God-Sized Prayer for the Community

The truth is I have repeatedly asked God to send more people to our church.  This year we have experienced more departures than the normal attrition our church cycles through.  In any given year, we see a dozen or more people move whether it is because of graduation or moving to a new town.  Or, people leave the church for other reasons.  As that happens, new people join us.  Families move to the area.  People already living here decide they want to give our church a try.  In over decade, we have not had significant numeric growth or decline – until this year. 

            This year, our new arrivals are not keeping pace with our departures.  As the lead pastor of the church, this has troubled me and I have prayed fervently for God to do something about it.  However, recently as I walked through the neighborhood near our church property, I experienced a paradigm-rattling thought.  I may have been praying the wrong prayer.

            Does God want people to attend HillSong?  Maybe.  But more than filling the seats in our building with bodies on Sunday mornings, God wants people turning to Him in faith.  God wants the hearts of people turned to him for salvation. 

            There’s a middle school a block from our church campus.  There are hundreds of homes within a one-mile radius of our location.  I walked across that campus praying for the kids who would be taking year-end testing.  I prayed for cafeteria workers, teachers’ classroom aides, the school nurse, the janitors, and the resource officer.  I prayed for office staff, the principal, and assistant principals.  And of course, I prayed for the teachers.  From the school, I walked up and down residential streets praying, asking God to send a wave of revival through this community. 

            Our church is not influencing or affecting this community in which God has placed us.  A few families are core members of our church family, but for the most part, the community is indifferent to the church.  I know.  I live in the community. I talk to my neighbors every day.  As I walked and pray, it hit like a thunderclap.  I need – we all need – to be praying for something much more important than increased attendance at our church.  We need to pray for a bigger impact in our community. 

            The second entry for “impact” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary reads that this is a noun which means “the force or impression of one thing on another.”  What Gospel force is our church exerting in this community?  What Godly impression are we making?

          People in our town don’t know how much they need Jesus.  They don’t realize they are lost without him.  I know.  I live here.  One of the nicest men I know decide Sunday morning was the perfect time an amusement park.  He’s a great dad and I love it when my kids play at his house because I know they’re safe, they’re having fun, and they don’t spend the time staring at screens. 

I love my neighbor.  But, it never occurred to him that Sunday morning is a time for the church to gather and worship God.  It just isn’t in his mind that his children need to be formed in the image of Christ and part of that formation is the teaching that comes in Sunday School, in extended session, and in worship services.  I hope my friendship with him is a witness.  He knows who I am and what I do.  But whatever effect our friendship has, in our half a dozen years of acquaintance, his family has been to our church exactly 1 time.  And they’re not missing our church to worship elsewhere.  In his life, Sunday morning is time for taking kids places or for working out.  He is but one example of the people around us – our church’s mission field.

We not called to encourage people to be nice.  We are called to help people become disciples of Jesus.  One of the most important and maybe one of the most overlooked passages to inform our calling is Luke 19:41-44.  Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem and knows he will soon be arrested and executed.  He knows this is coming, but he also knows he will have a week where he is able to teach in the temple’s outer court.  It is his last chance to give his vision for life in God’s kingdom before he goes to the cross.

As he approaches the city from the outlying village where he spends his nights, Luke writes he weeps. He weeps for Jerusalem.  His tears do not fall because he desperately wants to see better temple attendance for Sabbath day worship services.  He’s crying because he says of the people of the city, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!  Because now they are hidden from your eyes.  … You did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”

Jesus was God-in-the-flesh and too many people in the city could not see it and totally missed it.  This broke God’s heart.  We are nearly 2000 years removed from Jesus’ time in Jerusalem, from the crucifixion and resurrection.  Today, we live in the age of the church.  The Holy Spirit has come (Acts 2) to empower the church to draw people to Jesus.  We are the witnesses to what God has done and is doing – saving men and women from sin and from an eternity apart from Him.  Our testimony is meant to convince people to render a verdict: they are guilty and their only hope of rescue from judgment is Jesus. 

Would I love it if our church got bigger (had more people)?  Most definitely!  That’s why I have continuously asked God to send more people to us.  God responded to that prayer by challenging me to pray something much bigger and more important.  God wants the hearts of the people in this community.  We as a church need to pray that we would have a God-sized influence and a resurrection-persuasion.  We need to impact this community for Christ. 

That’s why I am urging you to make salvation prayer a crucial part of your daily prayer life (and if you don’t prayer daily, then start.  Now!).  Pray for the salvation of the people in our community who don’t know Jesus.  Pray for our church to be an effective witness.  Have your heart burn for people like many of my neighbors.  These are wonderful, upstanding folks, but without a sense of how much they need Jesus.  Pray that God will work through our church to help people find their way to Jesus.  If it means many end up attending our church, that’s great.  But that’s not the prayer.  The prayer is that people’s hearts would turn to God through faith in Jesus Christ.  Let this burn in you.

