Tilting the Table: The Care and Feeding of Youth

The Orangeburg Series

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Proverbs 22:6; Luke 2:41-52
October 23, 2011

For most of my adult life, I considered successful parenting to be little more than a crapshoot. It starts as a roll of the dice in the gene pool, and out comes a baby. Sometimes it’s 7 or 11 on the very first roll, and you win. But sometimes it’s 2, 3, or 12, and you “crap out.” (That’s technical terminology for losing on your come-out roll, so don’t get upset with me for thinking I just said something ugly. I didn’t. It’s a technical term.) Sometimes there’s not an immediate win or loss, but you just keep on rolling and rolling—4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10—without winning or losing either one. That’s pretty much how I’ve looked at parenting for most of my adult life. Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose; most of the time you just keep on rolling.

Now, I’m very much aware that the image of a crapshoot for the parenting experience doesn’t line up especially well with the famous biblical proverb of fail-safe parenting, “Bring children up in the way they should go, and when they are grown they will never depart from it.” The problem of course, is that there is no such thing as “fail-safe parenting.”

Almost every one of us could identify an example of an unexplainable parenting failure: “How did that child from this family turn out so poorly?” “Those parents brought that child up in the way she should go, but she sure departed from it.” Most of us could also identify at least one unexplainable parenting success as in “How did this child turn out so well from that family?” “Those parents did nothing to bring him up in the way he should go, but he found it anyway.” The biblical proverb is not prescription for fail-safe parenting. There’s no such thing. Instead, it is a description of tilting the table, tipping the odds, in a young person’s favor for turning out well.

Now, you might think that by speaking of “tilting the table” that I’m using yet another unsavory image of a game of chance, and maybe I am. But let me tell you where that image comes from in my family. I first heard it at the dining room table in my maternal grandparents’ home when one evening at dinner I asked for a second helping of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and more gravy, please. And as my grandfather reached for the gravy boat, he said, “Tilt the table toward Jeffrey.” They didn’t tilt it literally, mind you; but here came the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and the gravy all in my direction. And my grandmother added the green-bean casserole for good measure, even though I hadn’t asked for that. Over the years, I heard the expression many more times, and in retrospect, it was about the time the grandsons hit their preteen and teen years that the table started to tilt toward them. “Tilting the table,” then, is about seeing to it that young people are nourished and fed by what they need to grow into the healthy, strong, and faithful adults that God has created and called them to be.

What if I told you that it is possible to significantly reduce the likelihood that young people will engage in high-risk behavior such as problem alcohol use, violence, illicit drug use, and sexual activity? What if I told you it’s not a crap-shoot at all, that in fact we can reduce those behaviors among our young people to single-digit incidences—3% on problem alcohol use, 6% on violence, 1% on illicit drug use, 3% on teen sexual activity. Would you be interested? Every one of us would. The handout in this morning’s order of worship provides a blue-print for tilting the table, for tipping the odds, for feeding and nourishing young people with the social and emotional and spiritual diet they need to avoid negative behaviors and engage in positive behaviors such as succeeding in school, maintaining good health, exhibiting leadership, and valuing diversity.

Search Institute, which produced this free handout has studied more than 2 million young people and children since it was founded in 1990. Search Institute has found that in bringing up youth and children, there are statistically reliable outcomes based on 40 different inputs or “developmental assets,” as they call them. Search Institute research shows that a young person who accumulates 31 or more of these 40 assets reaches a statistical “tipping point,” if you will, toward the avoidance of high-risk behavior and engagement in positive behavior. Unfortunately, the data also show that only 8% of youth and children reach the number of 31 or more that tips them statistically in the right direction. But we can do better than 8%. We can do a lot better than 8%.

That’s why this morning’s sermon comes with a homework assignment for the adults and the youth among us. What I want you to do is to take this insert home with you. Adults, your assignment is to identify which of these assets you can see that each of your children or your grandchildren or your First Baptist youth and children have available to them as they are growing up. Mark them and count them up. And then begin to identify which assets they don’t have that you might be able to help bring to bear in their lives to get them to 31 or more. I want you to look at how you can do that in your family and in your church, and when you’ve finished in your family and your church, move on to your neighborhood and to Orangeburg at large.

Youth, I want you to mark on this page which of these assets you have now, and then I want you to circle the ones you don’t have that you could add either by your own effort or by getting other people to help you in order to get to 31 or more. If you want help, sit down with your parents or your grandparents or your minister or your teacher or a friend and talk about which ones you have and which ones you don’t have and which ones together you could add to your assets.

At Search Institute's website, each of the 40 developmental assets is accompanied by a link to a pull-down menu titled “Take Action” that suggests practical things you can do to cultivate that asset. We can tilt the table, tip the odds, in favor of our young people avoiding negative behaviors and engaging in positive behaviors.

Nowhere in the Bible is tilting the table any better illustrated than in this morning’s gospel lesson. The parents of Jesus leave Jerusalem for their home in Nazareth assuming that their preteen son is in the company of family, friends and neighbors who had traveled together from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the annual Passover festival. A day’s journey later, we read, they realize that he is nowhere to be found among the villagers from Nazareth. Can’t you just hear the panic and the accusatory tone in the parents’ questions to each other: “I thought he was with you!” “Well, I thought you had him!” “Some father you are, Joseph, losing your own son!” “Me? My son? Holy Mary, Mother of God, how could you not know where he is?” So, in a panic, Mary and Joseph rush back to Jerusalem to find Jesus of all places “in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”

What mother or father among us has not at least thought the question that Mary asks her son in v 48: “Child, why have you treated us like this?” And what parent hasn’t heard back some variation or another on what sounds like a typical preteen, self-possessed, smart-aleck answer, “Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?” If I were Joseph, right about then I’d want to throttle him even if he was the son of God.

The first thing we should see in this amusing—and for parents, terrifying—little episode in Scripture is that Mary and Joseph are not trying to bring up their youngster all alone. They are bringing him up in the company of a “group of travelers,” verse 44 says, an entourage composed of “relatives and friends.” Mary and Joseph are surrounded in their parenting by people whom they trust enough to know that their child is just as well off with them as with themselves. This morning’s gospel lesson illustrates the point that it takes more than parents to rear a child successfully.

When I was in high school, my mother would routinely infuriate me on Saturday mornings when she would ask—as though entirely innocently—some question like, “How was your pizza last night?” “Pizza?” I would say. “What pizza?” “At the Village Inn Pizza Parlor. How was your pizza?” “Who told you I was at the Village Inn last night?” And she would always answer, “Oh, a little bird told me.” It’s probably no coincidence that the only kind of hunting I’ve ever done in my life is bird-hunting. Shotgun in hand, I’ve gone after those feathered fiends in retribution for all the surveillance and intelligence they provided my mother.

Search Institute research shows that a young person who “receives support from three or more nonparent adults” has an asset that contributes to the likelihood that she or he will avoid negative behaviors and engage in positive ones. It’s asset #3 in your handout. It doesn’t say anything about surveillance, but it does say that having at least three supportive nonparent adults in a young person’s life—a teacher or coach who takes a special interest in them, a minister, a choir director, an uncle or aunt, a Sunday School teacher, a mentor—tilts the table in the direction of a positive behavioral outcome for a young person. Never underestimate how important it may be in the life of a young person when you take a supportive interest in a young person’s life as a non-parent adult. Let me put it this way: you have no business grousing and complaining about how bad today’s youth are if you aren’t doing anything about it by supporting, befriending, coaching, teaching, or mentoring a young person or two.

In this morning’s gospel lesson there are adults who allow a preteen boy to sit with them and listen to them, and they listen to his questions, and they listen to his answers (Luke 2:46-47). You can talk about the miracles in the Bible all you want, but that may be one of the biggest miracles of all time right there: adults who actually spend time with a preteen child not their own talking with him and listening to him. It’s not surprising that Jesus of Nazareth is said to have “increased in wisdom as he increased in years,” surrounded as he was by adult relatives and friends of his parents and by teachers who took an interest in him.

A second thing that can tilt the table is regular participation in a religious community. Luke 2:41-42 tells us, “Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.” Now, we can’t tell from this passage how involved Mary and Joseph were in the life of the synagogue back home in Nazareth. Luke 4:16 tells us that when Jesus was an adult, it was his weekly “custom” to attend synagogue, so it makes sense to think that Mary and Joseph had taught him that by taking him there weekly when he was young.

