A week ago on Sunday the news was just beginning to get out that a car full of teenage boys had gone off the road in the very early hours of the morning just about a mile from where we sit. One was seriously injured. One was killed. And one—the driver—is in juvenile detention hall awaiting a future that now is drastically altered for the worse. Amidst the grieving and the blaming and the suffering we all chalk it up to one more example of just how messed up this world can be, and just how messed up we can be. Who among us cannot tick off a long list of the ills of this world at the drop of a hat? Who among us cannot detail an even longer list of the problems we fight and the problems we create in our own lives? Multiply that times the more than 6 billion people now on the planet, and the magnitude of the problem is beyond comprehension.

People have always known these twin facts: the world is messed up and people are messed up. This fall, you and I are working our way through a detailed look at what the Christian faith has to say about the reality of the world and the human lives we live in it. One way to understand a fundamental sense of our faith is to understand how it is Christianity answers the problem of a messed up world with messed up people in it. We have seen that we believe there are clues all around us that there is more to reality than meets the eye, and that something more is what we call “God.” We believe that God has made all things, that God is present and active everywhere, that God is busy doing something about the messed up state of things and that he has been doing so ever since he started the nation of Israel through Abraham and Sarah. Last week we came to what God was doing in and through Jesus of Nazareth, and we celebrated the fact that in Jesus, God accomplished the reunion of heaven and earth, a move that decisively addressed the twin problems of a messed up world full of messed up people.

But we need to look at Jesus a little more closely. We need to try to wrap our minds around just how it is that Jesus is the answer to the problem. To be sure, Jesus proclaimed that in his presence with us “the kingdom of heaven” had come into the world. But we should not be satisfied just to say it and walk away. We have two questions about the twin problems we face. One question is: Exactly what is God doing about the problems? And the other is: Exactly what am I supposed to be doing about them?

God created Israel in order to be a blessing to all the nations of the world, or to put it in other words, to be an answer to the messed up state of things. But Israel itself ended up being all messed up. As a nation among nations, its history was a mixed bag of success and failure. As a people, the Jews endured their share of injustice, greed, hatred, and general human dysfunction. But Israel looked for God to do something about the situation. Israel looked for a new leader who one day would come from God, a leader they called the “Anointed One.” That is what the term “Messiah” means. The Jewish expectation that prevailed when Jesus was born said that the Messiah would be a human leader endowed with special grace from God so that he could restore both the power and the purity of the Jewish nation. In the midst of Roman occupation from without and general corruption and decay from within, the Messiah was sorely needed.

Along comes Jesus. His ability to teach and inspire as well as to take on even the mighty Pharisees was a clue that he was someone special. His ability to heal the sick and feed the hungering masses was another clue. His ability to rise to the occasion and speak and act so directly to the miserable situation of the once-mighty Jewish nation stirred not a few people to wonder if he was the Anointed One. And all of that was fine and good until the combined power of the corrupt Jewish leaders and the occupying Roman forces took Jesus, tortured him, and then killed him on a cross. So much for dreams of this man from Nazareth being the Messiah. But wait! On Sunday morning Jesus does something that no one expects of a man, not even a Messiah. And then everyone has to rethink everything. Jesus is resurrected, and over the course of the next 50 days he moves in and among his disciples. What do we make of that?

Clearly, God was up to something in the life, the death, and now the resurrection of Jesus. And there were clues about what that something was way back in the spiritual vision of the great prophet Isaiah. Isaiah had prophesied extensively about a mysterious figure who one day would come and in his suffering would answer the problem of human sin and restore the nation of Israel. Modern scholars have given this figure the name of the “Suffering Servant.” We don’t know exactly what Isaiah saw or what he had in mind when he talked about the Suffering Servant, but we do know what the people who knew Jesus thought about Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. They came to see that the long-awaited Anointed One—the Messiah—was not a human leader who would bring greatness back to Israel, but was instead a brand-new possibility and a brand-new reality: God and Man in one person, who in suffering and death and resurrection totally blew away all the former expectations and took things to a whole new level. And so Paul would write to the Christians in Philippi that Jesus is the Anointed One—in Greek, the word is “Christos, Christ”—and even more so, Jesus is the Lord, the name reserved for God himself. In Jesus, God has suffered and died and been resurrected and so answered the twin problems of the messed up nature of the world and the messed up nature of we humans who live in the world.

