"What is Left to Do in Your Life?"
Look to God for a sense of meaning and purpose
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Text: Job 31:16-23
Whether you look in public book stores or religious stores, you will find many books extolling the virtues of having a meaningful life. Whether you read Rick Warren's book, The Purpose Driven Life, which is very popular in certain circles, or Rabbi Kushner's book, Living the Life That Matters, it seems there is a plethora of books encouraging people to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
I think one reason for this is that within the soul of our society, and within the hearts and the minds of many people, there is a great void. For all our material wealth and power and all the pleasures available to us 24/7, there is still a feeling that something is missing, and that what is missing is a sense of the divine, of the transcendent - a sense of meaning and purpose. What people feel they need is to have a life that matters.
I don't believe that whether our lives matter depends on what we do. I think that everyone matters, regardless of who they are, where they are from or what their social condition may be. I don't think we earn the right to matter. I think we matter because God made us, and his Son, Jesus Christ, paid a great price to redeem us.
This was brought home to me a number of weeks ago as I walked along Bloor Street. As I crossed the road to go into a store, a gentleman stopped me because I was wearing my clerical shirt. He asked, “Are you a Christian?”
I felt like saying, “No, I just dress like this because it looks cool, that's all!” But I didn't. I said, “Yes, I am a Christian. And by the way, some ministers are Christians.”
He laughed, and said, “No, no, you misunderstand me.”
I replied, “Yes, I think I do.”
“I would like to talk to you,” he said. “Have you got a moment?”
I said, “Sure, I have a moment. By all means!” Anyone who is bold enough to come up to me and ask me if I am a Christian is worth talking to, don't you think?
He began to tell me a story, and it touched me deeply. The man is from Gansou, a province in China. He told me that it is one of the poorest parts of the People's Republic. It is so poor that the basic living standard of a family is less than $7,000 a year. However, over the years, Gansou has been important. It was part of the Silk Road. It has been the meeting place of many different religions: Buddhist, Muslim and Christian. Yet throughout the years, it has tended to be one of the poorest, most ill-regarded of all the provinces in China. Even though it has a population in excess of 25 million, which makes it just a little bit smaller than Canada, it has little or no notoriety. Frankly, I confess I had never heard of Gansou province until I met this man.
What was interesting about him was that he wanted to tell me he was a Christian, and that as a Christian he was part of a small minority. He said one of the most fascinating aspects about being a Christian was belonging to a small community of faith. Even though they had been oppressed by the government over the years - they hadn't been given the freedom to worship - still the community meant a great deal to him. He said, “You know, one of the problems in China is that there are so many of us. It is easy to get lost in the crowd; easy not to be an individual; easy not to be noticed.” He continued, and this was the key, “But when you belong to a community of faith, all of a sudden you are embraced, and you realize (and this is the word) that you matter.”
I have thought about that man many times, because I think a lot of people don't believe they matter. Whether you are an auto worker in Windsor, a Supreme Court Justice in Ottawa, a fisher on the Zambezi River - you do matter! Part of the mission of the church, like that of those communities in China, is to ensure people understand that they matter, that they are important, that they have value in God's eyes. They don't earn that value - it is something that has come by the grace of the One who made them. So I want to ask this question on Mission and Service Sunday: Precisely how can you and I, as believers, help make other people's lives matter? How can the church, in its mission to serve God, enable people's lives to matter?
I used a very remote, rather distant passage from the Book of Job. In it, Job is rather defensive. The story of Job is well-known. But just to re-cap it very basically, Job is a good man who suffers greatly, and he has friends who are brought along to give counsel to him. If you want to read more on this, there is a series of my sermons about Job on the Internet that you can access through our church website. Job suffers, is judged and given advice by his friends and has an encounter with God. The story has a marvellous ending, which speaks of God's sovereignty and Job's humility.
However, this passage from Chapter 31 describes a moment when Job's friends have condemned him. They said, “Job, if you are suffering, you are suffering because you haven't done things correctly.” In a moment of self-defense, Job says something that speaks of the virtues of the life of faith. He says, “Look, if (and in the classic legal protocol of his age “if” is in a sense the oath, and “then” is the judgment) I have not cared for the widow, if I have not fed the poor, if I have been sinful and unrighteous, if I have been overly materialistic, if I have not been a faithful spouse, if I have not been a good citizen, if I have not been honest in my business dealings, if I have not lifted my hand to help the oppressed, if I have not given clothing to the naked, then I want my arms ripped from me and I want to face the judgment of God.”
