Marion M. Edwards - Sermon Untitled (January 2, 2000)

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-	The gospel lesson is from John 1:10-18.	0:06
	"He was in the world,	0:12
	"and the world came into being through Him,	0:14
	"yet the world did not know Him.	0:17
	"He came to what was His own,	0:21
	"and His own people did not accept Him,	0:23
	"but to all who received Him, who believed in His name,	0:26
	"He gave power to become children of God,	0:30
	"who are born not of blood or of the will of the flesh	0:34
	"or of the will of man, but of God.	0:38
	"And the word became flesh, and lived among us.	0:44
	"And we have seen His glory,	0:47
	"the glory as of a father's only son,	0:49
	"full of grace and truth.	0:52
	"John testified to Him and cried out,	0:55
	"'This was He of whom I said,	0:57
	"He who comes after me ranks ahead of me,	1:00
	"because He was before me.'	1:03
	"From His fullness,	1:06
	"we have all received grace upon grace.	1:06
	"The law indeed was given through Moses,	1:11
	"grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.	1:14
	"No one has ever seen God, it is God, the only Son,	1:19
	"who is close to the Father's heart who has made Him known."	1:24
	This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.	1:29
-	Greetings to you on this significant Lord's day	1:54
	at this hinge point in history,	1:58
	welcome to this place of worship.	2:02
	The scriptures that we have heard from the New Testament	2:08
	focus our attention on this significant day	2:14
	on a theological presentation of who Jesus Christ is.	2:18
	Perhaps it is in John 3:16	2:26
	that these words from John	2:29
	and Ephesians	2:33
	come into clear focus.	2:36
	For God so loved the world	2:40
	that He gave His only Son	2:44
	so that everyone who believes in Him	2:47
	may not perish but have life eternal.	2:51
	Let us pray.	2:57
	Set us afire, O God, with new understanding	3:00
	of who Jesus Christ is,	3:05
	and His place in our history	3:09
	at this new millennium time.	3:14
	May the words of the scripture	3:19
	become today the word of God	3:23
	in our lives, in our human journey, amen.	3:27
	John Killinger, a noted preacher,	3:35
	tells the story of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt	3:40
	and his longtime friend and confidante Bernard Baruch,	3:46
	talking late into a winter night	3:52
	in the Oval Office of the White House.	3:56
	World War II was raging around most of the globe.	4:00
	Their responsibilities that night were momentous,	4:06
	the decisions that they were making would affect the lives	4:10
	of countless people around the Earth.	4:15
	When their conversation, their business,	4:21
	was finally concluded,	4:23
	President Roosevelt suggested to his friend	4:26
	that they go out into the rose garden	4:30
	and look at the stars before going to bed.	4:33
	They went out and they looked up	4:38
	for what seemed like several long minutes.	4:41
	In silence together, they peered into the sky	4:45
	at the thousands of stars,	4:51
	beaming so brightly on that cold winter night.	4:54
	Then the president turned to his friend and said,	5:01
	"All right,	5:08
	I think we are now small enough	5:10
	"to go in and go to sleep.	5:15
	"I think we are now small enough	5:19
	"to go in and go to sleep."	5:23
	In this year of our Lord,	5:28
	January 2, 2000,	5:32
	oh, how we need in our time	5:36
	to sense the wonder, the reverence,	5:41
	the mystery, the humility,	5:46
	that President Roosevelt shared that night,	5:49
	especially do we need it as we launch	5:54
	into this new year, this new century,	5:58
	this new millennium.	6:02
	However, many of us are simply	6:05
	not given to star watching, are we?	6:09
	We take ourselves far too seriously to watch stars	6:13
	and to feel our smallness.	6:19
	We are prone instead to watch TV,	6:22
	the bowl games, the upcoming ACC basketball,	6:27
	the computer as we surf the net,	6:32
	the stock markets, especially NASDAQ,	6:36
	the want ads, the post Christmas sales,	6:40
	we live among so much wonderful technology	6:46
	that we have created,	6:50
	that we tend to take our own little creations so seriously	6:52
	that we are lulled into a fantasy	6:58
	of assuming that we are the creator	7:01
	instead of the creature.	7:05
	And many of us live with a kind of pre-Copernicus mentality	7:08
	as we see the world and all of it we are doing	7:13
	and all that we have created	7:16
	as the center of all reality and all truth.	7:18
	There is indeed for many of us	7:24
	little time for star watching and for feeling our smallness.	7:27
	In fact, star watching in the metropolitan areas	7:34
	of this whole Earth, like the triangle,	7:39
	has been made very difficult by our creations.	7:42
	The defused light of our cities	7:48
	make it hard to see the stars.	7:51
	The sky clutter that we have created and put aloft	7:54
	makes it hard to see the stars.	7:58
	Even when we can see the sky clearly,	8:03
	we tend to mistake moving airplanes and satellites	8:06
