Colin W. Williams - "Discipline and Discipleship" (January 30, 1966)
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Transcript
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(soft upbeat music) | 0:03 | |
- | In St. John's Gospel, there are several stories | 0:29 |
which represent Jesus in a dramatic struggle | 0:33 | |
against the political and religious authorities of his time. | 0:37 | |
These struggles all concern in his determination | 0:42 | |
to break through the limits of their expectation | 0:48 | |
for other people. | 0:51 | |
Like all religious and political authorities, | 0:54 | |
they had high expectations for themselves | 0:56 | |
but they had fairly strict limits | 1:00 | |
as to who these expectation should rightfully belong. | 1:04 | |
And so in the society of that day, | 1:08 | |
they had walls which represented these limits. | 1:10 | |
Sometimes these walls were occasioned by physical illness. | 1:15 | |
Lepers, for example, were put right outside in the desert. | 1:19 | |
Sometimes these barriers represent moral illness, | 1:24 | |
or at least that's what it was considered to be | 1:29 | |
by the authorities. | 1:31 | |
And so they had outcasts, publicans and sinners | 1:33 | |
who were excluded from the normal commerce of their society. | 1:37 | |
And these walls of limited expectation were kept there | 1:43 | |
in order to maintain order, | 1:48 | |
they served a good useful purpose for the people | 1:51 | |
who were inside the order. | 1:55 | |
They made sure there was a limit | 1:57 | |
to the disturbances that could occur. | 1:59 | |
But Jesus broke through these limitations, | 2:03 | |
through one to another, he went. | 2:07 | |
And every time when he crossed these barriers | 2:10 | |
of limited expectation, trouble arose. | 2:13 | |
Now I want us to look at one of these stories | 2:18 | |
and then recognize that this is representative | 2:21 | |
of a number of such cases. | 2:24 | |
And from it, we should then be a able to discern something | 2:28 | |
of the significance of Jesus for ourselves in our time. | 2:31 | |
This is a story from the fifth chapter of John's Gospel. | 2:36 | |
In this case, the excluded people | 2:40 | |
are those who are physically sick | 2:42 | |
not to the point of being an obvious enemy | 2:44 | |
of society as with the lepers, | 2:48 | |
but nevertheless to the point of being clearly awkward. | 2:51 | |
And so you find them gathered all together in isolation | 2:55 | |
around a pool, the Pool of Bethesda. | 2:58 | |
And the story now opens with Jesus | 3:02 | |
crossing the barrier again and going to these people | 3:04 | |
by the Bethesda Gate. | 3:08 | |
John has a neck of putting his stories | 3:11 | |
in very clean dramatic form and shape. | 3:14 | |
And this story is no exception. | 3:19 | |
It's a story in three acts or three scenes. | 3:21 | |
So the first scene has Jesus going outside the walls | 3:26 | |
to visit the sick people around the pool. | 3:30 | |
Now at the Sheep Pool in Jerusalem, | 3:34 | |
there is a place with five colonnades. | 3:36 | |
Its name in the language of the Jew is Bethesda. | 3:39 | |
And these colonnades, they lay crowd of sick people, | 3:43 | |
blind, lame, and paralyzed | 3:46 | |
waiting for the disturbance of the water. | 3:49 | |
For from time to time, | 3:52 | |
an angel came down to the pool and stirred up the water. | 3:54 | |
The first to plunge in after this disturbance | 3:58 | |
recovered from whatever disease that afflicted him. | 4:00 | |
Among them was a man who had been crippled for 38 years. | 4:04 | |
When Jesus saw him lying there | 4:08 | |
and was aware that he had been in a long time, | 4:10 | |
he said to him, "Do you want to recover?" | 4:12 | |
So he replied, "I have no one to put me in the pool | 4:16 | |
when the water is disturbed, | 4:19 | |
but while I am moving someone else's in the pool before me." | 4:21 | |
Jesus answered, 'Rise to your feet, | 4:25 | |
take up your bed and walk" | 4:30 | |
The man recovered instantly took up his stretcher | 4:33 | |
and began to walk. | 4:36 | |
And that's the end of the first scene. | 4:38 | |
And this is a clear cut type of scene, no real problem here. | 4:41 | |
Jesus goes out into a situation of human despair. | 4:47 | |
Crowds of sick people gathered around this pool, | 4:53 | |
