O – Opportunity Oriented: From
Attending to Participating
Pastor Mathew Magera – 3/24/19 – Sermon 339
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Jesus is shocking us, His
Church, to life so that we can shock the culture around us with his love and
grace. As we work through that shift toward making disciples and modeling Jesus
for others, today we specifically look at opportunities we have before us in
which to do this. We can talk about making disciples and we can talk about
modeling Jesus but until we actually participate in this process, we have
nothing to back up our intentions. Today we look at the Church as being
opportunity oriented as we move from attending to participating.
I’m noticing more and more
in our day and age that going to church has become a religion. On first hearing
that, it may sound strange that I would say that because of course you would
say that going to church is part of our religion but listen closely: Going to
church has become a religion. There are two things wrong with this. First, we
are the Church, we don’t go to church we go to worship. Second, for people who
do regularly attend worship, their doing so has become a religion, something
they can check off their list, and for those who don’t regularly attend
worship, they see it as religion and stray from it because they don’t want to
be tied down to it. I remember a time and I’m sure you do too when people went
to worship because it was what good and respectable people would do. People no
longer go to worship because of the old cultural expectation. Rather, we go to
worship to place a checkmark on our list, more or less. Now, I will say this is
not the case for every person in every congregation. Each congregation will
have its share of participation but each congregation is also plagued with its
share of attending. There are those who give God an hour and call it good. There
are those who fill out a Communion card and go home. There are those who are
becoming passive when we are called to active. The whole body, therefore, loses
strength and we need Jesus to shock us to life once again.
Our reading from Hebrews is
what is shocking us today, particularly Hebrews 13:15-16 which say, “Through
Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise – the
fruit of lips that openly profess his name. And do not forget to do good and to
share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” The Church is called,
from this, to create opportunities for service, to utilize areas of giftedness
within the Church to bring the Gospel into our community. But, looking at those
two verses from Hebrews, when I read them it’s almost as if the writer is
writing directly to us. When it says “let us continually offer to God a
sacrifice of praise” I think boy sometimes setting aside time for God
definitely is a sacrifice. With everything else going on, it sure can feel like
a sacrifice. Now, the writer doesn’t exactly intend it this way, he’s actually
comparing it with Old Testament sacrifices, but the Holy Spirit can sure use
this to speak to us. We’re not changing what the verse means but we are letting
it convict us a little bit.
Now,
later in the verses from Hebrews, this conviction goes even further when it
says, “do not forget to do good and to share with others.” I don’t think it
would say this unless this is a common problem. It must’ve been in the early
Church and I can say that it probably true of the Church today. Scheduling time
for God, that’s a burden at times.
I remember my dean in
seminary told a story about one time he was on an airplane exchanging
conversation with a couple next to him. Eventually, the topic of Church came up
and the couple had commented they had actually recently sat down as a family to
talk about Church, among other things. The family wrote down everything they
were trying to juggle on their calendars and started getting rid of things that
were just too much and getting in the way of the most important things. Sounds
good, right? Except when they explained that going to worship was one of the
things that didn’t make the cut. Making time for God can feel like a sacrifice
and I believe it is one that more and more people are beginning to cut out of
their priorities. Scheduling God is no longer going to be a problem for them.
Scheduling time for God,
however, is not something we should be doing. We should never schedule time for
God. Oh, now you’re listening. What, Pastor? Don’t schedule time for God? No.
Never schedule time for God. Instead, schedule time for other things around
your time with God. We shouldn’t have to schedule God because that implies that
God has not come first. God should set the schedule. God should be first on the
calendar, first in our phones, first on our daily agenda. Everything else comes
after that.
Already, these verses bring
us to the hard truth that we may not be doing enough for God, not as much as we
should, certainly not as much as we could. Maybe we are just attending rather
than participating. Maybe we are scheduling God around rather than scheduling
around God. We are left at the feet of Jesus pleading that he would help us. Help
us when we can’t, help us when we don’t want to, help us when we neglect your
call. When we do this, Jesus comes to us. He comes to us and he points us back
to these verses in Hebrews but he points us to a specific place right back at
the beginning where it says, “Through Jesus, therefore.” It’s not through us.
