Sermon Notes, December 2, 2012
What if Jesus had Never Come? An Unimaginable World John 1:1-5, Colossians 1:15-20
This is from a Yale historian named Jerislav Pelikan . This is what he wrote:
"Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about Him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost 20 centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super-magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of His name, how much would be left?"
It struck me in reading the book he wrote about this that because we all tend to be so selfabsorbed, we often think about Jesus' part of my little life or our little church. We don't stand back and recognize the scope, the sheer awe-inspiring enormity, of His impact on the world.
Today, we're going to try to stand back and look at who this Jesus is. And maybe you will be overwhelmed, possibly be stunned, delighted, by how God has shaped history through Jesus in awesome ways.
It would be hard to choose a less likely candidate to change the world than Jesus. He was not a political figure. He had no connections with Herod, the Sanhedrin, or Rome. He led no military action. He never wrote a book. He never traveled. His followers were relatively uneducated and ridiculously unimportant people. The New Testament itself records them as being called unschooled, ordinary men, but it was careful to note they had been with Jesus. Two thousand years later, it is virtually impossible to imagine our world apart from His imprint on it. We're going to try.
Imagine a world without its most influential movement because Jesus gave to the world the church. Imagine a world with no church. Then all the people.
We’ll go back to the beginning for a moment...the idea of the church. In the ancient world, there were nations, families, ethnic groups, guilds, tribal religions, and philosophical schools.
The church was none of these. Paul says this about the church: "Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and in all.
Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience."
Was there any movement anywhere before this Jesus movement of the church that actively sought to include every single human being regardless of nationality, ethnicity, status, wealth, gender, moral background, and education to be included, loved, and transformed?
As a matter of historical fact, not only had there never been a community like this before, there simply had never been the idea of a community like this before. It was His idea.
If you're familiar with the Twelve Steps, the Twelve Steps Recovery Movement came directly out of something called The Oxford Group, which was a community reclaiming the practices of
Jesus for transformation. No Jesus, no Twelve Steps. Who was this man?
Jesus changed how we think about history. Do you know why New Years Day falls when it does on the calendar? Because of Jesus. In Israel, they would start counting on the day a baby was born. Then on the eighth day, that baby would be brought to the temple, circumcised if it was male, and given its name. December 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31. January 1 marks the beginning of the New Year because that's the day when Jesus came into the world. It was expressing something that was changing in people's idea of history, which is hope.
In our day, we kind of take it for granted that we expect progress. There will be surveys every year. "Do you think life will be better for the next generation than it was for yours?" Nobody in the ancient world would have done that survey. That question didn't get asked. Most cultures thought of existence as this kind of endless cycle that just gets repeated. Reality is an endless repetition of ups and downs, ups and downs. Seasons come and go.
But the followers of Jesus came to believe that history is a story. This idea began with Israel.
Then through Jesus, it spread around the world. God is leading history somewhere. It also meant people would face the future with hope. Now the secularized version of this is progress. We all kind of take for granted the notion that time should bring progress, but that is an idea. It is an idea

the ancient world did not share. It came from somewhere.
Luke is going to tell us about when Jesus was born. He writes in the gospel of Luke, "In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.
(This took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)" The system of Luke's day and region was that events would be dated by the reign of the emperor. Year one of the reign of Augustus and so on. Over time, the power of every Caesar, their grip on the human imagination, faded as power alone always does while the vision of this Man Jesus, this crucified unknown carpenter, kept growing.
By the sixth year ( this is 600 years after Jesus now ), a Scythian monk living in Rome proposed a new system for reckoning history. His name was Dionysius Exiguus. His suggestion was the calendar be centered not on the pagan myth of the founding of Rome but on the incarnation of this carpenter Jesus, who never held an office, never wrote a book.
The creation of the calendar as we know it, see, was not just a chronological convenience. It was a theological statement that life in this universe is not an accident, not a random cycle, but a story with a storyteller. Its critical event is the entrance into this world of a Jewish carpenter named Jesus. Jesus Himself lived and died in this little region. No Caesar ever heard a hint of His existence, but still in the first century, His disciple John called Jesus, Lord of Lords and King of
Kings. In the first century while the movement was tiny (a few thousand people), such a claim seemed laughable.
The fact remains 2,000 years after the birth of this carpenter, every time any human being anywhere on the planet opens a calendar, unfolds a newspaper, boots up a computer, we are reminded every day that Jesus Christ has in fact become the hinge of human history.
If we are forced to think that maybe Jesus was not Lord of Lords and King of Kings, how strange it is that now every ruler who ever reigned, every nation that rises and falls, must be dated in reference to the life of Jesus. Who was this man?
Jesus changed how we arrange our time. Our week would not be arranged as we know it. God ordained the Sabbath for the people of Israel, the only ancient culture to deliberately give up a day of potential economic gain as a statement of trust in a creator God. By the end of the 1 st century, Christians had begun to meet on another day, not the seventh day anymore. It was now the first day. Why the first day? Because that's resurrection day.
For centuries, there were followers of Jesus in monastic communities. They oriented their days around the practice of prayer to worship Jesus. They were called the prayers of the hours. In the
13 th century, some Benedictine monks created mechanical clocks so they could know when to come together to pray.
Jesus shaped how we express compassion. All human beings have the capacity for compassion, but Jesus' movement shaped this in ways we often don't know about. In ancient Greece and
Rome, it was generally the beautiful, the noble, and the strong that were admired. The rich and the powerful might sometimes give money for public works or parks or statues or baths, but they would always carry the rich man's name. It was a way to show the rich man's greatness.
The weak and the marginal in the classical world were not valued. There were some wonderful parts of that world but some brutally cruel ones. In the 1 st century, a Roman philosopher named
Seneca wrote: "We drown children at birth when they are weak and abnormal." That's part of the way the world worked except in this strange little community where these people remembered they followed somebody who said, "Let the little children come to Me."
They began to take in abandoned children, even children who did not belong to them. There had never been any movement like this before. Widows by law were actually fined by Rome for surviving their husbands. It was considered kind of bad form for a widow to do that; it was a drag on the economy. Then there was this community of people who remembered they followed somebody who said to His mother and His friend John when He was dying on a cross, "Dear woman, here is your son. And here is your mother." They started taking in and caring for widows they weren't even related to. In fact, James commands the Christian community to “Look after

