Let’s pray together:
Father of Light draw us near to you and may your name, in all the nations, be blessed.
Jesus, the Vine, draw us near to you and may your name, in all of creation, be blessed.
Spirit of Life draw us near to you and may your name, in all devotion, be blessed.
Over the last few days I began reading Bill Easum’s book Dancing with Dinosaurs: Ministry in a Hostile & Hurting World and as I got into the first chapter of his book I noticed there was a visionary image titled:
New Life Comes to Us on its Way to Someone Else
The image within the first chapter of the book reminded me that while I was serving as youth minister at Christ Church in Mississauga we were led through a stewardship campaign in the fall of 2007 by one of the United Church of Canada’s stewardship ministers the Rev. Rob Dalgleish, who was one of my predecessors at Shiloh-Inwood United Church southeast of Petrolia, Ontario. He gave us something to chew on during that stewardship campaign – which consisted of gathering the church’s leadership team – both staff and lay – to wine and dine together and then listen to what Rev. Dalgleish had to say about why Christians do stewardship and, further, entailed a sermon series on stewardship, in which Rev. Dalgleish preached the final and redemptive sermon on the joy of giving. His mantra through the entire campaign was similar to Easum’s:
Generosity comes to us on its way to someone else!
We found during that campaign that when we invited our fellow Christians into the call of the Kingdom that they were only too happy to respond by pledging to give more than 50% more over the course of the year than they had in the previous year. I think that the beauty of that campaign was in how Christian giving was couched – out of the joy of being Christian and out of the joy of being part of the lifeblood of Christ Church, Mississauga. Perhaps, more bluntly, that the only way we find joy as Christians is when it has marked its course by moving from ourselves and our yearning for God toward the yearnings in our friends and neighbours.
Generosity comes to us on its way to someone else!
And I think that this is what it means to be Christian. Too often we think that our walk with Christ is the only walk and that it is all about our own spiritual growth, but I think today’s text reveals something deeper:
Jesus Christ comes to us on his way to someone else!
Or, perhaps I should offer this another way:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us on its way to someone else!
An example that illumines this very implication of the severity of the text is a story about some random guy from the Philadelphia area of Pennsylvania:
A young man gets up to tell a story about a summer working on the mission field for a well-known speaker and theologian – Dr. Tony Campolo. Here goes:
In the springtime we had a speaker come into our school who came to tell about the work he does with his church and with his charitable organization, so I signed up and showed up for an event the following May.
This pastor worships at an inner-city church in West Philadelphia, and that’s where we met. It was a Saturday morning in the month of May when we gathered at the church with thousands of teenagers. All of a sudden Dr. Campolo walks into the room, grabs a microphone and cries out:
“Do you want to change the world for Christ?”
The crowd of young people rumbled, “YA!!!”
“Are you here to serve the Gospel?”
“YA!”
“Do you want to bring Jesus Christ to people who do not know that name?”
“YA!”
“Then get the hell onto that bus!” he commanded.
Well, we got onto that bus, and the neighbourhood that the pastor’s church was in was pretty scary to us white boys – abandoned and rundown buildings, homeless people, nobody there like us at all. Well, the neighbourhood we came to was even more worn and run-down than the one we began in.
I remember that I first went to a run-down apartment building and knocked on the door and an old woman answered, “What the hell do you want?” So I said, “I’m here to talk to you about Jesus!”
Well, as soon as the words came from my lips the woman began screaming and hollering and I don’t know what came over her, but next thing I knew she was chasing me down 6 flights of stairs and she said to me, “I better never catch you in this place again!”
I thought to myself, “OK – a simple NO would have sufficed.”
So I made my way out to the street crushed. I had come out here to help change the world for Jesus and was utterly rejected. It really hurt…I didn’t know what I should do so I just prayed aloud, “Lord Jesus, I don’t know why you brought me here to his abysmal neighbourhood where I normally wouldn’t be caught dead – but if you can use me you know where to find me!”
After that prayer I went down to a convenience store, bought a pack of smokes and a pack of diapers and headed back to the projects. I headed up to the 2nd floor and knocked on the apartment door. A voice called from the other side, “Whaddaya want?”
I slipped a pamphlet under the door and waited. A woman opened the door a crack and saw me and said, “Come in!” I handed her the pack of cigarettes and diapers, she offered me a smoke and we lit and I smoked the first cigarette of my life.
She asked me, “What’s all this about? What is a white boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m here to talk to you about Jesus.”
“Well, I just don’t understand. Why would Jesus want to knock on my door? What does this Jesus know about me?”
I looked her right in the eye and said, “Well, actually Jesus knows a lot about you – he’s always looking for people just like you.
I spent the rest of my day with that woman in her apartment in the projects and before I left she asked me, “Would you pray for me and my baby? Would you pray to Jesus that we would someday get out of this place?”
