Sermon preached on February 4, 2024, Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and Mark 1:29-39.
Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was incidentally the source of my name. It was his first novel and a breakout hit. He is a pilot by nature and training, though, so after its success, Bach turned back to flying as a career. Eventually, he wrote another novel, Illusions. In its preface, he wrote, “I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won’t even reach for a pencil. But once in a while there’s a great dynamite-burst of flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the throat and gently says, ‘I will not let you go until you set me, in words, on paper.’ That’s how I met Illusions.”
When we speak about a calling, that’s usually what we have in mind. God calls you to do something in particular and won’t let you go. You feel a sense of urgency about it, and it becomes all-consuming. Maybe, like Jonah, you try to avoid your calling, and life falls apart. You find yourself metaphorically swallowed by a great fish, and decide, OK, I’ll do it, I’ll follow my calling.
That’s not the only type of calling, though. A more common form is where you have just a subtle feeling of being on the right path. You feel a little urge to do something, and it feels right. So you do it some more, and it feels even more right. Eventually, you find yourself on a path that is just so natural, you can’t imagine your life any differently. That’s more or less the way I would describe my calling to church leadership. I didn’t have a great vision or anything like that. I just started doing things, and they felt right, so I did some more, and now here I am.
There is a third form of calling, too, similar to what we read in Mark this morning. Jesus did some amazing things, healing Simon’s mother-in-law and many other people. So, people wanted to follow him. Simon and the others who sought Jesus didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. All they knew was that they wanted to be a part of whatever Jesus was doing.
Whatever form your calling takes, the important thing is to act on it. Grow into it. If you don’t know what God is asking you to do, perhaps a little time encountering the scripture together this morning could help.
Paul’s calling was of the first type. He had a dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus. It took him a little while to decipher its meaning, but once he did, he knew he had to act on it. He was called to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles around the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. This was a transformational message in many ways. First, he had to transform Judaism itself. In Judea, the dominant schools of thought within Judaism were fundamentally nationalistic to varying degrees. Most Jews in Judea thought that Jerusalem was the very center of the cosmos, that historical Israel was the essential homeland, and that “real” Jews were descendants of Abraham. Out in the Diaspora, though, Hellenized Jews had a more flexible understanding. Jerusalem and historical Israel still figured largely in their belief system, but so did the local synagogue. Proselytes, that is, Gentiles who converted to Judaism, were somewhat common.
Paul was born in that Hellenized Jewish environment. His encounter with our risen Lord transformed his beliefs even further. Now, he realized that proselytes did not need to become Jewish to become a part of God’s family. Greeks did not need to be circumcised and initiated into Judaism. They just needed to be baptized and welcomed into Christ’s family, which transcends Abraham’s earthly descendants.
So, as Paul wrote in today’s passage, he lived as a Jew among Jews and as a Greek among Greeks. Between his encounter on the road to Damascus and his travels to Corinth and Ephesus and other cities around the Roman Empire, he spent years in study to determine what was essential to participating in God’s kingdom and what was only culturally relevant to being a Jew.
We could read this passage and think, Paul just goes along with whatever people want to do. He’s just some easygoing, you-do-you kind of guy, right? WRONG! Paul never held back when people were violating some important tenet of this newly-developing religion. I would not characterize any of his writings as “gentle.” He was more of a firebrand, never afraid of a confrontation.
Instead, we should see this as encouraging relational evangelism, rather than colonial evangelism. Pastor Dennis talked about relational evangelism a couple of weeks ago. Colonial evangelism is what a lot of Christians did over the past few centuries. Colonial evangelism emerges from a belief that our God is the True God, and the way we understand God is the only way to understand God, and the way we live is the only right way to live in God’s kingdom. There were some great successes over the centuries. One article I read concluded that there was a positive correlation between Christian missionary activity and the strength of democracy among colonized peoples in the Pacific. Missionaries also brought medicine and hygiene practices and many other benefits to primitive societies, and dismantled evil practices like cannibalism and human sacrifice. But along the way, some of them also destroyed local cultures that were supremely life-giving. They destroyed inherited knowledge about the best way to live in that place and ecosystem. They disrupted and destroyed the lives of children. And they paved the way for military conquest that ultimately led to the loss of freedom for millions of people.
Many forms of evangelism in America today are colonial in some sense. They imagine that there is only one right way to live and only one right way to believe and only one right way to follow God, and they insist that everyone join in. This is a major election year, so I feel compelled to remind everyone that Jesus was not a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or anything else. No political party can claim to follow God’s law perfectly. No nation has been specially chosen by God—not the modern state of Israel, not America, none. We have all been chosen to be a part of God’s kingdom. We all have different ways of doing God’s will.
