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“Do You Know the Way?” (The Gospel lesson for this sermon is found in the book of John Chapter 14: verses 1-14)
Pastor Stan Larson Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas Sunday, April 20, 2008
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How many of you had any trouble finding your way to church this morning? Most of you know the way; you have been here a few times. But, if someone was new in town and they said, “Well, where is Central Presbyterian Church”, what would you tell them? Well it’s right downtown; it’s on Main Street; you just have to find Arkansas and come back a couple of streets on Main Street. But what if they didn’t know anything about where you were. So often, when my wife and I are traveling around, people will say, “You need to go here”. They will never tell you an address; they will never tell you where it is, because they assume that you know where everything is.
That’s the kind of the dilemma that the disciples have today. As Jesus is talking and saying, “I have to go away and when I go, it’s a good thing, because I go to prepare a place for you; and I will bring you to where I am; and you know the way where I’m going”. And Thomas says, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going and we do not know the way”. Now we would assume that any good disciple, any of those around Jesus, or any of us, would know the way. But sometimes we get kind of mixed up with what Jesus is saying, because we are Presbyterians, right? Now when you say, “How do you live as a Presbyterian?” we would bring out our constitution, our Book of Confessions, our Book of Order. And we would say, Here is how you do it, you know, because Presbyterians have a nice orderly way of doing things; and we have rules and regulations for everything that we do.
We would fit in very well in Jesus’ time because the rabbis, the Pharisees, and those way back in the Old Testament times all said, “Well you know when God was forming the nation of Israel and bringing them out of the land of captivity in Egypt, he gave them the Ten Commandments”. But then when they looked through the Old Testament, they said, “You know we came up with more than 600 commandments and laws and rules in there; and this is what you’re supposed to live by”? No, we would say, “Here is your book here are your rules and regulations; here is the way you are to live”.
Now, what did Jesus say? Even the rabbis and the Pharisees and all of the Jews knew by the time of Jesus, that when you break it all down; and Jesus is asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” and he turns the question around, they say, “Well, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself”. Six hundred rules now down to just two! And when Jesus comes along and is talking about this passage, he says, “I am the Way”. He didn’t say that this rule book is the way; he didn’t say, and God forbid, the Church is the Way, which is what the Reformation was all about. In that day and time, the Church was saying, “We are the Way”. If you want to be saved, you’ve got to do it through the Church. You’ve got to come and go to church; you’ve got to come to confession; you’ve got to come and do good works. You’ve got to come and do all of these things because the Way is through the Church. And the reformers said, “No, the Bible never said that the Church was the Way. The Church is a help along the way”. The one who said, “I am the Way” is Jesus.
Jesus doesn’t say, “Now here is the rule book”. He doesn’t take out his pamphlets and give them to his disciples, saying, “Now here are rules you live by. This is when you get up in the morning, this is when you pray, this is when you do this and this and this”. He simply says, “I am the Way”. It’s so simple, but it’s so hard. It’s so hard for us to understand even when Jesus says, “Okay, look at me; I am the Way. Do you see what I’m doing? Do you see where I’m walking? Do you see where I’m going? Do you see how I treat people? That’s the way”. But we say, “Oh, it’s got to be more difficult than that; it’s difficult and it’s got to be made simpler. We need our nice little rule book that says, when we meet somebody, you know if they’re this person or that person, or if they’re on this side of the track or on that side of the track, we can treat them differently”. And Jesus said, “No!” When we look at Jesus’ life he accepted everybody; he even accepted Samaritans who were that hated people that were so close to our religion, but were seen as not really following the true religion; he accepted sinners; he even had a tax collector as one of his disciples. You know we think we hate the IRS; well, they truly loathed tax collectors because they were conspiring with the enemy; they were collecting money for Rome. Jesus kept accepting all these people, and kept saying, “I am the Way”. We keep saying, “Well give us a roadmap”. And Jesus says, “I am the roadmap. This is the way we are to live; this is the way we are to live together. What you see me doing is what you are supposed to be doing”.
But we’re academic. We’re Presbyterians. We want you to give us a book. We want to read about all the rules. In the Reformation, because most of us do not have first hand experience knowing Jesus, they said, “The best and most accurate resource for us is to know our Bibles, is to look in the Bible and get to know Jesus, get to know the One who is the Way”. And so, what did the reformers do—they put the Bible in your hands. They said, “You’re supposed to read the Bible, to get to know the One who is the Way”.
A wonderful book that I read a number of years ago, by Phillip Yancy, called “The Jesus I Never Knew” tells how He grew up in the church, the Sunday school, went to worship every Sunday. He said that later in life he sat down and actually read the Bible. And he said that the Jesus he came to know in the Bible was significantly different from the one he had come to know in Sunday school and in church. The one in the Bible was much less judgmental, much more loving and caring and accepting of people. We’re supposed to know Jesus. He is the Way. He said that himself, “I am the Way. Good Jews would know that when you say, “I Am” it again takes us back to the Exodus when Moses went to God and said, well how can I let the people know that I am from God. Tell them, “I AM sent you”; that’s one of the names for God. God is the Way. Jesus says, “I am the Way. When you meet me, you have met God the Father”.
We keep wanting to make it academic; Jesus keeps saying, “This is the way to live”. Another one of the prominent people of the last century, Ghandi, when he was struggling to find his identity early on in his years, he looked at the Bible, he read the Bible, he saw what Christianity stood for and he almost became a Christian—except for two things: 1. He wanted to go into church one Sunday morning and the people wouldn’t let him in because he wasn’t dressed right; and 2. Because there were so many Christians he saw who were not living as Jesus. They were not living their faith. I’m not sure we’d see something different today. We are called to live our faith.
The reformers talked about our living a Christ-like life or being little “Christs”, of letting people see in us and in our lives Christ coming to them. We are to be helping others to find the Way, pointing them to the One who is the Way. We are to live so others, who by our actions are helped to get on the true path of following Jesus Christ.
We keep wanting that to lead other
places. We want it to mean, well, we can just come to church on
Sunday morning, and when we leave its doors, we can treat everyone
just like we do the rest of the week. Our faith is intended to be
lived. The Reformation reformers said,
When we go from here, we go out as witnesses to Jesus Christ. We go out, showing if we are following the Way. If we’re following the one who said, “I am the Way” people look at us and say, “Do I see something different from everyone else? Do I see someone who is showing their faith by how they live, by how they treat one another, by how they treat their friends and neighbors, both within and without the Church? We are called to live our faith. Jesus said,” I am the Way”. The hardest thing for us to say is “Lord, we just don’t know the way. You haven’t put those little steps out there showing us where to go”. Jesus kept saying, “I am the Way. Look at me. See how I live. See how I treated people; see what I asked of you, and do likewise”. Live the Way. We, like Thomas are saying, “Well Lord we’ve had you here in our midst saying all these wonderful words, but we just don’t get it. We do not know the way”. Jesus invites us to come and get to know the way, to get to know Him. The followers of the early Christians for long time were called, “The Way” because they were following the One who was the Way. They didn’t call themselves Christians’ they were following the way that Jesus had set out for them to live and act and live together.
The mark of the early Church was the fact that they cared for one another, that when there were widows and orphans and people who were sick, it was Christians who responded and cared for them and not other people. Many of the social institutions that we have in America and around the world are there because of Christians. Because they saw the needs, as Jesus saw them, and they started orphanages and hospitals and nursing homes and all kinds of other things. They said, “We saw the needs and we’re following the Way. Jesus asked us to respond to those around us, to reach out as Jesus would have done. We are to follow the Way. And hopefully the Church is a help along the way. Hopefully, even some of our other writings are help along the way, but only as they point us to Jesus Christ and following Him. One of those analogies for sin that you get all the time is about missing the mark. One of my professors in seminary, in using that analogy, talking about all of the resources we have to help us in our life of faith, is to say the center of the archery target or the rifle target or whatever you want to call that target, the center is Jesus Christ. We state that very emphatically in all of our documents that the head of the Church is Jesus Christ. That’s the one we are to emulate and be like. All the circles around it are to point us into the center, to help us get closer to the center. The closest thing we have to the center is the Bible and then there are our confessions and our other writings that are helpful as they point us to Jesus Christ, but ONLY as they do that. The goal always in archery or shooting is to get closer to the center. For us as Christians, it is to come closer to Jesus Christ, so that when he says, “ I am the Way”, we realize that it means following him.
It means living our lives and having our lives show to the world that we indeed are following Jesus Christ, who is the Way and the Truth and the Life. And when we are in alignment with Jesus, when we’re following Jesus, then the last couple of lines of this scripture passage come true—that when we are in alignment with Jesus’ purposes for us and for those around us, then we can ask whatever we want because we are going to be asking for what Jesus wants for our life and for the people around us. And then Jesus will indeed give us anything that we ask for. More often than not, we are far out on the target’s edge and we say, “Jesus make my life easier; provide all the things I need”. When we get much closer to the center we will say, “Jesus, help my friends and neighbors; yes, I need some things, but give them to me so that I may help others, not just so I can have a comfortable life, but so I can continue to witness in your name”. We need to hear those familiar words again where Jesus says, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. The question for us is, do we know the way? Do we know Jesus? Are we looking at Him and trying to find our way, following Him; and then showing by our lives that we are indeed the Way, the Truth and the Life?
He is the one who provides all that we need, so the question for us always is, “Do we know the Way”? Sometimes when we’re lost, it’s a very important question. Sometimes when we think we are so very found and so centered in life, we need to ask that question again. Do we know the Way? Are we showing that we indeed are following Jesus Christ who is the Way? For he calls us to that task, and says, “I am here preparing all of the things that you need, rooms for the future, help for the journey, resources along the way. Jesus says, “I am the Way; follow me”. Amen It is so much easier to follow ourselves, to follow where we want to go and not to go where Jesus is because we’d like, especially in Arkansas, to get on the Interstate and go. Sometimes Jesus will say that we need to get on Highway 7. It is so picturesque; you may actually meet people. We may meet people as we go through life and as we come to different places, sometimes Jesus says, “Take the scenic tour, and not always through the nicest of neighborhoods. Jesus says, “I will go with you, bear with you and prepare the way for you”. And Jesus calls us together in worship to strengthen us, to help us to know more about Him and what it means to follow the One who is the Way.
And now we gather our hearts and minds together as we affirm our faith together. I invite you join us in the Apostle’s Creed.
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
Amen
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