Engaging Disciples

Sermon by John Turner

September 20, 2009

Building a Community of Hope

We are halfway through the small group meetings introducing the working draft of our Mission and Vision Statements for your consideration. For those of you who have not yet heard the presentation, we are using the heading, “Building a Community of Hope through Jesus Christ.” We identified “hope for a better life” as the single most-needed factor in our community.

Component 1

We believe that there are three components of how we deliver this hope. Component 1 is evangelism. As Christians, our hope for a better life is in Jesus Christ. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, how can people hope in one abut whom they have no accurate information? Paul quotes Isaiah, “How beautiful are the feet of those who proclaim good news.” I might add that the good news is proclaimed not in words only, but also in deeds, and the good news is that a God of compassion and righteousness reigns and prevails over human sin and evil, and we may experience his reign if we will put our trust in him. So Component 1 to delivering hope is sharing the good news of God’s reign, which we are commissioned by Jesus Christ to do.

Components 2 and 3 Bring Credibility

But our message will have substance, integrity, and credibility only if we add Components 2 and 3.

Component 2: Spiritual growth, meaning that we ourselves are being changed into the likeness of Jesus, and

Component 3: hands-on mission, meaning that our faith is leading us into tangible efforts to make life better for people here in our area and for people around the world.

In the past two weeks, we have talked about the first two components, evangelism and spiritual growth.

Emphasis on Component 3: What This Congregation Does Best

Today, our emphasis is on Component 3, hands-on mission to make life better for others.

Actually, that is what this congregation does best. Let a need be known, and this congregation will respond with time, material goods, money, prayers, encouragement, meals, and more. We will respond not just when some big need comes along, but on a regular basis through our work at the Loaves and Fishes food pantry. We respond not just here at home, but around the world. Dan Krotz left for Africa Friday and Dave Buttgen will be leaving Monday where they will be making life better for fish farmers, grain farmers, and their families and communities.

The top 6 spiritual gifts in this congregation are assisting, showing mercy, believing, administering, contributing, and encouraging. Those are the gifts that show up in our helping other people toward better lives.

Let’s look at the scriptural foundation for this.

Isaiah 58

Isaiah 58 tells us that spiritual life is worse than pointless if it does not result in our seeking peace, justice, and opportunity for the poor and oppressed, for those who need new beginnings in life, or who need some help just to make it from one day to the next with food, clothing, and shelter. Our faith in a loving God is empty if we are not working as we are able to show and to share that love. We get that message and show it in our actions.

Isaiah 61 and Luke 4

Jesus took Isaiah’s message to the next level. Jesus quoted the opening verses of Isaiah 61, which concern the Spirit-Anointed Conqueror who comes to set our world right and to declare that the Year of Jubilee, the time of new opportunity for the poor and oppressed, is not just every fiftieth year, but every day of every year, that the opportunity for new beginnings is constantly present in and through this Spirit-Anointed Agent. Jesus said that he was that Agent, and, later he said that, after his death, resurrection, and ascension, he would send the same Spirit anointing upon those who believe in him, upon his church that would follow him. If we are believers in Jesus, we are Spirit-anointed to offer new opportunities for better living to people around us day-by-day.

Acts and 1 Peter

That is precisely what the early church did, not only in Jerusalem, but also wherever they spread throughout the ancient world. There were times and places where persecution of the early Christians meant that they lost some of the opportunities that the world offered to practice their trades. The church had to step forward to offer opportunities for their members to replace the ones that were lost because they were faithful to Christ. But the church did not just serve its own members. It also offered opportunities for new beginnings to people who were not yet Christian.

Peter wrote to the early Christians in what is now Northern and Central Turkey. I agree with scholar Karen Jobes that Peter’s audience consisted of refugees who had been exiled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius. If Jobes is right, Peter had known them in Rome before their exile, and he was writing to urge them to make a positive difference in their difficult circumstances in a new environment that was not of their choice.

In the passage we are reading today, Peter reminds his reading audience of their distinctive Christian identity. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

Peter is saying that Christians are people chosen by God, called out of darkness and into light, claimed by the mercy revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and commissioned to represent God’s character and purposes to the world. They are obligated to live out that identity. Peter emphasizes that Christians must live out their distinctive morality so that those who criticize them will be confounded by their good and honorable lives, and so that the foolishly ignorant will be silenced by their good deeds.

In verses 11,12, 15, 16 and most of 17, Peter says: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation….For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God.”

I suggest that the good deeds Peter had in mind were things that made life better, not just refraining from doing wrong, not just helping their fellow believers, but actually improving life for their neighbors. They were to honor everyone even as they loved one another and revered God. Honoring everyone means everyone, including people whose lives are despicable. I believe that Christians everywhere are to live so that life around them is better. This is how we make our faith attractive.

