"A redemptively involved church"

Belmont UMC— January 16, 2011
Jerome Del Pino, preaching

Audio - MP3

“A REDEMPTIVELY INVOLVED CHURCH”

Text: “The very next day John saw Jesus coming toward him
and yelled out, “Here he is, God’s Passover Lamb!  He forgives
the sins of the world!  This is the man I’ve been talking about, the
One who comes after me but is really ahead of me.’  I knew
nothing about who he was – only this: that my task has been to
get Israel ready to recognize him as the God-Revealer.  That is
why I came here baptizing with water, giving you a good bath
and scrubbing sins from your life so you can get a frest start with
God.”
John clinched his witness with this: “I watched the Spirit,
like a dove flying down out of the sky, making himself at home
in him.  I repeat.  I know nothing about him except this: The One
who authorized me to baptize with water told me, ‘The One on
whom you see the Spirit come down and stay, this One will
baptize with the Holy Spirit.’  That’s exactly what I saw happen,
and I’m telling you, there’s no question about it: This is the Son
of God.”  St. John 1:29-34 (The Message by Eugene Peterson)


Some time ago, Harper’s magazine carried an article that told the “Trials of
a Word-Watcher”.  The author, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., confesses that he is a fetishist about words:  he suffers when he hears or reads affronts to grammar; he wants to administer correctives when he catches mistakes in what he hears and reads, and is usually in trouble because of his purism.  But he explains that even a purist has his vindications – as when the satellite, “Mariner I,” aimed at Mars, went off course into oblivion because a single hyphen was inadvertently left out of the instructions fed into its guidance system.  That mistake cost the nation two billion dollars.
In our Gospel lesson this morning, we learn how the church goes tragically off course unless its members have the right words and accent marks to know and see Jesus.  The Apostle, John has gone to great lengths to describe the multiple epiphanies experienced by John the Baptist, that ultimately lead to Andrew’s telling his brother, Simon Peter, “We’ve found the Messiah!”  
Some twelve times in fourteen verses, John uses verbs like “look,” “see,” and “reveal” in his portrayal of the baptism of Jesus and the selection of Jesus’ first followers.  I find it intriguing how unrelenting the Gospel writer is in making this part of his narrative so thoroughly visual.  Language – the spoken word is very important for John.  Where the writer of Genesis presents God as “speaking the creation into existence,” John, in his Gospel, “presents God as speaking salvation into existence.”   The fallenness or gone-wrongness of all things created needs fixing and, for John’s Gospel, it is accomplished by speaking salvation into being in the person of Jesus.  This is why it is so important for John, the Gospel writer, that John the Baptist’s introduction of Jesus is with words of power and accents of clarity and certainty.   Nothing less than the salvation of the world – the entire cosmos – is at stake!
Even though the actual baptism of Jesus takes place in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it is in John’s Gospel that what is really important is reported.  What is important is that John saw the Spirit descend on Jesus and remain with him.  What is important is John, the Baptist’s, testimony – his witnessing – that Jesus is the Son of God – the light of the world – a theme that runs throughout the Gospel.  You will remember that John began his Gospel with this theme:
He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being
through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the
light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness did not overcome it.  (John 1:1-5)
This image of Jesus as the light of the world permeates the first chapter of John’s Gospel.  It’s a wake-up call – a call to attention – that all of life has changed because Jesus, the anointed of God, is the light of the world.
And so, John, the Baptist, claims this change in all of life that Jesus brings by pointing at Jesus and declaring: “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  “Here he is, God’s Passover Lamb,” the One who has it right!  Here he is, the One who, in addition to dying a terrible death for the atonement of sins, yours and mine – our personal sins and individual faults – is sent by God to address the brokenness at the heart of the cosmos itself.  Hence, the Gospel writer’s use of the singular: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  Unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, John makes clear that Jesus’ mission is not only as a personal Savior – yours and mine – but his mission is to redeem the world.  He comes not only “to give his life as a ransom for many,” making right all that has gone so terribly wrong so that love, not fear, would define God’s relationship with you and me.   His mission is to take back the cosmos, to expose and defeat the very power of sin itself.  
