“Raising Disciples”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Reading: Exodus 12:21-27
An important anniversary in Canadian history happened this week. Until 95 years ago women couldn’t serve in the Canadian senate. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that women didn’t qualify as “persons.” The Famous Five, including Nellie McClung, appealed that ruling to the privy council in London and won on October 18, 1929. Nellie McClung was also a preacher who preached in this pulpit, and her granddaughter, Marcia McClung, is becoming part of our church and will read scripture for us. I wonder what kind of church raised up Nellie McClung? I wonder what kind of church we’d have to be to raise up future Nellie McClungs?
Where our family last lived in the North Carolina mountains it was a perfectly normal question to ask someone where they went to church. The south is where there are more Baptists than people, so if you were making small talk, you might just ask so what’s your church? When we moved to Vancouver BC we tried to instruct the kids, hey, you can’t ask a new friend where they go to church. Normal question in Boone, not a normal question here. First day in Vancouver one of ours bops home from the playground and announces, “I met a Jewish kid.” How do you know that? Well, I asked where he went to church. He said, “I don’t. I’m Jewish.” So, I asked “Do you believe in God?” He said, “This is a lot of pressure.” Our kids were soon domesticated by Vancouver. As good Canadians they’d be more likely to ask a stranger about their bank balance or their medical history than their religious beliefs.
This is the second sermon in a series on our vision as a church, supported by five pillars. Last week we heard a corker of a sermon from Dayle about awakening community. Then we went and practiced that with a community meal on Thanksgiving. More than 750 plates were cleaned that day and strangers became friends. I am so proud of our church.
Today our focus is on raising disciples. And this one is a little harder to enact the next day. How do you raise a Christian? Most people I know become Christian because someone they admire follows Jesus and takes an interest in them, encourages them, builds them up, models faith for them. That’s sure how it happened for me. Some of the wisest and kindest people I know model faith not from afar. They take the time to get to know me, to learn from me, not just the reverse, and to say hey, let’s follow Jesus together. And I’m guessing, if you’re a Christian, it’s the same. Someone you trust and got to know showed you they are the way they are because of Jesus. You can’t microwave that. Takes decades.
Last week I was at Beth Tzedec for Yom Kippur. Rabbi Steve Wernick asked me to sit on a panel about being allies of the Jewish people. I was honoured to show our church’s love for our Jewish neighbours. The minute I walked in they were teaching me. Here, cover your head with this, it shows we’re all in the presence of God. We’d offer you food or drink but we’re all fasting for the Day of Atonement. Would you like to share in the nothing we’re having? I noticed no one was wearing dress shoes. Oh, it’s a tradition not to wear leather on Yom Kippur. I looked at my leather shoes. Party foul. Why are so many people wearing white? Well, this is a day about purification, so some wear white for purity. Some wear the shroud they’ll be buried in. I hadn’t been there 10 minutes, and I’d absorbed half a dozen bits of wisdom about how to be human. What about us? How does our community incite curiosity, and pass on what we’ve been entrusted with?
The scripture you heard is about the first Passover. Each family in Israel slaughters a lamb and takes some of the blood and spreads it on their doorpost, so the angel of death will pass over that house and spare their firstborn. It’s the last and most terrible of the plagues. And before it even takes place, God is already planning how to teach children in the future.
25 When you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this observance. 26 And when your children ask you, “What does this observance mean to you?” 27 you shall say, “It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.” (Ex 12:26-27).
When Jewish families to this day celebrate Passover, children kick off the celebration. The night doesn’t properly start until a child asks, “How is tonight unlike any other night?” Then everyone reenacts the story. We were slaves in Egypt. Not some other people a long time ago far, far away. We. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to say Judaism believes the only God there is intervenes in history personally to free slaves. That’s radical, isn’t it? And it’s not the only time the story is told with children in mind.
Deuteronomy 6 commands us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.”
Lots of families attend church, but don’t ever talk about God at home. Nor look for excuses to bring God up with their kids. I get it. It’s awkward, we might sooner talk to our kids about drugs or sex. But our kids notice what matters to us. Our kids have our politics and our sports allegiance and our same basic values by osmosis. Same with God. If we take God seriously, talk about God, pray to God, listen to God, they’ll notice, and do the same. The Byassee kids notice when Jaylynn and I want to discuss something out of their hearing. “Finances,” they say, rolling their eyes. I wish they were as cued in to when we talk about God.
When the Israelites come into the promised land through the Jordan River, we’re told: Each of you take up a stone on his shoulder… so that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, “What do these stones mean to you?” Then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark of the covenant... So, these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever.
Israel is constantly looking for an excuse to tell the children the story. Do this weird thing. Gather stones. Make a tower. That way the kids will ask one day, hey, what’s that weird tower thing for? And you can tell them that God frees slaves still.
