August 21, 2011Faith Memorial Chapel
Cedar Mountain, N.C.
John 12:12-26
One afternoon a month or so ago, I was driving through Greenville when the voice of a three-year-old in a car seat behind me chimed out of the blue, “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” “Sing Jesus to you?” I asked. “Sing Jesus to me!” he insisted. “How do I ‘sing Jesus’ to you?” I asked him. “You know,” he said, assuming a lot, it seemed to me at the time, “The Bible song.” “Sing Jesus?” “The Bible song?” So I sang what came to mind: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” “Is that it?” I asked. “Yeah, that’s it!” he said. And so I sang it. And when I got to the chorus, he joined in loudly and happily on the only words he knew: “loves me!” “loves me!” “loves me!” And when we finished he said, “Sing it again, Daddy!” And so I did.
And I marveled as I drove and sang that Sunday School teachers in preschool classes for two-year-olds and three-year-olds had created such a positive emotional and spiritual environment that a child who didn’t yet know how to count past five or how to finish his ABC’s—he always gets stuck at “V” for some reason and perpetually recycles “T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L,M, N, O, P; it’s an alphabetical loop into infinity, a song that never ends—that child knew enough to ask for “the Bible song”: “Sing Jesus to me!”
I also marveled at how the unexpected song request of a three-year-old expressed the essence of the gospel in a famous passage in the gospel of John, in two books on the message of the gospel that have been published in the last two years, and in the words of a grandfather who died 24 years before he was born.
The more widely-known of the two books was Rob Bell’s runaway bestseller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Bell’s book was controversial before it even arrived on bookstore shelves and electronic reading devices. Before its publication, Bell was a darling of American evangelical circles, “one of the nation’s rock-star-popular young pastors,” USA Today called him. He’s not so darling in some circles any more, as his book called into question the traditional teaching of the church about hell as a literal place of eternal damnation. Nothing Bell says is particularly new, at least in liberal Christian circles. What made his book so controversial is that Bell is a card-carrying conservative, an evangelical pastor who came to the conclusion that “the good news” just might be even better news than most evangelicals have been inclined to suppose.
Lost in the public furor over what Bell says about hell is the more important message of what Bell says about the nature of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The essential message of the gospel, Bell says, is as his title claims, Love Wins. In Jesus Christ, sin and death and hell lose, and we can all sing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. . . . “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s not just good news; that’s the very best news of all. Sing all you want about heaven; sing all you want about hell. Sing all you want about Trinity; sing all you want about mystery. Sing all you want about about revelation and tribulation and consummation. But above all else, “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s the gospel, and even a three-year-old can know it.
The second book didn’t get nearly as much attention as Rob Bell’s Love Wins. Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola was published last summer to considerably less hoopla and controversy. But in a truly memorable assertion, Sweet and Viola suggest that “the major disease of today’s church is JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.” JDD, Jesus Deficit Disorder, is what the church contracts, Sweet and Viola write, when “the person of Jesus” is “replaced by the language of ‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” Just in case you don’t read the ideological shorthand in the words Sweet and Viola use, Jesus Manifesto is an equal opportunity offender in the contemporary American Christian context.
They spell it out this way: “The body of Christ is at a crossroads right now,” they say. “The two common alternatives are to move either to the left or to the right.” Most “people are frozen,” they write, “as they look in either of those directions. When they look to the left, they decide they cannot venture there. When they look to the right they decide the same. Whether they realize it or not, people are looking for a fresh alternative—a third way.” And that way third way, according to Sweet and Viola is neither left nor right but forward: “this global, Google world,” they write, “needs a meta-narrative more than ever, and the Jesus-Story is the interpreting system of all other systems.” The “Jesus-Story” is the way forward: “Sing Jesus to me.”
This morning’s gospel lesson is most familiar as the story of the triumphal entry, the Palm Sunday narrative. In it, a great crowd has heard that Jesus of Nazareth is coming to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. They are eager to see Jesus because of what they heard that he had done when he raised Lazarus from the dead. So they “took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!’” On Palm Sunday, that crowd gets all the attention. But several verses later, we are introduced to another set of characters, some “Greeks,” they are called in verse 20, after the Palm Sunday gospel lesson has ended.
