Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
1 Corinthians 12:4-14
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8 To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. 14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.
“Whoever dies with the most toys, wins!”
The epitaph is in jest. But as with most jokes, there is at its core, a nugget … a statement that contains a kernel of truth, or supposed truth, that makes the whole thing funny to begin with.
Can you tell me in one word what best defines success in American popular culture?
Is it “Richer”? That seems to be the most common denominator when it comes to the measure of how successful someone or something is – how much money do you (or did it) make? How big is your budget? What was your profit margin? Though that one IS prevalent in American popular culture, we can honestly say that wealth is not a uniquely American litmus test for success. Throughout the ages, wealth has been a law unto itself, giving those who have it the ability to do rather just as they pleased.
Is it “Bigger”? For a while, it seemed as though American Popular Culture took notice of the limited nature of vast natural resources the world has and decided to start building cars, for example, that would stretch, if not minimize the use of those resources. But in recent years, the culture has reared its ugly head and made it worthwhile for the auto industry to produce the Excursion and the Hummer successfully. Bigger might be the most blatant example of disregard for the Edenic entreaty to be good stewards of the world and all that is in it.
Is it “Stronger”? We are bombarded with it every week on television. ‘Fear Factor’, ‘Survivor’, and now we also have ‘Family Fear Factor’ … I’m really not sure how to say how I feel about these shows. To be honest, I’ve only watched a couple of episodes of ‘Survivor’, and that was in it’s first or second season … and have never watched a full episode of ‘Fear Factor’ … the whole concept that this is ‘reality television’ is preposterous to me. I’m sorry if you enjoy watching them, if you take them as purely escapist entertainment, then perhaps it isn’t so bad. But if that is reality, then I’m the majority stockholder of General Electric.
I’m faced with a dilemma. In the position I held at what was then Bell Atlantic, the structure of the company was very well defined, and there was an obvious hierarchy built into the corporate structure. I knew who my supervisor was, and who his or her supervisor was in turn, and who was above them and so on and so forth until I got to the chairman and CEO of the company, who made ‘the big decisions’ and made more money in a month than I will probably make in my entire life. Though I had some input in some minor things, there was a clear sense of being a part of a huge, generally faceless structure, a cog in a wheel in a machine, a tiny part of a massive company that stretched from Maine to Virginia at the time and which has since grown to be, if I’m not mistaken, the largest telecommunications company in the country. What we as 20th and 21st century citizens of the United States have come to understand as success has been … imprinted on us by the culture we live in.
There are those who would say that the United States is a Christian Nation, or if not an outright Christian nation, at least a nation that was founded on Christian Principles. I would disagree with the first notion and question somewhat the second notion.
You need to know that this is me coming off an overnight retreat in a monastery in Newport News. We may all look back on today’s message in a couple of months (hopefully not in 15 minutes) and say ‘what was I THINKING??’ But bear with me. There are some points that I’d like to go over which I’d like to unpack a little more.
The reason I would disagree with the two earlier statements is this: while we as a country have historically been able to grow faith among our people, and have had the freedom to do so, we have so intertwined that faith with the culture, that in the melding of the two, our faith culture, that culture that we should find most clearly within these walls, and which should be evidenced outside these walls, what we could call the Kingdom Culture, is not that radically different from what we find in the prevailing culture of our society. It might be slightly countercultural, but maybe not what Jesus had in mind … and maybe not what Paul had in mind either in the passage we just read. If our Kingdom culture were to be as dramatically and radically different from the prevailing culture as Jesus said it should be – and in this I mean the way he was speaking to his followers, and the crowds of people that seemingly followed him everywhere, as well as the religious leaders of the day, then the values we present to the outside world – that is, the world outside our national borders, not just the world outside this building – should be so easily distinguished from those of the NATION as a whole, that we would be considered almost a nation within a nation.
My dilemma is this: if Paul speaks of the Church as the body of Christ, as he does in this passage, how do we reconcile that to the reality that the structural model we find most often in our churches here in the States? Granted, Jerusalem Baptist Church isn’t a large church by most standards, but to the degree that it is, we find ourselves settling into functional structures found most often in the business world of the prevailing culture. Committees, departments, divisions. I’m not criticizing committees and departments as such. The structures we have in place have allowed for Jerusalem to be, to exist, to grow, and to continue to spread the good news of Jesus Christ here and across the world for over a hundred and fifty years. But there is an inherent hierarchical structure that we must be wary of. There is a … I’m not sure how else to describe other than a flow of authority that comes into play that is somehow based on our position OUTSIDE the church, and it carries into the church.
In the best of all circumstances, that is because the person carrying the authority has wielded it well in one arena and can be trusted to wield it well in the kingdom culture.
But there is a danger to that. Jesus said ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last … whoever wants to be the greatest among you must be the servant of all’, and carried that out – in humbling himself, in the words of the Philippian hymn – ‘and became obedient to the point of death – even death on the cross,’ a death that we are approaching daily as we move through the season of Lent.
The danger is that we will rely on skills ONLY rather than gifts, on the human person rather than the maker and giver and sustainer of life. It can sometimes be a fuzzy line. To distinguish where God is leading and where we would naturally want to go, since it seems so much the right thing to do.
Paul’s letter to Philemon is an entreaty to a slave holder to take back a runaway slave, Onesimus, as a brother in Christ. The implied request is to free him from his status as a slave, and work alongside him for the Kingdom. Philemon, being the slaveholder, had every right to do as he wanted to with Onesimus. The prevailing culture would have probably even allowed Philemon to put Onesimus to death. It would have been the right thing to do.
My question to you this morning is this: in which direction is the flow of authority going? Is it coming IN these doors from outside, or is it going OUT the doors from in here?
In the same vein, where is the authority in your LIFE coming from? Do you bring it in with you through the doors, or do you take it OUT with you? Let me put it another way: are you in your life being led by what happens inside or outside this building? Are the principles that govern your life Kingdom principles or prevailing culture principles?
When presented with a decision, do you ask yourself “what would Jesus do” or “what would Donald Trump do?” It’s a fairly stark contrast, and I would submit to you that the contrast is one that has not changed drastically, as much as we’d like to think it has, in the two thousand years since we had the opportunity to SEE “what Jesus would do.”
The church, the body of Christ, will always stand in opposition, in contrast to the prevailing culture.
We can be thankful that we live in a culture that engages kingdom values, and makes it sometimes easier to PRACTICE kingdom values, but let us never lose sight that in the end, the motivation for the world and the motivation for the kingdom are radically opposed to each other.
Let’s pray. (Prayer)
Invitation:
Your invitation today is to stand in that opposition, to be that contrast …
Your invitation is to live out Kingdom values in such a way as to create discord in your own life – we don’t WANT that, granted, but just as Christ did, we are called to take up OUR crosses and follow him.
(Hymn)
(Benediction)
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