John is not playing for small stakes as he makes this claim about Jesus.  As one commentator has observed, within the full meaning of these words, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” are all of the sentences of all the creeds of the church.   John’s Gospel sets the stage for Jesus’ ministry as personal Savior and the Savior of the world.  To be sure, John the Baptist’s followers heard enough to believe that their personal salvation was promised in their taking up with Jesus.  But the charter for evangelism that caused the two disciples to heed his plea for them to “come and see” and then Andrew’s declaration to his brother, Simon Peter, that “we have found the Messiah” is made real by their yearning to know what Jesus is doing in and for the world.  
And so they responded, “Well, Rabbi, where are you staying?” which, at one level means, “Where do you live?” Or, in the language of the street, “Where’s your crib, man?”  But, in light of God’s purposes for Jesus, the question is: “Where are you living in the world?”  We’d like to know about that before we sign on to what you are up to.  To which Jesus responded, “Come and see.”
Tomorrow, we will remember the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  And we will be reminded that we can’t serve Jesus at a distance.  It’s important that we are reminded of this as individuals, but given the challenges of the current cultural, social, political, economic and spiritual crises we face in our nation and around the world, it is an imperative for the church to be reminded that it can’t serve Jesus at a distance.  The church must give account of its stewardship of God’s message of salvation for the whole created order.  And thus there can be no division between personal and social holiness, between charity for a few and justice for all.
It is this challenge that Dr. King posed to the church, and especially its clergy, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” at a time when injustice and war ran rampant in our nation and the world.  As much as some believed then and yet endeavor to represent now – or should I say reduce – his work to that of  mere a civil rights leader or starry-eyed social reformer, the truth is that he said what he said and did what he did as a baptized Christian, ordained Baptist pastor, and a citizen of this nation.  He was first and foremost a theologian and a leader of the church of Jesus Christ, not a social scientist or community developer, as laudable as these vocations might be.  His vision of a nation committed to justice for all its citizens and not mere acts of charity for the poor and marginalized is born of his encountering and seeing Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and hearing and believing the risen Christ’s promises that “I will make all things new.”  And no less so is his expectation that the church be intimately involved in taking back – redeeming – the brokenness of the world – rooted in his encountering and seeing where Jesus is living in the world.  
Taylor Branch, in his epic chronicle of the struggle for civil rights, Parting the Waters, observes that “the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ did not spring quickly to acclaim, [but] remained essentially a private communication for some time. . .”  [Indeed,] not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month. . . In hindsight,” Taylor continues, “it appeared that King had rescued the beleaguered Birmingham movement with his pen, but the reverse was true: unexpected miracles of the Birmingham movement later transformed King’s letter from a silent cry of desperate hope to a famous pronouncement of moral
triumph.”
Why a moral triumph, you might ask?  Because, in spite of having been chided by church leaders, not least the senior bishop of the Episcopal church in the United States, on the grounds that protest – even non-violent – “lacked Christian respectability,”  Dr. King persisted in claiming that the church had a divine obligation – indeed mandate – to be redemptively involved in the struggle for racial equality, justice and peace.  He presumed that anyone who claimed to follow the nonviolent Jesus would seek the fullness of God’s reign, promote its consistent ethic of nonviolence, and advocate for the disenfranchised.
But King learned the hard way, as I fear we are learning in our present struggles as a nation, that church leaders rarely join – much less lead – the struggle.  Sadly, too often, they stand in the way.  His lament nearly a half century ago is yet prescient for us.  
The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an
uncertain sound.  It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo.  
Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power
structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent
and often vocal sanction of things as they are.  But the judgment of
God is upon the church as never before.  If the church does not
recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its
authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an
irrelevant social club with no meaning in the twentieth century.
