Text:
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
But
now that we’re at it, I may as well bring up the matter of visions and
revelations that God gave me. For instance, I know a man who, fourteen years
ago, was seized by Christ and swept in ecstasy to the heights of heaven. I
really don’t know if this took place in the body or out of it; only God knows.
I also know that this man was hijacked into paradise—again, whether in or out
of the body, I don’t know; God knows. There he heard the unspeakable spoken,
but was forbidden to tell what he heard. This is the man I want to talk about.
But about myself, I’m not saying another word apart from the humiliations.
Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me,
My grace is
enough; it’s all you need.
My strength comes into its own in your weakness.
Once I
heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and
began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my
weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these
limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad
Quote: “…most of the time, all you have is the
moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.”—Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
“The
Answer to Unanswered Prayer”
Are any of you familiar with the cartoon strip “Cathy”? It was released in 1976 and ran through
2010. Cathy is the creation of Cathy
Guisewite, and, according to Wikipedia, “features
a young woman who struggles with the four basic guilt groups: food, love, family, and work.”
What I remember is that about this time every year Cathy
would enter a women’s clothing store, select a bathing suit, stand before a
mirror and gasp; “horrors” she’d say.
What she had been hiding behind loose clothing wasn’t very pretty, but
she could live with the denial until spring, when she grabbed a bathing suit
and stood before a mirror. Mirrors don’t
lie.
I
want to talk about denial for a minute.
Denial is a defense mechanism. If you're in denial, you're trying to protect yourself by
refusing to accept the truth about something that's happening in your life. The
bright side of denial is that it gives us a little time to adjust to a
challenging situation. The dark side of
denial is that it prevents us from dealing with painful or stressful issues
that remind us that we are vulnerable and also require action.
Cathy didn’t want to do
the work of wearing a bikini well but she wanted the results of wearing a
bikini well. Her dilemma was this—if she
didn’t have a bathing suit she missed out on all of the summer fun at the pool
and the beach. If she DID suit up, well,
she wasn’t perfect. How did Cathy
resolve her dilemma? Most of the time
she’d hand the bathing suit back to the clerk and then make a promise to her self
to lose ten pounds by next spring…so she could have a life.
This past week was a little painful for Central Christian
Church. We invited someone from our
national church organization to look through our statistics and tell us what
she saw.
She held a mirror up to us, and we were sad.
Our median age is 70 years old.
We average 33 persons in worship.
Our congregational membership is about 69 persons.
Only fifty percent of our budget is raised through
pledges. A congregation should be
receiving 67% of their income from pledges.
Our sanctuary can hold up to 150 persons, which means we
only use 20% of this room on Sunday mornings, but heat and cool 100%. We could easily live in half of the upstairs,
but we live, and heat, and cool 100% of the upstairs—the YMCA rents our
basement.
When she asked, “What ministries do you have?” We couldn’t list very many. Disciple Women are talking about disbanding,
and so is the Men’s group. We have three
senior high youth attending church camp this summer. We still do Community Service but the list of
service organizations we help is smaller. Our Moderator, Kelli Maxwell, has a
plan for a community garden and for our congregation to get out of the building
and get to know our neighborhood and community, but they haven’t quite taken
off yet.
And the list goes on….
Like Cathy, standing before a mirror with a flabby body
dressed in a bikini, well, we gasped “horrors!”
We are so small and so old, and our incredibly lovely but large building
feels like a moo- moo.
The conclusion we jumped to?
If we could just find that magic cure and get more people in
here—especially younger people—then we could have a life. We could have a large worship service and a
children’s program. And then we moved to
problem solving such as create and distribute more fliers and visit the pastors
of other churches that are successful and find out what they are doing to
attract more and younger people. Because
if we were just bigger and younger we could have a life, correct?
Here’s
the question, “Is the gospel life best lived out by younger persons? Is the gospel life best lived out by large
churches? Do buildings create the gospel
life?”
You know what the gospel life is, don’t you? I like the way Douglas John Hall defines
gospel in his book Waiting for Gospel,
“the Spirit of the LORD is upon me (us)…to bring the good news to the poor,
heal the broken-hearted, preach deliverance to captives, bring recovery of
sight to the blind and set at liberty all that are bruised. Gospel is not a set of beliefs, it is an event. Gospel is not something we do, it is something done unto us. “ The same
Spirit that moved over chaos and created the universe moves over you, and me;
us. It is seismic. It transforms people into doers of justice,
sources of mercy, people of prayer, dreamers, and visionaries—CHRIST!
I like the way the
prophet Ezekiel describes gospel in the OLD TESTAMENT, Chapter 36:26---“26 I'll give you a new heart, put a new spirit
in you. I'll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart
that's God-willed, not self-willed. 27 I'll put my Spirit in you and
make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.”