Search Institute research shows that being regularly and actively engaged in a religious community is a developmental asset. It’s asset #19 on your handout. More specifically, though, the religious-community asset entails that a “young person spends one or more hours per week in activities in a religious institution.” Notice that the asset says, “spends one or more hours per week.” Not one or two a month. Not one or two a fall or winter or spring or summer. Not one or two a year. That’s not an asset. That’s a flirtation. The research suggests that engagement in a religious community rises to the level of an asset when it reaches “one or more hours [or times] a week.” That’s one of the 31-out-of-40 assets that young people need to tilt the table in a positive direction, and it shows up in Luke 2.

One more. Look at asset #39: “Sense of purpose: Young person reports that ‘my life has a purpose.’” That brings us back to Jesus’ question to his parents: Did you not know “that I must be about my Father’s business?” as the King James Version translates it. Jesus’ parents did not understand what he meant by that, verse 50 tells us, but Luke 2 suggests that as a youngster, Jesus had a sense of purpose in his life, a sense of a calling on his life. Whether they realized it or not, Jesus’ parents and his synagogue and his relatives and his parents’ friends and his hometown of Nazareth had planted and cultivated in him the seed of a sense of purpose and calling in his life that is one of the 31 out of 40 developmental assets that tip a young person’s life in a positive direction.

When young people in the youth ministry of First Baptist Orangeburg identify and explore their gifts, when they are introduced to and nurtured in God’s call on their lives, the table is tilted toward them: the spiritual and emotional and psychological equivalents of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy and green-bean casserole—are all coming to them. In fact, no institution or agency in all of contemporary American society provides as many or as wide a range of opportunities for youth to expand and enhance their developmental assets as a church like First Baptist Orangeburg does. Just look down that list of assets and think about at the things we provide and teach through the youth ministry and wider ministries of this church.

Under “Support,” I’ve already mentioned #3: “Other adult relationships.” Under “Empowerment:” #7: “Community values youth.” #8: “Youth as resources.” #9: “Service to others.” Under “Boundaries and Expectations,” #14: “Adult Role Models.” (Now, I’ve been around churches long enough to know that not every adult in church can be classified as an “adult role model,” but plenty of you can be!) Under “Constructive Use of Time,” #17: “Creative activities” such as children’s choir, #18: “Youth programs” such as Wednesday and Sunday evenings, #19: “Religious community” such as Sunday mornings an hour or more a week.

Look at the “Positive Values” list. Those are biblical and gospel values, folks: #26: “Caring,” #27: “Equality and social justice,” #28: “Integrity,” #29: “Honesty,” #30: “Responsibility,” #31: “Restraint.” We teach those things in spades around here. Under “Social Competencies,” #33: the “Interpersonal competence” of “empathy, sensitivity, and friendship skills.” #34: “Cultural Competence.” Sarah mentioned that developmental asset as something she had gotten from the student ministry here when she introduced the video: “Young person has knowledge of and comfort with people of different cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds.” #35: “Resistance skills”; #36: “Peaceful conflict resolution.” Under “Positive Identity,” at the very least, #39: “Sense of purpose.” Without even stretching, we can identify 19 out of the 31 assets needed to reach the tipping point that turns young people away from negative behaviors and toward positive behaviors. Through our youth ministry and music ministry and missions ministry and educational ministry, along with the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are delivering proven developmental assets to young people.

Now, remember, even for an entire church, there’s no such thing as fail-safe parenting. And it’s our responsibility as parents to get our young people here where they can develop their assets, whether they want to come or not. When our young people get up on Monday morning and say, “I don’t feel like going to school today,” we parents typically say, “You know, I don’t feel like going to work today either. Let’s just stay home.” That’s what we say on Monday morning, isn’t? So why is that exactly what we say on Sunday morning? Excuse me, that’s not parenting; that’s behaving like a teenager instead of an adult. When we exercise our parental responsibility and see to it that our youngsters are where they need to be, the ministries of First Baptist Orangeburg are delivering multiple developmental assets to them.

All those years I had it wrong. It’s not a crap-shoot at all. It’s true that there are unexplainable failures and unexplainable successes. But it is also true that you and I and all of us together can tilt the table toward our young people to feed and nourish and cultivate them to grow into the healthy, strong, and faithful adults that God has created and called them to be. Adults, you have your homework assignment. Youth, you have your homework assignment. Take it home with you and do it. It’s passing the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and gravy and the green-bean casserole. It’s tilting the table toward our youth. Let’s do it so that they too will increase “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

The Sending Church: A Biblical Mandate

The Orangeburg Series

Readers of past posts may recognize sermons in this series. To anyone who may be disappointed to see a "rerun," I apologize. I dare say, however, that for a preacher, revisiting familiar sermonic ground is as delightful an experience as a walk in a familiar wood or a stroll on a favorite beach. (Click on the pic to visit the church's website.)

October 16, 2011
Genesis 12:1-3; Luke 10:1-11,16-20

There are all kinds of churches in the landscape of American Christianity. There are large churches and small churches. There are country churches and city churches. There are old churches and new churches. There are high-church “smells-and-bells” churches, and there are low-church “meet-and-greet” churches. All kinds of churches.

Years ago, my friend and my former boss at Furman University, A.V. Huff, Jr., a South Carolina historian by trade and a Methodist minister by calling told me the story of a Furman student who came to him for counsel. The student felt called to the ministry, but he also felt confused about what kind of church he was being called to. He told A.V. that he was wrestling with whether to remain Methodist, as he had grown up, or to become Episcopalian, as he had been introduced to by friends and a favorite professor while at Furman. The young man had done his homework, and he laid out for A.V. the argument that he was having with himself over Methodist and Episcopalian theology and ecclesiology and which was better.

When he finished his lengthy monologue on the merits of being Methodist and the merits of being Episcopalian, he finally asked A.V., “How do you decide which way to go on a question as important as this one is?” To which A.V. responded, “It’s very simple, actually. You need to decide whether you want to spend the rest of your life going to pot-luck suppers or going to cocktail parties.” There are pot-luck-supper churches and there are cocktail-party churches. There are all kinds of churches in the landscape of American Christianity.

Not so long ago, it was enough to identify churches by their middle name: First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, St. Andrews United Methodist Church, Holy Trinity Catholic Church, and so on. These days, there are still “middle-name churches,” churches for whom their identity is primarily defined by their denominational brand. The most important thing to those churches is that they are Lutheran, or they are Episcopalian or they are Baptist. It used to be that knowing a church’s middle name was enough to know what kind of church it was. But times have changed.

The landscape of American Christianity has shifted dramatically over the last 40 years, and among the most dramatic shifts is a decrease in the importance of middle names when people are looking at a church. These days, people choose a church less for its form and more for its function. People are looking less at middle names and more at missions. If we look at functions instead of forms, if we look at missions instead of middle names, we could say that along with “middle-name churches,” there are four other types of churches these days.

In addition to the middle-name church, there is the “member church.” The primary function of a “member church” is the care and feeding of the people who have signed up to be members. You can always tell a member church by the way the people in it introduce themselves. “Hi, I’m Bob. I’ve been a member here 42 years.” “My name is Alice. I’ve been a member here 11 years.” People in member churches don’t identify themselves by the ministries and the missions they are engaged in through their church. They don’t introduce themselves by saying things such as, “I sing in the choir” [on the praise team], or “I teach children’s Sunday School,” or “I work in the soup kitchen,” or “I volunteer at the FLC.” The most important thing in a member church is how long it’s been since you signed up for the care and feeding of the member church.

Middle-name churches and member churches have been around for a long time. A third type of church was introduced to the American religious landscape about 40 years ago. It’s called a “seeker church.” The seeker church was originally developed in the 1970s as an evangelistic tool to reach a particular group of people whom observers of American religious life call “seekers.” “Seekers” are people who are seeking spiritual fulfillment but who haven’t found it in middle-name churches or member churches. Seeker churches were designed to attract people with no previous experience in the great and lasting traditions of the Christian faith. Seeker churches were created to provide an “entry-level” Christianity that contemporary unbelievers could understand and be comfortable with. A seeker church is not designed for people who have already found Christ and profess the Christian faith but to attract unbelievers who are still searching. The seeker church.

A fourth type of church is the “disciple church.” Disciple churches are designed primarily to teach and equip—or “disciple”—people who have already found Christ. Disciple churches focus on turning people who have professed the Christian faith into people who understand and live by the Christian faith that they have professed. The worship of disciple churches is designed to nurture believers in traditions that are centuries old, to turn believers into followers of Jesus. Disciple churches are essentially “program” churches. They offer “programs” in Christian Education and Spiritual Formation and Faith Development, Bible studies and book studies and denominational studies and all manner of things to help people who have professed faith to understand their faith and live by their faith. The disciple church.

