The text for the Third Sunday after Epiphany continues the dramatic action of Jesus “calling disciples, “this week, now, in the Gospel of Mark.  We heard from the Gospel of John last week that Jesus first found and called Philip and Nathanael.  Bernie’s theme was that all of us are called to discipleship and that we have nothing to do with our being found.  Jesus and faith find us, every last one. 

 

This morning we hear the writer of the Gospel of Mark say that Jesus came to Galilee and started proclaiming the kingdom of God.As he passes along the Sea of Galilee he calls out to several fishermen and bids them “follow me” and, without any other prompting, they do. We don’t know why they did so with such immediacy, but what we do know is that there was something compelling enough about Jesus and his message that prompted the four fisherman-- and later many others -- to follow him, to become his disciples, students of this teacher and servants of his mission.

 

Today we too are called to be Jesus disciples.  We are here this morning because we also, have been found and called by Jesus to be his followers in this place – the church, and we are Christ’s body called to be his servants in the world.  We believe deep down inside our souls that following Jesus is what we want to do and that our faith makes a difference in our lives and the lives of others that follow him.

But we also know that the church is not as alive as we would like it to be.  Church attendance has been declining for about 40 years or so in mainline congregations and is now declining in Evangelical congregations over the last decade as well

 

What does a church that is alive look like?  How can our congregational life – our discipleship – enable people to become the kind of people they want to be and, even more, believe God is calling them to be?

 

I believe that one compelling aspect of a church that is alive is that it is loyal to the past but open to the future!  If you take a serious analytical look at the history of the Christian Church from its beginning, with the twelve Jesus found and chose, right down to this very moment, to you and me, the miracle is not so much in the fact that the church has survived.  The miracle is in the fact that God has done so many incredibly great things through us.  And those great things have been done in spite of our quirks, our broken promises, our controversies, our heated arguments, our positions of theological arrogance, our criticisms of one another.

 

Suppose for a moment you were Jesus and you had reached the point where it was time to leave the carpenter shop and begin your public ministry.  Suppose you were Jesus and you decided to choose twelve to be a part of you core organization.  Where would you begin?  What criteria would you establish?  What moral and theological parameters would you employ?  Just how much would you leave to God to influence you?  These are probably the same critical questions our PNC were thinking about in their search for St. Philip’s new pastor.

 

Today we would employ a professional search corporation for personnel and all sorts of consultants.  Then suppose you were Jesus and you submitted twelve names for the consultant to evaluate.  It seems their evaluation might come back to this kind of report which I came across in my sermon file with an unknown author.

 

 

That is a startling reminder that Jesus is always surprising us by using all sorts of imperfect people to do his work.  It is a startling reminder that the church is a very human, frail, diverse institution, nonetheless charged with the mission to be a body of Christ, doing the work of Christ on earth.

 

That may be our best starting point: to acknowledge that we are an imperfect people who belong to an imperfect church, living in an imperfect world, trying to worship and serve a perfect God.  What we keep forgetting, or keep refusing to remember, is our frail, sinful humanity, which is why God, in the fullness of time, became flesh and lived among us perfectly in Jesus the Christ.  The first disciples were far from perfect; they were temperamental, selfish, fickle, disloyal, unfaithful, and even quarrelsome with one another.

 

So how did we get here, to this point in time, as a church?  That’s where loyalty to the past demands our attention.  No matter how much history has preceded us, most of us have a tendency to go back in time only as far as we can remember, and we tend to believe that time really began with our birth, so the past is primarily what we have experienced.  Not so with the church – not so with Jesus.  Time for Jesus began with God, and time for the church began when God made a promise – an agreement – a covenant with the Jews that God would be their God so long as the Jews would be faithful to God.  The long history of God’s dealing with the Jews set the stage for the coming of Jesus to establish, out of the tradition of Israel, the Christian tradition, and thus the church was born.

 

I hasten to admit all is not perfect in the church.  It never has been and it never will be.  But if ever there was a time for us in the church to be loyal to the past but open to the future, now is that time!  Someone has said that God created time because we humans cannot learn everything at once.  And someone also said God created memory so that we could have the past as our permanent teacher.  And someone said God created the future because there is so much more that God wants to teach us and do through us. 

           

The truth is that placing the blame for an imperfect church may be a part of diagnosing any problem, but it is the prescription that actually produces the cure.  So we need to keep going back to the source book: the Bible.  The early church had its squabbles, its disagreements, its arguments, but always someone called them back to the past to get their point of departure for the future.

           

The church almost at inception was disrupted with theological and ecclesiastical controversies.  Beyond the obvious power struggles between the Jewish and Gentile segments of the church, there was also the ever-present issue of who was the authentic spokesperson for the church.

            Paul and Peter argued vehemently about whether or not these new Christians had to obey the laws of the Jews in order to be Christians.  Paul argued with the elders in the early church because they let secular, unethical practices into the church.  Paul argued against spiritual aberrations that detracted from faith in Jesus Christ.

           

As our text declares, from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians “Do not quench the Spirit.  Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.”  When Jesus was giving his final instructions to the disciples, when he was saying goodbye to them, he said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16: 13).  We often hear side discussions in the church calling for a return to the old-fashioned gospel and to old-time religion.  But that is a stuck in the past way of thinking, because the Spirit of Jesus calls us not to live in the first century but to live by faith in Christ in the twenty-first century.

