Throughout the past year we have
been reflecting on a recent sermon. Usually, our morning speaker goes back to
the previous Sunday’s sermon and presents ideas and questions that occurred to
home. I’m going back three weeks to my own sermon – on the way that God calls
us into mission. I emphasized the comprehensive nature of God’s call. It
includes everyone, what John the Revelator calls “all nations and kindreds and
peoples and tongues”.
Near the end of the sermon, I
made an important point – that we cannot give away what we don’t have. We are
witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection only if we have experienced Jesus’
resurrection ourselves. I want to reflect a bit on this thought, as we come to
the end of our Men’s Prayer Breakfast Year. To do so, I’m going to read an
extended excerpt from the Break Point commentaries, started by Chuck Coulson.
This commentary was written by Dustin Messer.
“I’ll say this
for you, you’re not a jerk.” That comment changed the way I thought about my
faith and the way I go about sharing it. Some context may help. I was sitting
across the table from a friend who was exploring the Christian faith. She had
no background in Christianity except for a fire and brimstone style evangelist
she’d occasionally hear preach on the quad of her college. The conversation
started around the difference between the Christian understanding of grace, but
quickly moved toward the Christian sexual ethic.
She politely but
firmly told me that she found the ethic I hold … was regressive, oppressive,
and otherwise morally bankrupt. The up side: she left thinking I wasn’t a jerk.
The down side: my “unjerkliness” made no difference with regard to her faith,
or lack thereof. … Our winsomeness won’t carry the luggage we think it will
because people aren’t rejecting the faith because they don’t feel welcome, but
because they don’t want in. …
… Let’s go back
to the conversation that got me thinking about this. By saying I wasn’t a jerk,
my friend was telling me I wasn’t the obstacle. The reason she wasn’t
interested in Jesus wasn’t because of who I was, it was
because of who He was. In his brilliant little book Indispensable, David
Cassidy emphasizes this very point:
Whoever Jesus was, he was not a ‘nice’ person spouting lofty platitudes
about peace; no, Jesus was a threat, despite his goodness—or, rather, precisely
because of his goodness. Jesus was good but was considered as good as dead by
his opponents, both religious and secular, because he was everything they
weren’t and the people knew it. For those leaders, it was ‘Jesus or me,’ not
‘Jesus for me’! …
Our kindness
comes from our love for God and neighbor, not because we find it to be an
effective strategy. In this way, the post-Christian world in which we find
ourselves in today isn’t that different from the pre-Christian world of
yesterday. Now, like then, people stay home on Sunday not because
they view themselves as deficient, but because they
view Jesus and the church as deficient.
You hear that critical line:
“people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as
deficient, but because they view Jesus and the church as
deficient.” To put it another way, if we people around us think that Jesus has
nothing to offer them and that the church is irrelevant, we’re wasting our time
inviting them inside.
So, are we the problem? Is Jesus the
problem? Sometimes the deficiency in the church is just that we don’t follow
Jesus well. We aren’t any different than people outside the church, and they
rightly wonder why they need to become a Christian to be just like they are
now. The cure for that deficiency is to follow Jesus. That’s the idea behind my
saying earlier, “We can’t give what we don’t have.”
There’s another more serious
problem though. Sometimes the problem that people see is what Jesus wants,
indeed requires, of us. Jesus says over and over again, “Follow me.” We use
words like, “Jesus is Lord of my life.” Really? Well, who wants that? We call ourselves
“slaves/servants of Christ.” That feels like a problem to people in our
society.
The watchword of our society is
“Look out for number one.” Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone push you
around. The idea that we should be “slaves of Christ” is not attractive to a
self-confident inner-oriented society. That we should give our lives on behalf
of others and on behalf of someone who died 2,000 years ago just is not
attractive at all.
What’s the cure to this
deficiency? How do we reach out to people who don’t want what we have? Let me
suggest two simple and vital steps.
1)
Be good. Be kind. The way that the writer I quoted begins is good: “I’ll
say this for you. You’re not a jerk. Given that many people around us think
Christians are jerks, it’s worthwhile when we develop relationships in which
they can learn to know us and trust us. If we have strong relationships, we may
even be able to make the case for Jesus.
2)
Being good is not nearly enough: Be vulnerable. Be honest about
yourself. Life is hard, and everyone – sooner or later – experiences the
brokenness that goes with being alive. If we have been good and kind, and if we
have shown that following Jesus is intellectually credible, and if we are
honest about our doubts and hurts and our own broken times, then, when a friend
falls under the wheels of life, they may hear what we’ve been saying and check
us out. Then they find that Jesus and the church no longer appear deficient. Then
we can give what we have.
1 June 2019
Men’s Prayer Supper
Steinbach Mennonite Church
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