The Story of Being Too Close | More or Less | Pastor Zach Weihrauch

Matthew 27:1–2

Matthew 27:1–2

When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people

took counsel against Jesus to put him to death, and they bound him

and led him away and delivered him over to pilot the governor.

Matthew 27:11-26

Matthew 27:11–26

Now Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him,

are you the King of the Jews?

Jesus said, you have said so,

but when he was accused by the chief priests

and elders, he gave no answer.

Then Pilate said to him,

do you not hear how many things they testify against you?

But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge.

So that the governor was greatly amazed.

Now, at the feast the governor was accustomed

to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted.

And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas.

So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them,

whom do you want me to release for you?

Barabbas, or Jesus, who is called Christ?

For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up.

Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat,

his wife sent word to him, have nothing to do with that righteous man,

for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.

Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd

to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.

The governor again said to them,

which of the two do you want me to release for you?

And they said, Barabbas.

Pilate said to them, then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?

They all said, let him be crucified.

And he said, why, what evil has he done?

But they shouted all the more, let him be crucified!

So when

Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning,

he took water and washed his hands before the crowd.

Saying, I am innocent of this man's blood.

See to it yourselves.

And all the people answered.

His blood be on us and on our children.

Then he released for them Barabbas, and having scourged

Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.

Well,

good morning and welcome to the weekend here at Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Zach.

I'm one of the pastors here,

and I'm so glad that we get to be part of your weekend.

Also, of course, special shout out to moms.

Happy Mother's Day.

We love you.

We appreciate you. Come on. We clap it up for the moms.

And if you're here, this morning

because that's what mom said she wanted was for you to come to church,

good job

Mom, and good job you for coming and supporting her in that way.

Hey, we are in week two of our May sermon series.

A little, little bit of a nontraditional series.

In this way, we're looking at a story

Jesus told in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 13.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

It's called the parable of the soils.

It's about a guy who goes out to scatter seed, and the seed

lands on different kind of ground.

It's really a metaphor.

It's a it's a parable.

It's a story about God and the ways in which

we tend to respond to God and what we're looking at

this this month is that Jesus says of the four ways that people tend to respond

to God in three of them, we miss God, and we don't want to miss God.

We don't want you to miss God.

So we're looking at these soils to say, hey, what is it Jesus is telling us about?

Why we tend to miss God, but when we look at it

each week, we're not returning to the same story.

We're using another story in one of the gospels to

to illustrate the type of response Jesus is talking about.

That's why this weekend we're in Matthew 27, not Matthew 13.

So if you have a Bible you want to follow along, open it up to Matthew chapter 27.

Matthew 27 · chapter mention

Of course, it'll be on the screen behind me

if you want to follow along that way.

Or if you'd like to hold a Bible in your hand,

there's a Bible in the pew in the back of the pew in front of you,

or over in East Hall and seeing what I use so I can tell you,

today's reading is on page 792 and 793.

But however you going to follow along,

I have three points I want to use as an outline and they go like this.

I want to show you that God is in the room.

And then why we miss him, and what it would take to notice him.

God is in the room.

Why we miss him and what it would take to notice him.

Well, let's start with the first one.

God is in the room.

I told you, this whole series is based on a metaphor.

Jesus gives in Matthew 13 a story, a parable.

Let me read you just a few verses of that, because I think that story is telling us

something really important for how we we think about responding to God.

Here's what Jesus says.

That same day,

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea,

and great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat down.

And the whole crowd stood on the beach, and he told them many things

in parables, saying, A sower went out to sow.

And as he sowed, some seeds fell along

the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

In Jesus's metaphor, God is compared to a sower, a planter,

someone who has a bag of seeds and goes around

kind of indiscriminately throwing the seed.

Understanding that it's going to land in different places, some of them

conducive to plant life, some of them not.

It's just interesting, though, that

before we get to the way we respond or the type of soil

that we are, it's important to notice the first thing Jesus is saying.

Jesus says, God is like a sower who dips into the basket

of seeds and indiscriminately throws seed around.

Of course, the seed represents the truth about God.

Jesus is saying that God is a communicative God.

He's saying that God wants to share who he is, what he's up to eat.

He could have said it like this.

You could have said,

the kingdom of heaven is like a guy who has a bag of precious seeds

and waits to see who will find him to get one,

or the kingdom of heaven is like a man who has a bag of precious seeds,

and he looks around for who is worthy, who?

Who deserves one, who will handle it well.

All of those ideas would make sense to us, because they would cast a vision

for a God who's interested in the best and the brightest,

and that would resonate with us, because it probably if I was God,

that's how I would think.

But Jesus says, no, no, God isn't like that at all.

