". . . but in these last days God has spoken to us by a Son . . ."

Sermon by James W. Crawford

March 1, 1998, First Sunday in Lent

From Hebrews 1 and 2

Do you ever wonder if there is anyone or anything really running the whole show? As you peer over or into your own life, is some inexplicable event, confounding tragedy, protracted illness getting you down, eating you up?  Do you ever find doing good, being kind, helping others, really does not  make much of a difference, sometimes gets you into more trouble than it is worth, and the world trundles on its own way regardless of what you try to do? And as for your prayers, do they just bounce off the ceiling? And have you given up praying? Is church attendance strictly a matter of take it or leave it? Have you concluded that your hope that finally someone is really in charge of this creation, preparing to carry everything finally to a gracious and peaceful end is just a lot of wishful thinking?

Or taking another tack, you could look at it this way: Churches have been around a long time and the world does not seem to be one iota better for it. Christians have been operating for nearly two millennia, and we have created problems no less devastating than agnostics or unbelievers, and indeed over two millennia in the name of Jesus Christ initiated our share of malice and brutality illustrating, finally, how a supposed Christian Civilization could collapse in the horror of holocaust and genocide. If your  hope and your confidence in the promised triumph of love are a little shaky, and when you hear us preacher types or the church affirm that promise and you get a little cynical about what appears to be sentimental drivel and an illusory launch into sentimentality, then, friends, you are in very good company.

Because, you see, The Letter to the Hebrews is written for an exhausted, discouraged, cynical congregation. We do not know where they are located.  We do not have the foggiest idea who writes to them. But one thing we know: they are on their last legs. They have tired blood. They are losing members by the ton. Religion is just another compartment of their lives.  They will make time for it if they can, but frankly its promises seem stale, its results nil, the core of their Christian hope appears as a dive into self deception. For many of them the Christian faith has turned out to be at best a wild superstition, at worst a vile hoax. They are giving up, drifting away, trying something else.

And then this letter! Do you know what this writer says to this discouraged and straying congregation? Do you know how he treats religious apathy,  wobbly faith, wilting hopes? He prescribes a heavy dose of what we might call high Christology - he recommends an intense study of Christ. If we read this letter like the Hebrews we see our author does not pamper us with religious gimmicks. He does not putter around with language for novices and beginners. He does not seduce us with subtle programmatic decoys,  beguiling clichés or tantalizing invitations to a religion by the numbers. He tells us what makes Jesus the Christ; he delivers a straightforward  testimony evoking a vital, trenchant Presence -- a Presence living with us; a Presence with us in death; a presence who suffers and struggles, fails and triumphs, braves and endures with us all the perils we face, a Presence bearing in, and radiating through a person the very assurance of things we hope for, the essence and conviction of things we can not see.

Do remember how this author -- this preacher, for what he writes is not a letter but a sermon -- do you remember how this preacher begins his testimony? Do you recall his opening assertions? "Long ago," he says, "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son." What a fabulous beginning! What a marvelous reminder of the ancient rooting of our hope and then the blossoming of the Gospel promise.

"Long ago God spoke in fragments," says our preacher; in different fashions, styles, moods, he insists; here and there and over yonder, in this year and that, during this land together with friends or that nation among foreigners, and yes, even amid our enemies you will discover a life- transforming encounter, a world-changing vision, a heart-converting confrontation . . . God speaking. In former days, for instance, through the prophets: Elijah compelling us to choose the one God deserving true worship from among all those other seductive claims on our loyalty. Or Amos: literally screaming, at least it seems so, at our readiness to join in solemn religious assemblies -- something like this, maybe, singing our hymns, saying our prayers, preaching our sermons, while what God requires of us is to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever rolling stream. And in one of the most daring and sensational images in all of scripture, the prophet Hosea describing the heart of the universe and its bending toward us as a husband wooing again with tears of passion and yearning, mutuality and trust his beloved who betrays him time and again. You see, in many and various ways, through fragments and in differing styles God speaks to us through the prophets, trying to get a message across about what it means to live together not as the human race but as the human family, pursuing us, like Frances Thomson's Hound of Heaven, eager to renew our lives, our churches and cities, the whole creation, that we might live as a community in solidarity with one another and in communion with the Source of love reaching out for us from the Heart of the Universe.

But in these last days, says our author, in these last days, God speaks to us by a Son -- a child, a human being like you, like me. In this person we see the ultimate and final word sent, spoken, revealed. Through this human being, this fellow pilgrim with us, we see the consummate presence of the Divine life that can be packaged in flesh and blood. Through this Son -- this Divine Child -- we find ourselves encountered, challenged and embraced by the core, the heart, the mind, the soul of the radiant, overflowing grace grounding our lives and all of creation; through Jesus as Christ we find ourselves side by side with a Transcendent Reality who hungers and tires just as you and I, shoulder to shoulder with One who, as the old hymn says, walks with us and talks with us. This is it -- at last! This culminating, concluding, perfect Word, not simply spoken, but now incarnate.

