The text of my sermon this morning
is the book of Jude. I know what’s going
through everyone’s head, so let’s just sing it quickly and then set it aside,
okay? “Na-na-na…” There you go.
Now let’s get back to business.
We’ll come back to the Beatles later.
Jude is a very short and very odd
book. It’s a letter, but we do not know
whom it’s addressed to; it seems to pertain to a particular church but its
location is not mentioned and no people are named to help us pin it down. The author calls himself
“Jude,
a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James”
[1:1]
but
if that James is the brother of Jesus, as some suggest, why doesn’t Jude
mention that? If he’s the brother of
James the disciple, then why doesn’t he call himself brother of James and John
or the third son of Zebedee?
Furthermore, he never refers to himself as an apostle, which the leaders
of the first generation of Christians tended to do.
The letter of Jude quotes the
apocryphal books of Enoch and The Assumption of Moses, which is where
it gets the odd reference to the archangel Michael and the devil arguing over
Moses’ body. If you thought that section
sounded weird, you are in good company because each of those books was rejected
by both the rabbis and the Church when the point came where they were deciding
which books should be considered holy scripture and which should not. That made Jude itself a somewhat questionable
item and it wasn’t always included in the earliest forms of the New Testament. On the other hand, the concerns the letter
addresses are similar to some of the concerns in II Peter, and they use similar
language, but whether or not one depends on the other, or which way they
influence goes, is up in the air.
Maybe some of it is familiar.
“Now
to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without
blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our
Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority,
before all time and now and forever.
Amen.” [1:24-25]
That
is sometimes used as a benediction at the end of worship. I’ll be using it today, in fact.
And
then there is this verse, which encapsulates what the letter seems to have been
written for:
“I
find it necessary to write and appeal to you to contend for the faith that was
once for all entrusted to the saints.” [1:3]
Here
“faith” suggests a system of belief, a framework of thought as well as of
action, which is why some scholars put the time of its writing pretty late for
a New Testament book, at the edge of a time when the Church was leaving its
infancy and beginning to define its beliefs over and against those that might
have a Christian-ish sound but were going too far in one direction or another
and losing their anchor. So Jude becomes
downright condemnatory:
“Woe
to them! For they go the way of Cain and
abandon themselves to Balaam’s error for the sake of gain, and perish in
Korah’s rebellion. These are blemishes
on your love-feasts, while they feast with you without fear, feeding
themselves. They are waterless clouds
carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, uprooted;
wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars,
for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever.”
[1:11-13]
We
don’t know what they were teaching, but Jude is not happy about it.
Now, let’s think about the Beatles
song again. It starts out with Paul
McCartney singing the melody pretty clearly.
By the time you get toward the end, the music and the voices are a
little more crowded (if that’s the word).
Everybody is singing the na-na-na parts together, but the instruments
are going off in different directions, and it starts to sound like it might
fall apart. Then, out of nowhere, comes
the part where you hear,
“Hey, Jude, now! Judie!
Judie! Judie! Judie!”
I’d
suggest an analogy between this song and the development of the Christian
faith, in two ways, one individual and one applying to the group.
Individually, Jude suggests that if
someone’s thinking about faith is mistaken, their life will also turn out to
exhibit some of the chaos that he describes.
It’s like when someone says, “If I’m forgiven, it doesn’t matter what I
have done in the past.” No, real
repentance means wanting to undo any harm you may have done. Maybe you can and maybe you cannot, but the
sense of real regret will always be there and when the opportunity to make
amends comes up, it brings a sense of relief.
Whoever the people were that Jude warned about, they took Christian
freedom as a blank check rather than a clean slate, and this letter clearly
says that is a mistake and that bad theology can lead to an unholy life.
That’s why, very early on, the Church
developed a series of statements about the faith that we call the creeds, from
the Latin word “credo”, “I
believe”. They developed out of a series
of crises when one teacher or another would be the voice that just didn’t match
with all the others in the chorus. It
isn’t that all voices always sang the same note, but that there were some
singers who threw the others off and threatened the whole song.
There were people like Marcion, who said
that the God described in the Old Testament was not the same God as in the New
Testament (and you hear people say that sometimes today). There was Arius, who said that God the Son was
a creation of God, not a part of the Father from all eternity. That meant that it wasn’t the eternal God who
suffered on the cross, and it wasn’t God himself taking the consequence of our
sin. There was Pelagius, who said that
sin doesn’t totally mess us up, but that we can fix ourselves once salvation
has lifted the weight of sin from our shoulders. There were the Donatists, who said that God’s
grace cannot come to one sinner through another, but only through someone
already made holy by the Spirit. It goes
on and on.
What the Church did was produce the creeds
that outlined the content of belief as statements about the points that are
non-negotiable. They don’t say anything
about some of the points where Christians have varied over the centuries. They say nothing about what we mean when we
say Jesus is present in communion or at what age someone may be baptized. They don’t talk about what it means for the
scriptures to be inspired by God, or even specify which books are to be
included in the Bible. (“Bible” is a
word the creeds never use at all.) They
don’t lay out how the Church should be organized or conduct worship.
What they talk about is who God is, as
Creator and as a human being named Jesus and as a Spirit that does some very
specific things in people’s lives, like pulling people together into the
communion of saints (or the community of the holy), declaring the forgiveness
of sins, and preparing both body and soul for eternity with God.
The letter of Jude shows us what the
beginning of that process looked like – and, no, it wasn’t pretty all the
time. But if we are made in the image of
God, then how we talk about God is also in some way how we talk about who we
ourselves are. God didn’t ever stand
apart from creation, so we cannot stay aloof from the people around us, even
when love means the risk of rejection.
So
“anytime you feel the pain, hey [you],
refrain;
Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders.
For well you know that it’s a fool who
plays it cool
By making his world a little colder.”
See,
the gospel is about someone who carried the world upon his shoulders for
us. He sang our sad song and made it
better. He let us into God’s heart, and
that’s he started to make it better.
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