So we prayed together and then I left.
We got back on the bus and the pastor was there. Still on fire, he asked, “Did you bring some people to Jesus today?” and the crowd roared!
After things calmed down I approached the preacher and said, “You know, I thought that I was going out to bring people to Jesus…but I found out during my time in that neighbourhood that the person who found Jesus was me.”
You see folks,
The Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us on its way to someone else!
This young man couldn’t see Jesus until he met that young, struggling single mother in the middle of the slums of Philadelphia. And, perhaps, the very same imprint of the Gospel will shape that young single mother’s life – that it will be hard for her to become deeply connected with Jesus until she shares the witness of his redemptive power with somebody else in her life. I think that this is a very pointed message for you to hear today, because you who are of this community have not, to my knowledge, shared the joy of life in Christ by telling your friends and inviting them to share in the good news that is embodied in the lifeblood of this congregation. So I’d like to inspire you to live in the witness of today’s prophetic text:
In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. (Micah 4:1)
The mountain Micah is referring to is the one that the Jews call Zion, which is usually a metaphor for either Israel, Jerusalem, or, in this case, the Temple in the centre of the City of Jerusalem.
The problem that we have as Christians with the text, however is that we have been called into a different image of Zion – namely the Lord Jesus Christ. Here’s the most pertinent narrative that has shaped our understanding of Zion:
[Jesus] came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can I get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
“I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth. (John 4:4-24)
You see, folks, as Christians we search for God’s holy mountain called Zion. But, as you just heard, it is no longer in Jerusalem or Samaria – it is in the Spirit that comes from Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, for us, has become the embodiment of today’s Scripture in which:
Many nations will come and say
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Micah 4:2)
But I think I have found one of the flaws of today’s text. I was listening this week to that 1976 song by classic rock band Queen called “Somebody to Love” and the premise of the song is that this person works so hard all day and every day and still cannot find love and so I was struck by these words found in the song:
I work hard every day of my life
I work till I ache my bones
At the end of the day I take home my hard-earned pay all on my own
I get down on my knees and I start to pray
Till the tears well up in my eyes
Lord, somebody, ooohh, somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
We live in an ambiguous world where people are searching for answers to many of these very same ambiguities; the joy in being a Christian is that we have been invited and welcomed into an answer – namely the Lord Jesus Christ. As the world offers the question, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” We call out to the world, “Come back to your first love, the Creator of the Universe, Jesus Christ!” And we say that because, as Christians, we are centered in the life-giving and liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ and, further, our witness is illumined by texts that our ancestors in faith, a mighty Cloud of Witnesses, proclaimed to be authorized texts which light up our Godly lives. One such Scripture comes from 1 John and says:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:7-10)
The writer of 1 John examines where love comes from and his answer is that we find God when God reaches toward us through atonement. When we think of atonement we often think of the brutal torture, and sadistically violent execution of Jesus, when atonement literally means to be “in accord” or “at one with” and I think that this is the sheer joy of John’s statement – Jesus was sent as a sacrifice for us that we might be at one with God; that we, based on today’s text, might find our way to Zion where God lives. And for us, as Christians, that literally means that we might find Jesus Christ – Zion.
But as you may know it is difficult for us to find Zion when Zion is only about us. We see that in the Scriptures and we see that in our daily lives.
Zion comes to us on its way to someone else.
For the people who Micah preached to this was clearly evident as they say,
“The mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised among the hills, and peoples will stream to it.”
But at the end of this oracle we hear:
All the nations may walk in the name of their gods; we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever. (Micah 4:5)
As the peoples stream to the “mountain of the LORD’s temple” God’s people will find out who they are and who their God is.
Zion comes to us on its way to someone else.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us on its way to someone else.
One of the things that we have been talking about lately in this church is our own inability to reach into people’s wallets so that our budgetary problems might be averted. I think that the most pressing concern isn’t actually money, but our basic theology – the way we have been articulating our concerns has steered us away from who we are – our core identity as Pelham Community Church. We, as the Church, live inside the promise of the God of Zion – the Lord Jesus Christ – and if money has become the problem and we are only concerned with money then we have already lost our only purpose in ministry – to proclaim Jesus. The very same Jesus once told an interesting parable, and here’s how it goes.
A manager at the Royal Bank of Canada branch in Fenwick was accused of wasting away the branch’s assets. So they called in the CFO from the bank’s national headquarters who said, “I’m about to take your job because you’ve been responsible for all of these bad loans and whatnot. What do you have to say for yourself?”
The branch manager thought to himself, “Darn, I’m gonna lose my job. I can’t become a construction worker and I don’t want to lose my house because of missed mortgage payments. So he thought to himself for a little while.
Finally the answer came to him. “AHA!!!” he cried out. “I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their homes.”
So he called in each of the bank’s debtors and asked, “How much do you owe?”