In many ways, this is an act of self-righteousness on Job's part. He is trying to justify himself. But, if Job's words are turned around, there is a profound statement of truth. The “if” I have done these things is the way in which we help other people's lives matter. I think Jesus had Job in mind when he spoke the words recorded in Mathew 25. I can't make a direct link, but it is certainly in the tradition of wisdom literature when Jesus says, “If I was naked and you clothed me, if I was hungry and you fed me, if I was a prisoner and you visited me (notice the same sort of cadence, the same type of language) then you have done these things for me.” Herein is the mission; herein lies the call to a life of service; herein lies the way in which we make other people matter.
To accomplish this, we need to do a couple of things. First, we really need to develop a mission individually. Mission statements by organizations, governments, academics and corporations are very much in vogue. A lot of time is spent writing a mission statement, choosing the right words and finding exactly the right phrases. Sometimes, when you boil them down, these mission statements are a little vague and banal, and sometimes you can drive a truck through them logically. Other times they are helpful, because at least they cause an institution, organization or even a person to say, “What is it that I really want to do? What is my calling? What are we here for? Why do we exist?”
I think in our individual lives, we need to do that for ourselves. So often, we are pulled in a myriad of directions and we lose the sense of our God-given mission. A passage like this from Job helps us have that sense of mission. Listen again to the words. They are poetic! “Look, if I have withheld anything that the poor desired, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fade.” What a lovely phrase! The widow, like the orphan, is one of the most vulnerable people in Jewish and ancient society, as in our society today.
Job says, “If I cause their eyes to be turned down” (in other words, to look away, to be ashamed) “then I am to be judged. If I have eaten my morsel alone, and the orphan has not eaten from it - for from my youth I reared the orphan like a father.” In other words, he says that if he has only taken care of himself and not the most vulnerable, then he is to be judged. “If I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or a poor person without covering whose loins have not blessed me” (the best translation of this phrase is ”˜whose whole existence has not blessed me') and who has not been warmed with the fleece of my sheep. If I have raised my hand against the orphan, because I saw I had supporters at the gate, then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder.”
Here, then, is a mission statement. Here is a statement of what we are supposed to do: Care for those who are the most vulnerable - the weak, the poor, those who need clothing, those who cry out for justice and anyone who is in need in our society. We need to have a sense of personal mission that this is something we need to embrace and take seriously. After all, it is reiterated by Jesus in the positive sense, if we do these things, then we have done them for him. We have done them for the Lord of Life.
This might mean that we have to examine our “best practices,” to use corporate-speak. Maybe this means we have to decide for ourselves where our values are, and what is most important to us. The comedian, Richard Pryor, was very ill in 1980. He had been burned very badly and needed help. A few months later, in an interview with Carson, he said, “When I was in need, I called on God for help. Never once did I call Bank of America!” At that point in his need, no matter how much money he had or what material things he possessed, he turned to God.
Here is my point: We are by our baptism, by our faith, by our convictions, followers of God and his Son, Jesus Christ. It seems to me that when people are in need, they should want to turn to us. They should want to turn to those who subscribe to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. If we have a mission statement, if we have a sense of what our lives should be, then we are living up to what God calls us to be, and can enable other's lives to matter.
There is a wonderful, ancient document in which Celsus wrote to Diognetus. He was talking about Christians and, as a Roman, he said he had noticed that Christians were different. This is what he wrote to Diognetus about the Christian community:
Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humankind either in locality or in speech or in customs, for they dwell not in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language, nor practise an extraordinary kind of life. While they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians, and follow the native customs in dress and food and other arrangements of life, yet the constitution of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvelous, and confessedly contradicts expectations. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign. They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they surpass the laws of their own lives with their giving. So, Christians are kept in the world as in a prison house, and yet, they themselves hold the world together.
This is not an idealized picture. It is a description given by a Roman to a Roman about the earliest Christian communities. But there was a sense of mission that reached out and transcended wherever Christians lived and whatever they had. There was something about them that caused them to give to the world around them and attracted others. Isn't that a great mission statement for you and for me?
