Getting Back in the Saddle...

OK, so I've been gone for a while.

We spent a month together with our families and friend in Glendale and Burbank this summer. It was a great (and necessary) time of rest and play and connection with people that we miss a lot during the year. I'll get back to writing soon, but here are some pictures from our summer in California.

Chinatown for Dim Sum with some friends.


Ian got to hang out with one of his best buddies from nursery school.

The Griffith Observatory in LA (where the knife fight in 'Rebel Without a Cause' was filmed.

Ian and Ericka

No wonder people find LA confusing...

The pendulum in the atrium (Latin humor)

Yes, there are two starches on my plate. Sue me.

Family dinner in Shell Beach.

I was going to say we played a little chess, but that would be wrong...

Ian and I fished off the pier, and also on one of the half-day deep-sea charters.

This amounts to a 'before and after' set of pictures.

Something to Boast About

(This is the last in a series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

2 Cor 1:12-14

This past week I’ve been catching up on movies and finally saw ‘The Damned United’, the story of English football manager Brian Clough. Clough was a true character, and also quite possibly a genius when it came to coaching soccer. The film covers a part of Clough’s life where he was obsessed with another manager who had insulted him, and how his attempt to retaliate sent his career off course. Along the way we get a glimpse at Clough’s personality—he was known for being annoyingly confident, often without understanding how other people saw him. In one TV interview he said: “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the country, but I’m in the top 1.”

The complexity here was that Clough wasn’t just a braggart. The top league in England at that time was becoming known for its violence and brutal play. Clough believed that it was possible to play football at a higher, more honorable and beautiful level than he saw in the top league here. After watching the World Cup this summer, who could really argue with that?

We’ve been talking about the idea of the “active ingredient.” The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God's grace. For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand. And I hope that, as you have understood us in part, you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Second Corinthians is actually made up of a couple of letters Paul wrote to this important church. Paul had spent 18 months or so helping the church at Corinth get off the ground, and he’d continued to provide pastoral care for them through the post. If you read through this letter you’ll see that Paul refers to other letters that he’d written in the past to address key issues or problems.

Both 1st and 2nd Corinthians give us a glimpse at what it was like for Paul to be a missionary and pastor in the 1st century. He teaches theology, describes what good church leadership looks like, argues with critics, and encourages healthy behavior in these letters. Paul also tries to teach his readers how to think for themselves—to take teaching from any source and evaluate it on their own to see if it was worth following.

One writer said that these letters of Paul were meant to teach ‘the significance of Christ’s death, the meaning of the Holy Spirit, how God shows his power in our weakness, and how the believer’s life is both graced by God’s love and claimed for obedience in service.’

You know, the easy stuff.

In our passage at the start of this letter, Paul is responding to some criticism about something he wrote in an earlier letter. You know that feeling when you’ve been irritated and written an email and regretted it as soon as you hit send? Maybe that’s just me.

Paul isn’t backing down, but he is reminding them that he has dealt with them with integrity in the past, and so they should listen to what he says.

Paul leads off with a line that is anything but an apology or even an explanation. He says: ‘Now here’s our boast. Our consciences are clear. We have conducted ourselves in a way that is perfectly consistent with the way God himself has led us to act.’

It’s as if Paul kicked off the letter by saying: ‘I wouldn’t say I’m the best apostle in the world, but I’m in the top 1.'

All that talk about boasting rubs our modern ears the wrong way, doesn’t it? We’ve all been around people who are pretty impressed with themselves, right? We’ve all been around people who seem only too happy to tell you all of their accomplishments—what they’ve done on their own power and because of their own wisdom and ability.

That’s not what Paul is talking about here at all. (OK, well maybe a little, but it’s not his main point.)

It helps to get a 1st-century understanding of boasting and what it means in the Scriptures.

The word that translates to ‘boasting’ here has a rich meaning. The way it’s used here it really means ‘glorying in the acts of God’. It describes a mix of awe and wonder and delight in the way God works through his people—even when you might be talking about the way he works through yourself.

None of this is about announcing what we can do on our own power or wisdom or ability. ‘The Christian can boast in him- or herself,’ one writer put it, ‘only in so far as his life is lived in dependence on God and in responsibility to him.’

That doesn’t sound like the annoying kind of boasting or bragging at all. Paul is talking here about ‘boasting’ in the way he and his team lived in complete dependence on God, and how they interacted with the world and presented the gospel. He says that they did it with ‘holiness and sincerity’.”

Holiness and sincerity are two of the easiest words in the English language to dismiss or poke fun at or turn into a punch-line.

We dismiss Holiness because we associate it with being judgmental or holier than thou. The dictionary defines being ‘holier than thou’ as Self-righteousness (also called sententiousness), a feeling of smug moral superiority derived from a sense that one's beliefs, actions, or affiliations are of greater virtue than those of the average person.

Another describes it as "excessively or hypocritically pious; often with a sickening sanctimonious smile" Other words used are 'pharisaic, pharisaical, sanctimonious, self-righteous, pietistic'.

Well that doesn’t sound very nice at all.

We do the same with sincerity because in this cynical age we simply don't believe it—there’s far too much of the opposite in our culture, and so we don't trust sincerity when we see it or experience it. If you Google ‘sincerity’ you find that it’s ‘the virtue of one who speaks and acts truly about his or her own feelings, thoughts, and desires.’ When people act that way toward us we have a hard time believing it, right?

But when Paul uses those words here he means something very different—he uses them without sarcasm or irony—he means them.

But what did he mean?

In the Scriptures only God is holy, but when it talks about people holiness describes the idea of somehow being set apart for a special purpose. It describes being ethically pure or free from sin, but it’s more than that.

In the New Testament, holiness describes a type of faithfulness that isn’t simply doing the right things, but rather living by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s not connected to places or things or rituals. It’s the behavior that comes naturally out of true faith—out of a true relationship with the one who made us and redeemed us and loves us still.

In the Scriptures sincerity describes purity in relationships and other dealings. One dictionary defined it as ‘ingenuousness’, which gives you an idea of just how rare this quality is. Think about that. I’ve heard disingenuousness before, but I never even knew there was a positive opposite to that word.

The sincerity Paul writes about to his friends in Corinth literally means, ‘visible in the sunlight’. Out there in the open—honest—without guile or ulterior motives. This is about having integrity and a sense of honor in the way we deal with other people.

What does that mean for us as we learn to live as missional people in a missional church?

Being missional is as much about who we are as it is about what we do. Our text this morning hints at a character profile of what a mature Christian disciple is supposed to be like.

Part of it is vertical and part of it is horizontal. Part of it is about being connected to Jesus Christ, and part of it is about how we interact with other people.

The point here is that if we’re going to be authentic, effective communicators of the gospel in our lives—if we’re going to make our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods into healthier, more shalom-filled places, then we have to acknowledge our dependence on God, and we also have to live with integrity in the world.

Holiness and sincerity become a path for people to experience the gospel, which is the point of learning to live as missional people in a missional church. Holiness and sincerity become something we boast about—something we give God the credit for, something that draws others into experiencing what Christ is really about in this world.

