’s message has shaped the lives of individuals and societies of 2.2 billion people, making it the largest world religion, or 33% of the world’s population.

As we have found in other religions, Christianity is not monolithic. Today after 2,000 years we are hardly a unified Christian faith! There was a major split in the holy catholic (universal) church in 1054: Roman Catholics went to Rome in the West and Orthodox went to Constantinople in the East: Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, etc. Then came the Protestant Reformation in 1517 and there were four main reform movements producing Church of England, Quakers, Episcopalians, Methodists, Pentecostal; another movement were all the Lutherans Reformers – Evangelical Lutherans and Missouri Synod Lutherans, then the Reform Movement, including Presbyterian names: Presbyterians (USA), Presbyterian Church in America, Evangelical Presbyterians and Cumberland Presbyterians, Reformed Church in America, Church of Christ, Christian Church and then there was the Ana–Baptists, American Baptists, Southern Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Mennonites, Amish. Then there are still others –Jehovah Witness, Adventists, Assembly of God, Salvation Army, and Mormons, and that is not all who call themselves Christians! I understand that there are over 33,000 Christian denominations. In the United States there are 52% Protestants, 24% Roman Catholics and 2% Mormons.

All are followers of Jesus. What has been so powerful and compelling about the character and personality of the person of Jesus that has shaped so many lives? We actually know few facts, which are mostly recorded by eye witnesses in the books of the Bible known as the Gospels, written between 65–95 A.D. There are the stories of his birth, a time when he was 12 years old and confounded the Pharisees and scribes in the Temple with his questions and answers. Then he appears at the age of 30 years old to be baptized. His baptism is a turning point in his life; an experience of singular intensity that confirmed he was now set apart in a special way for the service of God. But what was that service to be? The story of his temptations by Satan, illustrates his wrestling with that question of vocation. He decides against being a great economic provider, a supernatural super-hero, a person welding great political power. Instead he came out of that wilderness time of fasting knowing that he was to be a servant of love and compassion following God’s will for his life. There are three years of preaching the kingdom of God, teaching and healing, then a brutal death by crucifixion and a miraculous resurrection.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as an anonymous Q Source were not so concerned about biographical detail as communicating Jesus’ life and teaching that changed their lives, and as a guide for his followers, as they spread and established communities of believers throughout the Greco–Roman world.

So what is the essence of Christianity? I believe what is essential is captured in the scripture today in the story of Nicodemus. “God so loved the world that he gave…”

God so loved the world that he gave us a system of enlightenment so that souls could come back again and again until they reached God. NO.

God so loved the world that he gave us a book to follow, so following all its teaching one could reach Paradise. NO

God so loved the world that he gave us a series of commandment and rules so that humanity could by good deeds climb up to God. NO.

God so loved that God gave God’s only son so that the world may not be condemned but persons could find life and meaning eternally with God. YES!

Our God is a God of love – the essence of God is love. From the beginning God created this beautiful world for us out of love and a desire to be in relationship to us. God created us in God’s image to be recipients of God’s love and to do good and to love. But we recognize that something is not quite right with us. Its like the Apostle Paul says,“the good that we would do, we do not, and that which we do not want to do, we do.” There is a brokenness, a separation from this love that we call sin. It is our separation from God.

God wants to do something about this. God gave us the law and sent prophets, but we did not heed or follow God’s way, so God in God’s creativity decides to come to us. In a mystery that is hard for our scientific minds to understand, God became a human being; God put God’s essence in a particular human being, Jesus, in a particular time of Caesar Augustus in 6 B.C., in a particular place, Judea. God was incarnate in Jesus. So in Jesus we see divine love, a divine ethic and way of living. If you want to know what God’s love is like, what God is like – look at Jesus! In Jesus we see what we might be. We also see how far God’s love is willing to go, how costly is the price for our brokenness. We see a love that is so great, that is willing to die for us. and in that dying forgives us! Our salvation is being able to accept that love and live that love. Or another way of seeing salvation is as Dr. Fleming describes:

Well one way to tell about salvation I think, is with Jesus’ paradoxical statement “he or she that would save one’s life must lose it for my sake in the gospels.” So salvation for one take is that we lose ourselves for Christ’s sake, and in return we gave our truer, our real selves. Ego is replaced with Christ.

Let me go back to the story of Nicodemus. Here is an intelligent man, a Pharisee, a man of the law. He has been watching Jesus and seeing the signs and miracles he is doing and knows that there is something different about him, something special. I am sure he is thinking: I wonder if this man could be the Messiah? Though Jesus does not fit the image of a powerful king to save us, he speaks and acts with authority, and has an authenticity Nicodemus longs for.

Jesus uses two of the most passive, mysterious images, birth and wind, to describe how the Spirit acts in the name of the God and the Son to save.[i] When John 3:16 is invoked in our day, it is usually with a question, “Have you been saved?” or “Are you born again?” as if being “born from above” is something that we decide, a program that we follow, something that we are to think or to do. But for all of us birth is something that is done for us rather than by us. Jesus reiterates this by referring to the mystery of the wind: you can hear the wind but you can’t control or channel the wind. It is all gift, all grace.

You see Nicodemus is so much like us; he sees himself as the savior of his soul. He just needs to know what to do. Nicodemus is an intelligent and powerful person who has come to Jesus asking, “What do I – as a competent, intelligent person – need to do to get in on whatever it is that you are pushing? running? building?”

