The Standing Ovation of God's Love

Doug Page: Well, good morning,
LCU.
It is good to be with you this morning. I want to tell you three
stories this morning.
Story number one,
this is a picture of a guy named Eugene Peterson.
During his lifetime,
Eugene Peterson was a pastor.
He was an author. He wrote more than 30 books.
He pastored a church in Maryland for about 29 years.
And when he died in 2018,
his son spoke at his funeral.
And his son said that after thousands of sermons over the course
of his career,
over 30 years almost of preaching in churches and preaching to people about the story
of Jesus,
the story of God,
he said that his dad,
Eugene Peterson,
had everyone fooled. People thought
that he was really creative,
that he had this amazing writing ability,
this amazing speaking
ability.
And they thought that he was good at using words and being creative with how to explain
the story of God to people who had never heard it. But really he had people fooled because he,
though it appeared that he had lots of sermons,
he really only had one sermon.
And that sermon was
this.
God loves you.
God is on your side.
God is coming after you and God is relentless.
Story number two.
One of the best books that I have ever read is a book by the title of Wonder.
This book was made into a movie in 2017.
If you haven't read the book, you may have seen the movie.
In case you haven't seen the book,
seen the movie or read the book,
I want to give you a little bit
of a summary about kind of what the story is about. The main character is a boy named Augie Pullman.
Augie Pullman has extreme facial disfiguration because of some ways he was born, but also
some surgeries that he's gone through.
And as the book begins,
it says,
whatever you imagine about
him, he says about himself,
whatever you imagine about his face,
it might be worse.
His parents had homeschooled him in his entire life, but in fifth grade, they decided to enroll
him in school for the first time.
I want you to imagine this for just a moment, that you have been
kind of isolated.
It's been hard to go out in public.
Every time you go out in public as a child,
people turn and they look at you.
Maybe they turn away when they look at you because of the way
your physical appearance portrays itself.
He wants more than anything else to be included,
to be treated like everyone, to be welcomed into the community.
There's this scene in the book where Augie goes to watch his sister perform in the school play.
And at the end, he says the entire audience stands and gives the cast of the play a standing ovation.
And he has this line in the story that's always stuck with me.
He says that I think there should be a moment, a rule that in everybody's life,
there's one moment where every single person gets a standing ovation at some point in their life.
Story number three.
This story is from the Bible, and I want you to listen to this story from John
chapter 8,
beginning in verse 1.
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives, and at dawn he appeared again
in the temple courts,
where all the people gathered around him,
and he sat down to teach them.
The
teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand
before the group and said to Jesus,
Teacher,
this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
The law
of Moses commands us to stone such women.
Now, what do you say?
They were using this question
as a trap in order to have a basis for accusing Jesus, but Jesus bent down and he started to write
on the ground with his finger.
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to
the crowd,
let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.
Again,
he
stooped down and wrote on the ground, at this,
those who heard began to go away one at a time,
the older ones first, until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there.
Jesus straightened up and asked her, woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?
No one,
sir,
she said.
A crowd has gathered to listen.
Jesus said, neither do I condemn you.
Go now and leave
your life of sin.
The crowd is gathered to hear Jesus teach.
That's the reason they're at the
temple that day.
And this woman is dragged before Jesus by this crowd of men because she's been
caught in the act of adultery.
They want to know what Jesus thinks that they should do to this
woman, what they,
what Jesus thinks should happen to this woman.
The old Testament says that she
should be put to death.
And these men who bring the woman to Jesus, they have chapter and verse
in their Old Testament Bible,
Leviticus chapter 20,
verse 10, and Deuteronomy chapter 22,
verse 22,
both say that someone who is caught in the act of adultery should be put to death. But it does say
that not just the woman should be put to death. It says that both the man and the woman should be
put to death.
These people only want to trap the woman,
catch the woman.
They want to know what
Jesus thinks. And John tells us in this story,
they're really not all that interested in the
woman.
They're only there to try to trap Jesus. And so Jesus bends down and begins to write in
the dirt with his finger.
A lot of people have speculated, have wondered, have guessed about what
he might've written in the dirt that day, but the story doesn't tell us only that he writes.
And they take his silence as this sort of act of refusal,
like he doesn't want to engage them.
