Disconnected Christianity

Message Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund looks at the beginning of Jesus' ministry in Luke 4, his fulfillment of Scripture from Isaiah 61 and how we can become disconnected from the mission of Jesus.

Message Transcript

Well, good morning and welcome to this morning's mass. We're glad that we can be here to gather as this. Actually that story from Mike, it's a great reminder of just how significant it is that so many of you take time and serve, so many of you are serving in these Christmas Eve services. I know that sometimes that feels like a big investment, but you never know how God will use that. Just caring for people as they come and inviting them in can have such a profound impact on what happens here as a church. Just thank you for being a part of that. It takes so many people just to run each of the services as you know. I think there are 15 services here in Wexford. I don't think there are 15 services here at Wexford for Christmas Eve. 3:00 and 5:00 later today.

3:00, 5:00 and 7:00 tomorrow, and then 11:00, 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00 and 9:00 on Christmas Eve. Also, I just want to say thank you to those of you who have participated in the year end giving initiative. That really does help us to start next year, understanding something about just the financial possibilities and opportunities in front of us. If you're part of this church and you'd still like to participate, you can do that online on the church app. You can do that with a card or something as well and that would be greatly appreciated. I mentioned that we have Christmas Eve services here.

Certainly there are things that are a part of our Christmas Eve tradition here at Orchard Hill, the stars, the incredible music, the candle lighting, kids coming and being part of that little pageantry where they come forward. When you see that you probably think, what could go wrong? Let me show you a video of what could go wrong when you have kids engaged. Take a look.

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Hopefully we won't have that kind of an event in any of our Christmas Eve services. Let's pray together. Father, thank you just for a chance to be gathered here to gather this morning, and I pray that in the next several moments you would speak to all of us. Father, if I've prepared things that don't reflect your word, I pray that you'd keep me from saying them. If there are things that would be beneficial in these moments that I haven't prepared, I pray you would prompt me and that I would respond and we would all come away with a better understanding of who you are and what your perspective on our lives is. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let me ask you a question. Do you think people are more generous during the Christmas season?

On a whole, would you say people are more generous or less generous? Most people would probably answer that question, they're more generous. Certainly charities receive somewhere, depending on the stats you see, around 50% of their resources are given to them in the last section of the year, November, December. In fact, a lot of shelters that have volunteers have to turn people away on Christmas day, Thanksgiving day, the days leading up to Christmas, but struggle to staff their spaces with volunteers in August and in July because people have an impulse to say, "I want to do something for others during this time of the year." What is it that causes that? Is it just simply the sense of the season? Is it movies that we see, It's a Wonderful Life?

Is it just that we feel good if we do something for somebody else? Well, I'd like to suggest today that the reason that maybe people feel more generous, more giving this time of year is because there's something divine in it. There's something that is God-like, that's Christ-like when we see needs and we decide that we want to be a part of meeting those needs. Certainly at this time of year when we talk about Christmas and we gather in churches and people gather all over the world, we focus on the nativity and that's right and that's good. But I believe if Jesus had a business card that he wouldn't have put on his business card, born of a Virgin. He probably wouldn't have even put on his business card born and entered the human race via poverty.

But instead, the words that were read in the scripture in Luke 4 probably would have been on his business card. The reason I say this is because when he first went to the temple and he chose something to read to describe himself, and he says, "This is the scripture fulfilled in your hearing today." This is what he chose. He chose to quote Isaiah 61 and he says this in Luke 4. It says, "The spirit of the Lord is on me. He's anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." It's almost an exact quote of Isaiah 61 and what he's doing here very simply is he's saying, "This is what I came to do."

In a sense, you could say this is almost a mic drop moment. This is one of these things where he's like, "You want to know what I'm here for? Boom. There it is. This is what I have come to do." What he is basically doing is he's saying, "I have come to bring justice." He doesn't use the word. In Isaiah 61, we see the word poor and brokenhearted, captives prisoners, all used. In the Old Testament, there's a word that's used for justice and the word is mishpat. Mishpat is a word that is used some 200 times in the Old Testament and it usually has a connotation of two different things. There's a negative aspect where the person who is bringing mishpat will punish wrong and then there's a positive aspect where the person will give the oppressed person their due.