There is another element to this. This is Mission and Service Sunday, and we need to look at the mission of the church. I happen to believe that the church does not have a mission. Let me be clear: the church does not have a mission - the church is the mission. By that I mean that we are the Body of Christ. It is not as if we decide we are going to have a mission and define it. Rather, Christ has called us to be the mission, and to embrace what is known in Latin as the missio dei - the mission of God. It is not our mission that we select; it is who we are in the light of Christ.
It seems to me that these days there is a great deal of confusion about this. For example, I sometimes hear from religious leaders that congregations, their growth and the attraction of new members don't matter. That church buildings don't matter; that they are irrelevant and that all the church needs to do is be concerned about what is outside of itself. While I understand the dangers of idolatry in worshipping buildings, and while I understand that it is very easy for any community to become narcissistic and self-absorbed, I find that kind of comment overly narrow.
It seems to me that the mission of God includes the development of the worshipping community. It includes the buildings we have been given that we may use them for others. It means that worship and the praise of God is a starting point and the energizing point for our compassion and concern for the world. I believe the church exists to welcome people, to reach out to people, to draw them in and send them out, to bring them together and to care for individuals. It exists to have a vision of the sovereignty of God that causes people to feel the love, grace and power of fellowship - a fellowship that reaches out, embraces and gives itself to the world. I believe in a big picture of the church, because I believe it is not our mission, it is God's mission. God is always greater than any one form we might think his mission takes.
Jesus said, “Whatever you do for the least of these, my children, you have done for me.” Maybe he was just talking to a small group of disciples. Maybe he did just bring a few intimate people around. But, as someone said to me recently, the crowds followed Jesus gladly. They saw in him something profound. They saw in him the mission of God at work, and they followed him. When Jesus called the disciples together, as much as he loved them, embraced them and wanted them to be his own, he said, “I want you to go out into the world, into Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the outermost parts of the world, and teach people to obey what I have commanded you.”
It was imperative, then, to go out and expand. I think that vision is an expansive, gracious vision, and it is what I believe the Mission and Service fund of the United Church of Canada should be about and is really about. It is about providing churches with homes and starting new churches. It is about helping our theological seminaries develop and grow. It is about missions and chaplains. It is about people helping the poor on the street on the east side of Vancouver or the north end of Halifax. It is about helping people who are providing care to the lonely, lost and dispossessed. It enables people to be a voice for the voiceless in a world that often tries to silence them. The vision arises from communities like our own. For if we are not expansive and growing, if we are not dynamic and full of the Spirit, where does that vision of the Mission and Service fund ultimately come from? No, it is not a case of one or the other: it is the case of both. That expansive sense of vision is what I really hope we grasp in the church these days. It is narrow thinking, small mindedness, and sometimes even lack of faith that prevent us from doing what Christ and his mission call us to do.
There is a wonderful story about a man called Old Ed. Every Friday evening as the sun sets, Old Ed goes down to a pier in Florida carrying a bucket of shrimp. He doesn't hand the shrimp to people; he doesn't eat the shrimp himself; he doesn't throw it into the water for other big fish to eat. Rather, he puts the shrimp in his hands and he holds them out. To everyone's astonishment, every Friday evening, on that pier gulls appear from nowhere - sometimes hundreds of them - waiting to eat the shrimp out of his hands.
When asked why he did this, and told what a strange ritual it was, Eddy Rickenbacker answered, “You see, I was a bomber pilot in World War II, and I flew B-17s in the Pacific. One day, I was to go and help rescue McArthur, but my plane went down in the ocean. The wings fell off, and while the plane sank, they stayed afloat.” He and the crew stayed on the wings. He said:
After days in the sun, we became hungry and thirsty. We were about to die, and so we prayed. We asked for God. All of a sudden, a gull landed on my head. I grabbed the gull and broke it, and we ate it. We took the innards and used them as bait. We caught fish, and we survived until we were rescued a few days later. That was on a Friday evening, and so from then on, I decided that I would feed the gulls on Friday nights when the sun is going down and thank God for having provided for me.
That, my friends, is the mission of the church! It is that sense that we have been rescued and we are thankful. We are full of praise and we are grateful. We have been restored and renewed by the grace of Christ, and we offer our open hands to feed others, to give to others. Why? Because we want them to know that they matter, and we want them to know that they matter most of all to God. May that be our mission! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.