Calvary

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was heavily damaged in 2011 by a tsunami, resulting in three meltdowns. 200 Japanese retirees volunteered to fix the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station. The group is called The Skilled Veterans Corps and they are led by Yasuteru Yamada. He and his groups have exposed themselves to radiation so that young people won’t have to.

Yamada has said, “I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live. Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. The older ones have less chance of getting cancer.” Although many people say Yamada is a hero, he sees his actions as purely logical.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What an example these men set for the church. We are called to lay down our lives for each other. This should be no surprise since we follow a Savior who did just that. He laid down his life that we might live.

In her book Ten Fingers for God, Dorothy Clarke Wilson writes about Dr. Paul Brand who worked with leprosy patients in India.

Sometimes they would all gather together in fellowship. One evening, Paul joined them, and they asked him to speak.

Dr. Brand had nothing prepared, yet he willingly stood up, paused for a moment and looked at their hands, some with no fingers, and some with only a few stumps. Then he spoke: "I am a hand surgeon, so when I meet people, I can't help looking at their hands. I would like to have examined Christ's hands. With the nails driven through, they must have appeared twisted and crippled. Remember, Jesus, at the end, was crippled too."

The patients, on hearing this, suddenly lifted their poor hands towards heaven. Hearing of God's response to suffering had made their suffering easier.

Richard Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He once debated John Lennox who is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. They debated the existence of God. At one point Dawkins says of John Lennox:

He believes that the creator of the universe, the God who devised the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics, the physical constants … that this genius of mathematics and physical science could not think of a better way to rid the world of sin than to come to this little speck of cosmic dust and have himself tortured and executed so that he could forgive.

That, says Dawkins, is profoundly unscientific. Not only is it unscientific, but it doesn't do justice to the grandeur of the universe. Why would God bother entering into our small and broken planet? Dawkins chided Lennox and all Christians for believing in that kind of God.

God’s only and eternal Son on a Roman cross? Despised and rejected by men on this tiny planet. It’s like being blind-sided in the subway station on a Friday morning in Washington DC in a hurry to get to work and you pass by one of the most brilliant violinists in the world playing some of the most beautiful music in the world on one of the most expensive violins in the world. You don’t expect to see the master violinist performing in such a dirty, undignified place. But that is the very point. Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners.

Charles Price in his sermon: “God's Power in Unexpected Places,” PreachingToday.Com (March, 2014)

There have been many famous deaths in world history; we might think of John F. Kennedy, or Marie Antoinette, or Cleopatra, but we do not refer to "the assassination," "the guillotining," or "the poisoning." Such references would be incomprehensible. The use of the term "the crucifixion" for the execution of Jesus shows that it still retains a privileged status. When we speak of "the crucifixion," even in this secular age, many people will know what is meant. There is something in the strange death of the man identified as Son of God that continues to command special attention. This death, this execution, above and beyond all others, continues to have universal reverberations. Of no other death in human history can this be said. The cross of Jesus stands alone in this regard. … There were many thousands of crucifixions in Roman times, but only the crucifixion of Jesus is remembered as having any significance at all, let alone world-transforming significance.

No greater pain has ever been experienced on any level than the hell of Christ suffering in this moment. But why? Because he carried all of that pain, sin, guilt, and shame in that moment. Yet on a far deeper level he was forsaken and punished for us to reconcile us to God (2 Cor. 5:18).

Tim Keller illustrates it this way:

If after a service some Sunday morning one of the members of my church comes to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," I will feel pretty bad. But if today my wife comes up to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," that's a lot worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of its loss.