We don’t know who, exactly, these “Greeks” might have been, except that they would have been non-Jews. They may have been “God-fearers,” Gentile persons of faith who attached themselves to a synagogue but who declined to submit to the Mosaic dietary restrictions and, in the case of men, circumcision. Or they may have been only “spiritual tourists,” as Max Stackhouse suggests, the first-century equivalent of “new-agers” who were seeking a spiritual fix in the latest religious fad. Whoever they were, the words they say to Philip in verse 21 have become famous in churches.
In churches all over England and in not a few scattered around the states, the words of their request, “Sir, we would see Jesus,” as the King James Version translates it, are carved, engraved, emblazoned, and otherwise displayed on pulpits where the preacher can see them as he or she stands before the congregation. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Preach all you want about heaven; preach all you want about hell. Preach all you want about Trinity and mystery. Preach all you want about revelation and tribulation and consummation. Preach all you want about “‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” But above all else, “Preach Jesus,” those pulpits tell the preacher.
The great American preacher Fred Craddock tells the story of how when he was little his family moved from their farm into town when times got too tough to make a living on the land. Not long after they arrived, some women from a nearby church “came to our house and brought a pair of Buster Brown shoes that fit me, and enabled me to start Sunday school—those women didn’t just bring me a pair of shoes. You know what else they brought me? They brought me a picture book of stories about Jesus. I needed those shoes. I really needed those stories,” Craddock said. In this “global, Google world”: the way forward—rather than to the left or to the right—is the Jesus-story. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me! “Loves me!” “Loves me!”
Ten years or so ago, as we prepared a missions team to Canada to work with international refugees, among whom there would be many Muslims, we instructed our team members to answer the question of their own religious identity as “I follow Jesus” or “I’m a Jesus-follower.” The term “Christian” among Muslims is a lot like the term “Baptist” among Americans: it’s a religion with a bad reputation. So to side-step the preconceived negatives, we used the name of Jesus instead of the name of a religion. The first time I heard of this rhetorical slight of hand, I confess that I was offended by it. Why should I change how I speak of myself because of someone else’s sensibilities? Never mind that the apostle Paul went so far as to say, “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all. . . . all for the sake of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:19,22-23). It’s their problem, not mine, I thought to myself. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that we could all probably do with less Christianity and more Jesus-following.
The widespread distaste of people in our time for so-called “organized religion” is on the one hand a cop-out. Take it from a Baptist who knows: disorganized religion offers no advantages whatsoever. But the popular criticism, on the other hand, is a clear and compelling commentary that Christianity is too much with us and Jesus not enough. “We wish to see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!”
Now, just in case you think I think that’s all there is to it, let’s look back at this morning’s gospel lesson to see what happens next. Because of our expectations of immediate gratification and our genie-in-a-bottle approach to God, we would expect that the Greeks’ request would result in an immediate audience with the Nazarene. “Your wish is my command,” he would say. “What can I do for you today to make your life better?” he would ask. But that’s not what Jesus says at all, is it? Instead, he says, “The hour has come.”
If you have been reading the gospel of John up to this point, 12:23, where Jesus says, “The hour has come,” you know when you hear these words that you have reached a defining moment in the story. For ten chapters, John’s gospel has been telling us that Jesus’ hour had not yet come. “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus says in 2:4. “My time has not yet come,” he says in 7:6. “My time has not yet fully come,” he says in 7:8. “His hour had not yet come,” we read in 7:30 and again in 8:20. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. And then, in 12:23: Now. Now “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
This is the moment that the reader of the gospel of John has been waiting for ever since chapter 2. Finally, it is now; Jesus will be glorified. “King of Kings! And Lord of Lords! Hallelujah!” That’s who the first crowd in this morning’s gospel lesson turned out to see, and that’s the Jesus we want to see. That’s the Jesus we want to sing: “And he shall reign—and so shall we—forever and ever, forever and ever.”
But look at what Jesus says at the defining moment of his ministry in the gospel of John. It begins in verse 24. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains but a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” His glory is in his dying? “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In order to keep life, we must lose life? “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” To see Jesus—to be where Jesus is—we must serve and follow?