Actually, God is like a sower who just throws seed around he.

He's casting around the information about who he is

to everyone, all the time, indiscriminately.

God is a communicating God and more than that, the story of pilot,

the story we're looking at this weekend shows us that

not only is God a communicative God in like the macro sense,

in the day to day sense, in the personal sense,

he is in the room so important to him

that people know who he is, that he is engaging in human affairs.

I don't know if you know the story of pilot.

Pilot is the Roman official who will ultimately decide

if Jesus lives or if he dies.

Spoiler alert he decides he will die.

But what's interesting about this story is on the way to making

that decision, Pilate is literally in the room with God.

I mean literally the Son of God.

God in the flesh is in the room with him.

And here's what's even more interesting,

especially when you consider the conclusion you know, we're headed towards.

I think Pilate knows it.

I think pilot knows he's in the room with God.

There are all these little indicators in the story.

Let me just show you a few.

The first. You can find it in verse 14.

The Bible says that Pilate is amazed by Jesus.

The don't blow by that.

A pilot part of his job is interrogating criminals and passing sentence on them.

He's done it hundreds of times.

He's familiar with criminals.

The best way I could put this would be

if you've ever watched a police procedural on television.

That's one of those shows where

somehow they solve every crime in 45 minutes, right?

Then when you watch one of those shows, they always take place in big cities.

New York, Chicago, right, Boston.

And every time when you realize about eight episodes in,

even though these are big cities with big police forces,

they're really just kind of one man operations.

There's one key detective that solves somehow he's on call

always when something happens and he solves the crimes.

And one of the ways he solves the crimes

is he can see through the criminals lives like everybody else believes him.

And he just. He's heard it before. He gives him that squint.

You know the screen I'm talking about, he pilot has that squint

he did.

Keep in mind, when Jesus dies on the cross, he dies

next to two thieves that pilot also sentenced to death.

Pilate has seen criminals he knows criminals.

He knows there's something special about Jesus.

This is.

This is just a conveyor belt of justice in the Roman Empire.

Jesus. Jesus.

The pilot stands up.

Pilot knows it in his gut.

The second interesting thing is that Pilate also knows Jesus is innocent.

He understands.

I mean, in verses 18 and 19, you'll see this.

He understands that it is envy, its social and political clout,

political conspiracy that has led to the death

or the the accusations of Jesus that will lead to his death.

He knows that.

He knows Jesus is something or someone special.

He knows he's innocent. Here's the third thing.

His wife starts having crazy dreams about him.

In fact, you have to understand the impact of this

because in the first century, women were not partners.

They were not equals. They were they were property.

And by the way, I don't think that was okay, especially on Mother's Day.

Okay.

Especially on Mother's Day. It's not okay.

I'm just telling you that's how it was.

And so a wife would never, ever interrupt her husband at work, ever.

I don't care what he did for a living,

let alone if he was the key Roman official of the time.

And yet, while he's on the judgment seat doing his job,

she sends a messenger to him saying, don't do it.

This guy is innocent, I know it.

I can't stop having these crazy dreams.

So Pilate knows in his gut he knows reading the room and he knows

that something is happening with his wife that's so out of the ordinary.

Pilot is in the room with God,

and I think he knows it.

You know, it's interesting because one of the chief objections

to Christianity is the idea of exclusivity.

You know,

Christianity teaches the Bible, teaches that there's only one way

to have a relationship with God, and that way is through Jesus.

Jesus himself taught this, by the way, in the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse

John 14 · chapter mention

six, only one way to have a relationship with God, and it's through Jesus.

And sometimes people will say, if that's true,

then what about the quote unquote man on an island,

the man who is born and lives and dies and never hears about Jesus?

What happens to him?

How is that fair?

That's a great question, by the way.

I don't have time to answer it now.

At hour 730, Thursday night service.

After that service, we do a Q&A, and I answered that question.

You should have been there. I was great,

but I can't do it now.

But what? I'll just tell you, it's a great question.

It's a fair question. There's a good answer to it.

But what I want you to see is that question doesn't apply to Pilate,

does it?

He's in the room with God.

He knows it in his gut.

But can I tell you something?

That question doesn't apply to anybody in this room either,

because here we are

in the room with God seed being scattered.

Because isn't it also true in the same way with Pilate?

Is it not true?

I don't care how you define yourself

or how you think about yourself spiritually, religiously.

Is it not true that you've had moments

where you knew God was close?

You could feel in your gut.

You've had moments where you knew.

You knew you were so close to an encounter with God.

You knew he was present.

You knew he was saying something.

He he was wanting something.

You know that feeling.

And you know why?

