Category: The Bible & Christianity

You Gotta Have Faith

10/1/2013

A number of years ago I attended a national convocation on evangelism in Washington, D.C. One of the pleasures of such a conference is the making of new friends. One new acquaintance asked me what I thought my major gifts were. After thinking hard about it, I responded that I thought I had a gift in reaching secular people and those with intellectual doubt about the truth of Christianity. I responded that this was the case because there was a great deal of skepticism in me. Faith has never been easy for me. Thus I can be empathetic with others for whom Christian faith is not easy. But what is faith?

Tony Campolo writes that when his son was a young boy he once defined faith as “believing what you know isn’t true.” I can see how easy it is for many to arrive at that definition of faith, but faith for me has never been that. I would rather define faith as believing in that which you think really is true though you cannot absolutely prove it.

As long as human knowledge is partial (and I believe that will always be the case, at least on this side of death) faith is necessary (for the atheist as well as the Christian).

I always have been struck by the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick quoted by John Claypool when he was trying to continue with his life after he had learned that his eight year old daughter, Laura Lue, had leukemia (she later died of it): “A man can put off making up his mind, but he can’t put off making up his life.”

He was pointing out the truth that we cannot refuse to live until all our questions are answered. Answers will come only by and through our living (and Christians believe at the end of our living). The Paul was right: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

©2013 C. David Hess

The Disappearance of Baby Jesus

12/2/2011

I have spoken and written previously of my problems with “baby Jesus.” Oh, I’m not talking about the flesh and blood baby Jesus but the plastic baby Jesus that I put out on my front lawn as a part of my Christmas display. I have found that taking caring of “baby Jesus” is a lot of work. This mainly involves dealing with problems of wind and snow. Quite frequently I have had to dig baby Jesus out of the snow. On other occasions he gets blown out of the manger, and I have to retrieve him and put him back in. Fortunately, the extension cord to which he is attached has kept him from being blown too far. As I have pointed out, my plastic Jesus is not so different from real babies. They need a lot of work too. As a matter of fact, they are completely helpless. In their weakness and need, they demand our love. It is a direct shot to our hearts that God has chosen to approach us this way.

At the end of last Christmas season, I was confronted with a new problem. Baby Jesus had disappeared. One morning I went out and found Mary and Joseph lying on their sides, and baby Jesus was gone! He was nowhere to be found! Upon further investigation, I found deer tracks. I surmised that a deer had come to feed at my bird feeder and got tangled up in baby Jesus’ extension cord and dragged baby Jesus off into the woods.

As this Christmas season approached, I knew that baby Jesus needed to be replaced. I went off in search of baby Jesus and could find him no where. I went to Walmart, K-Mart, and all the other usual places. I could find plenty of front yard Santas, reindeer, stars, Snoopys, snowmen, etc., but no baby Jesus! I finally found baby Jesus at Home Depot! Whew! I ended up getting him and the rest of his family and some wise men (the blow up variety).

Has this not become a parable of our Christmas celebration? With all the commotion and hubbub of our celebration, has baby Jesus disappeared? If so, maybe we, like the wise men of old, should seek him out. Of course, the real point of Christmas is not that we spend a lot of time searching for God. If truth be told, much of the time we are evading Him. The point of Christmas is that God has come in search of us!

©2011 C. David Hess

Love Wins or Does It?

4/16/2011

“God loves us.

God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our part.

Unless you do not respond the right way.

Then God will torture you forever.

In hell.”

Huh?

Those words are from the dust jacket of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins, A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

To say the least, the book is provocative. Since it was published a few weeks ago, it has become a huge best seller (number 6 on Amazon as I write this). It has elicited responses from literally thousands of blogs and was featured in a Time magazine cover story. It has been both applauded and condemned by many pastors and theologians. One North Carolina pastor has been fired for saying that he agreed with it.

In his book, he argues that we need to rethink the church’s teaching about Heaven, Hell, and Judgment. He raises the possibility that far more might end up in Heaven than Christians have traditionally thought. He argues that there is hope for those after death who have not explicitly confessed Christ before death.

Bell is no traditional liberal theologian. He is a graduate of two strongly evangelical schools, Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the founding pastor of the 7,000 member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids Michigan. He has produced a series of videos called NOOMA (our adult education class watched one last year).

