Yours, Mine and Ours: The Introduction
September 25, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Luke 18:15-17
People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it.But Jesus called for them and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Our youth department, our discipleship staff and leadership, our children’s ministry leaders, our youth leadership, and adult ministry leaders have been working with two people from Fuller Theological Sanctuary (Chap Clark whom you’ve met, and Dr. Kara Powell), to implement processes, a culture, to provide “sticky faith” for our children and youth. And frankly, for all of us.
Dr. Powell and Dr. Clark wrote a book called Sticky Faith based on many years of experience and research. It’s about what makes faith last a life time as opposed to people sort of fading away after they grow up in the church. They’ve identified three principles and I want to remind you of those. We’ve talked about two already. The first is that they grow up in an intergenerational community of faith and build relationships. Not just that they’re there, but they build relationships across the spectrum of the church. Many people of all ages invest in them, care about them, know them, nurture them, pray for them, celebrate them, learn from them. That they’re not sort of siloed but that they’re integrated into the life of the church.
Second, we talked last week about the importance of parents as primary faith teachers and that it isn’t that parents are to subcontract out faith formation to the church. We sometimes try that “dry cleaner parenting” where they bring the kids to the church and pick them up at the end of church with a plastic bag over them, all clean. But rather they are involved with their young people in the life of the church. They talk about faith at home. I’d say that’s true for all of us. If we want to have sticky faith, it cannot live only between 8:30 and 12 o’clock on Sunday morning and on Wednesday night when you’re in Bible Study. It’s got to be a part of your conversation, your thinking, everything about you throughout that time. We talked about that last week.
The third component of “sticky faith” is that they have a grace-based understanding of the faith and I want to talk about that today. So let’s begin with a word of prayer.
O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open up our hearts, God, that we might feel. And then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
A number of years ago I was invited to give the invocation at a literacy luncheon that featured the former First Lady Barbara Bush. Not only was I invited to give the invocation, I and my wife were invited to the VIP reception ahead of time. We are very important people. So we and about 200 other Very Important People went to the VIP reception ahead of time. We waited in a long line to be able to meet Mrs. Bush and have our picture taken with her. Then we moved on. She was very gracious.
So I was able to say to people after that, “Well, I know Barbara Bush.” That year we took the picture and sent it out to some of our closest friends as a Christmas card. It just said, “Merry Christmas, love, Tom, Dee and Barbara.” It was great. That was our Christmas card.
So here’s the thing. There’s a difference about knowing about someone – I knew about Mrs. Bush before that. The difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone. In fact if the Bushes had invited us to Kennebunkport to hang out with them, play a little golf, have dinner, then we would have known them better than we know them now. But at least we could say we knew them.
So here’s the basic premise of my sermon today that I hope you will take home: That it is the primary job of the church not so much to teach people about Jesus, but to help them know Jesus; to have a relationship with Christ that’s real and living and personal. That’s what it means to be grace-based.
Sometimes people think the responsibility of the church is to help people learn to behave, to be nice.
I was sitting in the airport lounge working on my sermon there in the place where you get on the plane – the departure lounge. And the plane was late so it was packed with people. Southwest Airlines, you know what’s that like, there were just millions of people around. This guy was sitting right next to me and I was working on my sermon. He was looking at my laptop as I’m doing it. He said, “You working on a Sunday school lesson?” I said, “No, I’m a pastor…” I’m telepathically sending him that message that says, “Leave me alone. Please let me alone. I’m really not a nice person. I know I’m supposed to talk to you about Jesus right now but it’s Friday and I have to get this done.”
My telepathy didn’t work because he kept chatting with me. In the lounge there were also these kids. Maybe five and seven or six and eight. They were out of control. They were running up and down, all around and tripping over people’s legs and knocking over suitcases. The parents were just reading their books. You could see that everyone in the lounge had that stink-eye look as they’re looking at them.
Finally the guy sidles up next to me and he says, “Those parents really need to send those children to church so they can learn how to behave.” He was trying to kind of “connect the dots” of who I was and what was going on there. But I thought to myself how much of the time that’s what’s in our minds. We want to take our kids to church so they’ll learn how to behave. So they’ll learn how to be nice to people and so that they’ll have good social skills. So they’ll be socialized, and hang out with nice kids, and be with nice people. And we’ll go to church because there are other nice people there and people will just be nice.
Those social skills are important, I believe in them. I’m not disparaging them. I don’t know how many times on the way out of church people will bring their kids by and say, “Good sermon. Good sermon.” Then they’ll look down and they’ll say to little Johnny, “Johnny, say hello to Dr. Pace. Shake his hand. Look him in the eye.”
That’s fine, that’s great, but it is not the primary purpose of church to teach us how to be nice. In fact, if you read Scripture I would suggest to you that Jesus was often not so nice. And he certainly did not live by the manners of his day and follow the social mores of his culture. He was counter-cultural – he ran across it. I think it’s fine that we work for our children to be nice but it is not the primary purpose of church.
