The Gifts We Bring: Frankincense

Let us pray.

God, as we open your word, let us hear what you want us to hear

so that we might be who you want us to be and do what you want us to do.

Amen.

Our second reading is from John, chapter 14, starting with verse 8.

John 14 · chapter mention

Let us listen together for God's word to us.

Philip said to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.

Jesus said to him, Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say show us the Father?

Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.

Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

But if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

In the early 1990s, the Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard was speaking at the Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

As she was speaking, she was smoking a cigarette and walking around the stage.

At the end of her speech, when it was time for the question and answer period, someone got up and asked her,

You often mention God in your work. How can someone as educated and intelligent as you be so certain God exists?

She shrugged her shoulders with her cigarette in her hand and said, We've met.

And then she moved right along to the next question.

Just like that. So simple, so clear, so confident. If only for us in our sense of God's presence, our encounters with God,

if only it was all so clear, if only we felt such confidence, we often struggle to articulate our experience of God.

We question it. Was it really God?

We propose all kinds of alternate explanations, these kinds of experiences that might be experiences of God.

They just register differently in our mind and in our senses than ordinary experiences causing us to doubt them,

even if our heart feels sure.

And so if we're going to have a harder time understanding one or the other of Jesus's natures,

his human nature or his divine nature, I think where we're going to be tripped up is understanding what it means that he was divine.

In a twenty twenty two survey, forty three percent of evangelical Christians in the United States agreed with this statement.

Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.

Forty three percent of evangelical Christians in the United States agreed with that statement.

During these weeks of Advent, we're looking at the three gifts that the Magi brought to Jesus.

And today we're on the second of the three, and that is frankincense.

Frankincense was one of the most demanded, most expensive spices in the ancient world,

but it had a special meaning for Israel in the Book of Exodus and one of the explanations of how Israel is to offer

their sacrifices to God as they're figuring out this new covenant relationship.

It spells out specifically how frankincense, among other things, is supposed to be used.

And those who use it in other ways, for instance, as perfume, as was common in the ancient world,

well, they were to be removed from the covenant family, voted off the island if they used frankincense in the wrong way.

So the significance of this particular element in Israel's worship has led to the longstanding

interpretation of this particular gift that it symbolizes the divinity of Jesus.

So what are we to make then of Jesus as divine?

I once heard the New Testament scholar NT Wright joke that we often think of it as Jesus going around being God everywhere.

We sometimes imagine that Jesus has superpowers at His disposal.

When I was a kid, I loved the movie Ben Hur with Charlton Heston, super long movie.

It required two VHS tapes.

And in this movie, if you've seen it before, it takes place at the time of Jesus,

but Jesus doesn't really factor in as a major character, but He does make a couple of key appearances

at important moments in the story to drive the plot in important ways.

But when Jesus shows up, you don't see His face.

He doesn't speak.

He just sort of appears and does whatever He needs to do for the movie.

And then He vanishes again.

He has a kind of mystique about Him.

He's aloof.

He's almost like an angel appearing and then vanishing again.

These kinds of images of Jesus as a divine being, whether it's the aloofness, the angelic quality,

or the imagined superpowers that He is supposed to have, these things contrast a little bit too much

with our imagination of Jesus as a human being, a mortal.

And we have a hard time squaring that circle.

It gets us back to our difficulty pinning down our encounters with God.

Our general sense is that human things are human things and divine things are divine things,

and if something is human, then it's not divine.

The two are mutually exclusive.

And we're not alone in feeling this way.

Some of the earliest theological challenges that the church had to deal with were about this dual nature of Jesus.

But even before that, if you look at our passage from John, the disciples themselves are struggling to understand it.

These men got to spend an enviable amount of time with Jesus,

and still they don't feel like in Him they have encountered God.

Philip says to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.

Now, I have preached on this chapter in John countless times,

sometimes in a setting like this, but more often actually in funeral services,

because the first seven verses of John 14 are where Jesus comforts His disciples

by telling them that where He goes, they will follow, that a place is being prepared,

and that Jesus Himself is the way and the truth and the life.

And then I leapfrog over a whole bunch of verses to verse 27, where Jesus says,

My peace I leave with you, my peace I give you.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

It's a wonderful message of comfort, especially at a time of death.

But I don't think I've ever stopped to think about verse 8,

where Philip makes this demand of Jesus.

It's hard to believe that he had the gumption to say this directly to Jesus' face.

And it makes Jesus mad. I like to imagine Jesus is mad here.

It seems to come through the words, but the words sort of flatten it all out.

Jesus says to Philip, Have I been with you all this time?

And maybe he's pulling out his beautiful movie star hair while he says this.

Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don't know me?

How can you say, Show us the Father?

Now in Philip's defense, in our own defense, what exactly should we be looking for in Jesus?

What should we expect to see in Jesus that signals to us the presence of the Almighty God?

What does divinity look like in a human life?

Typically, I think we imagine divine attributes that get pasted onto a human frame.

God is good. God is loving. So of course Jesus is those things, and we know that.

