Sermon

What Are You Looking For?

Doug Nave

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A smaller, but telling incident from the Gospels reinforces the point.  Luke tells us that Jesus visited the home of Mary and Martha.  You know the story.  Mary came to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.   Martha welcomed Jesus into her home, too, but Luke tells us that then she “was distracted by her many tasks.”  Eventually she went to Jesus and complained that Mary was not helping as she ought.  And Jesus issued that gentle rebuke:  “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”

So we come back to our questions.  What are you looking for?  If Mary – or others – are not serving as you think they should, what is that to you?  I wonder if many of our difficulties in the Presbyterian Church today arise because we have forgotten the experience of grace in the exercise of judgment.

There is danger here not only for those in the church who would exclude others.  Can I say it gently?  I believe there is also danger for those of us who would be excluded. 

Some of us may become so focused on our hurt and anger and sense of betrayal that our entire life of faith revolves around our claim to better treatment.  I remember being in the sanctuary of a progressive church a few years ago.  It was ringed with beautiful stained glass windows depicting scenes out of the Bible.  But next to the pulpit the congregation had removed an old window and replaced it with a modern stained glass depiction of two same-sex symbols.  Part of me was glad to see this clear affirmation of the congregation’s commitment to inclusivity – we see it so seldom, it’s wonderful when we do.  But somewhere in the back of my mind I also heard a small, worrisome voice, warning that if we’re not careful, we can allow what should be a life-changing engagement with Christ to become simply an affirmation of self.

What are we looking for?  If people mistreat us, what is that to us?  Will we take our eyes off Jesus Christ?

The biggest risk I see, in all our controversies in the Presbyterian Church, is the risk that some may lose their faith entirely.  We may lose our focus on Jesus Christ.  I work hard on these issues because when I contacted the New York City spokesperson for a gay Presbyterian group many years ago, he bitterly told me that he was no longer a Christian at all.  And sometimes I can understand that.  I look at the church, at our adversaries in the debate, and all I see is fear, denial, and rancor.  I see an inward turning, an unwillingness to consider the world as, at least, I think it really is.  I see arrogance, rather than humility, exclusion rather than embrace.  And I wonder who would want to be part of all that.

I remember getting on an elevator at General Assembly several years ago, in Columbus Ohio.  An older gentleman got on with me, and we began to chat easily.  We felt an immediate warmth toward each other because we knew that we shared a mutual commitment to Jesus Christ.  But suddenly he started to look at me differently.  He hesitated, and said “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”  I watched as his expression darkened, then froze, and he said, “You’re the fellow in that video” – the one we were circulating in favor of ordination reform.  Suddenly the air was thick with hostility.  He turned to face the door, and didn’t say another word as we went down the last eight floors.

On bad days, when I see some on the other side of our debates – people who claim to have a faith so much deeper and more substantial than mine – I wonder if Christ really does have the power to bring grace into our lives.  If this is what Christianity produces, can Christianity really be true?

You see the danger in looking to others . . . instead of to Jesus Christ.

I had my first theological experience of grace when I was about eight years old.  I was raised the son of a Presbyterian minister.  Like all good preacher’s kids, I thought my job description required me to raise a little hell in church.  One Sunday morning, while my father was in the sanctuary leading worship, I was in the Sunday School chasing a friend around the halls.  We had a wonderful indoor playground, a labyrinth of rooms separated by doors made with large glass windows.  My friend ran through a door and pushed it shut to slow me down, but I didn’t see that in time.  I charged head first through the glass.

Somehow I didn’t cut myself very badly, but folks were concerned that I might have a concussion.  My mother rushed me home and put me to bed.  That gave me a fair amount of time to lay there and get deeply concerned about how my father was likely to take to his son destroying church property in such a spectacular breach of Sunday decorum.  Finally I heard him come in the front door, then climb the long staircase up to my room.  I was filled with trepidation.

That is when my father taught me one of the great theological lessons of my life.  He came in without any of the anger I expected and deserved, and instead brought me a gift – one of those little cards they handed out in Sunday School those days, maybe four by six inches.  The lower half of it had a cross made of phosphorus, which would glow in the dark.  And the upper half had a picture of Jesus Christ.  Receiving a gift rather than well-deserved punishment taught me, in ways no words could, what grace is all about.  I actually think my father had a different lesson in mind:  The picture of Jesus on the card was taken from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”  But it didn’t matter.  I mounted that card on the wall beside my bed with a thumb tack, and it remained there for years until I left home for college. 

