We would See Jesus
Psalm 119:9-16
119:9 How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word.
119:10 With my whole heart I seek you; do not let me stray from your commandments.
119:11 I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you.
119:12 Blessed are you, O LORD; teach me your statutes.
119:13 With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth.
119:14 I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches.
119:15 I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways.
119:16 I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.
Hymn "Be Thou My Vision." #532
INVOCATION /LORD’S PRAYER Eternal God, we come before you in prayer to ask forgiveness for what we have said and done. For all our good intentions, the week did not pass without our saying things we ought not have said, did things for which we are sorry. Forgive us, renew us with deeper commitment, empower us in loving those whom we meet - and you.
Children’s Time Communion
GREETINGS PRAISE SONGS
Prayer
praise
troops
ill
mourn
new pastor
Prepare the people for the necessity of Jesus' death, and what his death means to us as the church, as the world.//Father show us which parts of our attitude and behavior do we need to bury, and to keep buried? Grudges, /greed, /lust, /self-righteousness, /false pride, and so on. ////Then, offer a prayer of thanks, or invite the people to offer sentence prayers of thanks.
God , you bury the products of our confession; for that we rejoice. In light of our forgiven life, what kind of wheat will we produce? Each of us is a rich grain, waiting to be born anew each day. What new thoughts, words, behavior will we allow your Holy Spirit to sprout and grow, for our sake, the world's sake, Christ's sake?
SPECIAL MUSIC Holy City Rick Irish
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31:31 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
31:32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt - a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD.
31:33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
31:34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
Offering
Hymn of Commitment: Jesus Calls Us # 580
John 12:20-33
Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the Feast. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. "Sir," they said, "we would like to see Jesus." Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus. Jesus replied, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me. "Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ’Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!" Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and will glorify it again." The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him. Jesus said, "This voice was for your benefit, not mine. Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.(NIV)
Sermon : We would See Jesus
As Jesus enters Jerusalem, he is met by "a great crowd" who, as we now know, had no real idea what Jesus was about nor what was soon to happen. No doubt they came with a variety of expectations, all the way from mere crowd curiosity to the men who wished for a violent overthrow of the Roman rulers. But none of them, not even Jesus' closest friends, could quite guess or perceive what was immediately ahead. We, of course, know what history records say (whether we fully understand it ourselves or not).///It is something like this story: One author told of a tradesman in a certain town who discovered that a trusted employee had been stealing from him. He quickly brought charges against the man, who was found guilty and sent off to prison. However, when the man was finally released, he learned to his amazement that during his time in prison his employer had paid his usual wages to his wife and children, and that his job was available once more. "We can start afresh," the employer said. Perhaps God's forgiveness is like that. There are consequences to our misdeeds, but they take place within the province of God's continuing love. The Bible seems to say that at least some of those consequences are exacted in this life./////the man saw the love of Jesus at work.
Behind the pulpit in the chapel at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, GA, there is a small sign. It is a brass plate with an inscription, quoting the New Testament lesson for today. “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
The reason someone put that sign behind the pulpit is to encourage the new preachers being trained at the seminary not to proclaim themselves, but to proclaim Jesus Christ. Every sermon ought to enable people to see Jesus more clearly.
As a minister, I am the first to admit that sometimes I am not able to do this. No minister is able to perfectly proclaim Jesus ALL of the time. We’re all human. Sometimes the sermons we preach simply seem to cloud the issue, rather than to clarify Jesus – to obscure rather than to proclaim Jesus.
I heard of a person who, in her early years of ministry, did volunteer work as a chaplain at a nursing home. One day she was invited to conduct a Sunday morning service at the nursing home – an invitation which she accepted gladly. She threw herself into the task with all of her energy. She thought very highly of the people who lived at the nursing home and she wanted to deliver - not just a sermon - but a great sermon. So she worked and worked on it, filled the trash can with rejected thoughts, until finally she had IT.
The only trouble with IT is that it was the kind of sermon that only a recent graduate of the seminary would understand. It had lots of references to Greek and Hebrew in which the thighbone of Justification is connected to the hipbone of ecclesiology.
On the day when she delivered the sermon, the residents of the nursing home gathered in the activity room. Now, one of the gifts of old age is that you often take the freedom to say the truth, no matter what the truth is. My friend was preaching her sophisticated, theologically artistic sermon, when all of a sudden one of the patients started wheeling herself out of the activity room and back to her own room. With each push of the wheel chair, the lady said very loudly, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
She admitted that while she had tried to preach the greatest sermon of all time, she had failed to help them “see Jesus” - so that it had become nothing more than “blah, blah, blah.”
There is something about the Gospel that is on one hand very complex. Whole libraries of books have been written in which scholars try to unravel the mysteries of God. You want to get to know Jesus? You want to see Jesus? There is an avalanche of material on the subject. Understanding the Trinity. Understanding the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Comprehending fully the meaning of bread broken at the Table and wine shared in the cup. Our faith is full of complexities. We can’t understand them all.
