Preached By: Pastor Rick Pearson
Scripture Text: Mark 1:9-11, 14-15
at College UMC and North Oxnard UMC
August 13, 2017
Prayer – “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.”
Someone once said – and that someone might have been Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or some even say, Winston Churchill – but someone once said that “Great Britain and the United States are two countries divided by a common language.”
Well, I think you could also say that Christianity is a collection of religions divided by a common Lord.
Let me tell you about this conversation I had years ago that may illustrate my point. A man walked up to me (I suppose I was in my twenties at the time) and asked me if I was a Christian. I said, “Yes, I am a Methodist.”
He said he didn’t care if I belonged to a Church or not, but was I a Christian.
I asked him how he defined “Christian”. He said, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” I said, “Yes” and that seemed to satisfy him.
I was greatly relieved because if he had pushed the issue much harder we probably would have found significant areas of disagreement about what we each meant by those words. But at least I was being honest in my response.
When I was confirmed – probably in about 1963 or 1964 – I am sure that I responded to the membership vows that were in the then-current Methodist hymnal. I looked back in my old hymnals to confirm the wording and it is this: “Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and pledge your allegiance to his kingdom?” and the answer is, “I do.”
Now I am aware that that vow lacks the word “personal” – my personal Lord and Savior – but otherwise all the words seem to be there.
But for some Christians, those words – in that order – are vital to being a Christian. If you have said them, you are a Christian – if you haven’t said them, you are not.
Those words are so vital to some that I once had a member of a congregation I served who requested that all people who joined the Church face the congregation and recite those words – “I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.”
When I said that people did affirm those words when they said “I do” to the sentence I read earlier – “Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and pledge your allegiance to his kingdom?” – he said, “No, they can’t just affirm them, they have to say them.”
As you may know by now, my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. She was tireless in her efforts to bring others into the Witness fellowship. One woman in particular, my mother met with just about every week to study and share the Witness message. It was my mother’s fondest wish that this woman would eventually choose to be baptized as a Witness.
I think that this woman, who was in her seventies when my mother began to meet with her, was just lonely and enjoyed my mother’s company. But after about twenty years, when both the woman and my mother were in their early 90s, the woman finally said she was ready to take the plunge, so to speak, and be baptized.
My mother was ecstatic and immediately called an elder from the congregation to go over and get it arranged. My mother’s joy was short-lived, however. After the elder visited the woman he announced that she could not be baptized. It seems that she had started to lose some of her mental acuity and she could not adequately recite back the Witness doctrine to the elder. She could not pass his test so she could not be baptized.
When I was in seminary, there was a recurring joke that would come up every time one of us was struggling to understand what some theologian we were reading was trying to say. The joke went like this:
And Jesus said unto the theologians: “Who do you say that I am?”
They replied: “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed.”
And Jesus answered them, saying: “Huh?”
It seems that when you mention a Church today – any Church – the first question someone asks is, “What does that Church believe – what are its doctrines?” We have come to believe that doctrines make the Church – if you don’t have a creed, you don’t have a Church.
But it is helpful to remember that followers of Jesus got along for more than 300 years without a creed – without a formal doctrine.
For 300 years a three-word statement sufficed to identify a Christian – a follower of Jesus. That statement is “Jesus is Lord.”
But that statement was not a theological statement, per se. Those early Christians did not sit around and discuss what are the theological implications of the statement, “Jesus is Lord.”
That is because being a follower of Jesus was not so much about belief as it was about action. It was not about a statement of faith but a faithful life. It was not about what you said. It was about what you did.
We think that the Churches we see today – in all their many forms and architectures – are what the Church was in those first three centuries. We believe that those early followers set up a structure – including a real structure, a building. That they gathered in that building and they invited others to come to that building and join them and as the Church grew the buildings became larger to accommodate all the people who were joining the Church.
And we think that what attracted the people to these structures was the compelling message that they preached – the doctrines that they proclaimed.
But what attracted people was not the structure and doctrines of the Church. There was no structure – if by structure you mean a building. And there was no structure if by structure you mean an organization.
There was no building. There was no clergy. There was no creed or statement of belief.
There was just that statement “Jesus is Lord.” And that statement was not a belief about Jesus, it was an organizing principle about living one’s life.
Making Christianity about belief – about creeds and statements of faith – was the price that Christians paid to have the government stop killing them. When Constantine recognized the Church, the first thing he made Christians do was formalize their beliefs.
He called together whoever he could identify as a leader in the church and he brought them, at his expense, to a lavish resort in the town of Nicaea on a lake near the Black Sea. He wined them and dined them extravagantly.
But he told them they could not leave until they agreed on a concise statement of faith that would be binding on all Christians. They debated and argued and hammered out a statement that today we call the Nicene Creed.
And the first thing they did was to begin killing those who did not agree with it. Within the blink of an eye, Christians went from being killed by the government to being killed by each other.
The Church suddenly became a structure – with buildings – great buildings – and with an organization structure of clergy and hierarchy.
Titles like bishop and elder and deacon, which had formerly been offices which described action in the lives of Christian communities, became positions of power and authority.