Should We Go to Church?

            It’s Sunday morning.  What should we do today?  Go to church?  No, not this week.  We can go next month when they have the potluck.  Today, let’s sleep in and then take a morning walk.  We can hit the IHOP around 10:00, take our time, and then go to the small-town art festival before the crowd gets too big.

            It’s Sunday morning, and ohhh, I am hung over.  My life is falling apart.  A DUI and now a likely divorce.  O God, what will I do?  God!  Why would God listen to me, if there is a God?  I haven’t given God a second thought in years.  Now I want to cry out to God?  What a crock!  Do I even know how to pray?  What would they do if I showed at that church on the corner?  Would they kick me out?  Everyone else has.  Why not try it?  What do I have to lose?

            OK, Sunday morning!  Get the kids up and start getting ready.  We don’t want to be late for Sunday School a third Sunday in a row!  Can we stay home today?  Not on your life.  As long you live in this house, you will go to Sunday School, to worship, and you will sing the songs and listen to the sermon.  God is important and we won’t learn anything about him or grow closer to him staying home.

            Which one most closely resembles how your Sundays go?  I know, I know, you can think of an option that’s not even remotely close to the ones I cited above.  You can think of 10 options not like the ones above.  Fine. What are your Sundays like?  Is church a major part of your Sundays, and if it is, why is it?  Is church important because you want to see friends?  Does it make you feel good?  Is worshiping God a crucial part of your life?

            Or is church a part of a few of your Sundays, but definitely not all of them?  I recently read “the new normal for church attendance is one-and-a-half times a month.”  Assuming that one-and-a-half times is mostly at the same church, that church gets a chance to be with that attendee or family 18 times a year.  I don’t know where the person who said that got that statistic because he doesn’t cite a source.  My own observations lead me to think that’s about right.

            I am church pastor.  Most of the core members of our church are in worship more than 30 Sundays a year.  But, we have a lot of casual attendees that we see anywhere from 10-20 times a year; less than half the time.  Where are they the other 32-42 Sundays?  On those few Sundays that we see them in worship, what led them to decide to go to church that particular day?  The rest of the time, how did they decide to do whatever they are doing when they aren’t in worship?  And is it important?

            Hebrews 10:24-25 says, “Let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”  Of course no one, is going to come to church because a pastor says they should.  No one is going to come to church because a pastor says the Bible says they should.  That’s what people expect pastors to say and pastors are easy to ignore. 

            The Bible indeed in many places including this passage from the New Testament book Hebrews insists that followers of Jesus must gather together regularly.  Solitary faith is foreign to the Bible.  I can follow Jesus in my own way.  It’s a very individualistic sentiment and our American cultural ethos just adores individual autonomy.  But the follow Jesus in my own way idea makes no sense from a Biblical perspective.

            So what do we do then?  We can’t force people to come to church (and we shouldn’t try).  We can’t shame people into coming to worship every week (and we shouldn’t try; convicting the heart is the Holy Spirit’s job, not ours).  What do we do?

            First, each individual Christian/church member has to decide not only to come to church every week, but to do so with a joyful heart.  Church isn’t just some “thing that we do.”  Church is the gathering of people to worship the risen Lord, the present Holy Spirit.  If we come together in love and in genuine joy, that will be attractive to people.  Life is hard and people are lonely.   More people take medication for depression and varieties of personality disorders than at any point in history.  Our addictions to our phones has left us inept at actual person-to-person, face-to-face conversations and relationships.  If people can go somewhere that’s free where they are welcomed and loved, they’ll come back.  We have to come in joy.

            Second, we have to maintain that joy no matter how many people are in church on any particular Sunday.  It might one of those Sundays where most of the people who attend once a month or less are not there.  We can either focus on the empty seats, or put our energy into sharing joy and love with the few who are there.  We’re joyful regardless of the crowd size.

            Third, we heap love on people when they come.  If someone walks through the doors Sunday morning, someone who hasn’t come in a couple of months, we smile and welcome them.  They know how long it’s been since they last came.  They don’t need us pointing it out and making a big deal of it.  Remember, it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict the heart.  We share joy and love.  For the person who came early in February and now in May is finally back, why do we think he came back?  To be lectured?  I think we’ll have a better effect on him loving him than lecturing him. 