It’s not through hard work of rescheduling our lives, it’s not through our
power. It’s through Jesus that we can do this. When we submit to him in faith,
when we see, again, the meaning of his sacrifice on the cross, we are
encouraged by the forgiveness and renewal he gives us to go out and be his
disciples in the world, knowing that on our own we are unable but through him
and through him only we are rightly equipped for service in His world.
Therefore, as we seek to participate in faith through Jesus by becoming
opportunity oriented, we are driven to at least two ways in which we can open
ourselves prayerfully to the ministry that Jesus himself is calling us to.
Recognize
Opportunities Through Intentional Discernment
The first way we can move to
be more participatory is to recognize opportunities through intentional
discernment. There are opportunities around us to be in the community but if we
do not take the time to be in prayer, to discern what these opportunities are,
we might end up leaning on what we think we need to do rather than what the
needs of the community are. God sees these opportunities even if we don’t, but
we have to trust him to show us these opportunities.
When Lane and I were in
Africa ten years ago, there was a big difference in the culture from the western
world to east Africa. For one thing, time meant absolutely nothing. The common
phrase we heard was that Americans may have the watches but Africans have the
time. Nothing ever happened on time. If something were to start at 9am, you’d
be lucky if it started by 11. When we went to worship, while worship was
scheduled to start at, say, 10am, worship actually started when everyone was
there. If someone wasn’t there, another person went looking for them. They were
not bound by time like we are in the west. Fitting into that culture required
us to make some changes within ourselves, changes in expectations, changes in
attitude, changes in behavior. If we didn’t care and just placed our own
expectations upon this culture, we would get nowhere. There was a plan, but the
planner was not time or us for that matter.
There is a culture around us
and while it’s not like being in a different country we, as the Church, operate
differently than that culture. We are on two different levels, whether we think
so or not. Interacting and seeking opportunities to participate within that
culture requires discernment on the differences so that we can better
understand how we can participate within that culture.
Discernment starts with
identifying who is in charge. There is a planner for the Church. That planner
is God. When we are focused on our agendas and comfort, fixated on our
expectations that we miss opportunities that God is trying to share with us, we
are not connecting effectively. The way it usually happens is when we discern
opportunities to participate we might often want the community to come to where
we are and to do what we want to do and in the way we want them to do it
because that is what is most comfortable to us. However, until the Church
embraces and operates from the perspective of serving, not focusing on self,
actually focused on serving the community and finding out what is needed there,
until we do this, we will always have a disconnect. That disconnect will
continue to grow and we will continue to operate from the experience of being
shaken by that cultural earthquake around us.
As a result, it all comes
down to recognizing genuine opportunities through intentional discernment and
remembering that on our own power, we can’t, but through Jesus, therefore, we
can.
Respond to
Opportunities Through The Responsibility of Discipleship
A second way we can move to
be more participatory is to respond to opportunities through the responsibility
of discipleship. Opportunities will come. The Holy Spirit will not disappoint
in showing us what we should be doing. Still, we have to then get over another
hurdle, that being our own will. We have to get over the “I don’t wanna.” The
Church must remember that they are a lifestyle. Because we are the Church and
don’t just go to church, it becomes something that we can’t just switch on and
off. When Christ comes to us and claims us in the waters of baptism we are
changed. Who we are, how we live, where we live, what we say, all of this
changed. Our life is no longer about us but about the Kingdom of God, who is
there is who isn’t. It’s about people entering that Kingdom through Jesus when
we have the opportunity to help make that happen. Church isn’t something we
tune out or that is something additional that we do. Instead, being the Church
is something intentional, where we respond to the opportunities we have instead
of saying “I gave my hour this week, maybe another time.” We have to understand
that we have the power and the presence of God in us at all times in all that
we do. We are representing God and His kingdom in everything that we do. We
need to operate and walk with the understanding that we are being watched. When
we avoid an opportunity, the world sees that. When we reject an opportunity,
the world sees that. When we respond to an opportunity, the world sees that and
benefits from it.
