Advent Sermon Series, Part 1

Who Are We Waiting For, Part 1

Jesus as a Human Being

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 29, 2015

Scripture: Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Advent. We talked about what that means during our 9 o’clock session this morning. If you weren’t there but want to know more about Advent I’ve got a handout I prepared on the subject. Let me know, and I’ll get you one. To recap very briefly, Advent is the season of the church calendar when we intentionally anticipate, wait for, and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as Christmas. We’re preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but I have an important question about why we’re doing that. That question is: Just who is it whose birth we are preparing to celebrate? That may sound like a dumb question, but it isn’t. Just who Jesus is is perhaps the central question of the Christian faith. In our reading from Mark this morning Jesus asked his disciples who they say he is. He asks us that question too. It’s a really important question, and it is the question I want to focus on in a sermon series this Advent. So here goes.

The question of who Jesus is arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being. Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us. So today you get part one of this sermon series, Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child. A human baby. A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy. “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on. We’re talking about a human baby here. A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world. It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you: Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that? I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are. I think there’s a good reason for that shock. The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man. Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up. Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters. It really matters because his call to us is to follow him. His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him. I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him at all if he were only God. None of us humans could. We aren’t God, or even gods. In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans. Jesus is truly human, and that really matters. We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods. The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human. God actually became human in the person of Jesus. In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human. He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being. What sort of human being was he? What does it mean for us to follow him? There is a term for Jesus that I’ve heard Jesus called that I think sums up pretty well who he was as a human being. Jesus is a Galilean sage. Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing. It means a wise person. As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), Jesus was a wisdom person. He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom. He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God. Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK. Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught? There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book. So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are. We all know something about worldly wisdom. We know how the world works. We know what the world values. The world values power. The world values wealth. The world values success, prestige, and status. The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way. The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens. They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them. They use violence against their own citizens. They execute people they believe are criminals. They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like. All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject. You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite. He taught nonviolence. About that there is no doubt whatsoever. He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable. He meant inclusion of the outcast. He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores. He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.” Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity. In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world. Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God. Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work. It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important. It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one. His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being. His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life. Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

It really does matter, and it’s really good news too. It’s really good news precisely because, like I’ve already said, as a human being we can relate to Jesus. We can be close to Jesus. Jesus can come to us as one we can understand and as one who can understand us. Yes, we love God. Of course we do. But let’s face it. God is an abstraction. God is spirit yes, buy spirit isn’t flesh and blood like we are. Jesus is flesh and blood like we are. So hold onto Jesus. Invite Jesus into your heart like you invite a friend into your home. Because he’s human you can do that. Because he’s human you can love him intimately, and he can love you intimately. Who are we waiting for? The human being Jesus. That’s not all he is, but it is a big part of who he is. He’s coming to us as one of us. Thanks be to God! Amen.