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Contrary to All Expectations Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 2, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Corinthians 9:12-23 “When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’” I come before you, Sunday after Sunday, as one whose job it is to speak of God. I am human, however, and so cannot speak of God. I can only recognize both my obligation and my inability so to speak. Thus if any hint of God’s Word happens to be heard from this pulpit, God is due the glory. In so many words, this is how Karl Barth characterized the perplexity of the ministry. To attempt this impossible task each week, I open the Bible, a book I cannot help but read through the lens of my own life. It is a lens I am constantly seeking to sharpen and critique through the lens of the church’s theological tradition and through the lens of the world beyond my limited perspective. But it must also be a lens I try to set aside, as much as possible, because I am not charged to represent myself in the pulpit: I am ordained to proclaim the gospel, to speak of God, to listen for God’s Word in scripture through the church’s faith. I am ordained to do what I am humanly unable to do. Still, I must confess that the attempt this morning has hit a bit close to home. For as I read and reread Mark’s account of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, I found myself undone by the decision Mark’s gospel places before my own understanding of ministry and before the ministry of this church. After Mark has reported in one phrase what the other gospels take a whole chapter to tell--that Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, he moves immediately to the story of Jesus’ first twenty-four hours in the public’s eye. There in the midst of the people of God, rather than alone in the wilderness, I read through the lens of my own ministry the story of Jesus’ temptation, a temptation that has haunted his church’s leaders ever since. Having called the disciples in the morning of that first day, Jesus enters the synagogue in Capernaum where he astounds the congregation with his teaching [he taught as one who had authority, not as the scribes] and he amazes them as he exorcises a demon [he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him]. Then Jesus makes a house call, healing the fever of Simon’s mother-in-law. That evening and still within the hours of his first day, his disciples bring to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. Mark tells us that the whole city gathered at his door, where Jesus responded to their every need. On the next morning, while it was still dark [a detail I think meant to let us know we are still talking about the same twenty-four hour period], Jesus goes off by himself to pray. The disciples come to him saying, “Everyone is searching for you.” This line stops me in my tracks! “Everyone is searching for you,” the disciples literally shout, I hear them shout in words that have echoed down the dark night of most preachers’ souls ever since. I hear the cry of those seeking a shepherd who would stay put and fulfill human expectations. Still I read on and hear another call, Mark’s call to the early church and so to us, to do what we have come out, in Christ’s name, to do: to speak of the God who has come to the world in Jesus Christ. It is what we must do and are unable to do, which is why, too often, the church and her ministers seek to meet simply everyone’s expectations in the church, as though in so doing, we are thereby doing God’s will. No doubt, if Jesus were the comfortable word people thought they had been waiting to hear, if he had come in direct response to human expectations, he would certainly have returned to the town of Capernaum, maybe even set up shop there, and let the people come to him. This is mostly how we understand the church’s ministry. We hang out a shingle, call a minister to tend the shop, make sure the minister hears how everyone in the congregation is searching for him or her, thereby keeping the minister busy with tending the given flock and, unless the church happens to be in the midst of a fortunate set of demographics, together we watch the church die. Make no mistake! We have, as perfectly as we know how, met the expectations of the people who come to church. We have carefully organized the church’s ministry around the lives of religious people who tend to hang around churches anyway. But we have missed what we came out to do in the first place: that is, to speak of God such that people who would never, in a million years, believe themselves to be addressed by God’s Word, hear and believe! No one did that better than Paul did. So for help, I turn to Paul’s struggles with the early church in Corinth, a church already turned in on itself and irritated with Paul. His preaching was not to their liking, his whereabouts did not meet with their expectations for his prompt, personal attention, and the gospel he explicated asked more of their lives than did the ditties of itinerate preachers always passing through town. After spending much papyrus on their internal struggles, Paul declares his freedom from their expectations in a way that few of us in ministry today dare do. He was a tentmaker, and so needed not a penny of personal support from these folks. Oh for such freedom! Though in light of his freedom from the church financially, he goes on to say that he has made himself a slave to “all” so that he might win more of them for the gospel. On first reading and in spite of Paul’s defiant tone toward the Corinthian’s insular cries, it sounds as though Paul is finally bowing to their expectations: for the sake of the gospel, I will be what you need me to be. It sounds that way until you realize he is talking not about those within the church, but about those outside her bounds: I have become all things to all people so that I might by all means save some. “Paul represents himself here as a conciliator,” notes Richard Hays, “seeking to overcome cultural and ethnic divisions in order to bring people of all sorts into the one community of faith…submitting himself in various ways to the cultural structures and limitations of the people he hopes to reach with the gospel.” Suddenly it occurs to me that when Jesus heard the disciples say, “Everyone is seeking you,” he heard it not as a human a call to settle down with those who have already been privy to the gospel. Rather, for the sake of the gospel, Jesus heard these words as God’s call to go out to a world whose search for God would never find them seeking him out. Likewise, Mark heard these words as Christ’s call to the church of his day, the church that seemingly said nothing to anyone about the resurrection—if the end of Mark’s gospel is accurate--because they were afraid. How, then, ought the church in this day, how ought the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill and her leaders hear these words, words that initially frighten us with their weight, yet words spoken to a community that, if rightly led, may be found in the years ahead doing what we were called out by God to do? What I know we must do for the sake of the gospel’s proclamation is begin to imagine what we would be and do if we were to be the church contrary to all expectations: the church not for ourselves, but for a world that would never darken our doors…the church for a world that, nevertheless, is seeking word of God’s nearness. Do you know what we have to overcome on this hill that still thinks of us as the cold, closed, stuck church on the Avenue? Do you realize how many people have come through these doors and left wiping the dust off their feet? My friends, we are running to stay even with the church this should have become thirty years ago! Unless we begin to speak and behave as a people sent out into the neighboring towns with word of a God whose lively presence, contrary to all expectations, is to be worshipped in this place, we will be left to keep each other comfortable until—with an astounding number of Presbyterian Churches in this Presbytery—we close our doors. So what if, contrary to personal expectations and needs, we actively engaged those out in the community whose minds are taken seriously every day of their lives at work and who would never expect a church could do the same in the things which pertain to God? What if we actively sought to become a patron of artists and musicians who live so close and yet so far from this church because they have come to believe the church would rather die than open its senses to God’s good gift of the imagination? What if the resources we have been given were offered freely and generously, such that the energy the church’s leadership spends figuring out how we are going to survive is turned, instead, toward serving? What if this community could be the very spark of hope to a city also too easily stuck in a past with no future and little imagination and less daring? Though finally what we have come out to do has to do not with a program we would devise, but a person we would follow. Here we are in Capernaum seeking him, and he has gone out to the neighboring town. What in the world we are doing here without him? “The call to follow,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “at once produces a new situation. To stay in the old situation makes discipleship impossible…. The first step places [Christ’s disciples] in the situation where faith is possible. If we refuse to follow and stay behind, we do not learn how to believe. We who are called must go out of our situation in which we cannot believe, into the situation in which, first and foremost, faith is possible.” By the Word that God alone can speak, Christ has called us out saying, “Everyone is seeking you,” is seeking the community that proclaims God’s nearness. Let us, therefore, go on to the neighboring towns, speaking of God as those who know we cannot and who know we must, for the sake of the world, giving God alone the glory if, contrary to all expectations, someone beyond these doors should hear! Thanks be to God! |