SCRIPTURE READING: John 1:12-13
12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
SERMON: "A WELL-TRODDEN PATH" Sunday, Febuary 10, 2008
PASTOR HUDSON: Today we are visiting
a familiar passage out of John's gospel to resource
our lenten journey and spiritual growth. I've
chosen to describe it as a well-trodden path because
in this short passage, we find laid out, in essence,
the route to God. If you're hungry for a relationship with God, and
certainly scholars tell us of certain studies indicate that this is
a time when people are probably more spiritually
motivated, spiritually interested than at anytime within our
lifetimes, and yet the truth is in the midst of all that spiritual
hunger, we may be as churches at our least effective
point in terms of being able to reach out and
provide them something significant.
So I suppose in some ways this text speaks to us
on a couple of different levels, one is the level
of outreach. As we think about being Wesley
United Methodist Church in our community, what is it exactly that
we are offering to those who may come our way with real spiritual
hunger within their lives? Secondly, and
this is perhaps the lenten dimension, what is it that
we have within our own hearts that satisfies the
spiritual hunger that is a part of our everyday life?
Do you feel like that you're as close to God as
you'd like to be? Are there dimensions of your
relationship with the Lord that you'd like to think
were richer and deeper than they are right at this
moment in time? Well, I think this text can offer us
a little bit of help along the way.
Friends, let's consider that John tells us that there
are three things that the route to God is not and one
thing that the route to God is. I want us to explore
each of those just briefly this morning.
As you journey in lent and as you think about
your own spiritual journey with God, the first thing
that John tells us is that the route
to God is not about being born of blood. Now, what
does he mean by that? I think we often think this image relates
to natural birth, and I do believe that that's right,
but let's take it a step further.
John understands within his total Gospel that there is a tendency
on the part of people to imagine that because of
their pedigree they were somehow or another given a
unique position, an inside track to the favor and the
approval of God. Therefore, we could translate this passage
this way, that the route to God, the
well-trodden path is not about our pedigree. There
are many of us today that are proud of our
spiritual roots.
In Jesus's day, he had that same issue to deal
with because the audience that he often spoke to would say we are
children of Abraham. Naturally, God likes us and approves of us.
All that we are is because God understands that we are
ultimately the right stock genetically as well as
spiritually.
Jesus's response, as John tells it, is that
salvation is not about pedigree. In our own day and
time we have those same issues. Some of us sitting
here this morning are intensely proud that we can
trace our Methodist heritage back across several
generations. My parents and my grandparents and my
great-grandparents were all Methodists in one form or
another, and that's a matter of significant pride for
us, and not necessarily pride in a bad sense, but
pride in a general sense of the term.
It only becomes a negative when we imagine that
somehow or another our pedigree counts on the
spiritual realm. John Wesley put it this way one time
when reflecting upon the spiritual blessings that the
people called Methodists had in his own day. He said, you know, I
really do not worry that there will come a day where there will
be no such group known as Methodists, but rather, that we might
come to a day when as Methodists we look at one another and imagine
that we are God's uniquely favored
people, and that we would lose the real touchstone of
God's power and would become confident merely
in our pedigree.
Wesley understood as did John's gospel that everyone who
believed in Jesus Christ, that critical phrase was the
source of the power they needed to become children of
God. He said to those individuals would be granted
power, ability, effective relationship that would
shape and change and transform their lives, not
because of their pedigree, but because of their faith
and their trust in Jesus Christ.
Regardless of the sign that hangs on the door, no
matter how we may appreciate our heritage, the truth
of the matter is our pedigree counts for nothing in
satisfying the spiritual relationship, the hunger that
is there within our lives.
Quite the contrary. How many of us when we were
growing up found ourselves frustrated because the
church of our parents or our grandparents was no
longer relevant to meet the spiritual needs of our
heart and life? Some of you here today have either
this experience yourself or you know someone who has-
who laments the fact that your children or your
grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are no
longer a part of the church that you dearly love, but
they moved on somewhere else, and in some other
setting, some other place, some other time they have
carved out a spiritual spot that is very different
than yours, and maybe you've experienced or know
someone who has experienced kind of a poignancy in
that, that gee, I wish they could be here with me.
So, pedigree is not the route to God. Pedigree
is not a part of that well-trodden path, but neither
is, John tells us, the flesh. When he says that it's
not by blood, nor by flesh, I think that's an
interesting term, as well. What did John mean when he
says that the path to becoming a child of God is not
through the flesh? Could flesh represent the
positive intentions, the good resolutions, the desire
to be a better person than we were before.
You see, there are certainly religions, and I
probably all religions, that have this element. We
imagine that the path to God includes somehow or
another grabbing ourselves by our lapels, shaking
ourself, getting our life organized and by main strength
making our way to God.
The New Testament is very clear that that does not
work, and most of us probably have lots of personal anecdotes
that can share how, in fact, that doesn't
work. The New Testament message is
summed up in the story of the prodigal son.
It's a telling rejection of the idea that the
path to God involves personal improvement or
self-help. The message of the
prodigal son is that he journeys to a place where he losses all of
his resources by living in a manner that is extremely imprudent
until finally he is materially bankrupt. Sitting
there in a condition of great loss, he finally he manages to find
someone who will hire him to feed the hogs, and as he's feeding the
hogs, he comes to
his senses and realizes that his life is out of
control, but the answer is not to somehow or another
say, hey, I'm going to get myself up, and I'm going to
take a shower and I'm going to get my life
back in order. No.
He goes home-- back down the road, and he returns to
the father's house. For Jesus, that becomes
a metaphor for returning to God's grace and
acknowledging, as the prodigal did in his speech to the father.
You remember it. He said, Father, I am no longer
worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your
hired servants, which is a way of saying just, please,
let me stay in the house.
He didn't even get that speech out before the
father actually cut him off, wrapped his arms around
him, loved him, forgave him, provided for his
cleansing. He didn't cleanse himself, provided for
his raiment. He didn't dress himself up. He simply
threw himself on the father's grace and Dad took care
of the rest.
You see, the truth of the matter is the path to
God is not by flesh. It is not by my imagining that
through my own efforts I can make myself good enough
to be acceptable to God, and God will look at me and
say, you know, that's the kind of person I need in my
household, what a fine job he's done. Not by flesh.
Nor is it by the will of man, that's the third image
that John adds in. It's not by pedigree, the blood.
It's not by the flesh, our own best self-efforts, nor
is it by the will of man.
Now the will of man for me in this passage
becomes indicative of the ideologies that oftentimes
we imagine carry a great deal of weight with God.
I remember -- now many of you will not admit to
watching this show, so I won't ask for a show of
hands, but there is a television
program called South Park. Don't laugh, that's a dead
give-away, now we know who watches South Park, but the
adults, the older folks in here, they watch it, too,
but they just think I'm not going to laugh, I'm not
going to laugh.
There is an episode where the kids at South Park
are wrestling with this whole thing about salvation.
It's a fascinating episode because Stan and Kyle,
these are two little kids in the show, they get in an
argument over what you need to do for God to love you,
and here is what Kyle says to Stan, if you want to be
a Christian, Stan, that's cool, but focus on what
Jesus taught, not on how he died.
Now that's an interesting phrase because you see
John, the gospel writer, would
say, are you kidding? Focusing on what Jesus taught
in terms of how we live and how we should act and the
values, that's not the route to salvation. It's not that those
things are bad, we do
need to focus on those, but you cannot live by the
teachings of Jesus in a manner that is good enough -- if you'll
permit me that phrase -- to have God look at you and say, you're
the kind of guy, you're the kind of gal I want right
here, just come on up.
What we do in this Christian life is always about
response to what God has done within our heart and
life through an act of unmerited grace, that's what I
mean and that's what I think John means when he says
it's not by the will of man. It's not by the
ideologies of man. We cannot concoct an ideology that
is sufficient to deal with the real struggle issues
that we face as human beings.
Kyle had it wrong, not because the teachings of
Jesus are wrong, but because the teachings of Jesus
come after that journey to the cross. For me, when
John said that salvation comes to everyone who has
believed in Jesus Christ, that is the critical issue.
You want to know what the well-trodden path is, and I
know that the answer is known to probably virtually
everyone in this sanctuary, but it's worth repeating
again.
The well-trodden path, the route to God is the
path where we as individuals come to the Father
through belief in Jesus Christ, and we acknowledge
that neither our pedigree nor our positive intentions
nor any ideology or any system of belief that we might
be predisposed to believe is an excellent way are
sufficient for entrance into his presence and grace.
It is only by excepting the grace of Jesus
Christ, the work that Christ did on the cross that we
as individuals have now freedom to come into the
presence of God, and when we have done that, when
we've come back like the prodigal son or daughter, and
we've said, Lord, I'm not worthy, and I understand
that, my pedigree won't cut it, my best intentions
won't cut it, my ideologies are insufficient, then we
discover by casting ourselves on grace that God wraps
his arms around us, and in that moment he gives to us
the Greek word is exusia. It's the image of the
right, the privilege, the effective ability, the power
to become children of God.
The very best of what happens within us is always
a God work. So today, Brothers and Sisters, let me
ask you this: First, have you made that journey?
It's always possible, and I say this always
respectfully, never disrespectfully, but it's always
possible that there could be one or two or three
somewhere who up until this point in time have counted
on the pedigree.
You counted on the fact that you were a
United Methodist or Presbyterian or something else
or maybe you counted on the fact that somehow
you were just doing the best you could to
live a good life and knowing that somehow or another
that that would maybe pan out at the end of the day,
or maybe you had an ideology, a belief system and you
were counting on that to get you enough good marks on
the ledger sheet of life to give you a fair shake when
you stand in the presence of God.
If you're in one of those situations today, I
would invite you to consider the possibility that the
route to God, John's well-worn, well-trodden path is,
indeed, the path that touches deep within the heart to
where all the uncertainty is washed away, and as
Wesley would put it centuries upon centuries later,
that we could have the common privilege of every
believer and that being a heart-filled assurance that
God had made us, adopted us as a part of his family.
But then maybe you're in that arena, you've
experienced that wonderful, powerful grace-filled
moment in which truly the spirit will witness within
your spirit that you are a child of God, and you'd
just like to travel that path again simply because
coming back knowing that as we return time and time
again to the source of grace, it becomes as the old
hymn has said, simply sweeter as the days go by.
No matter where you're at, I invite you today, as
we come to that time in our service, to feel the
liberty to come and to spend time in this lenten
season at the altar, whether to experience for the
very first time or to refresh again and again. Let's
come and pray.