John 15:1-8 Prayers that Never Fail

John 15:7 “. . . ask whatever you wish. . .”

Jesus made this remarkable statement as the dramatic conclusion and practical application of what it means to live out an authentic spirituality: “ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (v. 7) Powerful prayer proceeds from one profound principle: pray according to God’s will. When we want what God wants then whatever we ask will be done for us. Jan Karon calls this prayer the prayer that never fails.

In the promise of powerful prayer Jesus gave a protasis. In order to receive” whatever you wish,” Jesus made clear that his disciples would “abide” (KJV, v. 7) in him. To pray for what we want is not difficult, but the protasis--to abide in Christ--so that our will is the same as God’s will requires what we often find very difficult. It requires the willingness to be shaped by God, to be formed in the image of Christ or to use the metaphor that Jesus employed, it means the willingness to be “pruned” by God. (v. 3)

Pruning means cutting away. It means some loss of what we are in order to grow in a new direction. The pruning makes us more fruitful for God, that is, it makes us more like Christ. So, the question of powerful prayer begins with the question of our willingness to be pruned or our willingness to change. Instead of thinking that we pray to change God we think of being changed by God so that we can pray as Christ prays, so that we can genuinely pray for God’s will to be done.

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Mark Twain.  This week Judy and I visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (thanks to Bryn Burke for hosting us) and saw this quotation from Mark Twain inscribed on a wall, “Travel is fatal to prejudice.” In my experience arguments seldom change people, but new experiences do change us. 

Grandchildren. Sweetie Pie and Mr. Happy enjoy having me read books to them, but they especially like for me to tell stories about two adventurous children named Fiona and Freddie. Now that they are getting older the story telling has become more challenging. If the story lags for interest or lacks excitement they jump in to say, “No, no that’s not what happened; here is what they did . . . .” They take the story in a direction that more suits their expectations. With Mr. Happy that usually means some sword fighting. Sweetie Pie has no interest in or liking for swords; she prefers descriptive detail. So story telling has come to require a measure of consensus building between the three of us. Fortunately, my years as a pastor have prepared me for just this kind of negotiation and  narrative formation. 

John 10:11-18 A Reflection on Jesus the Good Shepherd

John 10:11   "I am the good shepherd."

One of the challenges of people who want to go to church today comes in finding a good pastor. This challenge has always existed. The prophet Jeremiah declared God's judgement upon the religious leaders of his time who failed to attend to the people God had entrusted to their care. Instead of gathering and protecting them they scattered the flock and put them at risk. (Jeremiah 23:1-4)

Although it is easy to enumerate the failures of pastors--and as a retired pastor I have a long list of my shortcomings--it is better to spend our time in thinking about how to find a good pastor. The way to find a good pastor is actually straightforward. There is only one good shepherd. He is the one who has laid down his life for the people, the one who had the power to lay down his life and the power to take his life up again. (John 10:18) Jesus, the good shepherd, is the only one who can fulfill the needs of the flock. He is the one and only Son of God who came to take away our sins through his death on the cross. He is the one and only one who has risen from the dead never to die again so that he may be with us now and forever to give us the strength to live life as God created it to be.

The right minister is the one who points away from his or her own ministry to the ministry of Jesus. Someone has said you never make yourself and Jesus look good at the same time. As John the Baptist said, "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John 3:30) The same is true of every local church. We do not want people to talk about the great choir or the great worship team or the great educational program or the great youth organization or the great panoply of ministries to the poor we perform. When people think of our church and our ministers we want them to say, what a great Savior is Jesus. The best pastors and the best churches point to him and they make sure that he receives the credit for the ministry given. No ministry will last that is not offered under his guidance, and no one seeking a pastor will be satisfied until Jesus is recognized as the one and only good shepherd.

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Safety? Judy found a story on one of her news feeds that reminds me that we are never safe or we are only safe in the hands of God. A man in Georgia decided to shoot an armadillo, a creature with a very armor like covering. He fired a 9mm pistol at the armadillo and hit him, but the bullet ricocheted and went through a fence post nearby, kept going a hundred yards more and pierced the side of a mobile home, kept going and pierced a recliner in which his mother-in-law was sitting. She was struck by the bullet! Although she needed to be taken to the hospital, she made a full recovery. I'm sure this story will be retold in their family much to the chagrin of the son-in-law for the rest of his life. For me it is a reminder that one can be sitting in a recliner inside one's home and still be in danger. The only safe place is in the providence of God.

Luke 24:36-48 A Reflection on the Bodily Resurrection

Luke 24:41 “Do you have anything here to eat?” (NIV)

It is the kind of question that your son returning home from college would ask. It is a family kind of question. It is the kind of question that only a friend would feel free to ask. It reveals intimacy and confidence in the relationship. “Do you have anything here to eat?”

More importantly, theologically, this question of Jesus made to his disciples when he appeared to them after the crucifixion makes clear the message of the bodily resurrection. The living Christ was not a vision. He was certainly not a ghost though that thought came to the disciples. He had a body. He could speak. They could touch his scars. He could eat and drink with them. At his request "they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence." (vv. 42-43) He was alive.