It’s no wonder that the crowd who sang, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!” on Sunday shouted, “Crucify him!” later in the week. When his hour finally came, Jesus did not say what they expected him to say or do what they expected him to do; and instead of reassessing their own expectations, they called for his crucifixion. And when they did, it turned out exactly as Jesus said that it would: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
The apostle Paul recognized Jesus’ defining moment as the stumbling block that it is when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jews and Greeks alike come out to see Jesus only to have their expectations disappointed and their desire for gratification go ungratified. Because Jesus says it is in dying—not clinging—to life that we bear much fruit. It is in giving—not grasping—that we receive life. It is in serving and following—not lording and leading—that we arrive where Jesus is. If there is a “Jesus Manifesto” for our lives and for the church and for our world in the gospel of John, it is right there in the defining moment of the arrival of the hour that we had been waiting for since chapter 2.
More than 30 years ago, as I was experiencing the church-culture shock of having moved from my high-church Lutheran upbringing into a decidedly revivalistic stream of Baptist life, I wrote to my father who was a Lutheran minister that I was unnerved by the fact that all I was hearing in church was “Jesus”: “Jesus this” and “Jesus that.” “They don’t talk about God; they don’t mention the Holy Spirit. It’s just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all the time. I don’t think I’m in a church; I think I’m in a Jesus movement,” I wrote. I fully expected him to affirm my prejudice, but what he wrote back instead was this: “As for being in a Jesus movement, not to worry. I’m a priest in a Christ-cult. A Jesus movement sounds pretty good to me.”
Thirty-six years later, a grandson he never met echoed his grandfather's assertion from a car seat: “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” The way forward is neither to the left nor to the right but to the Jesus-story. “I needed those shoes,” Craddock said. “And I really needed those stories.” So do we; so does the church; and so does the “global, Google world.” It’s the story of dying that leads to life, of giving that leads to receiving, and serving and following that leads to where Jesus is. Let’s go forward, shall we?
As you go, may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus now and forever. Amen.
Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
John 12:12-26
One afternoon a month or so ago, I was driving through Greenville when the voice of a three-year-old in a car seat behind me chimed out of the blue, “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” “Sing Jesus to you?” I asked. “Sing Jesus to me!” he insisted. “How do I ‘sing Jesus’ to you?” I asked him. “You know,” he said, assuming a lot, it seemed to me at the time, “The Bible song.” “Sing Jesus?” “The Bible song?” So I sang what came to mind: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” “Is that it?” I asked. “Yeah, that’s it!” he said. And so I sang it. And when I got to the chorus, he joined in loudly and happily on the only words he knew: “loves me!” “loves me!” “loves me!” And when we finished he said, “Sing it again, Daddy!” And so I did.
And I marveled as I drove and sang that Sunday School teachers in preschool classes for two-year-olds and three-year-olds had created such a positive emotional and spiritual environment that a child who didn’t yet know how to count past five or how to finish his ABC’s—he always gets stuck at “V” for some reason and perpetually recycles “T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L,M, N, O, P; it’s an alphabetical loop into infinity, a song that never ends—that child knew enough to ask for “the Bible song”: “Sing Jesus to me!”
I also marveled at how the unexpected song request of a three-year-old expressed the essence of the gospel in a famous passage in the gospel of John, in two books on the message of the gospel that have been published in the last two years, and in the words of a grandfather who died 24 years before he was born.
The more widely-known of the two books was Rob Bell’s runaway bestseller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Bell’s book was controversial before it even arrived on bookstore shelves and electronic reading devices. Before its publication, Bell was a darling of American evangelical circles, “one of the nation’s rock-star-popular young pastors,” USA Today called him. He’s not so darling in some circles any more, as his book called into question the traditional teaching of the church about hell as a literal place of eternal damnation. Nothing Bell says is particularly new, at least in liberal Christian circles. What made his book so controversial is that Bell is a card-carrying conservative, an evangelical pastor who came to the conclusion that “the good news” just might be even better news than most evangelicals have been inclined to suppose.
