Sermon from December 18, 2005
G.K. Chesterton said one time, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried at all." It was a wry reminder of the vast, unexplored possibilities of what it means to be a Christian. In a way this sermon series, Fully Human, Fully Free, is a call to explore those possibilities.

It has rooted us squarely in the Church, the community central to God's purposes of salvation. The Church is made up of diverse humanity and finds its point of integration in Jesus Christ. Its vocation is to be the dwelling place where God the Creator and Redeemer lives with the human family – a kind of beachhead from which He has already begun the liberation of the nations of the world from the disorders of sin.

The good life, the vision of what it means to be truly human and truly free, as Christ reveals it, is closely bound up with this vocation of the Church. And that is where we come in. Christians are to live a life worthy of this vocation, even though such a life has to be lived within the inescapable boundaries of our flawed humanity. Baptism is the act of faith by which christians acknowledge and accept this vocation as their own.

A life worthy of this vocation will put into place the Grand Pattern of Ephesians four: get rid of old, ungodly habits, learn to think a new way, and learn new habits of life that are worthy of our vocation and worthy of our God. Within this new life the distinguishing mark of the Church is Christian love, which has to do mostly with little things, because life has to do mostly with little things.

God has not left us to accomplish this on our own steam. Through Jesus Christ He has given us the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit God ... works in us to will and to act according to his good purpose. That is why the good life is not an indulgent life; it is a disciplined life. We have at our disposal the time-honored spiritual disciplines of the Church, such as Bible reading, prayer, public worship, fasting, solitude, etc.

There are obstacles to a life worthy of the Church's vocation. We find them in opposition from other people. Mostly, we find them in ourselves. In the mysterious providence of God the Church in North America has been spared the kind of suffering inflicted on Christians by hostile outsiders in many other nations. Nevertheless, following Jesus Christ faithfully in our culture has its costs.

Throughout the fall, I have been calling for this congregation to commit or to recommit ourselves to lead a life worthy of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and to do it by New Year's Eve. Today, once again, I will issue the call at the end of this sermon. To frame the invitation properly, we need to consider two other central passages of the New Testament that reinforce the propriety of this invitation. The first one takes us to the Gospel of Mark 8:33.

Take Up Your Cross
Jesus had just made to His inner circle of disciples the first of three predictions that He was to die a violent death and three days later rise from the dead. He said it plainly. Just as plainly, Peter thought it was a bad idea and told Him so.

Verse 33 says: But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

That abrasive answer furnishes the context in which we read the first of our central texts, Mark 8:34-38. Verse 34 is important. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

Those words – take up his cross – may sound like exaggerated rhetoric to us. In a world where the Romans regularly crucified people as a way of showing their absolute control, there was no exaggeration, as events subsequently proved. Following Jesus Christ had liabilities of the extreme kind.

Not all followers of Christ pay the ultimate price. But His statement said in no uncertain terms that what He brought into the world merited a person's complete dedication, even the sacrifice of his life.

The other significant part of verse 34 is the statement at the beginning of the verse that he called the crowd to him along with his disciples. He didn't restrict His call to discipleship to the Twelve Disciples. He called the crowd to him. We belong to the crowd. Great dedication to Christ is possible for any of us. Don't let that be lost on you.

According to verse 35, Jesus offered this motive for such dedication. "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." This is a frontal attack on our feel-good-I-can-have-it-all-right-now approach to life. That is not the good life. That kind of life is fragile, and sooner or later we'll lose it. To put the priorities of God first in our lives will definitely cost us here and now, but in the long run something in us of eternal value will be preserved.

Jesus drove the point home in verses 36-37. "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul" – the essential you that God had in mind from the start? "Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" Nothing. To become what God created man to become is a prize for which the whole world is too small a price.

And it all comes down to verse 38. "If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels." That's not about being eloquent; it's about standing up for Christ when the chips are down. It's about living in a way that puts the priorities of God first in our lives. It's about leading lives that are worthy of the Church's vocation to be holy. His word is clear and uncompromising.

From these words you can appreciate better why C.S. Lewis said one time: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher .... You can shut him up as a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us, (Mere Christianity, 45)."

Bodies As Living Sacrifices
The summons to radical, Christian discipleship appears again in the New Testament in Paul's letter to the Romans 12:1-2. Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. Several parts of these verses speak to our circumstances.

First, Paul says: I urge you, brothers. Like Jesus before him, the apostle didn't restrict what he was about to say to a spiritual elite. He addressed the entire congregation – brothers. Didn't Paul mean that for some people religion is a kind of hobby like skydiving or mountain climbing? If you go in for that kind of thing, what Paul was about to say applies. Otherwise, it doesn't apply.

Now, there are people who are religious in a way that other people are not. But the apostle didn't allow that distinction to limit his challenge. He was writing to the congregation in Rome, whom he had never met, most of whom were quite ordinary people, like us, who did not consider themselves especially religious. The apostle addressed them all.