This is really about what it means to be that active ingredient—that part of the culture around us that makes it better, healthier, more like God intended in the first place.

There’s a section of the book Deep Church that talks about this. The author writes:

“We Christians should be known as people who create culture for the common good, for all people and not just for fellow believers, culture that makes life better, more whole, for the entire city. While we’re distinct from the surrounding culture, we also engage it. Add to this the mandate in the Bible to see the welfare of the city, and we get a powerful recipe for cultural transformation.”

That’s what holiness and sincerity look like in practice. Being set apart from the culture, but also involved in every part of it—depending on God, but also living as people who share God’s love and grace with our communities.

In the end, this whole idea of being missional people in a missional church really boils down to these two things—maintaining our relationship with God, and living our faith honestly in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll have the faith and courage to live as Christ’s disciples here and wherever we go. We can boast a little about that.

Let’s pray together.

Terms and Conditions

(This message is one in a series titled, 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Deuteronomy 10:12-22

We’ve been talking about the idea of the “active ingredient.” The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

12 And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13 and to observe the LORD's commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?
14 To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. 15 Yet the LORD set his affection on your forefathers and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations, as it is today. 16 Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. 17 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. 19 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. 20 Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. 21 He is your praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. 22 Your forefathers who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.

This passage comes near the end of a long speech that Moses makes to the people of Israel. It starts back in chapter five with the giving of the 10 Commandments, and moves through some teaching about how to live as the people of God. It’s in chapter six that we get the familiar prayer known as the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

Later in the sermon Moses retells the story of how God had brought God out of bondage in Egypt, and of how Israel responded by worshipping a golden calf. ‘Understand then,’ Moses says just as God’s people enter into the Promised Land, “that it is not because of your righteousness that God is giving you this land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

Moses tells the story of how he was so angry and ashamed that his people had worshipped idols that he smashed the two tablets God had given to him, and also how God had told him to make new ones just like the originals.

By the time we get to our text Moses is back on what it means to live as people of faith—how the followers of God are supposed to live. There are commands and calls to certain behaviors, there are teachings about who God is, there’s a reminder that God had saved them when they needed him the most.

Moses reminds the people that God had chosen them—not because they were good or worthy, but simply because God loved them and wanted them to share his blessings with the rest of the world. And there’s a reminder—did you catch this?—there’s a reminder not to be “stiff-necked” anymore.

I get most of my news on the web these days. It’s cheaper to read the online versions New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and others, than it is to try and manage subscriptions to all of them. Each time I sign up for a new service I’m asked to read the fine print and click that I agree with the “terms and conditions” of the arrangement.

We do that a lot, right? We enter into a contract or business relationship or partnership, and at some point we have to review the “terms and conditions” and to agree with them.

The dictionary defines the legal concept of terms and conditions as the “provisions specifying the nature of an agreement or contract.”

When we apply that definition to our text this morning, it leaves us with some pretty important questions.

If this passage is talking about what it means to live the life of faith, then what exactly is it saying about the terms and conditions of our relationship with God?

In other words, what it is about this ancient text describing what God wants from a group of recently settled nomads that can help us become active ingredients in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods?

How can it help us grow into missional people in a missional church?

I was hoping you’d ask that.

This text is laid out in an unusually straightforward way. We’ve all struggled with different parts of the Bible—with how hard it can be to understand what different texts meant and what they mean for us now. This one is different. There are three main parts.

First, there’s a list of things that God calls us to do.

We’re called to Fear God: This isn’t about being scared—it’s about having some understanding of who we are in relation to God. It’s the sense, at the same time, of our unworthiness before God and also what God has done to restore us.

God also calls us to walk in his ways. This one describes how we avoid the idea that there is some checklist of things we do to please God—it’s meant to remind us that this is a lifestyle—like a long walk in the same direction—not something we finish before going on to something else.

God asks that we love him and serve him. In another part of the Old Testament, in Micah 6:8, there’s a question about how we’re supposed to live. The answer, according to the prophet Micah, is supposed to be simple. ‘To act justly and love mercy and to walk humbly with God.’ Love God and serve him, that’s the point.

But none of this means that God is backing off of his Law. The last part of this list is to ‘observe his commandments.’ We push back on rules, but a review of the 10 commandments can be healthy every so often. Observing God’s commandments is one of the ways we act on what we believe.

In the next section there are some things about God that are designed to answer an obvious question that we don’t ask out loud very often: Why should I be interested in doing what God wants? Moses gives us five pretty good reasons: God is the creator and Lord of the universe, he loved us first, he defends widows and orphans, and he loves the outcast, the alien, the stranger.

Finally, and just in case the rest of that isn’t clear, God calls us to two crucial practices for the life of faith—two ways that we can show that we’re living by the terms and conditions of the covenant God offers us.

First, “circumcise your hearts”, he says. Make sure your faith is lived from the inside out and not the other way around. Somehow in Hebrew this is the opposite of being “stiff-necked”. To have a circumcised heart, as one writer put it, is to have your “mind and will purified and devoted totally to the Lord”.

Second, we’re called to “love the aliens among us”. What better way to honor the God who redeems us and calls us, than to love the aliens he loves, to reach out to the stranger the way he dies, to love the outcast the way he does? And just in case we’re not convinced, there’s always the reminder that once we were aliens and outcasts, too. But God reached out to us. God loved us in the life and ministry and death and resurrection of his son. God reached out to us and folded us into his family. What he wants in return is for us to do the same.

I’ll say that even more bluntly. How we treat the aliens and outcasts and strangers around us is a sign of the extent to which we grasp how much God has done for us to bring us back to him.

It’s in the example of Christ’s sacrifice for us that we see how far we’re called to go in order to make the rest of the world welcome in this place. It’s not fashionable, it won’t sit well with everyone, but it’s honest and has the advantage of being exactly what we were called to do—it’s exactly who we were made to be.

The book I’ve been quoting lately, The Monkey and the Fish, has something to say about this. Dave Gibbons writes:

“So who in your community is the outsider, the misjudged, the misunderstood? Maybe the one who seems the weakest? Who are the strangers and the friendless? Focusing on them as a church may mean you won’t grow as fast. And you may even lose some people. But your church will be fulfilling the most beautiful expression of who God is.”

I’ll say that a different way. When we reach out to the friendless outcast we show the world that we understand, just a little, about the way God reaches out to us. When we show love to the lonely around us we show people that we understand, just a little, about the God we worship and serve.

Those are the terms and conditions of living as God’s covenant people. It’s not rules and restrictions—it’s not a list of do’s and don’ts. It’s allowing our hearts to be transformed, and living our lives in a different way.

Being the part of our communities that make them healthier, better, more shalom-filled places is what the gospel of Jesus is all about.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll take some time this summer to reflect on what this all means in our lives—that’s we’ll review the terms and conditions of our relationship with God.

That’s how we’ll grow into missional people, and that’s how we’ll become a more missional church.

A New Identity

(This message is part of a series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Gen 32:22-30 and 1 Peter 1:13-20

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.
Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

It’s a standard scene in movies about war or life in some kind of a repressive regime. A person is wanting to move from one place to another, or through some passage into another part of a city or country, and someone—usually a menacing looking guy—stands in their way and asks to see their ‘papers’.