Whether we are getting a
haircut, at the doctor’s office, shopping for groceries, whatever it happens to
be that we are doing, we are still the Church and we have opportunities to be
the light of Christ in those situations. We may feel as if we have the choice
to switch Church off in those situations but we don’t. As disciples of Jesus,
as his followers, we have the responsibility to keep that switch on and to
radiate his light in everything that we do. We have the responsibility to
respond to opportunities to participate as the Church in the world.
It’s like this. Have you
ever been to a store when it’s not very crowded and you go into the freezer
section and the lights in the freezers are off? As you start walking down the
aisle, the motion sensors notice and the lights inside the freezers turn on as
you get closer to them. This has happened to me once or twice and it’s kind of
fun to play with, to see how the lights move. How intentional are we about the
light of Christ we are giving off? How much of that light is radiating from us
in everything that we do? How are we impacting the amount of light that is in
our space? Jesus calls us the light of the world. Remember the children’s song,
This Little Light of Mine. What’s the rest of the verse? I’m gonna let it shine.
Are we going to hide it under a bushel? No. Are we going to let Satan blow it
out? No. Are we going to shine it until Jesus comes? Yes. When we go to the
store, when we go anywhere, we should let that light shine.
This is where it can start
for us. If we start responding to these opportunities in our personal lives, we
as a congregation can begin to respond to those opportunities that we have
discerned in the surrounding community. It doesn’t have to start big. It can
always start small, the transition being gradual but still intentional and
through Jesus, therefore, we can do it.
* * *
As we are shocked to life by
Jesus and then called to shock the culture around us, whether we are in
discernment of recognizing opportunities or responsibly responding to
opportunities, the bottom line is that we were not called or created to just go
to Church. We were commissioned to be the Church. There are many Christians,
maybe even too many, that believe that going to Church is evidence of being a
good Christian. They say that if they go to Church on Sunday, then on
Wednesday, spend an hour at choir practice or some committee meeting, then they
are doing exactly what they need to do. Afterall, that’s about five to six
hours per week. No, it’s not enough to do about five to six hours worth of
work. It’s not enough to do about 40 hours of work either. It’s about being,
about having that switch on all the time. A colleague of mine put it this way
in saying that we are called human beings, right? We are not called human
doings. We are not called to do this, do that, do the other thing. We are
called and created to be. We are made in the image of God whose name is, “I
am.” God’s name itself is a form of being and we are created in that image. So
we must be.
As we work together to be,
as we let these words from Hebrews sink into us and become who we are, let us
remember that this transition from doing to being is not a simple one. If it
feels like a shock, that’s because it is one. It’s a shock for us and one that we
cannot manage alone. We are powerless without the Holy Spirit, we are powerless
without God’s power and presence in our lives. We are powerless without the
death and resurrection of Jesus. Though we may stand around thinking well we
have to do this or that or the other thing, let me remind you that we don’t
have to do any of it. But, then again, Jesus didn’t have to go to the cross
either. He chose the cross. He chose to love us. He chose to free us. He chose
to forgive us. He chose to be our Savior. The moment we put a “have to” on
ministry, it weakens the power of Christ in our lives and it places the power
on us. Our power gets us nowhere. Jesus’ power gets us anywhere.
Let us make this shift
together. Let us move from attending to participating. Let us discern new
opportunities and let us as responsible disciples of Jesus Christ respond to
those opportunities for the sake of his kingdom. Let us continually offer a
sacrifice of praise and let us not forget to do good and to share with others
for this is what Jesus came to accomplish and it is what he has called and
commissioned us, His Church, to be. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.