Given by Ken Wilson - Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor - www.annarborvineyard.org
Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Dialogue with The Da Vinci Code: The Divinity of Christ (Ken Wilson)
Dialogue with The Da Vinci Code: The Divinity of Christ (Ken Wilson)
Finishing up our dialogue with the DaVinci Code series, we'll be looking today at the divinity of Jesus, hopefully save the best for last. Age old tendency to stuff people into the boxes of our choosing. I know your kind is a judgment we make quite often with other people. We all do it and we all resent it when it's done to us. The fictional scholar of the DaVinci Code, T. Bing I think is his name in the book in the movie, he says this is exactly what happened to Jesus at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. That the powers that be Emperor Constantine and the bishops that he gathered to get their story straight, they needed Jesus to be divine, Constantine especially needed Jesus to be divine. So they shoehorned Jesus into the God box. And so this raises a very important question for us today. What does the New Testament actually teach about the divinity of Jesus? And maybe even more important, how does the New Testament teach the divinity of Jesus? Now it should go without saying that of course Constantine wanted to use Christianity to political advantage. Hard to imagine, isn't it just hard to imagine that, you know, I mean politicians today would never do that. And we as the church, we would see right through it, we wouldn't waddle like lemmings to the drumbeats of the politicians when it comes to religious, oh no, we would not, you know, but Constantine did not need a divine Jesus to help him secure his grip on, you understand the basic situation that Christianity for as long as it had been up to that point, had been a minority religion in the empire, it was subject to harassment. In fact, it was in direct conflict with the empire because the confession Jesus's Lord inferred Caesar is not. So it was in direct competition with the emperor of Rome. And so when Constantine flipped and said, "No, I want to make Christianity the state religion." He was dealing with some wise and old leaders who were trained in resistance to the power of Rome. And this is what he did. He decided he wanted to make Christianity the state religion. And so he gathered together 318, I think, bishops from all over the known world at the time to get their story straight, to make it clear what Christianity was actually teaching. And there's no doubt that he would have had some political motive for this, but he didn't need Jesus to be divine in order to help Christianity help him secure his grip on power. You know, for any religion with roots in Abraham to declare that a human being is divine is definitely a path less traveled. Politicians generally like the path of least resistance. I mean, Islam has been successfully used by rulers to secure their grip on power with Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet. There's no reason to think Yahweh is God and Jesus is his prophet, wouldn't have served Constantine's purposes quite well. Instead, these 318 bishops gathered in the sea. Many of them, as I said, uneducated poor trained themselves in resisting the power of the Roman authorities. One of the things they did apparently was each bishop had an opportunity during the council simply to say in their own words what it was they believed. And this was part of the discernment process for these men traveling on foot again. As I said, many uneducated, many poor, many who at least knew people who had died for their faith speaking in their own words, what it is they believed. And what they came up with is this creed, the Nicene Creed, darn, I left my copy. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth. And of all things visible and invisible and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, begotten of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made. Who for us men, for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, he suffered and was buried in the third day he rose again according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father, he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead as kingdom shall have no end. That's the first part of the Nicene Creed. It pertains to the question of the divinity of Jesus, the remainder of the creed is organized around the Holy Spirit and the church. So what the creed is saying here is that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine. This is not necessarily an easy sell. This is not the path of least resistance kind of thing to come up with. It's like when the physicists tell us the electron and the other quanta are both a wave and a particle, both a wave and a particle. Even though these are mutually exclusive categories, it would be like saying something is an apple and an orange, not a mix between an apple and an orange, but an apple and an orange, you know the Nobel Prize in 1906 was one for someone who said the proved that the electron was a particle. And then in 1937, the Nobel Prize was won again by someone else who said the electron is a wave and just in a little poetic thing, both of the guys were named Thompson. Interesting. And we talking to the physicists say, well, wait a minute, you mean it's a cross between a wave and a particle. And they say, no, that's the