Message 09-18-05
Series: The Three Gifts of God
Scripture: John13:1-17
Title: Coming Clean
Intro:
“Credo ergo ago”... I believe therefore I act.
We are called on by God to act in the world. How do we do that?
For a while now I’ve been working through an idea that I call “the three gifts of God.” I spoke on this some little time ago. You may remember because it was in that series that people walked out on the message. So, I want you to know that I will be safer this time. I want you to hear this and I want you to think on it with me. You don’t have to fear. We will be safe.
We are called by God to act with him in the world. I suggest that there are three significant gifts of God that he gives us and these three gifts are what we can then give to the world – to the people around us. Listen to these words of Paul, the apostle…
16So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
No longer do we regard people – not any person – from a worldly point of view the way people who aren’t reconciled with God view each other. We are new and we are given the responsibility by God to bring his message of reconciliation to the world – to act as ambassadors on his behalf. How do we do that?
I suggest the three gifts of God. These three gifts are cleansing, feasting and knowing. They aren’t in any particular order. But today we’re going to look at cleansing. Next week we’ll look at feasting, and we’ll feast together at the Alternative Vespers service next Sunday evening at 6:00pm. The following week is world communion Sunday and we’ll look at knowing. That was the one that people left during, and, again, I just want to assure you that this time you will be safe.
But, first, how do we bring cleansing into the lives of others.
Study:
God is holy and I think it’s important to admit that holiness seems like a boring idea. I think we’ve made it like that. Holiness is this foreign concept to us. How do you picture holiness?
My dad grew up in New York city and because my family lived on Long Island we made various trips into the city with my dad. He knew it well. One day, for some special event, he took us all to an Italian restaurant called “Mama Leoni’s”. I was a kid of about 11 or 12. They seated us in this lower room that was all brick and covered with wine bottles on racks. They were all laying pointed down around all the walls. We got into a conversation about whether they were real or not and most of my family thought they were, but my mother didn’t. She said, “they’re not going to put real bottles of wine just out here in the open.” And with that she reached up and pulled a bottle off the rack beside her and was about to shake it to show us it wasn’t real.
Instantly, three or four waiters surrounded our table catching hold of my mother’s hand and saying, “Madam, Madam, don’t touch the wine.” They took the bottle from her, put it back into the rack and disappeared. We weren’t even sure where they went. But my mom said, “I guess they are real.”
You don’t touch the wine. Why? Because, it is special. It is set aside for a special occasion. It is only to be used by the people who know what it is actually worth.
Holiness is like that it seems sometimes. It just sits up there, gathering dust, being told it is special.
I want us to realize deeply that this is different from the holiness of God. We have stories about how we can’t touch it, that it will kill us. Moses couldn’t look at it. And we have stories in the Bible of people who reached out to the things of God, to the things closest to God and were killed because they touched them.
I was just talking with a professor at Union Theological Seminary about this all and he compared it to Nuclear power. We can’t get close to nuclear power. If we do it will kill us. That is more like the holiness of God. The holiness of God is a power we can’t control.
Nuclear power is closer to the idea of holiness than aged wine. But there’s an amazing difference between the holiness of God and special wine or radiation. The holiness of God moved to us in Jesus and it came to bring us to himself. So the holiness of God is not just untouchable and needs to be set in a special place gathering dust. It is not just uncontrollable and can kill us if we get too close. The holiness of God in its “specialness”, in its difference, creates a difference. It changes us in a way we can’t change ourselves. The holiness of God has no problem sitting down with tax collectors and sinners, prostitutes and religious bigots.
The holiness of God is not made unclean by us. The holiness of God makes us clean.
Did you ever think about that? Just the way that dark can’t take over light, God’s holiness can’t be tainted by our sin. Have you seen those pants that repel stains? It’s that kind of idea. But it’s even more than that. WE can’t make it dirty, but it can make us clean. Did you ever notice that?
We can make other people dirty by touching them, can’t we? I remember that for the first year’s of my son’s life, one of the sleeves of all my shirts had stains on it. Those grubby little hands were eating carrots and jelly and buttered toast and then they’d grab hold of me. We can always make someone else dirty. What was amazing about Jesus was that his touch made people clean.
Not only did his touch make people clean, but his word made people clean and now we say that his blood made people clean.