Now these ‘papers’ are identity papers—they confirm who the person is and whether or not they have permission to move freely from one place to another. We all have them, even if using them isn’t as dramatic as in the movies. My passport identifies me as an American citizen, and my visa names me as a minister of religion. It also says nice and big that I have ‘no access to public funds’. I am, though, allowed to pay taxes here, even if it doesn’t say so in my passport.

The idea of identity papers gives us a chance to think more broadly about our own identities. It’s such a broad term, but it’s an important one for psychologists and sociologists.

According to my friend Wikipedia, identity formation is the process of the development of the distinct personality of an individual in a particular stage of life, in which individual characteristics are possessed by which a person is recognized or known. This process defines individuals to others and themselves.

An identity crisis happens when an individual loses a sense of their own personality and historical continuity. The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson. According to Erikson, an identity crisis is a time of intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of looking at oneself.

Healing for an identity crisis comes when the process of identity formation is restored or repeated, and individuals reclaim those characteristics that define them to others and to themselves.

In our church family we’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

Like a lot of you I’ve been taking hay fever medication this summer. Mine has 8mg of acrivastine in it—that’s the active ingredient in Benadryl—the part of the capsule that helps control my sneezing and itchy throat. I took some this morning so I could get through two services today.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."
Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

This passage from Peter’s letter goes hand-in-hand with the text from Genesis that Zena read earlier in the service.

Peter's letter was written to the Christian churches in what is now modern Turkey. This is a general letter—not written to one community with a specific set of problems, but written to all Christian churches with teachings that all of us can relate to. Our text comes at the beginning of a longer section on the responsibilities that go hand in hand with the gifts we’ve received from God. “Shape your priorities”, the writer says, “to the priorities of God.”

The gift that Peter is talking about here, just so that we’re clear, is the redemptive gift of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection. It’s the core message of the gospel that calls us to a new way of living—to a new identity as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

That core message, by the way, is the basic structure of why Jesus the Messiah came in the first place. It goes like this: God created us to live in perfect Shalom with him and with the world. Shalom represents the Hebrew idea of wholeness or completeness—“the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.”

But that Shalom was broken by our sin—by our rebellion against God, and human history up to this point has been about God reaching out to us to bring us back into a whole relationship with him—to put the pieces of Shalom back together again. Jesus the Messiah came to bridge that gap in a decisive way—to offer everyone a way to be connected with God again, just as he intended from the start.

The central idea in this letter, as one writer put it, is “the contrast between what the readers had once been and what they have now become because of their obedience to Christ.” In other words, the focus of this letter is the way those who follow Christ experience a radical change in our identities.

But this isn’t anything new. God has been calling his people to a new way of life—to a new identity built on him alone—from the earliest pages of the Scriptures.

Jacob is one of the great characters of the Old Testament. He’s a sort of slippery character with marginal ethics when we see him. He cons his father and cheats his brother out of a blessing that should have gone to him. He gets conned by his father-in-law in one of the great two-for-one deals in the Bible. And when we see him he’s wrestling with an angel and won’t let him go until he gets a blessing from him. (Jacob has bit of a blessing fetish.)

But Jacob gets more than he asked for. As a part of the blessing he gets a new name—Jacob becomes Israel, and plays an important part in bringing God’s covenant to life.

See what I mean? Part of following God means allowing our identities to be transformed as God himself works in us and through us to remake us into the people we were meant to be all along. He might not always change our names, but he always reaches in to help us become the people we were meant to be.

In our staff meetings this year we’ve been reading a book together called ‘God Hides in Plain Sight’, which is on our reading list in the bulletin. The chapter we discussed last week was about the idea of baptism—of being cleansed of our sin and welcomed into the community of faith. But the author made the case that there was a lot more going on, too. He writes:

“Baptism is what occurs when we are shown who we are apart from our roles, our masks, our attachments, and our created selves. It is the means by which we take on the most real roles in our lives. It is when we hear a voice from heaven saying ‘This is my child in whom I am well pleased.’”

Part of becoming missional people in a missional church means recognizing that as we grow in faith our core identities change—they’re transformed—we go from who we thought we were and why we thought we matter, to who God calls us to be and why he loves and cherishes us.

How does this help us become missional people? How does this idea of identity change help us work together as a missional church?

If we look back at the passage from 1st Peter we see three steps toward aligning ourselves to God in a meaningful way—we see three practices we can apply as we seek to be active ingredients in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

First, we see ‘prepare your minds’. We can’t get around the need to understand our faith and to be able to articulate it. Reading and reflection—conversation and prayer are the ways we prepare our minds to engage the world as disciples of Jesus.

Next the text calls us to ‘be self-controlled’. This is not just about resisting sin, though that’s a part of it. It’s really about taking responsibility for the way you live your life; this is a direct challenge to the concern I hear sometimes about how hard it can be to let colleagues and friends and neighbors know that you’re a Christian. This is your identity. The rest is secondary.

Finally, ‘set your hope fully on the grace of Jesus Christ’. This is a part of the Christian life that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Hope is supposed to be one of the markers of faith—one of the outward signs of trusting that God is who he says he is, and more importantly, that he’ll do what he promised to do.

This is about developing the discipline of hope—about living lives that are marked by the discipline of hope.

That’s not how we talk about hope most of the time, is it? We think of hope as something that comes and goes—we might wake up some days and feel hopeful. But Christian hope isn’t just a feeling that may or may not hit us on any given day. Christian hope is something that we practice—something that we cultivate as we grow in our knowledge and experience of the way the living God works in our lives.

Hope isn’t just hoping that everything will be OK. Christian hope is trusting that God will come through—it’s living with the knowledge that somehow God will bring his creation to himself, and that in the meantime he loves us and cares for us.

It’s in the rest of our text that we see where this new identity comes from: ‘For you know that it was not with perishable things that you were redeemed, but with the precious blood of Christ.’

It’s through Christ’s blood—that symbol of struggle and sacrifice—that we are given our new identities. It’s because we’ve been redeemed and forgiven that we can leave our old lives behind and become something completely new and different: disciples of Jesus Christ.

Identity formation happens as we develop those parts of our personality that define us for others and for ourselves. The question for us is this:

Where does our faith fit into the way we see ourselves?

Where does our faith fit into the way others experience us—not just here at church but in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

Being missional people in a missional church means allowing our identity to be transformed. It means that through Christ’s sacrifice we can become the people he made us to be in the first place.

On the front of your bulletin this morning you’ll see a quote from a great little book that the Council is reading over the summer…

“…this presents an amazing opportunity for the church to become the most relevant, most vibrant, most vital part of people’s lives—both to the young and the old. But to pull that off, we need to radically shift our thinking from believing that success means being a safe place for people to catch up and be together for an hour or two on Sunday and maybe hear an entertaining message, to recognizing that we are, first and foremost, a movement of people called to a dangerous mission.”
(Dave Gibbons, The Monkey and the Fish)

My prayer for all of us, as we wrestle with what it means to see our lives and our church in a different way—my prayer is that we’ll prepare our minds for the task, that we’ll take responsibility for allowing our faith to be visible in our lives, and that we’ll live lives marked by the hope that comes from believing that God is exactly who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he would do.