            Finally, in our preaching, prayers, and teaching, we emphasize the way of discipleship.  Of course discipleship is much more than committing to attend worship 30 times a year.  Discipleship is committing to follow Jesus every moment of every day.  People need help moving from occasional church attendance to committed church involvement to devoted discipleship.  In the sermons, the song, the testimonies, and prayers, we model discipleship and invite all present to consider the disciple life.

            I don’t know if the suggestions I have made here will actually increase attendance at our church or in church attendance in general in our country.  But increasing church attendance isn’t our goal.  We’re not here to get that couple that decided to sleep in and go to IHOP to instead attend our church every week.  We’re here to help them become passionately devoted followers of Jesus.  If we work on that, helping people become disciples, we’re doing what God wants us to do.  God can worry about the attendance numbers.  We can live in joy knowing we are followers of Jesus at church and in all the places of our lives. 

Fully Submitted to Christ (Ephesians 5:21)

Sunday, November 19, 2017

            Imagine a trek through jungles, across a river, in all weather.  You walk for days, thirsty, bug-bitten as you deal with snakes and wild animals.  By the time you arrive, you’ve used up your supplies.  Still you make that final climb up the mountain in order to sit at the feet of the shaman.  He’s older than time.  That’s why you seek his wisdom.  Yet before you can open your mouth, he speaks as if he knew you were coming.  He asks, “What is the theme of your life?  Why do you exist?”

            Maybe that doesn’t work for you.  You couldn’t, in a million years, imagine yourself on some kind of adventurer’s journey.  You don’t hike and you don’t “rought it,” and you have no plans to do so.  But, you can see yourself in a coffee shop with a friend you’ve known a long time. A good friend. The trust between you runs deep.  On this occasion the conversation has exhausted the usual topics – gossip about friends you have in common, complaint about how commercialized the holidays are, and delight at the pumpkin spiced latte.  Why don’t they serve that all year?  At the lag in the conversation, your friend asks, “What’s it all about?”

            She’s asking the same question put by the aged wise man.  What is theme of our lives?  Why do we exist? What’s it all about?  Hint.  The answer is not to save for a comfortable retirement.  That’s something we do, but that is not the purpose of life.  The answer is not watch football. That’s something some of us do.  It is not why we are here.  So, why are we here?  What is it all about?  In Ephesians, we find one path to the answer.

            Issues abound Ephesians chapter 5.  “Do not get drunk with wine.”  This is not an anti-alcohol sermon message.  What we see here relates to drinking only because the heart of the matter relates to every part of our lives.

“Wives, be subject to your husbands.”  I see red-hot anger on the faces of advocates of equality in marriage and smug satisfaction on those who promote complimentary roles in marriage.  This is not about marriage.  This word from Ephesians informs our marriages because the central idea sees Jesus at the center of all our relationships. 

The central idea comes in verse 21.  “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  The Greek actually says, “[we are] submitting to each other in fear of Christ.”  In my previous study of this verse I saw emphasis on “submitting to one another.”  All of Ephesians is related to mutual submission within the church, but that’s not the first and primary lesson.  Mutual submission comes after “fear of Christ.”  The answer to all the hypothetical questions I posed at the outset is found in this idea.[i]

We have to read the passage and listen to God’s word very carefully.  I think that is what the NRSV editors had in mind when they rendered the Greek word ‘fobw’ as ‘reverence.’  Fear is a negative emotion.  In the dark, we fear sounds that creak in the house in the dead of night.  We fear financial ruin, we have fears when we have to have surgery, and we fear heights and enclosed spaces.  Phobias, from the Greek word ‘fobw,' used in this passage’ are categories of fears.

Fear has been used to oppress people in churches.  The fear of judgment and God’s displeasure has been used been by heavy-handed church leaders to beat people down. It’s the attitude of superiority Jesus condemned when he confronted priests and Pharisees.  We approach Ephesians 5:21 cautiously.  Speaking of “fear of Christ,” we don’t want to awaken the fears that break people spiritually and drive them out of the church. 

In the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, [ii] the entry for fobw shows the term to be part of a family of words.  The description of this family of words is over two pages long.  The way the term is used in Ephesians 5:21, it specifically means reverence or respect.  That’s a bit more inviting than fear, as in being scared of someone.  We’re happy to revere Jesus Christ.  We’re eager to show how much we respect Christ.  We love him.  He doesn’t strikes terror into our hearts.

However, we don’t want to neuter this term.  The deference and esteem we give to Jesus exceeds any respect we would extend to a general in the army or the president or the pope.  We might hold a special kind of respect for human beings in elevated stations of life, but it is nothing like the reverence we offer Jesus.  The force that defines who we are is the light in which we see Jesus Christ.  He is Lord and everything in life is done based on who we understand Jesus to be and how we see ourselves in light of who He is. 

