Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
The Sacrament of the Survey
What did Jesus leave behind for us to treasure and tend until his return? 1.) The God-embraced world, 2.) The Spirit, who bears hisloving presence on earth, 3.) The church, who maintains his bodily presence on earth.
our gifts, our ties, and offerings in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and made the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable. In your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer, amen. All right. A couple of things. First, I wanted to give you an update on Mike and Philly. Please do keep praying for them, for their immigration status to be clarified. They'll be going back to the UK for a period of time, and we're thinking about actually initiating, because we haven't heard anything about our initial request, and it's longer than expected we're going to be initiating another request on a different status. So please keep that whole thing in your prayers. We've got to let my people come prayer watch going. So if you'd like to sign up in the lobby, you can sign up for a time to pray in the morning, in the midday, in the evening, around the dinner hour, and before bed. We're structuring it around the divine hours, but you don't need to use the divine hours in order to participate in a prayer watch. Just commit to praying for Mike and Philly at one of those time slots. Just take some time during that period to lift them up in prayer. And I would encourage you, too, while we're praying for their immigration status. Let's also just lift up our country's facing an immigration crisis right now, and Congress, and the President are trying to sort that out and come up with an equitable solution. So if we could be in prayer for that, because the system's kind of broke, and we're being affected by the broken system, because we should have heard by now. So please do pray, and Bible has a lot to say about treating the sojourner, the stranger in the land well, so let's keep our prayers going for that. And the next weekend we begin a series based on some of the issues raised by the DaVinci Code. This is not going to be a critique of the DaVinci Code series. If you're looking for that, you'll be greatly disappointed. There's lots of websites that do a fine job of that. What's this sense in critiquing something from Hollywood? I mean, give me a break. But it's a fantastic opportunity to talk about some of the really interesting questions being raised in the culture by the movie. So next weekend we'll be talking about how the biblical canon, especially the four gospels, came to be the accepted gospels for the church. The weekend after that, we'll be talking about the Gnostic gospels. What's up with the Gnostic gospels, and how do they differ from the gospels that we use, and then the weekend following that, we'll be looking at the issue of God and gender and the sacred feminine and all those kind of questions. So I'm really looking forward to being able to. These are things that interest pastors usually, be it don't preach about them, because nobody could, people could care less about some of these questions. But now everybody cares, so I'm just so thankful for the Da Vinci code making everyone care about these rather, you know, expertise kind of issues. This is fabulous. I couldn't be happier. So, you know, the entertaining but theologically flawed Left Behind series has the church in the last days flying off like a flock of birds bidding good riddance to a messed up world, which is really just a remake of a much older film, The Great Escape. But we know from the Bible that the dynamic of salvation is heaven coming down to earth. It's a four-act drama. As we've said before, Act 1 is the Garden of Prehistory, where God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, raises up a son, humanity, male and female, his image bearers, representing his interests on the good earth, but before that first day is done, it all ends very badly with a breach of trust and a great loss, a loss of innocence, of love, of self, of relationship of God. Act 2 is ancient history, the temple, the tabernacle, and its various iterations, which signifies the hope of a place for us where God and his son lost humanity, male and female, can meet again. Act 3, the beginning of this hope realized where Jesus, the divine son, won with the Father before all time, enters the human experience and offers to plant in our hearts a new garden, to make of us a new temple, the beginning of a new creation to be realized fully in Act 4. Now, Act 3 ends with the death of this innocent son, his resurrection on the third day, and his ascension into heaven. That is the uncreated order where God dwells fully, just a breath away from this order of space-time. Act 4, yet to come, could be described as extreme makeover earth edition. When the son appears from heaven to complete the reintegration of heaven and earth and all the earth becomes a new garden city, the heavenly Jerusalem. Now, we live now at the hinge between Act 3 and Act 4, and the question we have is a very important one, what did Jesus leave behind for us to treasure and tend until Act 4? What did Jesus at the end of Act 3 leave behind for us to treasure and tend until Act 4? He did not, after all, leave without a trace, nor did he leave us empty-handed, but he left us with three things. And to be a follower of Jesus, we must, it's just non-negotiable. We must embrace these three as if our very lies depend on it. First of all, Jesus left the God-embraced world behind. I'm not talking about the world in the sense the Bible very rarely speaks of it, but it is one sense of the world, meaning the anti-human world system that's defined by the powers and the principalities, but I'm talking about the world and the more basic sense in the Bible, the broken, wonderful joy and pain-filled world that is now aching with hope for a fresh start. St. Paul says the whole creation is waiting with eager longing for the children of God to be revealed, is waiting for the Creator to make a finish of making all things right. So every prayer, every