There is a fifth type of church in the American landscape that I’m going to call the “sending church.” The biblical mandate for the “sending church” is found, among other places, in the mission of the seventy in the tenth chapter of the gospel according to Luke. If you look at the beginning of Luke 10, what you see first are verbs of sending and going. Verse 1 tells us that Jesus “sent them,” apesteilen in Greek. The English word “apostle,” which means “one who is sent” on a mission on behalf of someone else, comes from the same root word as the verb apesteilen, Jesus sent them. In verse 2, Jesus says to the 70, “ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers,” “send out,” ekbale in Greek. Ekbale means to “throw,” “to cast,” to sling ’em out there. Then in verse 3, Jesus says, “Go on!” “Go!” “Scram!” And then he says, “I am sending you,” apostello. It’s the “apostle”-word again, one who is sent on a mission on behalf of someone else. Four times in three verses: “send,” “throw,” “go,” “send.” It doesn’t look as though Jesus is trying to draw a crowd or maintain a crowd; it looks as though Jesus is in the business of sending a crowd.

In fact, sending looks to be the business of God from the book of Genesis on. In Genesis 12:1, the call of Abraham, “the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go!’” “‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’” God whom we worship and serve has always been a sending God. Do you remember last Sunday’s OT lesson from Isaiah 6:1-8, our model for the drama of worship, in which God asks, “Whom shall I send? And who will go?” Those of you who were in the Bible study on the book of Exodus last Wednesday evening will remember God saying to Moses at the burning bush, “I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). God whom we worship and serve has always been a sending God.

So it stands to reason that if First Baptist Orangeburg is in the business, as it were, of “building a community that glorifies God and reflects Jesus Christ,” as the mission statement of this congregation says, then we, too, must be in the business of sending. Not just middle-naming. Not just membering. Not just seeking. Not just discipling. But sending also.

I want us to look this morning at the “mission of the seventy” in Luke 10 as a biblical mandate for a sending church. The first thing to see about this biblical mandate is that a sending church has a global vision of its mission. Why are there “70”? Why not 64? Why not 36? Why not 120? Why 70? Over the centuries of Christian interpretation of the gospel of Luke, there have been a variety of proposals to explain the number 70. Here’s the one I think fits Luke’s gospel best. Way back in Genesis 10 after the great flood, we read that the descendants of Noah spread abroad “in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations” (Genesis 10:5,20,31). “These are the families of Noah’s sons,” says Genesis 10:32, “according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” And guess how many families there are in Genesis 10? That’s right: 70. The number 70 in Luke 10 points back to all the families of the earth in Genesis 10.

Now look at what the Lord says to Abram in Genesis 12:3 when God calls and sends Abram: “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Abraham is sent to bless and to be a blessing to “all the families of the earth.” Now look at what Jesus tells the seventy that they are to do first when they go out. “Whatever house you enter,” Jesus says, “first say, ‘Peace be to this house!’” Speak shalom to it, Jesus says (Luke 10:5). Before you know anything about the household, good, bad, or indifferent, says Jesus, pronounce a blessing upon it: “The peace of God be to this house!” Just like the mission of Abraham who was to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, the mission of the followers of Jesus is to pronounce a blessing on every household to which they come: “The peace of God be with you.” The sending of the seventy, like the sending Abraham, is a global vision of blessing to all the families of the earth. That’s the global vision of a sending church that is mandated in Luke 10.

The second thing to see about this biblical mandate is that a sending church has a holistic vision of the gospel. A holistic vision. In verse 9, Jesus instructs the seventy to do two things: cure the sick and proclaim the gospel. Jesus says, “cure the sick who are there” and then Jesus says, say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” Jesus tells his followers to meet both the physical needs—cure the sick—and meet the spiritual needs—proclaim the good news—both of them. Not just one of them. Both of them. That’s the great both/and of Jesus. The sending church both proclaims the gospel and feeds the hungry, gives a drink to thirsty, clothes the naked, welcomes the stranger, cares for sick, and visits the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46). The great both/and of Jesus, is the holistic vision of the sending church mandated in Luke 10.

This morning while the offering was being collected, we saw a video that highlights the missions efforts of this church. It highlighted ways in which this congregation responds to Jesus’ mandate in Luke 10 to meet the physical and spiritual needs of people outside these four walls. That’s missions. The root meaning of our English word “mission” is “to send.” Instead of coming from the Greek verb apostello as in apostle, it comes from the Latin verb mittere, “to send,” and the Latin noun missio, “the act of sending”; and it’s exactly the word that is used in the Vulgate, the great Latin translation of Luke 10: “I am sending you.” “I am giving you a mission,” Jesus says. If Luke 10 is any indication, being sent—missions—is at the heart of the church. Show me a church without a heart for missions, and I’ll show you a church on life support. Show me a church without a heartbeat for missions, and I’ll show you a church without a pulse.

There’s nothing wrong with being proud our middle name, and there is every good reason to teach and to learn and to cultivate in the world this congregation’s great old General Baptist understanding of the gospel that is grounded in John 3:16, that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever [whosoever, mind you!] believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Our middle name says, “whosoever will,” and that’s a part of our mission. Taking good care of the members of this congregation is a good thing. We come together to be “mutually encouraged by each other’s faith,” as Paul says in Romans 1:12, and to “encourage one another and build up each other,” as he says in 1 Thessalonians 5:11. Care for our members is a part of our mission. Certain parts of this congregation’s worship and its ministry are specifically designed to communicate to seekers—unbelievers—and engage them in the gospel of Jesus Christ in ways they can understand and connect to. That’s a good thing. It’s part of our mission. Various programs of this church are designed to disciple: to teach, to equip, and to empower believers to understand and live the faith that we profess. That’s a part of our mission.

But Luke 10 reminds us on this morning of missions emphasis that following Jesus means not just gathering here and drawing people in but being sent out into the world to share the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ by addressing both physical and spiritual needs of people to whom God sends us. Jesus said, “I am sending you out.” “Go!” “Go on!” “Scram!” “Get out there!”


Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Showing Up: Worship as the First Work of the Faithful

The Orangeburg Series

Readers of past posts may recognize sermons in this series. To anyone who may be disappointed to see a "rerun," I apologize. I dare say, however, that for a preacher, revisiting familiar sermonic ground is as delightful an experience as a walk in a familiar wood or a stroll on a favorite beach.

October 9, 2011
Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 12:1-2

One book in the New Testament has been responsible for more revolutions, reformations, revivals, and conversions than any other book in the history of the Christian faith.

For example, in September of the year 386, a young professor of rhetoric at the university of Milan sat despondently in a garden. Through tears of frustration at his confusion over the character and quality his life—or the lack thereof—he read the verses, “Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, nor in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” The young professor wrote this about his encounter with those verses: “No further would I read, nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.” His name was Augustine, and he went on from that experience in the garden to became the first great theologian of the Christian faith—and a saint, no less.

Fast-forward to the early 1500s. An Augustinian monk and university professor was reading the same New Testament book and struggling with a particular expression in it: the “righteousness of God.” He wrote, “Night and day I pondered until . . . I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, [God] justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before ‘the righteousness of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage . . . became to me a gateway to heaven.” From reading this book, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation and changed the course of the history of the Christian church.

One more example. Two hundred years after Luther, on an evening in May in 1738, an Englishman in his 30s sat in a church on Aldersgate Street in London and listened to the Preface to Luther’s commentary on this book read out loud. He wrote in his journal about that evening: “About a quarter before nine, while [Luther’s Preface] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken my sins away, even mine; and saved me from the law of sin and death.” From this “Aldersgate conversion” in which his “heart felt strangely warmed,” John Wesley went on to found the Christian movement that became the Methodist church, and once again this one book was responsible for a revolutionary new course in Christian faith and practice.

It is no wonder that the great British New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce wrote in the introduction to his commentary, “There is no telling what may happen when people begin to study the Epistle to the Romans.” Paul’s letter to the Romans is responsible for more revolutions, reformations, revivals, and conversions than any other book in the history of the Christian faith.

This morning, we’re only looking at two verses from Romans, but as we saw in the case of Augustine, it only took two verses to put a university professor on the road to sainthood! So “there is no telling what may happen,” even if we read only two verses. Romans 12:1-2 mark a new beginning in the book. In chapters 1-11, the apostle Paul lays out great ideas of the Christian faith: the righteousness of God, justification by faith, the nature of sin, the nature of grace, the nature of the gospel, the work of Jesus Christ in salvation, and many more. But in Romans 12:1-2, Paul turns from great ideas to great and faithful living in the light of those great ideas. After all, what good are great ideas if you don’t put them into practice? That’s what Paul calls us to do beginning in Romans 12:1: put the faith we profess into practice.

According to Paul, putting the faith we profess into practice begins with worship. “I appeal to . . . you, brothers and sisters, . . . to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” So the first work of the faithful is worship. We gather in this place in the morning of every first day of the week to worship God, because in our work-week, as it were, our first work is worship.

