Sermon from October 22, 2006
The mission of Brandywine Valley Baptist Church is to be followers of Jesus Christ, known by our love. The validity of the mission faces the following challenge. We are battered everyday with words. Television drones on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the flagrant lies of people we trusted have debased speech.

As a result, most of us have mental filters that try to control this unceasing, unreliable torrent of words. The Christian message is not immune to this mental filtering. That is why the credibility of our message depends on the authenticity of our love. Words alone do not establish credibility. Action must accompany words.

What would authentic love look like in action? That's a little like asking what the 26 letters of the alphabet look like in writing. In other words it's hard to give a simple answer, because there are so many possibilities. So, let's narrow down the possibilities with two courses of action that we can work with.

Galatians 6:10 gives us one course of action. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Followers of Jesus Christ, known by their love will engage people with compassionate deeds. We will talk about this in more detail next Sunday.

1 Peter 3:15 gives us a second course of action. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. Followers of Jesus Christ, known by their love will engage the great moral issues of our culture with gracious discernment. We need to talk about this right now.

Overwhelming Issues
I want to begin by calling your attention to the content of what we watch on television. Television brings before us important moral issues and, without saying so in so many words, asks us to make decisions about these issues. Let me list some of them. I think we may find ourselves in a state of some fatigue, just hearing the list.

Let's begin with some of the more notable bio-ethical issues: frozen embryos, embryonic stem cell research, partial birth abortion and the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court, animal and human cloning, end-of-life decisions, and extending life expectancy.

The debate about homosexuality presents us with the following potpourri of issues: same-sex marriage, civil unions, political correctness in the workplace, homosexuality and disease, public school curriculum and advocacy of homosexuality, Christian convictions about homosexuality as "hate crimes," and Supreme Court rulings such as Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that struck down a Texas state law banning private consensual sex between adults of the same sex.

Here are some family issues that are coming to a TV screen or family member near you: divorce, remarriage, care of aging, dependent parents, retirement, abuse, sexually active teenages, and cohabitation. Is anybody feeling tired yet? Here are some more sheep that you can count at night without getting sleepy.

What is appropriate – not just legal but appropriate – for a church's engagement in political issues? How shall the United States handle illegal immigration? In the entertainment world we are concerned about Internet pornography and sexual predators, who pose a danger to our on-line children. We are concerned about media misrepresentation of Christian faith. How shall we monitor what we and our children watch on TV and at the movies?

I could go on for a long time, but I don't know if it would make you feel any better. It doesn't make me feel any better. Aside from how I feel, I have some questions about these issues. For example, are we the people wise enough to resolve these issues in a way that achieves a national consensus about them? Are we in too much of a hurry even to understand these issues, much less resolve them? In these culture wars is television an instrument of propaganda or an instrument of understanding? In these culture wars is higher education an instrument of propaganda or an instrument of understanding? Is our political and judicial process in danger of becoming irrelevant to these issues?

I do not enumerate these issues or raise these questions to despair but to measure the gravity of our national dilemmas and to caution us about any utopian schemes for solving these dilemmas.

The Gathering Darkness
And there is something else, which is more ominous than all the other dilemmas and which makes them more grave. Our nation no longer agrees on what is right and wrong. We have no shared moral basis for resolving the disagreements. Let me illustrate.

During 2006, I have held two newborn grandchildren in my arms. On August 8, I held my new granddaughter, Jessica, in my arms. My daughter, Joy, told us what it was like at the moment of Jessica's birth. We loved the stories of that moment.

There are places in this country where the doctor will kill a baby just before the baby emerges from the birth canal. We call it "partial-birth abortion," and it has the full protection of United States law, even though "no evidence (has) been presented to Congress or a court showing any case in which a partial-birth abortion (has) been necessary or even safer as a procedure," (First Things, "This Heartbreaking Court," October, 2006, 12).

Yet, Supreme Court "Justice Breyer was willing to strike down the bill (that banned partial-birth abortion) simply because it was conceivable that this prcedure, in certain instances, might be safer," (ibid.). Mr. Justice Breyer, is one little being at the moment of birth human and the other not? Is that the best you can do?

On April 13, I held my new grandson, Alexander, in my arms. He had been stillborn around 5:00 a.m. Two days earlier, a medical team at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston had performed a heart catheterization on Alexander to enlarge his left aortic valve, while he was still in his mother's womb. It would allow blood to flow normally and his left ventricle to develop normally. It looked at first like they had succeeded. A few hours later, he died in utero.

He was my grandson, when that brave doctor inserted the catheter into his heart. He was my grandson, when I held his lifeless body in my arms, and we committed him to God. But not far away in Boston was a place where another child, Alexander's age and with none of Alexander's disease, was destroyed by abortion.

