SEP 20, 2009  SERMON ARCHIVE

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Amen.

The text for our meditation today is the Gospel Lesson for today Mark 9:30-37. There we read these words:

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise." But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him. And they came to Capernaum. And when he was in the house he asked them, "What were you discussing on the way?" But they kept silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, "If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all." And he took a child and put him in the midst of them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me."

Dear Christian friends,

John Dewey has profoundly impacted each of our lives. No, I am not talking about the Dewey Decimal System, which many libraries use to catalogue books; Melville Dewey is responsible for that. John Dewey has profoundly affected our lives because of his personal philosophy on life, and because he brought his philosophy into public schools and used it to help form basic assumptions about how children ought to be educated.

Following a path blazed by philosophers who had gone before him, John Dewey claimed that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is really whatever you want it to be. Your truth may be different than my truth, but because there is no absolute truth, your opinion is as good as mine and mine is as good as yours. The Ten Command-ments were not divinely written, they are just one view among many of how things ought to be in the world.

Dewey postulated that there is no superiority of one religious system over the other. If your particular religion happens to give you the things that you think you need, that religion is true for you, even if it may be false and demonic to someone else.

All of John's Dewey's mental tidily-winks would have been bad enough if they had simply remained between the covers of some dusty book, or in the scribbled notes of a college sophomore. But no, John Dewey found a way to bring his philosophy into the public schools, and it has become one of the basic assumptions behind our children's education, and quite possibly, our own education as well.

John Dewey did some experiments and discovered that children would much rather go to art class and make clay sculptures of Julius Caesar than they would go to Latin class and memorize verb forms. Dewey therefore concluded that art classes ought to replace Latin in the curriculum. After all, there is no absolute truth! There is no foundation of knowledge that we must build for our children! If clay is what works for them, then we ought to give them clay.

As a result, today's education largely functions on the assumption that there is no absolute truth; that children need to learn about different lifestyles, beliefs, and behaviors, choosing those things that seem right for them and throwing away whatever truth claims they personally do not like.

Essentially, Dewey's philosophy, when boiled down to its nuts and bolts, you do what you think is good for you, no matter what anyone else may tell you. (And by the way, John Dewey died in 1952, so let's not go thinking that only the younger generations have been encouraged to think in this way.)

I am not by any means suggesting to you that we all run off into the woods and set up our own little community and hide from the world. But the Church must understand how the thought process of the world runs directly opposite the thought process of the Church. The Church must realize and teach its children that not everything heard in our everyday lives is helpful to us. The Church must cling to absolute truth as it floats about in the Dewey-ocean of do-what-is-right-for-you.

Someone who has apprehended this false idea that there is no absolute truth will do some amazing things with the Scriptures of God. If you believe there is no absolute truth, you will be free to choose those things in the Bible that you think are applicable to you, and equally free to abandon those things that you do not like. If you will reject absolute truth, you will be able live any sort of debased, corrupted lifestyle you please and still call yourself a Christian and a faithful follower of Jesus. If you reject absolute truth, your rejection will allow you to look at today's Gospel and say, "There it is! Jesus Himself tells us, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me" (Mark 9:37). The Church should never proclaim what is right or wrong, but we should just be accepting of everyone and let each person decide for himself or herself what Christianity means to them. "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me."

Just because abortion isn’t right in your eyes doesn't give you the right to tell other people that it is wrong, or that God hates it.

Just because you are old fashioned about the whole man-and-wife thing, that doesn 't mean you can condemn homosexual marriage if that is what other people want.

Just because you personally believe in the Trinity, that doesn't mean that all the followers of all the other religions are going to hell. We must be accepting of everything that claims to be Christian, because Jesus says.

"Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me"!

I am not saying that you should all become monks, I am not telling you that you must seal yourselves off from the world around you, and I certainly am not saying that the entire public school system is evil. The Church must know how the world thinks, so that she may defend her children against the way the world thinks. John Dewey, by bringing his philosophy into the public classroom, has brought the rejection of absolute truth home for you and for your children. He has profoundly impacted your lives because, like it or not, this is the thought world in which you live.

Believe it or not, this is the thought process of the world in which you live today. Even if you do not understand Dewey's rejection of truth for yourselves, you must confront it and respond to it each and every day of your lives. The rejection of absolute truth has come to surround you everywhere, not only in classrooms, but also in advertising, in popular literature, in conversation, in music, and even in such things as clothing fashion. The rejection of absolute truth has even found its way into those places normally described as Church.

But the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Eternal Word which proceeds from the Father, does not speak anything but absolute truth. "The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill Him and after three days He will rise" (Mark 9:31). This is absolute!

And as you already know from many other passages in the Scriptures, this absolute truth of the Son's death and resurrection is the truth that now saves you. "The Son of Man is going to be betrayed" because "He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; He was pierced for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:4,5).

"They will kill Him" because "He shared in their humanity so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil-and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death" (Hebrews 2:14-15).

"After three days He will rise" because He "has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel" (2 Timothy 1:10).

This is truth dear saints, and by this truth God has established for you YOUR truth. Your truth is not what you personally design it to be, but it is God's truth applied individually to you: By His betrayal, death and resurrection, the Lord Jesus Christ has forgiven you all your sins and has given you the certainty of eternal life. This is absolute, and this is for you.

The disciples had been arguing along the road, fighting over "who was the greatest" (Mark 9:34). In so doing, they had taken a step away from this absolute truth, this concrete reality that Jesus saves you and gathers you into His kingdom solely because of His great love for you. In arguing who was the greatest, they had fallen victim to the whims of their own personal opinions. They had begun to focus on themselves, and on what they believed was personally best for them, rather than on the absolute truth of the Gospel.

But Jesus said to them, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all" (Mark 9:35). This, too, is absolute!

Salvation is not found by personal exaltation, but by the exaltation of the Son of Man upon the cross. The door of heaven is narrow, and those who would pass through must first drop everything about who they are, entering only on the basis of who the Son of Man is. "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

Then "He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking the child in His arms, Jesus said to them, 'Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me" (Mark 9:36-37a). Jesus does not speak here about the gathering of willful, self-aggrandized people created by John Dewey's philosophy; He speaks of welcoming them "in My Name," that is, by faith in Him, through trust in Him, and on His divine authority. To receive children for God in Jesus' name is to receive them on the basis of HIS self-revelation and His Word and truth, rather than on the basis of their own, errant claims to personalized truth.

This, dear friends, is where the true greatness of the Church is found. It is not found in the self-exaltation of personalized truth. It is found in the humiliation of realizing that God speaks His absolute and unmovable truth to us. The true greatness of the Church is found in gathering children in His name and according to His truth, rather than in our own name or in their own name, and according to our truth or their truth.

The true greatness of the Church is found in the loving and yet courageous insistence that God has spoken, and that life comes only by His Words. "The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill Him and after three days He will rise" (Mark 9:31). The Son of Man rose victorious over the best that the world could throw against Him. Because we belong to Him, so also shall we.

Here is real truth. Christ Is Risen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.