Maybe you’ve heard the conventional wisdom that “90% of success is just showing up.” “90% of success is just showing up.” I have to admit that I usually consider that statement not conventional wisdom but conventional stupidity. It takes a whole lot more to succeed than just showing up. But this morning, at the risk of attracting the ire of preachers and pastors and teachers and employers the world over, I’m going to endorse the conventional stupidity that “90% of success is just showing up.”

Here’s why. First, if you don’t show up, you can’t possibly succeed, so “just showing up” is in fact the foundation for success. Second, the first thing the apostle Paul says when he turns from talking about great theological ideas to talk about great and faithful living is “prez-ent your bodies.” Prez-ent. Be there. Now, I know as well as you do that the correct pronunciation is “pre-zent.” But you cannot pre-zent anything if you are not prez-ent.

When it comes to worship, the common stupidity turns out to be pretty wise. 90% is prez-enting “your body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Congratulations. You are 90% there just by being here. If you are listening on the radio because you can’t get here, you are 90% here by being there where you can participate by hearing. But none of us, no matter where we are, is where we need to be yet.

But before we move on from where we are to where we need to be, let’s take a moment to look at here. I cannot tell you how important it is to see and to understand that according to Paul we don’t come to worship “to get something out of it.” We come to worship to give something to God. The something we come to worship to give to God is ourselves: “present your body as a living sacrifice . . . to God.” If you came to worship this morning in order to get something out of it, then you came here putting yourself ahead of God, and that’s idolatry. When God said in the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before me,” that includes the god of self who comes to worship thinking that worship is about what I get out of it instead of about what I give to God first, foremost, and forever.

In a famous description of worship that I’m sure you’ve heard before but that we can’t hear often enough, the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized worship as a play on a stage with actors, prompters, and an audience. The actors in the drama of worship are everyone in the congregation gathered to “exalt God” as the mission statement of this congregation says of worship. You are the actors in worship prez-enting and pre-zenting “your bodies as living sacrifices . . . to God.” That’s what you are doing right now. The leaders in worship—the preacher, the praise team or the choir, the deacons, the ushers, whoever reads Scripture or leads in prayer—are all merely prompters, people whose job is to prompt you the actors as you act out your part and deliver your lines for the audience who is God. The music that is sung or played in worship is not sung or played for us as though we were the audience. It is sung and played as an offering to God who is the audience. The sermon is not offered to you for your approval or disapproval. The sermon is offered to God for God’s approval or disapproval and as a prompt—a prompt for you to respond to God by offering yourself to God.

Look at the drama of worship in Isaiah 6 that we heard read this morning. If you have a Bible with you, open it to Isaiah 6. In Isaiah 6, the prophet Isaiah is present for worship in the temple in Jerusalem—Isaiah has done his 90%. But the more import presence than the presence of Isaiah in the temple is the presence of God: Isaiah “saw the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up,” verse 1 says. The audience—God—is present, and the drama of worship begins in v 3 with the praise of God in a Hebrew praise chorus: qadosh qadosh qadosh adonai tzebaoth melo’ kol ha’aretz kebodo, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” That song of praise wasn’t sung for Isaiah; Isaiah wasn’t the audience. It was sung for God; God is the audience and the object of praise in worship.

The praise of God in verse 3 is followed by a confession of sin in verse 5: “Woe is me,” says Isaiah, “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Any time we catch even the slightest glimpse of the holiness and the glory of God we cannot help but recognize our own unholiness. But by God’s mercy and by God’s grace, “If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” as 1 John 1:9 says. And so the confession of sin in Isaiah 6:5 is followed by the forgiveness of sin in verse 8: “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out,” Isaiah is told.

After praise and confession and forgiveness, worship continues with a word from God, in this case, a question that is a call: “Whom shall I send, and who will go?” comes the word. And worship is not complete until the worshippers respond: “Here am I! Send me!” Isaiah answers in response to the word that he has heard. Praise. Confession of sin. Assurance of forgiveness. Proclamation of the word. Response to the word. That’s the movement of the drama of worship, and 90% of it is getting yourself here on stage to play your part for God. Congratulations! But even if showing up is 90% of success, it’s only 90% of success; and the other 10% makes all the difference.

Look at verse 2 of Romans 12: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The other 10% is being changed by God, being “transformed,” being renewed, being revolutionized, being reformed, being revived, being converted. Did you come here to be changed today? Did you come here to be transformed, renewed, revolutionized, reformed, revived, converted? I did. I walked into this room to offer myself to God—that’s the 90%—and I walked into this room to be transformed, re-formed, re-newed, revived, converted by God—that’s the 10%, the difference that makes a difference in my life and yours.

When we give ourselves over to God as a living sacrifice, God never fails to give our selves back to us, changed, converted, revived, renewed, re-formed, transformed, in the direction of God’s will, which Paul defines as “what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Remember what F.F. Bruce said: “There is no telling what may happen when people begin to study the Epistle to the Romans”? Well, there’s also no telling what may happen when people begin to worship, when people begin to prez-ent and pre-zent themselves, body and mind, “as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.” Because when we do, God changes us.

I don’t happen to know what kind of change needs to happen in your life this morning. Maybe you are like Augustine, disappointed or despondent in the character and quality of your life, and you need an entirely new direction, a fresh new start. What you need this morning is for “clear light” to flood your “heart and all the darkness of doubt” to vanish away. Maybe you are like Luther, struggling with something that just doesn’t makes sense to you. And what you need is to feel yourself “reborn . . . so that the very thing that is filling you with confusion or pain or anger or hate can become to you “a gateway to heaven.” Maybe you are like Wesley, needing your heart to feel “strangely warmed” by the assurance that Christ has taken your sins away, even yours.” Maybe the change that needs to happen in your life this morning is not Augustine’s or Luther’s or Wesley’s or anyone else’s, and maybe only you and God know what it is. You are 90% of the way there just by being here.

Open yourself now to the other 10%, and ask God here and now for the revolution, the transformation, the reformation, the renewal, the revival, or the conversion that you need. 90% of success is showing up. The other 10% is opening up: opening yourself up to God to be changed today and every Lord’s Day in worship.

Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Bread of Life

The Orangeburg Series

Readers of past posts may recognize sermons in this series. To anyone who may be disappointed to see a "rerun," I apologize. I dare say, however, that for a preacher, revisiting familiar sermonic ground is as delightful an experience as a walk in a familiar wood or a stroll on a favorite beach.

October 2, 2011
John 6:22-35,47-51

Have you ever been hungry? Have you ever experienced that gnawing feeling eating at you because you haven’t eaten? Every one of us has been hungry at one time or another. Some people are hungry on a regular basis. According to the most recent comprehensive study of hunger in America, “one in six Americans. . . . cannot make ends meet and are forced to go without food for several meals, or even days.” Fifty 50 million Americans—33 million adults and 17 million children experience hunger regularly.

In the New Testament, all four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—tell us that one part of Jesus’ earthly ministry was feeding the hungry. Again and again in the gospels, Jesus is said to have had compassion for the people he saw. He had compassion for people who were sick (Matthew 14:14) and compassion for people who were blind (Matthew 20:34) and compassion for people who were grieving (Luke 7:13) and compassion for people who were “harassed and helpless” (Matthew 9:36); and he had compassion, we are told, for people who were hungry (Matthew 15:32; Mark 8:2), and he fed them.

The good folk of First Baptist Orangeburg who gather on Thursdays to prepare and serve a hot meal to anyone in need, “anyone” numbering anywhere 125 to 175 people a week, are continuing the ministry of Jesus by feeding the hungry. And so do the good folk of First Baptist Orangeburg who gather in this space at 8:45 and 11:00 on Sunday mornings for the worship of God. “One does not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:4), Jesus said, quoting the book of Deuteronomy (8:3). Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6): blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right relationship with God and right relationship with the people around them.

You see, Jesus recognized that there is a spiritual hunger and there is a spiritual thirst that are every bit as real and powerful as physical hunger and physical thirst. And that’s why the meal-plan at First Baptist Orangeburg offers physical food on Wednesday evenings and Thursdays afternoons and spiritual food on Sundays.

In chapter 6 of the gospel according to John, the day after Jesus satisfied the physical hunger of a large crowd of people who were following him, the conversation turns from physical bread to spiritual bread. In verse 27, Jesus says to those who have come looking for him on the day after the feeding, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” “For the bread of God,” Jesus says, “is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Those who had come looking for him “said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’” (vv 33-35).

