Messages from the Body

Here is a sampling of some of the messages that have made a special impact at CCiPH, and that have been transcribed or written in manuscript.

Most weeks in our equipping assembly, at least one man has been asked to prepare a message that will build up believers. Often, the message is taken from the liturgical Gospel reading of the day, or it is a life message that God has been working into the fabric of that man. It is included here to build you up.

The Kingdom is for Everybody

Message from Ben Gregory on January 25, 2004

Luke 4:14-21

When I was in junior high school my family lived in Lansing, Michigan, and in Lansing, Michigan there were two approved Restoration Movement franchises.  There was the West Lansing Church of Christ and the South Lansing Church of Christ.  My family attended the latter.

There was a girl at school named Jenny Nubacher and she and I didn’t get along particularly well.  I don’t remember now what all the issues involved were, but where she was popular my family didn’t have much money so I wore substandard clothes.  Where she was one of those socially confident people who was invited to and comfortable at all of the important parties I was a little goofy and didn’t have all of the legendary social skills that I have today (or maybe I did).  I think now that lots of it was that she was just a fundamentally unhappy and therefore mean person.  It was the kind of thing happens a hundred million times a day in middle schools everywhere; she didn’t like me--I didn’t particularly care.

One Sunday, for reasons I don’t remember, my family visited the rival Church of Christ in town.  I’ve never liked going to church and unfamiliar churches are extra bad and when you’re in junior high everything’s even worse.  Walking into a strange building full of strange furniture and strange people who sang strange songs and did strange things when someone had a birthday…  Being abandoned for an hour’s worth of Sunday School in a room full of people my age whom I didn’t know at an age when people my age whom I didn’t know were almost universally mean…  All I wanted was to sit in the corner, mind my business, endure some inane song about whether you could or could not get to heaven on roller-skates, and then leave.  Didn’t sound like a lot to ask, but it was the most I could hope for.

I was directed to the appropriate classroom by an older lady who smelled funny and who couldn’t understand my not wanting to be there.  (No doubt she chalked it up to my bad attitude.)  And when I opened the door, there stood…Jenny Nubacher.  She looked at me and said, loud enough to get the attention of everyone in the room, “What are you doing here?”  which is okay if you’re Billy Joel, but which made me want to die.  “What are you doing in my church,” she said.  And I didn’t have a good answer for her.  I never dreamed she was going to be there.  That she was part of the same Christian denomination that my family  was was stunning to me.  And I don’t remember anything else about that day.

Let’s look at our text.  Jesus has just been tempted.  I don’t think it was the first time, and I know it wasn’t the last, but it was the most dramatic.  He’s suffered physical deprivation--Luke tells us that he hadn’t eaten anything for forty days.  He’s faced mankind’s deepest temptations.  And by the end he’s exhausted.  He heads home to Galilee, ostensibly to rest--and eat.

In October on 1972 a rugby team from Uruguay, along with some of their supporters, boarded a small airplane and headed for Chile where they were to play a match.  (Some of you remember this.)  The plane never arrived.  It went down in the mountains.  Of the 45 people on board, 35 survived the initial crash.  Those who survived found themselves trapped in the Andes in the worst winter there in a hundred years.  It was cold.  Their only shelter was the fuselage of their wrecked Fairchild aircraft.  Needless to say, no one had packed for anything like this.  There were no warm clothes.  The only food they had was a few chocolate bars and a little bit of wine.

As the days passed more and more of them died.  Survivors watched helplessly as their friends, mothers, wives, cousins, sisters and teammates died slowly from their injuries, from the cold, from starvation, from the absence of hope.  Eventually their desperation drove them to a difficult decision.  They realized that if they were to escape and live they would have to save themselves--they couldn’t rely on a rescue mission; winter weather made it too dangerous.  And in order for any of them to have the strength necessary to even make an attempt to go for help they had to eat.  And since the only thing available to them were the frozen bodies of their dead friends, that’s what they ate.  And after 72 days, Roberto Canessa and Nando Parrado climbed out of the Andes into Chile wearing rugby cleats and sweaters.  Forty-five people boarded that airplane.  Two and a half months later sixteen came out alive--and none of them were ever the same again.

There’s something about an intensely trying experience--one that demands all we have to give, whether physically or emotionally or both, the kind you’re not sure you’re going to survive--that forever changes our awareness of who we are in the universe and what difference it makes (whether we like what we discover or not).  Maybe you know what I’m talking about.

I’ve wondered here before how much Jesus knew about who he was at different points in his life.  It seems possible to me that part of what’s going on in verses 14-30 is at least indirectly a result of his temptation in verses 1-13.  He’s been through one of those harrowing experiences and he’s survived.  And now, for what seems to be one of the first times, he begins to reveal that there’s more to him than just a bright guy who, as verse fifteen tells us, people liked.  He begins to say things about himself that make descriptions like that insufficient.

He’s been teaching in the synagogues in Galilee--verse 16 tells us that this was his custom.  People were used to it--they were comfortable with him.  They liked it.  He gets up and reads from their scriptures.  From what we now identify as the  61^st chapter of Isaiah.  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

They’ve heard that before.  And he sits down (the reading is over) and he tells them, “Today, in your hearing, this scripture is fulfilled.”  And I wonder if they got it.  I wonder if they realized that all of the years, the generations, the centuries of waiting were over.  That the young man whom they were used to seeing around had come to usher in the very Kingdom of God and that it was among them as they say there and listened to him.  I doubt it since they’re about ten verses from trying to kill him.

And I wonder if we get it.  So much of Christendom is concerned with what happens when I die or what it may or may not look like when Jesus comes back that we miss the fact that the Kingdom is right here right now today--not tomorrow, not after breakfast--now.  And that apparently a big part of what that Kingdom means is that people who are historically not accepted--the poor, those in prison, the physically handicapped, the oppressed--are not only accepted, but sought out and invited.

Jenny Nubacher was afraid that I’d ruin her church--that I’d be an embarrassment because I wasn’t as together as she was.  She missed it.  None of her words carried the grace with which Jesus impressed people.  And while I don’t hold it against her (I mean, come on, we were in sixth grade) I’ve never forgotten that.  And twenty years later now, looking back, that whole thing seems like a pretty good example of what happens when people who ought to know better miss the fact that the Kingdom is for everybody (even goofy twelve year old boys) and that it’s here and now.