Lost in the public furor over what Bell says about hell is the more important message of what Bell says about the nature of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The essential message of the gospel, Bell says, is as his title claims, Love Wins. In Jesus Christ, sin and death and hell lose, and we can all sing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. . . . “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s not just good news; that’s the very best news of all. Sing all you want about heaven; sing all you want about hell. Sing all you want about Trinity; sing all you want about mystery. Sing all you want about about revelation and tribulation and consummation. But above all else, “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s the gospel, and even a three-year-old can know it.
The second book didn’t get nearly as much attention as Rob Bell’s Love Wins. Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola was published last summer to considerably less hoopla and controversy. But in a truly memorable assertion, Sweet and Viola suggest that “the major disease of today’s church is JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.” JDD, Jesus Deficit Disorder, is what the church contracts, Sweet and Viola write, when “the person of Jesus” is “replaced by the language of ‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” Just in case you don’t read the ideological shorthand in the words Sweet and Viola use, Jesus Manifesto is an equal opportunity offender in the contemporary American Christian context.
They spell it out this way: “The body of Christ is at a crossroads right now,” they say. “The two common alternatives are to move either to the left or to the right.” Most “people are frozen,” they write, “as they look in either of those directions. When they look to the left, they decide they cannot venture there. When they look to the right they decide the same. Whether they realize it or not, people are looking for a fresh alternative—a third way.” And that way third way, according to Sweet and Viola is neither left nor right but forward: “this global, Google world,” they write, “needs a meta-narrative more than ever, and the Jesus-Story is the interpreting system of all other systems.” The “Jesus-Story” is the way forward: “Sing Jesus to me.”
This morning’s gospel lesson is most familiar as the story of the triumphal entry, the Palm Sunday narrative. In it, a great crowd has heard that Jesus of Nazareth is coming to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. They are eager to see Jesus because of what they heard that he had done when he raised Lazarus from the dead. So they “took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!’” On Palm Sunday, that crowd gets all the attention. But several verses later, we are introduced to another set of characters, some “Greeks,” they are called in verse 20, after the Palm Sunday gospel lesson has ended.
We don’t know who, exactly, these “Greeks” might have been, except that they would have been non-Jews. They may have been “God-fearers,” Gentile persons of faith who attached themselves to a synagogue but who declined to submit to the Mosaic dietary restrictions and, in the case of men, circumcision. Or they may have been only “spiritual tourists,” as Max Stackhouse suggests, the first-century equivalent of “new-agers” who were seeking a spiritual fix in the latest religious fad. Whoever they were, the words they say to Philip in verse 21 have become famous in churches.
In churches all over England and in not a few scattered around the states, the words of their request, “Sir, we would see Jesus,” as the King James Version translates it, are carved, engraved, emblazoned, and otherwise displayed on pulpits where the preacher can see them as he or she stands before the congregation. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Preach all you want about heaven; preach all you want about hell. Preach all you want about Trinity and mystery. Preach all you want about revelation and tribulation and consummation. Preach all you want about “‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” But above all else, “Preach Jesus,” those pulpits tell the preacher.
The great American preacher Fred Craddock tells the story of how when he was little his family moved from their farm into town when times got too tough to make a living on the land. Not long after they arrived, some women from a nearby church “came to our house and brought a pair of Buster Brown shoes that fit me, and enabled me to start Sunday school—those women didn’t just bring me a pair of shoes. You know what else they brought me? They brought me a picture book of stories about Jesus. I needed those shoes. I really needed those stories,” Craddock said. In this “global, Google world”: the way forward—rather than to the left or to the right—is the Jesus-story. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me! “Loves me!” “Loves me!”
Ten years or so ago, as we prepared a missions team to Canada to work with international refugees, among whom there would be many Muslims, we instructed our team members to answer the question of their own religious identity as “I follow Jesus” or “I’m a Jesus-follower.” The term “Christian” among Muslims is a lot like the term “Baptist” among Americans: it’s a religion with a bad reputation. So to side-step the preconceived negatives, we used the name of Jesus instead of the name of a religion. The first time I heard of this rhetorical slight of hand, I confess that I was offended by it. Why should I change how I speak of myself because of someone else’s sensibilities? Never mind that the apostle Paul went so far as to say, “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all. . . . all for the sake of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:19,22-23). It’s their problem, not mine, I thought to myself. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that we could all probably do with less Christianity and more Jesus-following.
