Jesus and his disciples
are headed for Jerusalem, where he knows perfectly well there will be a major
conflict with the religious authorities, a conflict he expects to lose. He is trying to prepare his disciples for
this reality because it has become his conviction that even if he loses—and losing
in this case probably means death for him—he will ultimately be vindicated and
good news will prevail.
It all seems crazy and
distressing beyond measure, but Jesus believes God is up to something in his
life, and even though that something appears to be utter disaster, it is
actually good news.
Mark says that the
disciples did not understand any of this and were afraid to ask him. Which means, of course, that they did
understand him. If they were afraid,
then they knew enough to have a sense where this was going, but it was not a
way they wished to go.
Instead they were having a
conversation about themselves. Who is
the greatest? Who should be the leader?
Who has the answers?
Jesus is disappointed, to
say the least, by their distraction. No,
he says, everything is upside down in the world I am trying to live and to
teach you to live in. To be the greatest
you have to be willing to be the least. To be the leader who have to be willing
to be the servant. And, as an example,
he holds up a child. In the conversation
they were having, a child is worthless.
A child cannot be great, a child cannot lead, a child does not have
answers. But, Jesus says, a child can be
welcomed, and that welcome will take you to the very heart of God, where the
good news is born.
This story is almost perfectly
applicable to where we are as a church today, and I mean “church” in both the
big picture sense and the local sense.
If there is one question
that dominates the church these days, it is, “How do we reach people out there
in order to get them in here?” It is the
growth question. We’ve been asking this
question for a long time now and some of us have more or less given up. These days this question is often put by our
leaders in terms of whether we are an inward-looking church or an
outward-looking church, or whether we are primarily about maintenance or
mission.
Personally, I have been
hearing about these distinctions for all 21 years of my ordained ministry and
the promise that if we change our focus, everything will be all right. I have, in fact, in the past preached that
particular false gospel. I say false
gospel because it has become clear to me, as it has to many other people,
including Mary Ann, that these are false distinctions. Yes, it is good to be outward-focused, but
you cannot stop being inward-focused. Yes, it is good to prioritize mission
over maintenance, but we cannot exactly stop maintaining our buildings, and
that’s partly because they are the place where a lot of our mission happens!
And this mission vs.
maintenance conversation has the affect among us of having a lot of “who is the
greatest” conversation. Who has the
answers? Who’s got the program that’s working?
I am so tired of clergy meetings where we go around and tell each other
what we are doing, what is working. Frankly,
it’s like showing off our newest shiniest toy. What we don’t talk about is the
legion of broken toys in our closets. If
all our new toys worked, we should have tripled the size of the church in the
last twenty years.
So what is the new
conversation we have to have, the new focus?
It is the Jesus conversation, which means at least two things about
it: it’s is going to be a Good
Friday—Easter conversation (because that’s the shape of Jesus’ life), and it’s
going to turn our world upside down (because that is the work in which Jesus
specializes).
We can discover one of the
bottom-lines of this new conversation in the story from the Gospel this
morning: We have to stop talking about
ourselves, and by that I mean, we have to stop talking about the church. Here are some words from the Rev. Alan
Roxburgh, a Canadian Anglican priest:
For people asking the [growth] question,
the church remains the focus of attention. The church is a location and a place
where we bring people and certain things happen. Obviously, there are important
elements of being Christians that require us to gather in a place to do certain
things, like the sacraments,…formation in Christian practices, and so on. But this has become the limit of what is
functionally meant by church for too many Christians and their leadership….most
people, including leaders, simply assume that the gospel is about getting to
know Jesus and knowing Jesus means coming to church.
Roxburgh goes on to talk
at some length about Luke chapter 10, a key text in which Jesus sends out the
disciples with the message of the good news.
He then goes on to say:
In terms of the discipleship community
Jesus gathered, it is clear that they were not to function like the disciple
bands of other groups. Instead of turning
inward, like the Essenes huddled together in expectation of some future
tomorrow, Jesus would not allow his disciples to shape themselves around this
option… His disciples, like the Pharisee groups, don’t seem to be focused on
keeping all the regulations of righteousness… Instead, Jesus gathers and sends
out his disciples to announce that God’s future has come among them….Jesus’
work is about being sent out, about leaving places of familiarity, control and
security.
We keep trying to turn
things around by making the church better, fixing whatever it is we are doing
wrong. And we do need to do that, don’t
hear it from me that hospitality, generosity, and stewardship are not
important. They are. But they will not
save us. They are the things that we
need to receive people and help them discern their place in our
communities. But they are not, by and
large, the things that attract.
When I first came to Two
Saints, one of the things I heard from many people was that “This church is one
of the best kept secrets in Rochester.”
When I came to St. Stephen’s with Mary Ann five years ago I heard from
several people, “This church is the best kept secret in Rochester.” Recently I
did some work with the vestry at church of the Ascension up on Lake Avenue, and
several of them told me, “This Church is the best kept secret in Rochester.”
We are awfully good at
keeping secrets.
The only way the secret
gets told, is if we/you tell it, and let me suggest to you that the secret we
need to be telling is not primarily about our churches. It is about the good news. It is about our transformative relationship
with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit or a Higher Power. It is about our lives which are complex
stories of struggle and joy, but lived in the hope of that Good Friday—Easter
pattern that Jesus showed us is the way God works.
As we build relationships
with people, those are the things they want to talk about. The church is just the place where and the
people among whom I get fed on this journey.
And, by the way, you might give it a try.
I believe one of things
our two churches could be doing as a joint project is to learn, to practice,
being in these kinds of conversations, not the formulaic “Are you saved?”
conversations that are at least the stereotype of our evangelical brothers and
sisters, but conversations authentic to us and our tradition of the good news.
Secrets, my friends, most
often are forgotten and die. Telling the
truth—which, granted, is often risky business—sets people free.
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