            The Spirit of Jesus Christ is a living presence, and the basic Christian affirmation (especially for those of us in the reformed tradition) is about the future, not the past.  It is that, in Jesus Christ, God was doing a new thing in human history.  It is that God continues the process, continues to create newness.  That is what the old story is about – birth, life, death, resurrection.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not about the resuscitation of a dead body two thousand years ago.  That’s history. The Christian faith, the resurrection faith of the church of Jesus Christ, is about the presence of the risen Christ in our life, creating new possibilities, making all things new, establishing justice, welcoming children, healing the sick, and binding up wounds.  The cross stands forever showing forth the magnitude of that love.  Jesus was always biased in favor of the power of love to forgive, to heal, to redeem.  Jesus remains as the world’s only authentic Savior.

            The Spirit of Christ is a living spirit, a Spirit who does not simply recite the faith of past centuries but who inspires and calls us into the future.  We often sedate and somber Presbyterians would be wise if we were to discover who this Spirit of Christ really is.  The Spirit of Christ is not some vague, dim figure who hides quietly in the corridors of the past or behind the sacred walls.  No, the Spirit of Christ is a very powerful presence, motivating individuals and churches to be a powerful influence for God in a complex and violent world. 

            A church that is alive, a living church, is made up of real people who, because they are real, do not always agree on every issue.  Two groups tend to be the dominant ones.  There are those who are traditionalist, conservative, resistant to change; and there are those who by temperament, are restless, impatient with old ways, eager for change.  Some of us find that there is a bit of both groups in us.  We want to be loyal to the past but we want to be open to the future.  And some of us believe the church needs both groups if we are going to be loyal to the past but open to the future.  The future always grows out of the past.  The one thing we cannot do is to run off in all directions, because that will destroy us.  Nothing threatens us more than disunity!

            One of Aesop’s great fables illustrates this.  Four oxen who lived in a certain field were good friends.  Sometimes a lion would prowl around them.  The oxen would put their tails together so that when the lion came, he must face the horns of one of them no matter from which direction he approached.  But after awhile, the oxen bean to disagree with one another and to quarrel among themselves.  Soon they separated and carelessly went in different directions.  The lion, finding them separated, attacked one at a time and soon killed each one of them.  Such disunity threatens the church! 

            Jesus, in his final prayer with the disciples, prayed this way to God:  “I do not pray for these only” – meaning the Twelve – but also for those who are to believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.  And I do not pray, Father, that you should take them out of the world, but that you will keep them safe from the evil one” (John 17).

            Never have we as Christians been more in need of the guidance of the Spirit of Christ – so that we can learn how to distinguish between what is new and good for the church and what is simply new but may destroy the church.  If I had to explain in a single sentence the religious mood of today in this country, I think I would do it this way: there is a profound desire for God and for God’s help with living, coupled with a deep distrust and rejection of all organized religion, which means the church!  We frequently hear people say, “I’ve got my own religion, my own spirituality, so I don’t need the church.” So also thought each of the oxen in Aesop’s fable, which led to their individual destruction.

            So our vision must begin with people and look to the church that believes in an unchanging Christ in an ever-changing world that must once again grapple with its theology, its belief in Christ and Christ’s hope for the human family.  I believe the greatest challenge for the church today is to revive the biblical concept of community.  John Winthrop’s sermon – “A Model of Christian Community” was delivered onboard ship in 1630, just before the people disembarked in the new world.  In that sermon, Winthrop warned that if we pursue our pleasures and profits, we will surely perish out of this good land.

            Paraphrasing the apostle Paul, Winthrop put it this way: “We are to entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities…we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.”

            More often, we have ignored Winthrop’s advice.  Perhaps now more than ever before the church needs to discover what has caused the decline of the concept of community, an authentic faith community where the needs of one become the concern of all in that faith community. 

            The huge question is: What are people looking for from the church?  What is compelling for them?  The honest answer is: Most don’t know.  Because of this, I must confess that the work of the church has a tendency to wear us out, to drain our energy, to exhaust our imagination, to stifle our ability to dream creatively and to plan wisely.  We spend an exorbitant amount of energy and time and money trying to give to people what they want, when in the end it does not satisfy their most basic hunger.  The hunger is spiritual in nature, and the unchanging Christ is what we must give to people. 

This raises immediately the question: What should the church look like in the future?  Hans Kung, noted Roman Catholic Theologian, wrote this piece titled “The Church of the Future” and raises this question:

            To what kind of Christian, to what kind of church does the future belong?

            Not a church that is lazy, shallow, inefficient, timid, and weak in its faith:

            Not a church that expects blind obedience and fanatical party loyalty;

            Not a church that is the slave of its own history, always putting on the brakes,    suspiciously defensive and yet, in the end, forced into agreement; not a church that is blind to problems, suspicious of empirical knowledge yet claiming competent authority for everyone and everything; not a church that is quarrelsome, impatient and unfair in dialogue; not a church that is closed to the real world.

            In short, the future does not belong to a church that is dishonest!

            No, the future belongs: To a church that knows what it does not know; to a  church that relies upon God’s grace and wisdom and has in its weakness and ignorance a radical confidence in God; to a church that is strong in faith, joyous and certain yet self-critical; to a church filled with intellectual desire, spontaneity, animation and fruitfulness; to a church that has the courage of initiative and the courage to take risks; to a church that is completely open to the real world; to a church that is completely committed to Jesus Christ.  In short, the future belongs to a thoroughly truthful church. 

 

So what is our goal, our purpose, our mission as a church that is alive in Christ? Our mission is to be a servant church, sharing the love of Christ with all people.  It is brief; it is clear; it is precise; and it is why we exist as a church. 

 

Loyal to the past, yes; but for Christ’s sake, let us also be open to the future, because that is where Christ is – and if we believe that, one day, at the end of our life, we will be where Christ is, namely, with God, forever and forever, through all of eternity. 

 

We celebrate this church and will, with God’s grace experience again the strong hope for the future of the church because of this promise from Isaiah 43: “I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” 

 

Amen.