As is always the case in the gospel of John, a conversation about something physical shifted gears to become a conversation about something spiritual. So, have you ever been spiritually hungry? Have you ever experienced that gnawing feeling eating at you because you haven’t been fed, because you haven’t eaten? Maybe you’re hungry now, and not just because you didn’t eat breakfast this morning, but because you are hungering and thirsting for something deeper than food and more satisfying than a drink. If so, you’ve come to the right place.

This table is set for those who hunger and thirst. On this table is the bread of life for you. On this table is the cup of new life for you. Just as this congregation prepares a meal and sets a table for “anyone in need” for the physically hungry in this community on Thursdays, so also this congregation prepares a meal and sets a table for “anyone in need” for the spiritually hungry in this community on Sundays. It’s the bread of life for you and for the world.

The legendary preacher Fred Craddock tells the story of the first church he served as pastor in the hills of east Tennessee, not far from a sleepy little hamlet called Oak Ridge. In the 1940s, when Craddock was pastor there, Oak Ridge, TN, suddenly became one of the leading centers of work on the Manhattan Project, the now famous code name for the U.S. government’s operation to develop the atomic bomb. Almost overnight, says Craddock, “that little bitty town became a booming city. Every hill and every valley and every shady grove had recreational vehicles and trucks and things like that. People came in from everywhere and pitched tents, lived in wagons. Hard hats from everywhere, with their families and children paddling around in the mud in those trailer parks, lived in everything temporary to work.”

The church Craddock pastored met in a beautiful little white frame building over a hundred years old. “It had beautifully decorated chimneys, kerosene lamps all around the walls, and every pew in this little church was hand hewn from a giant poplar tree.” After church one Sunday morning, Craddock asked the leaders of the congregation to stay, and he said to them, “We need to launch a calling campaign and an invitational campaign in all those trailer parks to invite those people to church.” “Oh, I don’t know,” one leader said. “I don’t think they’d fit in here.” Another said, “They’re just here temporarily, just construction people. They’ll be leaving pretty soon.” “Well, we ought to invite them, make them feel at home,” Craddock said. They debated the matter, he says, and time ran out. They said they’d come and vote the next Sunday.

The next Sunday, they all sat down after the service. “I move,” said one of them, “that in order to be a member of this church, you must own property in this county.” Someone else said, “I second that.” It passed. I voted against it, Craddock says, but they reminded me that I was just a kid preacher and I didn’t have a vote.”

Decades later, after Craddock and his wife Nettie retired to north Georgia, they took a ride one morning north to Tennessee to see if they could find that little church for which Craddock still held such fond and painful memories. The roads had changed. The interstate now goes through that part of the country, so he had a hard time finding the way, but he finally did. He found the state road, the county road, and the little gravel road. Then there, back among the pines, was that little building shining white. The parking lot was full—motorcycles and trucks and cars packed in there. And out front, there was a great big sign: Barbecue, all you can eat. It was a restaurant, so they went inside.

The pews were pushed against a wall. There were electric lights, and the old pump organ was pushed over into the corner. There were aluminum and plastic tables, and people sitting there eating barbecued pork and chicken and ribs—all kinds of people, lots of different people from lots of different walks of life and lots of different places. In the course of the meal together, Craddock said quietly to his wife Nettie, “It’s a good thing this is not still a church; otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.”

The church is not a private dining club in which the food and drink are prepared for property-owners only, members only The meal plan of this congregation is the banquet of God in Luke 14 to which everyone is invited, the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind— physically and spiritually alike.

Whatever your grief, whatever your fear, whatever your loss, whatever your need, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6). That’s nothing less than a promise of God, and that’s why if you come here with a gnawing feeling eating at you, you have come to the right place. Because here is the bread of life prepared for you. Here is the cup of new life prepared for you.

We’re going to pass it around. We’re going to share it with each other. And we’re going to go from this place to share with the world the good news that when you hunger and thirst, there is bread of life for you and a cup of new life for you. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Let’s eat and drink together.

Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Sing Jesus to Me!

August 21, 2011

Faith Memorial Chapel

Cedar Mountain, N.C.
John 12:12-26

One afternoon a month or so ago, I was driving through Greenville when the voice of a three-year-old in a car seat behind me chimed out of the blue, “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” “Sing Jesus to you?” I asked. “Sing Jesus to me!” he insisted. “How do I ‘sing Jesus’ to you?” I asked him. “You know,” he said, assuming a lot, it seemed to me at the time, “The Bible song.” “Sing Jesus?” “The Bible song?” So I sang what came to mind: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” “Is that it?” I asked. “Yeah, that’s it!” he said. And so I sang it. And when I got to the chorus, he joined in loudly and happily on the only words he knew: “loves me!” “loves me!” “loves me!” And when we finished he said, “Sing it again, Daddy!” And so I did.

And I marveled as I drove and sang that Sunday School teachers in preschool classes for two-year-olds and three-year-olds had created such a positive emotional and spiritual environment that a child who didn’t yet know how to count past five or how to finish his ABC’s—he always gets stuck at “V” for some reason and perpetually recycles “T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V . . . H, I, J, K, L,M, N, O, P; it’s an alphabetical loop into infinity, a song that never ends—that child knew enough to ask for “the Bible song”: “Sing Jesus to me!”

I also marveled at how the unexpected song request of a three-year-old expressed the essence of the gospel in a famous passage in the gospel of John, in two books on the message of the gospel that have been published in the last two years, and in the words of a grandfather who died 24 years before he was born.

The more widely-known of the two books was Rob Bell’s runaway bestseller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Bell’s book was controversial before it even arrived on bookstore shelves and electronic reading devices. Before its publication, Bell was a darling of American evangelical circles, “one of the nation’s rock-star-popular young pastors,” USA Today called him. He’s not so darling in some circles any more, as his book called into question the traditional teaching of the church about hell as a literal place of eternal damnation. Nothing Bell says is particularly new, at least in liberal Christian circles. What made his book so controversial is that Bell is a card-carrying conservative, an evangelical pastor who came to the conclusion that “the good news” just might be even better news than most evangelicals have been inclined to suppose.

Lost in the public furor over what Bell says about hell is the more important message of what Bell says about the nature of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The essential message of the gospel, Bell says, is as his title claims, Love Wins. In Jesus Christ, sin and death and hell lose, and we can all sing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. . . . “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s not just good news; that’s the very best news of all. Sing all you want about heaven; sing all you want about hell. Sing all you want about Trinity; sing all you want about mystery. Sing all you want about about revelation and tribulation and consummation. But above all else, “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” “Loves me!” That’s the gospel, and even a three-year-old can know it.

The second book didn’t get nearly as much attention as Rob Bell’s Love Wins. Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola was published last summer to considerably less hoopla and controversy. But in a truly memorable assertion, Sweet and Viola suggest that “the major disease of today’s church is JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.” JDD, Jesus Deficit Disorder, is what the church contracts, Sweet and Viola write, when “the person of Jesus” is “replaced by the language of ‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” Just in case you don’t read the ideological shorthand in the words Sweet and Viola use, Jesus Manifesto is an equal opportunity offender in the contemporary American Christian context.

They spell it out this way: “The body of Christ is at a crossroads right now,” they say. “The two common alternatives are to move either to the left or to the right.” Most “people are frozen,” they write, “as they look in either of those directions. When they look to the left, they decide they cannot venture there. When they look to the right they decide the same. Whether they realize it or not, people are looking for a fresh alternative—a third way.” And that way third way, according to Sweet and Viola is neither left nor right but forward: “this global, Google world,” they write, “needs a meta-narrative more than ever, and the Jesus-Story is the interpreting system of all other systems.” The “Jesus-Story” is the way forward: “Sing Jesus to me.”

This morning’s gospel lesson is most familiar as the story of the triumphal entry, the Palm Sunday narrative. In it, a great crowd has heard that Jesus of Nazareth is coming to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. They are eager to see Jesus because of what they heard that he had done when he raised Lazarus from the dead. So they “took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!’” On Palm Sunday, that crowd gets all the attention. But several verses later, we are introduced to another set of characters, some “Greeks,” they are called in verse 20, after the Palm Sunday gospel lesson has ended.

We don’t know who, exactly, these “Greeks” might have been, except that they would have been non-Jews. They may have been “God-fearers,” Gentile persons of faith who attached themselves to a synagogue but who declined to submit to the Mosaic dietary restrictions and, in the case of men, circumcision. Or they may have been only “spiritual tourists,” as Max Stackhouse suggests, the first-century equivalent of “new-agers” who were seeking a spiritual fix in the latest religious fad. Whoever they were, the words they say to Philip in verse 21 have become famous in churches.

