Focus: Love Feast, Holy Week
Function: To get people to Love Feast Worship
Form: GOK
Intro:
During this Lenten Season, we have been looking at “a day in the life of Jesus.”
We literally saw the events as they unfolded on the day He healed the man who was born blind.
And then we saw the events on a day the week before Holy Week when He raised Lazarus from the dead.
Today is Palm Sunday, the day that celebrates the rejoicing of the people as they accept Him as their leader, just 5 days before He is crucified at the beck and call of many who were in that same crowd.
How did people's emotions and attitudes change so quickly?
I find it one of the great tragedies in the bible.
When I see how fickle people are, I realize how quickly leaders fall in and out of favor. It is all a false reality based on manipulated perceptions. It happens. Sometimes it has very tragic consequences. But God is in control. Satan manipulated this crowd from this huge celebration of Jesus to this huge murderous rage.
And Satan thought he won. But his destructive devices, his use of exaggerating the meaning of petty issues ultimately destroyed him.
In the book of Acts, which we will be looking at after Easter, we see on two different occasions thousands of people who come to Christ.
Could this be the same crowd that on Palm Sunday cried out “Hosanna” and on Friday cried out “Crucify?”
How did that crowd change so quickly? Today we are going to look at the other events from Holy Week: Maundy Thursday and Jesus crucifixion.
Maundy Thursday, the upper room, the agape meal, the feet washing and the institution of the bread and the cup are a celebration of a sad and somber event.
It is odd. But this worship service is a celebration of sorrow. It is odd to celebrate sorrow, Wouldn't you agree?
Every year, on 9/11 we pause in some way or another and commemorate a day of national tragedy. Every year, on December 7, we pause and commemorate “the day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor that brought is into WWII.
We do it as a nation, and we do it personally.
Every year on December 14, I pause and remember my best friend, who was struck by a car and killed walking across the street on the way to my house right before school.
We commemorate sorrow, but celebrating it seems odd.
And yet. That is exactly what we are commanded to do on Maundy Thursday: CELEBRATE SORROW.
We call it Love Feast. We recreate the entire ceremony that Jesus did with His disciples right before He was betrayed.
But celebrating sorrow does not go along with our cultural values. Sometimes, they have gotten so bad that we forget what Christianity is all about. I remember hearing a TV evangelist criticize people for singing “The Old Rugged Cross.” He said: “I ain't clinging to an old piece of wood. I have been made a king and a priest as a Christian. But the Bible says: “God forbid that I should boast in anything but the cross of Christ.” (Gal 6:14)
It is easier for us to celebrate victory.
I know a man whose marriage was breaking up, and in humility, he turned his life over to Christ. He became a changed man and his marriage stayed together.
I know a man who got saved on his death bed and left this earth one of the happiest people I have ever met.
But I have a friend, a young man I taught in Sunday School several years ago who became a missionary to Saudi Arabia. After introducing someone to Jesus, they threw him in prison for a year. His mother and my mother were good friends. And for him and his mother, that “something beautiful” didn't feel that way. His wife left him and moved his two children away into a completely different country.
We dedicated all of our children to the Lord for their protection and establishment in the Christian faith. When our 3rd child was not quite 2, he was burned on 18% of his body. Kathy and I were dismayed at how God could let this happen. The pastor came over the night before a surgery was scheduled and asked us this question: “When he was a brand new baby and everything was just fine, was it easy for you to dedicate him to the Lord?” We answered yes. Then he said: “Now that his life is in the balance, do you still place him in God's hands?”
And that fear “well what if God decides to take him?” Came to us. And with a sacrificial faith, we got on our knees and rededicated him to God.
Here is the point. In good times, it is easy to praise the Lord. But what about the times of suffering?
Sometimes, Christianity was sold as a commodity, a get out of jail free card, a get out of hell free card, a “do over” card with the idea that if we become believers, everything will be hunky dory and we are promised to be automatically exempt from pain and suffering.
But that isn't at all what the bible teaches.
The promise of something better, something beautiful, something wonderful has indeed brought many people into a relationship with Jesus.
But this ceremony is completely different. It is a celebration of sorrow. It is a celebration of our own sinfulness that brought God to earth, to show us how to live and to purchase our salvation.
How can we accept only the chance for power, the chance for a miracle, the chance for a do-over and not also accept the terror, the sorrow, and the pain of our salvation?
Jesus gave His life for us. And He wants us to acknowledge that fact. He wants us to say thank you by recreating that ceremony. The last verse of our text says “Blessed are you if you do all of these things.” That is why several of our churches only have full communion, with the foot washing, agape meal and then the bread and cup. The text says, as a command to us as Christians: “Do all of these things.”
And it isn't that He has a big ego or low self-esteem.
He is God and He is our Salvation. That is what they were crying out on Palm Sunday, when they cried Hosanna! It means “Lord Save US!”
They just didn't understand that in order to save them, it wasn't going to be pretty. And it isn't.
My theology professor at Bible College was in a friendly, and I emphasize friendly debate with some of the Rabbi's in our local Jewish Community.
They were more conservative and they believe in the OT prophets. Isaiah 53 will be read Thursday night. It starts out with this idea “Man of Sorrows.” That is the prophecy that describes Jesus.
Students of the NT know that the religious leaders and bible scholars of Jesus' day couldn't agree on what role the Messiah would fulfill.
They couldn't agree on which prophecies wee linked to the Messiah because there seemed to be a huge contradiction between them. There is the role describing Him as the King of Kings. There is the Role describing Him as a second Great Prophet would would establish a new Covenant, a new Testament. And there is the role of the suffering servant.
They couldn't reconcile the idea of Him being a suffering servant and a conquering King at the same time.
This man was to come from Egypt, Galilee and Bethlehem. How could one man be from three places? Well, we know Jesus did. He was born in Bethlehem, fled to Egypt and grew up in Galilee.
The early leaders had a hard time worshiping the idea of a suffering servant who saved them. They wanted a big, strapping, successful business man, football player, athlete, soldier and etc.
Thursday night, we will be reading the scripture from Isaiah 53. Let me read some portions of it to you.
A Man of Sorrow...
There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried— our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him, that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
We've all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong, on him, on him.
Like a lamb taken to be slaughtered and like a sheep being sheared, he took it all in silence.
He died without a thought for his own welfare, beaten bloody for the sins of my people.
The plan was that he give himself as an offering for sin so that he'd see life come from it—life, life, and more life.
Through what he experienced, my righteous one, my servant, will make many "righteous ones," as he himself carries the burden of their sins.
He took on his own shoulders the sin of the many, he took up the cause of all the black sheep.
This prophecy when it was originally written was a song. So, someone took the essential part of it and made it into a song. The song is titled: “Man of Sorrows.”
In order to understand it, to put ourselves in the mindset of Holy Week, let us sing that song, it is numbered 258 in the Blue Hymnal.
I like the last part that I read from the prophecy: “He took up the cause of all the black sheep.”
From the best of us, to the worse, in relationship to Him, we would look like black sheep. The idea is that we need a savior. Jesus did that for us on the cross.
Because the image of the cross, its bloodshed, pain and suffering are too much for us to continually bear, Jesus commanded us to celebrate His sorrow with this special service the love feast.
Which we will do Thursday Night. I beg you to clear your calendar and come. It is an important worship service. It brings us not to the celebration of victory, but to the cost of our salvation.
We will start out by washing each other's feet, men on one side, women on the other. Then we will share together the agape meal. It is a simple meal of meat and broth with bread.
And then we will share the bread and cup communion.
It is a somber service. It isn't intended to be fun, exciting, hyped up. It isn't full of positive messages about human potential. It isn't full of joyful music.
It is a time to join Jesus and just like His disciples did, to eat this meal with Him, and one another in community as their love and presence comforted Him before their sorrow.
I ask you to do whatever you can to be here Thursday night. It is fun for us to joyfully parade around the sanctuary on Palm Sunday and enjoy the feeling of joyful celebration. But it is also important for us as Christians to acknowledge the pain, sorrow and suffering that Jesus shared, that some of us share as we dwell together in Christian community.
No comments:
Post a Comment