hope, every wish, every dream is filled with that anticipation. If we turn our backs on this world, the world that God embraces, we're turning our backs on Christ. He left us in the world to fuel hope, to starve, to spare, and to love the world back into the arms of the waiting Father. Second of all, he left behind the Spirit to bear his loving presence on the earth. It's better for you, Jesus said, if I go, because if I don't, you won't receive the Holy Spirit. This is the same Spirit who hovered over the virgin planet and brought forth life. This is the Spirit who hovered over the virgin Mary and brought forth the divine Son. This is the Spirit who hovered over the virgin tomb and raised Jesus from the dead. This is the Spirit who is the very breath of Jesus breathed on us from the heavenly realm. If we turn our backs on the Spirit, we turn our backs on Christ. He left us in the world to fuel hope, to starve, to spare, and to love the world back into the arms of the waiting Father. We cannot do this without the Spirit. And then third, he left behind the church, our main point today. His flesh and blood agency on earth designed to be infused with his Spirit. So in combination spirit and church, Jesus maintains a bodily presence on the earth. This is not the church triumphant that we're talking about, but the church emergent. The could be better church. Not the church as she will be when the new creation is fully realized or the idealized church of our ecclesiological fantasies, but the church that's just beginning to shake off her slumber. The morning alarm is finally sounded and the first song on the radio is a rise shine and give God the glory and we're just trying to respond to that song by Father irritatingly used to sing that song to wake us up in the morning. Everyone who has heard the sound of the Savior's voice and is drawn to follow him must know this. We, to him, our love for him, our usefulness to him is measured by our embrace of these three things you left behind. Our embrace of the world that he's in the process of saving, renewing and recreating, our willingness to receive, to obey, to make room for, to defer to the Holy Spirit, and our love for the could be better church. If we are cold or lukewarm to the world or to the spirit or to the church, we are cold or lukewarm to God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And we are challenged, aren't we? I mean, as I spin this out very quickly, we are challenged, aren't we, on all three fronts? These are not things that we are inclined sometimes to embrace these three left behind. It's common for Christians today to hold the world in contempt. In fact, that's what Gnosticism is all about. It's common for Christians today to hold the world in contempt, to pursue their faith as an escape from the world. It's equally common. It's getting better, but it's equally common to live as if the Holy Spirit didn't exist, or as if the Holy Spirit didn't mind being ignored. But it's outright fashionable to hold the church in contempt. To say, "As a badge of one's superior spirituality, Jesus I love, but I can do without the church." We might just as well try telling a newly married husband, "I love you, man, but I can't stand your wife. Let's be friends anyway and see how that works." Today we are participating in the mystery of the church by filling out an information survey. We'll be doing that in a few minutes underneath your chairs there, but don't be distracted by them. Yes, it's the sacrament of the survey Sunday, as a matter of fact. I know that sounds strange, but it's a strange world, and it's a strange salvation God is working out. He's in that phrase, half-kitting, strange in particular because God has decided to save the world through working through flesh and blood, which to me is just bizarre, because we've made such a mess of it, but he sent his only son in flesh and blood. Jesus permanently has flesh and blood now. He's decided to work through the church, which beside being a mystical body is also a brown paper bag kind of enterprise like the Ann Arbor Vineyard, for example, or St. Luke's Lutheran Church down the street, or the Assembly of God down the way here, or Calvary Presbyterian, not too far from us, with brown paper bag needs for information and for flesh and blood human beings to make the church happen. So it's not just on paper, but it's on the pavement of Ann Arbor, circa 2006. Well, here's the thing, I don't want us filling out the survey in the flesh to use a biblical phrase. In the flesh, in biblical code, means with a perspective void of the Spirit. I don't want us filling out that survey, and it would be so easy to fill it out in the flesh. Why? Because, believe it or not, this is the primary tool we use in the church corporately for one of the most powerful manifestations of the created order, which is information, correct? You understand how important information is in the universe, I mean before there was matter, there was energy, and before there was energy there was something, and you know what that something was? That something was information, information man is really, if you think information is just bureaucratic, I mean you see that survey and you say, "Oh Lord, that's bureaucratic." If you think information is merely bureaucratic, try falling in love without some information. Information is the first car in the love train, you understand? You meet someone who is someone you think, "Well maybe this is a promising person, I'd like to get to know this person better," and you realize it's hopeless, it's hopeless without some data, without some information, name, email, phone number, and above all you have to get some information about willingness and availability. Oh, this is just what our survey is all about. Before we administer the sacrament of the survey, I would like us to consider just how important a real live functioning, flawed, but struggling to be faithful church is in the world today. We've been talking about justice, and about God's heart for justice, and about the gospel being God's effort to restore justice to the world. One of the major