Sermon Cloud

PLAY BALL

In our gospel text this morning Jesus asks his disciples to tell him who they think he is.  In the ancient world, it was more the community that assigned one’s reputation and identity, rather than one’s own self-perception through self-examination and analysis.  Whole communities sometimes participated in naming a newborn.  People became known by their attributes – and we also know God by God’s attributes.  We also name him Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Divine Healer and dozens of other descriptors.  And it was the same for Jesus.  His neighbors and parents called him “Crazy.”     

We do that still today – because we have an incomplete understanding of all that God is, we give God human attributes – which are often incorrect – because our limited human existence is all that we understand.  Sometimes we manufacture a god with the personal characteristics that we like best – for example a God who is all love and no judgment; or a God who is more like Santa Claus.  We must guard against that, by continuing to read the whole Bible and not just the parts we like – so that the God we worship is the true God, and not an idol of our own creation. 

  We have domesticated Jesus into “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” and forgotten that the God represented in the person of Jesus Christ is the same God who brought the judgment of the flood and saved Noah and his family.  This is the same God who claimed and led Abraham out to become a new nation, the same God who made the sun stand still for Joshua, and the same God who freed the Hebrews from Egyptian captivity and preserved them for 40 years in the desert with manna from heaven, water from rocks and shoes that never wore out.

When we were in Brazil, Pastor James pointed out that in the third chapter of the Book of Habakkuk, the prophet is lamenting the condition of Israel and asking God to intervene.  This is what he says:

“O Lord, I have heard of your renown [your fame], and I stand in awe, O Lord, of your work [your mighty acts].  In our own time, revive it, in our own time, make it known…”

Do it again, Lord, you did it for them, now do it for us.  Be that God, not the one who is content with a church that is content with itself.  Be the God who delivers his people from slavery by defeating evil with grasshoppers and frogs, not a god who is content with a church that tolerates evil and allows it to have its head to run in the world, because the church believes that evil is so pervasive that it can’t be stopped, or a church that has forgotten that when you said that “upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it,”[1] you meant not that we were to hunker in our bunkers to keep hell from getting into the church, but that the gates of hell will not be able to stand against the advance of the church!  The word “prevail” is an offensive term, it’s a defensive term.  Hell will not be able to withstand the church that comes against it in the power of God!

So if the God we worship is any god other than the God I’ve just described, if our God is a god who is not as powerful as the God whose mighty acts Habakkuk asked to see revived in his own time, then I don’t want to worship that God, and I’ll quit doing church because it’s a waste of time.  Maybe I’ll sell shoes instead.   

But if the God we worship is in fact the powerful God whose aid  Habakkuk invoked, then most of God’s churches have a lot of explaining to do to God and to the world, because we aren’t living like people who believe that.

So that’s who we say God is, but who does the world say we are?  In our last time together, I quoted some statistics about how the world sees us behaving no differently from themselves, and perhaps a little bit worse, because we say we are different, but we live like hypocrites.  If you ask anonymous Christians and non-Christians what they did during the past week, you will get the same answers:  the Christian is just as likely as the non-Christian to have physically abused a family member, used an illegal drug, or misused a prescription drug, consumed alcohol to the point of drunkenness or visited a pornographic website.  No difference. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, they see the church in terms of “anti” – they only describe us by what they believe we’re against:  Anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-whatever.  The world may not know much about what’s in the Bible, or what the church is really like, but they DO know enough about Jesus to know that most of us aren’t anything like him.  And for more than 50 years people have been voting with their feet as they avoid the institutional church, or we hemorrhage 50,000 members every year as they leave the institutional church. 

Jesus says the reason for this is that we have “[set our minds] not on divine things, but on human things.”

In our text, Peter couldn’t stand the idea that the Messiah would have to suffer and die.  He wanted the Messiah that he wanted, not the Messiah that God sent and who Jesus was.  He wanted the Messiah he created, the one who was destined to be a triumphant earthly king, not the suffering Savior Messiah that God created.

We too, are uncomfortable with the Jesus that God sent to us, the Jesus of the radical way, the Jesus who brings justice to the poor and oppressed.  Instead, like Peter, we, too, want a “soft gospel,” with a Jesus who blends in with political, economic and social norms.  Some of us want a Jesus who is so transcendent he is unconcerned with earthly matters, doing nothing to relieve suffering in this life, except standing poised at the gates of heaven, waiting for his Father to give the word so he can come and snatch us out of harm’s way.