all they had to cling to was a rather absurd little hope, | 4:57 | |
but at least it was their hope. | 5:02 | |
Society gave them nothing else. | 5:04 | |
As far as society were concerned, they were beyond hope. | 5:06 | |
But there was a legion, which said that, | 5:09 | |
"Every now and then an angel of the Lord | 5:11 | |
stirred the waters of this pool, | 5:13 | |
and the one who got in first, could be cured." | 5:15 | |
And so they clung to that ephemeral, absurd hope. | 5:19 | |
They had nothing else. | 5:25 | |
Then Jesus comes to them in their ghetto of despair | 5:29 | |
and his eye is fixed upon one man, | 5:33 | |
representative of the lot. | 5:36 | |
Story says he'd been sick for 38 years. | 5:39 | |
And Jesus says to him, "Do you want to recover?" | 5:42 | |
But the answer obviously is yes, that's why he is there. | 5:46 | |
And so Jesus says to him, "Rise, take up your bed and walk." | 5:51 | |
And so John pictures Jesus | 5:59 | |
as the one who breaks through the limitations of human hope. | 6:01 | |
Here he brings hope where previously there was no hope. | 6:07 | |
Here he brings life where previously | 6:12 | |
there was only the expectation of death. | 6:15 | |
Here he gives those who have no future, | 6:19 | |
a future to which they can direct their lives. | 6:23 | |
Jesus is presented then as the hope of the world. | 6:28 | |
And the hope who breaks through our human limitations | 6:33 | |
on hope, going through in to the ghettos, | 6:37 | |
here the ghetto of the physically sick. | 6:40 | |
And so the first scene ends with real joy. | 6:45 | |
The man recovering instantly, picks up his stretcher, | 6:50 | |
puts it under his arm and walks out. | 6:53 | |
Now he's happy, he's a free man. | 6:55 | |
He has a future. | 6:57 | |
But then comes scene two. | 7:00 | |
And a rapid change in mood. | 7:04 | |
This man walks out and walks into the past. | 7:08 | |
The past in the shape of the political | 7:14 | |
and religious authorities. | 7:17 | |
That day was a Sabbath. | 7:21 | |
So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, | 7:23 | |
"It is a Sabbath, you're not allowed to carry your bed | 7:25 | |
on the Sabbath." | 7:28 | |
He answered, "The man who cured me said, | 7:30 | |
take up your bed and walk." | 7:32 | |
They asked him, "Who was the man who told you | 7:35 | |
to take up your bed and walk?" | 7:37 | |
But the cripple had been cured did not know | 7:40 | |
for the place was crowded and Jesus had slipped away. | 7:43 | |
A little later, Jesus found him in the temple | 7:47 | |
and said to him, "Now that you are well again, | 7:49 | |
leave your sinful ways or you may suffer something worse." | 7:52 | |
The man went away and told the Jews | 7:57 | |
that it was Jesus who had cured him. | 7:59 | |
The second scene. | 8:04 | |
The man with new hope, | 8:07 | |
a hope beyond the previous limitations of society | 8:10 | |
walks out with joy. | 8:13 | |
And when he walks into the political | 8:16 | |
and religious authorities, all they see is the orderly walls | 8:18 | |
of their society beginning to crumble. | 8:25 | |
They said, "But look, it's the Sabbath, | 8:30 | |
it's against the rules to be cured on the Sabbath." | 8:32 | |
The man rather astounds, | 8:36 | |
"But somebody told me to take up my bed and walk and I did." | 8:38 | |
Well, that made them all the more shocked. | 8:42 | |
Here's a second rule gone. | 8:45 | |
"You mean somebody cured you on a Sabbath? | 8:47 | |
That's against the rules too." | 8:49 | |
So the man is utterly confused. | 8:56 | |
All he knows is there's new hope, new life, | 9:00 | |
and all society tells him, "You are not entitled to it." | 9:03 | |
Now of course we can sympathize in a way, | 9:11 | |
we should be able to, we see it plenty in our own time. | 9:14 | |
This is always a dangerous moment. | 9:19 | |
When hope begins to break through the limiting barriers | 9:22 | |
of the past and begins to stir up, | 9:26 | |
new communities previously, safely excluded. | 9:29 | |
We've seen it for example, | 9:35 | |
all across the face of Asia and Africa, | 9:36 | |
the British for example, | 9:42 | |
had many of the people of Africa and Asia in their place, | 9:44 | |
a place of limited hope. | 9:48 | |
That was all they were allowed, | 9:53 | |
that was all the order of society could guarantee | 9:55 | |