The widespread distaste of people in our time for so-called “organized religion” is on the one hand a cop-out. Take it from a Baptist who knows: disorganized religion offers no advantages whatsoever. But the popular criticism, on the other hand, is a clear and compelling commentary that Christianity is too much with us and Jesus not enough. “We wish to see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!”
Now, just in case you think I think that’s all there is to it, let’s look back at this morning’s gospel lesson to see what happens next. Because of our expectations of immediate gratification and our genie-in-a-bottle approach to God, we would expect that the Greeks’ request would result in an immediate audience with the Nazarene. “Your wish is my command,” he would say. “What can I do for you today to make your life better?” he would ask. But that’s not what Jesus says at all, is it? Instead, he says, “The hour has come.”
If you have been reading the gospel of John up to this point, 12:23, where Jesus says, “The hour has come,” you know when you hear these words that you have reached a defining moment in the story. For ten chapters, John’s gospel has been telling us that Jesus’ hour had not yet come. “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus says in 2:4. “My time has not yet come,” he says in 7:6. “My time has not yet fully come,” he says in 7:8. “His hour had not yet come,” we read in 7:30 and again in 8:20. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. And then, in 12:23: Now. Now “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
This is the moment that the reader of the gospel of John has been waiting for ever since chapter 2. Finally, it is now; Jesus will be glorified. “King of Kings! And Lord of Lords! Hallelujah!” That’s who the first crowd in this morning’s gospel lesson turned out to see, and that’s the Jesus we want to see. That’s the Jesus we want to sing: “And he shall reign—and so shall we—forever and ever, forever and ever.”
But look at what Jesus says at the defining moment of his ministry in the gospel of John. It begins in verse 24. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains but a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” His glory is in his dying? “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In order to keep life, we must lose life? “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” To see Jesus—to be where Jesus is—we must serve and follow?
It’s no wonder that the crowd who sang, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!” on Sunday shouted, “Crucify him!” later in the week. When his hour finally came, Jesus did not say what they expected him to say or do what they expected him to do; and instead of reassessing their own expectations, they called for his crucifixion. And when they did, it turned out exactly as Jesus said that it would: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
The apostle Paul recognized Jesus’ defining moment as the stumbling block that it is when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jews and Greeks alike come out to see Jesus only to have their expectations disappointed and their desire for gratification go ungratified. Because Jesus says it is in dying—not clinging—to life that we bear much fruit. It is in giving—not grasping—that we receive life. It is in serving and following—not lording and leading—that we arrive where Jesus is. If there is a “Jesus Manifesto” for our lives and for the church and for our world in the gospel of John, it is right there in the defining moment of the arrival of the hour that we had been waiting for since chapter 2.
More than 30 years ago, as I was experiencing the church-culture shock of having moved from my high-church Lutheran upbringing into a decidedly revivalistic stream of Baptist life, I wrote to my father who was a Lutheran minister that I was unnerved by the fact that all I was hearing in church was “Jesus”: “Jesus this” and “Jesus that.” “They don’t talk about God; they don’t mention the Holy Spirit. It’s just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all the time. I don’t think I’m in a church; I think I’m in a Jesus movement,” I wrote. I fully expected him to affirm my prejudice, but what he wrote back instead was this: “As for being in a Jesus movement, not to worry. I’m a priest in a Christ-cult. A Jesus movement sounds pretty good to me.”
Thirty-six years later, a grandson he never met echoed his grandfather's assertion from a car seat: “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” The way forward is neither to the left nor to the right but to the Jesus-story. “I needed those shoes,” Craddock said. “And I really needed those stories.” So do we; so does the church; and so does the “global, Google world.” It’s the story of dying that leads to life, of giving that leads to receiving, and serving and following that leads to where Jesus is. Let’s go forward, shall we?
As you go, may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus now and forever. Amen.
Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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