I am not suggesting that we can wipe away seventeen hundred years of the Church as we know it today. But I do want us to remember that what we call “the Church” would be completely unrecognizable to a follower of Jesus who lived in the first three hundred years following Jesus life.
Because – as I have been saying repeatedly for the last three weeks – for those Christians – for those followers of Jesus – the Church was the collection of individuals who were trying – day in and day out – to live in the kingdom of God and not in the Empire that ruled the land.
“Jesus is Lord” is not a statement of belief about the divinity of Jesus. It is a statement that I choose to follow Jesus and not Caesar. That Jesus claims my allegiance and not Caesar. It is a statement about how I act in the world and not a statement of theological belief.
We have been talking for the past month about what the Church – the people of God – would look like if we understood the Church to be the people of God in mission rather than a building or an institution.
We have said that if the Church were truly in mission, our focus would be external rather than internal. We have said that if the Church were truly in mission our focus would be on the development of people rather than on the development of programs.
And today we say that if the Church were truly in mission, our focus would be on living in the Kingdom of God rather than living in the Empire of our age.
Yes, living in the Kingdom of God has grand goals and aims – that all are feed – that all have shelter – that all live in peace and security. And we need to continue to find ways to make this happen both locally and globally.
But living in the Kingdom of God also has simple aims. It means that in the minute to minute decisions that we make every day, we live out the twin commandments of Jesus to love God and love our neighbor.
Our focus is not to convince people of the rightness of our opinions so that they will join our Church structure. Our focus is not to convince people of the rightness of our beliefs so that they will believe as we do and that that convergence of beliefs will somehow make us both more pleasing to God.
Our focus should be on loving them as they are – where they are. Our focus should be on living in such a way that they will experience the love of God – the acceptance of God – the grace of God – through us.
People do not experience the grace of God simply because we tell them that God loves them. People experience the grace of God because they see the grace of God in us.
But whatever we may think and do about prayer we can find ways to live in the Kingdom of God now. A couple of years, Anne Ward and Ginger Novstrup (two members over at North Oxnard) reminded me what it means to live in the Kingdom of God right now. They did it by sharing this Facebook post.
“When you find yourself to the position to help someone, be happy and feel blessed because GOD is answering that person’s prayer through you.
Remember: Our purpose on earth is not to get lost in the dark but to light to others, so that they may find [a] way through us…”
Being a blessing to others. Being the answer to another’s prayer. That is what it means to be the Church. To be the people of God.
This morning we heard some words read from the very first chapter of the very first Gospel ever written. Within the first couple of hundred words of that first Gospel, Mark summarizes all of Jesus message in just a couple of sentences. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
The Kingdom of God. We hear those words and we immediately think, “If God has a Kingdom, then God must be a King.” So you might be surprised to hear that nowhere – in any of the four Gospels – is Jesus recorded to ever refer to God as King. Not once.
When I first heard that statement, I wouldn’t believe it. I mean, we speak of God as King all the time. Our opening hymn this morning was “Lead On, O King Eternal.” To prove the person wrong I got out my concordance – that reference book that tells you every instance of the use of a word in the Bible.
You know what? Jesus is never quoted in any of the Gospels as calling God “King.” Not once.
On the other hand, Jesus calls God “Father” about a hundred times – including, of course, when he taught us how to pray.
To be more precise, Jesus called God, “Abba” which is an Aramaic word for Father – but not exactly Father. Abba is a child’s word for God. So a much better translation would be that Jesus referred to God as “Poppa” or “Daddy.”
So, if Jesus often called God Poppa but never King, why would he speak of God’s Kingdom? Well, the word that is translated Kingdom can mean a wider range of ideas than just Kingdom. Basilea (the Greek word) can mean any of the many ways that people structure themselves – Kingdom, country, state, republic. If we translate it as Kingdom, we think of God as King. If we translate it as State of God, we think of God as Governor. If we translate it as Republic, perhaps we think of God as President.
But if we think of God as our loving Poppa – as Jesus clearly did – then God is the head of the family – the head of the household.
So, instead of announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God – where rules God as King – Jesus is inviting us to be a part of the household of God – where God cares for us as our loving Poppa.
In a Kingdom, we owe obedience and loyalty to the King. But in a household – in a family – we owe love to the Poppa and mutual respect and support to all the other members of the household.
Remember, “When you find yourself to the position to help someone, be happy and feel blessed because GOD is answering that person’s prayer through you.” That person whom you help is not your fellow citizen in the Kingdom of God. That person you help is your brother or sister in the family of God because you have the same Poppa.
That is the Good News that Jesus preached and taught – the Good News that Jesus called us to believe and to be faithful to. The Church is that visible family of God – all of those brothers and sisters of Jesus who have the same Poppa. Jesus wants us to be that family. Jesus wants us to be that Church.
I started this morning with the question that the man asked me, “Are you a Christian?”
Sometimes people ask it a different way. They ask, “Do you go to Church?” That is the wrong question. Don’t GO to Church.
Be the Church.
Amen.
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