Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 1/22/2012
Jonah 3:1-5, 10, Mark 1:14-20
Letting Go
As Charlie Skinner shared a few minutes ago, we are now entering what I think is the most exciting phase of our strategic planning process – the survey of the congregation. We’ve got a two-week window in which we are asking all of you to go online and fill out a survey. What the leadership will get as a result is a 30 page document with all kinds of charts and graphs that pull your responses together into a coherent form that we can see and understand.
Some of you will remember the cottage meetings of some seven years ago: 32 meetings of fifteen to twenty people designed to help me get to know you and you get to know me, and for us to listen to what was on your hearts. Everything we’ve done these last seven years really started right there, and so much has happened as a result.
Same idea this time, just a different format, and I’m very eager to see the results. I think when we see your feedback and combine it with the demographics we’ve gathered on this community along with what we know of God’s own heart, we are going to see some very clear directions emerge for our congregation. So please, make sure you take the survey in the next couple of weeks. If you need a written version, let us know and we’ll make one available to you.
In the midst of this process and as we prepare for those new directions, I think it is helpful to keep in mind what might be called the “I wish, I won’t” syndrome.
Every church wants to be strong and healthy, and pretty much every church would define that as people in the pews and money in the bank. In an old, established denomination like ours – a denomination that can trace its roots in this country back to the 1700’s – the vast majority of our congregations are well over thirty years old; some of them are a hundred, or a hundred and fifty or even two hundred years old.
All of those churches can look back to a golden era in their history: a time when the church was at its peak and served as the vital center of its community. The issue, of course, is that communities change. Think here of Highland Park, or East Liberty or Millionaires’ Row along 5th Avenue. They aren’t the same communities today as they were fifty or a hundred years ago. And churches that fail to change with those communities, churches that try to hang on to what they’ve always been, end up dying.
This is where we see the “I wish, I won’t” syndrome. Churches want to be healthy. They want to see the pews packed. They mean it when they say “We want to grow.” But they fail to add or even recognize the second clause. “We want to grow, but we don’t want to change.” I wish. I won’t.
I have a friend who accepted a call to a church down in North Carolina. This church was old and well established and had a wonderful history in its community. In recent decades, however, the church had begun to stagnate. The members saw what was going on. They saw their membership getting older and their pews getting emptier, and their budget getting smaller in spite of a significant endowment. They called my friend in the hope that he could help turn things around.
Well he did. What happened in that church over the course of his ministry was nothing short of spectacular. Attendance and giving sky-rocketed, and the church was reaching people it had never reached before. That, as it turned out, was the problem.
One morning when the latest class of new members was being presented to the congregation, one of the long-term members looked at this group of new members who came from a very different social and economic background and he realized he was looking at the future of the church. These people embodied where the church was heading and what it was going to become, and this man decided right there that that it wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t going to allow it to change.
My friend was gone within a year. Today, he’s serving a congregation in Honolulu. That’s called landing on your feet. The congregation, however, is still struggling with all the ramifications of what happened of that terrible time. I wish. I won’t.
The point here is that congregations get in trouble when they engage in that kind of thinking. And it’s not just congregations that do it. We can be every bit as guilty ourselves. “I wish I was closer to God, but I don’t want to change. I don’t want to do anything differently.”
That’s where Jonah is in our first lesson this morning. He was close enough to God to recognize God’s voice. When God called he understood exactly what God was saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” And what did he do? He went in exactly the opposite direction. He loved God enough to recognize God’s voice, but he didn’t want to change. He didn’t want to move beyond his own very narrow bounds of who should be in and who should be out.
Jonah, here, embodied the heart of God’s people, Israel. They hated Nineveh, and they hated it because Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and it had been the Assyrians who had conquered Israel and leveled Samaria years before. No good Jew would ever want anything good to happen to Nineveh. If God wanted to wipe them out, then that was great news. It was cause for rejoicing. The last thing Jonah or any good Jew wanted was to see Nineveh repent and so be saved from God’s wrath. And so he ran.
Unlike all the other prophetic books in Scripture, this book of Jonah doesn’t feature the oracles of the prophet. His whole message is captured in a single line, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” No, this book is about the prophet himself. It is his story that’s the real message here, and the message is that God’s vision for humanity is bigger than the Jewish people alone. God cares about all humanity.
This is a message that goes all the way back to that moment when God first called Abram, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).
Not just you and your family. And not just some of the families. But through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. That is the purpose, that’s the end towards which God is moving.
We see it again two generations later. Jacob, Abram’s grandson is running away from his brother. On his way to Haran, he stops for the night and lies down to rest. And that’s the night when he dreams of the great ladder connecting heaven and earth, and sees angels ascending and descending upon it. God comes up beside him in that vision and speaks to him, promising him descendants, promising him the very land on which he is lying, and then God adds, “and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Genesis 28:14).
It has always been about the bigger vision. It has never been about just the covenant community, but what God was going to do through that community to reach all humanity, to reach all the peoples of the earth. That’s where Jonah and the people of Israel missed it. They lost track of the mission. They had lost track of God’s own heart for all the peoples of the earth.
We see this truth reflected in our second lesson this morning. Jesus came, we are told, proclaiming the good news of God. The Greek here is “euangelion” – “eu,” meaning well or good, and angelon meaning message or messenger. So literally, here, a “good message.”
There is nothing good about a message that condemns people, any people, to eternal damnation. There is nothing good in the news that God favors one group of people but hates another. That’s not the gospel. That’s not the message that Jesus proclaimed. No, Mark sums it up in the fifteenth verse of our text, “The Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
The Kingdom of God is near. That realm where God is present, where God’s will is done and life is experienced at its very best, is here. It is all around us. And this life, this kingdom, is accessible not just to some, but to everyone. It is open to everyone who will turn and embrace this invitation that Jesus is offering.
So what does Jesus invite Simon and Andrew and James and John to do? “Follow me,” he says, “and I will make you fish for people.” Far better and far more accurate than our translation here is the New Jerusalem Bible, “'Come after me and I will make you into fishers of people.” Literally, “make you to become…”
In other words, reaching out to others (fishing) isn’t just something these followers will do. It is who they will become – a part of their very nature – as they experience God’s presence and touch.
Remember the promise to Abram and to Jacob – “through you all the families [or all the nations] of the earth will be blessed”? Here it is actually being fulfilled; God’s message of good news moving out through Jesus’ followers to touch all the peoples of the earth.
This is the part that we so often miss as individuals and in the church today. Maybe it is a reflection of our consumer culture. Or maybe it is all the emphasis on the individual that has emerged in this age. Whatever the reason, so many people come to church these days asking “what’s in it for me.” They come like Jonah, or like the people of Israel in Jonah’s time. We get the “blessed” part, but we forget the second clause of the call: we are blessed to be a blessing.
It is never just about us. As we turn to God we are always going to find God turning us towards those beyond ourselves, those who are out there on the fringes – the needy, the poor, the people it is so easy to forget. Those are our Ninevites. Those are the people God cares so much about and wants us to remember, too.
It is when they focus on themselves and forget or turn away from those people that churches begin to die. It is when we, ourselves, ignore God’s call upon our lives that we stagnate in our own spiritual journeys – that we find ourselves down in the depths, living as it were, in the belly of the whale.
Yes, God wants to bless us. That is this clear and wonderful message of Scripture. But the blessing comes not in hanging on to what we’ve been, but in moving beyond ourselves out into the community and into the world that we, too, might cast our nets and both touch and bless those who live beyond these walls.