without disruption, without disorder. | 9:57 | |
But suddenly out there in the ghettos of despair | 10:03 | |
in the years after the war, new hopes began to rise. | 10:07 | |
And the representatives of political and religious order | 10:12 | |
were shocked by this grasping out after new hope. | 10:16 | |
You remember the famous words of Churchill, | 10:21 | |
"I refused to preside over the dissolution | 10:24 | |
of the British Empire." | 10:27 | |
For for him, that order had been the guarantee | 10:31 | |
of a gradual civilizing power. | 10:36 | |
But if you allowed hope to spring up spontaneously | 10:38 | |
from the ghettos, surely only disorder could result. | 10:41 | |
Perhaps you think the parallel is farfetched. | 10:51 | |
Perhaps you ask what justification do | 10:55 | |
having drawing a parallel between the new hope there | 10:57 | |
beside this pool in Bethesda and the new hopes | 11:00 | |
in Africa and Asia, which we've seen rising in our time? | 11:04 | |
Notice here that when this man meets the authorities | 11:09 | |
they say to him, "Who cured you?" | 11:12 | |
And he says, "I don't know." | 11:15 | |
He didn't know. | 11:19 | |
The work of Jesus in the ghettos of despair | 11:22 | |
is first incognito, he works as the unknown one. | 11:26 | |
That's the meaning also of the passage | 11:34 | |
and the lesson we had read to us this morning. | 11:35 | |
When John the Baptist sends to Jesus and says, | 11:38 | |
"Look, I'm confused, are you really the representative | 11:41 | |
of the Kingdom of God or aren't you? | 11:45 | |
The name Messiah is not clearly written on you, | 11:52 | |
I can't recognize you." | 11:55 | |
And Jesus said, "Go and tell John this, | 12:00 | |
the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, | 12:05 | |
the lepers are clean, the deaf hear, | 12:09 | |
the deader raised to life, | 12:13 | |
the poor are hearing the good news, | 12:15 | |
and happy as the man who does not find me | 12:18 | |
a stumbling block." | 12:20 | |
And so he lists the various ghettos of despair and says, | 12:25 | |
"I am penetrating these with the new act of God. | 12:29 | |
It's in those ghettos that I'm bringing hope, new life. | 12:32 | |
I'm forcing back the borders of society | 12:35 | |
so that more and more and more can participate | 12:39 | |
in God's good life." | 12:42 | |
But I know that many will be offended | 12:48 | |
because this destroys the boundaries of order | 12:54 | |
upon which they have learned to rely. | 12:57 | |
But of course, we don't have to go to Asia and Africa | 13:07 | |
to see it, but it's much easier to see it there first, | 13:10 | |
we're seeing it all over this land, | 13:17 | |
in the ghettos of despair. | 13:21 | |
The poor of the inner cities, the ethnically excluded, | 13:25 | |
are hearing the word of hope. | 13:30 | |
We're seeing it in Latin America. | 13:32 | |
Those who previously believed that there's masses, | 13:34 | |
there was no hope for them in this life | 13:37 | |
are now stirring to new hopes. | 13:39 | |
And we are seeing the fears, | 13:42 | |
which the stirring of their hope causes in our breasts | 13:46 | |
for are we are the establishment. | 13:50 | |
In this second scene, however, Jesus goes further. | 14:00 | |
The man now thoroughly confused. | 14:05 | |
And we see this confusion too | 14:09 | |
all over amongst those who have found new hope. | 14:12 | |
Thoroughly confused because still the major nations | 14:17 | |
or groups or peoples reject them. | 14:23 | |
Still, they may be refused to seat in the United Nations. | 14:26 | |
Still, they may be refused their recognition | 14:34 | |
as true partners in the family of nations. | 14:39 | |
Still, they may be refused participation in a society | 14:44 | |
which calls itself a democracy, soon still, | 14:48 | |
they may be rejected by the very families | 14:53 | |
who believe that they are representatives | 14:57 | |
of the love of God, the families of our churches | 15:00 | |
and our homes. | 15:05 | |
And so this man was confused by that rejection. | 15:09 | |
And so he run back to the temple | 15:14 | |
hoping that somehow God would have a new word for him | 15:17 | |
and there he met Jesus. | 15:20 | |
And at last he found out his name. | 15:21 | |
And Jesus said two things to him. | 15:25 | |
First, "Look, you are walking." | 15:27 | |