But raising disciples is not just children. I’m struck how many more people we have coming to church at age 40, 50, 60, who don’t know anything about faith. I’m 50 and my parents threw off the faith their parents saddled them with. They saddled me with nothing. Careful what you don’t give your kids. They might take it up too eagerly. So, folks my age often got nothing in the faith department. But now that we’re aging, they’re asking questions. Is this all there is? Is there more to life than the sum total of my accumulation? The church is the rare place willing to say yes. God is bringing a whole new world, and you can be part of it, want to sign up? When we raise disciples, church, we don’t just mean kids or teens, though we do. We mean all of us taking a new step in faith, at whatever age. That will mean senior citizens getting baptized. And young children that are wiser than the rest of us.
There’s a critic of technology I admire named Sven Birkerts. Great Swedish name. When I met him for an interview he didn’t have a phone. Ah, right anti-tech, of course. You know how odd it is to try and find someone at an airport without a phone these days? I asked how he raises his kids. He said you can’t fight the screen use. But you can try and seduce them with a love of learning. We have great books in the house. My spouse and I read all the time and try and model a love of reading for our kids. Does it work? Sort of. Sometimes. I just thought, wow, that’s like trying to raise a Christian. You can’t make anybody be Christian. It backfires. You can try and lure them into it though. Surround them with saints. Talk about God on the road, in the car, in ordinary life.
I love asking people why they’re Christian. One mentor said he heard a group of ministers during the civil rights movement in South Carolina talking about their run-ins with the Klan. Yeah, I had a cross burned in my yard. Really? I got a brick through my window. Oh yeah? I got fired for preaching against racism. You too, eh? My kid got called a name at school for my work on race in the church. My mentor sat there dazed. Wow, this sounds like the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard of, how do I sign up? Our elder siblings at Beth Tzedec and Holy Blossom both report membership numbers are up in an awful year to be Jewish worldwide. Why? Well, folks are asking, why do people hate us so much? I should at least find out what I’m being hated for. I wonder if we, church, could be interesting enough that people might hate us again? That might mean growth. There’s a story in Baptist circles told of a young girl who wants to be baptized. The preacher thinks she’s too young, so he tries to talk her out of it. Baby girl, if you’re baptized you could be sent to the jungles of Borneo. They have tigers there and tribes that’ll execute you, you don’t want that now do you. The girl’s eyes got big. Wow, yes, I do want that, can you baptize me right now?
I mentioned that every one of us is called to a new step in faithfulness in following Jesus. How do you know what that is? It’ll probably frighten you a little. Someone wise said ‘fear teaches what you must do’. One example: if you listen to our text with Christian ears, you can hear Jesus all over the place. Take a lamb, Moses commands, each family gets a lamb. When John the Baptist introduces Jesus, he says, “there goes the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” Touch the blood of the lamb with hyssop and spread the blood on your doors. When Jesus is on his cross, he says he’s thirsty. The soldiers “put a sponge full of wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.” Hyssop is there at the first Passover and at the cross. Blood in Jewish imagination means life. And the lamb gives its blood so a family can live. As Christians, Jesus is our Passover lamb. He gives his life so the family of humanity can live. Our Passover meal is the Lord’s Supper. St. Paul says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” Once you learn how to see Jesus in unexpected places, you start wondering where else he might be hiding. Not just in the Bible, but in the neighbour, the enemy, the mirror.
Raising disciples might be the most difficult of our new pillars. At our church we celebrate beauty well. We awaken community almost without trying. We mend the world with mercy. We worship well. But making disciples? Isn’t that something fundamentalists worry about? I remember following a family off a subway in Vancouver, there was a guy with a sandwich board shouting through a megaphone about hell. I heard the kid ask her mom, “what’s he doing?” He’s practicing his religion, just like we are free to practice, our, uh, never mind. Western liberalism was supposed to mean nobody bullies you into faith with government power or whatever. But it often means people receive no faith at all. Ontario was Protestant Canada. We thought people caught faith by being born here and drinking the water. Nope. It’s way more difficult than that. Being a disciple is like being a dancer. You gotta practice. If you ask a dancer where they dance and they say, I don’t actually, you’d say, then you’re really not a dancer, are you?
Church is a place where we dance faith. We eat it and drink it. We share it with others, especially others’ kids. I always love it when someone else at church corrects my kids. It shows I didn’t make the rules. In church we have a sort of superpower. Someone describes it with these initials: I C N U. You can tell someone you barely know, hey, I see in you this skill. That gift. This ability. God gave you that to bless others. Now, go use it. Find me a successful musician on the planet who didn’t get their start in some community of faith? I bet you can’t. Where else does someone learn music, get encouraged, find a teacher, get a stage and a mic? Friends, I encourage you to use this gift, ICNU, not just on kids or youth, but on each other. Hey, I’ve noticed you’re amazing at this. Or riskier now, I’ve noticed you struggle with this. Maybe that wound is one God wants to bless others with.
I’ll close with this story. In the south churches often still have altar calls. Invitations to follow Jesus where folks come up and pledge their lives to him. One man comes up praying out loud this way: Lord, please make me like Joe. Lord, I just want to be like Joe. Can you make me like Joe? The preacher asks, excuse me, don’t you mean Jesus? Isn’t he the one you want to be like? The praying man looks at the preacher and asks, uh, is Jesus anything like Joe?
Friends, we can be Joe to other people. Those through whom Christ shines, refracts, glory to others. And they, and we, will be changed. Amen.