Does God Accept Everyone?

  Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Back in January of 1991 I was mobilized for the first desert war. Most of you know I’m a chaplain in the Army Reserve.  As luck would have it I was in a hospital unit and was mobilized to Walter Reed Army Hospital.  We were expecting many, many casualties which didn’t happen.  We were very happy about that.  I was there for several months.  I was assigned to minister on some of the floors and some of the patients there.  I talked with many of the active duty chaplains.  One I ran into had a very difficult assignment.  His assignment was on the AIDS floor.  I talked with him about this.  He had a pastor’s heart.  He wanted to do well.  He wanted to help these people but it was a hard place to minister because many of them were going to die.  It was a long term thing for them.  I remember talking with him and in our conversation he said, “You know in order to minister to these people you have to have to agree with their lifestyle.”  By their lifestyle he meant the gay lifestyle.  There were some people who had the disease because of transfusions but many of them were gay.  I remember thinking, “Chaplain, you have put us all in a bind.  If you logically take this through then you have to accept everyone’s behavior.  You really can’t minister to any one, really.”  But I know why he did it.  I know why he thought this.  One reason was, he did have a pastor’s heart.  He had the best of intentions.  He was in a hard spot trying to help people who had very little hope.  The other piece was that all human beings, almost everyone, we all tend to judge someone’s love of us by how much the other person cooperates with our agenda and our perception of ourselves.  So that if somebody doesn’t accept us the way we are we don’t think they love us. And that’s where he was.  He had bought into that. 

Today I’m starting a series of sermons on “the Purposes of the Church” as they are outlined in your banners in the back of the room, the five purposes of the church.  Being the season that it is, it is stewardship season.  We are going to do these purposes in the context of stewardship.  I realize when we hear the word stewardship everybody immediately thinks money.  It is that time of year.  I will say to you unashamedly that we will be asking you for money in the next few weeks.  We’ll be asking for your pledge of money and time.  One of the criticisms of the church is that is all we do, we ask for money.  I will defend that we really don’t do that much here. Maybe we should do it more.  It is that time of year.  I want you to begin thinking about that.  What would be your commitment here again for the coming year.  Stewardship is a bigger deal than just money.  The biblical view of stewardship refers to a person, a hired person or even a slave, who is given charge of someone else’s property.  So a steward was one who managed someone else’s property. The Bible basically says that even your whole life is owned by God and God will ask you in the end how you managed your gift of life and your gift of money and your gift of everything.  Stewardship also refers to the idea that we are responsible for many things including the message of God, the Gospel.  We are responsible for how we say the message.  That’s what I want to talk to you about today. 

I’ve chosen a scripture which most of you are familiar with. It is the scripture telling the story of a person we refer to as the rich, young ruler, basically, a young man who happens to have a lot of money.  He comes to Jesus asking him a very important question, “How do I have eternal life?”  I’m sure you’ve heard this story read before but hear it again.  This time listen to the question.  Listen to how Jesus answers the question. But also how Jesus feels about the young man and what happens afterwards. 

17As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" 18And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. 19"You know the commandments, 'DO NOT MURDER, DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, DO NOT STEAL, DO NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS, Do not defraud, HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER.'" 20And he said to Him, "Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up." 21Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, "One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." 22When he heard this he was shocked and went away grieving for he had many possessions.

This is the reading of God’s word.

Thanks be to God

Would you pray with me

Father, as always, we come to you and plead for Your Spirit to come upon us and our hearts and minds as we may hear what you want us to hear.  Teach us Lord.  May we walk from here glorifying Your name lifting You up having been touched and ministered to and yet challenged as well to Your Will.  We give this time to You, Lord and lift it up to You.  We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. 

Preachers are a little bit like cooks.  I’m sure most of you have seen these cooking shows.  Like Emeril when he starts cooking.  He’s not really just concerned about cooking the food, he’s concerned about presentation.  He’s concerned about whether it tastes good, whether its savory, whether its smells good.  He is always interacting with his audience.  They always go “Ooooh.  Ahhhh. Mmmmm.” and all the things that go with that.  I admit that cooking shows aren’t my cup of tea but my wife likes them.  I have noticed that cooks are mostly about presentation.  They want people to like what they are going to cook and rightly so.  Pastors are like that, preachers are like that.  I spend a great deal of time not just outlining a message for you but I hang things on that message like stories and illustrations and things so that it will become savory to you so that you will hear it.  On the other hand, theologians are kind of like chemists.  A chemist is one who wants to make sure that everything is measured out perfectly and put together perfectly so one, he doesn’t blow himself up when he puts it together.  The other is if he’s making a medicine or whatever he’s making it has to be perfect.  Theologians are like that because when they begin to do their theology they are very concerned about precise language.  They are very concerned about how it is presented in a book.  It doesn’t matter if it’s readable or not, believe me some of it isn’t, but it has to be right.  Sometimes I have had theologians, the chemists, who have written me or emailed me and said to the pastor who isn’t as precise, “You’ve got it wrong!” most of the times they are right.  I remember even in seminary I had a professor named John Leef who a fairly well known Presbyterian.  He had a gruff sounding voice, “Mr. Carlson, you’re a good student but you need to be more precise in how you say things.”  I felt a little complimented by his saying I was a pretty good student but he was right. 