Then we’ll be missional people in a church with a mission—people whose identities are reflections of the one who made us, who redeemed us, and who loves us still.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Amen.

Ready for Anything

(This Farewell Sunday message is a part of our series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Romans 15:14

It’s graduation season. Hard to imagine that we’re here again, sending kids off to college, seeing other kids move up to new grades or levels—I can’t believe that my son Ian goes to middle school next year. This is a season when people try to pass along some wisdom to those who are moving on to new things—new places. A lot of that happens in the tried and true literary form we call the graduation speech. Here are some examples.

There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live. -- John Adams

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.---Nelson Mandela

I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught. -- Sir Winston Churchill

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go. -- Dr. Seuss

Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As we celebrate our own day of transition here, I want to share some biblical wisdom for all of us to wrestle with—whether we’re leaving or staying here in London.

We’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.

Paul’s letter was written to the new Christian church in Rome. It was mostly Gentile but it had a strong core of Jewish converts in it, too. There were 50,000 Jews in Rome in the 1st century, and many of them converted to the Christian faith. Many of the early Christian churches in Rome were actually converted synagogues, so there was a deep sense of connection between the Jewish and Gentile members of the Roman church. That’s why there’s so much about Judaism and Jewishness in Romans.

This letter was written in the year 55AD—fairly early in the history of Christianity. Remember that the Christian movement was still being persecuted at this point, and it would get worse as the church grew.

By the time we get to this chapter, Paul is starting to talk about his future plans, including a trip to Spain and Turkey, and eventually a visit to Rome. (Sounds a little like listening to people make holiday plans around here.)

Paul is an entrepreneur at heart—part of the reason he’s thinking of moving around is that, as he says later in the chapter: ‘It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on anyone else’s foundation.’ The church was already well-established in Corinth, even if it had some problems, and so Paul was getting restless to take the Christian message someplace where it could have an influence over as many people as possible.

In our text Paul is making plans to visit the young church in Rome to see if he can help them to take the next step. What’s clear is that Paul knows he doesn’t have to go there and start from scratch—there’s a group of leaders there who are ready to take the next step—ready to graduate to a deeper level of leadership and discipleship.

And so our text is Paul’s way of affirming the faith and growth of the Roman church—it’s like a commissioning or a graduation speech. Listen to it again: “I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

As we prepare to say goodbye to some good friends today, what should we notice in Paul’s commissioning of the Romans?

‘you yourselves are full of goodness’: This one has two-parts. First, there’s an admission here on Paul’s part that since he hadn’t been their teacher, that they’d reached their maturity largely on their own, or at least without the help of one of the major apostles. Second, we should notice that being ‘full of goodness’ isn’t about perfection or somehow learning to live without sin, but rather about being mature models of Christian kindness and mercy.

‘complete in knowledge’: Again, this doesn’t mean that they knew everything. When Will Durant, one of the great American historians, gave a commencement speech, he said: “Education is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance.” Paul the apostle would have agreed with that. Being complete in knowledge isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about having insight and understanding into God’s purposes and God’s plan. The Roman Christians, who had to overcome serious obstacles every day in order to live out their faith, knew enough of how their stories and God’s story intersected to handle themselves in any situation.

‘competent to instruct or admonish one another’: This is about taking that step from being beginners to being more mature in the life of discipleship. Part of that comes when we take our experiences and share them with others through teaching or exhortation—maybe even warning or correction. Mostly, though, this is about the Roman Christians being ready to be influencers in a city that was the most influential place on earth at the time.

As we mark another graduation season and especially as we celebrate this special anniversary for your church, what can we take from Paul’s commissioning of the Roman Christians? More to the point for all of us, as we talk about what it means to be active ingredients—to be mature Christians in a missional church, how does all of this help us grow as disciples where we live and work and study and shop? We’ll use the same outline Paul used.

Full of goodness: We’re called to be mature models of Christian kindness and mercy. That includes everything from simple hospitality to sacrificial acts on behalf of those in need. But mostly it’s about how our faith guides how we live in our homes and neighborhood and jobs and schools—how we live as active ingredients—how we become missional people.

Complete in knowledge: It’s crucial as we live our faith that we work to understand it, too. This isn’t about knowing everything, this is about understanding the content of the gospel. This is also about understanding how our own lives are being transformed through Jesus Christ. Where does your own story intersect with the gospel story? The answer to that question, however it is unfolding in your life, is about becoming ‘complete in knowledge’.

Competent to share our faith: This isn’t about getting degrees or reading books or passing tests. Being ready to share our faith is just that—growing into an awareness of how we can help others come to their own experience of the transforming with of Christ in their lives. This is about taking responsibility to be influencers for the gospel. Just as Rome was an enormously influential city in the ancient world, there aren’t too many places in the world today with more influence than London.

Where are the influencers for Christ in this city?

A lot of them are in this room right now. The real question is this: Will you step out in faith to influence this city, and the world, with the good news of the gospel?

Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome: “I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

I would say the same thing about you.

If you’re rooted here in London or at least staying for a while, being missional people means living our faith, understanding how it works, and sharing it with other people. That’s what this church is going to be talking about and practicing in the coming year.

If you’re leaving this summer then let me give you this challenge. Take how you’ve grown here and share it with the community of faith you settle in wherever you’re going to live next. Take your experiences here and let them become the fuel for how you live your faith in a new city or country.

We say the Charge and Blessing together each week, but it takes on new meaning as we prepare to say goodbye to another group of friends.

When I say ‘You go nowhere by accident’, remember that your response is ‘Wherever we go God is sending us. Wherever we are, God has put us there—he has a purpose for us.’

God can and will work in you and through you wherever you go—whatever you’re doing. Christ who lives in you wants to do something with your life wherever you are.

That’s what we believe, or at least struggle to believe. It’s what the Roman Christians were struggling to live out under terrible persecution and threat. It’s what we live to do each and every day as we grow into missional people in a missional church.

“I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

I really am.

Amen

Where Goes the Neighborhood?

(This message is a part of our series titled, Missional People, Missional Church.)

Jeremiah 32:6-15

We’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief. Last week Jim Belcher talked about being resident aliens—people who participate and contribute to the culture, but who aren’t products of the culture.

Jeremiah said, "The word of the LORD came to me: Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, 'Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative it is your right and duty to buy it.' "Then, just as the LORD had said, my cousin Hanamel came to me in the courtyard of the guard and said, 'Buy my field at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. Since it is your right to redeem it and possess it, buy it for yourself.'

"I knew that this was the word of the LORD; so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels of silver. I signed and sealed the deed, had it witnessed, and weighed out the silver on the scales. I took the deed of purchase—the sealed copy containing the terms and conditions, as well as the unsealed copy, and I gave this deed to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel and of the witnesses who had signed the deed and of all the Jews sitting in the courtyard of the guard.