I’ve read his book. It is thoroughly biblical (always a controversial thing). I agree with his assessment that “Love wins,” but there is more depth to that simple statement than one would imagine. He considers the question, “Does God get what God wants?” and invites readers to move to the question, “Do we get what we want?” He writes, “And the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure and positive yes. Yes, we get what we want. God is that loving.” Ah, there’s the rub!

As a biblical preacher, I must preach within the tension between Jesus’ statements in the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7) and the Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). From the first: “He leaves the other ninety-nine sheep in the pasture and goes looking for the one that got lost until he finds it” From the latter: the foolish virgins wanted to gain entrance to the wedding party but could not, “the door was shut.”

I highly recommend this book for your consideration.

P.S. Anyone who has read The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis will know where Bell is coming from.

©2011 C. David Hess

My Problems with "Baby Jesus"

11/30/2004

Some of you have heard me speak of my problems with “baby Jesus.” Oh, I’m not talking about the flesh and blood baby Jesus but the plastic baby Jesus that I put out on my front lawn as a part of my Christmas display. I find that taking caring of “baby Jesus” is a lot of work. This mainly involves dealing with problems of wind and snow.

In past winters (although mercifully not this one thus far), my first job every morning was to dig baby Jesus out of the previous night’s accumulation of snow. If the wind is strong, baby Jesus occasionally gets blown out of his manger, and I have to keep putting him back in. Fortunately, he is connected to an electrical extension cord so he can be “a Light to the Neighborhood” so he can only blow away so far. But my baby Jesus is a lot of work. He’s completely helpless.

Come to think of it, plastic babies aren’t the only ones that are completely helpless. Flesh and blood babies are helpless too. They can’t feed themselves, change themselves, clean themselves, transport themselves or anything else. About the only thing they can do is cry, which is literally a cry for help.

William Willimon has written:

Nothing is so helpless, so dependent, so fragile, so frail as a baby. I know of no other religion so bold as to admit to the possibility of its god appearing in so vulnerable a form. How scandalously condescending is the love of this God who deems to meet us first as a baby. How threatening is this God to my human desire for an aloof, Platonic deity who lives in the realm of the abstract, self-contained ideal, rather than in the stable out back, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. For most of the year we preach about humanity’s need for God. But on Christmas, can we be so bold as to speak of God’s need for humanity--a God who comes, reaching out to us, as a baby, needing the love, warmth, and nurture of an utterly human family? (On a Wild and Windy Mountain, p. 25)

As I said earlier, this winter has not yet presented many problems for my baby Jesus. My shepherd has fallen “prostate at his feet” a few times, but perhaps there is a sermon in that as well. Maybe you would like to do the same this Christmas?

©2004 C. David Hess

Easter Earthquake

4/4/2002

During my sermon this past Sunday, I focused on the earthquake which Matthew says occurred on Easter morning. As long as my sermons are, it might be hard for anyone to imagine that I actually leave things out that I don’t have time to include, but I do. For example, some points left over from last Sunday are:

Matthew’s inclusion of the earthquake in his account of Easter emphasizes that the resurrection was not just an internal event experienced by the disciples. Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, in dialogue with Marcus Borg of the skeptical Jesus Seminar, says,

Marcus thinks the disciples had an experience. They said, “Wasn’t it great being with Jesus before they killed him? You remember those great stories he told? The lectures, er, sermons? Just thinking about it makes him seem almost still here. Yep, he is still here. Let’s all close our eyes and believe real hard that he’s still here. Okay?”

The resurrection was not just a psychological event. The earth shook!

It is important to note too that God’s coming into the world and into our lives is always an earth-shaking, life-shaking event. William Willimon raises the intriguing possibility that the angel who met the women at the empty tomb was the same angel who awakened Joseph one night and gave him the message that his fiancée was pregnant. (Willimon remarks, “Talk about an earthquake!”) The point is that when God comes into the world or into a life, things cannot remain the same.

Lastly, earthquakes reveal that which cannot be shaken. Our lives can be shaken by accident, by the gyrations of the stock market, or by a word from our doctor or employer. We sometimes wonder if there is any solid ground upon which we can stand. The Easter earthquake reveals the frailty of this world and its powers. It also reveals the “Solid Rock” upon which we may build our lives.

