8-15-2010 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MICK JAGGER

     Forty years ago, I wanted a mini-bike more than anything else in the world.  I made it very clear to my parents that that’s what I wanted as my birthday was fast approaching.  I remember talking about it with my friend Vince Landeck as we were riding bicycles.  I said to him, “I’ve been begging my parents for a mini-bike.  I’ve even been praying to God about it.”  Vince, ten-year-old theologian that he was, said, “You’ve been praying for a mini-bike?  Well then, you’ll get one for sure!”  I arose bright and early on the morning of August 4^th, 1970, expecting to see a mini-bike parked in the driveway.  Instead, I found a note.  It said, “Brian, we love you very much.  We just don’t feel you’re ready for a mini-bike right now.  Love, Mom and Dad.”  I don’t remember what I got for my birthday that year, but it wasn’t a mini-bike.  It was a real trial for my faith at the time.  I had prayed to God for a mini-bike, but somehow, God had come up short.

     Here we come to the contrast between faith and experience.  On the one hand, we’re led to believe that all things are possible with God, but on the other hand, we’re left disappointed when God comes up short.  On the one hand, we’re led to believe that God wants what’s best for us, but on the other hand, we’ve got Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones singing to us, “You can’t always get what you want.”  We have a contrast here between faith and experience.

     The question is, “Does God really want what’s best for us?”  When I was asking for a mini-bike and didn’t get one, I wasn’t so sure.  But listen to this.  Just the other day, I was sitting at the intersection at one of Meadville’s new four-way stops.  There was a car heading north, and I was the second car in line heading west.  As the car in front of me started to turn left, a boy came flying down the sidewalk on one of those motorized scooters.  He shot right out into the street.  Fortunately, the driver turning left saw him in time.  As I think about it, that’s probably exactly what I would have done on a mini-bike.  God’s preventing me from getting a mini-bike probably saved my life.  Perhaps in retrospect, I can indeed say that God truly wants what’s best for us.

     Have you ever prayed to God about a job?  Seven years ago, I was absolutely certain that I was going to a church in Hastings, Nebraska.  A friend of mine named Hal Shafer was a minister in Erie.  He was in this church for a presbytery meeting.  He called me and said, “I was just in your next church.”  I said, “Hal, their minister just left.  They won’t be ready to hire someone for at least a year.”  Well, the committee moved faster than I expected.  In fact, the day I left Salem to interview in Hastings was the day I sent my application here.  So I interviewed in Hastings and I was just sure they were going to offer me the job.  Then at the end of the interview they said, “Well, we promised this other guy that we’d interview him.  But he can’t meet with us for six more weeks.”  I was devastated.  I was just sure I was going to Hastings. 

     In the meantime, I met with a very impressive group of people from the First Presbyterian Church of Meadville.  As an aside, during the interview, I remember saying to them, “I hear it snows a little bit in Meadville.”  The committee members quickly said, “Oh, Edinboro is where it really snows.  We don’t get near the snow they get in Edinboro.”  I said, “No, no, I like the snow.”  They said, “Oh, well then you’ll love it here!”  I accepted the call to Meadville, even though I was certain we were headed to Nebraska.  I think of an old adage that says, “If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans!” 

     The move was particularly hard on my kids.  Salem was home to them and they really didn’t want to move.  Yet shortly after we left, the school system there collapsed.  A levy failed to pass and the state actually had to come in and take over.  There were no longer any advanced placement classes and sports were offered on a pay-to-play basis.  My kids have gotten twice the education they would have gotten in Salem.  I have to say that God really does have our best interests at heart.

     But does God have our best interests at heart when it comes to human suffering?  Butch and Nancy Brown were a farming couple in my first church.  They had four girls and a nine-year-old boy named Kent.  One day Butch and Nancy were out mending fences.  Butch told Kent to hop in the truck and go back to the barn to get some nails.  So Kent hopped in the truck and threw it into gear.  As he went over a little hill, he didn’t see his mother kneeling there.  He ran right over top of her. 

     She was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit at University Hospital in Iowa City.  We prayed and we prayed and we prayed for Nancy to get better.  I, for one, couldn’t make any sense of   the accident.  It wasn’t fair for Butch to have to raise those kids by himself, it wasn’t fair for those kids to grow up without a mother, and it wasn’t fair that Nancy wouldn’t get to see her kids grow up.  In the end, Nancy died. 

     I heard Chuck Colson address this kind of thing some time later.  He said, “Is it possible that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential?”  Again, “Is it possible that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential?”  Chuck Colson said, “I believe there is.”  And that’s the point of the resurrection.