To say we fear the Lord, in the sense of Ephesians 5:21, is to say we can’t imagine any life decision, situation, or relationship apart from full obedience to the way of Jesus.  We are fully submitted to Him.   The use of the Greek word fobw in Acts 9:31 is helpful. 

Paul had just turned from persecuting Christians to joining them.  Barnabas joined forces with him, convincing the churches to trust him – congregations who feared his past evils against the church.   With Paul now in the fold and Barnabas at his side, the church experienced tremendous growth.  Many people began trusting in Jesus.  And Acts 9:31 says, “Throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria [the church] had peace and was built up.  Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it increased in numbers.”  ‘Fear of the Lord,’ that is, life fully submitted to the way of Jesus, was coupled with peace, comfort, and growth.  Normally, we don’t associate fear with peace and comfort.  It is the opposite of those things. 

That’s why the phrase ‘fear of the Lord’ is different.  At the center of the Christian reality we see “fear of the Lord” as the only way to live.  Have you suffered soul-crushing abuse at the hands of judgmental Christians?  Come and discover the merciful welcome of Jesus in a community fully submitted to Him.  Together we discover and rediscover life lived fully in fear of Christ.  It’s a life of love and grace. 

The fear of the Lord is why we live and act the way we do.  Once we have established that life is fully submitted to Jesus, then we move to what in most English translations is the first stanza of Ephesians 5:21.  “Be subject to one another.”  Why do we subject ourselves before each other?  Because we fear Christ.  We revere our Lord and want to walk in His way and thus, we submit to each other. 

The Greek verb is upotassomenoi, and like fobw, we derive a variety of English ideas from this word.  In Ephesians 5 it means the voluntary yielding to each other out of love.  Why we do what we do?  Out of reverence for Christ.  What is it that we do?  We submit to each other as an expression of love.  We are reminded, in chapter 2, verse 19, that we are all together in the household of God.  Once we have submitted to Christ, we do not have the luxury of simply ignoring one another.  We belong to each other and are accountable to one another.  Beyond technicalities of membership in a local congregation, this is about membership in the body of Christ.  We are connected to other believers.

In Ephesians 4:2, Paul emphasizes humility, gentleness, and bearing with one another.  There is no option for indifference.  Too often in our cultural context Christianity is treated as one religious option among many and Christians approach church as their own individual preference.  If you are following Christ, the church you belong to should be the one he leads you to join.  I have had times in the life of our church where people in our church family simply refused to talk with me about a difference between us. As Americans that’s our right.  We can engage with people or ignore them at our leisure.  But we do not exist in this space or anywhere as Americans.  We are a people fully submitted to Christ.  We submit to one another.

That doesn’t mean when I call to talk with you that you are obligated to do whatever I say or vice versa.  I am not beholden to you nor you to me.  In love we voluntarily submit to one another because Jesus is Lord and he tells us to live this way.

In Ephesians Paul extends this out telling wives to submit to their husbands, husbands to love their wives, children to obey their parents, and slaves to obey their masters.  Paul’s effort is to bring the call to voluntary submission in love to the places of real life in first century Ephesus.  He’s not writing primarily about marriage or households so much as he is locating the call to mutual submission in the context of home life because Jesus is Lord there. 

This passage cannot be used as grounds for affirming slavery or affirming a husband’s dominance over his wife and children.  Slavery was an accepted first century institution.  Paul subverted it by declaring that in the church, everyone was to submit to everyone else.  He commended deferential behavior, but he also broke the law himself when the way of Christ demanded that he do so.  This letter was written from prison.  In his letter to the slaveholder Philemon, he tells the man that now, the slave Onesimus was a brother in Christ.  Philemon, out of fear of Christ, would need to submit to Onesimus even as the other submitted to him.  Wives and husbands, parents and children submit to each other. 

For us to live out the words of scripture we ask, what does it look like when, because of our reverence for Christ, we live in mutual submission in the places of our lives?  It looks many different ways depending on the situation, but we know this.  We have unity instead of strife because our reverence for Christ takes priority over individual rights and preferences.  We eagerly seek ways to meet the needs of all who come.  We love each other and this love is seen in the way we extend grace to one another. 

