Sermon – March 21, 2010: New Thing
Sermon for Sunday, March 21, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
New Thing
Isaiah 43: 16-21; 2 Philippians 3: 4b-14; John 12: 1-8
One of Muhammad Ali’s late-career fights had the usual big buildup. Just before the
fight began they introduced Ali’s opponent, and I can’t remember which fight this was, so I
don’t recall who that was. The cameras panned the great arena with the ring in the center,
seats filled to capacity. Over the loudspeaker came the introduction of the man who was to
box Ali that day, and he and his handlers appeared at one axis of the arena. Immediately
the whole place was filled with the musical theme from the movie “Rocky,” the famous fight
film done by Sylvester Stallone.
That’s big, loud, bass-thumping, pulse-pumping music, and it’s the theme of a story
about a scrappy fighter who makes the big time. The whole crowd goes wild. The next
thing that has to happen is for Ali to be introduced, but what music can be played now that
won’t be a letdown? You feel like the promoters, like the designers of this spectacle have
rushed to the climax before it’s time, and there’s a slight anxiety on behalf of Ali’s fabled
image while the seconds tick off as his loudspeaker introduction begins. Then he’s there, on
the opposite side of the arena, and suddenly the whole place is full of the musical theme
from “Star Wars.” It’s perfect. The “Rocky” theme fits a great fight story, but the “Star
Wars” theme is epic, it’s cosmic, it’s on a whole other plane–and the crowd gets it. They go
even wilder than before, and the boxing begins in an atmosphere of delight, the fans
savoring the symbolism of the “Rocky” theme and the surprising one-upmanship of “Star
Wars.”
It’s rare, but it’s splendid, when you think things can’t get any better, and then they do
get better. All three of this morning’s scriptures characterize God’s saving efforts on behalf
of human beings in exactly this way. It’s not that God had some second-rate scheme going
and finally came up with a decent approach. It’s that God had a marvelous, gracious, fulfilling
salvation achieved and then God came up, astonishingly, with one that is even better.
In the part of Isaiah we read today, Isaiah refers back to the great, fundamental
miracle of deliverance. God brings to mind God’s making a way through the sea, and then
sending the pursuing preventers of liberation and new life into the sea and extinguishing
them like a candle’s wick. That’s the great story celebrated in the song of Deborah and over
and over in the psalms. It’s the great salvation which sets the stage for covenant and land
and the Chosen People’s call to be God’s people.
Here, in Isaiah, God gives us that saving story–and then says, forget that story, now
I’m going to do something even greater. Here’s the reversal: before I made a dry place
through the waters–now I’m going to make rivers in the desert. Where it was all wet and
my people needed me to make it miraculously dry, I did that. Now, where it is all dry and
my people and even the creatures of the wasteland require it to provide water, I’ll do that.
That will signal a great new salvation. There’s a common feel to it, there’s something familiar
about God intervening, but it all will be new. Before it looked like a negative, now it will look
like a developed photo. That’s part of the newness. That’s a sign of how everything is
new.
We get the same idea in what Paul writes to the Philippians. Paul is emphasizing
just how astonishingly new and different-looking this salvation through Christ is, and Paul has
to, because of what’s going on with his churches. Paul has become the great evangelist to
non Jewish congregations. All around the Mediterranean basin, in every big city, in the
colonies of Jewish traders, there have been synagogues. Those synagogues have
intrigued non Jews. People that we now might call “religious seekers” existed then. They
weren’t content with the myths and philosophies and cults that were built into their culture.
They were drawn by the God they learned about listening around the synagogue.
Not many of them had converted to Judaism. When Christianity began to blossom
out of Judaism, however, and Paul encouraged his fellow Jewish Christians to embrace the
entry into Christian life of people with no Jewish background, there was the sudden
possibility of gaining the moral authority and divine power of the God of the Bible apart
from the more stringent demands of Judaism. Paul saw this as part of the miraculous grace
of God. Some other early interpreters of the evolving Christian way saw it as slipshod and
inauthentic. So some of these who felt that more Jewish rigor needed to be included in
Christianity went around to the churches founded by Paul and told them that Paul hadn’t fully
taught what God demanded, and they wanted to impose more Jewish practices on the
new converts.