The promise of the Gospel is bodily resurrection for us, too. Our bodies will be transformed. “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44)

The bodily resurrection of Christ affirms the physical creation. When God looked upon his creation he said that it was good. (Genesis 1:18) He said that it was very good. (Genesis 1:31) God loves us, including our bodies, and so God came in flesh, and so Jesus was raised bodily.

Creation is good. The body is good. Human life is very good. Our sins have marred God's creation and brought death, but God came in Christ to redeem us--all that we are--that we might be raised to eternal life.

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Video Series. Judy and I have been enjoying a series of videos we found in our public library. They are entitled, “Bless Me, Father.” This British situation comedy describes the adventures of an Irish Catholic priest and his young curate in the fictional parish of St. Jude’s in suburban London in 1950. They are very funny--at least to one whose life has been in church ministry they are very funny--and insightful. In one episode the older priest explains why his curate should be sympathetic toward the rich as well as the poor. He explains that the rich do not have the comfort of the illusion that money will solve every problem.

Grandchildren. Around the front door to our house there are panes of glass. Judy and I have noticed a smudge on the glass which always reappears even though we have cleaned it away regularly. This week we realized that Mr. Happy whose is about as tall as the smudge presses his nose against the glass and flashes his big smile whenever he comes to see us. We’ve stopped cleaning the smudge now. It makes us happy to see it, and we know that it will too soon go away.

John 20:19-31 "The Central Question of the New Testament"

John 20:25   “ . . . I will never believe.” (ESV)

One of my professors of theology served one morning as the visiting teacher in an adult Sunday school class in which I was a member. He was a good professor from whom I learned much in my seminary studies, but oddly enough, the one quote of his that I remember all these years later came from that Sunday school class. He said, “The central question of the New Testament is belief.”

John’s Gospel was certainly written with the purpose of bringing people to belief. (v. 31), and Jesus made clear as recorded in this Gospel that belief in him was the “work of God” (6:29) and it is the labor we should perform above all else. (6:27) Before one loves God one first, necessarily, believes in God.

So, how shocking to read the words of Jesus’ apostle Thomas who declared that he would not believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead unless he had physical proof that satisfied his rudimentary experiential standards of sight and touch. Actually, such evidence does not always serve as a convincing proof since people do, at times, see and hear things that are not present. Hallucinations happen. When Thomas refused to believe he rejected the witness of his fellow apostles. What’s more Thomas resisted the Holy Spirit. The apostles had been empowered with the Spirit for the very purpose of proclaiming the Gospel. (v. 22-23) which would bring forgiveness of sins to those who believed. 

Jesus accommodated the lack of belief in Thomas. A week after Easter Thomas encountered Jesus. He saw him and touched him. Thomas made a powerful, clear, direct confession of faith when he yielded to Jesus and proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”

Even so, there is a gentle rebuke of Thomas in the passage because Thomas missed the blessing that could have been his. He could have been the first of the Apostles to have believed without seeing or touching. He could have been the first of all those who would come later and give themselves to Jesus in response to the witness of the Apostles recorded in the Bible and empowered by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Jesus could have said to Thomas personally--had Thomas taken his opportunity--”Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (v.29)

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Killing Jesus, the Movie. One way to understand this movie is to see it as the popularization of what Albert Schweitzer called “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.”  Bill O’Reilly, co-author of the book, Killing Jesus, has repeatedly said on his TV program that this movie is an historical approach to Jesus. John Meier, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, described what an historical approach means. “Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic. . .were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library . . .and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended in his own time and place.” (A Marginal Jew, Rethinking the Historical Jesus, by John P. Meier, Doubleday, 1991, v. 1. p. 1)

Of course, not one of them, except perhaps the agnostic, would be happy with the resulting historical document. In this imaginative conclave Meier described the work of many New Testament academics for the last 240 years (since the writings of H. S. Reimarus). The remarkable Albert Schweitzer wrote a review of this research, often called, “The Lives of Jesus.” Although the research continues into the 21st century, Schweitzer’s conclusions about it seem just as accurate today as when written in 1913. “No personality of the past can be transported alive into the present by means of historical observation or by discursive thought about his authoritative significance. . . " (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer, Fortress edition 2001, p. 486)

Schweitzer concluded his book by saying how people can find Jesus. He wrote, ".  . . as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was. He says the same words,  ‘Follow me!’ . . . And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise, he will reveal himself . . .” (p. 487)

Historical research will provide a place for scholars to meet and discuss, but for an encounter with the living Christ the only means is the Gospel, true to the canonical scriptures and proclaimed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Killing Jesus, the Movie is a disappointment to believers because it uses the New Testament selectively, on the basis of one or another scholar’s idea--think of the conclave described by Meier. Like all the “Lives of Jesus” books and articles and movies from earlier times, this one gives us more information about the movie makers than it does about Jesus. Therefore, the movie cannot and does not give witness to the faith passed on by the church from one generation to the next.