"In their presence I gave Baruch these instructions: 'This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Take these documents, both the sealed and unsealed copies of the deed of purchase, and put them in a clay jar so they will last a long time. For this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.'

Some background on Jeremiah: He served under five kings: one good one, Josiah, who found the Torah and renewed Judah’s faithfulness, and four more who were increasingly corrupt or cynical. Jeremiah preached a message of God’s judgment, including the threat of being taken away in exile, which was meant to turn Judah’s behavior back to God. Other prophets, more concerned with keeping their clientele happy than with preaching the word of God, minimized the threat of punishment for sin.

Through all of that, Jeremiah stood firm.

His life was threatened, he was beaten by the kings who were supposed to listen to him, he was ostracized by the people he was sent to serve, and at one point he was imprisoned in a sewer. In the end Jeremiah has to deliver the bad news that God was going to send his people into exile because of their disobedience. That’s where we pick up our story about Jeremiah and the field. The enemy army at the gates, the king was in denial, the other prophets were trying to make it seem like it wouldn’t be that bad, and the people responded by ignoring the whole thing. The culture of Jeremiah’s day was completely against him.

Through all of that, Jeremiah stood firm. Who was this guy?

From the Scriptures we can indentify five character traits of Jeremiah:

First, Jeremiah had a deep sense of integrity—he was honest and, as far as we can tell, impossible to bribe or corrupt. Second, and related to that, Jeremiah’s ministry was built on a foundation of courage in carrying out his convictions, even when he complained (remember that it’s Jeremiah who wrote an entire book called Lamentations.)

Third, Jeremiah was passionate in his opposition both to personal immorality and social injustice. (Both of those are priorities of God’s, too.) Fourth, as harsh as his message could sometimes be, Jeremiah showed a deep sensitivity to people’s sufferings.

Finally, and this is where our text finds us today, Jeremiah had hope for the future. He could complain with the best of them and his message was loaded with the promise of God’s judgment, but that didn’t take away his sense of hope that God would redeem his people just as he had promised.

How do we see that? Jeremiah buys a field in the path of an invading army.

Not exactly a wise investment, right? Jeremiah had the right to buy this plot of land, but no one would have blamed him if he’d passed on the opportunity. On the surface it was a disastrous use of funds—there was no apparent potential for any return on Jeremiah’s investment. And yet through it all, notice how public this transaction was. He paid the money and signed the deeds in the center of the city, where everyone could see. Why? Because God called Jeremiah to buy this field as an act of hope—a demonstration of God’s faithfulness.

Jeremiah stood firm, and bought a piece of property in the path of an invading army. What do we learn from that?

Being a Christian in London…or anywhere else, means keeping the faith—keeping our eyes on the essential truths of our faith—no matter what the culture tells us or how they might threaten us. Sometimes—and let’s be honest here: what I mean is in every waking moment—sometimes we have to stand firm in the path of all kinds of opposition to our faith in Jesus Christ, right?

The model for how we can do that faithfully and hopefully can be found in the life of Jeremiah the prophet.

We’re called to live with the same deep sense of integrity that Jeremiah had.

We’re called to have courage in living by our convictions, even if we don’t like doing it.

Our lives of discipleship should be driven by passionate opposition to both personal immorality and social injustice. I know that makes us uncomfortable, but, well, I just wanted to say that I know that makes us uncomfortable.

But through all of this—in the many ways we can stand in faith against anything the culture can throw our way—through all of this we have to demonstrate a sincere sensitivity to people’s sufferings and feelings. We’re not here to club anyone over the head. We’re here to speak and live the truth as we reach out with the love of Jesus Christ.

Finally, and this may be the hardest one of all, we’re called to have hope for the future—to believe that God will bring his process of redemption to completion just as he promised.

What this mean for how we’re called to live as Christians here in London or anywhere else?

What does this passage teach us about being the active ingredients—in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods—people who live out what we believe not just here in church, but everywhere we go?

First, Jeremiah’s investment strategy teaches us that the culture can’t prevent us from living lives of faith. On the surface it might seem like a bad investment, but if God is who he says he is, then the call on our lives is to live and love and spend and invest as if it’s true.

Second, we’re meant to live our faith publicly—where the culture can see us. This is about getting out in our neighborhoods and living our lives according to the values of the Kingdom. This is not about standing in front of our houses and preaching on a soap box.

This is meant to be much louder than that.

It’s not just words, but how we live our lives—lives of integrity and conviction, lives that model personal morality and a commitment to social justice, lives that our aware and concerned about the sufferings of people less fortunate than we are.

Finally, God calls us to live faithful lives as an act of hope—a demonstration of God’s own faithfulness to his promises. God calls us to this life, even when it feels uncomfortable to us.

I’ve been reading a book called The Monkey and the Fish, about what it means to be faithful Christians in a culture that doesn’t know what to make of us anymore. The author talks about how uncomfortable it can be—and how important that discomfort is as we learn to live as Christ’s disciples. He writes:

‘Living a life of [faithful] discomfort means venturing into places we don’t feel like going, doing things we don’t wish to do, being with people we don’t feel comfortable being with, serving them, loving them, helping them—all of which demonstrates a not-of-this-world brand of love that is irresistible to all people in all places.’

Being active ingredients in our communities isn’t always going to be comfortable, but it’s an effective way to sharing the love and mercy we’ve received from Christ with other people. It’s the best way to share that ‘not-of-this-world brand of love that is irresistible to all people in all places.’

My prayer for us, as we move through this season of learning what it means to be missional people in a missional church—my prayer for us is that we’ll embrace the discomfort of being Jesus followers in a culture that doesn’t always understand what that means—that we’ll invest in our communities wherever we are—however long we’ll be there—as a way of sharing the blessings God has already shared with us. Amen?

Some Reflections on Ministry in London

We've had Jim Belcher with us in London for the past few days. If you're not familiar with Jim, I'm happy to introduce you. Jim is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA, and the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (http://www.thedeepchurch.com/). Jim and I were at Fuller Seminary in the late 80s, and have gotten to know each other better over this past year. He's taking a writing sabbatical over this next year, and we were happy to host him while he was scouting a place for his family to live. Jim preached at the American Church in London on Pentecost Sunday, and the next day sat in on two conversations among church planters and other leaders here in my part of the world.

If you've read this blog over the last few years you know that London is a challenging place to do ministry. Without devaluing in any way my own seminary and practical training, it's safe to say that in order to be effective here, I had to learn a new set of skills to go alongside what I brought with me. It's the church planters who are teaching me what I need to know.

In my role as the pastor of a local church, some of the challenges to doing ministry come from within the congregation itself. It's a largely transient group; many of our families are here for 2-3 years and then are reposted to another country or back to the US. Our congregation is also made up of different denominational traditions--there isn't much shared knowledge or understanding of how to think about (or govern) a local church. Mostly, though, London itself can often pose the most daunting challenges to leading an effective, growing congregation.

In Southern California you often hear about the growing sense of secularization in the culture, made worse by the way church members move around. It's hard to say this without sounding dismissive, but in comparison London can make LA look like a stable community of unified Christian believers. (I'll pause to let that sink in.)