thing of interest. It exists as a wave and as a particle. And we say, well, that doesn't make any sense. And they say, good, now you get it. And then they have a technical word for it. It's found in all the texts, it's found in all the books. It's the favorite word of the physicists. They say, it's weird. It's weird. Politicians like slogans and easy answers, but the bishops came up with weird. They came up with this. Why? Well, it's because of those pesky gospels, the New Testament gospels in the pesky faith of the early church. Fully human, fully divine goes back to the earliest witnesses. The earliest of the ancient writings about Jesus, there's no dispute about this, come from Paul of Tarsus. And Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, so this is written, I don't know, 50, 60 AD at the latest. Paul writes in chapter two, and by all accounts, he's quoting a hymn. So if he's quoting a hymn, he's quoting something that was circulating long before he wrote this letter, and the hymn goes like this. I'm using the Tilby translation that gives it the lyrical quality of the hymn. Christ Jesus was divine in form, yet to God's form, he did not cling, but emptied his immortal self and took instead a servant's form. In human likeness, he was born in human form, he found himself, and humbled, he obeyed to death, death on a cross. Therefore, God raised him to the heights and gave to him the name of names, that at the name of Jesus Christ, all knee should bow and tongues confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father. Now here you have it, I mean the humanity of Christ. We're not to understand God was divine in form, yet to God's form, he did not Christ was divine in form, yet to God's form, he did not cling, but emptied his immortal self, took instead a servant's form. Whatever you believe about the divinity of Jesus, there's absolutely no indication that Jesus had anything like an automatic awareness of his mission or of his full identity, say at age 21. He emptied himself of his divine prerogative, and he had to discover we infer his mission and his identity through a glass darkly like human beings have to discover their identity, or he wouldn't have been fully human. But when it says therefore God raised him to the heights gave in the name above all names, this is surely a claim to divinity. Paul is applying to Jesus words of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah chapter 45, "By myself I have sworn "a word will not be revoked, before me every knee will bow, "by me every tongue will swear. "They will say of me in the Lord alone, "our righteousness and strength." Paul, who knew his Bible, is applying to Jesus a text that applies only to God. And this was often the strategy of the New Testament writers. We have the same thing in applying to Jesus what only applied to God. First John being an example, that which was from the beginning, which we've heard, which we've seen with our eyes, which we've looked at and our hands have touched. This we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. So fully human here. I mean, we've seen and we've touched, but applying to Jesus, those things which only apply to God, he's there in the beginning. He is eternal life, not he gives eternal life, but he is eternal life. All in the context of someone in history who can be touched, who has flesh and blood. In fact, one of the main concerns of that same letter is to warn against those who say, "Jesus did not come in the flesh, that he was not fully human." But the letter ends with this cryptic, strange ending, and we are in him who is true. Even in his son, Jesus Christ, he is the true God and eternal life. Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. So this is not some nostic or new age writer who thinks everyone and everything is divine. In which case, there are no idols. This is someone who's warning against idols, saying that Jesus is the true God. John's gospel begins first verse and the beginning was the word, and the word was God. I mean, just flat out, and the word was God. Of course, the Jehovah's Witness said, no, that's an incorrect translation. There's an article missing, the original manuscripts which aren't owned by anyone has the original article, he is a God. But scholars believing and unbelieving, there's just no credible support for that translation. Even if they were, you'd have so much more in John to have to tangle with, like John chapter eight, 54. Jesus is in one of his disputes with the leaders of the time, things are really getting hot. I mean, it's almost as if the heat of the controversy, the anger of Jesus involved in this controversy is provoking him to this rather bold revelation where he says, your father speaking to the leaders, your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He sought and was glad. You are not yet 50 years old, but you said to him, the Jewish leaders, and you have seen Abraham. I tell you the truth, Jesus answered, before Abraham was born, I am. At this, they picked up stones to stone him. And they knew exactly what he was inferring. He was using, I mean, that he was using a form of the tetragrammaton, the divine name, I am who am and applying it to himself. Now, for all this, and there's more where this comes from, there is a certain reserve about the New Testament claim concerning the divinity of Jesus. There absolutely is quite a considerable reserve. You know, I