In other words, they'll punish the person who's opposing justice and then they'll take the person who's getting wronged and they'll say, "I'm going to give you what it is that you deserve." I mentioned that Isaiah 61 had a handful of words in the Old Testament and words that are often used are words for a group of people to express the need for justice. We see the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. These words are used over and over again along with the words widow, orphan, immigrant and poor. What is being pointed to each time is a group of people that you would say are poor and vulnerable and weak. People who need something.

What we see through the Old Testament and then in Jesus taking this scripture and making it his mission is he saying, "This is my mission and it's to help those who are vulnerable, those who are weak." In fact, in Proverbs 14:31, we read this. It says, "Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God." The word here for contempt, Bruce Waltke says, he's an Old Testament scholar, means to scoff or take lightly. In other words, it's to say I don't care much for people who don't have what they need.

Now, what's happened in the church over time is people have by and large seen this and they've said, "Okay, this is really referring to the spiritually poor. Jesus' mission was for the spiritually poor, the spiritually blind, the spiritually weak, the spiritually hurting," and that's not untrue. You can make a case for that from the sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor, the poor in spirit," but here what you're seeing I don't think is purely something that's spiritual. I think that this is Jesus saying, "My heart, my mission is for those who are weak, those who are oppressed." Here's what we see and that is God's heart is to use divine power on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable. That's what God did in sending Jesus.

There's a story that has been around for years. In fact, it's become a popular story in sociology textbooks. It's about a lady named Kitty Genovese and Kitty was murdered in 1964 in New York City. The man who murdered her was a man named Winston Moseley. According to the New York Times that printed an article about this in 1964, there were 38 witnesses who heard or saw the attack and did nothing. The reason this has become such a popular story in sociology textbooks is because the people who read about this, saw it, heard it wanted to understand what went through people's minds that they could see a person being attacked and murdered or hear it and say, "We're not going to do anything."

Now, in hindsight, the New York Times in I think 2007 published a retraction of their original story and said that they exaggerated many of the accounts evidently to promote kind of the see something, say something idea is what they did. But the reason that I think that story became part of sociology's folklore was because people said, "How could somebody see desperation and close their shades? How could somebody hear a woman crying for help and say, "I'm going back to bed." Here's what is true about Jesus is when he first went to the temple and first said, "Why did I come," what he did was he stood in front of a group of people and he said, "I have come for the weak and the vulnerable, for the disadvantage, for the people who are hurting. That is my mission."

What's happened I think largely in the church today is that we can go to one of two extremes, either say Jesus' only mission is to help the hurting or Jesus is only about the spiritually hurting. But here again the word of the Lord in Micah 6:8, it says this, "He has shown you, O mortal or O man, O woman, what is good and what the Lord requires of you." Here's what it says, "To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God, to walk humbly with your God, to love mercy, and to act with mishpat," that word for justice. In other words, this is God's call that people, not just Jesus, but his people would be people who say, "We care about the vulnerable and the disadvantaged in our world." It isn't just something that's spiritualized.

It's not something that's just a call to be selective or seasonal, but it's something that God says, "This is what I want my people to do." Now, you may hear that and you may say, "Okay, sounds like you're making Jesus into a Democrat." Just what some of you probably are thinking. Tim Keller, who's a well-known author and pastor, has said this. He says, "If we come to the Bible and we see it only basically with our current political lenses, we won't see the real Jesus." We need to put aside our political glasses because sometimes Jesus will sound very liberal in terms of care for the poor and social programs and sometimes Jesus will sound very conservative when it comes to gender and sexual ethics and some of the things that we tend to say belong on one side of the aisle.

Here's the real point, it isn't that understanding or following Jesus will make you more Republican or more Democrat, but what following Jesus will do, if you understand Jesus' mission, is it will make you care deeply about the things that Jesus cares about. What that means on some level is that you will say, "My life isn't just about taking care of me and getting where I want to go, but I care about people who are vulnerable and weak in this world as well." There's a couple of movies that have come out this season. I've only seen one of them, but they're both significant in that they tell the story of an individual who cares about justice. One is the movie Harriet.