We want our churches to be prosperous and we want us to be prosperous too.  We might make fun of prosperity preachers, but even Christians with a Reformed worldview connect our prosperity with God’s pleasure with us.  It’s just human nature. But any minister will tell you that the hardest church to pastor is the church whose people are financially secure, because they either don’t need anything they can’t afford – or get a loan to afford – and they think the reason for their prosperity is that God is on their side because they have put on the team jersey.  It’s hard to coach self-reliant players who think they known the game plan and the playbook.  

But Jesus told Peter that the game was changing: that the economics of heaven – the things and actions that have value in heaven – those things are nothing like the economics of earth; and that the things that are valued by God are often the things we avoid the most.   He said, “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”    

What did Jesus mean when he said we were to deny ourselves?  Our most common understanding is that we are to deny ourselves material things that we want and give more to the poor – and that’s reasonable, because Jesus even said as much to the Rich Young Ruler when he told him that he should sell everything he had and give all the money to the poor.  But later, Paul said that even if he did give all of his money to the poor – but had no love for them – and denied the needs of his body only so others would see and think he was holy - he was nothing more than a noisy gong.  Such works done with this motivation are done because we still have our minds set on human things.  We do these things out of the conventional human wisdom.

But “denying ourselves” in the sense that Jesus uses it here, means more than just doing without.  It’s more than “giving to the poor” or working in a food bank, although those things matter too.  Denying ourselves means embracing the gospel and living according to its demands, even at the cost of our own lives.  To merely say that Jesus went to the cross out of love for the world, and as an example for us, is incomplete, and therefore a misunderstanding. 

James Denney wrote: “What would we think of someone who ran down a pier at full tilt, loudly proclaiming his love for the world, and who jumped off the end of the pier and drowned?  Surely we would not praise his love; surely we would pity his dementia.  For one cannot meaningfully speak of self-sacrificing love unless there is a purpose to the self-sacrifice.”[2] 

“Jesus’ death on the cross was for the specific purpose of our salvation – our pardon, our reconciliation to God, our restoration to a proper relationship with both God and other human beings, and our ultimate transformation when Jesus comes again.”[3] 

That is the example:  If Jesus’ obedient death was for the purpose of pardon, reconciliation to God, restoration of the relationship between God and humanity and for our ultimate transformation, then that is to be our example.  When we “deny ourselves,” we are lifting up the sovereignty of God over our lives and the lives of others.  When we lift up the sovereignty of God, we call him Lord of our lives.  When we truly believe he is Lord of our lives, we will obey what he commands without a second thought, without a thought for ourselves.  And the purpose of our denying ourselves, the purpose of our obedience, is, like Jesus, to bring forgiveness to others, to attract them to reconciliation to God, to lead them into restoration of relationships, for their ultimate transformation.

I want you to think about what that means.  It certainly doesn’t mean that Jesus went to the cross and suffered and died and went into hell to prosper us, so we can all retire early and have nice houses and cars and play golf for 25 years until we can’t get to the course anymore; and it doesn’t mean that he suffered and died so God’s people can have nice church buildings just for us.

Every day, in great numbers, people trade away their lives in pursuit of fleeting pleasures and possessions.[4]  Jesus could have done that too – he could have lived a quiet life in Galilee, married, had children and cared for his little corner of world.  But it was commitment to the kingdom of God that sent Jesus to the cross – and his commitment had been made long before he came into conflict with the leadership of Palestine. 

Jesus is making the cost of discipleship plain to his followers: stay here or follow, but decide now and decide for the long haul, because tomorrow we head for Jerusalem, and there is too much evil in the world to allow for the luxury of many little decisions along the way.

What does that mean for us?  Some of us have been followers of Christ all of our lives, but that’s all – just one of the crowd, showing up on Sunday, maybe giving a little money.  Some of us have not embraced the gospel with the kind of commitment that would ever put us in conflict with anyone.   Some of us have not crossed that mental and spiritual line in the sand, and that’s what keeps us tied up with human concerns like retirement and property and what kind of songs we’re singing, instead of kingdom concerns like who is hungry in Guymon today and what pastor in Brazil is struggling to stay in ministry and provide for his children’s education at the same time, and what family in our own neighborhood has to choose between paying the rent and buying school supplies for three children.  We can’t change the world, but we can pay the educational tuition for a pastor’s children in South America.  We can’t change Africa, but we can give up a cup of coffee every day to buy a forty cent pill that will save a child from dying of dehydration.  We can’t change Guymon, but we can invest ourselves personally and change the lives of 3 or 5 families in a meaningful way this year.