trends to fuel injustice, poverty, crime, addictions of all kinds is fatherlessness. The major trends, we cannot change the world, we cannot restore justice without addressing the issue of fatherlessness. I'm borrowing some of this great material from Rich Nathan who gave an awesome talk at our Great Lakes Regional Conference last week, www.vignardgreatlakes.com, should have that as well as Don Elle's presentation, which is fabulous on and about a week or so. But the modern American landscape has been stripped mind by fatherlessness for about the past hundred years. I mean, you think about it. We didn't know anything about post-traumatic stress disorder, and what did we do? We sent thousands, thousands of young men to war in Europe, World War I, where they suffered unspeakable traumas in trench warfare, gassing, and all the rest. My great-grandfather at the very old age, he wanted to go to war, he had 13 kids, so he lied about his age, and he went to war, he returned after being gassed, didn't get any counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. My grandfather served in the same war, came back alcoholic. My dad served in World War II, was part of some of the biggest shelling in November 11th, 1944, the biggest mortar shelling in all of the war, and he was injured on that day, and the guy in his right, and the guy in his life were killed. I said, "Dad, do you think that affected you, just seeing all that mayhem and what?" And he said, "No, no, no, not at all." He said, "I do think about those guys every day, I think about those young men dead on my left and on my right every day, but it did not, it did not affect me at all." You know, Jesus said in Luke's Gospel, "Before going to war, count the costs or risk being called a fool, fatherlessness is certainly part of the cost of war." There's another thing, factor fueling fatherlessness. A third of children in the United States are born without the benefit of two parents. This doesn't even include pregnancies that are ended with abortion. A third of children in the United States are born without the benefit of two parents. Usually the missing parent is the sperm donor. It's a hard truth, but sex without commitment is a great deal. It's just fabulous deal for the willing participants who enjoy themselves immensely got designed sex to be enjoyable, so we would do it frequently and often and populate the earth. But it's a lousy deal for the children produced by it, sex without commitment is. You know, among the children of divorce, I know I'm speaking some hard truths here, but you know, facts are hard. And unless we're willing to look at hard facts, we're not willing to engage in reality. And if we're not willing to engage in reality, we're not willing to be in the realm where the real God operates. And so we can hide from hard facts, but we're hiding from God when we're hiding from hard facts. Among children of divorce, 40% do not see their fathers in a typical year. Among children of divorce, 40% do not see their fathers in a typical year. Now just at the same time in our culture, when we're facing this epidemic of fatherlessness, the social fabric of the extended family and close knit neighborhoods and civic organizations and people having contact with each other and in card clubs and other personal connections, all the fill in the gap forms of community that might be kind of a safety net for all this fatherlessness, all of that social capital, that social fabric is in precipitous decline and has been since World War II. Beginning with the baby boom and in every successive generation, social capital is in precipitous decline according to the studies, bowling alone as chief among them, Robert Putnam from Harvard. But listen to this, before you despair, Harvard economist Richard Freeman found in a study of at risk youth that get this, church attendance, church attendance, non-sexy church attendance is a bigger predictor of who escapes poverty, drug addiction and crime than family income, family structure and other variables. Church attendance, I'm not talking about some hip postmodern church which hasn't been invented yet or is only available in Minneapolis, Boulder, Colorado and Arbor and Seattle. I'm talking about the churches she finds herself today, full of human frailty, moral scandals, cultural irrelevance, bad theology, not to mention cheesy banners and some of the worst coffee on the planet. The church today hasn't always been exhibit A of God's commitment to showing his strength through human weakness so he gets the glory and we don't. So in this climate we sit back and we fondle our fashionable and scathing critiques of the church. I've generated plenty of my own, this is one, and we use these critiques to justify our individualistic impulse to remain aloof from the church and our consumer impulse to treat the church like a shopping mall for our spiritual needs, a little of this, a little of that as much as it meets my needs. Can anyone here, St. Paul saying from the grave, knocking on the top of the grave, anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body eats and drinks judgment on himself? Not often quoted text. He was talking about communion, the celebration of the Lord's Supper. And in the Corinthian church, the rich believers were ignoring the poor believers, they were coming early, they were bringing their own fine wine and they were celebrating communion among themselves and the poor were coming later and didn't have as good fear for the communion meal which was celebrated in the context of a full fledged meal in the early church. And he's saying by not recognizing the church as his body, by treating the church as a cafeteria full of strangers, you're bringing judgment on yourselves. In other words, this mentality of holding ourselves aloof from the church is bad for us. It's shooting ourselves in the foot, it's guaranteeing a weak connection with God. We sang as our first worship song, a few of you were here. Open the eyes of my heart, open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see you. Do you want to see Jesus? Would you just love to see Jesus, St. Paul is