Title: “Don’t Weep For Me.........”
Text: Luke 23:26-31 “As they led him away, they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, Blessed are the barren women, the wombs than never bore and the breasts that never nursed! Then ‘they will say to the mountains,’ ‘Fall on us!’ And to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
I assume that most of you have heard by now, about my very trying week. Several days of back and chest pain coming and going, eventually led me to my doctor’s office where after several tests of one kind and another he surmised that I was beginning to plug one or more of the stents that were inserted in my arteries last December. Tomorrow morning I am scheduled for another nuclear stress test and if they don’t like what they see they will do a heart catherization and insert new stents where needed. If that doesn’t work then it’s on to open-heart surgery.
When these troubles first came upon me last winter everything happened so quickly I really didn’t have time to think about it. I went from the emergency room in Eaton Rapids to the operating room at Ingham in short order. From that point on the rest of the week, with its return visits to the O.R. became a blur of doctor’s and nurse’s coming and going and me sleeping in the interim.
This time around I have had plenty of time to consider the consequences of such radical techniques as open heart surgery. Especially I recall that sheet of paper they had me sign each time before they wheeled me away. In essence it says that I am giving my permission to the surgeons to do whatever they deem necessary. If they determine that a stent will fix the problem then they will insert a stent. If they decide my condition has deteriorated beyond what a stent can correct then they will perform by-pass surgery. Oh, and by-the-way, the paper I am signing concludes……I understand that I could die during this process. Please sign here____________. Gulp!
As I said, the first time around I was so out of it I really didn’t think about it too much. Someone pointed to the line where they wanted me to sign, and I dutifully signed. This time around however, I have had time to give it some lucid thought. For those of you who haven’t had cause to undergo any physical tests in your doctor’s office or the lab lately, let me remind you that no one else in the whole world appears to be as concerned about getting the results back to you, in timely fashion, as you are. Believe me you will have plenty of time to play several of your favorite ‘worst case scenarios’ in a continuous loop format on the big screen T.V. we all have implanted in our imagination.
For all of the uncertainty, however, I am ready to say at the end of this very tumultuous week that it has been a good experience for me. Quite frankly for all that it portends, I don’t know how else God can bring us to a place where we can know ourselves at the depth we must know ourselves, other than to use one or more of the trials life brings our way.
For instance you may have asked yourself “Why was it vital for Abraham to take his son Isaac, up on the mountain and sacrifice him to God, when God knew all along that Abraham wouldn’t be required to go through with it, but it was just to see if he would go that far for God?” As one commentator has pointed out “God knew that Abraham’s love and faithfulness would motivate him to obey God, even in something as drastic as sacrificing his own son, but Abraham needed to know it! Actually, then, the whole business of Abraham offering his son in sacrifice to God wasn’t for God, but for Abraham.
I don’t believe that God saw to it that I was born with a bad circulatory system. I believe that my parents are responsible for that. But, I do believe that God is free to use anything, even my faulty DNA to teach me about myself and His Kingdom.
Several years ago I traveled with some friends to Ann Arbor to watch as another friend played a bit part in the play, “Evita.” Wow! It may well have been one of the best plays I have ever attended. Not only was it well directed and a perfect showcase for the talents of these graduating U. of M. seniors, but if you weren’t careful you might also get a smattering of a history lesson. It was, and is, the story of the life of Eva Peron, wife of the Leader of Argentina, who died at a very young age. As history tells it she had a special love for the common folks from which she also came. At any rate, the song “Don’t Weep For Me Argentina…………..” has stayed in my head all these years and I seem to resonate with its directive. (I don’t know if I can recommend the play with Madonna playing the part of Eva, or not. I have never seen the movie.)
In my “wonder years” I was always amazed by those men and women throughout history who could meet death with such aplomb. Sydney Carton’s last thoughts before his life is sacrificed to save the life of Charles Darnay in Dickens’s book “Tale of Two Cities, although a fictional account makes my point quite well: “It’s a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done before….”
Nathan Hale – “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country!”
(?) – “Shoot if you must, this old gray head, but spare the American flag” she said………
Could I die like that I wondered, as a young person first being introduced to a selflessness quite foreign to most children and teens. Our sanitized modern world doesn’t force too many of us to even have to deal with the question, so most don’t. Before I became a Christian I’m afraid I would have had to answer honestly that I could not have died with any kind of peace of heart and mind………..for any cause – be it fraternity, patriotism, or fidelity to any religion. I had far too many unanswered questions. I wanted to know more about the trip. I wanted to know more about the destination…………if in fact, there was any destination at all.
