A Sermon by Worth Green, Th.M., D.Min.
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be uninformed. 2 You know that when you were heathen, you were led astray to dumb idols, however you may have been moved. 3 Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. 1 Cor. 12:1-3
By this time each January, many of the gifts we received for Christmas have been worn-out, broken, forgotten, or at least put away.
Some few gifts continue to give us girth and mass, as in the case of “fruits and nuts and candies” and “cakes and pies and cookies.”
Even fewer gifts continue to give us real pleasure and utility.
My late mother-in-law used to give wonderfully practical gifts. The year I entered the ministry, she gave me a stapler for my desk. Initially, I was not impressed. But for the three decades and more, it has sat on my desk, and I have used it daily. I never use it without thinking of her.
If you search Google for the phrase “the gift that goes on giving,” you will get about 275,000 hits. Some of those hits refer to a gift that God gives, the Holy Spirit. In Acts 2:38, in his Pentecostal sermon, St. Peter says:
“Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit is the lowest common denominator of Christian discipleship. In Romans 8, St. Paul says, that in two ways. He says it in a negative way. He says, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” He also says it in a positive way. He says:
“When we cry, ‘Abba, Father!” it is the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Jesus Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him.”
Every Christian has the Holy Spirit.
In the text before us this morning, St. Paul turns to the work of the Holy Spirit in us, and once more he uses negative, and positive terms.
First, Paul tells us what is not of the Holy Spirit. In verse 3 St. Paul says, “no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus be cursed!’”
Now when we read this, immediately we think of using the Lord’s name in vain. That is certainly serious. My dad did not like John Wayne because he was the first actor my dad heard say, “damn,” on the silver screen. I remember the first time I heard someone use the name of God as a curse. I was in 2nd grade. I had moved from Davidson County to Forsyth County. One of my friends at South Park was drinking water at a fountain. The water splashed on him. He used God’s name in vain and I was shocked. I never heard the name of Jesus used as a curse until I went off to college. I found that particularly offensive.
When we hear the name of Jesus invoked as a curse that hurts; but Paul is talking about something worse. He is not talking about using the name as a curse, but of cursing the name and the person. Who would do such a thing? In his Daily Study Bible commentary on St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, William Barclay suggests four possibilities.
1. Barclay says that Jews could have used this phrase in their worship.
Prayers were regularly offered in the various synagogues that cursed all heretics and apostates, and Jesus would come under that curse. According to the four gospels Jesus not only claimed to be the Messiah—which the Jews did not believe; but according to Mark 2 and elsewhere Jesus made himself equal with God by forgiving sins, something which God alone was thought able to do. Further, as Paul reminds us in Galatians 3:13 Jewish law declares, “Cursed is everyone that hangs upon a tree.” Jesus was crucified. The Jews considered him cursed under the law. There can be only one reason that the messiah suffered this curse, he suffered it for us. The question for us is was the cross of Jesus the bad end of a good man, or was it a road traveled once for all by a now victorious Savior and Lord?
2. Barclay says that this phrase could have used by the Jews to separate the proselytes attracted by Christians to separate them from the synagogue.
The Jewish prophets said that Israel was a light unto the nations. She was, and is. However, Christianity has burned as a brighter light. It is impossible to ignore that Christianity enticed untold magnitudes of people to worship the Lord God of Israel. We still do. At present there are a little over 13 million Jews in the world, just under 5 million in the state of Israel, and just over 8 million in the rest of the world. By contrast there are 2.1 Billion Christians in the world.
This has created tensions between us. In the beginning Jews drove Christians, who believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah from the synagogues. This became official doctrine after the Council of Jamnia that took place just after the fall of Jerusalem. Christians retaliated. Christianity has a terrible history of persecuting Jews. If you want the full scoop read The Sword of Constantine by James Carroll. He documents the atrocities we enabled over 756 long pages. This ought never to have been.
I saw a bumper sticker that read, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” Yes. That’s it. Jesus was a Jew. Judaism is our mother. Jews have a special relationship to us, and a special place before God. In Romans 9-11 St. Paul reminds us that God has made a great many promises to Israel, and God never breaks a promise. He even offers the hope that, after a time of rejection, “All Israel will be saved.” Some Christians believe this (as I do); and others reject it. At the very least we must remember the word of Jesus that was directed to Jews and Gentiles. It was a prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) I love the Moravian passion hymn based upon this verse:
Hark, his dying word: “Forgive!”
Father, let the sinner live;
Sinner wipe your tears away,
I your ransom freely pay.
3. Barclay suggests that this phrase could have been used to weed out Christians who tried to make a place for them selves in the Roman Empire.
Paul boasted of his Roman citizenship. He considered it a blessing to his work. The day would come when Christians would come into sharp conflict with home. In the time of Trajan, near the end of the 1st Christian century, it was the test of Pliny, the governor of one of the provinces to demand that a person accused of being a Christian had to curse Christ to prove his allegiance to the Emperor. In 156 A.D. when Polycarp the Bishop of Smyrna was arrested, the proconsul who tried him demanded that he “Swear by the godhead of Caesar and blaspheme Christ.” Polycarp responded, “Eighty and six years have I served Christ, and He has never done me wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”
When I was a boy, and I endured a great deal of social pressure because I was a preacher’s kid. Long before my father told me he did not like John Wayne, he told me to do all that I could to avoid denying Christ. He said, “If someone challenges you about your faith, and you must, you tell them, ‘Damn right I am a Christian.’ Whatever you do, do not deny Christ.”
Later he told me that such a confession is the strategy of those who are weak in faith, but it is better than no strategy at all.
4. Finally Barclay suggests that it was entirely possible in the early days of the church for someone caught-up in the frenzy of worship to cry out “Jesus be cursed.”