What is your plan, Jesus? Are you offering us some new technique for salvation? What are your steps that you say we must follow if we are to save ourselves? Probably because Nicodemus is both powerful and educated; he is one of those people who, having had so much success in striving, and planning, and setting goals and working for what he wants in life; Nicodemus thinks that all he has got to do is to find out Jesus’ program, get with it, master it, and than he will be “saved.”

And Jesus responds to Nicodemus by noting a phenomena that we don’t have anything to do with–wind and birth. Then Jesus says, “God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but to save the world.” God sent the Son. God gave. Whatever it is that Jesus is about, it’s not some new self-help program; it’s a gift!

In Hinduism it is your ignorance that is in the way of life with Brahman, so you may have to keep working to come back on a higher level with each death and rebirth cycle. In Buddhism, still working on those death and rebirth life cycles, your goal is detaching from all things and desires until you reach a blissful state of Nirvana. In Islam you need to work hard accumulating the good deeds described in the Quran to reach Paradise. In Judaism it is your righteousness and deeds of kindness and justice here and now that is your salvation.

In Christianity,“It is by grace you are saved through faith, it is not of your own doing, it is a gift from God.” (Ephesians 2:8).

You see God turned this idea of earning your way into heaven on its head. It’s as if God said to God’s self – What if I, God, pay the price or did battle for the brokenness and sins of these my beloved humans who I have created? God takes all our bad stuff, our jealousies, greed, our hate and anger, our horrific deeds of hurt and injustice and dies with them on the cross, so we are free. Rev. Fleming says it this way.

The cross is God going to the out-most limit to be with us come hell or high water, come what may, God with us. In death as well as resurrection means that God over came sin and death with Easter, and what happened exactly we do not know because we were not there. Eye witness accounts vary somewhat but in any case what happened created the church in a very real sense in that those who thought they had been defeated and lost the One they had chosen to follow with their lives, in fact, became the church of Jesus Christ and it has sustained through the century.

See! Then in the mystery of his resurrection death is defeated and we know that there is “Nothing impossible for God.” Even death and evil are defeated by the power of God’s love and grace!

This concept of grace is covered in a couple of the key tenets of the Reformed Presbyterian faith. Listen to how Rev. Maryann Dana, our former Associate explains it.

This idea of the sovereignty of God and Presbyterians and Reformed Christians aren’t the only people who believe in the sovereignty of God, but it is very, very key and very central for us as Christians. And, what that means is that there is nothing that happens in this universe that isn’t outside of God’s concern and God’s power. What it does mean is that there is nothing that happens in our lives that God is not present with and God cannot somehow bring good out of. Not that God wanted a bad thing to happen but that God is with us working out God’s purposes for us and for creation.

Then there is that challenging understanding of Predestination for us as Presbyterians. Again Rev. MaryAnn.

Of predestination and election – I think modern theologians have come to learn it, come to understand it in a more nuanced way, and one of the things that I really think about is this idea of election or predestination means that it goes back to the sovereignty of God. That there is, that God has got this and we know God to be a loving God, and so God can be trusted, and it is not our job to figure out who’s saved and who’s not. And that was when Calvin came up with this it was a comforting thing, it was meant to be a doctrine of comfort to say “there is nothing you can do to earn it, it’s not up to you, it is up to the good and loving God that has always been with God’s people.” And the other part of that that I think is important is that, if we are the elect then we are elected to serve. That is what election is. It is not just well I got my golden ticket to heaven it means we are elected by God to serve this world that God loves. And so it’s not a selfish thing it’s a servant thing that we serve this world, because God has elected us to be the ones.

Back to our story:

And that night Jesus told Nicodemus that the one with whom you speak, the one who invokes mysteries like birth and wind, this one is sent from God to save. Your ultimate status with God is not your spiritual achievement; it’s God’s gracious gift!

That is why I am a Christian and why I have such a passion for the Christian faith! I have truly experienced God’s grace over and over again. Through conflicts, disappointments, pain, despair, I can say – God’s grace is sufficient! His forgiving love has brought me back to wholeness.

I am a Christian because I believe in the eyewitness accounts of Jesus life as authentic. I often think that Jesus life is either the greatest hoax in the world or it ISthe most powerful truth. My study of scripture tells me it is the truth of God’s acts in history and human beings responses. It is our rule for faith and life. The scripture has withstood incredible scrutiny for more than a thousand years and still does.

I am a Christian because of the power of Jesus parables and the ethic of his love and compassion for all people; the woman caught in adultery is changed; the bent-over woman stands up; the Roman centurion child is healed; 5,000 hungry people are fed; cheating Zacchaeus becomes a philanthropist; blind Bartimaeus opens his eyes; even the soldiers who nailed him to the cross are forgiven! It IS this love that overcomes hate and evil!

I am a Christian because I experience my greatest freedom in life lived for God, a God who can “still the waves” and “raise the dead”; a God whose redemptive power can repair my brokenness and the brokenness of the world.

I am a Christian because I have hope in Christ and trust that this life is not all there is. I know that I have come from God and I go to be re-united with God at the end of my life.

Wherever you are in your Christian journey, I hope you will be open to receive God’s gift. I pray you will respond to God’s amazing grace each day of your life.

Let our “Affirmation of Faith” today be an invitation to grow in faith–let us stand and sing Amazing Grace, hymn #280 (verse1, 3, & 5).

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen[ii]

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