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. A church planter from Camden Town, an under-churched, poly-cultural, bohemian part of London with a tiny fraction of residents identifying themselves as Christians, said that many of the people in his area move every 12 months. Why? Because the standard length of a lease for a flat is one year, and after that many people move in search of more affordable housing. How do you do ministry in a community like that? The need is there, to be sure, but there is little chance to get a foothold.

Partly our conversations focused on staying theologically healthy as we reached out to our various communities. The rest became a free and wide-ranging discussion of what might work in some places (or, as it turned out, not in others), to share the gospel in a way that draws people into healthy relationships with God, with themselves, with each other and with the earth. There weren't any miracles or magic conclusions reached, but it was good to hear where people were struggling and, in some cases, seeing fruit in their ministries.

For me this past week has revealed a new and unexpected part of my own ministry here. My church is relatively stable organizationally, and that allows me to offer a gathering place for those who are out on the front lines. Just today another young church planter (from LA, no less) came by for a chat and we ended up making some tentative plans to offer space for one of their projects, and also to get together from time to time for prayer and conversation.

This convening and supporting of missionaries and church planters is becoming a part of my ministry beyond my work with ACL. It occurs to me today that I couldn't be more surprised...or happier about it.

The Electromagnetic Radiation of a Wavelength, Visible to the Human Eye

Matthew 5:14-16

Two men were arguing over which one knew the most of the Bible. The debate went on for a while and then the first guy said to the second guy, “I’ll bet you $10 you don’t even know the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

The second man said, “I’ll take that bet.”

They put down their ten dollar bills, and the first one said, “All right go ahead, say the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the second man began, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom...”

And at that point, the first man handed the money over and said, “Here’s the $20. I never thought you would have known it.”

Clearly neither one of these guys knew their Bible very well, which is too bad. The Scriptures represent the most important part of God’s plan to communicate with his creation. They are the centerpiece of God’s revelation—his revealing of himself—to all of us. Knowing the Bible is an important part of how we know God—how we know his mind and heart—and how we prepare ourselves to be the light of the world—to share what we know and believe with anyone and everyone.

We’ve been talking over these past few weeks about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

We continue our series on what it means to be the active ingredients—to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients that bring the message of the gospel in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. Those are the terms we’re going to use over these next weeks and months.

We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live as God’s people in the world.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Our text is the flipside of the passage last week about salt. In the 1-2 punch that Jesus was delivering to his listeners, this is the second strike. People came to Jesus to find out what he was offering—what was in this faith business for them, and Jesus turns it around so that the point was how this faith made a difference in how they treated others—what they were willing to share with the world.

He starts by appealing to their egos. ‘You are the light of the world.’

Who wouldn’t love to hear that? Who doesn’t want to be the star of the game, or the head of the class, or the life of the party. ‘You are the light of the world.’ I can see the crowd feeling pretty good about that.

But it might have started to turn with the second line. ‘A city on a hill can’t be hidden.’

That one might have made them squirm a little. If you’re going to be a source of light, then there’s nowhere to hide—nowhere you can’t be seen. This is one of the mixed blessings in battle of using radar. It helps you find what you’re looking for, but it also let’s other people find you. Nowhere to hide. I wonder how many people got up and left after that part.

Then Jesus breaks the tension with a joke. ‘No one lights a lamp and then puts a bowl over it.’

People would have chuckled about that one. Of course no one would do that—what a dumb thing that would be. Lighting a lamp and covering it with a bowl would be, well, it would miss the point of having the lamp in the first place.

Jesus would have agreed. ‘When you light a lamp you hang it up so that everyone in your house can benefit from the light.’

And then he drops the bomb. ‘Let your light shine where everyone can see it, so that they can see the way you live and give their own praise to your Father in heaven.’

Meeting Jesus in a meaningful way and not sharing it with someone else is like lighting a lamp and covering it with a nice big bowl. It just doesn’t make any sense. It misses the point of having the light in the first place.

Meeting Jesus in a meaningful way brings with it the call to share and to live that story with the people around us.

We finally got around to seeing the movie, ‘The Blind Side’, last week. As a matter of fact, we saw it on Friday night and liked it so much we watched it again on Sunday.

The movie was based on a book that was about the changing economics of football. In 1985 Joe Theismann, the quarterback for the Weashington Redskins, was hit so hard by a guy he never saw coming that he shattered his leg and never played again. Even now I can see some of you wincing—you remember how many times they replayed that tape. 'The Blind Side' partly tells the story of how NFL teams had to rethink the value of each player on their squads. Eventually, while the quarterback remained the highest-paid player on every team, the left tackle—the one who protects a right-handed QB’s blind side—is now often the second-highest paid player.

But the book and movie also follow the story of Michael Oher, a poor kid in Memphis who has the physical ability to thrive in this new era of football, but who needs some help in getting his life in order.

The movie also tells the story of a Christian family and their response to a young person in need. The focus is really on the mom in the story, Leigh Ann Touhy, played by Sandra Bullock. The mom’s story—and the story of the way her family responded—is pretty compelling. What surprised me, and one of the things I’m loving about the book, is that in this upper-middle-class white evangelical Republican cast of characters, person after person does exactly the right thing…explicitly because of their Christian faith.

The principal of the private Christian high school that took Michael in, a man named Steve Simpson, had a plaque on his desk with a verse from Second Corinthians. It read:

‘God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in his good works.’

One of the amazing things that comes out in both the book and the movie is that the administrators of the school thought it was more important to give Michael Oher an education than to make a sports hero out of him. Principal Simpson, the one who had that plaque about sharing our abundance, admitted Oher to the school with the provision that he wasn’t allowed to play sports until he could function on his own as a student.

Simpson didn’t have to do that. In a part of the US that is football-crazy he probably seemed like he’d lost his marbles for keeping this potential star off the field.

‘No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a bowl. They put it on a stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.’

In the end these people acted as the light of the world—they believed and prayed and agonized over whether or not they were doing the right thing. Teachers, parents, administrators all seemed to care deeply that what they believed would somehow help them make the right decisions about what to do to help this poor kid.

The family at the center of the story did their best to share the light of their love for Jesus with Michael Oher—and with the world. The point is that they started with their own home. They had two kids of their own—a young son and a daughter who was Michael’s age. They were successful and respected in the community. They were proper Southerners who’d been educated in Mississippi and gotten rich in Tennessee.

The movie plays this part for laughs, but anyone who knows the South knows what kind of a social risk they took.

This conservative, white, wealthy, socially prominent family opened their home to a kid in need who happened to be an orphaned black teenager who was 6-foot, 5-inches tall and weighed 350 pounds…at 16 years old.

Here’s the point—other than that you should go and see this movie and read this book today. Here’s the point. Whatever else made up the values of this Southern family, everything was secondary to doing what their faith called them to do.

When they were presented with the need of Michael Oher, the Touhy family chose to fire up that lamp, hang it on a stand, and let it give light to everyone in their house and neighborhood.

‘No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

So back to this idea of being ‘the light of the world’.

The scientific definition of light goes like this: It's the electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength, visible to the human eye.