Is one little being human and the other not? Our nation can't agree. Our nation can no longer agree on what is right and what is wrong. We have no shared moral basis for resolving the disagreement. The platform of one national political party says that abortion is good. The platform of another national political party says that abortion is bad. Both platforms strike me as concessions to what is expedient rather than commitments to what is moral.

Against this moral coherence the ancient words of Isaiah find their voice once again. Look with me at Isaiah 5:20.

Woe to those who call evil good
     and good evil,
who put darkness for light
     and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
     and sweet for bitter.

And we dare not miss verse 21.

Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
and clever in their own sight.

Those words utter God's No! to our national confusion. Those words also make it very clear that if we at BVBC, along with Christians everwhere, are to engage the great moral issues of our culture with gracious discernment, we will do it in circumstancese that are confusing and emotionally charged. We will also do it on an uneven playing field that may work to our disadvantage.

Giving an Answer
Our mission is to be a community of Christ's followers, known by our love. We face moral issues that defy easy solutions, and we face interminable, often conflicting talk about them. How do we engage them with gracious discernment?

That brings us back to 1 Peter 3:15. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

The apostle did not write that to some elite of the Church. He wrote it to the rank and file. It is to us that scripture says, be prepared to give an answer, a gracious and discerning answer. Don't be intimidated by how little you know about an issue. We can all learn more, but we'll never know enough. The call for most of us is not to win debates; it is to bear faithful witness to our moral convictions. You can say something as simple as: "I believe that an unborn child is a human being, made in the image of God, who deserves to be protected by the law of the land."

Don't be intimidated by the elite. The elephant in the room is that the elite of the land disagree with each other. For example, either side of the abortion debate can call as witnesses people from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists or the American Public Health Association, the California Medical Association, and the Association of Reproduction Health Professionals. They will offer learned and contradictory testimony before Congress or in a court of law, and at the end of the day the judges will make decisions based on legal technicalities that few of us understand.

Your voice may not be heard in a congressional hearing or before a judge, but your neighbor may hear you and be persuaded. Peter's counsel is: set apart Christ as Lord, and always be prepared to give an answer whenever people give you a platform to speak. Don't be silent. Don't back down. Don't belittle your opponent. Don't underestimate the power of hundreds of thousands of Christians who speak like this.

There is nothing utopian about this. We are not going back to some golden age in the past; we go forward to the golden age of the kingdom of God. Until that day, human efforts will be a mixture of good and evil. But God is at work to judge the evil in our world. Let's leave the judgment to Him and bear faithful witness to the truth as we understand it.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
That is our mission and part of our vision, and we have a Five-Year Plan to help us do it. Part of that plan is to provide the physical resources that help us to carry out our mission and vision. Physical resources include funding, staffing, and a new sanctuary and gathering spaces that will be adequate for the church in the next 30 years of its life.

New opportunities and a new sense of mission are driving these changes in our physical resources. Engaging our culture with gracious discernment represents our new sense of mission. Here are some tangible ways in which this vision has recently found expression.

Two years ago, though the good offices of Tim Houseal, I was invited to sit on a panel with a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic priest to discuss Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ. It played to a standing room only crowd at the Jewish Community Center, and the impression at the end of the evening was a desire for more.

Last year, Howard Gerlach of our congregation gave testimony in DE senate hearings on embryonic stem cell research. He gave leadership to BVBC's efforts in a Rose and a Prayer, a statewide effort that defeated the senate bill in January. The issue will come up again in 2007, this time with Congressman Mike Castle's weight behind it.

In April of this year, a religion editor from the Wilmington News Journal called me and asked if I would write an evangelical perspective on The DaVinci Code, book and movie. She gave me a 600-word maximum and a deadline. The newspaper printed it virtually unchanged on Mother's Day, complete with scripture and the witness that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world.

WHYY-TV called in August to ask me about embryonic stem cell research. Nothing came of that, but the fact that the reporter would think of BVBC was another straw in the wind that we are right to engage our culture with gracious discernment.

We believe Phase III will support our new opportunities and our new sense of mission in the Brandywine Valley. Can we engage our culture without Phase III? Of course we can! But permanent institutions make additions and changes to their supporting physical structures in order to carry out their missions. The YMCA, the JCC, and Pilot School have done it or are about to do it. The Wilmington Savings Fund Society has done it in a big way in Wilmington and in a small way in Fairfax Shopping Center. The DE judicial system did it in a big way with a new courthouse.

Now the decision is before us. Is it time for BVBC to make additions and changes to its supporting physical structures? The answer thus far has been, "Yes." The answer has reached us step by step over a period now approaching four years. The next step is Celebration Sunday, November 5, when we make pledges to give to this project from now through 2009.

Carole and I have looked at our resources to decide how we can give sacrificially. We are prepared to defer a new car for another three years and to take money from our retirement investments. I was surprised at how much we agreed on. What will you do?

The Nugget: The credibility of our message depends on the authenticity of our love, which will be sharply tested by engaging our culture with gracious discernment.