The Point for Today

The point for today is that the Apostles, and specifically here, Peter, want Christians to be perceived as good, productive, and reputable citizens, who can be admired even by their unbelieving neighbors.

When the way the social order is working is not for the advantage of most people, Christians are not to defy the law, except in extreme circumstances, but are to create legal ways to benefit the people of their neighborhoods, to bring such benefits that the neighborhood will have to respect and value them.

What Is God Calling Us to Do?

Right here in Carroll County, things are not working for a lot of people, and realistic hope for a better life is hard to come by. We need to be asking God what we can do that will make a difference and that will earn respect for our faith, what we can do that will build hope for our neighbors. There are dozens of possibilities. We cannot set out to do all of them simultaneously. We can give prayerful attention to Berryville and Carroll County circumstances and ask God to show us what he would, out of all the possibilities, specifically call us to do to make things better, to renew the hope of new beginnings for our neighbors.

Ideas that are circulating here and there in our congregation include:

1. Local Food Production and Local Food Marketing. We are celebrating the near completion of stage one of this concern today with our Harvest Dinner. I hear a lot of ideas circulating among us about how we might improve the impact of what we are doing with the gardening and marketing local food. We have to determine which few of these many ideas are God’s will for us to implement, to which ones God is calling enough of us that we can be effective in doing something.

2. Families, Children, and Youth. We have opened our new Youth and Children’s facilities. We are ready to move ahead to new steps. I am so proud of our youth group. Yesterday our youth moved to the forefront in planning the second annual community youth outreach concert sponsored by the Berryville Alliance of Churches. This is a concern in which evangelism, spiritual growth, and hands-on mission overlap. There is a great need in this county for Christian-based family counseling. There is a great need for helping families develop organized financial plans with a chance of success at digging them out of deep holes. We need more Christian foster homes and Christian Big Brother, Big Sister type programs. The list goes on and on.

3. Chemical Abuse and Addiction. There is a great need for more to be done in the area of helping people of all ages break free from alcohol and drug abuse, whether it is more widely distributed A.A., Al-Anon, and N.A. groups, or for more widely available Celebrate Recovery groups, generic, Christian-based, Twelve Step programs, or for more Spirit-filled healing prayer ministries where many get a jump start on their recovery path.

More: We could go on to list other matters of concern: community-based economic development, job creation, and income enhancement, high quality, Christian-friendly education, health care, creation care, and so forth.

Scary? God Will Supply Us as We Grow

It may seem scary to think of tackling such a wide array of issues, but we will not tackle all of them at once, and we will tackle only those for which God supplies us with the people to carry them out. As the congregation grows in numbers, and I believe that we will grow in numbers as we focus on and follow our mission statement, the human energy and material resources to do more and more will be supplied.

Our present fifty people cannot think of doing much more than we are doing; we would have to stop doing something we are presently doing in order to take up some new thing.

But one hundred people can accomplish more than twice as much as fifty. I believe that we can be to that point within three years.

Three hundred people who come with the expectation of becoming part of a mission-focused church, just six times our present numbers, might accomplish ten or twelve times as much.

Why can more people accomplish proportionately more? Because as we grow, although we will have to have some increased numbers of members devoted to basic congregational survival and maintenance, the percentage of members devoted to such tasks will drop. A higher percentage of members will be free to focus on missions and ministries. I can imagine that we could reach those kinds of numbers within ten years.

Why I Am Confident

The reason for my confidence is this. There are a lot of people out there who are looking for two things: (1) spiritual growth, and (2) hands-on mission. A church that reaches out with the gospel and focuses tightly on these two additional things will reach a lot of people. I do not know that there are any churches around us articulating such a clear focus on the things most needed.
Our vision for growth is not a cynical plan to grow a church institution, for at its heart it is about obeying the most basic commands of the New Testament. Ultimately, it is about becoming compassionate, Christlike people who seek to build a community of hope in Jesus Christ.

Compassion Hymn

We have learned two Getty-Townend hymns “In Christ Alone” and “Speak, O Lord.” I would like to refer you to another new Getty and Townend hymn, one we have not yet learned. It is simply called “Compassion Hymn.” The first three verses describe Jesus’ compassion.
And the fourth verse extends the compassion through our present day efforts. The refrain reflects on God’s “boundless love” and “fathomless grace” which we are now called to show to the world as an offering of our praise.

Experience the hymn on this video from a Getty concert tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmRjBnuaH-U

To see the words, click the title “Compassion Hymn” from the list of hymns on this webpage:
http://gettymusic.com/hymns.aspx