This passage challenges our church to understand who we will be in a world swirling with both change and tension.  Public mass shootings have us on edge.  How can we prepare for something unpredictable?  Divisive political rhetoric has us feeling combative.  We’re always ready to establish our position and then defend it in verbal combat.  The nature of gender and sexuality has created generational divides.  We don’t know how to talk to each other anymore.  In these and many other controversial topics, the church and individual Christians are pushed to extremes, unable to unite with one another in love.  How do we move forward as a faithful witness to the Salvation we have in Christ?  How do show people outside of God what life in the Kingdom is like?  The answer is not found in how we deal with any individual crisis or debate.  As soon as we find our ground in one issue, another, one we don’t understand, will arise.  The answer comes in who we are in Christ.

We are a people fully submitted to Jesus as Lord.  We fear the thought of life apart from him, and we fear Him in a way that exalts him all the while knowing he extends us love, grace, and life.  Because we are fully submitted to Him, we live in gracious submission to one another.  That defines as we face the questions of our day and try to help people come to know Jesus. Whatever arises to confront the church, we face as a people in Christ.  That’s our top value.  We are His, a people whose identity is found in Him.  Who we are in Him determines what we do, how we do it, and what it means.

AMEN

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[i] I am indebted to Marcus Barth and his commentary in the Anchor Bible volume on Ephesians 4-6.  He helped me understand the centrality of ‘fear of Christ,’ as the starting point in Christian life.

[ii]Bauer, Walter and F. Wilbur Gingrich (1958), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, revised and augmented by F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker (1979), University of Chicago Press (Chicago), p.862-864.

Response to the Shooting at First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs, TX

Church Security and Soft Targets

Pastoral Response to the Texas Church Shooting, 11-5-17

Rob Tennant, HillSong Church, Chapel Hill, NC

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

            Terrorist events (see Boston Marathon bombing, San Bernardino shooting), mass shootings (see Orlando night club, see Las Vegas country music concert), racially motivated violence (see Charlottesville), and other deadly interruptions into the flow of normal life have occurred with alarming frequency in the last 7-10 years.  We Americans haven’t yet caught our breath from the unthinkable attack in Las Vegas, and we learn of Sutherland Springs, Texas.  We learn that we love the people of that small community because the First Baptist Church (FBC) there was shot up on a Sunday morning, the sanctuary full.

            For me, a church pastor, this hits close to home.  I have raced through, in my own mind, how our church would react if a shooter entered.  I have played the scenario out repeatedly.  Truthfully, I don’t know what I would do because I am not prepared for that.

            On a Sunday morning, I am prepared to preach.  I am prepared to meet the people of the church.  Some need encouragement, and if I can, I give it.  Some need a welcome and a hug.  I certainly can and do give that.  Some are leaders in the church and we need to confer about what’s going on Sunday morning or what’s going on at other points in church life.  These are the things on my mind on a Sunday morning.

            I hope, my heart and mind are prepared to encounter God.  I pray that we – myself and all in the church – come expecting to see God act among us.  Over and over the disciples who walked with Jesus every day found themselves surprised by his displays of power as he commanded demons and the demons obeyed and angry, storming waves on the sea cowered before him.  They found themselves scandalized when they saw Jesus love people society had pushed to the margins.  These disciples saw it every day with Jesus and still got surprised.  I hope we’re open enough and worshiping with enough eager anticipation that we see it when God send surprises of love and provision and hope to us.

            What we’re not doing is preparing how to respond to a crazed, murderous shooter (or bomber) (or vehicle operator).  And I don’t we should.  I think our call and our responsibility is to God.  We need to be looking for God when the church gathers.

            My heart goes out to First Baptist Church Sutherland.  That church, like ours, is small.  So many were killed and so many more were critically injured or traumatized, and the community is so small, that that specific church may not recover.  The pastor has got to be devastated.  I don’t know if I could continue in ministry if a shooter killed a bunch of our people, and I survived.  We pastors feel a certain responsibility for all who enter.  God has entrusted the worshipers into our care. 

            The other time, recently, I felt such a burden for a church was the Emmanual African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, when Dylann Roof shot up their prayer meeting in June, 2015.  On that occasion, I preached a sermon about how churches should exist in a time of random, unpredictable, deadly violence.  The text of that message is here https://honesttalkwithgod.blogspot.com/2015/06/sermon-in-response-to-shootings-in.html. 

            One of the things I stressed in that message is that the deadly shooting happened when the church was doing “what churches do.”  They were in a prayer meeting, and they welcomed Dylann Roof, a dangerous person, into their fold.  They didn’t know he was dangerous.  We never do.  We know we are called to welcome people – people with mental illness, people will deep-seeded anger, and people who are themselves badly broken.  As we are church, the body of Christ, we welcome the lost.  That’s what we do.