Second, Paul expressed the decisive action we are to take in an unexpected way: offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. Why "bodies?" That sounds carnal, earthy, unspiritual. Why not say, "Offer your hearts and souls?" or "Offer your very selves?" The body with its imperial hormonal powers, sheer necessities and irresistible mortality, seems so unspiritual.

But the body is the instrument by which the world "out there" reaches our minds and spirits. It is also the instrument by which our thoughts and intentions influence the would "out there." So, it is essential to place this unique and powerful instrument at God's disposal to serve God's purpose.

As we saw earlier this fall, the human body is a kind of tool kit: eyes, ears, tongue, hands, feet and the like are the tools at our disposal. The question for people whose vocation is to lead lives worthy of God asks, "How are you going to use these tools?" These tools are good, but we can use them for good or evil. Everywhere we go, we take this remarkable tool kit with us. In the old life, before Christ, we used them to indulge our passions. In the new life in Christ we put them to new purposes. Bodies is just the right word. It anchors Christian spirituality in the flesh as well as in the human spirit.

As one who stands in the unbroken tradition that goes back to the apostles, I challenge you again to place your body at God's disposal. That is fitting for those who in the act of baptism have acknowledged and accepted as their own the Church's vocation to be holy. This sermon series has been designed to help us be clear and realistic about that. I haven't wanted you to be hasty; this is for thoughtful people. I don't want you to be half-hearted; this act affects your whole being. I don't want you to be afraid; it will not turn you into a religious freak; it turns people into something beautiful and winsome. I have wanted you to count the cost of doing this. That does not mean that anyone can anticipate all that lies ahead; it does mean that Christ is worthy of what you are opening yourself up to.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
We often hear people express admiration for Jesus and disdain for the Church. That is easy to do. It is understandable why people do it. I don't for a minute deny the gap between the saintly vocation of the Church and the spiritual vacancy of some Christians. Most things critics say about the Church have substance, and there is worse. The Church is often indefensible, guilty as charged. But it's not the whole story. The Church is not an irritating appendix that could be excised without noticeable loss. It is the vital organ without which the plan of God for the liberation of humanity fails.

I think critics of the Church are mistaking signs of life for signs of death. When Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, and he came lumbering out of the grave, bound hand and foot in strips of linen and the burial cloth fastened to his face, he looked more dead than alive, and he smelled more dead than alive. But he was alive. What he needed was for someone to remove the grave clothes and let him wash up. That's what the Church is like. There is life not death here and in ten thousand other gatherings like this. If we could just remove more of the tokens of death that make the Church lumbering and smelly, we would find something beautiful underneath. Such is the vision I have of the Church of Jesus Christ, as it actually is.

I don't know how much of the Church's beauty we can bring out in our pilgrimage through this world. We are not a cohort of people, who began the journey together and will finish together. People are in and out all the time. We don't march in lockstep. We are at different stages of spiritual maturity. Some of us care about what I'm talking about, some care less. We are all pulled in many directions.

But in my vision of this congregation, the only one I really know and can do something about, I believe there is a critical mass of people here that cares about the Church's vocation to be holy. We are people for whom what I've been saying this fall is not foreign. It has been a reinforcement and encouragement to continue on and go deeper with the strength which God provides.

I hope many of you have for the first time received what I have been saying as your spirutal vocation. I hope many of you for the first time have committed yourselves to lead a life worthy of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

If this is happening, if the life of God, which is at work in us, is bringing this congregation to an unparalleled pursuit of God, it will be in a non-coercive environment. We have no religious police to check on your sincerity or your progress. We respect the need for each person to proceed at a pace appropriate to his or her stage of spiritual growth. We can't hurry spiritual growth any more than we can hurry biological growth. There will be no ranting from this platform to lather us into some emotional frenzy about God.

Whatever God may be doing here, it won't be flashy. Jesus called His followers the light of the world (Matthew 5:14). The stunning truth about light is that you don't notice it until you don't have it. In a great paradox light remains invisible, even as it makes everything else visible. My hunch is that whatever God is forming within us will come out in thousands of small acts of Christian love over the next five years. Christian love has mostly to do with small matters, because life itself has to do mostly with small matters.

It may also be that from within the soil of this congregation, out of sight, unpredictable, a few heroes of faith and sanctity may emerge in the next decade or two. They would be God's crowning achievement in this generation of Brandywine Valley Baptist Church.

By this series of sermons on the holiness of the Church I have the sense of handing on to you a trust of incalculable possibilities. I of course accept that trust as my responsibility as well. When the last sermon in this series is over on Christmas Day, we will all step out into the cloud of unknowing, where God works in the mysterious depths of human hearts, directing us, as only He can do, to the fulfilling of His purpose.