I still have it.  And in my mind’s eye, whenever I think of Jesus Christ, I see the picture on that little card, and remember the profound lesson of grace that it taught me.

Much has changed in those years since I charged through the glass door.  The warm church family I knew in my childhood is long gone.  Once I was surrounded by loving grandmotherly types who gave me hugs, encouraged me to excel, showered me with an extravagance of unearned love – a love that modeled what I thought the church was called to be.  Today I see little grandmotherly ladies, and I know there are at least even odds that their gentle smiles and twinkling eyes disguise a deep animosity.  Where once I had a warm feeling whenever I passed a Presbyterian church, I now make a mental calculation about how likely they are to welcome “my kind.”

The faces in the church have changed for me – all but one.  “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”  As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”  “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”  Runners who look to each other, instead of the goal, are distracted.  They risk colliding with others on the track, or may stumble and fall.  We must run the course set before us with our eyes on Jesus Christ alone.

That brings me to the last thought I’d like to share with you this evening.  When things appear most dark, when we’re most discouraged, or in doubt, when we’ve lost our way or believe the church has lost its way and taken us with it, perhaps it becomes difficult to see Jesus, or even want to look for him.  Scripture promises us that, in those times, Jesus comes looking for us.

In the twentieth chapter of John, we find the disciples in a locked room.  Their leader, Jesus, had been brutally humiliated and tortured and murdered on a cross.  He died, and the disciples’ hopes died with him.  There were tensions in the group.  You can hear them now, Bartholomew berating Philip because he had persuaded him to come hear Jesus in the first place.   “I left my family and lost my job, and now what?  What was it all for?”  “What ever deluded us into thinking there was any promise in all this to begin with?”  (How many of us have felt that way after a General Assembly?)

But they hung together, because they were really the only friends they had left.  They were now outsiders from the religious establishment, so outside in fact that they feared for their very lives.  They hid, and locked the door.  And then Jesus, the leader whom they deserted, the one who sacrificed everything for them on the cross, Jesus came looking for them.  Came looking for them in their doubts and discouragement, came looking without reproach for their easy abandonment of what had been earned so dear. 

It’s not the first time we read this kind of story.  We read earlier in John (Chapter 9) about the blind man, healed by Jesus.  The man testified before the religious leaders, rapturous in his praise of the grace he had received, and the church turned a cold shoulder.  His healing didn’t conform to the law, he didn’t have the learning the religious leaders had, his experience of grace didn’t count.  The man’s own parents refused to stand up for him, they were so intimidated by the religious establishment.  The man must have gone away despondent and doubting.  Then Scripture tells us that Jesus went looking for him, and found him.

That’s the comfort we have when things seem most dark.  That’s the very thing that makes discipleship possible, because let’s face it, we’re really not made of very stern stuff.  We become discouraged, we start to doubt, we decide that we have better things to do, and then Jesus comes looking for us.  If we’re hurting, Jesus comes to us in the Spirit with sighs too deep for words, and hugs us close as a parent comforts a hurt and crying child.  If we’re doubting, Jesus finds us and invites us to put our hand in his side, to explore his wounds and believe again.  If we’re just fed up, discouraged with the prospects for success, Jesus comes to us with the witness of his entire ministry and reminds us that a single, solitary man changed the world.

The great 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, wrote shelves of books about Christian theology.  His Dogmatics alone – unfinished when he died – totals 9,138 pages.  But when he was asked what the essence of the Gospel is, he was very clear:  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” 

Jesus asks each one of us, every day, What are you looking for?  If you’re unhappy about how others act in the church, what is that to you?  We are finally called to place our trust and hope, not in the Presbyterian Church, or its laws, or other Presbyterians, but in Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.  Jesus alone can make us disciples, and only Christ can give us community.  And when we falter, as we all do, we can rely on his comfort and assurance – the loving parent who picks us up, dusts us off, gives us a hug, and tells us to try again.  Those are the foundations of discipleship as I know them.  Thanks be to God.

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