Now I don’t know what most of that first part means, but the second part makes perfect sense to me—the part about it being visible to the human eye.

So much about our faith is personal. We wonder and study and pray, mostly to ourselves. So much of our faith is personal.

But right in the middle of our private search for some kind of a connection with Jesus we get confronted by this little verse—so easy to breeze right past while we’re looking for something else.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

That’s what was happening in the story of ‘The Blind Side’. The book described how the economics and values of professional football were transformed through a terrible injury and a need to protect the most important player on the team.

But the real story wasn’t about how the values of football changed. The real story was about how the values of a family were transformed through their faith in Jesus Christ. How they took the gift of light that came from their encounter with the Messiah, and shared that light in their home and with the world.

Try this version of that same text.

‘You are the light of the world. You can’t hide it, and no one should even try. When you get a little light going in your own life, make sure your own house is lit up. Then let someone else experience it too. That’s how they’ll know that the God you talk about is real, by your actions, by the way you share your light.’

Our faith becomes real when it begins to generate some light.

Our faith becomes real when we live it and share it and make different decisions because of it.

Our faith becomes real when it is visible to the human eye.

Whatever it is that we believe about God, about the work of Jesus Christ to redeem and restore our lives, about the role of the Holy Spirit to empower us to be the people we were made to be. Whatever it is that we struggle to believe as Christian people, what matters is how it offers light to people who think that the darkness in this world is all there is.

“You are the light of the world…let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

As we think about what it means to be missional people—to work and worship together as a missional church—keep those words in mind.

As we take a few moments to recognize the way some special volunteers here share their light with others, keep those words in mind.

Our faith becomes real when it is visible to the human eye.

How will you share that light with your world?

That was the point of that joke about the two guys who didn't know much about the Bible. Being the light of the world begins with knowing God’s word, where we see what that light means and what it promises. It begins with entering the Scriptures and wrestling with what they teach. It’s in that act of faith that we’re refined into the disciples God made us to be.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll allow the refiner to enter in, to make his values our values, and send us out as agents of his light for everyone to see.

Amen.

Let’s stand and sing together: ‘Refiner’s Fire’

Salt and Other Necessities

Matthew 5:13-16

In the Financial Times last week there was an article about the ‘European Christian Equity Index’, a new investment opportunity that is trying to earn competitive returns without trading in shares that involve alcohol or firearms or gambling, among other things.

It’s probably easy to poke fun or to be cynical about this. But I see it as an attempt to join what some people believe with how they invest. Whatever you might think about it, if the last few years have taught us anything it’s that we should pay more attention to how and where we earn our money.

13"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled.
14"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

We’re going to spend two Sundays in this brief passage. This week we focus on the salt in the passage, and next week we’re going to talk about the light.

We’ve been talking over these past few weeks about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

The technical term for the active ingredient in a medicine is pharmakos, which originally described a drug or even a magical substance. That same word also described the ‘scapegoat’ in ancient Greece, part of the practice of placing whatever harms the health of a community on an animal, and then sending it out into the desert. The hope was that the scapegoat would restore the health of the community—of the people and of the land.

We continue our series on what it means to be the active ingredients that bring the message of the gospel to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

Along the way we’re going to see how living what we believe can be a way to help restore health to our communities—to help take away whatever threatens the life and shalom of the world around us—to bring reconciliation and justice and even peace to the places we go and live in every day.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. Those are the terms we’re going to use over these next weeks and months.

We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live as God’s people in the world.

The Christian faith is a missional faith. The church, meaning everyone who follows Christ in faith—the church of Jesus Christ has a mission, and the mission of the church is to wrestle with what it believes and teaches about what God is doing in the world, and to be instruments of God’s love and plan everywhere we go, and in everything that we do.

That two-part definition is the sole mission of the church. Knowing God and living what we know is what we’re called to do and to be as missional people in a missional church. That’s the point for all of us as we move through the spring season.

What does that mean?

In one sense, being mission-minded and mission-hearted means understanding the gospel and what it offers for us and for the world.

It also means that we allow that gospel to season everything that we do, everywhere that we are.

The guiding text for this series is as familiar as it is crucial. It gets at the heart of what the life of Jesus teaches us about being the Body of Christ.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

Knowing about God is important. Living what we know is the rest of the story.

It’s in living what we believe about Jesus Christ that makes us active ingredients in our homes and lives and schools and jobs and neighborhoods.

So back to our text. It’s hard to imagine our lives without salt, and yet it’s a strange sort of relationship. Mark Kurlansky wrote a book a few years back about salt and its role in history. (I’ll pause for you to snicker at the idea of reading a history book about salt.)

He helps us understand the origins of the salt we take for granted on most of our tables. He writes:

"When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans."

He also mentions a booklet produced in 1920 by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of St. Clair, Mich., that listed a mere 101 uses, from ''keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables'' to ''making ice cream freeze,'' from ''removing rust'' to ''sealing cracks,'' from ''cleaning bamboo furniture'' to ''killing poison ivy.'' And that's not to mention all the medicinal applications, like treating ''dyspepsia, sprains, sore throats and earaches.'' Today, Kurlansky writes, the salt industry boasts more than 14,000 uses.

An ancient Egyptian document makes the claim that ‘there is no better food than salted vegetables’.

The Romans thought salt was an aphrodisiac, and used the term ‘salax’ to describe a man in love. We get the term salacious from the same place. I’m still trying to figure out how that part works its way into the sermon.

And salt has had a whole range of other important properties and roles in the history of civilization.

Preservative: The use of salt as a preservative for food transformed civilization and made it possible for more people to eat healthier food than they could before. Until the advent of the freezer, salt was the primary tool for preserving food and making it possible to distribute it around the world.

Medicine: Salt was used to clean out infections and heal any number of illnesses. Salt itself has been the active ingredient in a range of medicines right up to modern times.

Defining value: At one point salt was the major economic unit of the civilized world. It was used to pay employees and soldiers, and for a while functioned as the exchange rate mechanism between nations. It’s where we get the word ‘salary’.

Seasoning: This last use of salt is the one most familiar to us. It tastes good. We put it on food and whatever we’re eating comes to life. We get the word ‘salad’ from an old word for ‘salted vegetables’. Can you imagine eggs or French fries or even a steak without salt? Candy makers know that even sweet things taste better with a little salt.

How does this help us to be missional people? To be a missional church?

How does an understanding of the role of salt help us to become the active ingredients in our own places and lives?

Think about the properties of salt that we just talked about. There are four principles here about salt that can help us become the people and the place God calls us to be.

Preservative: We’re supposed to be deeply involved in the world around us, keeping it fresh and preventing it from getting rotten. God made this world to be nourishing—not just in food but in culture and commerce—family and political life, too.

Medicinal: As followers of Christ we’re called to be agents of healing and comfort, figuring out ways to offer cures or solutions to whatever makes our communities and cultures sick. The gospel has important things to say about personal and social morality. Just because we’ve done it poorly in the past, doesn’t mean we can surrender the field. Being active ingredients in our communities is how we share Christ’s work with the world he came to redeem.