And our preacher continues. Just who is this perfect Divine presence among us, and what might this presence mean to us? Hear this, he says: Jesus as Christ is heir of all things. Jesus Christ is heir of all things? What a confession! He is answering our perennial question: Where are things headed? What does our life mean? Are we just a blob of protoplasm, an itch on the epidermis of a doomed planet? Are we, as another observer remarks, are we "witless, lowbrow anthropocentric clods inflicting lesions upon the earth?" That is one way of looking at it. Or more bluntly, "Does the one who ends up with the most toys or the most weapons really win? Do the rich get richer, the violent carry the day, do the political spinmeisters, PR flaks and Budweiser apologists define the criteria for truth? Perhaps.  Cynicism can be terribly difficult to resist. But our preacher will not surrender to the cynicism he sees riddling his congregation. No way! He tells us the loose ends we cannot resolve, the problems besetting us, the freakish accidents bolting out of nowhere, the terrible assaults of nature on our bodies and brains, the cruel attacks we aim at one another, the pathetic and tragic impulses we succumb to resulting in the unraveling of our own lives, the headlines leading us to believe the oversight of the world rests finally in the hands of tyrants, oppressors, the warriors, the demagogues, -- our preacher tells us that what makes Jesus the Christ of God can be discovered as, on the one hand, we see the transient, partial, muddy, often desperate nature of our human condition and its afflictions -- but what makes our hope, what makes Jesus Christ, "the heir of all things" lies in the trust we risk that through whatever crisis and trouble we now pass we are joined by One whose love bears the crisis with us and whose grace lies in binding the loose ends, transfiguring the twisted, reconciling our antagonisms, healing our self-inflicted wounds. We cannot see that now, but we live by the promise that our God in Jesus Christ works, indeed wrings out of the chaos and the threats dogging us a resolution and a coherence we can attribute only to recreative, forging Divine love.

What a staggering affirmation! How dare we say such thing? Where do we see the sign of such grace and love amid this troubled creation of ours, this precarious existence each one of us lives? Well, we see it again in what we can only call astounding, incredible news -- news we could not have invented ourselves about the nature of God and of someone we call Christ -- for as our preacher asserts, this Christ who bears in human flesh all of our God whose identity can be squished into human form -- this God plunged into human life, knows suffering, knows death, this God is in no way immune or exempted from anything you and I experience or encounter.  This God in Jesus Christ becomes our brother, by passing through the stresses, the bruises, the afflictions life throws at him, no different from you or me.

Some years ago I read a wonderful little reflection by Edmund Steimle entitled, "Is God as Good as Jesus?" Steimle tells of that question put to him "in agony of spirit" by a diplomat who spent a number of years in the Far East. The diplomat rehearsed the overwhelming mass misery, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people living in desperate poverty, riddled by disease, half starved, illiterate. And for most of them -- and this was the damnable part of it, he said, -- nothing to look forward to, no future that offered anything but the same kind of grinding poverty. Over here, he said, in our pleasant churches and surrounded for the most part by good, decent people, it is relatively easy to believe that God is good, even granting the poverty and suffering and injustice so many people have to endure in Asia who have known nothing but poverty and disease and can look forward in life to nothing more. "I wish," he said, "I wish I could believe that God is as good as Jesus."

Well, my beloved friends, God is as good as Jesus. This rendering of the Gospel by our author assures us God knows what it is like to be us. The reflection of "God's glory" we see in Jesus as the Christ comes not through pomp and circumstance, not through crowns and gowns, not the trappings and ceremony we assemble to celebrate the place or position honored by office or accomplishment in our civilization. It comes from the anguish, the pain, the bloody defeat and terrible death suffered by this God incarnate in Jesus the Christ on the Cross at Calvary. The Cross makes Jesus our brother.

Can we grasp that? Jesus Christ, as our preacher affirms, is our friend, our brother, because through his suffering and death he knows what it is like to be you and me. He experiences the height and depth and breadth of our humanity no less than you or I. My word, what pathos! As one commentator puts its exquisitely: Whatever perfection we may attribute to Jesus, it comes in reference to his participation in human life, "in the sense that suffering joins him completely and empathetically -- [I love that:empathetically] -- to the human condition. Through his pain, Jesus becomes a 'brother' to every other human being . . ." and here lies the radical and decisive unfolding of the Gospel. Our preacher affirms "that when the gaze of the 'Eternal Son' of God encompasses a man or woman walking toward lethal injection on death row; that when the glorified Son sees a homeless woman wrapped in garbage bags asleep on our Boylston Street portico or an alcoholic man in our alley crawling under some cardboard boxes next to Snowdon High School's warm air ventilator; when "the Lord of All" sees a man on Copley Square or in the veterans' hospital or a woman at Mass. Mental Health, shorn of all dignity, a wild and haunted wreck blown apart by schizophrenia; when the "divine heir of all things" sees a mother weeping over the death of her child or a man battling the last excruciating and savage attack of cancer, or anyone living with the chronic threat of AIDS; when "the exact print of God's very being" sees the swollen body of a child slowly dying of starvation, a woman drinking herself to death, or another selling herself for her children's food; or when "the one who sits down by the majesty on high" sees a man ashamed and in despair without work, a woman in a Boston courtroom, standing beside her child whose life is lost to drugs, a wounded heart whose marriage is trickling away and whose love yet burns brightly, an Iraqi, a Croatian, a Palestinian soldier rotting on the killing fields -- through all of this the Savior does not see a charity case, a pitiful victim or hopeless cause. This Christ sees a brother, this Savior sees a sister and is not ashamed to call us, "brothers and sisters." This Christ who comes to us in these last days does not brush aside misery with a wag of the head and cluck, "There but for the grace of God go I." Instead we hear, "There because of the grace of God I am". . . Because Jesus experiences rejection, pain, abandonment, desolation surrounding a violent, scandalous death, his life is porous to the full range of human misery and catastrophe -- yours, mine. For this reason we are his brothers and sisters.  We are bound to God and Christ by our pain and by our faith -- our faith -- that at our side stands One who bears that pain with us and who guarantees it will not have the last word. We live by that hope; that conviction we do not see; we simply, humbly, gratefully trust.

And so we ask now as we asked at the beginning, "Do you believe anyone is really running this show? Is anyone finally in charge? Does our hope bear any validity? Of course. And we affirm it in confidence because, "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways, but in these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, heir of all things, creator of the worlds, reflection of God's glory, the exact imprint of God's very being, sustaining all things -- all things -- by his powerful word -- even Jesus Christ our Lord, our Savior.