 

 God does have our best interests at heart.  One day, we shall see our loved ones again.

 

     This is exactly the kind of thing the Apostle Paul is dealing with in the passage we read from the book of Hebrews.  They’re wrestling with this contrast between faith and experience.  Paul reminds them of the faith of Abraham and how God made of him a great nation.  Paul reminds them of the faith of Moses’ mother and how she put him in a basket in the Nile and he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter.  Paul reminds them of how the Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and how the Red Sea parted and they walked across on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried to cross it, the waters collapsed on them.  He tells them of God’s faithfulness     to faithful people in the past. 

     Yet these very same people were seeing Christians persecuted unto death.  They were being faithful to God and they were losing their lives.  So Paul reminds them of the resurrection.  He says in essence that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential.  God does have our best interests at heart.  So he urges them to keep the faith.  He tells them to run the race that is set before them.  They are called to remain faithful to God by being obedient to God.

     I suspect the Apostle Paul would say the very same thing to us.  When you encounter a contrast between faith and experience, trust that God does have your best interests at heart.  Perhaps God sees an outcome that we don’t see.  So run the race that is set before you.  Keep the faith by being obedient to God. 

     The problem is that sin gets in our way.  Sin is defined as separation from God.  The way I see it is like this.  Our obedience draws us closer and closer to God.  Sin is simply turning our gaze in the wrong direction.  All it does is distance us from God.  The problem is that we don’t know what sin is any more. 

     Author Timothy Keller puts it this way.  He says that we don’t live in a moral society.  Nor do we live in an immoral society.  We live in what he calls an amoral society.  A moral society has a clear understanding of right and wrong.  To be immoral is to consciously choose to do the wrong thing.  Yet we don’t have a clear understanding of right and wrong any more.  We do what we feel in our hearts we should do.  That’s what constitutes an amoral society.  For example, I’ll bet 90% of the couples I marry are living together before they are married.  We used to call that “living in sin.”  The Bible clearly says that that is wrong, but most folks don’t seem to have a problem with that any more.  That’s what constitutes an a-moral society.  We do what we feel in our hearts is right.  We let our conscience be our guide.  Yet how can we be obedient to God if we don’t know what God wants from us anymore?  We need to recover a sense of the Holy.  We need to learn what it says in the Bible again.      

     God really does have our best interests at heart.  Perhaps at times when we don’t get what we want, God sees something up ahead that he wants us to avoid.  Or, perhaps at times when we fail to get what we want more than anything else in the world, God resolves it through the resurrection.  So run the race that is set before you.  Keep the faith by way of obedience.  For it may be as Mick Jagger says, “You can’t always get what you want.  But if you try sometimes, you just might find…you get what you need.”  Amen.

 

7-25-2010 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

REMEMBER MY CHAINS

 

   I had a very disturbing conversation not long ago; at least it was disturbing to me.  An elderly gentleman told me that he had raised his children in the church – they were there every Sunday morning – but now those kids seldom darkened the doors of the church.  I pointed out how the very same thing had happened in my own family.  My parents took my brother, my sister and I to church every Sunday morning, whether we wanted to go or not.  And out of that upbringing, I became a minister, but my brother and my sister have absolutely nothing to do with the institutional church.

   That elderly gentleman’s daughter was present for this conversation.  Suddenly she spoke up.  She said, “I don’t think you have to go to church to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.”  It took me aback a bit, so I replied, “Well, I guess I’m paid to take the opposite side of that argument.  I think you do have to go to church to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.  I mean, it was Jesus Christ who established the church in the first place!”  Apparently I set the woman off a bit, and we were absolutely not in a place where a theological debate was appropriate, so – as hard as it was for me – I decided to let it go at that.

     The question remains: Does one have to be a part of the church to have a relationship with Jesus Christ?  Is there really such a thing as “spiritual, but not religious?”  A November 2009 issue of The Week magazine featured a story entitled, “Losing our Religion.”  It focused on the rapidly growing numbers of religiously unaffiliated people in the United States and referred to them as the Nones – that’s n-o-n-e-s, not n-u-n-s.  They called them the Nones.  Typically younger than the general population, many Nones believe in God, but they’re really quite skeptical about organized religion. 

     The article quotes recent statistics that suggest that if this trend continues, scads of nonreligious young people will soon replace older religious people, and will account for fully 25% of the U.S. population.  A recent article in U.S.A. Today concluded that young adults born in the 1980s and 1990s – approximately 72 million people – want to make an impact and are socially conscious, but simply cannot relate to traditional institutional structures.  Precious few of these young adults see the church as a place to make a difference in the world.        