God is also all-powerful, all-knowing. So those must be attributes that belong to a divine human.

God is the maker of all things, and not only that, but God sustains all that has been made

and directs it towards God's purposes.

If this is who God is, we look for evidence of these things in the human Jesus.

And yes, of course, we see the miracles that Jesus does,

but we're probably looking for something more on the order of telling this mountain here

to throw itself into the sea than we are to providing extra wine at a wedding reception,

which is impressive, but we still have questions.

Someone who possessed all of these divine traits you think would just exude power,

would have an obvious aura of divinity.

So when we don't see those things that we would expect of a divine incarnation,

we conclude that Jesus is a great teacher, but he's not God.

Show us the Father, and then we'll be satisfied. Can we stop wasting time?

Jesus, no more games, let's cut to the chase. Show us the Father.

The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth once said,

You can't speak of God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice.

And what he means by this is that we can't just take our ideas

and amplify them to the nth degree and say that that is God.

For example, humans have some strength, but it's limited.

So God's strength is unlimited. Humans have some knowledge, but it's limited.

So God's knowledge must be unlimited. Humans have some goodness, but it's limited.

So God's goodness must be unlimited. You get the idea.

We take what we know about humanity and we say it really loud

and assume that that's the nature of God.

What this amounts to is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

We do get a glimpse of that thing that we are trying to see, but it's a distorted,

diminished picture of what we're looking at. It doesn't magnify or clarify.

In fact, it makes it harder to see. It's counterproductive.

So when we look through the wrong end of the telescope, we keep looking for God,

but we fail to see clearly.

Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.

But we're not satisfied yet. Jesus hasn't yet shown us God in a really compelling

or convincing way, so we're still skeptical. We're still holding out for more.

Theologians have long discussed the idea that God is sometimes hidden.

Sometimes God feels absent. It's a way of expressing God's mysterious nature,

and sometimes that feeling that God is distant or inaccessible to us.

In an earlier age, when Christians reflected on the hiddenness of God,

it becomes an argument against God's goodness.

People see that God is not intervening to correct wrongs and say,

how can a good God not act?

But nowadays, we draw a different conclusion. When God feels distant, inaccessible,

or hidden, it's not so much a problem of God's goodness as it has become a problem

of God's existence. Instead of saying, how can God not act,

people might be more inclined to say God must not be there at all.

And this raises the stakes of this question. Our demand of God becomes that much more pressing.

Don't show us the Father, and we will be satisfied. Don't show us the Father,

and we're done. We'll go another way.

And here's where Jesus loses his patience with Philip and with us.

How can you say that? Have you been with me all of this time,

and you still don't know me?

The Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood writes,

the historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean

that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that.

It means that God is like Jesus. We've been looking at this backwards.

We need to turn the telescope around. Instead of starting with our assumptions

about God and then deciding whether or not we think Jesus exhibits sufficient

divineness to qualify, we should be starting with Jesus.

And from there, beginning to discover the nature of God.

The poet Christian Wyman writes, the revelation we want, or at any rate,

the revelation we need is not ultimate, but intimate.

What he means is that we need a revelation of God that is close,

that is familiar, that is accessible.

We often assume that if Jesus is divine, there will be telltale signs.

Of course, the sinless perfection, but also that dispassionate distance

of the Ben-Hur movie or unbridled power or a piercing gaze that can look deep

into your soul. We assume that divinity is something that Jesus just wears

on the outside. And when we don't see these things, we wonder, is he really divine?

Show us the Father. Give us that ultimate revelation,

that convincing, compelling revelation once and for all.

Show us the Father. But what we see instead is a man who stoops to wash feet

like a slave. We see a man who breaks bread with unsavory characters

and unchurched outcasts. We see a man who rages at religious corruption

and who warmly welcomes the children. We see a man who would sooner die

a shameful death than fail to love or forgive the ones who kill him.

Right, that's all pretty nice. We know the story of Jesus. That's great.

He was a good guy. But show us the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father

and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own,

but the Father who dwells in me does his works. He has been showing us the Father

all along, revealing God to us in a way that God has never been revealed before.

This is what it means when we say that Jesus is divine. To borrow the words

from our affirmation of faith that we'll say together in a moment from Colossians,

Jesus is the image of the invisible God. It means that if Jesus is a humble servant,

then God works through humble service. It means that if Jesus spends time with the lost

and the least, that God dwells with the lost and the least. It means that if Jesus

rages against empty religion, that God is not to be found in empty religion.

And it means that if Jesus shows self-giving love, that God is self-giving love.

God is not hidden. God is not absent. God is found in every act of love,

in every word of forgiveness, in every moment of grace. Believe Jesus when he says

that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. But if you don't believe Jesus,

if you can't take his word for it, then believe because of the works themselves.

Believe because you've seen the life of Jesus, the image of the invisible God.

Let us pray.

God, we have seen and studied the life of Jesus, but not always found you in him.

Open our eyes to see in his work, in his teaching, in his grace,

your very nature, your very will, your very presence. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.