The first thing was to reinforce his hope. | 15:32 | |
Don't give up your hope, | 15:35 | |
don't be driven back into the ghetto of despair, | 15:37 | |
cling to it no matter how hard it is. | 15:41 | |
But the second, "Make sure nothing worse happens to you." | 15:46 | |
Make sure your hope doesn't turn to bitterness. | 15:54 | |
Make sure you are not driven to play the game of tormentors. | 16:00 | |
The game of rejection, the game of hostility, | 16:07 | |
"Make sure nothing worse happens to you." | 16:14 | |
Then comes the third scene, a very short one, but of course, | 16:22 | |
pivotal in the whole story. | 16:27 | |
It was works of the kind done on the Sabbath | 16:30 | |
that stirred the Jews to persecute Jesus. | 16:33 | |
But he defended himself by saying, | 16:37 | |
"My father has never yet ceased his work. | 16:40 | |
And I am working too." | 16:45 | |
And here's the key to the whole story. | 16:48 | |
Look, he says the trouble with your attitude to life | 16:50 | |
is that you do not believe in a living God, | 16:53 | |
you don't believe that God is still at work in his world | 16:57 | |
in his history. | 17:00 | |
You think you run it. | 17:02 | |
You think you run it according to God's laws, | 17:05 | |
you pride yourself on that, | 17:09 | |
but you think God has left you to run the world | 17:13 | |
your way according to his laws. | 17:16 | |
But of course you're did wrong. | 17:18 | |
God is still a primary actor in history. | 17:20 | |
He's got a goal, a purpose, and he's moving. | 17:25 | |
"My father is still working and I am working." | 17:28 | |
In me, you see what God is doing. | 17:32 | |
And as you see me move out through the barriers | 17:38 | |
of previous expectation into the ghettos of despair, | 17:42 | |
bringing hope to the hopeless, | 17:47 | |
giving them participation in life, | 17:49 | |
there, you see God at work. | 17:52 | |
And the call to you is to open your eyes and your lives | 17:58 | |
so that you conjoin God in what he is doing. | 18:08 | |
Free yourself from your own expectations | 18:11 | |
with their limits, with their self-protective limits | 18:14 | |
and free yourself for the risk of joining God | 18:21 | |
in what he is doing in the world. | 18:26 | |
How do you know where he is? | 18:30 | |
How do you know where to join him? | 18:33 | |
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard, | 18:37 | |
"The blind recover their sight, | 18:42 | |
the lame walk, the lepers are clean, | 18:45 | |
the deaf here, the dead erase to life, | 18:47 | |
the poor are hearing the good news | 18:50 | |
and happy as the man | 18:52 | |
who does not find me a stumbling block." | 18:53 | |
You'll find him where he is giving hope | 18:58 | |
in the ghettos of despair. | 19:01 | |
And then his final word, | 19:04 | |
"Come to me all whose work is hard, whose load is heavy, | 19:07 | |
and I will give you relief. | 19:13 | |
Bend your necks to my yoke and learn from me." | 19:16 | |
To come to Jesus is to join him | 19:21 | |
in what he's doing in the world, | 19:26 | |
there's no other way to come to him. | 19:27 | |
"Bend your neck to my yoke." | 19:30 | |
Become a coworker in this struggle in the ghettos | 19:34 | |
of despair in the world. | 19:38 | |
That's what it means to be converted, | 19:43 | |
that's what it means to recognize that God is still working | 19:47 | |
and the shape of his work he's shown us by Jesus, his son. | 19:53 | |
And we are called to join him in the struggle within history | 19:59 | |
to bring new hope to those whom we have excluded from hope. | 20:05 | |
Let us pray. | 20:13 | |
(air whooshing) | 20:17 | |
We thank thee, O God, for the word of Jesus | 20:23 | |
that he is still at work in our world, | 20:30 | |
giving sight to the blind, good news to the poor, | 20:35 | |
acceptance to those whom we reject, | 20:40 | |
hope to those whom we drive into despair. | 20:44 | |
Help us, O God, to be converted, | 20:49 | |
to turn around from our selfish ways | 20:52 | |
and to join Jesus in his work in the world for thy Kingdom. | 20:56 | |
And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, | 21:05 | |
the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, | 21:09 | |
be with us all, evermore. | 21:13 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 21:20 |
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