Again I ask you—do we
have to be young church to experience the gospel? Do we have to be a large church—with a youth
group and a choir—to be visited by the Holy Spirit of God—and yield to its
direction?
You see, the problem isn’t that God has left
the building. The problem is that we are
feeling less than; we are feeling sorry for ourselves. We
are measuring ourselves against our past and we are coming out losers. And we won’t touch the building, we won’t
become better stewards of what we have--- because we think our past is coming
back; we think our youth and our numbers are coming back. Isn’t that what we lift our hands to heaven
for, praying…”God give us more people.
God give us children. Give us all
of those things that make us happy disciples.”
Which means our faith isn’t in the ever-present Spirit of God. Our faith is in numbers, youth, and money…our
memories, our past…our human assurances.
My husband serves the
Joliet Christian Church. When he met
them seven years ago there were 14 persons in worship. Now they often have 24 persons in
worship. They are so excited. If they could have 33 persons in worship and
69 persons participating in the life of the church, like we do, well, they’d be
huge.
When Jesus moved into
the mission of God—loving, lifting, feeding, healing, suffering for and with…he
chose 12 persons. Twelve persons to love
the world into a better place.
Understand what I am saying? We’ve
got to get out from underneath our past and we’ve got to get out from
underneath our miss-placed since of power.
We cannot control anything. We
cannot make our children be church with us but we’ve tried. We experimented with paying young persons to
be a part of us, but it didn’t work. Thank God it didn’t work! And all we are
doing right now is throwing money at our general fund and renew thy church
fund, and it’s not working either. We
can’t buy youth and we can’t buy participation.
We are vulnerable.
In our lesson from 2 Corinthians Paul says
vulnerability is good. It
keeps us on our toes. It keeps us
looking at God, the source of real power, and keeps us from looking at
ourselves, the source of human assurances.
He didn’t court vulnerability, however, so he says don’t give him credit
for being a super holy person.
What he courted was a God who would take away
his affliction, whatever it is. Many
scholars think Paul was burdened with epilepsy, but we really don’t know. All we know is that something had him and he
really, really didn’t want it. So he
begged God all of the time to take his pain away. What he encountered instead was a God who
told him, “I use your affliction to keep you close to me. The answer to unanswered prayer is me. My
grace is sufficient.” THIS is grace; not
grace as approval but grace as the very real presence of our very real God
showing up in our very real, very imperfect lives.
Could that be true for
us as church, perhaps, that God uses our current size and age to keep us close
to God? If God threw more money and people at us, would that make us gospel
people---people leaning in to hear who God is asking us to love and serve in
this time and place in 2015---or would we experience the opposite—would we be
satisfied, comfortable—and therefore full of ourselves?
A couple of years ago
I was leading worship when I was overcome by something someone had said to
me. Her words “snuck in.” A member of our church who has since left our
fellowship said, “You were supposed to bring us children, young people.” As I broke the bread and lifted the cup I
felt tears welling up in my eyes. I
looked out at the congregation, the thirty or so gathered, and I thought to
myself, “Dana, you are a failure as a pastor.”
But knowing I had to hold safe space for the congregation in worship and
that I had to be very professional, I fought back the tears. But the words were still there. My heart was
so heavy…when these words came to me, “Dana,
if you had managed to pack the house in the first year you were here, you would
have thought that you had done that.”
We learn humility
through humiliation.
Through his weakness, not his strength, Paul
discovered that God is love and love shows up with a word that’s trustworthy. The
work of the church is to listen for God’s word offered through the mighty Holy
Spirit of God; to discover what our purpose is today in the larger purpose of
God’s restoring the creation. Yesterday
it was worship and Sunday School and youth groups and fellowship groups. Today it is, well, have we asked? It doesn’t take money, or a young heart, or a
building, or a large worship service, or a coffee fellowship hour to ask God
what our purpose is—it takes a sincere heart.
Sincerity with God, I have learned, is the
result of running out of me—so I could run INTO God. It’s only when we truly realize that we have
no power that we reach out to who does have power—and do what God wants, not
what we want. Sincerity is hard work—it
takes a very disciplined heart to hear the word of God. God speaks softly, and quickly; God speaks
through earthly messengers and dreams.
What the Apostle Paul wants to know is if we
are up to the task…will we trade telling God what we want for asking God what
God wants…will we trade denial for reality…will we let go of our past for God’s
company in the present? Will we be open
to gospel?
Prayer: Amazing God, as the church calendar moves
from Easter to Pentecost, the season when we celebrate the Spirit-fueled faith
community, help us to move from self-pity to empowerment—we are not small in
your eyes, or old, or poor—we are yours—you have your eye on us and our
neighborhood—your Spirit is bearing down—wondering—if we’ll ask you what we can
do you for you? Gracious God, what can
we do for you? Amen.
(This sermon was preached by Reverend Dana Keener at Billings Central Christian Church on May 24, 2015.)
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