"The Personal Approach"
The power of the personal encounter
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Text: John 1:35-42
A few weeks ago I received two invitations on the same day. By coincidence, they were for events that were being held at the same time on the same day. The first invitation was very slick. It came in a beautiful envelope, was professionally printed, glossy and even had my name embossed on the very front of it! “Andrew Stirling, you are invited to a seminar on church growth.” When I opened it up, there were all these testimonies by leading people who maintained that their churches had grown tremendously because of these seminars, and there was even a guarantee at the bottom that, if I attended, my church would grow rapidly. The second invitation was a handwritten note inviting me to meet someone. The person was the editor of a well-known Christian magazine in the United States and, by reputation, a godly man. It wasn't a particularly effusive letter. It was just a simple, warm invitation signed by an individual hoping that I would be there.
The obligatory follow-up e-mail from the first invitation came about three weeks later wanting to know if I had received it and flabbergasted that I hadn't already responded. They told me again that I would learn techniques and technologies to make my church grow and that a seat was being reserved for me at the seminar. If I didn't sign up very shortly, someone else was going to take that seat. I also received an automated phone call that day from a woman I could barely comprehend. The follow-up to the second invitation was a real, live phone call from a person saying, “Andrew, we haven't heard back from you and we really want you to be there. I think you will find it a very meaningful discussion.”
I am always concerned, as you know, for the betterment of the congregation, so I tried to weigh up which one of these events I should attend. Which do you think I went to? Number two. Why? Because we live in an impersonal world. We live in a world that worships what philosophers call “technic” - the worship of the god of technology. We love the people who offer the nice pat answers and glossy promotions. We are bombarded with that and, after a while, we become just a little bit cynical about it. But the personal approach is what we really, really need in this world.
I couldn't help but think when I weighed these two options, “Which one do I really want to be moved by? Which would be of the greater benefit for the church?” It would be the one, I thought, where I would encounter a godly person talking about godly things in a personal way. For the record, it was an absolutely magnificent evening!
I am also influenced by the text from the Gospel of John, for in it we find another personal approach, another moment of an encounter between individuals. In this particular case, two followers of John the Baptist are walking with John, John sees Jesus, his cousin, in the distance and says, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” This is the language that would be used by Jews to describe someone representing God. Immediately, John's disciples' curiosity is peaked because their great leader has pointed them to someone else.
As the two men approach Jesus, he asks them what they want. They say, “Rabbi, we want to know where you are staying.”
Jesus replies, “Come and see.” We read that it was about the tenth hour. It is hard to know what was really meant by the tenth hour. Was it, as in the translation from this morning's text, four in the afternoon, or was it ten in the morning with the rest of the day still to be spent with Jesus? We don't know. But there is a reason this information is included in the text, probably to suggest that the disciples were with Jesus quite a long time.
They went to his house, and one of them was so taken by the encounter with Jesus that the first thing he did, and in the Greek it is emphasized with the word protos - immediately - was go to his brother, Peter, and say, “Peter, we have seen the Messiah!” The personal touch! He then took his brother and introduced him directly to Jesus. Jesus called Peter “Cephas” - “the rock” in Aramaic or Greek; the symbol of something solid, a foundation. The person who did the introducing was none other than Andrew.
Here, in this personal touch, we find a way of reaching people. No great pronouncements, no great sermons; just a warm welcome followed by a gracious, personal invitation. If there is one thing needed in the church today, it is that personal approach to the way we share the faith. I say that because I am convinced that in a world that is becoming desensitized and impersonalized, the personal approach is even more important.
To really convince you of this, we have to see a movement, in fact four movements. The first of these is a movement from seeing the church as a museum to seeing the church as a place of mission. If there is one thing we need to understand, it is that if the church is to survive, it has to reach out to the world. Not only to survive, but also to be faithful to the good news it has already received.
