4.13.08 Who Are We Here For?
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
April 13, 2008 “Who Are We Here For?”
Text: “Go Out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News to all creation.” St. Mark
“The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives. And to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lords year of favor.” St. Luke
I was listening to NPR the other day and there was a story about HMO’S. According to the commentator it was fine for a person with an HMO to be healthy and paying dues but when a person got really sick the HMO’s were throwing these people out. The commentary was really a lot like Michael Moore’s movie Sicko.
Now whether you like Michael Moore or not the man does have a sense of humor. My favorite part of that movie was when he was out in a boat with a megaphone outside Guantanamo Bay asking whether he could get the same health care as the inmates.
What has happened when an HMO throws out people who are really sick? There is a question they have failed to answer properly. It is “who are we here for?”
The answer for those HMO’s who are doing this kind of thing has to be we are here for the shareholders. We are for profit and it is not profitable to provide health care to the really sick. We can’t make money that way!
I would have loved to have been there when the hometown boy came home again. His reputation had spread and he had made good. He had taught extensively in other religious communities and this was the day when he came back to his home town.
The synagogue was full, rather crowded in fact. Rumor had got out that he might preach, so there was high expectation. He stood up to read and read that wonderful passage from Isaiah that talks about the poor, the captives, the blind and freedom for those who were down trodden.
And when he sat down again after he had rolled the Torah up again and given it back to the scribe, every eye in the place was on him. This was his moment. What would he say?
He said that this day this text is being fulfilled even as you listen. And he won the approval of everyone. They were astonished at the gracious words that came from the lips of the historical Jesus. They said this has got to be Joseph’s son, surely. The hometown boy come home as hero! The welcome mat was out.
And then he got into the subject of his sermon.
He set the ground floor. It is an interesting ground floor. No prophet is accepted in his own country. And he went even further and said that there were many widows in Israel who Elijah could have been sent to, during the time of a great three year famine, but Elijah was not sent to any of them. He was sent to a widow in Sidon. The historical Jesus’ audience would understand that this woman was a Syrophoenician. The point was this: A prophet of God ministered to a non Jew.
Ouch! And he had Scripture to prove it! Ouch again!
But the historical Jesus did not stop there. Displaying incredible courage he said that in the prophet Elisha’s time, there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these were cured except the Naaman the Syrian. Now the story of Naaman was always understood this way: A Syrian had had to come to an Israeli prophet to get healed. One up then for Israel! But Jesus doesn’t talk about that. He lifts up the fact that in Israel nobody was healed. In fact the only person healed was a hated Syrian. Remember that at the time of Naaman, the Syrians raided the Israelis and took slaves, including the slave girl who told Naaman about Elisha.
Yes the Syrians were hated and here was Jesus making a point. What was the point? It was an answer to the question “Who are we here for?”
Now if Jesus had completed the exegesis of the passage in the typical way he would have lifted up Naaman’s cry: “Now I know,” he said “that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” And if Jesus had lifted that part of the text up his audience would have clapped!
But his courage was far more complete than orthodoxy: Jesus was asking who are we here for? It was the poor, the captives, the blind, the freedom of the downtrodden and also the alien and the stranger the enemy and the non Jew.
And when they heard this everyone in the Synagogue was enraged. They hustled the home town boy out of town. They took him to the edge of a cliff to throw him down, but he managed to slip away through the crowd… He perfectly illustrated his ground floor assertion: A prophet has no honor in his own country.
Why does this problem still happen today?
One Biblical commentator says: “A church often wants to keep its religious privileges to itself…The congregation’s business, it thinks is to nurture its own life… it is God’s business that its precious life of its own be thus nurtured.” He says that politicians often have the same idea, “that whatever happens the nation’s special interests must stand first. Anyone who suggests that other peoples of the earth might be equally important in God’s sight is to be pushed aside as an intolerable nuisance.”
Last weekend I had the privilege of going to church in Chico. The pastor, Steve Schibsted, who has come to our Session here in Westminster in his inaugural sermon in Chico asked the question; “Who are we here for?”