	and helicopters and signal towers	8:11
	for heavenly bodies.	8:14
	I grew up in a small southeast Georgia town	8:18
	where the tallest building was two stories,	8:21
	and I went many a night with my father	8:25
	on cold winter nights to look at the stars.	8:27
	It became sort of a hobby,	8:32
	a hobby that I like to pursue even today,	8:33
	but I confess that when I step outside	8:35
	on the deck of my home in Raleigh,	8:38
	that I have a hard time on some nights	8:42
	distinguishing between the flight pattern	8:44
	of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport	8:46
	and helicopters and all other moving things	8:50
	to see the stars.	8:56
	But I confess to you	8:57
	that at this hinge point in our history,	9:01
	I believe a lot of us need to do some star watching	9:05
	in order to get the perspective on this new year,	9:09
	this new century, this new millennium.	9:12
	After all, the Bible tells us very clearly	9:16
	that God approved the star watching of the wise men.	9:20
	Their sense of wonder and mystery	9:25
	that led them to follow a star	9:27
	in fact was the source for God revealing	9:31
	the greatest mystery of human history,	9:35
	it was in the star that finally came to stand	9:37
	over Bethlehem's manger	9:41
	that we are finally told	9:46
	who we are and whose we are,	9:49
	that we are not the creator,	9:52
	we are, in fact, creatures	9:56
	in need of the creator.	9:59
	So may I suggest to you on this first Sunday of a new era,	10:05
	that as we journey into the new millennium,	10:12
	perhaps we too would be wise	10:14
	if we stopped off with the wise men	10:19
	for a visit at Bethlehem's manger	10:23
	to see that thing which God has done.	10:27
	Our New Testament lectionary scriptures	10:31
	describe it in beautiful theological language,	10:33
	but it is left to John 3:16	10:38
	to put it in a language	10:40
	that we can touch and feel and see with great clarity,	10:42
	for God so loved the world	10:46
	that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him	10:50
	may not perish but have eternal life.	10:54
	It is a beautiful thing	10:59
	that we see in this verse of scripture.	11:00
	We are told something quite phenomenal in this passage,	11:05
	where the star stood over Bethlehem,	11:10
	we are told that God has performed heart surgery	11:14
	on the human condition,	11:20
	and He has inserted a divine pacemaker	11:23
	into the human reality.	11:27
	The pacemaker is Jesus Christ.	11:31
	He has a heartbeat of love,	11:34
	and He comes announcing to all the world	11:37
	that at the heart of the universe	11:44
	is not something, but someone,	11:47
	and His name is love.	11:51
	If we can come to grapple with that love,	11:54
	we can enter the new millennium with hope	11:57
	and confidence and joy and peace.	12:00
	But what kind of love is this?	12:04
	How can we describe it in human categories	12:08
	that are so limited?	12:12
	To be loved like this implies a height and a depth	12:14
	and a width of love beyond our human experience.	12:18
	I dare not, you dare not today	12:24
	confuse this divine love	12:26
	with the counterfeit love that some of us	12:30
	have been trafficking in that claims so much	12:32
	and delivers so little.	12:36
	It is this counterfeit love	12:39
	that many of us have been living with	12:42
	that has left us at this moment in history empty,	12:45
	fearful, some of us hopeless,	12:51
	some of us looking into the darkness	12:55
	of an unknown era apprehensive and frightened.	12:57
	Maybe it's a good time to examine this love of God	13:03
	described in Ephesians and in John's gospel,	13:07
	how dare we grasp it?	13:11
	It's so overwhelming,	13:14
	how dare we take it with us into the 21st century?	13:17
	I have a simple sermon outline that is not mine,	13:24
	it belongs to the 20th century period	13:28
	of history and preaching.	13:32
	It came from a very insignificant man	13:34
	as the way we measure men,	13:38
	his name was Gance Little,	13:40
	and he wrote it as a wonderful commentary on John 3:16,	13:43
	he was a mailman.	13:47
	He had delivered so many Christmas cards	13:49
	til finally he tried to reduce it down to one sentence,	13:52
	and in so doing,	13:56
	he reduced it down to a commentary on John 3:16.	13:57
	And he wrote,	14:02
	"God's love is the kind of love that will not let us go.	14:03
	"It is the kind of love that will not let us down.	14:10
	"It is the kind of love that will not let us off."	14:15
	I think if we can grasp that simple outline	14:19
	and take it into our heart and our soul and our mind,	14:24
	it might be that which we need to journey	14:28
	hopefully into a new millennium.	14:31
	It's a love, he suggested, that will not let us go.	14:34
	Well, turn in our Methodist hymnal	14:40
	and find George Matheson's great hymn,	14:42
	and you discover that Matheson was already groping	14:44
	with that love, "O love that will not let me go,	14:48
	"I rest my weary soul in thee,	14:52