Now I think most of us know that but we push it sometimes a little further and go a little deeper. So we say, “Okay, it’s not that, but it is to create a moral code. That children, that all of us, that everyone who comes, will reenforce within us a moral code that we can follow. A certain way of behaving.” The Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, all through Scripture it talks about how we are to behave.
Let me just share with you from the New Testament. Philippians 2, “Do nothing out of selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility regard one another as more important than yourselves.” That’s a way of behaving.
Here’s straight forward – Col. 3:9: “Do not lie to one another.” I Thessalonians 5:11 says, “Encourage one another and build one another up.” Hebrews 10:24 – this is one of my favorites – says, “Provoke one another to love and good deeds.” It’s like you have a fork and you’re poking at someone, saying, “Do it! Do it right!”
Now look, all of those things are important. We want to learn to live an ethical way. Almost every children’s sermon we have is built on that. “Treat one another right, share your toys, be nice, help the other kids on the playground.” You can go on and on.
The prophet says, “What does the Lord require of us but to do justice…” Sometimes we are to stand up for what’s right; to have the backbone to stand up for what’s right. To be about the business of changing the world and making it a better place. To invest our resources and our time and our energy and making a difference in the world around us. That’s a way of life.
Now, listen, I agree that’s important. That’s absolutely an important part of what the church is supposed to do. But I don’t believe it’s the primary purpose. It’s not the primary purpose of the church; it’s secondary.
Sometimes people say the purpose of church is to teach religion. Somebody who had gone to church all their life said to me, “I’ve been trying to find a place where it says… in the book of Paul where it says….” And I said, “There’s no book of Paul. He wrote letters and there are letters of James. But there’s no Book of Paul.” I thought what a failure I am.
Someone said to me, “Is there a difference between resurrection and reincarnation?” And I said, “Yeah, there’s a big difference.” See, these are doctrines of the faith that we want to teach people. This is teaching religion, teaching faith. This is important that we understand what those doctrines of the faith are.
When we have candidates who are choosing to be pastors, we ask them to come before the Board of Ordained Ministry and we give them an oral examination. We ask questions like “What are the sacraments? And what do they mean? And what are the three components of Wesleyan’s understanding of grace?” All sorts of things and it’s kind of hard. It’s a difficult exam. That’s because we want people to articulate basic doctrines of the Christian faith. It’s that important to be able to teach Scripture and what it means. That’s part of our responsibility.
Teaching religion may also be about teaching spiritual disciplines like prayer, Bible study, fasting, tithing, service, and all of these spiritual disciplines. Richard Foster wrote a book called Celebration of Discipline and he has twelve of them that are part of what it means to live as a Christian. I think those are really important.
But listen, they are not the primary purpose of the church. The primary purpose of the church is for us to help one another know Jesus. Out of that relationship grows all those other things. Out of that relationship grows a certain way of living and behaving. A certain way of practicing, a certain way of trying to be in church on a regular basis so that we can practice our faith together. Practice those disciplines. It’s how we come along side one another and work to change the world and make it a better place. All of those things are important but they grow out of this core relationship. They are an outgrowth of it.
Imagine a house. The Scripture says that it’s clear, that there is a foundation which is Jesus Christ. And on top of that you can build spiritual disciplines and ethics and morals and a way of behaving. All of those things matter. But they’re built on the relationship with Jesus Christ.
The reason I love this Scripture so much…You know, it’s interpreted in so many different ways by different theologians but I think they make it more difficult than it needs to be. I will tell you a child doesn’t care anything about the doctrine of sanctification. What a child wants to do is climb up in someone’s lap and be loved. Jesus says, “Unless you receive the kingdom of God like a little child you will not inherit it.” The essence of the faith is this relationship we have with Jesus.
Let me give you a couple of other analogies so that you’ll understand what I’m trying to say. If you read Scripture, there are really two basic models or pictures of the faith. One is of a parent and a child, and one is of us – the followers of Jesus – as the bride of Christ, of a relationship of love, of a marriage.
Now in marriage there are all sorts of rules that you’re supposed to do. At my house you take your shoes off when you come in the door. That’s part of the marriage. You don’t use the decorative soap in the guest bathroom. You just don’t. It’s there. And you don’t use the pretty towel if there are guests coming over soon. And frankly, if there are guests coming soon you don’t use the bathroom at all there. You go up to the top of the stairs and you use that if there are people coming over. There’s just stuff you do. You call if you’re going to be late.
Is that the essence of marriage? No, the essence of marriage is a relationship with love. And out of that relationship of love we behave a certain way because of that relationship of love that we have.
In parenting it’s the same way. There’s a lot of stuff in parenting. You’re going to teach your kids discipline. You’re going to make sure what they need to eat. You’re going to make sure they get a good education. You’re going to make sure they stay safe. You’re going to teach them a certain set of values. You’re going to do all these things as a parent.