One church I know of asked this question when they had a parking problem. They didn’t have enough parking for their congregation and this was stopping them from growing. What would happen was this. The church was well attended by the members. The parking lot would fill up early. Newcomers would arrive in what they thought would be enough time for the service to find that it was difficult to park, so they would not come twice. After they had lost a lot of potential members this way, this church had the courage to ask “Who are we here for?” The answer was twofold: Yes we are here for our members, but we are also here for those who are in need and who are not yet our members. So do you know what they did? The core members deciding that the church was there to serve the community at large, decided to park a good distance away from the church and walk that distance leaving the prime spots for those who were yet to come. And they did come and the church grew…
Some people have the very honest question about church growth and it is this. What about the nurture of our own members? If we have an emphasis on church growth all the time will not our own members suffer because they are not nurtured as the first priority?
Steve Schibsted was asked this question and his answer was significant. He said that the answer was the very opposite of the fear. When the church began to grow the older members, shut-in’s and those in need of nurture were much better nurtured than before.
In Westminster we have a hard time filling all the slots of the various committees of the Session and deacons and all sorts of other volunteer opportunities. In fact being on the Session’s nominating committee can be soul destroying, and a recipe for burnout. Why? We are a very busy church full of very busy people whose lives are already very full. And so we get a lot of refusals to serve.
The Good news is this: Despite these difficulties Westminster is slowly growing.
When Steve Schibsted went to Chico the Bidwell Church was smaller than we are. Today it is much larger. They have many volunteer positions but their problem is quite the opposite of ours. They have more volunteers than they can put to work.
I asked Steve a number of questions at Session as to how Bidwell has grown into the vibrant church it is today. He stressed that at every level in the successful church we have to ask the question “who are we here for?” Translate every committee subcommittee, board and session and in every area of leadership.
The answer of the historical Jesus is the mandate for this: “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to every creature.” Christianity that is authentic reaches out to the poor, those who are captive to addictions or false ideologies, anything that does not free us. The message of the Historical Jesus was that we were to love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. He added to this that we were to love our enemies and to be bearers of Good News.
Jesus in fact hung out in the modern equivalent of Starbucks and sports bars. He ate with people from the I. R. S. he fraternized with the Roman Enemy, (check out his encounter with the Roman Centurion in his historical life and see the tribute of a Roman Centurion at his death.) Jesus hung out with prostitutes, donkey drivers, lepers, the poor, publicans all under the synagogue given the label of “sinners”. He even made the assertion that he came not for the good people who didn’t need a physician but for those who actually recognized their need of God. Jesus had asked the all important question, “Who am I here for?”
When Bidwell Presbyterian began to ask the question, “Who are we here for?” they realized they had a problem. If they were only serving their own members then it was not a problem. The problem was the time of the Christian Education Hour. They had the same configuration we have. Two services, contemporary first, traditional second, with an Adult Christian Education Hour in between, when they asked the question “who are we here for?” they realized that a newcomer needed to be integrated into the congregation at a coffee fellowship hour which would best be placed between the services. They also realized after a survey that young families with children would prefer the contemporary service to be later in the morning so that they could more easily get their act together with young children.
Because there was opposition to changing the holy hour traditional 11 o clock service, the Bidwell session and staff tried to make the new arrangement work by only instituting the coffee hour between services and leaving the service times as they were. They tried it for a year and Steve said it was not working. So then they did the hard thing and exchanged the two service times around and put the traditional service first. Immediately there was an increase in service attendance. Steve said to our Session: “Structural change is the hardest kind of change to bring about, but in our experience it produces the greatest results.”
When I went to Bidwell last Sunday I was experiencing ten years of hard work, steady gradual growth and a very alive church. Does Bidwell Presbyterian still have problems? You bet. But as the associate pastor said last Sunday, “The perfume of success is a great deodorant. You don’t smell the sweat of the team that is winning because the perfume of success covers it. It is the losing team that stinks.”
The perfume of success can be a problem if we don’t deal with the things that are actually wrong as well.
In our personal lives we can be seen as very successful. But we can be quite empty inside. That can be true of successful churches as well. But if we have asked the question, “Who are we here for?” and are really implementing the Good News at every level of the church we can become a healthy congregation.