	"I give thee back the life I owe,	14:55
	"that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be."	14:58
	This is God's love.	15:04
	He is a God who pursues us,	15:08
	who tenaciously searches and holds onto us,	15:11
	and who, despite all the rages of history,	15:16
	and personal tragedy that might be in your life,	15:20
	He will never let us go.	15:23
	So what does it mean to be loved	15:26
	by a God like this?	15:29
	It means that He is not a spectator God,	15:32
	He is not just sitting back,	15:36
	watching us play out the little games of life,	15:38
	He is not what Aristotle suggested	15:42
	and called a moveless mover	15:44
	that fed the deist philosophy of the 18th century.	15:47
	God is more than a benign spectator	15:50
	according to John 3:16.	15:54
	Our God is instead what the poet Francis Thompson	15:58
	called the hound of heaven,	16:02
	relentlessly seeking us and wooing us,	16:05
	searching for us, never letting us go.	16:08
	He is the God of the 139th Psalm	16:12
	who plunges into the uttermost parts of the sea	16:15
	to rescue us.	16:19
	Who, when we make our bed in hell,	16:21
	descends even there according to the apostle's creed,	16:24
	searching for us, and never letting us go.	16:27
	His love constantly pursues us,	16:31
	He is one who ever searches for us.	16:34
	John Wesley, the theological foreparent	16:37
	of people called Methodists,	16:40
	had a wonderful part of his theological structure,	16:42
	he called it God's prevenient grace,	16:46
	a grace that searches for us	16:50
	and knocks on our heart's door,	16:53
	and will never quit searching, yearning, and hoping	16:55
	that one day we will say yes to that love.	17:01
	I love the story about the little daughter	17:06
	who was told by her father	17:10
	when she had done something exceptionally good,	17:12
	he said to her, "I love you when you are good."	17:15
	And it was the child who responded	17:19
	with a godlike understanding,	17:21
	"I love you all the time, Daddy."	17:23
	And so it is with God's love,	17:27
	He never stops loving us,	17:29
	He never lets us go.	17:32
	Well, that's what it means to be loved by a God like that.	17:36
	I love you all the time,	17:42
	and I will never let you go.	17:45
	Let's go to point two of this simple sermon outline,	17:48
	it's a love also that will not let us down.	17:52
	Psychologists tell us that one of the greatest fears	17:58
	that we live with all of our lives,	18:00
	maybe even from time in our mother's womb,	18:04
	is the fear of being let down,	18:08
	of falling, of jumping into the hands of someone	18:11
	that is not there, who will not catch us.	18:15
	We are fearful that somebody will leave us,	18:19
	somebody will die.	18:22
	We are fearful of being abandoned,	18:24
	of being rejected, of being humiliated,	18:26
	of being excluded, of being shut out,	18:29
	of being prejudiced against.	18:32
	But God's love promises us	18:35
	that He will never do that to you and me,	18:39
	He will never leave us desolate,	18:42
	He will never abandon us, He will never desert us.	18:44
	Even when we let ourselves down,	18:48
	and even when others let us down,	18:51
	it is God's love that will never let us down.	18:53
	Someone has observed that it would be great	18:58
	if every human being had a tape in his or her brain	19:02
	that we could switch on when we feel	19:07
	that we are being let down,	19:11
	and it would simply play love lifted me,	19:13
	love lifted me,	19:17
	when nothing else could help,	19:20
	love lifted me.	19:23
	That's what John 3:16 is telling us.	19:26
	I love the story about Duke Ellington	19:29
	when he was being interviewed, the great jazz man,	19:31
	he said in the interview,	19:35
	"When I was a little boy,	19:37
	"I was loved so much and held so much	19:39
	"that I don't think my feet hit the ground	19:43
	"until I was seven years old."	19:46
	Well, I wanna tell you today as we enter a new era,	19:50
	that's who we are,	19:53
	we are loved by a God	19:55
	that will never let us down.	19:58
	And we are in the arms of that great and wise God,	20:01
	and He holds us and sustains us,	20:04
	but listen, there's more in this scripture,	20:07
	according to Gance Little.	20:10
	If you listen to John 3:16,	20:13
	you hear God saying something else about His love,	20:15
	it's a love that will not let us off.	20:19
	He will not let us off.	20:24
	God so loved, what does it say?	20:28
	The world, the world,	20:32
	not just you and me.	20:34
	I was told in earlier years	20:38
	that we could translate that scripture	20:39
	God so loved Marian Edwards,	20:41
	well, we can do that,	20:43
	but we'd better quickly add and the world,	20:44
	because that's what God came to save.	20:48
	We don't have just a private religion,	20:52
	a personal religion,	20:54
	a religion that makes us feel good	20:56
	and we can satisfy by going to worship on Sunday	20:57
	and then going home and living however we want	21:00
	the rest of the week,	21:04