was an early Jesus freak, and it's one of the Jesus freaks, we used to, we didn't wear our faith on the bumper stickers, we wore our faith on our blue jean jackets. And on my blue jean jacket, I had on the back here, Jesus is alive. Nancy Stitch did informing. Jesus is alive, but there was a guy at the prayer meeting who seemed a little off. He was just one of those people a little less than fully present. He was one of those people a little under supplied in the playing card department, you might say. And his blue jean jacket said, "Jesus is God." And all of us Jesus freaks were kind of, we didn't want to sit next to him in the prayer meeting. Well, why didn't the press release coming out of Nicaea in 325 AD, just say it like that, "Jesus is God." Well, because there's a tradition of modesty on this question that goes back to Jesus himself. Jesus was, and he is, a Jewish man. I just couldn't bear to put an image of him up on the screen because all the painters are European, you know, and you just don't have good images of Jesus as a Jewish man, as Jewish as he was and is. The Jewish people you understand were, shall we say, reluctant. No, reluctant, I think, would understate it. They were apoplectically averse. I mean, they were viscerally, viscerally, disinclined to think of any human being as divine. No, if you're a Gnostic, this is no problem. We're all divine, which is a good thing, since our humanity is hopelessly corrupted by evil matter. It's a good thing we're divine. But no, the Jews believed that the world was made good by a good God, and humanity was made very good. Ultimately, though certainly the mechanism isn't mentioned in the Bible, certainly not in scientific terms. Science, as we know, it hadn't been invented yet. But in the poetic language of Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter two, poetically what it's saying clearly, but ultimately is that earth and humanity are made by the hand of God. And God is God and we are not is the point. God is God and we are not is the point. And Caesar is not, and Malek is not. And sorry for the exclusive tone and all, but Asherah is not. And the bales are not for that much either. For Jesus to say, "I am God," would have been technically correct. But there is such a thing as being so right that you're wrong. And religious people fall into this one so hotted. There's the thought that if I ascribe to orthodox, that makes me right and it makes me right with God and my fellows, but there's such a thing as being so right that you're wrong. I was talking with a priest some time ago about evangelism and we were discussing the challenge of changing the culture of the local parish to be able to effectively share good news to the point where people who don't have any Christian background actually can find Christ. And that's regularly happening in Catholic parishes. And he was openly just saying, "No, this is not happening at all." And so we were talking, how do you guys get it to happen? We were talking about how could we get evangelism going in a Catholic parish? And I was offering one suggestion. And he said, "No, no, I think what we really need to do "is we need to be preaching a lot more about hell." In the parishes, there's not enough talk about hell. And you know, I put myself in a very odd position. I believe in hell. I believe a place exists where God chooses not to go because he's not welcome. I probably owe you a series on judgment and issues related to that, but Jesus preached hell to those steadfastly resisting the message and the demonstration of the kingdom. How about the kingdom is near, for starters, you know? How about, let's free the lady to do the works of the kingdom for starters. More hell satisfies the appetite for orthodoxy, but there's such a thing as being so right that you're wrong. For Jesus to say, I am God would have been orthodox, but it would have been understood to mean I am God and Yahweh is not, something or something equally wrong. See, Jesus wasn't expanding the view of who is God and who is not. Jesus was expanding our very understanding of God. He was shining a deeper, more penetrating light onto our very understanding of God himself. And so he approached this with like a bold caution or some kind of subtlety, there's a word out there for the way he did it and I haven't found it, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for, but it's something in that neighborhood of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the gospel writers, bring this out, especially this reserve, this modesty in Jesus, teaching on this. There's nothing as direct in those gospels as in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus simply quietly does the things that only God has authorized to do. Like forgive sins not committed against him personally. He told the paralytic, when hadn't met before, paralytic hadn't sinned against Jesus. And he said to him, "Not God will surely forgive your sins, son, but he said simply, son, your sins are forgiven." The people around him understood, the rulers were upset, only God can forgive sins. Jesus had in the gospels, all of the gospels. The most skeptical scholars would attribute this realm of saying to Jesus because it's characteristic of Jesus. It's not found in the ancient literature by any person, and it wasn't found in the Jesus movement after Jesus was gone. So the Christians didn't use this phrase. It was