Leaving out the fact that over my short fifty six years, God has several times pulled me back from the brink of an early demise, I believe that considering open heart surgery and its possibilities of “something going wrong” has given me new insights into myself and hopefully something I say will increase your faith as well.
How many of you have discovered that it is easy to sit in your easy chair or on the couch and watch events of the day unfold on the news channel and declare that if you were ever in a certain situation how you would have responded. If you were a hold-up victim or had been car jacked? If you were in a war zone, or involved in a plane crash? If a seat on the Ferris-Wheel locked up and dumped you out from three stories up? If your spouse abused you?
It’s easy to say all the right things isn’t it…………? When you are sitting in the comfort of your home and have all the time in the world to think about a life or death reaction, someone else had to make in a split second………………. Or when someone else was forced to take the best of several unproven options that might determine life and death for them or others.
Some people think it’s easy for the preacher to stand in the pulpit every Sunday and paint a picture of the glories of Heaven and the transitory nature of life on earth. “He talks big,” they may say “but what does he know about it?”
Well…….that’s what I want to talk about this morning. “What do I know about it?” “What have I learned about myself in this past week?”
First of all I can say this with flat-footed certainty……………..I believe it! I believe what I have been preaching and teaching over the past twenty years. I believe that God is good, and gracious, and merciful. I believe in His promise to never leave us or forsake us. I believe that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. I have a calm assurance that none of us will be left to walk that last mile of the way by ourselves. I believe that life is transitory and that we are only here for a short time and soon pass on. And I also believe that “the soul afraid of dying is the soul afraid to live.”
It seems that all of life’s great unanswered questions gathered ‘round my bed as I lay awake in the night pondering the outcome of pending tests and surgeries. In my midnight contemplations I came to realize that all of us will pass from this life with questions still unanswered, and that leads to my second insight into myself, garnered from the events of my week now past.
I realized with great clarity that God often has to force us back onto grace. Dire circumstances, impending disaster, dangerous locales, serious health concerns, are all occasions for God to show us, in no uncertain terms, that if we are still hoping for long life so that we can “clean up our act” or eventually become “good enough” to stand in his presence, our present position shows us the futility of such thinking. Let’s face it – if you are going to die in two months, and you know it – that leaves precious little time to become “good enough.” I mean, many of us have been trying for decades just to overcome some vexing, little habit or behavior and we still can’t say with certainty we will never do it again. What chance do we have with only two months to live, to clean up our whole act in order to be presentable to God? That’s what I mean when I say that God forces us back onto grace. We start out by confessing Jesus’ atoning death as our only way to the Father, but somewhere along the way we start to believe that we can add to it. A little farther on and we start to believe we must add to it. Before long we forget all about Jesus and it becomes a case of attempting to save ourselves. And that’s when God steps in and uses the misfortunes of life to bring us back to square one. “For by grace are you saved, through faith…..”
I guess I knew how I really felt about my personal transition from this world to the next, but I wanted to find a more timeless reference in which to couch my own thoughts. I found them in the words of Jesus that we read earlier in our text. “Don’t weep for me daughters of Jerusalem. Weep for yourselves and your children…………….”
You know it seems to almost border on blasphemy to say such things, but I have been in conversation with enough unbelievers to know how they think. (Or don’t think) “Was Jesus just being macho? Was he just playing out to the very end, the hand he had started with – bluffing instead of folding? Well……….I’ve sat in enough college class rooms to know that somehow or another unbelievers can find a way to neutralize his words…….and they will. But listen to what the writer of the book of Hebrews has to say about the mind-set with which our Savior went to Calvary. (12:2) “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
In other words, it wasn’t just sheer grit and determination that took him to the cross. It was for love of you and I and the “joy set before Him.”
Have you ever known the joy set before us? Have you experienced enough of heaven’s glories while still here on earth that you can meet your own transition with great expectancy?
Remember Abraham when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going? Remember how by faith he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God?
Remember how Moses, even though he wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land, was permitted to climb Mount Nebo, and from there look out across and into the land God promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?
There is something about standing high up on Faith Mountain. Way up there where the air is clear………..and you can see for miles and miles. With eyes of faith one can look way back to the beginnings of God’s creation. We can see that first man and that first woman in that perfect garden setting. We can see that there is no atmosphere of sin hanging over that park like place, like the smog over Los Angeles on a hot and humid summer day. In the depths of our being we resonate with the peace and tranquility, the communion with God, and each other……..with the creation……..and especially within themselves. With those same eyes of faith and an open heart we look in the other direction to what the Bible calls the “end of days,” and we see played out before us the last two chapters of the Bible, when everything is restored to God’s original blue print. Strangely enough, as we stand there we begin to feel welling up inside us a “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” And even though it is beyond our ability to articulate – we become consumed with thoughts of Heaven and home. The same joy that Jesus knew will keep us focused and on track and finally allow us to enter with faith into our own time of passing.