    Dr. C. Jeff Woods addresses this phenomenon in a book entitled, Congregational Megatrends.  He believes the church needs to make some significant “moves” if it wants to be relevant in the world today.  For example, the church needs to move from Tribal Education to Immigrant Education.  In other words, we cannot assume that the people who come to our churches today have any background in the Christian faith.  We must speak on a level that everyone can understand.  The church needs to move from Surrogate Mission to Hands-On Mission.  In other words, we need to move from exclusively paying others to do mission work for us to doing some of the mission work ourselves. 

     The church needs to move from Reasonable Spirituality to Mysterious Spirituality.  In other words, we need to help people not just to know about God, we need to help them to know God as well.  The church needs to move from Official Leadership to Gifted Leadership.  Too often the church has put people into leadership positions that do not fit their spiritual gifts.  But since we need elders and deacons and trustees, that’s where we try to put them, whether it fits their “giftedness” or not.

     The church needs to move from Segmented Programming to Holographic Programming.  In other words, we need to quit programming exclusively for one segment of the population – typically white, middle and upper-middle class families.  The world today is a little broader than that.  The church needs to move from Secondary Planning to Primary Planning.  In other words, don’t just throw together a program and say, “Y’all come.”  Make it specific.  Gear it toward parents of teenagers, or single adults, or those who are grieving.

     The church needs to move from Tribal Education to Immigrant Education; from Surrogate Mission to Hands-On Mission; from Reasonable Spirituality to Mysterious Spirituality; from Official Leadership to Gifted Leadership; from Segmented Programming to Holographic Programming; and from Secondary Planning to Primary Planning.  And last but not least, the church needs to move from Mass Evangelism to Relational Evangelism.

   Mass Evangelism focuses on the general population while Relational Evangelism focuses on the individual.  The principle means of church evangelism in the 1950s was simply opening the doors.  All you had to do was open up the doors and people showed up.  That is not the case anymore.  Today we have to build relationships with people and then we have to actually invite them to church.  Of course, as you’ve heard me say before, the average Presbyterian invites someone to worship with them once every 17 years.  But hey, at least we’re better than the Methodists.  The average Methodist invites someone to worship with them once every 24 years.  Ladies and gentlemen, those statistics are no longer acceptable.

   Of course, once we invite them, what will they see?  That’s where Relational Evangelism becomes even more crucial.  A number of years ago, when I was in Salem, Ohio, there was a mega-church that was forming nearby in a place called Greenford, Ohio.  It was called the Greenford Christian Church.  They boasted of 1200 people in worship on Sunday mornings and they built an 8 million dollar worship center.  They were reaching some of the unchurched people in the area, but for the most part, they were stealing sheep from established mainline congregations.  That did not sit well with a lot of us clergy-types.

   Once when I was at the gym, I was working out on the stair-stepper.  Next to me was a young girl – I think she said she was 20 – and we got to talking.  She was raised in the Friends Church, but now she attended the Greenford Christian Church.  I asked her, “What is the appeal?  Is it the contemporary music?  Is it the preaching?  Is it the brand-new worship facilities?  What is it that seems to draw people in droves?”

     The young lady replied, “For me, it was the sincerity of the people who were there.  They really seem to live their faith.  They welcome people who visit there and they really seem to care.”  In other words, she was looking for people who appear to live the life of faith they profess.  And once she found it, she had found a home.

   There you have it.  That’s Relational Evangelism in a nutshell.  A while back I quoted a theologian named Tertullian.  Regarding the growth of the Christian Church in the 3^rd century, he spoke of how outsiders saw the Christian faith.  Tertullian said that the outsiders said, “See how these Christians love one another, while we ourselves are ready to kill one another.”  Again, “See how these Christians love one another, while we ourselves are ready to kill one another.”  Ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Perhaps the very same thing is true today.  If the church is to survive – if the church is to be relevant to a new generation – perhaps we, too, need to learn how to love one another.  The question is, how are we to do that?

    Perhaps the Apostle Paul has some advice for us in the passage we read from the book of Colossians.  The book of Colossians is a letter Paul wrote to the church at Colossae.  It was         a church he had not founded himself, but it was a church for which he cared very deeply, just    the same.  It is believed to have been written while Paul was in prison – not in Rome, but in Ephesus.  Keep in mind the fact that Paul was in prison when he wrote this letter.