            FBC Sutherland was different than Emmanual AME Church in that they never had the chance to welcome Devin Kelly.  He came in shooting, killing.  He may have destroyed that church.  God allows human beings agency – the freedom to make moral choices.  Part of being made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27) is we have free will.  But too often, we use our freedom for evil.  God allows this because without this freedom, we would no longer be human.  Atheists will see and evil event and use it as an opportunity to attack the church, but they don’t understand the bigger picture.  God has created a world in which human beings and God are in a relationship of love and trust.  God doesn’t force the relationship.  But God is active in it and God is active in the world. 

The mark of the person walking in close relationship with God, in Jesus Christ, is how that person responds in crisis.  Tragedy hits all people – Christ followers and non-Christians alike.  God is seen in how his church represents his love and hope in the face of tragedy.  On Sundays, we in the church, pastors and worshipers, whether long-time members or first-time attendees, have the same invitation.  We are invited into the presence of God.  That’s what we’re seeking and preparing for, not a shooting.

I wrote in 2015 the following after the mass murder in Charleston:

We as a community of faith have to tell the alternate story – the grace story.  … We have to be the story of hope.  We do this by opening our doors and ourselves to the lost and hurting people in the world.  Yes, churches are soft targets because broken people need a soft place to land.  Hurting people need to meet Jesus in an atmosphere of love. 

By being a safe place, a soft target, we risk everything.  Dylann Roof could walk in here.  Or someone without a gun but with a dangerous agenda could attempt to infiltrate our community.  Our commitment to being a people who welcome all leaves us open to such risks.  But we embrace that because God has given us a particular mission.  God calls us to live a story in which people of different backgrounds are brothers and sisters who embrace each other in the love of Jesus.  God calls us to stand in the midst of the violence, throw open our doors, and say to the world, “Come in, you’ll be loved here.  You’ll be valued here.  You have a place here.  In the heart of God, in God’s Kingdom, you have a home.

In coming days, it will become harder for us to tell this story and live this mission.  But we will do it no matter the cost because God enables us as God calls us.  And we will do it with great joy because God’s story is a grace story and a joy story.  The hope for the world is in the telling and living of that story.  Now is the time.

Those words still ring true.  I know some churches are talking about having armed security.  I suspect there may be people in our church family who are armed when they come to church on Sunday morning.  My own preference would be for us to post signs that say “No firearms on the premises are permitted.”  My desire for this is not a comment on gun ownership as a political issue.  I offer no comment on that issue in this essay.  The action of posting a “No firearms permitted” sign would be a statement about where our focus is.  Our focus is on meeting the Holy Spirit of God in this place. 

This action wouldn’t slowdown someone like Dylann Roof or Devin Kelly.  But it would be a reminder to all our people that we put our trust in God.  The people of FBC Sutherland Springs put their trust in God too.  I don’t know why they died.  I don’t know why Stephen was stoned (Acts 7:58-59), but John died a natural death (John 21:23).  I don’t know why most churches have pleasant Sundays but on November 5, tragedy his Sutherland Springs. 

But I know this.  We who follow Christ cannot let tragedy tell us who we are to be or how we are to live.  Tragedy doesn’t get to be the boss.  Racism doesn’t get to dictate to us.  Terror doesn’t the first word, the last word, or any word.  We churches are communities of Christ followers.  We are the body of Christ.  We’ll voluntarily exist as soft targets because we want to be safe places for broken people who need a soft landing.  

For the Good of the City (Jeremiah 29)

Sunday, October 2, 2016

            Author Andy Crouch in his book, Playing God¸ helped me put words to my own understanding of life as a Christian in the United States.  We worship idols in our country.  These are not statues of god like those worshipped by the ancients, but they are idols nonetheless.  Crouch defines an idol as something that occupies the space God is to occupy in our lives.  The idol starts out promising us wonderful things.  But the more we are drawn to the idol, the more it asks of us and the less it gives to us.  This continues until finally, the idol demands everything from us, our very selves, and it gives nothing to us.

            God also asks everything of us – complete love, loyalty, faith, and devotion.  However, when we give these to God, we have more, not less.  The more love we give to God, the more love we have for others.  The more we trust God, the more faith we have and the more faithful we become. 

            An idol demands our worship and takes and takes and takes from us until it robs us of our humanity.  We become disfigured distortions who no longer bear the image of God. 

God graciously receives our worship, our hearts, and as we give to God, we are transformed.  We become new creations. 

            We – Christians in America – sorely need to remember who we are.  In Christ, we are sons and daughters of God, bound for the Kingdom.  In the Holy Spirit, God is always with us.  We live every little bit of life with God.  Our culture sells us shallow thrills, materialistic fulfillment, and deviant pleasures that excite or numb us but, like idols, rip life from us.  You can think of examples.  Drug addiction.  Gambling addictions.  Idolatry of certain body images.  The lust for comfort without regard for the wellbeing of our neighbors. 