And until you first “see Jesus” any answer you give is simply going to be a meaningless, “blah, blah, blah.”////
The Christian faith is like an archeological dig. You look at the surface and you can learn a lot. You brush away the dust, and then you can learn even more. You dig deeper, you learn more. You dig deeper and deeper, and there is more and more to discover.
But you have to start at the top. Start with the basics. You can’t understand God and the complexities of the faith unless you first start with the most basic.
“Sir, we would see Jesus,” means more than simply catching a glimpse of a celebrity who is performing miracles. // It means that you really want to get to know and believe in Jesus. // One of the dynamics of John is that “to see” is more than simply to see something with your eyes. For John, “to see” is “to believe.”
We see this early on in the first chapter of John. Jesus is gathering his disciples and one of them is Philip – Philip, the one who shows up in the Gospel lesson for today.
In chapter one, Jesus calls Philip, and Philip goes to find his friend, Nathanael. He tells him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote-Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."
Nathanael is not impressed. "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" Nathanael asked. // Philip doesn’t argue. He simply says "Come and - see." /////
Jesus meets a woman at a well. There is a classic conversation between the two and the woman and Jesus are on completely different wavelengths. Jesus talks about how he is the “living water.” The woman says, “where’s your bucket? Where do you get this water?”
In the end, she comes to believe that this is Christ - the Messiah. And John’s Gospel says (John 4:28-29), “Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.’”
In chapter nine there is a wonderful story about a man born blind. Jesus heals him. Afterwards there is a long investigation. Was this man healed? Was this man really born blind? The man who was healed finally gets frustrated with this whole process and says that there is a lot he doesn’t know – but he knows one thing: “I was blind, but now I see.” (John 9:25) Amazing Grace!
And he is not simply talking about how he can now see people and trees and buildings. He can see truth.
Even the disciples use this word “seeing” in terms of “believing.”
Toward the end of the Gospel of John, Thomas is told about the Resurrection. The other disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But Thomas is not impressed. He said to them that he had to see the nail marks in his hands in order to believe.
In the Gospel of John, “seeing” means more than simply looking at something. It is believing. It’s understanding the faith.
In our New Testament lesson, we read about how there were some “Greeks among those who went up to worship at the Feast. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. ‘Sir,’ they said, ‘we would like to see Jesus.’”
They don’t want to learn ABOUT Jesus.//They want to see him.//They want to believe in him.// They want to know him. // In response, Jesus spoke to them and said these things…
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me. ‘Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ’Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’”
It is a rather typical kind of response that Jesus gives in the Gospel of John. Typical because it is complicated. John loves complicated dialogue. But brush away the dust and look deeper at this long answer, and Jesus is simply saying, “The hour has come. I’m about to die. But I will be resurrected. Follow me.”
To see Jesus, to believe in Jesus means to first of all believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. // And until you come to see Jesus, to believe in Jesus, to accept the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus, God and life will make no sense at all – it’ll just be ‘blah, blah, blah.’”
You see, until we come to believe in the power and the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have not yet come to know Jesus at all.
The world is full of people who claim to know all about Jesus, and yet, they don’t know him. They haven’t seen him. Because they do not believe that he really rose again from the dead. // You see, when you take away the resurrection, there is nothing left in the Gospel record of Christ’s life that was not done by someone else.
Jesus said he was the Son of God. Others have claimed that. In fact, some of the worst murderers in American prisons have made that claim.
Jesus healed people miraculously. Faith healers have always been with us. Some authentic. Others charlatans.
Jesus was a great speaker and a great philosopher. History is full of speakers and teachers.
One of the most unique things he did was to raise Lazarus from the dead, but even that has been done by others. In the Old Testament, Elisha raised the dead. (II Kings 4) And of course, in today’s world, many of us have taken CPR classes that enable someone to be brought back from the very brink of death.
You see, the one thing that authenticates everything that Jesus said or did– the one thing that gives meaning to the fact that when he said he was the Son of God he REALLY was the Son of God, – and the one thing that gives meaning to EVERY single action of Jesus,
– and the thing that helps us understand him – is the resurrection.
The death and resurrection of Christ ties everything else in his ministry together. It authenticated everything in his life as being true and real.
Without the Resurrection, Jesus simply fades into history as just one more great teacher. But with the Resurrection, we begin to recognize that Jesus is indeed the Son of God.
It’s hard to make sense out of life. It’s hard to understand God.
Life is full of doctoral level questions. And until you see Jesus, and believe in him, accepting his death and resurrection, nothing in life will make sense.
Until you start with that basic level – believing Jesus, everything else will be nothing more than “blah, blah, blah.”
is everything in your life still just blah, blah, blah? Have you seen Jesus?
Have you really seen, and believed? Have you accepted him as Lord?
HYMN Open Our Eyes, Lord # 536
Charge to the Congregation We, watchers on the hill, have one of two choices: By our own justifications, we can keep regurgitating those attitudes we need to keep buried; or, in the Spirit of the Christ, we can allow God to provide new crops. Which do you prefer? Which will you act upon?
Meditation The church, at best, is God's greenhouse.