Good morning! We've had a great time over this weekend. I know Anna and I have had a lot of fun as friends being able to work together, but also to begin to think – I've said, and I'll say it again – this is one of the most challenging but it's one of the most exciting times to be the church. We're living in these challenging times where it feels like the church has been pushed to the margins, and all of a sudden that which we used to do doesn't seem to be connecting.
And it's more than just tinkering we've been talking about, but it is really about capturing once again the dynamic of faith that really was part of the New Testament Church in its first kind of inceptions. That's why I want to take you back into the Gospels this morning for just a few minutes. Because I think it's one of the teaching tools to help us think about what does it mean to be the Body of Christ in this time?
Everybody says to me – well not everybody and certain not my neighbours – but most of the people that I know that are people of faith say, "I want to be more like Christ. I want to be more like Jesus." And I sometimes wonder if they really know what that means. Jesus says, "If you want to find life, then lose it." I actually think he meant that.
But what does that mean for us in this time? And we've been talking about this idea of the – what we call in missional literature the missio Dei, the idea that God is at work and God is already out there and what we are doing is joining with God in his activity and what he is doing amongst us. Nowhere is that more captured than in this story of Mary and Martha.
Now if you're Martha, you hate this passage, amen? I mean this passage has been used to bash you over the head. If you are a Type A personality this passage always gets used on you. Now since I'm not a Type A person I love this passage, but I think Carla, my wife, would probably tell you that there's a kind of cumulative response that comes in these kinds of encounters. My guess is Mary has done this to Martha some other time and in her frustration wishing that Mary would actually help her, she misses something that is incredibly important. Jesus speaks to that in this passage.
What if I were to tell you that I don't actually think this passage is about being and doing. In fact I would argue with you that it's way more than that. This is a theophany. This is a disclosure of God, a god who has come to the door in Jesus Christ, knocks at the door and there he is. Do you have any questions you want to ask God? He comes to you. I have a pile of questions that I want to ask.
Just last week I was burying someone, a friend of mine in Edmonton whose husband had died five years before of cancer. And then she got cancer. I could think of a thousand people that should've gone before her, and I want to know, I want to understand for instance why my doctoral mentor, David Watson, who was renewing the church in England in remarkable ways, I would love to know why he went first when I could think of a thousand ministers that should've gone before him. I would've included myself in that list, just in case you're wondering.
But there's questions. Don't you have questions you want to ask? And Jesus comes to the door and maybe for once, Martha does recognize the moment. When you read Luke you should always ask why are the stories brought together. In this chapter I want to suggest to you that this story of Mary and Martha is really about not missing the moment. In fact all of the stories in this chapter are about that.
The first story in Chapter 10 is about Jesus sending the people out two by two, sending his disciples out. They come back and their first response is, "You should've seen it. It was incredible. We did this, we did that, we did this, we did that, God was at work!" It's about not missing the moment, when God just shows up and does something.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes God can work right in front of you and somehow you miss it? I was pastoring in Vancouver a number of years ago and it was just one of those Sundays – I'm a Baptist, I apologize – thank you.
We were talking about this. All the evil ministers in movies are always Baptist so it's got to be the hardest thing to be, you know. I was at First Baptist Church and all the evil churches are usually First Baptist Church. But it was one of those Sundays where it just seemed God was doing something amazing, and so I said to some people, "If you want to take Jesus seriously, why don't you come forward?" And they started to come. It was just one of those moments. They just started to come. We had had a baptism earlier and I got carried away. I do that sometimes. And I said, "Why don't we baptize them now? We do that in our tradition."
And so 18 people were baptized that Sunday morning. It was a sacred moment. I remember it because the baptistry was in the back and it had wooden stairs, and by about the ninth person the wooden stairs broke off so all the elders of the church were helping people into the water and then I'd be pushing them back up onto the platform.
I went to the door after this amazing God moment and we were shaking hands, and somebody came up to me and said, "Did you notice that the organ was really loud today?" I remember going, "Were you here? Did you see anything that was going on in this moment?" It happens all the time. If you do not believe in the missio Dei, in the idea that God is at work already, you will miss it when he just shows up.
The second story is a story of the Good Samaritan. That's a fascinating story as well because the person comes, the lawgiver. He asks what I call the question to try to capture Jesus in some kind of heresy, and Jesus says back to him, "Well, what do you think it means?"
And the guy says, "Love the Lord, your God with all your heart and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself."
And Jesus said, "Good, you should do that."
Then he asks the minimal question. You know the minimal question, "Who's my neighbour?" It's the same question that the disciples asked when they were talking to Jesus about forgiveness. How many times should we forgive, right? In other words when can I stop forgiving and I can start hating again? This is the question of basically the same thing. Who is my neighbour? Help me choose who I can like and who I can't like. And Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. This is a story about not missing the moment when just – somebody in front of you and you need to respond. Have you ever had those moments where you just needed to respond?
I remember working with the church, and you would walk out the door and across the street was a high school, the largest high school in the city, and they were trying to understand what their mission was. They had signs up all over the lawn saying –dreadful signs. “Don't sit on the lawn, don't do this, don't do that.” They had a chain-link fence around the parking lot so none of the students would come over and skateboard. And they said, "What's our mission?"
I said, "You're kidding me, right? You are kidding me."
They said, "No, we really want to know what our mission is."
