After that Scripture reading, and the warning
against people who end up in ministry and even lay church leadership for
less-than-the-best reasons, does anyone really think we’re in it just for the
money?
With maybe one or two exceptions, I haven’t
known ministers who are in it to get rich.
Because really, it pays the bills but the money is not going to make
anyone a millionaire.
Of course a million bucks isn’t the only
less-than-good incentive to being in ministry.
The benefits are pretty good. There
is also certain amount of job security; I wonder for instance how many
ministers sometimes avoid leading their congregations into amalgamation talks with
other congregations, or leave it too long because in the back of their minds
they know amalgamation will mean the end of their job. Or, years ago I was amused at the number of
ministers from the Toronto and London areas who I met at Theology School, whose
first churches were out west or in Newfoundland or up north, and who within two
or three years found themselves happily called by God to move, step by steady
step, to churches closer and closer to Toronto or London and to old friends and
family and stomping grounds.
Of course one of the graces of God we
treasure is the way God and the body of Christ meet personal need and hold
together the circles and cycles of life that feed us. But is there also – just because we’re human,
a point beyond which meeting human desire and our own felt needs becomes the
object of what we do, and not just a benefit of our commitment to the life of
the kingdom?
I remember years ago driving home from worship
at All People’s United in Welland, thinking how fortunate I am that I get to
talk about God – something I would do for free, and they pay me for it. Are there times, though, when that turns
around to, they are paying me to do it, so I’d better talk about God? Being human, the answer is probably not
simple.
That line, that shift, and that human
temptation also exist in church programs and the ministries we engage in.
Think of Sunday school, VBS, and other
Christian education programs for children and young families. In the beginning – in the olden days, Sunday
school and VBS were begun because there was a deep passion and heart-felt
desire that the children of the church and of the surrounding community have a
chance to hear and learn and know about God and God’s love and the stories of
God’s people, so they could grow into that tradition of faith and live it out
themselves. It was passion for others
and desire to help them know God that led to the programs, and what came of it
was strong Sunday schools and new families in the church and church growth.
So anytime the church starts to falter and
growth slows down one answer is to revitalize the Sunday school, get VBS going
again, start up some new children’s programs to get kids and their parents into
the church, to build up the membership, to serve the needs of the church.
Do you see the difference?
Even church membership, attendance at
worship, and leadership can be subject to the same human tendencies and
temptations. We come because we feel a
need for something – for connection with something or someone beyond
ourselves. We attend worship because
something has happened in our life and we want to give thanks, we want to pray,
we want to understand what this greater something is. And we get involved – we help out and we lead
because we want to give back, we want to maintain the good that’s here, we want
it to be available for others.
And as we do this we begin to encounter God,
we see and meet Jesus in new ways, we feel the holiness of our own spirit being
fed.
It feels good. It feels right. It feels – we feel, holy.
And is there sometimes, then, a line or a
point or a way that it gets to be more about our feeling good, than about
meeting God – more about our feeling right, than about serving others’ needs –
more about our being able to feel holy, than about giving ourselves to the healing
of the world?
Because we’re human, the answer is probably
not simple.
So what do we do to stay on the right side of
the line, to not slide too far in the direction of our own needs and desires,
to not let the church be just like so many other human institutions?
Two things stand out in the reading as maybe
a start in the right direction.
One is to constantly be ready to refocus our
image of Jesus, since he is the one we follow and the one we see as our window
and our doorway into the mystery of God.
Did you notice the reference to Jesus in the
reading? The author is encouraging the
leaders and members of the church of his day to commit themselves again to
confessing their faith and living out their belief in the kingdom of God on
Earth as they did in the beginning in their imitation of Jesus, and in order to
make this real and engaging for them the author points to a very particular
image of Jesus living out the kingdom of God on Earth – in his confrontation
with Pilate, when he is abandoned and alone, accused and on trial, powerless
and about-to-be-crucified, and still proclaiming the message of God’s love for
all the world even though it means giving his life for it. It’s exactly the opposite of what many of the
church leaders and members were like a few generations later, as the church
became more settled, with more of a place in society, more comfortable, and
more willing to compromise with things like unequal wealth, hierarchic power,
injustice and corruption .
I wonder in what ways the first images of
Jesus and the kingdom of God as he proclaims it and makes it known, may be
opposite to some of what we do, how we allow ourselves to be?
And a second thing then, that maybe follows
from the first – from really opening ourselves again to Jesus and the kingdom
of God, is to let ourselves be guided in our church life by passion -- by the
passion of our hearts and souls that’s awakened when we see and look at the
world through God’s eyes. And I wonder
what that is. What is that we really
care about – really get excited about – really cry and feel pain about, when we
look at the world through the lens of the Good News of Jesus Christ?
I sometimes think the most important part of
our liturgy on Sunday morning is not the sermon, not the hymns, not the choir
anthem nor offering nor children’s time – although the children’s time may be a
close second – but I think the most important thing we do is what we finally
come to just before our departing hymn – the Prayers of the People. Because this is a time each week when after
opening ourselves to God, recalling our faith in the hymns we sing, and
listening as best we can to God’s Word, before we return to the world we take
time to think and pray about its life and its needs -- we open ourselves to the
sorrows of the world, to the needs of our neighbours, to the concerns of the
community. And in the silence and quiet
of intercessory prayer we have a chance to know what it is that stirs our
hearts, what moves us to care and to cry, what draws us out of a safe place
into the riskiness of love.
And what would it be like to then structure
church – let all we are and all we do, be built around those concerns? Around the things we discover in prayer we
are passionate about? Around the things
in the world that our hearts are moved by God to care deeply about?
I wonder: what is church like, when it’s
focused and re-focused over and over again on the first images of Jesus and
what he shows of the kingdom of God on Earth, and is built around meeting
whatever needs in the world around us he inspires us to really care about?
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