Sermon Poetry, 8 November 2009
Sermon Text – John 18:1-13
Preacher – Pastor Mike Tardive
Kind Jesus, Your people are suffering life
With sadness and sickness and poverty strong
They’re crying with voices of weakness and sorrow
With quavering lips they are singing their song
You’ve given us cups with a drink hard to swallow
We haven’t the strength to survive Sovereign Will
We’re crying with voices of frailty and mourning
Come calm with Your mercy and make our hearts still
We suffer as people who worship our Savior
We follow our Jesus, our Suffering Lord
He drank from His chalice, prepared by the Father
Fulfilling the Scriptures, God’s beautiful Word
Our Father is Sovereign, with Providence Holy
His will is accomplished, no matter how sad
So as Jesus swallowed, our sins were forgiven
We’re bathed in His blood, and our mourning is glad
We’re washed in His mercy, we’re cleansed by His blood
Through death are we living, through blood made alive
In Him is salvation, we’ve access to Yahweh
Once sinners of darkness, now Children of Light
There is a scene in Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” where the evil villains, the Grasshoppers, are chilling under their sombrero hangout when Hopper, the gang’s ringleader, hears grumbling about going back to Ant Island to gather “The Offering” from the puny ants. Hopper jumps over to the bar in typical grasshopper fashion, grabs a seed from their large seed dispenser at the Grasshopper bar and throws it at the complaining party. He asks the guilty one if it hurt (it did not), throws another seed (“are you kidding” being the response) and then releases the whole bunch of heavy seeds onto the whiner, crushing him. The moral of this story? “There was that ant who stood up to me … if one ant stands up, they all might stand up”.
Just as unity is vital for ants, strings, voters and warriors, it is so for followers of Jesus as well. We are one body, in Christ. The Church, Jesus’ Bride, is not made up of a bunch of self-autonomous parts. We are joined and knit together, a unified, redeemed Body. Yet, “unity” can be, and in our pluralisticly philosophical and cultural milieu, often is, misleading. Believers in Christ cannot be unified with those who deny the insanely radical and thoroughly exclusive nature of Christ and the Cross. Believers in Jesus cannot be unified with those who call Jesus a god but who do not ultimately bow their collective knee in abject submission to the Lamb. Believers in the very Son of God cannot be united with those who deny the everlasting Love of Jesus and Grace of God. Yet, with true believers and followers of Jesus, the Christian IS unified and this unity finds it strength not in the collective might of those unified but in the One who is the Great Unifier. This unity and strength is for His Glory and for our Good. It is not just strong, it is everlasting.
There is perhaps no more powerful expression in human experience than the Story. It grabs our imagination and entices our intellect. A good story does to language what music accomplishes in a somewhat different way: it allows us to feel the ideas that words express as well as consider them rationally. The Story, the Ballad, the Parable allows us to think and to feel and to relate and to consider. Great stories posit great Truths, but they also allow us to express and imagine those great concepts. They captivate our creativity, using both the mind and the heart, the analytical and the sensual and the emotional.
In the biblical narrative of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection we can know some things. Christ was born to a human mother. Jesus grew and learned. He preached and ministered. Jesus never sinned and He died and He rose again. These things can be known analytically from the Biblical accounts. Yet, in Narrative, I can feel the joy and excitement of Jesus’ birth. I can sympathize with my High Priest who first sympathizes with me. I can feel horror and disgust at His scourgings. I can mourn with His disciples at His death. I can weep at what my sin did to my Sin-Bearer and Savior. I can experience pure exultation and surprise at His resurrection and I can glory in His exaltation. Through narrative I can indeed know the objective truths of Scripture, yet I can also feel and more fully understand those Truths, in Christ.