In churches all over England and in not a few scattered around the states, the words of their request, “Sir, we would see Jesus,” as the King James Version translates it, are carved, engraved, emblazoned, and otherwise displayed on pulpits where the preacher can see them as he or she stands before the congregation. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Preach all you want about heaven; preach all you want about hell. Preach all you want about Trinity and mystery. Preach all you want about revelation and tribulation and consummation. Preach all you want about “‘justice,’ ‘morality,’ ‘values,’ and ‘leadership principles.’” But above all else, “Preach Jesus,” those pulpits tell the preacher.

The great American preacher Fred Craddock tells the story of how when he was little his family moved from their farm into town when times got too tough to make a living on the land. Not long after they arrived, some women from a nearby church “came to our house and brought a pair of Buster Brown shoes that fit me, and enabled me to start Sunday school—those women didn’t just bring me a pair of shoes. You know what else they brought me? They brought me a picture book of stories about Jesus. I needed those shoes. I really needed those stories,” Craddock said. In this “global, Google world”: the way forward—rather than to the left or to the right—is the Jesus-story. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!” “Loves me! “Loves me!” “Loves me!”

Ten years or so ago, as we prepared a missions team to Canada to work with international refugees, among whom there would be many Muslims, we instructed our team members to answer the question of their own religious identity as “I follow Jesus” or “I’m a Jesus-follower.” The term “Christian” among Muslims is a lot like the term “Baptist” among Americans: it’s a religion with a bad reputation. So to side-step the preconceived negatives, we used the name of Jesus instead of the name of a religion. The first time I heard of this rhetorical slight of hand, I confess that I was offended by it. Why should I change how I speak of myself because of someone else’s sensibilities? Never mind that the apostle Paul went so far as to say, “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all. . . . all for the sake of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:19,22-23). It’s their problem, not mine, I thought to myself. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that we could all probably do with less Christianity and more Jesus-following.

The widespread distaste of people in our time for so-called “organized religion” is on the one hand a cop-out. Take it from a Baptist who knows: disorganized religion offers no advantages whatsoever. But the popular criticism, on the other hand, is a clear and compelling commentary that Christianity is too much with us and Jesus not enough. “We wish to see Jesus.” “Sing Jesus to me!”

Now, just in case you think I think that’s all there is to it, let’s look back at this morning’s gospel lesson to see what happens next. Because of our expectations of immediate gratification and our genie-in-a-bottle approach to God, we would expect that the Greeks’ request would result in an immediate audience with the Nazarene. “Your wish is my command,” he would say. “What can I do for you today to make your life better?” he would ask. But that’s not what Jesus says at all, is it? Instead, he says, “The hour has come.”

If you have been reading the gospel of John up to this point, 12:23, where Jesus says, “The hour has come,” you know when you hear these words that you have reached a defining moment in the story. For ten chapters, John’s gospel has been telling us that Jesus’ hour had not yet come. “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus says in 2:4. “My time has not yet come,” he says in 7:6. “My time has not yet fully come,” he says in 7:8. “His hour had not yet come,” we read in 7:30 and again in 8:20. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. And then, in 12:23: Now. Now “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

This is the moment that the reader of the gospel of John has been waiting for ever since chapter 2. Finally, it is now; Jesus will be glorified. “King of Kings! And Lord of Lords! Hallelujah!” That’s who the first crowd in this morning’s gospel lesson turned out to see, and that’s the Jesus we want to see. That’s the Jesus we want to sing: “And he shall reign—and so shall we—forever and ever, forever and ever.”

But look at what Jesus says at the defining moment of his ministry in the gospel of John. It begins in verse 24. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains but a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” His glory is in his dying? “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In order to keep life, we must lose life? “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” To see Jesus—to be where Jesus is—we must serve and follow?

It’s no wonder that the crowd who sang, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!” on Sunday shouted, “Crucify him!” later in the week. When his hour finally came, Jesus did not say what they expected him to say or do what they expected him to do; and instead of reassessing their own expectations, they called for his crucifixion. And when they did, it turned out exactly as Jesus said that it would: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

The apostle Paul recognized Jesus’ defining moment as the stumbling block that it is when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jews and Greeks alike come out to see Jesus only to have their expectations disappointed and their desire for gratification go ungratified. Because Jesus says it is in dying—not clinging—to life that we bear much fruit. It is in giving—not grasping—that we receive life. It is in serving and following—not lording and leading—that we arrive where Jesus is. If there is a “Jesus Manifesto” for our lives and for the church and for our world in the gospel of John, it is right there in the defining moment of the arrival of the hour that we had been waiting for since chapter 2.

More than 30 years ago, as I was experiencing the church-culture shock of having moved from my high-church Lutheran upbringing into a decidedly revivalistic stream of Baptist life, I wrote to my father who was a Lutheran minister that I was unnerved by the fact that all I was hearing in church was “Jesus”: “Jesus this” and “Jesus that.” “They don’t talk about God; they don’t mention the Holy Spirit. It’s just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all the time. I don’t think I’m in a church; I think I’m in a Jesus movement,” I wrote. I fully expected him to affirm my prejudice, but what he wrote back instead was this: “As for being in a Jesus movement, not to worry. I’m a priest in a Christ-cult. A Jesus movement sounds pretty good to me.”

Thirty-six years later, a grandson he never met echoed his grandfather's assertion from a car seat: “Sing Jesus to me, Daddy!” The way forward is neither to the left nor to the right but to the Jesus-story. “I needed those shoes,” Craddock said. “And I really needed those stories.” So do we; so does the church; and so does the “global, Google world.” It’s the story of dying that leads to life, of giving that leads to receiving, and serving and following that leads to where Jesus is. Let’s go forward, shall we?

As you go, may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus now and forever. Amen.


Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Karl Rahner on "The Decisive Moment of My Life"

Karl Rahner the existentialist (and a very baptist-sounding moment from a Catholic theologian):

"I must stand ever ready and waiting, so that when You open the door to the decisive moment of my life--and maybe You'll do it very quietly and inconspicuously--I shall not be so taken up with the affairs of this world that I miss the one great opportunity to enter into myself and into You. Then in my trembling hands I shall hold 'myself,' that nameless something in which all my powers and qualities are united as in their source, and I shall return this nameless thing to You as an offering of love."

From the chapter "God of My Prayer" in Encounters with Silence (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 1999), p. 24.

Harry F. Stoeckert (1926-2011)

June 24, 2011



“For everything there is a season,” says the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, “and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.”

Many people read those words in Ecclesiastes 3:1-12 or recognize them when they hear them, but it has occurred to me as I have listened in recent days to Harry stories and Harry-isms that Harry Stoeckert lived them. There is a time to climb up on the roof of the house on Long Island to turn the television antenna toward Connecticut to pull in the blacked-out Giants home games, and there is a time to send Scott up on the roof to turn the television antenna toward Connecticut. There is a time to let Erin come and go as she pleases, grabbing the clean clothes she needs off the stairs as she runs up to change, and a time to tell her she needs to apologize to her mother, show her more respect, and be more responsible for her own upkeep. There is a time to work—two jobs to provide for a family of six—and a time to play Big Shamu and Little Shamus with the grandkids in the pool in Windemere, Florida.

There is a time for war, and a time for peace. You would have thought Harry was a career Navy man for as important as his military service during World War II was to him. The old Navy recruiting slogan, “Join the Navy, see the world,” fit Harry to a T, and he was proud of it. The Navy didn’t take him to tiny Treverton, Pennsylvania, but two days after he was discharged, he arrived there to finally meet the girl he had been corresponding with for two years, the cousin of his buddy Frank. In 1948, he said to Ellen, “What do you think about getting married?” She said, “I never thought about it.” He said, “I think you should start thinking about it,” and it lasted very nearly 63 years through four children, seven grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.

“What a Wonderful World,” indeed, thanks in large part to men like Harry Stoeckert, who served their country well in wartime and in peacetime, and who provided for their families, not only by their hard work and the occasional care packages they received from him but also by their delight in play. (O.K., so maybe those hard-packed snowballs that brought you to your knees when they nailed you in the back of the leg were not so delightful.) But the model of a life well lived that Pop Harry offers us all—for everything a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven—is to celebrate and to remember under the heading of the anonymous proverb, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Or the Harry-ism, “Move your feet, lose your seat.” Or “Hi, kid.” Or “COD!” Or “I never forget anything I remember.” Or “Ruff-Ruff.”

All of which is to say, “What a Wonderful World” because you choose to make it that way for yourself and for others. Can’t get tickets to Giants home games? No problem. Take the family on the road to see them play in Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, D.C., Cleveland, Jacksonville, the Super Bowl.