Too many of us, if I may use a sports analogy, are like a team that wants to sit on a lead. It has been fascinating to observe this over the past few weeks. In the NBA, Los Angeles sat on a lead and lost to Boston. In hockey, Pittsburgh sat on a lead and lost to the Detroit Red Wings. One of the nations in the European championships - and I won't offend anyone by naming it - sat on a lead, only to have another team come back and win. The dangers of trying to sit on a lead are legendary and numerous. Yet teams still do it. They think they can put up a blockade and never go on the offensive, never reach out, never attack. Once they have got a goal, they just sit on it.
The Church of Jesus Christ is a little bit like that, particularly in its current mainline guise. All the scholars suggest that we have moved from what was called a Constantinian Christian model, in which we were in social ascendancy, and we are now what William Willimon calls “resident aliens.” We have moved from being in social ascendancy in our society to living in a world where we wonder if we even belong. But sometimes churches still act and think as if we are in the former, not the latter stage. So we become defensive, and we don't share the faith. We think of ourselves and not the world around us.
In 1976, my parents and I decided to visit the United States to celebrate their bicentennial. They wanted me to experience the great American cities that year and we toured many of them. The one that fascinated me the most, I think, was Washington, DC. As we went around, I rubbed the toe of Lincoln, walked around the Capitol, went to the Smithsonian and had a marvellous time. But then we went to this very strange museum. It was a museum of historic artefacts. One of the popular technologies of the time was the Polaroid camera. Remember that fad? Everyone was taking Polaroids of everything. At this museum, they took a photograph of you when you entered.
So we went in, click, click, toured the museum, and when we came out we found they had put all the photographs on a great big board. You could go and find yours and pay 50 cents for it to prove you had been at this museum. There was only one problem. Over the board displaying the photographs there was a great big sign that must have been there from a permanent exhibition that had been moved. It read: “Relics of the War of Independence.” I remember my mother looking up at it and saying to my father, “I'm sorry, dear, but I am no relic!”
My father replied, “No, dear, you are.” Then we had all kinds of problems!
Many of us have our names under a banner that make us feel like we are relics. We need to move from having a conception of the church as a museum to being a church with a real sense of mission. It is that mission that defines the church as we continue in the 21st century. But, first of all, we have to understand how important that movement is.
Having decided to make that movement, we might understand the importance of moving from family to family. It is fascinating that Andrew went first to a member of his family to announce the good news that he had seen Jesus Christ. The first thing that he did was to go to a brother in a personal way. He wanted to make this movement as a person to a person.
When you look at the life and the ministry of Jesus, so much of it was from a person to a person: Going to Zacchaeus and saying, “Zacchaeus, I want to come to your house and have dinner with you today;” meeting Nicodemus in the dark of night to bear witness to him; going to the woman of Samaria who was going to be stoned for adultery, entering into her life and standing between her and her accusers. So often, it was the personal touch of Jesus Christ that made a huge difference, and that witness, person-to-person, is what is desperately needed.
I don't know whether there is truth to this, but there have been a number of stories suggesting that before he made his speech in the House of Commons on the apology for residential schools, the prime minister met with four leaders of native communities who had been victims of a residential school. According to a number of reports, he then decided to write his own speech rather than rely on his speech writers, because he was so touched by the encounter with these individuals. It was the personal encounter that changed him, and changed his approach. I want to say more about this at a later date, because this was a significant event in the life of our country.
To take the personal approach, to sit down, listen and be with somebody transformed what happened socially. So it was with Andrew and Jesus. When Andrew met Jesus personally, he was transformed, so much so that he wanted to tell the story of what had happened and have a word that moved through family to family. He went to his brother, Peter, because of a personal encounter with Jesus.
Not long ago, I was reading a 19th-century theologian, the Congregationalist minister, Horace Bushnell, who wrote a piece called Christian Nurture in 1847. He does not necessarily share my views on the Doctrine of the Trinity. If we were to sit down and talk about the Doctrine of the Atonement or the Doctrine of Election, he and I would probably have a different outlook. Where he left a mark was in saying something to the world and to the church.