saying this is one of the reasons we don't see Jesus? We don't recognize his body, his chosen way of presenting himself to us and we know we don't recognize the body by the way we engage the body and it's bad for us. Meanwhile the Harvard economist is telling us that church attendance is the best predictor of whether or not kids escape poverty, crime and addiction, church attendance sure does not sound sexy but escaping poverty, crime and addiction is nothing to sneeze at, I think. So everything we do to make the church functional, giving financially, of course, serving in children's ministry or youth ministry, ushering multimedia facilities, compassion ministries, lay chaplains, Stephen ministry, all those things, all of it contributes to this possibility of hope in the world. Now some considerations before we proceed with the sacrament of the survey. The Jesus movement church is not just a little spiritual padding to cushion us on the bumpy road of our lives in this world. Christianity is a call to action to change the world. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven is the anthem of the church. Unconsideration, faithfulness in little things is what changes the world. Mother Teresa said, "Small deeds done with great love change the world." Faithfulness in little things is what changes the world. The civil rights movement, you know at a distance, wow what a great thing and Martin Luther King in television, you know what the civil rights movement was, it was just a bunch of churches having meetings, talking about it, signing people up, just hoping people would show up at the rallies and that wouldn't have even happened if there hadn't been a church in the first place with people showing up and giving money and being able to have buildings and all that little things. It's the little faithfulness in little things is what it takes to change the world. All things done with great love are what change the world. Third consideration, the scarcest resource in any church, and believe me on this, trust me on this, the scarcest resource in any church is not flashy gifts and it is not even spiritual power but it's faithfulness in little things. If I could have more of one thing in every church on the planet, it would be faithfulness in little things and man the spiritual power and all the rest would just be a matter of course. You know my job is to keep an eye on the overall health of our particular little slice of the church. I'm mightily encouraged of late, the giving has been healthier, worship more engaged than ever, we're on the verge of being able to expand our ministry to the poor with the ministry to the homeless and I'm hopeful certainly by the end of the summer people in small groups are caring for each other better than I've ever seen in the life of the church. I mean intervening, I've seen a couple of situations in our small groups where I think lives have been changed saved literally. One in particular, a life was saved by the intervention of a small group and where marriages are being saved by the intervention of a small group and people are being cared for in our small groups in a way that I hadn't seen ever before and it's so encouraging. But you know what little thing has thrilled me more than all these is last weekend when we filled all but four openings for summer children's ministry in one weekend. As we just asked everyone who doesn't serve in children's ministry during the year to take two celebrations during the summer to be with the kids and give our teachers a break and all but four openings fulfilled, I said that's a sign, that's a good sign. Faithfulness in little things is what it takes to change the world. Maybe we can do a little world changing around here. You know if you belong to Christ, that's the good news. Here's the bad news, you also belong to the church. And so you've got a double challenge. You've got to accept yourself and your own weaknesses. You can't give up on yourself. You've got to keep loving yourself if you're going to let God keep loving you. That's hard for us sometimes not to give up on ourselves to accept ourselves in our weaknesses and limitations are you willing to do that. You can't move forward in receiving the love of God if you don't accept yourself as you are now, but then the other thing is we have to accept the church as she is now in order to see Jesus in the church, to have the eyes to see him in the church and that's just harder for us in 21st century culture. So that's the good news, the bad news, good news, you belong to Christ, bad news, you also belong to the church and you are called to serve the church so the church can serve the world. And then if you're not serving in the church, what kind of a loof posture are you taking? It's just not healthy for us, it's just not good, it's just not the way it's meant to be. We're members of the church that means we participate in serving as one of the key ones. Now I know that sometimes people have twins and for three or four months they're out of church and you're in a postdoctoral neurosurgery fellowship and it's hard to basically do anything to get any sleep, but I also know there are people who just stand aloof from the church and don't have time to serve in a regular old church because it's not sexy enough but we've got time for so many other things and I'm just saying, if you belong to Christ you belong to the church and you're called to serve so the church can serve the world. So here's some little perspective, you can get out here moving on to the sacrament of the survey. Please print legibly on the survey. Someone actually has to take this information decipher it and translate it to something even easier to use, a.k.a. a computer. So if you would kindly print, I know some of us haven't printed in a long time, there's no time to do workshops, we're doing computer keyboarding and this is going to have to be handwritten so we're like back in the Neanderthal age, but please print legibly for other people who don't know you, please print legibly. Second, there's a front and a back to fill out and married couples, each of you is a person still, even in the eyes of the law, so you could each fill out one of those and each of you put who your spouse is, then we can verify, you know, if someone claims someone else's their spouse and their spouse doesn't claim them, as a spouse we might give them a call and say how are things going in the marriage or, you know, just little tricks like this to surface issues we use, but, and then, but only one of you needs to put the children's information, but don't assume that the other person's doing it, yeah, yeah, go ahead and put them both on and then that's a test too to see if you each claim the same kids, you know, sometimes things get raised that way. I would like you to just consider, as you're filling out, just the special needs of the church to function well, there'd be two areas in particular for us, people willing to faithfully serve the kids in children's ministry through the year, through the nine months of the school year, people serve one month on and one month off, you know, we can, you know, we have limited resource to lead to staff children's ministry, so we're trying to run pretty lean in this church staff wise, and the more time we put into recruiting, calling people up and everything to get you to serve in children's ministry, the less time we're able to actually put in the quality of the program, so you would just be such a blessing to the church and whatever, just to sign up, to offer yourself for children's ministry so that we can put our energy into things more fruitful than just calling people to get them to sign up, and then ushers is an issue for us, so if you're willing to serve as an usher one year, or one month on, one month off, that would just be great, and when you're thinking about children's ministry, think too about our children's ministry for our single moms program, so that's nine times a year serving with either the younger kids or the older kids on a Tuesday evening. A third thing, just as I'm hoping you can chew gum and talk at the same time, if you're serving on the prayer ministry team, we've got maybe, I don't know, 40 or 50 or even more people serving on our prayer ministry team, please don't consider that your only service to the church, we just can't afford to just release you only to prayer ministry besides it's not healthy to have a bunch of people thinking that praying for others is their main service, it's all, you know, Jesus prayed with the sick and he played with the kids, you know, and he watched the disciples' feet, so if you're on the prayer ministry team, I don't want you thinking, well, that's my service to the church, you know, I come up for 10 minutes during the service and I help pray with one or two people, but please be available to serve in other capacities as well, and then here's something that some people don't know, you don't have to be a convinced, committed Christian to serve in the church. The early disciples probably didn't know exactly what they were signing up for, but they started serving Jesus and they got to know him by serving, it's a perfectly valid way to get to know Christianity, get to know Jesus is by serving in some capacity, and we're fine about that. No, yeah, there are certain jobs, maybe preaching you wouldn't be so good at, you know, or leading a small group or something like that, so of course there's different things, but if you don't have to be a committed Christian to serve, service is a legitimate way to explore, to poke and prod and see if it holds water the whole God thing. One last thing is when I heard that Richard Freeman's statistic from Harvard about church attendance and at-risk youth, it made me think, you know, maybe one of the things we could, we've got a single mom's ministry that I think is doing just great, but you know one of the things we could do is we could see if there's people in the church who would just be willing to, I don't know, have like the son or the daughter of a single mom or a single dad for that matter on their radar screen, and like when you come to church, look for that kid at church, learn the kid's name, say hello to them, maybe sit with them just to be like a caring adult who has them on their radar screen, maybe buy him a birthday gift every year and a Christmas gift, something less than mentoring, but something that would pretty much take place at the church, but where you could be like a tether line to kids who need tether lines, I know my own son, part of his testimony that is his story of coming to faith and making it his own is he came to church and there was a guy named Tim Miller who was a Sunday school teacher for, you know, a period of time, but Tim after being a Sunday school teacher was just a tether line for Jesse, meaning he made a point of knowing his name saying hi to Jesse every time he saw him, asked Jesse how he was doing, kept saying hi to Jesse even Jesse went through the someone teenage years, and a few times actually took him out to big boys for a milkshake because he had Jesse's number, he probably took him out, Tim did three or four times, and Tim Miller is now part of Jesse's story of coming to, coming to faith, it just means the world to a kid to have another adult in the church who has you on their radar screen, and so if you'd be willing to be one of those attuned in adult to an at-risk kid, well then just put TIA, somewhere on the survey, TIA, whether it be a tuned in adult, and we're just getting this, this just kind of idea came to us, so not guaranteed we'll be able to pull it off, but if we get some people who'd be willing to be those tether line figures, men, women, does not matter gender-wise, that'd be great. Okay, we're doing good. Are you finished with the surveys? Good, let's pass them toward the center, and we'll pick them up from the center, and include the whole thing with the cardboard and everything, remember front and back, the back is especially important, and we'll pass those in, and let's ask our band to return and lead us in the, we've got time for communion. I'm very impressed. Unfortunately, I'm impressed with myself. Oh, they heard that. Yeah, if you don't get them done in time. You