The task before us, then, is to determine what is essential and what is not. Many of the members of this congregation have at some time been ordained an elder or deacon and pledged to be guided by the Book of Confessions and Book of Order. Well, the first chapter of the Book of Order states that “Human beings have no higher goal in life than to glorify and enjoy God now and forever, living in covenant fellowship with God and participating in God’s mission.” It goes on to say that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, who calls the Church into Being. This is essential. The portion of the Book of Order that relates to worship lays out a fourfold ordo, saying that our worship should be structured as Gathering, the Word, the Sacraments, and Sending.
But elsewhere it says, “We acknowledge that all forms of worship are provisional and subject to reformation according to the Word of God.” What that means is, we don’t have to worship in a sanctuary on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am with a piano and organ. We don’t have to center the worship on a sermon where one person talks and everyone else just sits and listens. We don’t need to have a choir. We don’t have to wear robes, or use liturgical colors for our vestments and paraments, or anything else. These are all choices that we have made. They are good choices, and they are meaningful to me as they probably are to most of you gathered here today, but they are not essential.
You know what else is not essential? “Christianese.” That’s the special language we use that marks us as insiders. I just used a bunch of it. What is a sanctuary? Well, the name means someplace holy, but we have taken it to mean a large room marked with symbols of our faith where we gather to worship. What really is the difference between a sanctuary and a chapel? We could use other words, like auditorium. What are paraments and liturgical colors? Paraments are these cloths that we put on the pulpit and table. Oh, a pulpit could just as well be called a podium, I suppose. Liturgy is literally the work of the people, but it has come to mean the words we say in our worship and the seasons of the church and things like that.
OK, those are all churchy words that you probably wouldn’t use in casual conversation. But there are others that have slippery meanings and can push people away from church. Next Monday, a campus group is having a sort of interfaith dialogue. We were trying to decide what topics would be meaningful to people from a wide range of faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, secular humanist. One guy suggested “salvation.” I pushed back against that because there are a LOT of assumptions built into the word. “Salvation” means being saved—but from what? If a person doesn’t come from a specifically Christian background, or doesn’t accept the doctrine of Hell, then “salvation” becomes meaningless. What about “grace”? It’s hard enough to explain what grace is to another Christian, let alone someone outside of a Christian context.
Again in the Book of Order, we find that, “The Church is to be a community of witness, pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Christ Jesus its Lord.” If we want to witness to and transform THE WORLD, then we need to meet people where they are. We cannot simply serve people who are just like us. We need to serve people who need to know the God of love that we know. That means learning to see life from their perspective and speaking to their needs.
I’m a professor, so I’m going to give you homework, but I won’t be collecting it or grading it. I still want you to do it, and yes, it will be on the test, the test that our Lord will give you when the race is run. If you have a specific calling—specific people that you want to serve and with whom you want to share the Gospel—your task this week is to learn as much as you can about their perspective. If you do NOT have a specific calling in mind and you’re still searching for one, choose Millennials in central Missouri. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, so they are right now between 28 and 43 years old. Probably beyond college and into raising families, if they followed the traditional path. Learn all that you can about what they’ve been through in the past decade and what their needs are today. Do not assume that their life at age 40 is like your life was at age 40. If you have kids or grandkids in this age group, do not assume that everyone in that group is like your family. Read articles online. If there’s a good book that you find, tell people about it. Learn all that you can.
And then there’s a second part of your homework. Once you see life through their eyes, the task before you, and the task before all of us, is to show them a path to the God that we know. The path should start where they are, and lead to a life of love and community. Just as you need to know where they are coming from, you need to know what you believe so you know where to lead them. So the second task I’m giving you is to read the Brief Statement of Faith that you should have received on the way in. This was added to our Book of Confessions when the historically northern and southern halves of what is now PC(USA) merged in 1983. It has some great stuff in it. You might not 100% agree with it all, or even understand it all. But I want you to spend some time with it and internalize those tenets of our faith that really resonate with you, the things that reflect your understanding of God, of Christ, of the Church, and of our place in the world. Maybe three or four things that are really, truly meaningful to you.
It’s time now to turn to the Lord’s Table to celebrate the Eucharist. That’s some more Christianese. If you really think about what it is we are about to do, it’s hard to understand, and even harder to explain to an outsider. I’m not sure that anyone really knows what happens here at the Table. But I do know this: Through this Sacrament, Christ is here among us, and the Triune God sustains us. Through this Sacrament, we are connected to the one holy, apostolic, and catholic Church, God’s people in every place and every time. And we are empowered to go forth and build God’s kingdom. Amen.
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