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. … Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing Judgment Day. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. And the answer is: For you, for me, for us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we would never have to be. The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

This story paints a vivid picture that reveals our helplessness before the devastation and comprehensiveness of God's Law. But it also shows how that helplessness creates the space for God's amazing grace and the freedom:

I'm a little like the duck hunter who was hunting with his friend in a wide-open barren of land in southeastern Georgia. Far away on the horizon he noticed a cloud of smoke. Soon, he could hear the sound of crackling. A wind came up and he realized the terrible truth: a brush-fire was advancing his way. It was moving so fast that he and his friend could not outrun it. The hunter began to rifle through his pockets. Then he emptied all the contents of his knapsack. He soon found what he was looking for-a book of matches. To his friend's amazement, he pulled out a match and struck it. He lit a small fire around the two of them. Soon they were standing in a circle of blackened earth, waiting for the brush fire to come. They did not have to wait long. They covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs and braced themselves. The fire came near-and swept over them. But they were completely unhurt. They weren't even touched. Fire would not burn the place where fire had already burned.

The law is like the brush-fire. I cannot escape it. But if I stand in the burned-over place, where law has already burned its way through, then I will not get hurt. Not a hair of my head will be singed. The death of Christ is the burned-over place. There I huddle, hardly believing yet relieved. Christ's death has disarmed the law. "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Wayne Cordeiro tells the story about a church member named Bully, a gentle man who got his nickname from his days of barking orders at construction sites. After Cordeiro noticed the scars on Bully's hands, he asked him, "Bully, how'd you get so many cuts?" Bully told the following story about a tsunami that hit the Hawaiian Island in the 1960s:

I was working above the bay that our home overlooks. One morning, the tide receded so much that the children ran out to catch fish in the tide pools left behind. We'd never witnessed the tide so low before, and it gave the kids an unprecedented opportunity to play and romp through the reefs that now protruded above the waterline like newly formed islands in the ocean. But what we didn't know was that the ocean was preparing to unleash the largest tsunami our sleepy little town had ever experienced.

Within minutes, a sixty-foot wave charged our unsuspecting town with a force we'd never seen before. The hungry waters rushed inland. Like bony fingers, the waters scratched and pulled homes, cars, possessions, and people back into a watery grave. The devastating power of that wave left in its wake twisted buildings, shattered windows, splintered homes, and broken dreams. I ran as fast as I could to our home, where I found my wife sobbing uncontrollably. "Robby is missing," she shouted. "I can't find Robby!"

Robby was our six-month-old child who was asleep in the house when the ocean raged against our helpless village. I was frantic as I looked over the shore strewn with the remains of the frail stick houses that were now piled in heaps along the sands. Realizing that another wave may soon be following, I began running on top of the wooden structures, tearing up pieces of twisted corrugated roofs that were ripped like discarded remains of a demolition project. I tore up one piece after another running over boards and broken beams until I heard the whimpering of a child under one of the mattresses that had gotten lodged beneath an overturned car.

I reached under and pulled up my little son, Robby. I tucked him under my arm like a football player running for the end zone, then I sprinted back over the debris until I reached my wife. We ran for higher ground, hugging our child and one another, thanking God for his mercy.

Just then, my wife said, "Bully, your feet and your hands. You're covered in blood!"

I had been wearing tennis shoes, and I didn't realize that as I ran over the wreckage, I was stepping on protruding nails and screws that had been exposed in the rubble. And as I pulled back the torn corrugated roofing looking for Robby, the sharp edges tore into my hand …. I was so intent on finding my boy that nothing else mattered.

Possible Preaching Applications: (1) Like the father in this illustration, Jesus was so intent on finding us that he experienced the pain and judgment of the cross to save us. (2) As followers of Christ we should display the passion and sacrificial love of this father to seek and save lost people. (3) Bully demonstrates the kind of sacrificial leadership that should mark every father as he tries to love and lead his family.

The movie Armageddon focuses on a burly oil-mining veteran by the name of Harry Stamper, played by actor Bruce Willis. Stamper has been called upon to take part in a last-ditch mission to save the human race from a massive asteroid on an unstoppable collision course with planet Earth. Landing a space shuttle on the surface of the deadly rock, Harry and his compatriots drill a hole deep into the asteroid's core and drop into it a nuclear bomb that might just split the asteroid in two and makes its halves miss the Earth.