And
to pursue this engagement with him. And they want to know, what do you think we should do about this
woman? And then Jesus has this line.
He says, let any one of you who is without sin be the first
to throw a stone at her. It's this mic drop moment where he says what he says and he says it directly
and he doesn't want to have any other conversation about it.
And one by one,
they begin to walk away.
Jesus doesn't say that sin doesn't matter. It matters.
And Jesus doesn't say that you shouldn't
obey the law.
He's saying that if we're going to obey the law, if we're going to be serious about
following the Bible,
then what we will find is that all of us are guilty.
There is no one who
is perfect.
There is no one who is not worthy of death, that all of us have fallen short of the
glory of God. And one by one,
they walk away until now only the woman remains standing there before
Jesus. And Jesus stands back up and looks her in the eye and asks her two questions. We finally
get to hear the woman's voice.
Jesus says, where are they?
And has no one condemned you?
And we hear her voice for the first time when she says,
no one,
sir.
And then Jesus responds in the
way that the story has already suggested that he would probably respond.
There is no condemnation
from him either.
The woman is free to go and she is exhorted. She is encouraged. She's challenged
to go and leave her life of sin.
The challenge with this story for lots of people is that Jesus
doesn't do what we expect him to do.
Somebody did something wrong. There should be a consequence.
There should be some kind of follow through.
Where is the justice in this story?
But this
tension that exists in the story, I think is also what makes it beautiful because in this story,
Jesus wasn't just trying to save the woman.
Jesus was also trying to save the crowd of men
who dragged the woman before him on that day.
Everyone in this story is saved from death.
Everybody in this story is offered a future.
Jesus really is good news for everyone,
which brings me back to you and to the story that I told about Augie Pullman from the book Wonder.
After a long and strenuous experience,
Augie Pullman finally successfully makes it through
his fifth grade year.
And at the end of his school year,
his school,
like many schools that you and I
we're a part of has like an end of the year award ceremony where all the students and parents,
everybody's gathered in an auditorium like this and people's names are called and they come up to
the stage and they shake people's hands and they're given an award.
And this is what,
at the end of
that school year,
Augie is there in that moment and he receives an award. And this is, I want to
read a quote from that story.
This is what he says about this moment.
He receives this award,
his name is called.
He walks to the stage and he's standing on the stage and he says,
I think I was smiling.
Maybe I was beaming. I don't know.
As I walked up the aisle toward the stage,
all I saw was a blue, happy,
a blue of happy,
bright faces looking at me and hands clapping for me.
Everyone was woohooing and whistling for me.
I felt like I was floating,
like the sun was
shining full force on my face and the wind was blowing.
And as I walked up the steps to the stage,
the most amazing thing happened.
Everyone started standing up,
not just in the front rows, but
the whole audience suddenly got up on their feet,
whooping and hollering and clapping like crazy.
It was a standing ovation for me.
His whole life, he had been this kid who had been excluded,
who had been an outcast, who had been pushed aside and avoided.
But now he was an ordinary kid,
welcomed by the whole audience,
by the whole community that he so deeply wanted to be a part of.
Three stories that all have a similar through line,
that all have a similar theme.
And it turns out,
I think that maybe Eugene Peterson was right.
Maybe there is really only one main sermon,
one main message,
one main image that all of us need in our hearts, in our minds as we live
our lives in this world. Maybe there's only one thing that we really need to hear,
only one message that the story of the Bible continues to repeat over and over and over again.
And whether you're a student this morning or a faculty member or a staff member or a guest,
I think that that message is the one that I want us to leave with this morning.
It's the one I want us to live our lives with.
That God is on your side.
God loves you.
God is coming after you and God is relentless.
And no matter what you have heard or what you have been told in your life,
the truth is Jesus really does love you.
And God's standing ovation for you and for me is that he sent his son,
Jesus Christ,
into the world to rescue all of us from death.
And we'll never be able to do enough.
We'll never be able to perform enough,
be good enough, or have all the right credentials,
but we are still welcomed into the kingdom of God.
God loves you.
God is on your side.
God is coming after you, and God is relentless.
This is the good news of Jesus Christ.
Thank you
for being here this morning.
You are dismissed.
Thank you.