Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit I Was on My Way out of Church Last
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Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit I was on my way out of Church last Sunday and I came across two men, Bill McIlmiel and Grant Moyer who, I discovered, were talking about the "Blood Moon" eclipse which took place last Tuesday, even though no one was able to see it due to cloud cover... and sleep! (It began at 2 AM). Grant asked me if I had heard anything about the so called "Blood Moon Prophecy" , an idea popularized by pastors John Hagee and Mark Biltz, which states that an ongoing tetrad (a series of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, with six full moons in between, and no intervening partial lunar eclipses) which began with the April 2014 lunar eclipse (did you get all that?) is a sign of significant things to come. Biltz believes that the Second Coming of Christ will coincide with the final eclipse of the tetrad, while Hagee only believes the eclipses are a sign of a coming change in the course of history for Israel. Well, to be honest with you, I didn't know anything about that at all. But I thanked them for giving me a place to begin my Good Friday message concerning the last word of Jesus from the Cross: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit". Stay with me, and you'll see the tie-in, shortly, Lord willing. I did a little web search after talking to those guys, and came across a Wikipedia article that listed some predicted dates for apocalyptic events such as the Rapture, Last Judgment, or any other event that would result in the end of humanity, civilization, the planet, or the entire universe. This list (which is obviously selective, but still has nearly 200 entries) shows the dates of predictions from notable groups or individuals of when the world was, or is, forecast to end, starting from the year 634 BC! There are many famous people on this list, from Christopher Columbus to Cotton Mather to Charles Manson, Jean Dixon. (Harold Camping himself gets six mentions. All separate predictions! If at first you don't succeed... ) Page 1 of 7 April 18, 2014 Pastor Steve Donat Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit I also, out of curiosity, looked up a number of doomsday web sites, and one thing that I noticed immediately that many of them have in common, is that they don't like to write with paragraph divisions, and they favor run on sentences. Perhaps they feel that the nonsense of their theories can be hidden in a forest of many words. What is obvious is that this is a subject that creates quite a lot of interest! People are fascinated by talk about the end of the world. I remember a couple years ago when there was quite a buzz about the Mayan calendar, which ended with the 2012 winter solstice. People took that as proof, somehow, that the world was going to end that day, and a lot of people were nervous. (Apparently, what really happened is that the Mayans just ran out of clay tablets.) The HVAC repair guy at our church - who spends more time there than some of my staff members - stopped me outside the church one afternoon about that time, and in all seriousness asked me if I thought there was "anything to this 'Mayan thing'". Well, you know, as a pastor, I would have liked to have said, "Absolutely, there is, and you need to get yourself into church... and don't miss another Sunday", but as I've never believed that fear is a good motivator for real piety, I told him... that "There is something to this, but it's not exactly what you might think! I seriously doubt that the world as we know it is going to end on December 21, 2012, but on the other hand...let's be honest, for a significant number of people, the world will end on that day." And, I said, "My friend, one day the world is going to end for you, too." So, really the date isn't all that important - but our being ready for the end - whenever it comes - most certainly is important." And it always will be. A guy named Stephen Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist, was quoted on a Website that talked about the phenomenon of failed doomsday prophecies, and how they impact Page 2 of 7 April 18, 2014 Pastor Steve Donat Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit some people very deeply. I thought his comments were especially interesting in that he was not speaking from a Christian perspective, but from the perspective of his understanding of human nature as a sociologist. Kent says "Part of the reason that failed doomsdays can be so traumatic is that they appear to be a way that people grapple with their mortality. Believers usually think they'll survive the end, whether by being one of God's chosen people, by building an underground bunker, or by hitching a ride on a friendly UFO." But listen to this sentence: "If you survive the end of the world" Kent said, "you never have to face your own death." "The believers always predict that their special knowledge will allow them to survive, that they will escape the mortality that all of us face, and so far, everyone's been proven wrong on that fact." We've heard today a number of fascinating and moving perspectives on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross. At First UMC, pastor HeyYoung and I have been preaching a Lenten Series based on these last words, so we've been living with them for almost two months now. It's been an awesome thing to ponder these statements of Jesus, knowing as we do the extent of his suffering. Knowing that any thought that Jesus decided to speak aloud from the Cross required an enormous physical effort, just to raise himself up enough to gasp the breath necessary to be able to speak. As we've heard throughout this afternoon, Jesus' suffering was not limited just physical pain. Now that was bad enough, but as I shared in one of my messages, Jesus also suffered in ways that likely were even more difficult to bear than the gruesome physical pain – i.e., the Page 3 of 7 April 18, 2014 Pastor Steve Donat Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit emotional pain of seeing his friends and followers turn their backs on him, being unjustly accused and tried, the ridicule that he received from not only the religious leaders, but also from ordinary people passing by who joined in. He was betrayed by one of his own, denied by another. Heaped on all of that, there is the Holy Mystery of what it meant that “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” that Jesus took upon himself the consequences of my sin, and yours… to the point of death… to the point that for the first time since eternity ‘began’, for the first time since the dawn of Creation, Jesus, on this Cross, does not sense the presence of God the Father within him… “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And yet, with all that weight crushing down upon him, the words that he speaks from this Cross are words of trust, words of compassion, words of forgiveness and hope. They all were teaching us something. And now we've come to the last word... a word, which to me, is the ultimate expression of trust. Luke writes that Jesus called out with a loud voice [again, think of the effort involved] "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last. He called out these words with a loud voice, I believe, because he wanted to be sure that no one missed them. He's once again, telling us something very important. Nevertheless, the words themselves are directed to God the Father, as they are certainly a prayer, perhaps one of the most significant prayers anyone can pray. You probably know that these words, like Jesus' Fourth word ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me") are a direct quote from Jesus' hymn book, the Psalms. In this case, Jesus was quoting from Psalm 31. Let me read them in their context: Page 4 of 7 April 18, 2014 Pastor Steve Donat Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit In you, O Lord, I seek refuge; do not let me ever be put to shame; in your righteousness deliver me. Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily. Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me. You are indeed my rock and my fortress; for your name's sake lead me and guide me, take me out of the net that is hidden for me, for you are my refuge. Into your hand I commit my spirit. Adam Hamilton in his Book, "Final Words from the Cross" comments: "This was Jesus' dying prayer. It was a prayer of absolute trust in God. Jesus had forgiven his enemies, offered mercy to a thief, prayed for his mother, come to a place where he felt abandoned by God, and expressed his physical thirst; but before his death, he declared the shout of triumph,"It is finished," and offered this beautiful prayer of absolute trust in his Father." William Barkley, in his NT commentary on Luke suggests that this prayer from Psalm 31:5, "Into your hands I commit my spirit," was a prayer that Jewish children were taught by their mothers - to pray as they went to sleep each night (kind of like 'Now I lay me/ down to sleep' but with a little more theological weight.) Hamilton invites us to consider this precious thought - that Mary herself may have taught this to Jesus when he was just a boy, and now, as he dies..