When I arrived at Bidwell Presbyterian I started by talking to the coffee hour people. I deliberately arrived after their second service had already started. The coffee hour was outside the church on their patio area open to the street. There were only five chairs set out. But there were about 8 tables with displays carefully set out. A person could sign up for Compassion Sunday when church was cancelled for all kinds of community service work. The men could sign up for a men’s retreat, the women could sign up for a women’s retreat. There was a table set out with how to join Bidwell and there were eight canisters of coffee.
As the service ended people began to flow out and talk to one another. You know how we say in Westminster that our parking lot conversations solve a lot of problems? That is what everyone was doing. They were having fun together the way we do after church, but two groups were there; the second service was meeting with some folks who had arrived early. There was tremendous information exchange going on. Over two hundred people had signed up for Compassion Sunday. What a great idea. Work hard painting someone’s house, then go back to the church for a Bar B Q lunch and one worship service and then back to work. They had remembered who they were there for and it was building their church spiritually at the same time. Magic!
In the Bed and Breakfast I asked for a review of Bidwell Presbyterian. “They are a vibrant church,” the host said; “They do a lot for the community and they have wonderful attendance.”
One more thing I noticed. After the service was drawing to a close they served communion. The communion was served to the people by the laity. The three pastors were doing something else. After a person had received the communion they could go to a pastor and ask them to pray for them. It was such a wonderful and simple thing to do. How did it come about? They first asked the question “who are we here for?” And they decided that they were here for those who knew they needed God. I felt the presence of the Historical Jesus there on that Sunday. I thought to myself, I think he would be pleased.
I also think that Jesus, the Jesus of History would be very pleased with Westminster and our courageous stands to include everyone of God’s children: the rich, the poor, the gay the straight, the lonely and the unloved and the little children, the teens in our neighborhood, the children at William Land, the refugees who come to Carol Merit’s garage, the homeless who are fed faithfully, by the hundreds, at Loaves and Fishes when it is our turn.
I believe that God is divinely guiding us and protecting us. I think that God sent us Steve Schibsted at this time. And I think that it is time for us to ask the question at every level of this great historic church, “Who are we here for?”
Jesus is sending us to bring Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, to bring sight to the blind both physical and spiritual through miracle and medical science and sound psychology.
We are to work to set the downtrodden free. That is what a compassion Sunday might be about here. So do we merely copy Bidwell hoping that a carbon copy would work here? Of course not! Nor would they want us to. We are our own church, but we can learn from them by learning to ask the right questions!
“Who are we here for?”
I don’t know if you saw the ABC special on Randy Pausch. This delightful professor has terminal pancreatic cancer. He has written a book called The Last Lecture. When a professor leaves it is a tradition that they give a last lecture when they say what they want about what life means to them. It is about what is important to them.
Randy under a death sentence decided to talk about what made his life meaningful and what lessons were learned.
It was an uplifting program and I am going to order the book. He is a very bright wonderful guy. His wife said that when he dies she will miss most the magic of his presence. Optimistic and realistic in the face of his own death he has preserved his amazing sense of humor.
At one point he was asked about how he was handling the idea of dying as it applied to his children who are quite young, (one of them is still a babe in arms.)
He said what got to him most was that he knew that someday someone would try to push his kids of a metaphorical cliff and that he would not be there to save them with a safety net. So his choices were to go into a corner and cry or to take the time when he still could to build nets for his children.
One of his great teachings is to tell the truth and his second teaching would be to always tell the truth. At the end of his last lecture he spoke the truth to a large audience. He said: “This last lecture is not for you…pause… It is for my kids.” and they gave him a standing ovation.
He has used his last opportunities to teach as a revenue stream to provide for his children…
Randy Pausch has asked himself the question who am I here for?
If we asked this pivotal question where we work in the hospital, in the city government, in our schools and businesses, at the board of county supervisors, in our State Senate and Assembly: If our future presidential candidates and national government asked this question; if we asked this question in our lifestyles that are at present closing out the options for our children and the poor of the earth due to our carbon emissions…
If we asked this pivotal question, we could change the face of society at every level and we would preserve the world.
That is why Jesus asked this question and in his name, I ask us all: Beginning here: at our beloved church community of Westminster…
“Who are we here for?”
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