            Our leaders fail to inspire us.  Many people came away from the first presidential debate disappointed because they find neither candidate appealing.   The thought of spending the next 4 years embarrassed by our president leaves us apprehensive and melancholy. 

            These less than encouraging thoughts filled my brain as I read Jeremiah 29 this week.  But, then I remembered that I had made a promise a few weeks ago.  I alluded to that promise last week.  I promised to make the case that Christians who live as true Jesus followers are agents of good who work to help people flourish.   Our exclusive loyalty and identification with the kingdom of God leads us to reject patriotism and nationalism.  We do not strive to be good Americans.  We do not stand on love of country because we know we are aliens in this place.  We belong somewhere else, to someone else.  Instead, we strive to live out the Kingdom of God on earth. In living this way, we end up as the very best American citizens. 

People who make love of country their top life value sometimes set whatever they conceive as ‘American’ in opposition to someone else, even other individual citizens’ visions of what is ‘American.’  But Christians, whose loyalty and love belong exclusively to Jesus, contribute mightily to the good of all people in society.  What we read in Jeremiah 29 shows why this is the case. 

            The people of Judah, God’s chosen people, had from the end of the 7^th century into the 6^th century BC been pressured by the Babylonian empire to pay taxes to Babylon and serve as a Babylonian colony.  King Zedekiah was installed over Judah by the Babylonians as their puppet.  The nation of Judah finally fell in 586 BC when Zedekiah rebelled and Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem.  Before that happened, several thousand Jews from Judah fled to Egypt.  Many others were taken to Babylon in a first stage of exile in 590 BC.

            Imagine tanks and cattle cars rumbling down the streets of your neighborhood.  A loudspeaker orders everyone out of their houses with as much they can carry.  You have 10 minutes to pack whatever you can.  Then it’s onto the cattle cars and before you know what’s happened, you’re relocated, forced to live in a cramped apartment in a country where you don’t know the language and have no way of getting home.  It’s a one way trip. 

That was the fate of the exiles sent to live in Babylon, modern day Iraq, in 595 BC.  Walter Brueggemann describes this as the end of history for these people.[i]  Their identity was tied to the land.  In their imagination, they reached back to the days of Moses and the God of Moses.  God led them (when He led Moses and their ancestors) out of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land that flowed with milk and honey.  Their life in that land was full of ups and downs.  With delight they remembered David and Solomon and heroes like Samuel and Samson.  With disappointment they recalled the reign of King Saul and the failures of King Rehoboam, Solomon’s son.  They held both, the good stories and the bad, and they held onto the land.

Now, the people were ripped from the land.  Was Babylon stronger than God?  Was their failure as his covenant people so grave that they could no longer trust in his promises?  Had God given them up?  The land was lost.  They were foreigners in a strange land.  Could they still tell their stories?  Or were they, as a people, lost too?  In Jeremiah 29 we read a letter the prophet sent to those exiles to help them make some sense of what had happened. 

Writing from the growing chaos in Jerusalem, Jeremiah sends verbs to the exiles.  Build.  Plant.  Take.  Seek.  Brueggemann calls Jeremiah’s prophecy a scandal.  How can the people of God be the people of God away from the Promised Land?  How can they worship Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in Babylon? 

Know this.  Today, America is Babylon.  We live in the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced country in the world.  We do everything we can to fill our country with the riches of other countries.  Gas.  Oil.  We assume it is our right to have these things in order to maintain our way of life.  And we export our way of life, our values, our individualism, our sense that monetary and material wealth will solve the world’s problems.  We assume that the more other countries become like us, the better it is for them.  America is today’s Babylon. 

We followers of Jesus are not made for this place.  We are made in God’s image, designed for and called to a society of creativity, cooperation, and mutual care.  We are meant for a Kingdom that welcomes all – really, all – and sees value in all people. Once we realize who we are in Christ, we know we are made for somewhere else.  How do we live as God’s people when we have not yet arrived in God’s Kingdom?  Build.  Plant.  Take.  Seek. 

In these verbs, Jeremiah tells the exiles to do the unthinkable.  Live life to its fullest in in Babylon.  They are to build homes, homes God will bless.  They are to plant gardens and when they do, they’ll be able to live off the land because God will make it produce fruit.  God is here – even here in Babylon.  The God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt will bring them life in this place.  Only this time, the prophet does not promise a wilderness journey back home.  They’re staying 70 years, the lifespan of a generation.[ii]  Those who receive this shocking word from Jeremiah won’t see Jerusalem again. 