I said, "Come with me," and we walked down the aisle – we were in the sanctuary – we walked down the aisle, we walked out to the front door and I opened up the front door and I said, "Jeez, do you think it might have anything to do with that?" We had this wonderful kind of God moment where all of a sudden they saw what they had been missing for so long.
The signs came down, the fence came down and they started an urban basketball league. They run a lunch program for the high school students – free lunch. They have foosball machines and ping pong tables and pool tables all over the church, and 30 to 400 high school students will come every day for lunch. And guess what? The church gets beaten up a bit, the building, but they're on a mission. They didn't miss the moment. So the first story is about God showing up miraculously and doing something in front of you, and all you can do is watch.
The second story is about God showing up and showing you an opportunity. It could be in your workplace, it could be in your neighbourhood, it could be almost anywhere where you have to respond. But if you believe in a god that is work, you're kind of on tiptoes wondering what he's going to give you as an opportunity.
The third story is about not missing the moment; pause to worship, to sit at the feet of Jesus, to just be there. The first one about a God who is at work, the second one about an opportunity. One of my closest friends is a woman name Regine King. Regine is a survivor of the genocide. She was Tutsi intellectual and she was on the list during the Rwandan genocide. One of the things they wanted to do was to open up her brain and see what a Tutsi intellectual's brain looks like, if you can imagine.
There are dreadful stories told about churches in that time in Rwanda, where culture and faith collided and culture won. There's one story of a pastor who came before his people. He was a Hutu, they were Tutsis. He said, "I'm here to tell you that God does not love you anymore and tomorrow you will die." They were all slaughtered.
But there's amazing stories of people, Christians, people of faith who recognize the moments that they were in, and with courage and bravery stood up to the times. One priest was housing a number of Tutsis in the back yard of the church and the guards came down the street and to the front of the door of this great cathedral. The priest came out and the captain of the guards said, "I'm here to take the Tutsis."
The priest said, "There are no Hutus or Tutsis here. You see, in Jesus we are all one. If you want to kill Rwandese then you must kill me first."
Can you imagine the courage that that took? To recognize the moment that God had placed before him? For seven days they would come down and they would say the same thing, "We're here for the Tutsis." And he would say, "I've told you, there are no Hutus or Tutsis here. You see, in Jesus we're all one. If you want to kill Rwandese then you must kill me first."
What if the people of God lived like that, in a kind of sacred holy anticipation, on tiptoes, believing that God places before us things that we don't want to miss? I believe this is the challenge of the 21st Century, that a people of God actually who believe that God can change lives are on tiptoes looking for the opportunities that are placed before him, or them, or are watching as God works in spite of them. Because they've sat at the foot of Jesus.
One time I did seminary down in Southern California – and I'll end with this – I came to this church. I was associate pastor in First Baptist Regina, which means that you didn't get a lot of time to preach in the mornings – senior pastor always preached in the mornings and I was a new graduate and I had all this stuff that needed to be said. There's nothing worse than a seminary graduate who thinks they've got it all bagged. You know, they've got it all in a nice little bag and, "Just set me loose!"
One Sunday, and it happened to be Pentecost Sunday, I was given the opportunity to preach about the birth of the church, and I went, "Wow, this is too good to be true." I mean my theology of the church, I've got this really pegged. And the Holy Spirit, this is big stuff for me. So I crafted this incredible hour-and-a-half-long sermon. It was good. I put it all together and I realized it was too long, so I cut it down to 45 minutes. Don't worry, I cut it down to 45 minutes, and I got up to preach and I was ready.
I started in the Old Testament and I said, "Do you know what the Hebrew word for spirit is? Do you know what it is? It's a great word – ruach – like breath. So I talked about good breath, bad breath. It was pretty bad when I think about it now but the word was good – ruach. I got into The Gospels, I talked about how the disciples – when Jesus said, "I'm leaving but it's going to be better." I talked about the fact that I didn't think the disciples believed him. They didn't think that the spirit thing was really going to be that. Then we got to the Day of Pentecost. I'll never forget the moment. I was in the midst of describing what was going on. I said, "Just think about it, there were tongues of fire that descended into that room.
Then I said, "And there was a great rushing wind, bam!" A window in the church blew up. I am not kidding you. You can ask the people in the church. It was a stained glass window. It turned out that something, a kind of wind tornado thing had set down, created a vacuum, the meteorologist in our church explained, and it sucked the window out. But it was right at the moment when I said, "And a great rushing wind, bam!"
This is what I remember. It was the look on everybody's face, because for just a moment they leaned forward, their eyes were wide and they were waiting to see what God was going to do. What if we lived like that? What if you believed so strongly that God could change lives, that God is at work, that this isn't just something we do on Sunday. What if you believed in a god who actually changes lives in such a way that he uses you to be a part of it? As a church, as an individual? What if you were in your workplace and you lived in anticipation that God just might place before you an opportunity of being a neighbour? Bam! What if you didn't miss the moment? What if you were so in tune and anticipatory, that when it happened you either thanked him for working in spite of you? Or you showed up and you offered a cup of water because you'd been sitting at the feet of Jesus, knowing that he was a God who was alive.
What kind of church do you want to be? That's the question of this weekend. What kind of people of faith do you want to be? My prayer for you is that you will be people of anticipation, on tiptoes, waiting.