I have come under some conviction in the last few months.  Its partly me, but partly just noticing how we have actually softened or watered down the message of the Church, the Gospel.  Particularly, I’ve become concerned with some of the words we use.  One is acceptance.  We’ve used the word.  It has almost become a truism about acceptance.  People say, “Well, God accepts everybody, doesn’t he? Jesus accepts everybody, doesn’t he?”  Kind of accepting everybody as they are, but is that true? Now I want to say right up front that acceptance is a good word and the synonyms that go with it like accommodation or tolerance.  Those are good words especially in a society like ours.  We live in a world, a nation, that is very diverse and becoming more diverse all the time.  Used to be we were mostly white, Europeans.  Three hundred million people and we are close to not being the majority any more.  There are lots of different cultures all around us even in Minnesota.  It surprises me to see people from the southern hemisphere near the equator here in Minnesota.  They have got to be freezing.  I know all about accommodation.  I’m in the Army.  My job in the Army I don’t have to compromise what I believe at all but part of the job of a chaplain is to accommodate religious practices.  In other words, if a Muslim comes in, it’s my job to help them make sure they are able to worship the way they need to worship.  We actually, do have Muslim chaplains now as of the last five or ten years.  Or Hindu or whatever it happens to be.  I am not allowed to proselyte (evangelize) in the Army.  I can witness if somebody asks and I do.  That is the fun part about it.  But I am to accommodate in a secular environment.  That is what we need to do to live with one another. In some sense live and let live.  But what has happened is that attitude which is good in the secular realm has infiltrated the Church to some degree and that we have substituted words like acceptance and tolerance and accommodation to being synonyms for the Gospel.  It isn’t true. 

I want to give you an example.  The story we just read.  I believe this story is repeated again and again and again one way or another throughout the Bible.  A rich man, a young man, comes to Jesus with the most important of questions, “How do I have eternal life?”  Jesus being who Jesus is does a couple of things.  We tend to think of Jesus as being kind of nice. Just read it closely, “Why do you call me ‘good’?  You know the commandments.”  There’s a little tone there, a little attitude.  So he rattles off some of the commandments as examples and the guy says, “Wow, I must be in. All these things I’ve kept as a boy.”  Here is where it gets powerful.  Jesus looks at this man and loves him.  He loves him but he doesn’t accept him the way he is.  He loves him!  The first thing I want to say to you it is part of our job just to love, to love people.  You can love people, you can eat with them, you can be friends with them, and you can do all kinds of things with them but not necessarily accept who they are.  In fact, it is not our job to accept people who they are because God’s job, God’s goal is to not simply accept people where they are. He’s out for change.  He’s out for something totally different than that.  If we just talk about it as being acceptance we have lost who we are as the Church. 

Now, the story goes on.  Jesus loves him and says, “You lack one thing.  Go sell everything you have and then give it to the poor and come follow me.”  He isn’t saying to us that we should sell everything we have but the issue is still the same for everyone.  It’s really kind of a first commandment issue.  You shall have no other gods before me.  This man’s god was his money.  Jesus was basically saying, “If you want to have eternal life you need to turn your life over to me for I am the Lord.  I am your God.  You need to be what you already are that is my child, the one who you actually belong to.”  Jesus always asks for a direction.  You will see that in the Bible over and over and over again.  It really is not arguable.  Over and over and over again make a choice left right, right left or forwards backwards.  I tend to think of salvation as basically walking in one direction toward the darkness and then turning around. So in some ways I’ve changed, I’m going a different direction but I’m still a sinner, still needing to grow and a lot of different things going on.  God is out to change us and that is the message of the Gospel. 