At the climactic moment when the charge has been set and the shuttle is about to lift off the asteroid, something goes terribly wrong, and it becomes clear that someone will have to stay behind and manually detonate the bomb. Without hesitation Harry Stamper chooses that job. In the final minutes, Harry speaks by videophone to the command center in Houston and says his last words to his daughter, Grace, played by actress Liv Tyler. With tears streaming down her cheeks, the daughter burbles to her dad: "Everything good I have inside of me I have from you. I love you so much. I am so proud of you. And I'm so scared." "There won't be anything to be scared of soon," Harry assures her. "I'll look in on you … I love you, Grace."

Moments later, Harry kneels on the surface of the asteroid as it violently shakes with volcanic eruptions. Struggling to maintain hold of the detonator, he watches the shuttle safely escape. Then Harry stares … the beautiful blue planet rotating quietly in space. A gentle smile creases his rugged face as he whispers, "We win, Gracie," and then presses the detonator.

Suddenly the screen fills with a racing stream of images as seen through the love of this father's eyes. We see back in time to a sunny day when Harry is pushing his laughing little girl on a backyard swing set. We're treated to a blur of images reflecting the glorious and grainy moments of miraculous human life. We see a moment out in the future when Gracie will be dressed as a radiant bride on her wedding day. And then the asteroid erupts in a blinding explosion, fractures in two, and careens clear of our planet, as the saved of the Earth explode in wild cheers.

The Bible teaches that God saw the consequences of sin and evil hurtling at human life like an unstoppable force. Unlike the main character in the Hollywood movie, God himself would not have been destroyed if he did nothing. Unlike the Hollywood tale, this destruction was actually the just deserts of a planet that had forsaken its Creator. But at a level infinitely larger than the love of Harry Stamper for his daughter, God the Father and God the Son looked with compassion at the children of this Earth and chose to intervene in a way that required a cataclysmic self-sacrifice.

In her book Because He Loves: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life, author Elyse Fitzpatrick writes:

Just in case you're unaware, identity theft occurs when someone steals your name and other personal information for fraudulent use. Most of us are dismayed by this new cyber-age crime, and we wouldn't assume that the theft of another person's identity is acceptable behavior. The surprising reality, however, is that Christian's are, by definition, people who have someone else's identity. They're called "Christians" because they've taken the identity of someone else: the Christ. Not only have you been given an identity that you weren't born with or that you didn't earn the right to use, but you're invited to empty the checking account and use all the benefits this identity brings! This is so much better than identity theft—it's an identity gift!

The 2010 website of the Chicago Bears football team presented a series of videos that followed the team's rookies from their first arrival at training camp and on through the preseason. One video showed part of coach Lovie Smith's first orientation talk with the rookie class.

Of course, the biggest thing on each rookie's mind is whether he will make the team. Rookies know that the team roster begins with 80 players who come to camp. After a few weeks the coaches cut the team down to 65 players. Then before the season actually begins all NFL teams are required to trim down to 53 players. Of the 19 rookies who were invited to the 2010 Bears training camp, the team would likely keep only around 7.

Lovie Smith knew that, and so he addressed the rookies' concern in his talk to the 2010 class.His challenge to them was, "Make us put you on the team."

In other words, play so well in practice that the coaches couldn't imagine cutting you. Make us put you on the team. Take the decision out of the coach's hands. Let your performance make the decision for us.

Most religions and most people of the world think that God makes the same sort of speech about who will get into heaven. "Do you want to 'make the team' and have eternal life? Make me put you on the team. Live such a good life, do so many good deeds, that I could not imagine rejecting you. Take the decision out of my hands."

The counterintuitive truth is that God works on a completely different basis than football coaches do. People who think they can perform so well that they can make God add them to heaven's roster because they are so deserving of it will be rejected. This is the idea of salvation by works, and it is the opposite of salvation by grace. God saves us by his grace and his grace alone, through faith in Jesus Christ.