In lots of place but for me, I look back to the first chapter of Mark, for a place where we see Jesus’ touch make someone clean. A leprous man comes to Jesus and says to him, “If you’re willing, you can make me clean.” And Jesus reached out his hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing. Be clean.”
In the Gospel of John he tells his disciples that they are made clean because of the word he spoke to them. But we also see his word cleansing people inwardly and outwardly.
But then we are told that it is through the sacrifice of Jesus, through his death, that we are cleansed and in Hebrews 9 we read specifically that just as forgiveness only comes through blood, so we find forgiveness through the blood of Jesus.
There is a cleansing that comes from God through the touch of Jesus, through the words of Jesus and through the sacrifice of Jesus. And I think we find all of that in our Scripture today. Our story from the last supper opens by telling us that Jesus was completely secure in his place with God. He was completely secure in having done the work of God and so now the only thing left is to demonstrate the fullness of his love.
This demonstration requires a sacrifice on Jesus’ part. He must humble himself to take on the role of the lowliest servant in the household. Taking hold of someone’s dirty foot and cleaning it was the work of the last guy on the totem pole. This is the picture of the CEO delivering everyone’s mail and taking their orders for coffee. Jesus gives up his position of power and strips himself down and kneels before each of his disciples and washes their feet.
No wonder Peter at first refuses for Jesus to do this. But then Jesus opens up for him this new insight. He needs cleansing in order to be part of him. He’s being made clean through the touch of Jesus. He is being made clean then through the words of Jesus and he is being made clean by the sacrifice of Jesus. In our picture the disciples are being prepared to see their leader, teacher and Lord be humiliated on the cross – his ultimate sacrifice.
This mystical aspect of the work of Jesus sometimes confuses people and sometimes it puts them off and sometimes it causes them to walk away from him. But don’t let that happen to you. Because there is something physical going on that helps us deal with the mystical.
The work of God in reconciling us to himself carries not only a mystical and spiritual aspect, but there is a physical aspect that helps us experience it even more fully. I believe this is an aspect of the grace of God to us. It gives us something to hold on to so we can know it’s true.
One of the things that caught my attention in studying cleansing was that leprosy had to be cleansed. The people of Jesus’ time didn’t talk about it as being healed or cured but cleansed. That led me back to investigate leprosy and what I found is that in the Old Testament the leprosy is spoken of as healed – a condition that was determined by the priests, but once it was clear that the leprosy was healed – then there was a ritual of cleansing. Actually, I was helped to find this as I spoke with Richard Boice, the seminary professor I mentioned. There is a ritual of washing, cleansing that took place after the leprosy was healed.
By the time of Jesus, maybe because leprous people had to wear torn rags and shout out “unclean, unclean”, it was spoken of as one thought. Leprosy had to be cleansed. But there was still a need to go through a ritual. The cleansing came with a physicality that we could understand.
Jesus gave this example to his disciples – to us. We can bring cleansing to our world through our touch, through our words and through our sacrifice. That’s what we’re called to do – to bring about reconciliation between people and God. We get to convey to them the touch of God, the word of God and the sacrifice of God that demonstrates his message of love and hope.
I know this because this week I’ve experienced it.
You may not believe this but sometimes people get mad at me. I know, you’re thinking how could anyone get angry with such a nice guy? But it’s true. It does happen. And a woman I know got very angry with me and it was hard for us to communicate and I found it impossible to clear up. So, it’s gone on for a while.
And that’s the way it is sometimes. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong. I had some ideas, but it wasn’t clear to me and because the communication had broken down I couldn’t get things straight. This is the way it is with sin. Sometimes we don’t even know what we did. How did we get leprosy? How did I get cut off from God? How come it doesn’t work when I’m just trying to get through? Jesus came as the message from God that there was a way but he was reaching out to make it happen.
This week I received an email saying I want to be friends again. Do you know that’s what reconciliation is? Reconciliation is the re-establishing of an old friendship. God wants us back. That was the email I received when I came into my office and open my email. It was a message of hope and forgiveness and reconciliation. And I wrote back saying, “Yahoo!” that’s what I want too. But then I got another email that said, “I am going to give you such a big hug the next time I see you.” And that’s it. That’s the physicality. I can be forgiven. I can be set right. I can be cured. But I need the cleansing. The cleansing comes with the hug.
Cleansing – the gift of God for the people of God and for the people of our world through the people of God. Through the holiness of God we get to help people get clean through our touch, through our words and through our sacrifice