limited to Jesus alone. Jesus had a quirky, a strange, a peculiar way of saying something solemnly. He'd say, "Amen, amen, I say to you." And then the solemn something would come. No one did that before. What the scholars say about it is up on the screen for your perusal, but what they're meaning is this, amen was said to affirm some other truth speakers truth speaking after they spoke the truth. Amen? There's too much European ancestry in this church to get that off the ground, but one day, one day, one day. So truth will be said, and the congregation will say, amen, because it's a dialogue. Amen, amen, they'll say. And you'll know you're on track because you'll say something and it'll be true and it'll be solemn, it'll be right, and it'll be someone to say, "Amen, thank you." But Jesus did not amen anyone. He did not amen anyone else's truth saying after the fact. He prefaced his truth with this odd saying, "Amen, amen, I say to you." It was more than the prophets. I mean, the prophets, when they were speaking the solemn words of God, the very words of God, they'd preface it with, "Thus saith the Lord." My voice, my language, my words, but these are the very words of God. Thus saith the Lord, a pretty dog on a nervy thing to do. Jesus took it a step further in immediacy. Amen, amen, I say to you. This is just the most immediate claim of divine authority possible. But it's under the radar screen. There's a reserve to it. Mark chapter 12, you just gotta love Jesus. Such a, you just gotta fall in love with them. Where does this come from? I mean, this is not stuff you cook up to start a religion. It's just way too subtle than that. Whoever wrote these gospels, if they were making it up, we should worship them. They were so brilliant, if Jesus wasn't who he said he was. Maybe that shouldn't be on the tape, it might be misunderstood. While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he said, "How is it that the teachers of the law say that Christ is the son of David?" David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared, "The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet." David himself calls him Lord. How then can he be a son? The large crowd listened to him with the light. This is dicey stuff he's on. He's skating on thin ice. The right thinkers of the day knew that the Messiah would be David's son. Jesus himself was a son of David, and by this time in the story, people are acclaming him as the son of David, and he's not saying, "No, you're wrong." So why bring this up? The crowd, he'd delight the crowd. The crowd's delighted because he's beaten the brow beaters at their own game, the Bible game. He's quoting a text that doesn't fit the parting line, and he's quoting it even though the parting line is correct. You know, why raise more questions than you're willing to answer classic Jesus? Leave the puzzle unsolved. It's only solved by someone who is both David's son and David's lord. And David was the king of Israel at its zenith. The only one above him, they weren't part of the United Nations at that time. It wasn't Kofi Annan, the only one above him was. But all that's left hanging. The question to which his divinity is the answer is just left out there. It's like a puzzle. The whole thing has to come together to make sense. There is just no way this puzzle could have come together in one generation to the point of the articulation of Nicaea. Nicaea in 325 AD certainly speaks the truth of the New Testament era, but it could not have happened or been articulated with that clarity in the first century. Some truth has to wait its time because Jesus wasn't saying who was God and who was not. Jesus was transforming our understanding of God. God is one, yes. In the sense that God is not one among two or three or many, but God being God is more mysterious and awe-inspiring than anyone imagined. God is not a unit. God is not a unit, God is a unity. God is a community of persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Relationship is not just something God is capable of. Relationship is something happening within God from the very beginning and before. But all of this unfolded subtly like a tender shoot out of dry ground. I think of it this way. Jesus came to know himself as Abba's child. He related to God. He was pulled into a relationship with God as his Abba, like no one before and he knew it or he came to know it. He shared his sense of God as Abba with his disciples. Go ahead, you call him Abba too. But he never noticed in the gospel tradition, he never ever said our Abba, meaning my Abba and your Abba. He said, when you pray, say our Father, our Abba, but he never referred to our Abba, meaning me and all, the rest of you, it was always my Abba and your Abba. Jesus knew and he knew he knew Abba uniquely. And as a man, as a fully human being, this must have been a horrible burden for Jesus to carry. Jesus also knew God as spirit, as Holy Spirit. He felt Holy Spirit flowing through him. But in time, when we don't know, but he knew something by the time that is the concern of these gospels, he came to understand that he was son in an extraordinary sense, that Abba had always been a Father, that Abba had always known and always loved a son. So Jesus, and now he's moving beyond all the safety of precedent in a religion that values precedent. He steps beyond the safety of precedent and he begins to say and do and love and create