In Christ and the Meaning of Life, German theologian Helmut Thielicke tells the story of a young [soldier] who reached out to pick a bouquet of lilacs and uncovered the half-decayed body of [another] soldier beneath the bush: "He drew back in horror, not because he had never seen a dead man before—he drew back because of the screaming contradiction between the dead man and the flowering bush."

Thielicke notes that the soldier's reaction would have been different if the man had come upon a dead and faded lilac bush instead: "A blooming lilac bush will one day become a withered lilac bush—this is really nothing more than the operation of the rhythm of life—but that a man should be lying there in a decayed condition, this was something that simply did not fit, and that's why he winced at the sight of it."

We can only understand the mystery of death if we see it through the lens of Adam's rebellion against God. We are pilgrims who traverse an "empire of ruins" with death as our fellow traveler. Unable to rid ourselves of this cheerless companion, we attempt to rehabilitate it instead, treating death as if it were a neighbor and not a trespasser.

We clothe it in our best dress and apply make-up to its waxen features. Laid out before us in stiff repose, death looks as if it were merely asleep and if we do not look too carefully, we can almost convince ourselves that it has a beating heart within its breast and warm blood pulsing through its veins. We whisper to ourselves that it is not as alien as it first appeared. But this fool's dream vanishes the minute we attempt to embrace death, finding that it repays our kiss with only sorrow and loss.

Death is not a natural stage in the cycle of human development. Death is a curse. The presence of death is an intrusion. It is "natural" only to the extent that nature itself suffers from the stroke that fell upon Adam as a consequence for his sin. Nature endures death but not willingly. It groans in protest, loathing the bondage to decay which death has brought upon it and yearning for "the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Death is "the last enemy," a tyrant who acts on sin's behalf and whose sway over us was finally broken at the cross but will only be fully realized at the resurrection (Romans 5:21; 1 Corinthians 15:26).

Death is our enemy but, like the law, it is also a schoolmaster that leads us to Christ. Death's hard lesson exposes the true nature of sin. Indeed, the law and death are strange allies in this mysterious work. In the hands of God both act as a goad, puncturing our denial and prodding us to turn to Christ for relief from death's sting.

Dave Dorr writes in an article on Resurgence.com:

Recently a firefighter in our church was told by one of his colleagues that belief in Jesus was for weak people. I found that ironic coming from a firefighter.

I have a fire hydrant in the yard that runs along the side of our house. I have never looked at the fire hydrant and felt any shame. I drive by a firehouse every day, and I never think, If this community didn't have weak people, we would never need firehouses. And when I pay my property taxes every month—taxes that help finance fire departments—I never get angry at myself, thinking, If I could just handle fires on my own, I wouldn't have to write this check.

Imagine a person whose house is on fire. The fire is raging out of control, and soon a fire truck pulls up, sirens blaring. The person runs out of their house in a rage and says, "How dare you come to my house and think that I can't handle this fire myself! Firefighters are for weak people—not for me!" What would you think of someone like that? You would think they were insane.

We know that fire departments are for "weak" people because a power exists that we simply can't deal with on our own: fire. Actually, we admire firefighters because they are people who have committed themselves to take on the power of fire at personal expense.

Christians are weak in the same sense that a community is "weak" for having fire departments. They are people who acknowledge that a power exists that they can't confront and live—the holiness of God. This, however, is not cause for shame, because there was a man, Jesus, who dealt with that power at his own personal expense on a cross. When someone is rescued from the flames, they're not thinking about their weakness; they're overjoyed that someone would risk it all to save them.

Used by permission of author.

Author and speaker Brennan Manning has an amazing story about how he got the name "Brennan." While growing up, his best friend was Ray. The two of them did everything together: bought a car together as teenagers, double-dated together, went to school together and so forth. They even enlisted in the Army together, went to boot camp together and fought on the frontlines together. One night while sitting in a foxhole, Brennan was reminiscing about the old days in Brooklyn while Ray listened and ate a chocolate bar. Suddenly a live grenade came into the foxhole. Ray looked at Brennan, smiled, dropped his chocolate bar and threw himself on the live grenade. It exploded, killing Ray, but Brennan's life was spared.