Jesus says, because that's who God is.

He's a communicative, revealing God.

He's in the room.

He wants to be known.

But of course, that begs the question

if he's in the room, why does Pilate miss him?

And maybe more relevant to us if he's in this room, why do we miss him?

Well, that's my second point.

Not just that God's in the room, but here's why we miss him.

Know, Jesus tells us in the first type of soil, the first type of response.

Let's know what he says in Matthew 13 verse 19.

Matthew 13:19

Here's what he says when his disciples say,

what is that whole metaphor all about?

He says this when anyone hears the word of the kingdom

and does not understand it, the evil

one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.

This is what was sown along the path.

Here's what Jesus is saying.

He's saying that the first type of soil is not a garden.

It's a path, meaning

it's a piece of land that has been assigned a different purpose.

You don't grow things on a path.

You you build it so people will walk on it.

It's the opposite of what you'd want in a garden.

In other words, what Jesus is telling us is what we see in the story of pilot.

Pilot is in the room with God, but he misses God.

And here's why.

Because God doesn't fit the path that he is on.

Pilot is a career minded guy.

He's got a management position with the Roman Empire.

Maybe you've heard of it.

Big deal. Right.

And and because he's career minded, he sees everything,

including God being in the room through the lens of his career.

There are all kinds of indications of this in the Gospels and the way they talk

about pilot. Let me just show you two just for fun.

The first one is in Luke 23, verse 12.

Luke 23:12

Listen to what it says.

And Herod.

Herod was another political official who also interrogated Jesus.

And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day.

For before this they had been an enemy with each other.

You see, Pilate is in the room with God, but he doesn't think of it that way.

He sees it as an opportunity to network,

to build up his political and

social clout, to improve his LinkedIn page.

Here's another example.

In John chapter 19, the Jewish people can tell pilots

John 19 · chapter mention

not going to kill Jesus, and they're not okay with that.

So in John 1912, this is what happens from then on, Pilate sought to release him,

but the Jews cried out, if you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend.

Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.

You know what they're saying.

If you don't do, this will get you fired.

And that's the doomsday scenario for Pilate, because he is building a career.

In other words, Pilate is on a path, and that path, wherever he envisions it.

Taking him, taking him straight to Caesar, taking him

to more money, more prestige, wherever it is taking him.

That path does not involve an encounter with God.

It does not involve interruption, disruption.

He's on a path.

God doesn't fit the path, so he misses God even in an intimate exchange.

In the Gospel of John chapter 18, when Jesus is getting through the pilot

John 18 · chapter mention

and Pilate doesn't like it, and Jesus says something about truth, here's

what Pilate says in John 1838, Pilate said to him, what is truth?

You know what he's saying?

I don't have the luxury of truth. I'm trying to get ahead.

Here's what this story is teaching us.

Here's what Jesus is talking about, about our response to God.

Here's what he's saying.

When we don't hear the voice of God,

it is not because God isn't speaking.

It's because we turn down the volume

so that the path we're on

doesn't get disrupted.

That's why in those moments when you can feel God, when you know

he's present in your gut, when you can see it in the room,

you can see it in the lives of the people around you.

When other people are telling you the stories of what God has done

and you know he's close, and then the moment evaporates, here's

what Jesus is saying.

It evaporates because you start to realize, if I take this seriously,

if I turn up the volume of God, if I listen to what he has to say,

if I go his direction, who knows what will happen to my path?

Pilate is in the room with God, but he misses them

because it's

his career that matters most to him.

You see, what this story is telling us is what if the distance between

you and God is not because of God?

It's not because God isn't in the room.

It's not because God isn't speaking.

It's not because God doesn't love you.

It's because of you.

And I don't want to hear it,

because it might just disrupt the path

we have for ourselves.

Now, if that's true, then of course, maybe we don't want that.

Maybe we're uncomfortable with that.

So that brings me to my third point, which is to say,

well, how do I what has to happen?

What has to change in order for me to see God?

But you know the answer to that, don't you?

What would have to change for pilot?

He pretty easy.

He would have to decide that an encounter with God

is superior to the career path he is on.

He doesn't know for sure that taking Jesus seriously will cost him his career.

He doesn't know it'll cost him a promotion, but it might.

He has to begin to believe that an encounter with God

is more important, is more beneficial, is more.

Let me put it this way.

Do you remember grade school math when they taught you greater than in less?

Then do you remember this?

So I don't know if your teacher was as cool as mine,

but the way my teacher taught it is use the alligator.

Right? The symbol.

And she said the alligator eats the bigger thing, right?

So alligators are hungry.

If they if the alligator eats seven turns its back to four.

What pilot is saying to Jesus, look, you might be God.