But how, exactly, does Jesus do that?

When we go back to the vision of Isaiah and the subsequent Christian affirmation about Jesus in places like Paul’s Philippian letter, we see that Jesus as the Suffering Servant is not powerful, pretty, proud, or prosperous. In short, Jesus is like most people most of the time: struggling, plain, weak, and poor. As God—and Jesus surely demonstrated his powers as God—Jesus could have chosen to end his life in some way other than he did. But Jesus left where he was and who he was so that he could come to be where we are and to share the life that we lead. Or, in other words, Jesus took on “the human condition” and in so doing, proved once and for all that the very power and presence of God himself is not absent from us but is instead with us. Because Jesus chose powerless humility as his modus operandi—his mode of operation—he ended up hanging on a cross. And had Jesus not come alive out of the grave, we would have gone on thinking that humility, service, and love are nothing wonderful. We would have gone on thinking that powerful and pretty and proud and prosperous are what God prefers. But Jesus did come alive out of the grave, and so everything he did in his life, especially the way his life ended, has to be totally reevaluated. As it turns out, the wrongness of the world and the wrongness of the people in the world do the worst violence they can to Jesus. We kill him. He suffers and dies because of us. And he suffers and dies for us. But he doesn’t just die. Dying alone doesn’t do it. He is resurrected. And his resurrection proves God’s will and God’s design for how the world is supposed to work and how you and I are supposed to live in it. Jesus’ suffering and death absorbs the messed up nature of us and our world and then Jesus’ resurrection transforms the messed up nature of us and our world and opens the possibility that we can move beyond it all and begin to experience what we saw in Jesus himself: a human life where heaven and earth actually come together.

We and our world do our worst to Jesus but Jesus comes back from it all and offers us forgiveness for the past and hope for the future, a future in which we can grow to become like him and live a life like his, a life where heaven and earth touch. It is a life where power is used to heal and restore and nourish and build up. It is a life where beauty is measured not by the outward appearance of the body but by the inward qualities of the soul. It is a life where pride in self is replaced by pride in God, a humility about self and the worship of God. It is a life where prosperity is not about having more of everything than everyone else but about everyone having enough of everything. We and our world do our worst to Jesus but Jesus comes back from it all and we suddenly realize that the way God is at work in our world is the way of suffering, sacrifice, and above all of love. And we suddenly realize that the way God designed us to work in the world is identical: the way of love. The world is messed up. We are messed up. Those are the twin problems we face. We want to know what God is doing about it. And we want to know what we can do about ourselves. Those are the twin questions we have. God answers both problems and both questions in Jesus: the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One. God’s answer is to take the worst our world can dish out and prove that it is no match for his power. God defeats our messed up world and God defeats we messed up people and then God offers a new possibility: do it my way, he says.

Isaiah said this of the Suffering Servant: “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.” Paul said this of Jesus: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend…and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord….” And then, Paul would go on to say, “Therefore, my beloved…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

It is all well and good to celebrate what God did in Jesus. But unless you and I take that and allow God to do something in us because of it, it is all for nothing. Unless you and I allow God to teach us how to be human, as Jesus was human, it is all for nothing. The messed up nature of this world and the messed up nature of we humans in it only has hope for changing when we change, and learn to live like Jesus. The way of the world, the way of power, pride, prettiness, and personal prosperity, is not the way that leads to life. The way of sacrifice, service, and love is what being human is all about. When you and I live that way, it is God living in us, heaven and earth coming together to defeat all that is messed up and make it well and whole again. And so there is our task and our challenge when we walk out of this house of worship. We walk out of here as messed up people who live in a messed up world, but now we have hope and we have knowledge and we have the Anointed One by our side and in our hearts. We walk out of here a bit more human because of what God has done in Jesus, and we walk out of here encouraged and ready to take on the world, as Jesus did, and continue the remaking of it into the place God means it to be, a place where heaven and earth are one.

Amen.