     Paul had gotten word that the fledgling church in Colossae was in trouble.  They were being led astray by some kind of false teaching.  As Paul put it in verse 8, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”  What on earth does that mean?  Apparently Christians in Colossae were being taught to worship angels who were represented   by certain stars in the sky.  It was somewhat similar to what we might call astrology today, only they took it seriously back then.

     So Paul calls the Colossians back to their roots.  His language is convoluted, to say the least, but the gist of what he says is this: “God made you alive with him when he forgave you of your sin, erasing the record that stands against you.”  Again, “God made you alive with him when he forgave you of your sin, erasing the record that stands against you.”  In other words, when it comes to our relationship with God, the slate now is clean thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.  And when our relationship with God is unblemished, our relationships with others can be unblemished as well.  That, my friends, is the point of the church in a nutshell.  Our relationship with God has been made white as snow, so now our relationships with others can be made white as snow as well.  We call this phenomenon reconciliation.

     Ladies and gentlemen, our sin is forgiven.  Christ died that our sin might be put to death once and for all, and he was raised from the dead that we might have the hope of life everlasting as well.  What have you done?  What sin have you committed?  What burden do you bear?   What guilt or shame do you carry?  Thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, God no longer holds that sin against you.  Now you are free to live your life as a child of God – loved and forgiven for all of the past – no matter what you might have done.

     Karl Menninger was an American psychiatrist who founded the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.  He once said, “If I could convince the patients in my clinic that their sins are forgiven, 75% of them could walk out of here the very next day.”  Do you see how oppressive the burden of sin can be?  Do you see how vital it is that we come to believe – to believe in our hearts – that we are indeed forgiven?  The trick is, how do we get there?

     Let me tell you a story.  Some years ago, there was a woman in my church whose husband was dying.  He was in the hospital for six weeks before he died, yet neither I nor my associate went to visit him.  Believe it or not, that woman was somewhat upset with us.

     When we found out about it, we were devastated.  My associate went over to her house and said to her, “Don’t you remember the conversation we had in the hospital?  You must have been so distraught that you just don’t remember.”  He lied to her to get himself off the hook.

   I went over to her house to talk to her as well.  I discovered that she had not called the church to tell us that her husband was in the hospital.  When she signed in at the hospital as a Presbyterian, she naturally assumed that the hospital would contact us.  I told her that they no longer do that.  Thus, we had no way of knowing that her husband was even in the hospital.  Then, still, I apologized profusely for the oversight.  That woman forgave me.  I felt terrible for what had happened, but I confessed and received forgiveness.  My confession and her forgiveness restored our relationship.  Let me add, however, that she was none too keen on our associate pastor after that. 

     Sincere confession is what receives forgiveness, not lying to ourselves and others to get ourselves off the hook.  We are sinners in the sight of God, justly deserving God’s displeasure, and without hope except in God’s sovereign mercy.  Yet God acts with justice and mercy to redeem creation in the Person of Jesus Christ.  Therefore I assure you – all of you – we are a forgiven people. 

     This is what allows us to love God and neighbor.  This is what allows us to live the life of faith we profess.  No longer can we look at people as better or worse than us since all of us are sinners who have received the grace of God.  Now we can look one another in the eye and say, “The peace of Christ be with you.”  And that person can reply, “And also with you.” 

     In fact, let’s do just that.  I want everyone who is able to stand.  Remember that you are a sinner forgiven by the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  Now turn to your neighbor and say, “The peace of Christ be with you.”  And I want that person to reply, “And also with you.”  Let’s just do that for a minute or two…

     Now that’s Relational Evangelism.  But the sermon title, as you see in your bulletins, is “Re-member My Chains.”  You’ve got to be thinking, “What does Remember My Chains have to do with Relational Evangelism?  Let me explain.

   When preaching on a passage of Scripture, it is important to view that passage contextually.   In the course of my research this week, I read the entire book of Colossians.  At the end of the 4^th chapter Paul writes, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.  Remember my chains.”  Why does Paul say that?  Is it because he wants to remind people that he’s in prison so they can pray for him?  That’s what most of the commentators say.  But I thought of something a little bit different.

     Paul says, “Remember my chains.”  Paul is in prison for proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Paul has sacrificed his freedom to proclaim Jesus Christ.  And prisons 2000 years ago were much, much worse than they are today.  They didn’t have prison advocates lobbying for better prison conditions, I can assure you of that.  Paul has willingly gone to prison because what he has to say is that important.  In other words, this stuff matters.  Don’t think for a minute that this stuff doesn’t matter.  So does one have to be a part of the church to have a relationship with Jesus Christ?  I think Paul would answer that question by saying, “Remember my chains.”  Amen.