It tells the story of Harriet Tubman, who was an African-American woman who gained freedom by running from slavery, and then said, "It isn't enough that I have my freedom, but I have to go back over and over and help others escape and find life." It's an incredible story, but what's really incredible about it is her motivation wasn't simply to say, "I just want to care." It was that she understood that God created people to be equal in value in his sight. She said, "I am not going to rest until I can care for people who don't have the same opportunities that I have." Then there's the second movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Fred Rogers. This movie tells about a man who made a children's show.

He was an ordained Presbyterian pastor first and then decided to make a children's show. But the movie tells the story more on the human side of how he cared for a reporter who was a skeptic and how he invested in his life and in people's lives, and how every person he came in contact with he saw is created in the image of God and worthy of his attention and to care for them. Then one of the climactic scenes in the movie, he's swimming and as he's swimming laps in his daily exercise, he's praying for individuals by name when he could very easily say, "Look, I'm doing my thing on TV." But he used his job and his life to say, "How can I bring mishpat to the people of this world?"

He may not have said that phrase, but again, one of the reasons he did this is because of his understanding of God and his understanding of Jesus Christ. In fact, one of his friends gave him a blue cardigan, which he wore often because blue was the priestly color of his denomination, of the robes they would wear. He said, "When you go to do your children's show, I want you to be wearing priestly colors because you're being a priest to those kids." What he understood was that following Jesus meant not just saying, "I've punched my ticket for an eternity," but I have a calling to bring justice to this earth.

Earlier this fall, I was in the city of Chicago with my family and my wife and two of our sons, Ben and Nate, got with me on a train and we were going to commute from one part of the city to the other. As we were on the train, there was a lady who was on the train, she was an African-American lady, and she was sitting there. She appeared not to be fully present, but she started to yell things just in general to everybody and everyone who was there just kind of was looking. But what happened next caught me off guard. She saw an Asian man on the train and she began to call out to him. She said, "Hey, China town, it's you and your people that have caused me and my people not to have economic well-being in this city. Why don't you go back to China?"

I'm sitting here and I'm just thinking, is this like a joke? Am I in a spoof of some kind? Is there a hidden camera? What's going on here? She got up literally and went over and sat down across from him and started to yell at him repeatedly about what offenses the Chinese people have propagated on her. Here's where I missed the moment. I can make excuses and say as a white man confronting an African-American woman over race in Chicago probably isn't wise or that I was caught off guard. I didn't say anything. I just sat there thinking, this is surreal. But you see, the idea of justice isn't just give a little money and call it good.

The idea of justice is saying wherever you are and there's a weak and vulnerable person and somebody else is pushing in, that you don't just say, "Well, that's their problem. As I got up, my stop came and we got up to get off, the guy got off and he was going to get on a different car. He handled it beautifully in the moment. I said something to him and he just kind of looked at it and said, "Yeah, this happens." It was a reminder to me that sometimes even when we think we have good intentions, that we can miss the moments of being like Jesus and saying, "I'm going to stand up for the people who are vulnerable." Now, why do we do this? Do we do it simply because it reflects what is right and reflects God?

Well, certainly that's part of it, but it'll be hard to maintain that over time. Another suggestion would be that we do it because of an overflow of worship. Psalm 1:46, it has the same phraseology as Isaiah 61 and Luke 4. What we see when we look at this is we see this idea of saying that we're called to this, that this is God's character, but here's how the Psalm starts. It starts with, "Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live." Verse three, "Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save. When the spirit departs, they return to the ground and on the very day their plans come to nothing."

Then it says this, "Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He is the maker of heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them and remains faithful forever. He upholds," here it is, "the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free. The Lord gives sight to the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous." But do you see how it starts? It starts with worship. In other words, part of maybe how we can say I want to be a person of justice isn't just to say I should, but it's to worship the God of justice so that our heart begins to see things the way he sees it, but I wonder if that's closer but still missing something.