The first one was a farmer who had used a loan for a tractor and he said, “Well, I still owe $46,000 on the tractor.”
So the manager says to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly and make it $23,000!”
Then he asked the second, who was a factory worker in Welland, “How much do you owe?”
“Well,” said the second, “I was given a loan to buy a car and I still owe $1,000 on it.”
The manager said to him, “Take your bill and make it $800.”
The CFO from bank headquarters commended the dishonest branch manager and he kept his job. (Luke 16:1-8)
God’s grace is scandalous, and following Jesus is a bizarre proposition, but following the story Jesus reminds us simply:
No slave can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. (Luke 16:13)
So the question that comes up is, “Who are we?” and “Who are we slaves to?” In the primordial soup of ancient Christian thought we know that the foremost concern for our ancient brothers and sisters was our slavery to Jesus, and the Church witnessed to this by commanding only one statement of faith – only one profound, yet simple, exoneration of their lives into these words:
Jesus is Lord!
This was the only statement of faith that early Christians upheld for baptism and the partaking of bread and cup together.
Mike Slaughter, lead pastor of Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church – a church that began much like Pelham Community Church, but now has grown into a church with weekly worship attendance of 14,000 and a Sunday School of around 600 – mentions in his book Spiritual Entrepreneurs that one of the 6 key principles present in every revival and renewal in the Church is what he calls the Lordship Principle – a clear commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord of all life. And after hearing our first of two sermons last week I began to wonder if our financial worries don’t actually stem from our ability to reach into congregation members’ pockets, but rather stems from our ability to make disciples.
In Christian practice money is a tool by which we accomplish the ministry of Jesus Christ; it is not Jesus Christ himself.
Perusing through Slaughter’s book has revealed how unapologetic the 1st century Church was in asserting its faith in Jesus Christ, with particular reference to the resurrection. I mean, Paul of Tarsus puts it quite bluntly in a letter he sent to the Church at Corinth:
If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain...If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor. 15:14, 17-19)
His point is this. If Jesus has not been raised then we are just the Rotary Club meeting at an inconvenient time during the week – and the worst part is that we don’t serve lunch. If our budgetary concern preceding the summer months arises out of our love of money rather than our conviction that we meet here because we see Jesus here and want to share him with the world, then we are not only serving the devil, but we are also not the Church of Jesus Christ.
In a lecture on "The Renewal of the Inner City Church," Jim Wallis told a group of pastors true stories of declining inner-city churches that had, by the grace of God, rediscovered their mission and begun to thrive. [Will Willimon] was inspired, but in the conversation afterwards one pastor after another criticized Wallis’s speech. They accused him of looking at the church through rose-colored glasses. One even implied that he had lied.
That evening [Willimon] told Wallis that [he] was appalled by the group’s reaction. "I wasn’t," [Wallis] said. "That’s the reaction I always get from mainline, liberal pastors. They are amazed when God wins. Scared to death that Easter just might, after all, be true."
Are we afraid of Easter being literally true?
Are we afraid to scale Mount Zion and call out to the world for all the nations to see and stream to the mountain of our God?
I believe that it is not only our ambition to reach the majestic heights of Zion, but to find ourselves nailed to the cross with Jesus where we witness to the world that with Jesus there is always an adventure because he’s always on the move from one place to another.
Jesus comes to us on his way to someone else.
And so, it is essential for us to re-examine our relationship with Jesus and reflect on Stevie Wonder’s words:
“Here I am [Jesus] signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours!”
Because when we boldly live inside the Gospel it only yearns to break out of us and into the lives of our neighbours. And so, to that end, I call on you to consider this week why you worship here on Sunday morning. And, when you are swept up by the joy of our common Lord, see if it inspires you to say to your neighbour, “Hey, I just gotta tell you, I’m part of this group of people who are really born of the Spirit” – that’s where the word inspire comes from. And invite them to Church.
On their first Sunday we’ll even teach them one of the basic parts of Christian living – giving our money in the name of Jesus Christ for the transformation of this, God’s world, into God’s eternal kingdom. This is part of our final mandate from Jesus. He said to us:
Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded...(Matt. 28:19-20)
And so I say, go, do this in the name of Jesus Christ for, “you are the salt of the earth” and “you are the light of the world” and you are the people who have tasted Christ’s water which has become in you “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” and you are the people of Zion. And Zion only comes to people on its way to someone else. Amen.
Let us pray together:
The place where we meet Jesus is in the time when our neighbours are spiritually or physically bleeding and we come to pass on the witness of insurrection by resurrection. We deal with an impossible God – a God who seems to reveal his fullness to us as the life of Jesus is passed on from neighbour to neighbour, from generation to generation. O Lord of Hosts; our help in times of trouble, we call upon your name and upon your power to reveal to us the Secret of your Kingdom. Amen.
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