The thing about Harry is, he made you love him. In the grocery store, at the pharmacy, where he said his name was pronounced “Stoh-kaire,” at the bank—everybody knew him. When Ellen went to Publix with him one day, the cashier asked her, “Is that your husband?” Ellen answered, “Yes,” and the woman replied, “God help you.” Kay was sitting in an office at the bank one day trying to sort out a long-running snafu with an account when Harry’s beloved little dog Jacque trotted into the office as though he owned the place and jumped up in her lap. “Well, hello Jacque,” Kay said, a bit surprised. “You know Jacque?” the banker asked. “That’s my father,” Kay replied, pointing into the lobby at Harry. “I see,” said the banker, and the banking snafu cleared up immediately. I guess when you buy a $20 dog at the Jockey Lot and name him Jacque Elat, the world will treat you like a Stoh-kaire. What a wonderful world, because you choose to make it that way.

Harry was a man of few words, and sometimes none at all. After all, there is a time to keep silence, right? When Jerry asked Harry for his permission to marry Ann, Harry said, “I’ll have to think about that.” At Jerry and Ann’s 35th wedding anniversary, Jerry said, “Harry, you never answered my question.” “What question is that?” asked Harry. “If I have your permission to marry Ann.” Without missing a beat, Harry said, “I’m still thinking about it.” “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Ecclesiastes goes on to say, “I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”

Those words are the ground of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, and they are every bit as much the ground of Harry stories and Harry-isms. So even as we cry because it’s over, we smile because it happened. There is “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.”

May the God of peace grant Harry peace eternal, and may God grant each of you peace now and forever.

Let us pray.
“May everlasting light shine upon them, O Lord, with your Saints forever, for you are kind. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them with your Saints forever, for you are merciful. Amen.”

Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Nola Janelle Scogin and Eric McDonald Hardaway

May 21, 2011
1 Corinthians 13:4-13

Nearly twenty years ago now, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote a business best-seller titled Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. You might think that a book about business is a strange place to begin a meditation on marriage. But when I asked Janelle to tell me a story about her childhood, she concluded the story by saying, “writing this reminds me of what a strange child I was. I’m sure Eric and I will be in for a treat when we start our family.” Indeed, you will be.

Here’s the story Janelle told. “I knew from a very young age that I wanted to have a career. My career goals changed from secretary to lawyer, then from astronaut to teacher as I got older, but at the end of the day my education and career was always very important to me. In the third grade my mom bought me my first suit . . . seriously. It was a navy pleated skirt, white-collared shirt, yellow jacket, and a navy neck scarf. I am sure I looked ridiculous, but I wore it every Wednesday!” So if the bride is a woman who began dressing for business in the third grade, a book about business might not be such a strange place to start a reflection on marriage at her wedding.

Eric told me a story about the day when he was eight years old that he announced to his parents that he was becoming a man, but I’ll leave that story to another setting. I will tell you this one, though. Eric’s first job out of college was working at a power plant in a tiny town called Roxboro, north of Raleigh, NC. Eric wrote, “I was unhappy with the location of my job in a rural, tobacco-farming town that was semi-stuck in time. There was not a whole lot going on for a twenty-five-year-old single guy, so I began coming home every weekend, a four-and-a-half hour trip. One of my good friends, Matt Cagle (yo, Matt!), was one of Janelle’s best friends growing up, and the three of us crossed paths several times during my Greenville visits. I quickly grew fond of her, and we began to see each other on a more serious note after a few months. Eventually, being away from her began to wear on me, and I began looking for jobs in Greenville once I had worked my job with Fluor in Roxboro about a year and a half, so I could be closer to her. That was five years ago, and the rest, as they say, is history.” As an aside, I want to point out God’s sense of humor. Roxboro, NC, was too far away from Janelle, so you took a job in Greenville that takes you to Afghanistan for weeks on end. That seems to me to belong in the category of “be careful what you pray for.”

In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras say, among many other things, that it is core values, not charisma, that make for a successful company. And the same is true of a marriage. For a marriage to be “built to last,” shared core values are far more important than personality and passion. Now let me be clear: I’m in favor of personality, and I’m a big fan of passion. But personality and passion are the icing on the cake of shared core values. In the time we have spent together, we have talked about some of those core values that the two of you share. As Collins and Porras point out, successful businesses, like successful people, change and evolve, grow and develop over time. So do successful marriages. As your marriage grows and develops, changes and evolves, it is your shared core values that will make your relationship “built to last.”

In 1 Corinthians 13:4-13, the Scripture that you selected as the biblical foundation of your marriage, the apostle Paul identifies three core values that are the ground of our relationship with God and our relationship with one another: faith, hope, and love are lasting. We grow and mature from childhood to adulthood, Paul says. He could have gone on to say that we continue to grow and mature, develop and change, during our adult years. The constant is our core values: faith, hope, and love are lasting, Paul says.

In a nutshell, faith is trusting your life to God no matter what happens to you. Hope is never, never, never giving up on God, on yourself, or on each other. And love, well the greatest of these is love. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

God grant that it may it be so for you. God grant that you may make it so for you as long as you both shall live. Amen.

Photo by Wayne-Amethyst Photography, used under license of Creative Commons.

Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

2 Kings 2:1-2,6-14
July 1, 2001


Note: While lying fallow for a time, I'm selecting and posting some personal favorites among sermons past. This sermon is from the first Sunday of my service as Senior Minister of First Baptist Greenville. Many thanks to Elijah, Elisha, and Five Man Electrical Band.


God whom we worship and serve is truly astounding. And the most astounding thing about God is God's imagination and creativity. Only the mind of God could imagine some things and make them happen.

The late Loren Eiseley, a distinguished biologist, anthropologist, naturalist, and occasional mystic once suggested that "out beyond the rustling of the galaxies" and deep within beyond "the great coil of DNA in which is coded the very alphabet of life," there lies the One whom Eiseley called "the ultimate Dreamer, who dreamed the light and the galaxies." Eiseley wrote, "Before act was, or substance existed, imagination grew in the dark." Only the mind of God could imagine some things and make them happen.

We are experiencing one of those thing this morning. More than thirty years ago, L. D. Johnson left the pastorate of this congregation to make Furman University his place of ministry. Earlier this year it began to dawn on me that somehow in the imagination and creativity of God the time might be right for Furman to return the favor to First Baptist. On Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, everywhere I went in the building I saw signs.

Now you have to understand that I am not one of those persons who goes through life looking for a "sign." Jesus was quite clear about his perspective on signs when he said, "An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign" (Mark 16:4). Paul called searching for signs a symptom of a misplaced spiritual emphasis when he said, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified" (1 Corinthians 1:22). I take Jesus and Paul too seriously to look for a sign.

But I kept seeing signs everywhere in the building. If felt as though I was living the chorus from an old song by the Canadian group Five Man Electrical Band: "Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind. Do this. Don't do that. Can't you read the sign?" You've seen them, too. They have a white background with a yellow design and purple letters that spell, "What Really Matters."

"What Really Matters." Most of us recognize that phrase as our stewardship theme for 2001. Many of us who have been around for a while will also recognize it as the theme of a lecture series at Furman University established and continuing in L. D. Johnson's memory. There have been any number of times in the last six months that I have wished our stewardship committee had chosen a different theme. I would have slept more easily at night, and I would have worked more contentedly by day if I had not kept seeing those signs calling me to commit my life to "what really matters" most to me.

Only the mind of God could imagine some things and then make them happen. "Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. . . . Can't you read the sign?"

Our Old Testament lectionary passage for this morning provides us with three signs that point us in the direction of "what really matters." The first sign is the largest of the three. It is the company of prophets. In ancient Israel, the company of the prophets kept prophetic proclamation alive. Some Old Testament scholars sometimes refer to this group as the "prophetic order" or the "prophetic guild." I call the the prophetic community. In the last two decades, the study of prophets and prophecy has taught us that prophets do not exist in a vacuum. Centuries of preaching and teaching in the church and the academy alike have overemphasized individual prophetic figures such as Elijah and Elisha and Deborah and Miriam and undervalued the role of the prophetic community.

But it turns out that there is no such thing as a lone-ranger prophet. The truth is, there never was such a thing as a "lone ranger." The only reason we heard those words each week, "The lone ranger rides again," was because last week Tonto had bailed his pale-faced buddy in the mask out of trouble.

Prophets--like rangers--exist only in community. When we read 2 Kings 2, we tend to read it as though Elijah and Elisha were the only actors in the play. It might look that way if we only read the portion the church has traditionally marked out for reading in worship, verses 1-2 and 6-14. But read with me between those lines. Verse 3 that goes unread speaks of the company of the prophets who were in Bethel. And verse 5 refers to the company of the prophets who were in Jericho. Verse 7 says that 50 members of the company of the prophets accompanied Elijah and Elisha from Jericho to the Jordan River, and verse 15 reports that they were waiting when Elisha returned alone. This nearly constant stage presence of the company of the prophets is an important sign for us, because the company of the prophets was the predecessor to our treasured idea of the priesthood of all believers. Long before First Baptist Greenville embraced the vision of "Each Member a Minister," Moses cried out in the wilderness, "Would that all God's people were prophets!" (Numbers 11:29).