That’s what Paul’s reacting to in today’s reading. Paul begins by going into this great
Jewish rant, like a Borscht Belt comic, one-upping hs Jewish opponents. “They think
they’re Jews?” he asks, and asserts, “I’m twice the Jew they are.” Then he says that all the
great things, the real, authentic, saving things of Judaism have been his–he had a good life
with God on the old terms, but now they are something he’s moved beyond, by his
reaching out to the grace of God in Christ Jesus. There has been a way of hope with God
in Judaism, Paul says, and Paul says “I’ve done it as well as it could be done” but this
Christianity based on faith in what God’s accomplished in Christ is better. The first thing, the
old thing, was wonderful, but now there’s something which surpasses it.
This theme of astounding reversal, of an even-better overtaking the established
good, is a little harder to detect in the gospel. It’s there in this obvious way– Jesus is at
table with Lazarus. Lazarus has been dead and is alive; Jesus is alive and will be dead.
Lazarus is already, in anticipation of Christian hopes, resurrected to share the table of the
Lord; Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet anticipates the crucifixion.
There’s a deeper level of the pattern, however, and we are clued to it by what
Judas says in response to Mary’s pouring the perfume on Jesus’ feet. Judas objects–and
we don’t really need Luke’s parenthetical remark that Judas wants to steal from the money
box to know this is wrong, because we know that Judas is the Betrayer–Judas objects that
the perfume ought to have been sold and the money given to the poor. Right there Judas
is in complete harmony with an overriding theme of Luke’s gospel.
Luke’s gospel, and its companion piece of Acts of the Apostles, are passionate
about God’s concern for the poor, Jesus’ service to the poor, and most radical in
commending social reforms to benefit the poor. It is only by understanding that first that we
appreciate how Jesus’ putting Mary’s gesture above relief for the poor is part of a
surprising reversal in the gospel reading.
In a way the story is similar to the tradition about Martha serving tables by herself
and Mary sitting listening to Jesus and Martha suggesting that taking care of guests–being
hospitable, and sharing the labor of the household–should be important to Mary. Jesus
surprises Martha and annoys generations of Christians by saying that Mary is doing
something even better by listening to what he says. See; we have an ethic in our culture
that productive work is good, and better than spiritual yearning; and we have an ethic in our
culture that poverty is the result of the refusal to do productive work. Jesus, on the other
hand, says that getting spiritual things right is even more important than practical concerns,
and Jesus regards poverty as something which always can be relieved by charity–and
should be. In one of the other gospels the version of this same story has Jesus saying,
“you will always have the poor with you, and whenever you want to, you can do them
good–but you will not always have me.”
So the gospel introduces the way God has been working in the past–here in the
discredited suggestion by Judas to use great gifts to benefit the poor, which you might as
well say is the whole gospel up to this point–God’s own son being sent to save and serve
the poor, and God’s miracles being spent on vast feedings and spontaneous healthcare
and uplifting companionship and encouraging preaching–you have to realize that almost
everyone is poor in first-century Palestine, that it’s a world of a small power elite being
supported by a sea of peasants–so that’s what God has been up to so far. That’s what
God was doing in John the Baptist, to whom all the everyday people flocked but who the
educated classes doubted and dismissed. That’s what God has been doing through
Jesus, who stirs the masses but offends the leadership class.
But it’s not the most important thing after all. The important thing is coming in Jesus’
sacrifice of himself, and in John’s gospel, with its emphasis on signs, this is one more big
heavenly hint about how God is going to remake the cosmos.
These three scriptures together remind us that freeing the slaves from Egypt is
great, and that being faithful to the law is great, and that serving the poor is great–and that
God’s Servant coming to the world to give his whole life to loving others and being true to
the ethic of love and service, courage and confidence is greater. That’s the astounding new
reality we will be celebrating together at Easter.
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