I can feel it. My God, I can see it in my eyes.

My wife's having dreams, but my career is greater than you.

So I'm going to eat that and turn my back to you.

What would have to happen for a pilot to actually have an encounter with God is

he would have to begin to believe that knowing God, meeting God

is greater than his career.

But is it not

me? Pilot is a middle manager in the Roman Empire.

Pretty impressive job, right?

Except not so much anymore, right?

Middle manager in a dying empire

and an empire that that that now is mostly irrelevant.

I mean, consider

this pilot is really only known for one thing in his entire career.

You know what? That one thing is?

Being in the room with God and missing him.

Is see, pilots story is a warning.

You and I are so bent on being middle managers of the dying empires

we build for ourselves that we will turn our back on God.

You know, it's interesting Jesus dies.

I said this already.

Jesus dies next to two thieves.

These thieves, they're at the lowest moment of their their entire lives.

They've been called a thief, convicted of being a thief,

stripped naked and are being murdered or killed in public.

Right. So. So that's the lowest moment, by the way.

You know what each of those thieves represents?

Pilots doomsday scenario.

If I if I take Jesus seriously, it cost me my career.

That could be called a traitor.

I could die next to him.

And that is in no way

better than the career path that I have for myself, except for this.

One of the thieves says to Jesus, hey, look, I know you don't deserve

what is happening to you, but I do.

Do you think there's any way you could show me mercy?

Any way you could forgive me?

Any way I could be included in you? Paradise?

Jesus says to him, today you will be with me in Paradise.

Jesus saying, it is better to be a naked, condemned

thief dying next to Jesus than the Middle manager of a dying empire.

Are you willing

to admit which is what is a pretty hard thing?

Which is that your problem and mine is not that God is distant

or we wouldn't have felt him.

Our problem is it like Pilate, we're holding on

to the dying empires of our lives.

We don't want interruption. We don't want disruption.

But what pilot is teaching us is what we're afraid of

is actually better than what we're holding on to.

Listen to what Jesus says in Mark chapter eight.

He puts it this way,

and calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them,

if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself

and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it.

But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

Listen, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world,

and to forfeit his soul?

For what can a man give in return for his soul?

Here's what Jesus is saying.

The only way to turn a path into a garden is violence.

Rain.

Tools.

Disruption. Interruption.

But Jesus says in the end,

it's better than the path

we are on. Friends, if this is true, what this means

is that you don't have to go another minute

disconnected from God.

All you have to do is see that in Jesus.

The alligator has found something better

than whatever you're worried about God disrupting or interrupting.

In fact, let's do this.

Let's do something a little different this weekend.

Normally at this point, I would pray we'd go to communion.

We're going to do that in a minute.

But before that,

I think we don't do this very often.

But every now and then it is it is right to give you an opportunity

to respond to the invitation of God through Jesus.

If you're here and you're going, man,

it has never been my problem that I thought God wasn't in the room.

I know every time I come here, I know he's in the room.

My problem is, I'm just not sure I want him to be.

I'm just not sure I'm ready for him to take me wherever he was going to take me.

Listen, friend, the invitation is not for you to be fully ready for that yet.

The invitation is for you to say, In Jesus, I have found a God

who loves me, who will forgive me, a God who's lived for me and died for me.

And risen from the dead, and said to me, if you give me control,

I will take you somewhere better than you will ever go.

And I have no idea what that means.

And I'm scared to death.

But for

the first time I realize I need Jesus.

And I'm going to pray you.

I'm going to invite you to pray with me.

Just a second,

and then we'll talk about what comes next.

Would you pray with me,

Father God?

Join me if you will.

I recognize that the distance between you and me.

God, is not because of you.

The truth is, I've known that it's because of me.

I have turned down the volume of your voice

because I don't want to hear it.

I don't want to hear what you have to say. I don't want to be interrupted.

I don't want to be disrupted.

But now I realize that means I'm at odds with you.

That means I am, at best, the middle manager of a dying empire

called my life.

I believe

that the alligator is eating the wrong thing.

And so now, in Jesus, God, I see that you have shown me your love,

and that he's lived for me and died for me.

Coming up under the weight of your anger and your judgment,

in order that he might die, in order that I might be forgiven,

that his resurrection has proven that that that you're showing me

that whatever you have planned for me is better

than what I have been so afraid to let go of.

So, God, now, for the first time,

I want to turn up the volume of your voice.

And I want to let go of the path I've been holding on to.

God, I don't want the seed

to be taken before it gets into my heart.

Would you forgive me?

Would you include me?

Would you show me the plan you have for my life?

In Jesus name we pray. Amen.