You see, so often what happens when it comes to this conversation is we like to see ourselves more as victims than as people who need justice. What we probably really need is a heart transformation where we understand to the core of our being exactly how Jesus' mission applies to us. Here's what I mean. It's really easy to spiritualize the idea of Luke 4 and say, "I'm poor, I'm blind, I'm needy," and that's true and say, "Jesus came for me because I'm that," or it's easy to say, "Maybe I'm not those things, but I care for people." But when we understand what Jesus did fully, what we'll see here is that actually at its very core, we are people who sometimes are the very perpetrators of injustice. Let me show you Luke 4 again.

It ends this way, verse 19, he says, "To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor," and it ends and it stops. But if you go back to Isaiah 61, the way that verse two reads is it says, "To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor," and then there's another clause and it says, "And the day of vengeance of our God." The day of vengeance of our God. Why doesn't Jesus say the day of vengeance of our God? There's day of favor and there's vengeance of our God. Well, the day of favor I believe is his way of saying, "For the oppressed, I am going to bring favor," and the vengeance of our God was his sense of saying, "I'm going to punish the perpetrators." Remember, mishpat had two elements to it.

It has the element of punishing wrong and giving the oppressed their due. The day of favor probably equates to giving the oppressed their due and the day of vengeance relates to this idea of punishing those who do wrong. But here's where our transformation can take place. The reason I believe Jesus didn't quote that is because Jesus didn't come to bring punishment. He came to take it. That's what the cross is all about. Jesus came to bear the punishment for sin rather than to meet it out. In other words, the transformation that you and I get is when he says, "This scripture has been fulfilled." What he was doing was he was saying, "I came to bring justice in a way that you can experience forgiveness because I'm taking that punishment."

I don't know if you've ever noticed, but when somebody gets passionate about the disadvantage in our world, that often what happens is they get a little self-righteous. What I mean by this is they'll start to say, "Well, I care about the poor and the oppressed and you don't care about the poor and oppressed," and then they start to look at other people and they become in a sense full of themselves. Well, you see, what the cross does is it actually helps us to say, "I can care about people without having to look down on other people because what I know is that Jesus came and took the punishment that I deserved."

If you get that, if I get that, then our Christianity will not be disconnected from the issues of our world and from the hurting people that we come in contact with or even our own hurt. We see far too often in our culture, the church has been disengaged from kind of the hurting of our world. Again, I'm not talking about in programs. There are a lot of great programs that the church universal takes place and there's great programs our church takes place in, takes part in. I think that in many ways, you or I could say very comfortably, "If I give to the church, I give to important causes."

But what I'm talking about is individually those moments when we know what's happening, the only way that we will have the courage to stand up when somebody is acting out on a train in a city that we don't live in, in a situation that we're not comfortable with is when we're so aware of Jesus' mission to bring justice and so aware that we ourselves are the recipients of his grace and his justice together on the cross. That is when we'll be able to be people who live with the same mission that Jesus Christ lived with. Maybe you're here today and you say, "Look, I'm not sure that... I'm a person who identifies as a follower of Jesus. I'm just a person who cares about global issues."

But you see, if you understand and know who Jesus really is, that'll give you the real power to be a person who cares about the things of justice and of this world because it isn't just believe in one day you will have. It's a call to say Jesus wants people who will be people of justice like Jesus was. If you see your place, then you will live more fully in that reality. It doesn't mean you won't miss some opportunities, but it means later you might be able to see them and say, "Maybe I missed an opportunity to be an instrument of justice in this world today." It will be a moment where you can say, "God has given me opportunities again in the next day."

Father, we pray today that you would help each one of us just to understand fully and completely that your justice means that we don't get what we deserve and that we can access that through faith by admitting that that is our place. God, as we sit in that and live in that reality, I pray that it would motivate us not just simply to say that's good for me, but that as I live and care for people, that I reflect a bit of what you've done for me. Father, we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Thanks for worshiping here this morning. Have a great Christmas and Christmas Eve.