©2002 C. David Hess

Cloning Jesus?

11/1/2000

Scientists have cloned sheep and other animals. Everyone is wondering when they are going to clone the first human. Now there is a group which is going to attempt to clone Jesus. They refer to it as “The Second Coming Project.” Here’s the explanation on the group’s website:

The Second Coming Project is a not-for-profit organization devoted to bringing about the Second Coming of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, as prophesied in the Bible, in time for the 2,000th anniversary of his birth. Our intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques pioneered at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, by taking an incorrupt cell from one of the many Holy Relics of Jesus' blood and body that are preserved in churches throughout the world, extracting its DNA, and inserting into an unfertilized human egg (oocyte), through the now-proven biological process called nuclear transfer. The fertilized egg, now the zygote of Jesus Christ, will be implanted into the womb of a young virginal woman (who has volunteered of her own accord), who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second Virgin Birth.

If all goes according to plan, the birth will take place on December 25, 2001...

No longer can we rely on hope and prayer, waiting around futilely for Jesus to return. We have the technology to bring him back right now: there is no reason, moral, legal or Biblical, not to take advantage of it. In order to save the world from sin, we must clone Jesus to initiate the second coming of Christ.

Despite the fact that this was reported as real news by Fox News and several leading newspapers, the whole thing is a hoax. (You can read about this and other famous religious hoaxes on the web at http://www.snopes.com/religion/religion.htm)

Of course, it got me thinking. Isn’t that what the gospel is all about, cloning Jesus? It’s not done with transplanted DNA inserted into a human egg but with his Spirit inserted into a human heart. That’s what God is trying to do with you and me. What a difference it might make in our community, to the whole world, if this experiment is successful.

©2000 C. David Hess

The Bible Needs No Interpretation?

8/24/2000

Baptists made big news again earlier in the summer. I am speaking of the Southern Baptists (our church belongs to the American Baptist Churches/USA). At their national convention in Orlando, they went on record as being against the ordination of women as church pastors. As significant as this action was, they took an even more radical action not as well noticed by the media. They radically revised the official SBC statement of faith and practice, “The Baptist Faith and Message.”

The previous version of the statement identified Jesus as the “criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted.” This statement was dropped from the newly adopted version.

If not Jesus, what criterion do we use to interpret scripture? Is the implication that scripture does not need to be interpreted? That we can always take it at face value? That idea can lead to all kinds of mischief—like when Southern Baptists, at their first national meeting, declared slavery to be God-ordained because the Bible says, “Slaves obey your masters.” (Ephesians 6:5)

Wayne Ward, a former professor of mine, told the delegates at the meeting:

The Bible is not a “flat” document. You could follow Moses and stone adulterers. It would clear out Congress and empty some pulpits, but it would not be true to words of Jesus in the New Testament...

The Bible is Scripture, God's written word, yes, but it does not say anywhere believe on the Bible and thou shalt be saved... We have to decide whether we're going to stop in the Old Testament with Moses or whether we're going to go on and interpret Moses by Jesus.

The Bible can be trusted, but it cannot always be taken at face value. It must be interpreted. The only valid standard of interpretation for the Christian is Jesus (“What would Jesus do?”). Of course we know Jesus through scripture, but not just through scripture. We also know Jesus through his Spirit which is here to guide us and lead us into all truth (John 15:12-13) We wrestle not with written words alone but with the living Christ.

©2000 C. David Hess

Rosie O'Donnell, Scope Mouthwash, and the Cross

5/10/1997

Scope, the mouthwash company, tried to get a little advertising at talk show host, Rosie O'Donnell's expense; now they wish they hadn't. It all began when Scope named Rosie the "least kissable" TV talk show host. Rosie responded by plugging Scope's competitor, Listerine, and declaring that Scope tastes "like scum." Guests which came on Rosie's show pointedly kissed her. Listerine took full advantage of the situation and offered to give $1,000 to one of Rosie's favorite charities for every kiss she received on her show. Celebrities, including the full cast of one Broadway show, lined up to kiss Rosie. Listerine paid out over a half million dollars to make good on their promise. It was money well spent. It was an advertising bonanza for Listerine. Scope finally cried "uncle" and apologized to Rosie, but the damage was done. Their advertising strategy had backfired big time.