and judge and redeem the things that only Yahweh was authorized to do. If anything kept him up at night, it was that. Now, if Jesus had a growing awareness, of course, the church would have a growing awareness of who he was. You know, the disciples in that first generation, they knew it with their hearts before they knew it with their heads. Of course, it took 300 years to articulate it to the level of Nicaea, but think about what a burden it was to that first generation, to know what they knew with their hearts and they were just beginning to speak. Imagine Jewish men coming to this conclusion. I mean, you see the tension of it all over the gospels, John chapter 20, you can cut the tension with a knife. Now, Thomas called Didymus, this is a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus. One of the 12 was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger or the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it." A week later, his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came instead among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe." Thomas said, "To have my Lord and my God." Then Jesus told him, "Because you've seen me, you believe. Blessed are those who've not seen and yet have believed." I mean, put yourself in the situation. How did Thomas justify what he had just done to himself? How did he justify it to others? He was extending worship to someone he'd known as one of them. I mean, these guys knew Jesus as a human in ways that we will never know Jesus as a human. They were the ones who slept with him. They heard his noises. They saw him tired and hungry and thirsty. They felt his family tensions. Like we all have family tensions. They felt Jesus' family tensions. Like James, who probably resented him. Like Mary, who at one point, according to the Gospels, felt that Jesus was in danger of harming himself by going too far and so wanted to take control of him. They felt all those family tensions that Jesus felt. And then they're the ones to cross the line in worship. Or at the end of Matthew, the same tension, then the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. You know, in the stained glass, it's just glorious, victorious worship. It's the first worship of the risen Lord. It's just awesome, but psychologically, theologically, humanly, how do Jewish men worship someone they've known as a fellow man without feeling something break inside? Knowing that some of your own brothers can't make the leap with you and are doubting as you are worshiping in a small group setting where the doubt can be felt. It's not a tidy picture, is it? It's not a tidy picture. It's not Jesus standing up with a sign over his head. I am God and all the disciples clapping. No, it's subtle, it's shocking, it's scandalous, it's mysterious, it's most of all, it's messy. Oh, here's the advantage. And we should give the da Vinci code, it's do, the advantage. And it's a massive advantage. A Van Brown's version of Jesus is it's infinitely tidier than the New Testament gospel version. The contemporary, especially, especially the contemporary Gnostic Jesus has been cleansed of anything to offend the modern sensibilities. I mean, he is as egalitarian, as Phil Donahue. He's looking for all the world like a new age guru. He's one who has transcended our messy humanity. He's just a body short of being a pure spirit. He's uttering esoteric sayings of the wise that you can't but love because you can't understand. And this, it must be admitted. Is a tidier, simpler, clearer, more manageable Jesus. But the question, of course, is, is it the real Jesus? For the real Jesus, how do you find the real Jesus today? Do you just trust the book or not? And if you don't, well, you're in bad shape. There's a lot of books I don't trust. How do you find the real Jesus today? For the real Jesus, look around and see who's following who. That will tell you a lot. Look for the martyrs. Look for the martyrs. I'm not talking about those people blowing themselves up and others with them, but those who are willing to die rather than toe the party line. There are more Christian martyrs in the 20th century than any other time in history combined and presumably it's continuing in the 21st. Look for the martyrs. You have to look beyond the shores of America unless you consider not being able to pray in school of martyrdom. Look to the global church and look for some martyrs. They're all over the place. Look for the martyrs, not the scholars or the author selling books. Demographically, Philip Jenkins says from Penn State University, the typical Christian today. The typical Christian today is not some white guy in robes living in a European castle. The typical Christian today is a 23-year-old single poor woman from Nairobi. Demographically, that's the center of the church today. Look for the first responders. Are they the academics? Are they the curators of museums? Are they the decoders of conspiracies in their spare time because they have so much of it? Or are they the confused, the broken and the hurting? Are they the ones willing to go wherever Jesus goes, partly because they've got no better place to go? Don't look for the tidy. Look for the mess. And they worshiped him and some doubted that's mess. Notice the text doesn't say, some worshiped and some others doubted. The text says they worshiped and some doubted. It could be that some of the worshipers were doubting