orphans and widows.”
Sociologist Rodney Stark says, "One of the main reasons for the expansion of the church came because of two major epidemics that destroyed almost a third of whole populations."
Folks in this strange little community called the church would bring in sick people they did not know to whom they were not related and care for them at risk of their own health because this
Jesus they followed cared for lepers and the blind and the deaf and the lame.
As this movement grew in the 4 th century, what was essentially the first hospital for prolonged care for the sick was developed by a follower of Jesus named Saint Benedict until by the 6 th century monasteries would commonly have hospitals attached to them for this same ministry.
A philosopher named Mark Nelson puts it like this:
"If you ask what is Jesus' influence on medicine & compassion, I would suggest that wherever you have an institution of self-giving for the lonely, (and for practical welfare of the lonely), schools, hospitals, hospices, orphanages for those who will never be able to repay, this probably has its roots in the movement of Jesus." Who was this man?
The Jesus movement shaped education as we know it. Jesus said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
What does it mean to love God with all our mind? About the 4 th century, some of Jesus' followers entered into monastic communities. For many centuries, these were the only institutions in
Europe for the acquisition, preserving, and transmitting of knowledge.
The church began to build universities. The first was in Paris in the 12 th century. Then in the
13 th century, Oxford and Cambridge. Then universities in Rome, Naples, Vienna, Heidelberg.
Followers of Jesus began all these so people could love God with all our minds. Interesting word, universities. They came to be called universities because they reflected the idea that in the beginning, God created all things. Reality is not just this random cyclical accident. God is supremely rational, so that means there is a reality that can be studied to a large extent known to the glory of God. So they made not multi-versities, not di-versities, not random chaos. A university to study a universe .
Dinesh D'Souza puts it like this: "Science as an organized, sustained enterprise arose only once in human history...in Europe, in the civilization then called Christendom."
I'll tell you how fundamental this man Jesus was to the rise of education in our own country.
Listen to this statement. This is in a college handbook. See if you can guess what college it comes from.
"Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, (John 17:3), and therefore to lay Christ...as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning."
Ninety-two percent of the first 138 colleges and universities founded in America were begun for followers of this uneducated, itinerant, never-wrote-a-book Carpenter named Jesus. Who was this man?
The alphabet of the Slavic peoples is called Cyrillic.
It was named for Saint Cyril, who was a missionary to the Slavs and discovered they had no written alphabet. So he created one for them.
This is now many, many, many hundreds of years ago so they would be able to read this book about Jesus in their own language. Then nation after nation, culture after culture, Christian missionaries went, and they found languages had not been committed to writing. So in acts of unthinkable, magnificent, stupendous heroism, they devoted their lives to this task. In many cases, Christian missionaries were the first to do scientific study of a language. They compiled the first dictionaries. They wrote the first grammars. They developed the first alphabets. The gospels are translated today into more than 2,200 languages. No other book is translated into onefifth that many. Maybe not even one-tenth that many. Who was this man?
The Jesus movement revolutionized art. Without Jesus, there is no Dante, whose Divine
Comedy was the primary shaper of modern Italian. Without Jesus, there is no Johannes Bach, who signed all of his works, "To the glory of God." Or imagine a world with no "Hallelujah

Chorus," no "Messiah," no Mozart's "Requiem." Imagine no Sistine Chapel , no Da Vinci's Last
Supper , no Pieta . There simply has been no transcendent vision of reality, no cosmic story to make sense of this earth that has gripped the artistic imagination, the battle of life and death, good and evil, love and hate like the vision of this man Jesus. Who is this man?
The Jesus movement changed political theory. Jesus said once, "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God." Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world."
Jesus' followers were not to withdraw from their countries. They weren't going to overthrow their countries, but they weren't going to give any country ultimate allegiance because their ultimate allegiance lay someplace else.
This is from an ancient document about the followers of Jesus. This is a remarkable quote.
"They dwell in their own country, but only as sojourners... Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a foreign country."
He changed how we think about human rights and worth and dignity. A founding document for this country, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and have been endowed by their Creator with certain rights."
Where did this idea come from because it's been not self-evident to lots of folks? It wasn't to the
Goths or the Huns or the Nazis. Certainly wasn't part of the caste system. It came from the idea that all human beings have been made by God in His image and are loved by God.
This idea reached an unprecedented height in this expression from the apostle Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
Who is this man? Who is Jesus?
He is the hinge of history. He is the King of Kings. He is the Lord of Lords.