Something like that happened almost two thousand years ago. Satan and the forces of evil conspired to kill the holy, Son of God, but their plan backfired really, really big time. What they had intended for evil, God used for good (we even call the Friday on which Christ was killed "good"). The cross was not the defeat of God as intended, but the instrument through which He saved us. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, "We crucified him on a stick, but we have always had a curious feeling that He somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it."

©1997 C. David Hess

Jesus Is Still Hot News

4/10/1996

Even after 20 centuries Jesus is still hot news. Last week all three major U.S. news magazines devoted their cover stories to Jesus. The articles dealt with the same questions with which humankind has been wrestling since Jesus first walked the earth: Who is he? Was he in fact raised from the dead?

Even among Christians there are differing interpretations of Jesus and of his resurrection. Some have emphasized the Easter experience of the disciples or the Easter faith. They would argue that whether or not the tomb was found empty is not important. The important thing is whether or not we can live lives of hope and faith as did the early disciples. Others have emphasized the Easter event. They contend that what actually happened that first Easter is of supreme importance. The latter group emphasizes the objective reality of the Resurrection. The first group emphasizes the subjective experience of the Resurrection.

I would argue that to choose between the two is a false choice. Both are absolutely necessary. When individuals speak of the "disciples’ experience," we must always ask, "experience of what?" The subjective and objective cannot be divorced from one another.

I very much believe in the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus. I stand with the apostle Paul when he wrote: "...if Christ has not been raised from death, then we have nothing to preach and you have nothing to believe. More than that, we are shown to be lying about God..." (I Cor. 15:14-15) This preaching of Christ’s real and complete victory over death was of supreme importance to the early Christians. Ernst Bloch, the late German Marxist philosopher, wrote: "It wasn’t the morality of the Sermon on the Mount which enabled Christianity to conquer Roman paganism, but the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead."

Of course, to contend for the historicity of the Easter event is not enough either. One must have the Easter experience, the personal resurrection within. No doubt Satan believes in the Easter event, but she (in an effort to be gender neutral) has not had the Easter experience. If the Easter event has had no effect upon the way you live your life, it really makes no difference whether it happened or not.

©1996 C. David Hess

Will the Fundamentalists or the Liberals Win?

3/27/1996

In this year in which our church is looking back through 200 years of its history, it is interesting to note that other churches are also looking to their own pasts. Of particular note was the recent celebration of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City in which they dedicated their newly repaired bell to the memory of their former pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Colgate Class of 1900. One of the church’s elders, David Pultz, re-preached a sermon which Fosdick had preached in 1922—"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

In an interview, quoted in The New York Times, Mr. Pultz said, "What a lot of people have missed over the years is that it is an appeal to tolerance. One of the remarkable things that people have said, after I preached, is how relevant it seems today."

In the sermon Fosdick asked: "When will the world learn that intolerance solves no problems?"

Fosdick added, "This is not a lesson which the Fundamentalists alone need to learn; liberals also need to learn it."

Fosdick numbered himself as a liberal. His chief concern was to fight for the proposition that we should always be open to new truth (John 15:12f.) and that truth is of one cloth—when properly understood, there can be no contradiction between scientific truth and religious truth.

While opposing fundamentalists in many ways, he also valued their contributions. In a later sermon, "A Fundamentalist Sermon by a Modernist Preacher," he declared:

You see, we modernists have often gotten at our faith by a negative process. We do not believe this. We do not believe that. We have given up this incredible idea or that obsolete doctrine. So we pare down and dim out our faith by negative abstractions until we have left only the ghostly remainder of what was once a great religion. Then seeing how few our positive convictions are and how little they matter, we grow easy going about everybody else’s convictions, and end in a mush of general concession. Then a crisis falls upon the individual soul, upon the family, upon the world at large, where a religion that is going to amount to anything must have deep conviction in it...Here in this church we will not stand for such thin modernism. O my soul, be broad in your sympathies but O my soul, go deep in your convictions.

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