The apostle Paul felt the same way. In 1 Corinthians 14:1, Paul exhorts us all, "Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy." Listen to how Paul defines prophecy: "Those who prophesy," he says, "Speak to other people for their upbuilding and their encouragement and their consolation." According to Paul, then, when we are called to the priesthood of all believers, we are called to be a prophetic community, a community pursuing love and speaking to people for their upbuilding and encouragement ad their consolation. That's what "Each Member a Minister" means in the prophetic community, and that really matters.

Let me give you an example. In June of 1977 in the small Baptist church where I was minister of music at the time, the pastor delivered a series of sermons on marriage and the family. Perhaps the best thing that could be said of his view of marriage is that he was more than twenty years ahead of his time--SBC style. Ordinarily, what he said would have been water off a duck's back as far as I was concerned. But this time, there was birdshot in the air because Bev was there to hear him. We were counting down the weeks before our wedding in August, and Bev wasn't taking to those sermons very well. Let's just say that the sermon I got over lunch every Sunday was even more animated than the one I had heard at church.

And then one Sunday it happened. To this day, it is one of the most memorable and moving experiences of my entire life. Never before or since have I felt that God has spoken any more clearly, directly, and personally to me. After worship was over that day, a small, silver-haired lady named Ethel Clarke came up to Bev and me and asked ever so quietly, "May I speak with the two of you for a moment?" "Sure," one of us said as we looked at each other with a mix of surprise and uncertainty. "Come with me," she said, and we followed her to the back of the sanctuary, up under the balcony. She stopped, turned, faced us, and this is what she said, word-for-word after twenty-four years: "I know what the Bible says, and I know what the preacher says. But me and Brodie were married for forty-seven wonderful years, and we always did things 50-50. I just wanted the two of you to hear that." And with that she smiled, turned, and headed for the door, leaving Bev and me utterly speechless.

Ethel Clarke taught me that morning that God whom we worship and serve is as likely to speak through a silver-haired widow as through a voice crying in the wilderness or a preacher standing in a pulpit. Ethel Clarke taught me that morning that if one essential ingredient in the life of a Baptist congregation is the freedom of the pulpit, then a second like unto the first is the freedom of the pew. And Ethel Clarke taught me that morning that the priesthood of all believers means cultivating a prophetic community. We are all in the company of prophets.

"Each Member a Minister" means every one of us pursuing love and speaking to people for their upbuilding and their encouragement and their consolation. That's the direction in which the sign of the company of prophets points us, and that really matters.

The second sign in this morning's passage is the sign of the spirit. In verse 9, the younger prophet Elisha requests of his mentor and friend Elisha something that the older prophet cannot give him. Elisha says, "Before you go, leave me with a double portion of your spirit." It's a fascinating moment, psychologically. Elisha is sufficiently unsure of himself and his own ability that he figures he needs twice as much as Elijah has to get the job done. I'm familiar with that feeling.

But as Elijah's answer makes clear, the spirit is not Elijah's to give, because the spirit that sufficiently enlivens and empowers him is God's spirit, not Elijah's. Though Elijah and Elisha are the only actors on the stage when this takes place, remember the community of prophets standing in the wings. Because in the prophetic community, what is true for one is true for all The spirit of God is not something to which only a few have access or recourse. The creative presence of God's spirit infuses the universe of God's creation from the rustling of the galaxies to the coiling of DNA. The book of Genesis tells us that the spirit of God swept across the face of the water while the earth was void and without form and darkness covered the face of the the deep (Genesis 1:2). There, imagination grew in the dark, and the spirit of God enlivened and empowered creation.

The gospel of Luke tells us that this same spirit enlivened and empowered the ministry and mission of Jesus, as our Lord announced in his inaugural sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me . . . because the Lord has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners" (Luke 4:18; Isaiah 61:1).

And the book of Acts tells us that at Pentecost God's promise in the book of Joel to make prophets of all the Lord's people was fulfilled: "I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Acts 2:17; Joel 2:28). From creation to Christ to the prophetic community, it is one and the same spirit. Through the continuing work of the Holy Spirit, the one who dreamed the light and the galaxies enlivens and empowers each one of us to pursue love and to speak to people for their upbuilding and their encouragement and their consolation.

The third sign for our reading is the mantle. The mantle. When Elijah disappears into the whirlwind and whatever it was that happened is described in 2 Kings as chariots and horses of fire occurs, Elisha spots the mantle of Elijah lying on the ground. It is the OT prophet's equivalent of the quieter, more reflective vision of the American poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote, "Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality."

I have sometimes mused over whether Elijah, upon seeing his conveyance arriving from a distance, removed his cloak from his shoulders, folded it neatly, and laid it down for his successor to pick up. And there Elisha found it where his mentor left it for him. Or perhaps, as the fiery steeds approached, the awe and the terror of the moment overcame him, and he simply lost his grip on it where he stood. And there Elisha found it where his mentor dropped it. Or maybe Elijah held on to that mantle with all his might as though it were his prophetic lovey, his professional security blanket, that was only wrested from his white-knuckled hands by the force of the whirlwind. And it fell away behind him where Elisha picked it up. Elijah's mantle is an apt metaphor, a sign, if you will, for how we all make transitions and negotiate profound passages in our lives.

Each of us handles the mantle of our life differently as we arrive at death's door, or as Dickinson put it, as death arrives at our door. Some of us wrap it up neatly and put it down carefully, the way we did everything else in life. Others of us drop our lives where we leave them, for someone else to clear up after us. After all, we did everything else that way, too. And some of us fight to hang on with all we are worth, never letting go until life is wrested from our grip. In this morning's passage, though, the sign of the mantle also applies to our acting as Elisha did by taking up the work that God has set before us to be done in the prophetic community.

There is work to be done in every nook and cranny of our congregational life both within the walls of this wonderful facility and reaching out into our world to places with which we are familiar, such as Greenville, in partnership with Open Heart church; such as Canada, in partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship; and such as Cuba, in partnership with the Alliance of Baptists.

The mantles in our congregational life also take some of us much farther afield, to places we might be hard pressed to find on a map. On the grounds of this church's campus (old ways of speaking die hard, you know), in its Sunday School rooms, conference rooms, Media Center, nursery, kitchen, reception area, gymnasium, ball fields, to name only a few, to a far-flung wherever that we have not even imagined yet--but God already has--there is a mantle. There is a mantle for every task, for every role, in every place, in every time, for everyone.

The most important question, then, is not who left a mantle behind or what condition they left it; the most important question is, "Who will pick it up?" Or, more pointedly yet, "Will you pick it up when you come across it?" Not so very long ago, the senior pastor search committee and came to the conclusion that it is the time and the place for me to pick up the mantle of the senior pastorate of this remarkable congregation.

Last week I listened on the radio as Baxter Wynn read the roll call of my twenty-four predecessors, and I was humbled and terrified. And I was moved, as Elisha was, to cry out, "Make it a double, Lord!" And I'll never forgive Bax for the fact that I had to put away the sermon I had pulled out of my file to preach today," "Synchronism and Structure in 1-2 Kings and Neo-Babylonian Chronicles."

But as impressive as the roll call was that we heard last week, what makes this congregation truly remarkable is not my predecessors but your predecessors. Because this congregation is a prophetic community in which each member is a minister. There is a mantle, a task, a role, for each on of us, from the oldest to the youngest. No one mantle is more important or impressive than any other because every one of them is indispensable to our efforts to be the prophetic community that God has called u to be. The mantle that you come across really matters. Pick it up and put it on. No matter how larger or small it is, it really matters. Enlivened and empowered by one and the same spirit that impels the rustling of the galaxies, the coiling of DNA, we are called together to pursue love and to speak to people for their upbuilding and their encouragement and their consolation.

The signs are up all over the building, calling you to commit your life to "what really matters" most to you. Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. Can you read the sign?

Let us pray: O God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekkah, Rachel, and Leah, of Moses, Miriam, Deborah, Elijah, and Elisha, give us eyes to read the signs, ears to hear the needs, and hearts and hands willing to be moved by your Holy Spirit and the example of Christ in whose name we pray. Amen.

The invitation of Christ and this church is open to all who would come professing faith in Jesus Christ and committing their lives to Christ's service. And that invitation is open as well to all who would commit their lives to Christ's service as a member of this prophetic community.


Copyrighted © 2001 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.