	passing by people going to hell in a hand basket,	21:05
	with little vision and compassion	21:09
	for a society that yearns for this love.	21:10
	God won't let us off with just a private faith,	21:14
	so it was that John Wesley said	21:18
	that there is personal faith and social faith,	21:21
	and until they are both linked together,	21:25
	neither is real faith.	21:27
	God will not let us off with pious, pious, empty religion.	21:31
	He loved the world, He has a plan for the world,	21:38
	and He calls you and me to be a part	21:41
	of that redeeming, transforming plan,	21:44
	such a love given to us must be shared,	21:46
	it propels us out into a society	21:50
	that needs to hear a word of hope.	21:53
	God so loved the world that He made you and me	21:56
	a part of that plan,	22:00
	and He will not let us off in our mediocrity	22:01
	and our emptiness and our littleness,	22:06
	we see the world just through	22:08
	our own personal, selfish eyes.	22:10
	If God so loved the world,	22:14
	He calls you and me to reach that world.	22:17
	Maybe we need to go back to the wise men	22:20
	and note something very significantly	22:22
	that happened to them.	22:24
	When they had come to that place	22:25
	where they saw Bethlehem's love,	22:27
	the scripture tells us they went back another way.	22:30
	They went back another way.	22:34
	That love propelled them out,	22:37
	never to be like they were before,	22:40
	but to send them out with a hope for a new world.	22:43
	We've experienced some of that in eastern North Carolina	22:48
	in this fall season.	22:51
	My wife Linda and I have journeyed	22:54
	into almost every place where that flood hit	22:57
	and hurt and destroyed.	23:00
	We have seen the eyes of those who were homeless.	23:03
	At the same time, we've seen the marvelous response	23:08
	of North Carolina people and folks around the whole nation	23:12
	who have decided that they can't go back the same way.	23:17
	The most haunting line of that experience	23:22
	was a young pastor that stood	23:25
	when we gathered in his church,	23:27
	and he said, "We've discovered something,	23:31
	"we've discovered that the poor	23:34
	"and the at risk children and the destitute	23:38
	"were already there before the flood,	23:42
	"and we never saw it.	23:46
	"We were riding down our safe roads	23:49
	"and into our luxurious homes and our safe harbors,	23:52
	"and we were not seeing the world as God sees it."	23:57
	So it is that we cannot experience this love	24:03
	and go into a new millennium	24:07
	going back the same way.	24:11
	God calls us, a love that will not let us off,	24:15
	and if we have that love,	24:21
	and if we have the love that will not let us go	24:24
	and not let us down,	24:26
	we have the equipment, the resources,	24:28
	a theology of faith that can go with us	24:31
	into a new millennium.	24:36
	May I paraphrase the point?	24:39
	And I said to the person who stood at the gate	24:42
	of the new millennium, "Give me a light,	24:46
	"that I may tread safely into the unknown."	24:49
	And he replied, "Go out into the darkness,	24:53
	"and put your hand in the hand of God.	24:58
	"That shall be unto you better than a light,	25:02
	"and safer than a known way."	25:06
	So I went forth, and finding the hand of God,	25:09
	trod gladly into the darkness,	25:14
	and He led me toward the hills	25:17
	and the breaking of day in the new millennium.	25:21
	So heart be still,	25:26
	what need our life, our little life, to fear,	25:30
	if God hath comprehension	25:34
	in the new millennium?	25:39
	In the name of the Father,	25:42
	and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.	25:45
	(organ music)	25:53

Item Info

Title:

Marion M. Edwards - Sermon Untitled (January 2, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: 01:54. Sermon end time: 25:50.
Our hope in this new millenium must come from an awareness of the height and depth of God's love for us. This is no human, counterfeit love; it is a love that never lets us go, never lets us down, and doesn't let us off to merely pursue a personal faith. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “Where the star stood over Bethlehem, we are told that God has performed heart surgery on the human condition, and He has inserted a divine pacemaker into the human reality. The pacemaker is Jesus Christ. He has a heartbeat of love, and He comes announcing to all the world that at the heart of the universe is not something, but someone, and His name is love.”

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January 2, 2000

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Edwards, Marion M.

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ref10141_e93
uachapelsermaud
duke:320766
dcrau001636
ark:/87924/r40863k8t
d97d1bd5-7a19-4015-9c7f-970a85e46462

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Marion M. Edwards - Sermon Untitled (January 2, 2000)

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