as they worshiped. Untidy worship. Yes, look for the untidy, the messy, the real live believers like these believers who are worshiping beyond what they were ever prepared to worship comfortably. Because old habits are dying hard and their habits are the heart. So some just can't bring themselves to worship yet. Or if they do, they can't worship without some doubt. Like all of us. If we could put a microscope and see, like all of us, in our most intense, heartfelt moments of worship now, our offering is always tinged with a shade of doubt. This is where I think you'll find the real Jesus. Now, the implication, if we could have the band come back up here. What's the implication of all this? The divinity of Jesus is the implication, well, a FedEx Christianity is right. Nosticism is wrong. And nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Yeah, that's it. Well, the implication is a little more significant than that. The implications are all our efforts to domesticate Jesus are doomed to fail. If this is true about it. All of our efforts to domesticate Jesus are doomed utterly and absolutely to fail. You know, in the world of scholarship, the contemporary Jesus studies of the last 50 years, careers, amazing careers were built on the most ingenious efforts and creative efforts to domesticate Jesus. So we've had Jesus the sage, Jesus the peasant, Jesus the magician, Jesus the Gnostic teacher. In the world of you and me, we don't live in that other world. In the world of you and me, any version of Jesus that we can manage or control or get comfortable with or fold up and fit into our hip pocket or stroke like a rabbit's foot for comfort. Alas, we all do this with Jesus. We're all reductionists when it comes to Jesus. We try to make him a little more manageable. But his divinity is a reminder that all our efforts in this direction are absolutely utterly doomed to fail. The claim of Jesus, if there's any claim at all, is an absolute claim that will only be satisfied with absolute surrender. No, thankfully, all thankfully. You know, you can hear so many sermons on absolute surrender and do it again and do it again. And you just like, give me out of this, absolute surrender. It sounds like hell to me, but it's put that way. That's not the way Jesus puts it. Jesus is pleased with every halting step we make in his direction. He's pleased with every halting mixed motive step we make in his direction. He's pleased with the frailest, the weakest, most pathetic steps we make in his direction. He's pleased with all of it. But he's only satisfied with absolute surrender. And this is not some static process. This is not some line that you cross. And after you've crossed the line, you've arrived. This is an awareness that we are either growing into or we are shrinking away from. Jesus is the one with whom we have to do. He's humble of heart. He's offering rest for our souls. The smoldering wick, he will not quench, but he won't quench the smoldering wick because he intends to approach us as the consuming fire. And light us. So his heart toward us is softer than a mother's breast. But his will, his will, will never, ever bend to our will. Ours will bend to his or break. So he is, I think. So tonight, today, where we are in time. Just a minute. I'm going to give you a moment, you know. So maybe you came in here and you're aware, like even as I'm speaking, you're aware. You know, I'm harboring a point of resistance in my will to his known will. I'm aware. I'm harboring a point of resistance in my own will right now to his known will. And so, you know, before we just move on to communion, what I want to ask you to do is if you know that to be true about yourself today, I would just like all of us to remain seated, but anyone who wants to stand is a sign that, you know, I want to want to surrender to his will. And I know that my will against his will never prevail. I would just like to invite you to stand up right now, if you want to signal that. Because something specific, something, this is not because you have an uneasy conscience in general. It's all clear. Good. So let's all stand with our brothers and sisters. The communion could come forward. That'd be great. And we just say together with those who've been given the light to know where their will is resisting, together with them, all of us who maybe don't have the light to know. We just want to say to you, Jesus, you are God and we are not. We surrender to you and we just pray that you give us the deep wisdom to get off the quest of changing your mind with our will. We thank you that you give us a strong will and you strengthen our will. And you like to engage with the strong will. And Lord with that will, we wish to come and surrender to your will. So we pray for the grace of the Holy Spirit to just be poured out upon our hearts, our broken hearts, our clenched like a fist hearts, just come Holy Spirit and soften our hearts. Take away our heart of stone and give us the heart of flesh. Love us into your kingdom, God. Thank you. We bless you and we honor you. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said this is my body, which is for you. Likewise, after supper, he took the cup saying this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. So we come with that faith and we come to receive you and we thank you. There's a place for us at your table. Amen. Two lines down the center aisle. (soft music)