More than a decade ago, in her Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, entitled “Leave No Child Behind,”  Marian Wright Edelman catalogued  the plight of  the least and most vulnerable of our society.  She noted that:
•    . . . one out of every seven Americans is poor, as is every sixth family with a child under 18.
•    Every fifth child and every fourth preschool child is poor.
•    Every third black and brown child is poor.
•    Every second black preschooler is poor.
•    Two out of every three preschoolers of any background are poor if they live in a female-headed family, in the richest nation on earth.
•    There are more poor children in America today – 14.3 million – than in any year since 1965, despite the net 88 percent growth in our GNP during the same period.
•    Contrary to popular myth, the majority of them are not black and are not on welfare.  They live in working families and outside inner cities, in small-town rural and suburban America.
I deliberately did not report fresh data because I want us to ponder for a moment what are the challenges of the present, not only for the body politic, but for the church, to address this stark evidence of the spiritual, as well as economic, malaise that grips us as nation.  
If he were with us this morning, I am strongly persuaded that Dr. King would ask “Where is our outrage?”  For, surely not least among the marks of the church’s being redemptively involved in God’s plan of salvation of the world is giving moral leadership to prevent crisis or to solve one when it occurs.  To be sure, redemptive involvement requires inviting women, men, youth and children to salvation in Christ.  But the church must also have a sense of right which stirs its members to oppose evil in any form, whether systemic or unintended.   Redemptive involvement will expose distorted moral judgments, and with confident witness participate in shaping a proper public life, discourse, and opinion.  Redemptive involvement of the church urgently requires our return to the public square, which we have abdicated, prepared to engage the powers and principalities of this world in the name of a Crucified, and yet Risen Lord who “breaks the power of cancelled sin.”  And, as Dr. King has reminded us, such involvement does not allow the church to make the “strange distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”    
To serve the present age, the church cannot settle for being “a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading [human beings] to higher levels of justice.”   Rather, the church is a community with a calling to wider horizons, to long outlooks, to steady hopes, to a compelling commitment to higher ground, to a vision of a new Heaven and a new earth still unfolding and which, in Jesus Christ, it has seen in part and for which it is willing to give up its life.
That kind of church is illustrated by a story with which I will close that comes out of South Africa.  Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa shared it in this way:
In my church at home, on our altar we have a candle which is not
unusual, except that this candle is surrounded by barbed wire.  You
would call it the amnesty candle, and that candle will stay on the altar
until the people of South Africa are free.  Every Sunday, we pause in
the service to speak about some area of pain or hurt or brokenness or
loss or violence or hate in our society around us.  There have been
some very painful moments around that candle;  there have been
moments in our congregation, which is about 60% Black and 40%
White, where maybe in the congregation there’s been a Black member
who’s come and said, ‘My brother was shot by the security forces in
Soweto last night.’

In the same congregation, there will be parents who will ask for
prayers for their White youngsters who have been called up by the
military and are being used in those townships.  When you get a
congregation where that kind of thing is happening, you can’t hide it;
you’ve got to bring it out into the worship and allow God to speak to
it and touch it.  So, we think of these things and then we light the
candle, and the small flame begins to burn in the midst of those cruel
barbs.  We’ve been doing that for a long time, because we believe
like Samuel Ryan, who said, ‘A candle is a protest at midnight.’  It
says to the darkness, ‘I beg to differ.’  The church is called to say to
the darkness of the world gone wrong and a world in rebellion against
God, ‘We beg to differ.  The barbed wire of injustice, of oppression,
of cruelty, of hate, and of division, is not the greatest reality; the
greatest reality is that small flickering flame of which the gospel
tells us. ‘The light came into the world, and the light burns on and
the darkness shall not overcome it’.
To a church seeking to fulfill its calling to share in God’s redemption of the world, to a church that begs to differ with all that would hold any of God’s children hostage, the Lord says:
It is too light a thing that
You should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may
reach to the end of the earth.
This is the good news!  That we go not on our own, but are sent with abundant gifts and concern to see that God’s will be done “in earth as it is in Heaven.”

Amen.