20220102 Mysterious Friend¶
Welcome¶
Good morning, my name is Clifton Bartholomew, and I am a local preacher here at UMC.
It is always so good to share with you all. Welcome again to any visitors and to all our online guests as well.
I always like to say before I preach that I am a teacher by training and so I am very used to being interrupted. If anyone is brave enough to raise their hand and ask a question or give an input, it is warmly welcomed.
Introduction¶
Jab 1 - Hopeless romantic¶
When I was a teen I was a hopeless romantic. (I might still be). I very much loved love. My first really real relationship was when I was 18, I was head over heels for this girl. But, devastatingly, her family was moving to Canada in 6 months. In spite of this we continue to date, almost ignoring the inevitable. When she ended up moving, we both, with the maturity and intensity of any teen, declared our undying love for each other and that we would never part and would do anything to make it work. It lasted less than two months.
We all know of this kind of fiery love that ignores the impossible. We don't understand it. We don't know why it is so all--consuming. Yet we know what it feels like. And most of us would have experienced it in some form or the other, whether it ended positively or broken heartedly.
Jab 2 - A different kind of love¶
Yet, now in my late twenties and going into my thirties, I am experiencing a different kind of love in the early years of marriage. This is the kind of love where unpacking the dishwasher and sweeping the floor is significantly more romantic than buying flowers. It's a life partner kind of love more than that fiery love of our youth. An accepting love. A sturdy love. Not a lesser love, but a deeper love.
All relationships experience different kinds of love. A parent's love is different to the love of a friend. In Greek they have different words for different types of love. Eros - the erotic love between lovers, Agape - an unconditional divine love, Philia - the love between friends and Storge - a familial love.
Love is what drives every relationship and every relationship is different. And there are no rules for love, no rules for friendship or laws of marriage, regardless of what your aunt told you on your wedding day. If you show me 1000 couples or 1000 friends or 1000 siblings there will be 1000 different ways that those relationships pan out.
Jab 3 - A Divine love¶
Yet when it comes to our relationship with God we are not as liberal. We can become rigid. We seem to think that there is a right way to be in relationship with God. We believe that we need to be biblically literate, or we need to be experts in prayer, or we have to have a specific kind of job or specific kind of hobbies. We somehow forget the naturalness of Christ’s love. The naturalness of the relationship.
Or we can forget that Jesus even calls us into a relationship. Where we spend so much time learning about Jesus and his teachings or studying the Bible and how it works and don't we don't actually experience relationship. It is VERY different reading about who my wife is and what she likes and what she is afraid of than actually spending time with her and making her laugh.
Today I want to talk about the natural, mystical, close love that we are invited into with Jesus. And I think that the whole world will change if we come to know the love of Christ. It is freeing love, a peaceful love, a challenging love, a life filled love, a graceful, kind and forgiving love. It is mysterious, captivating love that will change you from within and compel you to share it in the world.
Have you experienced this kind of love?
Right Hook¶
We are still in the season of Christmas and throughout this season we remember that Jesus entered the world as a human being. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Emmanuel. God with us. God wanting a close relationship with humanity. And there are three things which we can learn from today’s reading that teach us about our relationship with Christ.
Explanation¶
Teaching Point 1 - Logos is mystery¶
In verses 1-5 we read - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John uses this mystical, theological, philosophical language to describe Jesus. In particular he calls Jesus “the Word”. Which in Greek is Logos. A strongly Greek philosophical concept. John was writing to a Greek audience. A difficult word to translate. It means something like the divine universal reason or intelligence. It is the thing that drives life forward. It is the thing which tells the clouds where to move and tells rain drops how to fall. It is the thing which teaches trees to grow and tells water how to flow and our eyes how to see. It was the pure truth that the philosophers sought to align themselves with and understand. John is saying that Jesus is that thing.
These ideas are old.
And the point here isnt to know exactly what this all means. John is saying that Jesus is an integral part of our world. Jesus is unbound, endless. Jesus is mystery. Not fixed. Not bound by rules or special knowledge or special positions. Not something to be figured out. Jesus is someone to be experienced, not studied.
Teaching Point 2 - Logos is close¶
In verse 14 we read “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”
This is the Christmas message. This is the good news. The incarnation of God in Jesus. Incarnation literally means “in flesh”. For aeons people worshiped distant gods in the sky. The God of Abraham said I am with you. Close. This is what separated the Jewish God from all the other gods. We are not in a long distance relationship with a Jesus in Canada. Jesus actually lives here in South Africa.
How many of us feel like God has left and we are saving up heaven points to be able to go over and visit? How many of us feel far from God today?
Teaching Point 3 - Logos is written on our hearts¶
Right at the end of Moses grand teaching in Deuteronomy he ends with this:
Recently I watched a video of a baby being thrown into the pool by his mother and he does this spinning leg thing to turn himself face up and float on the water. It looks so hectic. This baby is somewhere between 6 months to a year. But apparently you can teach babies as young as this to do this because we have this innate ability to learn to swim. Its built into us.
This is what Moses is alluding to here. Our relationship with God is not in this ethereal plane or far out of reach. It is right here. A natural part of us. We learn as we go. Just like in any other relationship. Speak to any parent and ask them where they learnt to be a parent. It just happens. Our relationship with God is like that.
Application¶
For a large part of my faith I used to keep Jesus at a distance. I had very little experience of relationship. I felt like to be in relationship with Jesus I needed to be in a pentacostal church, speaking in tongues and falling over from being overpowered by the holy spirit. Or that I needed to be a person who could hear God speak. Or that I needed to be someone who wasn't sceptical about scripture and who understood it all. I was deeply sceptical of some parts of scripture. I would always think of the ways that they could have just been tricking people. Like when Jesus was resurrected and the disciples didn't recognize him, wasn’t that just a different person? Or could the disciples not just taken out his body out of the tomb?
It slowly started to change when I began realizing that I didn't have to be anyone else. That I could just be me. Even if it is different. That other people are doing it their way, and I am doing it my way. And that is all that Jesus wants. The differences in Christianity is what makes it rich and deep. As Ozzy once put it, Jesus doesn't ask you to change and then follow him, he says follow me and you will be changed. That is what love does.
So what can we do to move out of our heads and towards experience? I leave us with three actions to take in the weeks to come.
Be open - allow yourself to be led into the relationship style that makes sense for you. What does a date with Jesus look like for you? Is it reading the bible? Is it gardening? Is it through prayer? Is it through contemplative meditation? Is it through helping others? Is it coming to church? Is it walking on the beach? Be open to experiencing Jesus’ love in new ways. Be curious. Be free to be you.
Time - there is this beautiful picture of relationships as fires. Just as you have to keep on putting more wood in a fire to keep it burning, so we must put time into a relationship. Anything that you stop feeding will inevitably start to die out. This is the PERFECT time to start a quite time ritual in the morning (or the evening). It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Choose a place and a time where you regularly spend time in Jesus’ love.
Reflection - A famous quote of Socrates:
What beliefs do you still hold that may prevent you from entering into relationship? Maybe its not a belief but a feeling? Or a person? Or a sense of self? Maybe its nothing you can put your finger on, just an unsurety.
May we move into a deeper relationship with our mysterious friend this year. Jesus is mystery, moving not something to be mastered but experienced. Jesus is incarnate and close, right here in our midst, we don't have to go far. Jesus is natural, something that we do not have to force.
One Liner¶
Jesus is our mysterious friend whose love we can experience, each one of us.