This was a very Charismatic time in the history of the church. People often worshiped God in frenzy. At the same time, Christian doctrine was not yet fixed. The first heresy of the early church was to deny the full humanity of Jesus. Gnostic Christians thought that the man Jesus was just “used” by the Eternal Logos who ministered through Jesus then separated from the man Jesus just before his death on the cross. They despised the humanity of Jesus and thought it implied weakness. They may have said, “Jesus be cursed!” meaning the Man Jesus who merely supplied the use of his body to the Divine Logos.
It was not until the fourth Christian century that the church spoke authoritatively of the Two Natures of Christ, fully human and fully divine. Paul said that the truth of the Spirit is that one never denied the humanity of Jesus, or despised him for it.
The New Testament holds a tension between the charismatic church of the Corinthian correspondence, and the institutional church of the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. We need both.
It is easy to counterfeit the work of the Spirit. I have told you before about how Elayne and I attended a little church outside Quantico Virginia in 1972. It was supposed to be Baptist, but some Pentecostals had snuck in. One Sunday we took guests with us. The woman in front of us stood up and started jumping up and down and yelling. The pastor said, “The Holy Spirit has sister so and so.” He was disturbed. I looked over at our guest. The woman was in tears. The man was livid. We learned after the service that the woman’s little sister was an epileptic who acted like that when she had fits. Was this truly the work of the Holy Spirit? I don’t think so. The work of the Holy Spirit is to make us Christ like. A noted Missionary and Evangelist was invited to speak at the largest Methodist Church in California. He cabled that his topic would be the Holy Spirit. The pastor protested, saying that he did not want his people stirred up. He had seen Pentecostal manifestations of the Holy Spirit that he considered anything but Christian. The evangelist cabled back, “Have no fear. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. The only behavior the Holy Spirit engenders is Christ-like behavior.” The pastor said, “Come ahead, and preach what you like.”
First Paul says, “no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus be cursed.’”
Next, Paul says that “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ but by the Holy Spirit.”
The work of the Holy Spirit is to convince us of what God has done in Jesus Christ.
The 4th Gospel tells us that the Holy Spirit will convince us of sin, and righteousness, and judgment. (John 16:8) The Holy Spirit will take the Word of Christ and call it to our memory. (John 16:14) The Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. (John 6:13) In the Liturgy of Adoration we confess:
By our own reason and strength, we cannot believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord or come to him, but thou dost call us and enlighten us by thy grace.
Why some people find faith so easy and others find it so hard is a mystery. I believe that the covenant plays a powerful roll. Christian parents have a promise for their children. (And Grandchildren!)
I shall never forget my first meeting with Bishop Spaugh prior to my ordination. He told me he liked by background. I thought he meant Chapel Hill. He said, “No.” I suggested my seminary. Again he said, “No.” Then he said, “It is your parents.” I felt this last Sunday. As you know, I thought I was loosing my mother. I knelt by her and prayed for her as the EMT’s prepared to take her to the Hospital. When I had finished my prayer, she looked up at me, barely coherent and asked, “Don’t you have to preach.” For her, my preaching was more important than my being with her. One can’t help but be influenced by faith like that.
Many of you can identify with that, you are Christian because of your parents. Others have been influenced by people not their parents, and that is o.k., too.
Several weeks ago I did a funeral for the mother of Betty A________. I told her at the time that her mother had influenced me profoundly. For thirty years I watched with her as she lost a daughter to cancer (at age 38); a son in law to cancer (not much older); a granddaughter, already a victim of Cystic Fibrosis, in a car crash (at 21); a husband, and five siblings. In all this she possessed and retained a remarkable faith. A friend I respect immensely once said to me, “I would like to have the kind of faith that confesses to God, ‘Though you slay me, yet will I trust you.’” Betty’s mother had that kind of faith, and it profoundly influenced my own. She was a light reflecting Him our Sun.
At a wedding a woman approached me and asked if I really believed in God. I said that I did, and I gave her all the standard reasons. Had I thought about it, I would have added Betty’s mother, and my own, and all those who have come before who make it easier for me to believe. (Unfortunately, not all Christians make it so!)
Sooner or later we must choose where we stand. I decided long ago I wanted to stand with those Christians who have the kind of faith I have been describing. Only the Holy Spirit can enable that. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to confess, “Jesus is Lord.”
This is the oldest confession of our faith. It is older than the New Testament which reports it. It is older than the Apostle’s Creed. It is older than any system of doctrine. In Romans 10:9 St. Paul says, “If you confess with your lips, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
And what does it mean that “Jesus Is Lord?” Well it means that Jesus is in charge of me and I am not. It means that Jesus is in charge of the kingdom, and Caesar is not (nor any other politician, ruler or government). It means that Jesus is Lord and the powers are not. It means that we who have accepted the Lordship are free to respond to his direction in a world that belongs to him despite all contrary claims.
I would mention too that it is this confession that bind us together. The Moravian Church confesses the essential unity of all believers in Jesus Christ. What does this mean? It means that we do not judge those who call upon the name of the Lord. He alone is worthy to judge his people. Therefore we pray for and encourage the unity of all believers. Jesus himself prayed, “May they all be one.” (John 17)
This unity in Christ has expressed itself in some powerful ways. The 20th century Methodist Missionary and Evangelist E. Stanley Jones suggested that all the creeds of the church are useful, but serve to divide. He said that when we are dealing with one another, they all ought to be reduced to one. The one he suggested was the first confession of the Church, “Jesus is Lord.” He devised a one-finger salute. “Jesus is Lord.”
On Christmas Eve I reminded you that Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. He who walks in my light will never walk in darkness.” (John 8, John 9) He also said, “And you are the light of the world, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16) I invited those of you who wanted to show that light to lift your candle. I now invite you to salute.
Finis