Defining value: We don’t get paid in salt anymore, even if we’re worth our salt. But as Christians we’re called to claim our voice in defending the value of everyone and everything God has made. That’s why we work for economic and social justice in the world—it’s why we give and serve in efforts to stop the abuse of God’s people wherever it happens.

Seasoning: I love this one, because it reminds us that this business of being disciples of Jesus is supposed to be enjoyable—it’s supposed to make life better, more flavorful. It’s not right that meeting the savior of the universe in a transforming way somehow dooms us to being the stick in the mud at a party. Life is a gift, and enjoying life honors the gift God gave us all. When we become people who enjoy our lives not in spite of our faith, but because of it, we become salt to the world around us—people whose very lives make other people’s lives better.

If you don’t believe me on that, read the 8th chapter of Nehemiah. God’s people are back in their homeland and they gather to hear the Scripture read out loud. They start to weep and worry, but God tells them through a prophet to stop their crying, to get their best food and drink and to throw a party. He tells them to find people who don’t have enough and share it with them so they can celebrate too.

It should be a source of joy to know us. It should be a source of happiness and anticipation for our neighbors to see us and spend time with us. Does it work that way for you and your neighbors?

The invitation to all of us as we seek to live as salt in our communities is to reflect the joy of being forgiven, transformed people. As we move through this series of messages, that’s going to be our focus.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ The call is on us to do the same.

That European Christian Stock Index I mentioned before is just one example of how to do this in the world. It’s not the whole answer, and it may or may not work in the long run. But it’s an attempt to enter into the broader world—into the culture around us—and to live and thrive as an example of Christian values.

Jim Belcher, who will be preaching here in two weeks, makes a case for living in a way that is connected to our communities—being agents of the gospel in the culture. He writes:

“We should be known as those who create culture for the common good, for all people and not just fellow believers, culture that makes life better, more whole, for the entire city. While we are distinct from the surrounding culture, we also engage it. Add to this the mandate to seek the welfare of the city, and we get a powerful recipe for cultural transformation.”

I’ve said this before, but the people in this room on any given Sunday have enough influence and control enough resources to change the world. Will you?

It’s in joining what we believe to what we do—allowing our faith to call us to action—it’s in seeing how what we believe informs how we live—it’s in all of that that we become salt—the active ingredients in our homes and jobs and communities that communicate and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ in meaningful ways.

Next week, as we honor our teachers and youth volunteers, we’re going to shift our focus to the ‘light’ part of this passage—the part about how we take in and reflect the word of God in our lives. We can bridge the gap between the two with our song of response. Let’s stand and sing together, ‘Thy Word is a Lamp Unto My Feet’.

The Life of Jesus and the Body of Christ

John 1:1-14 (esp. v14)

If you look very closely on a container of medicine you’ll see something listed as the ‘active ingredient.’ The technical term for the active ingredient in a medicine is pharmakon, which originally described a drug or even a magical substance.

The pharmakon—the active ingredient—is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

Keep that in mind as we explore this familiar—and crucial—passage from Scripture.

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
6There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

That’s such an important passage for helping us understand who Jesus Christ was…and is. John builds this case that describes Christ as being in the center of things since before time began, and then screeches everything to a halt with the most amazing, audacious, revolutionary statement ever written in any language.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

We begin a series today on what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live. Put another way, we're going to spend a few months exploring what we learn from the life of Jesus about being the Body of Christ.

The Christian faith is a missional faith. The church, meaning everyone who follows Christ in faith—doesn't 'do' mission. The church doesn't simply have a mission, the church is a mission. The mission that defines the church is the sole mission of the church. That’s important as we move ahead through these next 8 weeks or so.

What does that mean?

In one sense, being mission-minded and mission-hearted means understanding the gospel and what it offers for us and for the world. It also means that we allow that gospel to season everything that we do, everywhere that we are.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

Knowing about God is important. Living what we know is crucial.

It’s in living what we believe about Jesus Christ that makes us active ingredients in our homes and lives and schools and jobs and neighborhoods.

Remember that word for the active ingredient…pharmakos? I was pretty happily surprised this week to learn that the other meaning of that word in the ancient world was scapegoat.

The pharmakos, or scapegoat, in ancient Greece was someone who was chosen or forced to take responsibility for a plague or famine or war that threatened the community. The scapegoat was saddled with all of the blame and sent out of the community—they took the punishment for whatever was happening in the hopes that the rest of the city or nation could be saved.

I hope the parallels to the gospel are pretty clear here.

In the 16th chapter of Leviticus we learn about the origins of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish tradition. One of the symbols of God’s atoning work in that holiday is the scapegoat. The goat is presented as a living sacrifice, saddled with the sin of the community, and then released into the desert.

The core of the gospel, of the Christian message, is that Jesus takes on that scapegoat role—that in order to complete his work of atoning for our sins, he takes all of that sin on himself so that we don’t have to.

But the story of Jesus turns the old scapegoat story on its head. The main point of the Jesus story isn’t that he went out into the desert and never came back. In fact, the point of the gospel is exactly the opposite.

The point of the Jesus story is that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

That’s the lesson in this passage for how the church is designed and called to live. In the life of Jesus we see him going out and living with people, with the ones who needed to know him, with the ones who were in desperate need of forgiveness and reconciliation and atonement.

Jesus came and went out into homes and neighborhoods and public squares and offered his life-changing power to whoever would listen.

Jesus came and went out into the world as the active ingredient that takes away sin and death and whatever else threatens us. It’s in the message of Jesus that we find something that makes us whole and healthy again—that restores the shalom we were meant to enjoy in the first place. It’s the message of the gospel that makes it possible for God, people and creation to live together in justice, fulfillment and delight.

So what do we do about this?

If the life of Jesus is the model for how the Body of Christ is called to live and serve, then there are some marching orders for us as we begin this journey together.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

If part of the point of Jesus’ ministry was that he came and lived his real life out among real people, then we’re called to do the same.

To put it very simply: The mission of the church isn’t about being in church. It’s also not only about going to foreign countries to serve, although that’s an important part of our ministry.

The mission of the church—what it means to be a mission-minded, mission-hearted family of people—the mission of the church is to live the gospel of Jesus Christ wherever we are—whatever we’re doing.

It’s about being the active ingredient in our homes and families and jobs and schools and neighborhoods—the active ingredient that makes Jesus real to the people we come into contact with.

When we look at it that way, coming to church isn’t really the point. The real point is coming to church so that we can be inspired and equipped to go out into the world as God’s messengers.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us,’ and the call on our lives is to do the same.

To go out and put flesh on the message of Jesus—to be the active ingredient that brings health and healing—to bring the message to life as we live our lives among the people God loves and wants to restore.

Over the next few months we’re going to circle this topic as we grow together in our understanding of what it means to be the people of God. We’ll use terms like ‘missional’ and being mission-minded and mission-hearted, we’ll talk about joining together the words of or message to the actions in our lives.

We’ll talk about a lot of things, but whatever we say here it all comes back to the way the life of Jesus shows us how to be the body of Christ.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us,’ and the call on our lives is to do the same.

Amen.