 The world is changing, and for the church to be relevant, it has to change too.  What we know about denominations is experiencing as radical a shift as the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, but on a global scale.  In just a short time, the world and the church will look nothing like we know it today, and it is happening not tomorrow, but now.[5]  Any church that does not change with it will die.  The world is changing all around us, but we are still doing church the way we have done it for 17 centuries!

 Some of you have expensive tickets to football games this fall.  You’ll drive a long way and use your expensive ticket and go sit in the stands.  The teams will come out and one of the first things they will do is huddle.  For five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour – an hour!  And then they break the huddle and leave the stadium.  If that happened, you’d go nuts!  You’d want your money back!  You’d never go to another game!

 Do you see that that’s what the church does?  Every week we spend most of our time and energy getting ready for the weekend event that we’re at right now.  I read and write for this sermon, Deborah spends a lot of time on the bulletin, the musicians and singers practice – hours and hours of time and energy for this one hour a week.  And then, when we do get together, what do we do?  We huddle for an hour and then we leave!  We do it week after week:  When is the church going to get around to playing ball?

  We talk about being a “Christian nation,” but the truth is that we are living in a post-Christian, post-denominational world.  What I mean by “post-Christian” is that there was a time when even the unchurched people we met had a vocabulary for talking about God.  You could use words to talk about God to unbelievers and everyone would understand what you were saying.  There was a general, secular knowledge of the Bible - for example, most people would have been able to identify Moses as a great leader of the Jews, but now Moses is just another name.  Ignorance of the Bible is so great that we even have to explain to adults in our own churches when we refer to things most young children would have known two generations ago. 

 What I mean by “post-denominational,” is that the world doesn’t understand denominationalism and doesn’t care.  They see no difference between Catholics, Presbyterians, Assemblies of God, Lutherans or Methodist.  It just doesn’t matter to them at all.  We are all the same.

 People don’t want to know what we believe – and when I say that, I don’t mean that what we believe as Reformed Christians doesn’t matter, because it does – all ideas have consequences.  But it doesn’t matter at first.  The world is no longer asking “Does God Care?”  They are asking, “Can God Make a Difference?”  They don’t want to know what we believe – instead they say, “Do I see qualities in you that want to make me be like you?”

People in the world are looking for relationships.  We live in a world where people are hurting and lost and seeking.  Families and marriages have never been under attack as they are today; people are living with addictions and lies and a constant state of loneliness.  The world is crying out, “Is this the only way to live?”  The world is wondering if there is a church that can make a difference in the midst of that pain and loneliness and addiction.  The world is waiting for a church that says, “Yes, send me into that darkness.” 

 These challenges will affect our resource allocations – there are churches that have sold their buildings in order to move to do ministry in a different context.  There are churches who have pledged not to ever build a building in order to stay flexible in ministry.  The church in Belo Horizonte has worshipped in a tent for the last five years.  Don’t get me wrong – buildings are not bad, but buildings are only tools for ministry.  So when we discuss how God wants us to use our property for relevant ministry in Guymon, things may look quite different from what we have come to expect.  Remember, for Peter, Jesus looked quite different than the Messiah he had come to expect. 

 Faced with such dramatic challenges and changes we cannot do church as we always have.  We need people who will say, “God, I will do whatever you want in order to accomplish your plan for our generation.”  We will buy whatever, sell whatever, go wherever,  We will need more people like Habakkuk, who will say, “God, I know you did great things in the past, but I want to see them in my day.”  We need to believe that God can do God-ordained, supernatural, God-sized ministries to fill the gaping needs we see.  We will need to set aside our competing denominational differences in order to join together as God’s church to accomplish together what we would be unable to accomplish alone. 

 We need to get out of our huddle and play ball.

[1] Matthew 16:15

[2] D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, (Baker Academic: Grand Rapids) 2006, 171

[3] Ibid.

[4] Interpreter’s Bible, Mark, 26                                                                                 

[5] Rev. James Kim, Belo  Horizonte Pastor’s conference, 9/8/09