But is that the essence of parenting? No, the essence of parenting is a relationship of love and commitment. And out of – because of – that moment when you take hold of that child for the first time, and your life and your whole heart are changed completely, you act and live in a different way with them. You behave differently.
But the driver, the motivation behind that changed behavior is this relationship of love. And sometimes what we do in the church is we focus all our energy on the things that grow out of it and we don’t spend enough time forming that relationship, that real living relationship of love. Because that’s the engine that drives everything else. You have to choose to give yourself completely.
Now there’s a very specific word for that in the Christian doctrine and that’s the word grace. Unmerited, unwavering, unrelenting love. That sense that “I have crawled up into Jesus’ lap and Jesus’ arms are all around me and there is nothing I can do that is going to take that away.”
The great theologian Karl Barth was probably the leading theologian of the 20th Century. He was born in Switzerland and moved to Germany before the Second World War, was part of the resistance to Hitler, left Germany just in time. He went back to his native Switzerland and after the war wrote a set of 13 volumes called Church Dogmatics. It’s a resource that we preachers get and put on their shelves and then never read because it’s way too dense and thick for us. But it makes us look really smart to have it there on the shelf.
So he’s a very substantive theologian - that’s the best way I can say that. In 1962 he was speaking at the University of Chicago at the Theological Seminary there. In a question/answer session after his lecture someone asked him, “Could you summarize your theology in just a few sentences?” He said, “Yes, I can do that. It’s ‘Jesus loves me, this I know/For the Bible tells me so.’”
It’s that simple. That’s the core of all of it. That’s what it means to say a grace-based theology.
Right now that doesn’t mean you do whatever you want. The fact that I’m in love with my wife and that she’s in love with me doesn’t mean I can do anything I want at home. I can tell you that. Certainly as a parent the fact that I can love you and you love me as a child and a parent doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want. Of course not.
What it means is that because of that relationship we work all the harder to live a certain way. That’s the essence of the Christian faith.
Here’s what I would tell you. When I look back over my life there have been times that I have behaved well. I have worked and I have made a difference in the world around me and I have lived incredibly ethically. And there have been times – not so much. There’s a line in the old Methodist communion service that speaks of our sins in the prayer of confession. It says, “The remembrance of them is grievous unto us.”
There have been some things that I’ve done in my life when I remember them is “grievous unto me.”
You, too, probably. There have been times in my life that I have practiced my faith very well. I’ve prayed every single day, I’ve read my Bible regularly, and I’ve kept my prayer journal. I fasted, I’ve been involved in service, and I’ve given generously – tithed. Just all of those practices that are windows to open God’s grace into my life and heart. And there have been other times – nada!
Even as a pastor, there have been times my prayer life was miserable. There have been times I believe every part of the Apostles’ Creed with all my heart, and when I say it, I say it with confidence and full of just believing it with everything I have, and being so excited to teach it to you all. And there have been other times that doubts overwhelm me.
So if you were going to kind of draw this as a graph of my own spiritual journey it would be quite volatile, if you want to know the truth. But underneath it all there was not one single moment that I can remember at least when I questioned whether God loved me with all of his heart, and when I didn’t want to love God back because of that love.
You see, that’s for me the foundation. And because of that foundation, when the winds came and the floods rose, my house didn’t fall. Because I had crawled up into Jesus’ lap and entered into that relationship of love with him.
That’s what it means to be grace-based. It’s more than being nice, and more than being good and more than being religious. It’s more than being socially active and all of those things that are an important outgrowth of our faith. The essence of it is that I love Jesus and Jesus loves me.
Now, so what that means for us is that our job is to make that introduction to one another. To introduce Jesus to one another, to know him together. Not just to know about him, but to know him. And a part of our job is to introduce our children and youth to that so that they know him.
There may be some people who come to know Jesus because they were at a bad time in their lives and they checked into the Motel 6 with their bottle of vodka. And then they opened the Gideon Bible in the drawer and they read the Scripture and Voila! I hear about that but I don’t think it happens very often.
Most of the time it’s because somebody says, “Let me tell you about this man who’s changed my life. This relationship of love that I have and I would love it if you had it, too.” That’s what grace-based means.
If we can make that introduction to one another – not just our children and our youth – but to one another, we can introduce one another to Jesus in this place. If we can introduce the world to this incredible God who loves us in Jesus Christ so much that he would die for us, then the behaviors will change, the world will be redeemed. That’s our job and everything else will fall into place.
Lord God, we thank you so much, we thank you so much that you sent your Son to be in relationship with us. That you didn’t hold us at arm’s length and wait for us to come to you, but you came to us. And you invited us to come and sit on your knee. We pray, God, that above all else you would help us to bask in that relationship of love and let it transform us. We pray in the name of Christ, Amen.