Take wives for yourselves and your sons and give your daughters in marriage.  Did not Moses have a non-Hebrew wife?  He did.  Was not Ruth, the great grandmother of David a woman of Moab?  She was.  Do we dare let our children marry Babylonians – these cursed Babylonians?  They’ll marry Babylonians and bring life with God to Babylon because God has preceded them there.  God has made a way for them in this, what looks like the darkest hour.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare” (29:6). 

How do we live as people who follow God, particularly God as have met God in Jesus Christ?  We seek good for the city where God has planted us.  Brueggemann calls it a gospel for hard times.  As I think about the crises of our day, immigration and refugee crises, race relations in America, our thoroughly self-serving politicians, as I think of it all, I consider these hard times.  But then, I hear Jeremiah’s word, “seek good for the city.”  I hear God speak through the prophet to us.  And Bruggemann is right, this is Gospel, because even though the times are hard, we have good news.  Gospel means good news and Jeremiah’s urging of us to seek the welfare of our city is good news for our city and for us. 

I propose, based the verbs of Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles, that in the act of seeking the welfare of the city, we point the world that is dying in sin to the one who can save it: Our Lord and His Kingdom.

First, we build and plant.  We participate in the economy of American life by holding jobs, doing them well, and helping those around us do their jobs well.  Even in jobs we wouldn’t choose, we work with integrity and effort.  Doing our work well and loving our coworkers is a holy practice endorsed by God.  We do not stay in work that is unethical or immoral.  We choose to leave and trust God for our provision rather than do dishonest or destructive work. 

Risk is involved.  Many Christ followers and nonbelievers alike find themselves in precarious situations as jobs don’t pay enough and don’t provide health insurance.  But even in those circumstances, how we live is a witness.  Are we joyful or woeful?  Do we see God, even in hard times?  Always, we practice our vocation as people of the cross.  We carry ourselves with a constant awareness of the presence of God.

We pay our taxes and manage our money responsibly.  We are profitable financial stewards who see our money as a resource to serve the Lord and help others. Don’t confuse generosity with recklessness.  God shows us how to be wise and extravagantly generous.   

We build and we plant.  We also enter into relationships of intimate friendship with people in the world around us, people who are not Christ followers.  Jeremiah said “take wives and give your sons and daughters in marriage.”  I understand this to be a way of saying, don’t isolate yourselves from others.  Don’t hide in a holy huddle inside the church.  Open your hearts to the people around you and win them over to God with your love and acts of service and kindness. 

We know from the New Testament that many in the church were single.  The best practice for those who marry is to marry fellow believers.  Life is pretty hard if the most important thing in your life is your relationship with Jesus and your spouse has no relationship with Jesus.  There were New Testament couples where one was a Christian and the other wasn’t.  The early church leaders saw just how difficult that life is so they recommended marriage to fellow believers. 

When we take Jeremiah’s instruction that the exiles marry where they are, and see it as teaching that we should enter relationships, then we love those around us as friends, as neighbors, and as people who help one another. 

Building and planting, investing in relationships, in these things we seek good for our city, our society.  We point our world to Christ by living as Christ in our world.  In Philippians 3, Paul says that “our citizenship is in Heaven” (v.20).  We are exiles here.  Idols abound around us, sucking the life from the people who bow to them.  We know the one, true, living God and in the way we live our lives, we can help people know Him too.  Our witness is verbal.  It is also life style and it is in acts of compassionate service. 

Also in Philippians, chapter 2, Paul says that when we imitate Christ we “Shine like stars” in the “midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (v.15).  It is as if Paul were writing for the church in 2016.  His words echo Jesus’ words.  He told the disciples, “Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles in Babylon; Paul’s words to persecuted Christians in Phillipi; Jesus’ message in the Sermon on the Mount; God’s word compels us to pray for our world.  God’s word goads us to work for justice, which means naming injustice and speaking out against it.  God’s Spirit prompts us to fight poverty by attacking its causes and walking with who suffer from it.  God leads us to use our voice in our democracy to call out corrupt politics and call for integrity.  In activism, in compassion, in right living, and in how we carry ourselves in the comings and goings of daily life – in all these ways we seek good for our city.  We Christians bring hope and speak life into our community. 

I close with God’s words, spoken through his prophet.

“Surly I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare not for harm, to give you a future with hope.  Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you.  When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile” (29:11-14).

AMEN

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[i] W. Brueggemann (1977), Fortress Press (Philadelphia), p.125-126.

[ii] D. Gowan (1998), Westminster John Knox Press (Louisville), p.116.