When Brennan became a priest he was instructed to take on the name of a saint. He thought of his friend, Ray Brennan. So he took on the name "Brennan." Years later he went to visit Ray's mother in Brooklyn. They sat up late one night having tea when Brennan asked her, "Do you think Ray loved me?" Mrs. Brennan got up off the couch, shook her finger in front of Brennan's face and shouted, "What more could he have done for you?" Brennan said that at that moment he experienced an epiphany. He imagined himself standing before the cross of Jesus wondering, Does God really love me? And Jesus' mother Mary pointing to her son, saying, "What more could he have done for you?"

The cross of Jesus is God's way of doing all he could do for us. And yet we often wonder, Does god really love me? Am I important to God? Does god care about me?

In a Bible study entitled It Had to Be a Monday, Jill Briscoe writes about the death of a Christian friend. During the funeral visitation, the deceased man's wife and sister stood by the casket, greeting people. The sister kept motioning to her brother's body, saying to each person who came to greet her, "There he is. There he is." After some time, when the wife could stand it no longer, she turned to her sister-in-law and, in love, said, "If I believed, 'there he is,' I would be miserable." Then she added, "Do you know what enables me to get through this day? What gets me through is that I know the truth: 'There he isn't.'"

In his best-selling book The Reason for God, Tim Keller reflects on the substitutional atonement of Christ, pointing out that "in a real world of relationships, it is impossible to love people with a problem or a need without in some sense sharing or even changing places with them. All real life-changing love involves some form of this kind of exchange." Keller goes on to share two examples that illustrate this well. He writes:

Imagine you come into contact with a man who is innocent, but who is being hunted down by secret agents or by the government or by some other powerful group. He reaches out to you for help. If you don't help him, he will probably die, but if you ally with him, you—who were perfectly safe and secure—will be in mortal danger. This is the stuff that movie plots are made of. Again, it's him or you. He will experience increased safety and security through your involvement, but only because you are willing to enter into his insecurity and vulnerability.

Consider parenting. Children come into the world in a condition of complete dependence. They cannot operate as self-sufficient, independent agents unless their parents give up much of their own independence and freedom for years. If you don't allow your children to hinder your freedom in work and play at all, and if you only get to your children when it doesn't inconvenience you, your children will grow up physically only. In all sorts of other ways they will remain emotionally needy, troubled, and overdependent. The choice is clear. You can either sacrifice your freedom or theirs. It's them or you. To love your child well, you must decrease that they may increase. You must be willing to enter into the dependency they have so eventually they can experience the freedom and independence you have.

Keller closes with these words:

All life-changing love toward people with serious needs is a substitutional sacrifice. If you become personally involved with them, in some way, their weaknesses flow toward you as your strengths flow toward them ….

How can God be a God of love if he does not become personally involved in suffering the same violence, oppression, grief, weakness, and pain that we experience? The answer to that question is twofold: First, God can't. Second, only one major religion even claims that God does.

Thomas Brooks was an English Puritan preacher and author in the 1600s. Though he's best known for his many books and theological treatises, we have several of his sermons in print, some of which are funeral sermons. In one funeral sermon, Brooks reminds his listeners that for the believer, death not only ceases to be our conqueror; death actually becomes God's meek helper. He wrote: "Death is another Moses: it delivers believers out of bondage, and from making bricks in Egypt." He continued:

Remember this—death does that in a moment, which no graces, no duties, nor any ordinances could do for a man all his lifetime! Death frees a [person] from those diseases, corruptions, temptations … that no duties, nor graces, nor ordinances could do …. Every prayer then [when we die] shall have its answer; all hungering and thirsting shall be filled and satisfied; every sigh, groan, and tear that has fallen from the saints' eyes shall then be recompensed. That is not death but life, which joins the dying man to Christ!