“Daughters of Jerusalem do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, blessed are the barren women, the wombs than never bore and the breasts that never nursed! Then ‘they will say to the mountains,’ ‘Fall on us!’ And to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Filled with the joy of coming glories, our Lord went to his death. But notice that it wasn’t just future heavenly glory that filled His heart and mind that day. Notice that He was also painfully aware of earthly terrors lying just ahead. Less than forty years later this particular prophetic utterance came to fulfillment when the Roman General, Titus, razed Jerusalem to the ground, killing or scattering abroad every one of its inhabitants.
As I contemplate the possibility of being wheeled into surgery again……..after having signed all of the requisite paper work…..including the one informing me that I could die during the scheduled procedure my weeks worth of mental preparation allows me to conclude………..every since the day I made Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior, I have lived my life for the moment of my passing. I have declared His sufficiency before congregations of His people. I have lifted up His name in private conversation. He has directed my spiritual maturation. He has proved His patience, His goodness, His love, His graciousness to me, too many times to recount. Why would I shirk back now?
In my quest to follow Jesus in all of His leadings I now………will borrow His very words, and say to you……………”Don’t weep for me children of God. Weep for our nation grown cold and calloused to God and the things of God. Weep for a world where nations harbor enough destructive forces to destroy life on planet earth many times over….and only await some mad man in the right place at the right time to blow us back to the Stone Age.
Don’t weep for me faithful Christians – weep for a church that has taken it upon themselves to decide which of God’s edicts concerning personal and social morality they will uphold and which ones they will discount and disregard. Weep for those who are “Christian” in name only………whose love for this world and the things of this world has long since displaced love for God and His people. Wail and beat your breast for people gone mad with lust for more temporary “things,” – who willingly lay down their lives in obeisance to the great god “More,” and his infernal high priest “The Bottom Line.”
Don’t weep for me Body of Christ – instead expend all of your energies praying for God’s great revival spirit to sweep over our land and around the world. Pray for a spirit of revelation knowledge that will open hearts and minds to a new awareness of the holiness of God. Pray that the vision will be so clear that our own poor efforts to please God by picking and choosing from among His directives will be exposed for the shallowness God knows them to be. Pray that people will be made starkly aware that their indifference to events around the world or transpiring within the realm of the spirit negates nothing. In a moment’s time, gunshots rang out in an obscure little town called Sarajevo, and WW I began. At a moment when no one was suspecting Japanese airplanes flew in low level, and sucker punched the United States, at a place called Pearl Harbor, and WW II began. On an otherwise normal work day, four years ago, several thousand people kissed their spouse and children goodbye and went off to work in the Twin Towers…….
Weep for a nation grown spiritually desensitized………..and that fails to acknowledge or realize that just because we have laid aside our spiritual weapons of warfare, our enemy has agreed to no such pact.
Let me close out my thoughts this morning with these words of the Apostle Paul that should at some point in our spiritual growth become the creed of every one of us.
2 Cor. 4:16; 5:1-10
For this reason we never become discouraged. Even though our physical being is gradually decaying, yet our spiritual being is renewed day after day. And this small and temporary trouble we suffer will bring us a tremendous and eternal glory, much greater than the trouble. For we fix our attention, not on things that are seen, but on things that are not seen. What can be seen lasts only for a time; but what cannot be seen lasts for ever.
For we know that when this tent we live in – our body here on earth – is torn down, God will have a house in heaven for us to live in, a home he himself made, which will last for ever. And now we sigh, so great is our desire to have our home which is in heaven put on over us; for by being clothed with it we shall not be found without a body. While we live in the earthly tent we groan with a feeling of oppression; it is not that we want to get rid of our earthly body, but that we want to have the heavenly one put on over us, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. God is the one who haw prepared us for this change, and he gave us his Spirit as the guarantee of all that he has for us.
So we are always full of courage. We know that as long as we are at home in this body we are away form the Lord’s home. For our life is a matter of faith, not of sight. We are full of courage, and would much prefer to leave our home in this body and be at home with the Lord. More than anything else, however, we want to please him, whether in our home here or there.”
Closing Prayer:
