Sermon from March 16, 2008
The third habit of highly effective Christians is loyalty to the Church.
That's a hard sell. Loyalty to any institution is a hard sell. Institutions have failed us too many times to inspire loyalty. They lie to us. They cut our jobs. They never admit they are wrong. They are too big.
Yet life without them is unthinkable. Institutions fill store shelves with products we buy. They provide the medical care we enjoy. They protect us from people, who would harm us. In short, institutions large and small make it possible for people to work together to accomplish what no individual could accomplish alone. They make possible the complex life of a nation.
So, when I say that loyalty to the Church is one of the habits that will make us highly effective Christians, this combination of institutional necessity and institutional nastiness goes to work in our souls. Our guard goes up. It isn’t long before we hear talk about the Church and slavery, the Church and anti-Semitism, the child-abuse scandal of the Roman Catholic Church, or the latest evangelical pastor to go off the rails morally.
Something else even more powerful threatens loyalty to the Church. Too many people are overworked and stressed out and have discretionary money. So, when the weekend rolls around, the idea of committing a quarter of your weekend to the Church has to compete with the beach, the slopes, and catching up on your life.
Jesus nailed it, when He said, “The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful” – Mark 4:19.
The supreme test for the Church in America goes like this: Can we be men and women of spiritual integrity in a world where we are free to do anything we can get away with? Unparalleled personal liberty makes possible an unprincipled pursuit of pleasure and power. Loyalty to the Church challenges the modern doctrine of personal freedom.
I’m not giving you hand-me-down theories here. I too have experienced all this from the inside. I don’t deny any of the Church’s failures, and I know how appealing personal freedom is; but I still say that a third habit of highly effective Christians is loyalty to the Church.
The Church’s Hidden Beauty
Something Jesus said may help you get your heart around this loyalty. Look at Matthew 13:33. It reports a parable Jesus told. He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”Jesus sometimes gave the meaning of the parables He told, because people, including His inner circle of disciples, didn’t get it. He did not interpret this one. How do you read it? Since you are polite enough to allow me to speak without interruption, let me tell you how I read it and why this parable has power over my imagination, and how it helps me cope with the Church’s checkered life and with the allure of personal freedom.
The second most obvious thing to me about the parable is that when the woman mixes yeast into the flour, the yeast disappears from sight. The third most obvious thing about the parable, even to a culinary dummy like me, is that the now invisible yeast does something to the dough: it makes it rise.
The most obvious thing about the parable is that it gives us a picture of how the authority of God (the kingdom of God) goes to work in the human family all over the earth. If I’m right so far, then it is fair to say God’s exercise of authority in the human family is typically out of sight, and it is irresistible. That’s Heaven’s M.O., if you will.
We feel God’s yeast-like invisibility in times of human catastrophe, when people say, “Where was God? Why didn’t He stop this tragedy?” People who raise those questions sometimes report that God didn’t answer their prayers – another hallmark of His characteristic shyness around human beings.
Well, all this helps me, when people start rattling off their litany of the Church’s failures. As I said, I don’t try to deny them, unless I know the accusation is false. But I do try to caution people by saying, “What you see is not the whole story. What you don’t see, because it is hidden like yeast in flour, is God’s presence in the Church and in the world. And He is not there as a passive observer. He is there to direct affairs in such a way that they serve His purpose, and His purpose is to bless the human family and redeem us from our sins and sorrows.”
So, why is it so hard for us to see this? What do we need? We need outside intervention to help us see what we will otherwise miss. Look at an apostle’s prayer in Ephesians 1:18-19: I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints (that’s the Church), and his incomparably great power for us who believe. It is one of the biblical prayers I listed for you last Sunday.
The truth is that we are blind to God. I don’t say that to criticize. I say it with tender regard for our God-given, easily frustrated desire to see and touch God. Our patron saint should be the disciple Thomas who said about Jesus, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it” – John 20:25.
In one of those rare moments of satisfying our desire to see and touch things, Jesus gave Thomas his wish. Thomas responded with deep devotion. Then, Jesus said to him for our benefit: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
When the Church fails, or when someone levels withering criticism at the Church, it wounds me, because my sight has been restored enough to see the splendor of the thing they pillory. I take hope in remembering that God’s life is the Yeast in this unpromising dough that we call the Church. I wish the same hope for you. That’s where loyalty to the Church comes from.
Does it ever strike you as odd that given all the criticism leveled against the Church, true and false, the Church is spreading throughout the earth in a way heretofore unseen in the history of the world? Jesus meant what He said in that short parable. We are just beginning to comprehend the scale of the dough and the power of the yeast.
This divine power inherent within the Church merits our loyalty to the Church. We have been permeated with a power that draws its life from God Himself. To be cut off from that life is to die. We owe loyalty to the carrier of that life.
The Model of Loyalty
So, what does loyalty to the Church look like? Let me start with another word picture that I hope will connect with most of us. Did you ever date someone you liked, who did not like you? The person was courteous enough and respectful. You had some fun together. You seemed to have some of the same interests. But you always sensed a barrier between you that said, “This relationship is going only so far and no farther.” The person seemed to walk on the margins of your affections, always keeping a safe distance, showing a certain coolness, never responding with warmth to the warmth you gave.
Does that person’s coolness describe your relationship to the church: always holding something back, ready to cut and run, if things don’t go your way? Living on the margins is not loyalty. Loyalty leaves the margins and moves toward the center.
Look at the model of what moving toward the center looks like, Ephesians 5:25-27. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
He wrote that to husbands and their wives, but it was about Christ and His Church. He loved the church and gave himself up for her. That’s loyalty. That’s living at the center. That’s holding nothing back. That’s the third habit that highly effective Christians aspire to cultivate.
And look at the realism of verse 27. He loved the church in order to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. This love is not blind. It sees the stains, wrinkles and blemishes. It loves in order to remove them and replace them with something splendid.
Let me change the word picture again in order to make the point. Every church is like a big rock in the vacant lot where I played baseball as a boy. Turn the rock over on a summer day, and you were likely to find any number of repulsive critters underneath it. And in the Church some of those critters can bite and sting.
Loyalty to the Church means that we accept what we find under the rock as normal, and we remember that Christ put us together in order to tame us and clean us up. So, we’re not going away. We are in this together.
Stains, Wrinkles and Blemishes
Now, let me get specific and talk about three critters we find under the rock, which take the form of three accusations. All three can be cheap shots that people take in order to wound. Nevertheless, these accusations have substance, and we would be irresponsible to ignore them.
The first is hypocrisy. This accusation often takes the form, “The church is full of hypocrites.” I suspect that accusation nearly always means, “I know someone who is vocal about Christianity, but I know what the person is like outside church, and he’s a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Let me tell you what bothers me about that. First, it bothers me when any of us talks one way about our faith and contradicts it by the way we live. We don’t like it, when we see it in other people; why should other people like it, when they see it in us?
Second, it bothers me, because the person who makes that accusation doesn’t see the hundred other people, whose lives are consistent with what they say about their faith. Why does the critic allow the hypocrisy of one person to outweigh the consistency of a hundred persons? Does the critic really care about truth, or is he just looking for an excuse to abandon and criticize the church?
If I am loyal to the Church, I will freely acknowledge hypocrisy when it happens. I will also respectfully ask the critic why he refuses to pay attention to the hundred people who are consistent in the way they talk and live. I would respectfully ask if he really cares about the truth or just wants to find fault.
A second criticism is that “the church has hurt me.” The hurt takes many forms. “People didn’t live up to my expectations.” “The pastor steamrolled me in the church meeting.” “No one visited my mother on her deathbed.” The list is quite long.
Churches, including this one, can hurt people. When a community of people lives in proximity to each other and has high expectations for each other’s behavior, someone is going to get hurt, because people don’t always live up to those expectations. Sometimes, people willfully disregard them and leave a trail of victims behind.
If I am loyal to the Church, how do I respond to the Church’s self-inflicted hurts? The first thing I would do, unless the accusation is demonstrably false, is to take responsibility for the hurt without making excuses. If I am the accused, I apologize for the hurt I have caused, I try to keep my mouth shut, and I listen to the other person’s lament. Then, I look for any way to rectify the wrong that has been done. I pray for my accuser, and I look for ways to build that person up in the ensuing weeks and months.
A third criticism is that the church fears people, who are uncomfortably different from them. It’s the “us four and no more” disease. We are comfortable with each other, and we’d rather not be bothered with strangers, especially with people who are “not like us.” When that disease infects an entire church, the church turns in on itself.
If you are loyal to the Church, you can fight this tendency by looking for someone you don’t know before you leave the sanctuary and introduce yourself to them. Never ask if the person is new to BVBC. It’s enough to say, “I’m sorry; I don’t know you. My name is . . . What is your name?” Then offer to help them find where to go next. Also make it your goal to talk to someone every month, who is dramatically different from you.
By the way, these accusations, which are too often painfully true, remind us why the habit of repentance matters so much. Hypocrisy, hurting people in church and turning in on ourselves belong to the dark and dangerous side of our beings. It is important to see them in us and confess them as tendencies and sometimes as actions, and then turn to God for forgiveness and help to live in a way that is more worthy of Christ.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
It is still winter, but today is Palm Sunday, 2008. On this day we celebrate Jesus’ ride into the city of Jerusalem to the thunderous acclaim of the multitudes. They thought He was going to throw off Roman rule and establish the Messianic kingdom foretold by the prophets. Their instincts were right, but they mistook His methods. The path to the kingdom goes through the cross. The divine Yeast would remain hidden in the human dough, until the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ.
Then, the New Jerusalem will come down out of heaven, and the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God – Revelation 21:3 – and the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it – Revelation 21:24.
If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we are building here in this and a million other congregations worldwide communities that anticipate the Triumphal Entry of Jesus Christ back into our world and the establishment of the New Jerusalem. The future belongs to us. So, here and now, let’s cultivate the habit of loyalty to the Church.
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, Brandywine Valley Baptist Church. All rights reserved.