He said that one of the things we have tended to do in the Christian faith is to stress conversion - and so one should, he said; there is a place for that. But he said that we lost one of the great messages of the Christian faith: the importance of nurture. He argued in his book that it is in the home, in the family, where many of the greatest teachings take place. He said there is a danger - now, this was in the mid-19th century - of losing the opportunity to share the faith within the family where people are at their most intimate, where relationships are often the closest.
Bushnell had a somewhat idealized view of the family. His views of fatherhood and motherhood reflected the age and spirit of his time. Be that as it may, Bushnell was right. It is often in the home that the most personal and prophetic statements of faith take place.
I have a word for fathers today: If we are going to turn churches from museums into places of mission, you have a significant role to play. I know that being a father is not always an easy role - I can understand that. I love what I read on being a father in Paul Harvey's book, Quote Unquote:
A father is a thing that is forced to endure childbirth, without an anaesthetic.
A father is a thing that growls when it feels good - and laughs loud when it's scared half to death.
A father never feels entirely worthy of worship in his child's eyes. He never is quite the hero his daughter thinks, never quite the man his son believes him to be. This worries him, sometimes, so he works too hard to try and smooth the rough places in the road for those of his own who will follow him.
A father is a thing that gets very angry when school grades aren't as good as he thinks they should be. He scolds his son although he knows it's the teacher's fault.
Fathers grow old faster than other people.
And while mothers can cry where it shows, fathers stand there and beam outside - and die inside. Fathers have very stout hearts, so they have to be broken sometimes or no one would know what is inside. Fathers give daughters away to other men who aren't nearly good enough so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than anybody's. Fathers fight dragons almost daily. They hurry away from the breakfast table, off to the arena which is sometimes called an office or a workshop … where they tackle the dragon with three heads: Weariness, Work and Monotony.
Knights in shining armor.
Fathers make bets with insurance companies about who will live the longest. Though they know the odds, they keep right on betting. Even as the odds get higher and higher, they keep right on betting more and more.
And one day they lose.
But fathers enjoy an earthly immortality and the bet is paid off to the part of him he leaves behind.
I don't know where fathers go when they die. But I have an idea that after a good rest, he won't be happy unless there is work to do. He won't just sit on a cloud and wait for the girl he's loved and the children she bore. He'll be busy there, too … oiling the gates, smoothing the way.
It is not easy being a father, according to Paul Harvey. It is not easy, but it is important. What a father says, how a father acts, has a lasting impact on children and a family. It is that impact that I think is necessary for good if we are going to move from museums to missions. It is not just in family-to-family that this message should take place, but also in family-to-the world.
Who would have ever had guessed when Andrew, who we hardly hear of again except for a couple of occasions in the Gospel, in sitting down with Jesus and recognizing him as the Messiah, would have the impact that he did. It was his brother, Peter, who preached the first sermon. It was his brother, Peter, who was the rock on which Jesus said he would build his Church. It was on Peter that the Church experienced Pentecost. It was on Peter that the word of God spread throughout so much of the world. Who would ever have thought that the magnificent St. Peter's Basilica would be built in honour of the brother of Andrew, who had the encounter with Jesus? Don't underestimate the power of the personal encounter!
Throughout the summer, I love to read poetry and I just started to work my way through Robert Browning, who I haven't read for years. I came across Pippa Passes. It contains a line that everyone knows - they just don't know where it is from: “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” The story of Pippa is amazing! She goes through a town in Italy called Asolo, encounters great sin, sexual torment and stress and sees great violence. It is not a pretty poem. But all the while, she keeps moving, and by her personal touch she makes a difference in people's lives. At the end, she has survived the time in this terrible, evil city, and there are these incredible lines by Browning:
All service ranks the same with God;
With God, whose puppets best and worst,
Are we: there is no last, nor first.
For us, in serving God, there is no best, or first or last. The personal touch in Christ's name can make a huge difference. May you, especially fathers, commit yourselves to have that personal touch for Christ, because you never know what fruit it might bear. Amen.