Being About the Business
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Being About the Business
September 18, 2011
by Rev. William “Buck” Day
I invite you to follow along in your bibles or it will be on the screen in front of you, as well. It comes from John, Chapter 4 and we are going to read four verses out of Chapter 4. (John 4:34-38)
Jesus speaking:
34Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35Do you not say, “Four months more, then comes the harvest”? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.” 38I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.’
God’s word for us this morning! I invite you to join me as we pray once again.
Mighty and Holy God, thank you. Thank you that you do lift us up and you walk beside us, and Lord you give us an opportunity to be your people. I ask that by your Spirit you would help us to hear what your Spirit has for us this day and that we might live up to that calling. We ask it in your name. Amen.
Well, today we are going to start by diving in deep right out of the gate. So what we are going to do is I am going to give you a couple different examples and what I want you to do is ask yourself as you listen to these examples, is this evangelism? Would you classify them as evangelism? Alright?
The first once comes from New York City. About fifteen years ago a group of Christ’s followers volunteered to serve at an AIDS hospice center that was the home for primarily homosexual men. The administrators, as you might have guessed, were a little concerned about having church volunteers come into the organization. So they made their expectations very clear. They said, “You can come. You can serve, but no proselytizing.” Well now, today, those volunteers still serve food there; however, they also do something that you wouldn’t have imagined fifteen years ago. They have a worship service. It started as a result of the request of the hospice residents as they developed deeper and deeper friendships with those who came and served them and offered a loving presence. So that now the name of Christ is heard in an organization that was primarily secular before. That’s the first example.
The second example is a little closer to home. It comes from the Minneapolis school system. Members of Sanctuary Covenant Church in our community are running a tutoring program to help students get ready for the next grade level at school. Also, what they have done is that they started an after school art program called the Hip Hop Academy—it’s in North Minneapolis. They help students enjoy the hip-hop culture apart from its association with gangs and with drugs. The results that they have seen are that teachers and families have joined this church. When you talk to the pastor, the pastor says, “It is not because we have come and said ‘You need to accept Jesus,’ rather,” he said, “we have come in and we brought them the love of Christ.” And he continues, he says, “What we do when we go in to tutor is we go in—we go in prayed up—and then we ask the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of the people and we trust the Holy Spirit for the results. So what happens is many times people will say, ‘How do I get to your church on Sunday?’ or ‘Can you tell me more about God?’”
Is this evangelism? I would argue that it is. I think our Scripture today will reinforce that but I invite you to think about that, talk about that as you head home after the service, maybe over lunch, continue that discussion to process that; because our Scripture today is about harvesting—why we should do it; who should do it; how we should do it. As we work through this passage, I think what we will find is what Jesus is saying to his disciples, and now to us, applies to this area of evangelism that we have been talking about.
So with that, I want you to start by looking at our Scripture, and Jesus says right out of the gate that his food is harvesting. In other words, harvesting is how he feeds himself. The disciples, in the verses right before this, have kind of walked up to Jesus—Jesus is with the women at the well in John Chapter 4—and as they walk up, the disciples think that Jesus is thirsty. But Jesus has another agenda; rather his is talking to this woman about her faith and about how she is going to go back to her town and share it with the village where she lives. See Jesus is taking this opportunity to help the disciples see the things that are really important; namely, doing the will of the Father. That is bringing in the harvest. Jesus’ priority was eternal, was spiritual; it wasn’t material.
God’s harvesting is all about storing up treasures in heaven; that is what Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew. So Jesus’ goal as he walks through his life was to increase God’s influence or, if you will, God’s reign in the world. That is what he wants to do. So, think about this, after this conversation with the woman at the well, the woman goes back to her town, tells the community about the things that she has heard from Jesus, and the whole town has come out to see Jesus. Do you think God’s influence increased in that town? Yeah! Yeah! There were people who were putting their faith in Christ as a result of that. So Jesus is telling his disciples the food that truly satisfies (just like maybe after you have had a really good meal and you sit back and you go, “Man, that was good.”), Jesus says that kind of satisfaction comes from doing God’s will, doing the work of the kingdom—harvesting. As you do that you will glorify God and you will satisfy your soul in the midst of doing all that.
How many times have you just been able to take a moment and stop, maybe after you have done something that has moved the kingdom of God forward in some way, and you can rest in the satisfaction that you have pleased God, that you have been faithful to what you have been about? It is a wonderful feeling. Maybe it is after you have had a conversation with someone, maybe you have helped them in some way or blessed them and you felt God’s satisfaction just kind of wash over you like a wave.
Sometimes after worship after someone maybe has said that they have been blessed by what I have said in my message—or I felt like, you know God I was faithful to what you wanted me to say, what you laid on my heart I brought to the people of Faith in a message, those times when I get in my car and I am driving home and I am just reflecting on that—I will just kind of pause in that satisfaction and I will rest in thanking God in that gratitude. For those of you who are Stephen Ministers, you will learn all about that in this coming year. This will be one of those things that you will put in your gratitude journal. You will learn about that tomorrow when you come to your soup supper.
We want that kind of satisfaction and Jesus says it is from doing the work of the kingdom. When we do the will of the Father, when we are about the work of the harvest, Jesus tells us in John 8:29 that it pleases the Father. If that was true for Jesus and it was true for his disciples, then guess what? It is also true for his Church, for you and me, as well. That is the call for us as the Church, to be bringing in the harvest, to be spreading the gospel, to be sharing our faith, to be witnessing. It is all the same thing. Pick the term that you like; that is our call. That is our call as the Church and that is why, as I said last week, “the Church is the only hope for the world.” It is the only hope for the world. When evil raises its head in all of its many different forms, and we know lots of them, more often than not it is the Church that steps in to try to rectify that.
The vast majority of the work that was done after Hurricane Katrina on people’s personal homes was done by church members from around the country. That is how a lot of the people down south got their houses rebuilt, because of people from churches, like ours. That is the Church at its best. When there is a famine around the world, who steps in? It is the Church. It is the Church. We demonstrated that a couple weeks ago when we took that offering for Somalia. You demonstrated that you are the Church when you gave faithfully and over and above to make a difference in that famine. That is the Church at its best. Now I say, “Praise God for you guys!” But we also know the other side of that coin. I think we all know either because we have heard it, or maybe because we instinctively just kind of know it, that the Church is struggling right now. The Church of Jesus Christ is struggling to increase God’s influence in the world. In fact, I was just talking with Al Wiig about that this morning. I think that is particularly true in the western world. When you look at the mainline denominations—the folks like the Lutherans and like the Methodists and like the Catholics and like the Episcopalians and the Baptists and even us Presbyterians—they are not growing. As denominations they are not growing. Do you know the last year that our denomination posted growth as a denomination? 1968! 1968. We have always pointed, well it is those non denominational churches that are really making the impact, that are doing the work. But you know what they are finding? They are finding that those churches are beginning to level off in their growth patterns, as well.
So I don’t think it is too much to say that the Church of Jesus Christ is ill. I think we can even say it is deathly ill. But deathly ill does not mean it is going to die. We need to understand that. The Church, as it reclaims its call to be about the work of harvesting, will find life again. I guarantee that. We will find life again because it is God’s will. We will be doing God’s will and God will bring life back to his Church. So if the Church is on life support, if you want to think of it in those kind of terms, what do we need to do? What do we need to do then? Well, I think that we need to be a place that starts thinking and talking about how to do church differently than what the majority of us has done church in the past.
The things that I learned when I was in graduate school, the things that worked twenty years ago that kind of worked ten years ago, don’t work anymore. They don’t work anymore.
Simply offering a different set of classes or new programs or better worship, while all those things are good and those things are important, they don’t have the same kind of effect as they once had. Expecting people to come to us is the wrong mindset. We have to get beyond our comfort zone and go to them. It is not about some new fancy way to argue somebody into the kingdom. That is not what we are talking about here, folks. We are talking about being ourselves. We are talking about letting Christ be shown through us as we go through our daily lives, as we interact in the lives that we are already living. People want to know about your faith after they have seen your faith, not the other way around. They want to see what your faith looks like. To use Pat’s analogy, they want to sniff our faith. The only way they can do that is for us to get close to them because they are not going to get close to us on their own.
I think that leads us to our second point from our text and that is that both the sower and the reaper rejoice as they gather their fruit, as they gather in the harvest. Yes, we have a duty to be about doing the will of the Father, but we have to change our mindset and think of it not as duty. We have to think beyond duty. We have to think of it as privilege. We have to think about the fact that God is welcoming us to join him in his business. That is a mighty thing. That is a joyous thing. As followers of Christ we have the privilege of representing Christ to the world. We as followers of Christ have been empowered to join God in the eternal work of bringing in his harvest. The reality is that, yes, that is a high calling but it is not something that every one of us has to carry the whole thing. Rather we just have to carry our part of it because the reality is that some of us are sowers and some of us are reapers. We just need to play our part in this cosmic harvest. That is all it is.
I heard a saying this week that I think is right on the money. It is the statement: How are you being Christ’s Church today? Isn’t that wonderful! How are you being Christ’s Church today? As you drop your children off at school, how are you being Christ’s Church today? As you sit down for your Monday morning sales meeting, how are you being Christ’s Church right there? As you meet for coffee with the girls, or maybe at lunch with a group of coworkers, how are you being Christ’s Church with them? How are you being Christ’s Church today? It is a wonderful thing to take on and begin to think about, because harvest time in the ancient world was a time of celebration. It was a time for joy. It was a chance for them to reap the fruit of their labor as they brought in the things that were provided by the land. The same goes for you and me. The joy of seeing someone cross that line of faith for the very first time is an amazing experience. And I hope that every one of you have that opportunity at some point in your life—to be with someone when they make that decision and say “Christ is my Savior. He’s my Lord. He saved my life.”
Because the reality is that some of us are sowers and some of us are reapers and the reality is that it is hard either way. Sowing is hard. If you are a sower, sowing is hard work, because as you throw those seeds out you never really get to see the benefits of what comes out of those seeds. But on the other hand, reaping is hard, as well. Reaping is hard because you can’t make that decision for those folks. You know the kind of eternal impact it will make in their lives, the way they will be changed, and you can’t make that decision for them. They have to do it themselves. So the reality is that both the sowers and the reapers have the joy of seeing what God is doing in their midst, seeing that harvest brought in. Maybe that’s why Scripture says when anyone comes to faith there is a party in heaven. The angels throw a party when someone comes to faith. Isn’t that great? It is a wonderful image.
That’s what we want to be thinking about as a church. It is Celebration Sunday today. There is a phrase on my wall out by my desk that I heard and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. I put it on my wall and it says: What you celebrate, you become. What you celebrate, you become. So today we want to be celebrating the diversity of the ministries here at Faith. So you got a bookmark when you walked in. I want to invite you after the service to walk through our information area and our atrium area—it’s just those two areas—and there will be some treats back in the atrium area—but what I want you to do is I want you to walk through and I want you to look at the variety of ministries that are available here at Faith. They are also listed on the back here, too. What I want you to do is go to an area that you don’t have much information, you don’t know much about. So if you have children in the children’s ministry, I don’t want you to go to children’s ministry. I would rather have you go to some other area that you don’t know anything about, maybe go to Stephen Ministry; maybe go checkout what is happening in our Beyond Us, our missions area; or maybe you want to go find out the things that Steve is working on in the music ministries. Or, maybe your children are long gone and you have no idea of what happens on Wednesday night here with our children, with our students. I want you to go see Joanna and Kevin and Leah and just talk to them. We are not going to ask you to sign up for anything today. This is not about signing up; this is not about recruiting. It is about just learning what we offer. Why do we do that? Because when you walk out and you make connections with your community, we want you to be able to know and look for those connections where you can connect people back to Faith. That’s what we want to be looking at.
Over the next 18 months that is one of our goals—we talked about it last week— was that we would have more people touch the things of Faith. They will touch the things of Faith as we invite them into those things of Faith. We want Faith to be a place where you can invite your friends to come. Imagine with me what might happen. What might happen if we actually had to have two “Evening in Decembers” because this place was over flowing, we couldn’t get everybody in? Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Or how about on the 21st of October we have so many families that we fill Faith Hall on our free family movie night. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?
That’s what we want to be about. That’s what today is about. I know some of you are saying, “Whoa, Buck, whoa. I am not the inviter type. I’m not the inviter type. I can’t go there.” And for you I want to say, you know what, hold on. Hold on to your questions because we are going to talk about those when I get back on the 9th of October as we start “Just Walk Across the Room.” We are going to address some of those things that I know all of us have concerns about, because I think we can do this, folks. I think we can do this. I think we can make Faith the place that we are all proud of, not because we are perfect, because Lord knows there is no perfect church. O.K. I will burst your bubble right now. There is no perfect church. But we can be proud because we are being faithful to the will of God to be the church in the world, for the world doesn’t think it needs the Church. We get the opportunity to help them see it differently.
So let’s go and let’s celebrate what God is doing in our midst as we celebrate today at Celebration Sunday.
Would you pray with me, please?
God thank you. Thank you that you are doing a great work in our midst. Lord we ask that you would help us, help us see those connections. Lord, help us to trust the Holy Spirit; to trust the Holy Spirit that you will work in us as we seek to be faithful to you. That is our desire, Lord. So Lord may this be a time of learning, a time of joy, a time of great conversations that take place right after this service. We ask that because you are Lord over all and you are Lord over Faith Church. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.