Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 8/24/08
Irrevocable Call
Genesis 17:1-8
Romans 11:28-36
Unbinding the Gospel by Martha Grace Reese is the fruit of a four year study of mainline denominations funded by the Lilly Endowment. Reese shares, at one point, the story of a woman who had been going through a particularly difficult transition time in her life. She spoke with friends about her struggles. She shared with them what was going on. One Sunday she decided to try a church and walked into a congregation close to her home. She was shocked to find five of her friends and co-workers sitting there in the sanctuary. In all their conversations not one of them had suggested that church might help. Even more, she had no idea that they were even Christians.
It is not hard to understand why so many of us are hesitant to talk about our faith. At one level, it is right up there with income as something that feels a bit too personal to share. At another, and perhaps even more compellingly, we don’t want to come across as pushy or judgmental. We want to respect the faith of others, which is a good thing. The issue is that that still leaves us with the struggling friend or co-worker who never hears an invitation at all.
It is one thing to respect the faith of others. It is quite another to keep to ourselves this extraordinary message of God’s presence and grace and unconditional love. That is a message, as so many of us already know, which can make all the difference in people’s lives.
I recently came across the story of a little girl who was attending a wedding for the first time. Seeing that the bride was dressed all in white, the girl asked her mother why. “Because,” her mom replied, “white is the color of happiness, and today is the happiest day of her life.” The girl nodded her head in understanding and thought about that for a while. Then she tugged at her mother’s dress and asked, “So why is the groom wearing black?”
There is a lot that happens in the church that doesn’t make much sense. It doesn’t matter whether you are six or sixty, sometimes you just have to wonder. The Gospel we proclaim is about a God who forgives. You would think, as a result, that we Christians would be the most loving and forgiving of people. As you know, however, that’s not always the case. The other day one of our members was telling me about a moment, years ago, when another member told her she didn’t belong here anymore because she supported a pastor that this other person deemed too liberal. Where in the world did that come from? That’s not the Gospel!
Again, you might think that because Jesus is so clear about not judging others and so clear in his call to love one another, that those who have the highest view of Scripture would be the very last to judge or to condemn. Hard experience has taught us otherwise. Or how about the emphasis we tend to place on various standards of behavior? The Gospel is very clear that we can never justify ourselves in the sight of God through our own efforts. We are always going to fall short. We are saved, instead by faith through grace – never, ever, by conformity to some outward standard of behavior. But to look at what the church does you’d think it was just the opposite.
Like that little girl, it is easy to get confused sometimes. A recent survey by the Barna Group revealed that only one in five people outside the church believe the church is a place where people are unconditionally loved and accepted. What in some ways is even sadder: less than half of churchgoers themselves believe their church demonstrates that kind of love.
Where are we missing it? I’m all in favor of being very careful about how we share the Gospel so that we don’t come across as narrow or judgmental. I’m not a big fan of standing on street corners or banging on the doors of strangers. Yet that doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of not sharing the Gospel at all.
Truth is not relative. What you believe does matter precisely because it is our beliefs that shape our behavior. The terrorist driven to kill others in the name of God – it doesn’t matter whether they call themselves Muslim or Jewish or Christian – that terrorist has got it wrong. The Christian Crusader of the Middle Ages, that Christian judge of the Spanish Inquisition or the participants in our own Salem witch trials; they’ve got it wrong. We know they’ve got it wrong because the God revealed in Jesus is so completely different.
God is always going to be so much bigger than this religion we call Christianity, but that doesn’t mean that Christianity doesn’t have something unique, essential, and very beautiful to share about God.
In the ninth, tenth and eleventh chapters of this epistle, Paul is trying to answer the question, “What about the Jews?” Has God abandoned them now that this new covenant has emerged in the gift of God’s Son? Paul’s answer in these three chapters is a resounding “No!” He puts it succinctly in the opening verses of our text: “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
It is precisely that call which we heard in our first lesson, “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7). God didn’t put a time limit on that covenant. The election wasn’t just for five generations or ten or twenty. The covenant, the election, God said, is “everlasting.” The good news here is that God doesn’t break his promises!
That refusal to let go is absolutely consistent with God’s nature. God didn’t send Jesus to condemn. Jesus didn’t die on that cross so that only some, a select few, might know God’s forgiveness. God’s purpose, rather, is very clear: verse 32: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”
Jesus died so that all might be forgiven (I Tim. 2:4, John 3:17). God’s intention is to be merciful to all. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that there is anything in all creation that could ultimately separate God from God’s intent. Whatever the faith, then, that people might profess, we can be absolutely sure that when they act in a hateful or mean-spirited or judgmental way, such actions are fundamentally contrary to God’s very nature. And that’s the hope that we have to offer this world – the God revealed in Jesus is a God of unconditional love for all humanity.
At another point in her book, Rees talks about a pastor who had been raised in a fundamentalist church and been ordained at 21. For eight years he faithfully served the church until his wife left him. At that point his denomination removed him from ministry even though it recognized that the divorce was not his fault. The connections to his pastor friends seemed to disintegrate. He was, in his own words, “ashamed and a wreck.” He continues:
A friend in my apartment complex was a mainline seminary student. He and his wife and their friends were so loving. They included me, prayed with me, listened to me for hours on end, and finally drew me into a part of the church I had always looked at with suspicion. Long story short, I became part of a mainline denomination… The theological freedom and the grace of this church still amaze me. But I’ll tell you, there is one thing that was really hard for me to adjust to. I couldn’t believe – I still can’t believe – how the liberal church that knows so much about God’s grace doesn’t understand the power of what it has to share. And they don’t share it!
If one key to love is our willingness to stand with each other here within the Christian community, another is in our willingness to share our faith with those outside the church – to share our faith with those around us, not in the superior, self-serving tones of the entitled; but rather in that classical construct of one beggar showing another where to find the bread. That’s what that woman with whom we began was looking for in the midst of her struggle. It is what you and I have to offer a world in desperate need of that loving, grace-filled God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Martha Grace Reese, Unbinding the Gospel, (Chalice Press, St. Louis, 2006), p. 77
David Kinnaman, Unchurched, (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 2007), p. 185