On one level you can say that Jesus was not welcoming.  That’s the word I hear a lot especially in some of the debates we are having now.  You get accused of that.  We’re not being welcoming because we aren’t accepting a person as they are.  I feel that I’m between a rock and a hard place.  I want to be welcoming.  We just spent thousands of dollars on a Welcome Center.  By the way, for those who are worried about it, it didn’t come out of the budget.  It was given by special gifts.  It’s beautiful. It’s lovely.  We have gotten rid of some things that I considered unwelcoming.  Like a wall taking up all that space.  I’m all for welcoming.  I’m actually all for accommodation and all for acceptance and all those things too, in the right context.  But Jesus wasn’t welcoming.  In fact, you could say he actually offended this young man.  We have to say that some of the stuff we talk about is highly offensive to the world.  That symbol behind us, the cross, is very offensive.  It was in Paul’s day.  Paul talks about that.  The foolishness of God is the wisdom of God.  The foolishness of what we preach, Christ crucified. It seems sophisticated to talk about acceptance and accommodation sometimes but we talk about the cross.  The cross is grace.  It is an invitation to be changed.  It’s an invitation to know the omnipotent God of the universe.  It’s an invitation to be saved.  All the old words are pretty good here:  righteousness, holiness, forgiveness.  We have to remember those words.  We’ve substituted them.  I’ve become convicted that in my preaching sometimes I have wanted to make it palatable.  Its good to be welcoming but the cross is offensive.  The Muslims are actually offended by the cross because they believe that Jesus was a prophet and in their theology, God would never allow one of his own prophets to actually be killed in this way so they are offended by it.  They deny that Jesus died on the cross.  They think we’re crazy that way.  Even to say, “You need forgiveness,” can be offensive because why?  Because we said there is something wrong with you.  You need forgiveness.  There’s not much we can do about this folks in that sense.  We don’t go out of our way to offend people.  I don’t do that.  But we can’t give up the message which can offend. 

God is after something much deeper and bigger than just acceptance of the way people are.  It may start with that.  But God is out to change us.  I know that in this particular issue, the gay issue, people say, “they can’t be changed.”  I also know that sexuality is an exceptionally powerful thing, for all of us. It’s exceptionally powerful and it’s hard.  There are thousands of people who have been changed through the power of God, who have been changed through the power of community.  They are minority, I admit that.  There are hundreds of people, thousands of people.  I find it troubling that we would deny God’s goal and power.  I know you may disagree with me and that’s just fine.  I think we can love each other and talk with one another.  I know some of you have family members and I know that that makes it especially hard.  I know that, I do know that.  It’s not my intent to stand up here and belittle you or offend you but it is my task as the preacher called by God to defend the Gospel and to propagate the Gospel.  T

The Gospel is about belief in Jesus, the invitation.  “God so loved the world that he gave His one and only son.”  Often people stop there.  What’s the rest of it? “That who so ever should believe should not parish.”  When John talks about belief, it’s a bigger deal than just intellectual ascent.  It is basically turning your life over to Jesus, saying, “You are Lord.” Right before the rich, young ruler story is the famous and wonderful story of Jesus being surrounded by children and the disciples come up and say, “All you children leave him alone.  He’s too busy for you.”  And Jesus says, “Let the children come to me.”  Wonderful.  But right after that what does he say?  He says, “Unless you all become like children, you will not see my kingdom.”  There is a requirement for repentance, another very offensive word.  There is a requirement for belief.  There is a requirement for turning it over to receive the invitation.  We must not forget that. 

In the midst of it we need to be as loving and kind and forthright with people.  Because Jesus proved that he could love people but not necessarily accept them the way they were.  He didn’t do that with anyone.  He did that with no one.  He was always, “Go and sin no more.”  It is our responsibility as a church to be stewards of the message.  In the context of where we live it is always complicated and always messy, where you happen to be in your particular time.  It is messy.  It’s hard to translate the Gospel into modern times.  It’s hard to present. We have a very hard time going out and saying, “Here’s Jesus. And oh by the way you need to repent.”  Talk about getting offended. But that’s where we are.  What does that mean to your life?   It just means that as you go out you really do have a message of joy and wonder that the omnipotent, holy God of the universe is saying, “Come, I love you, Come.”  That really is our job.  Our job is to just simply say, “come” to everyone because this place and this gospel is about healing and love and forgiveness and salvation and all the things that go with this.  We are a community of people who have been forgiven.  It can be easily said that if you go out and say, “I’m forgiven would you like forgiveness?”  People might say, “Oh, you think you’re better than me.”  Well no, we’re forgiven and we’re saying you can be forgiven too.  We are all in the same boat.  All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  There is none righteous, no not one, not one!  We come to people with open hands and say, “All I can tell you is what God has done for me.  One sinner, forgiven sinner going to another sinner and saying, “Come. Come. Come.” 

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen