WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE CHURCH: SHHH….
A Sermon by
Jeremiah 1
4Now
the word of the LORD came to me saying,
5 “Before I formed
you in the womb I knew you,
and
before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to
the nations.”
6Then I
said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” 7But
the LORD said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a
boy’;
for
you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and
you shall speak whatever I command you.
8 Do not be afraid
of them,
for
I am with you to deliver you,
says the LORD.”
9Then the
LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me,
“Now I have put my words in
your mouth.
10 See, today I
appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to
pluck up and to pull down,
to
destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
A man sat down in the library beside a cute little
pre-school girl who was looking at a picture book. Each page consisted of a picture of a single
object. The man asked the little girl if
she knew the name of all those objects.
She confidently began to turn the pages saying, “That’s a boy and that’s
a girl and that’s a house. That’s a car
and that’s a truck and that’s a wagon.”
When she came to the picture of a hatchet, she said, “That’s a
hammer.” The man said nothing. She turned the page and there was a
hammer. She turned back and looked at
the hatchet again; and then back to the hammer.
Then she quickly closed the book and with a sweet smile she said, “You
know, we ARE in the library and we really shouldn’t be talking.”
And perhaps there are some times when we should be silent in
order to listen or think or observe. But
one of the things wrong with the Church is that we are often silent when we
ought to speak. Sometimes our silence
destroys our mission.
You know how it goes.
It was heated meeting of the Regional Board. Things had not been going well recently and
something needed to change. But my
friend Doug was the only one who stood to speak against “business as
usual.” His words were dismissed by the
officers and things went as they usually went in the voting. After the meeting,
If God spoke to us the way that God spoke to Jeremiah, I
think we would have major problems with it.
In fact it sounds as if Jeremiah might have had some doubts about it
himself. “Before you were born, I consecrated you and appointed you a prophet to
the nations.” “Whoa there, Big Fella, I didn’t volunteer for this job! How can you
choose what I am going to do? Remember that free will thing? Before I was born?? You can’t select my future...especially not
before I am old enough to make up my own mind.
Who do you think you are—God?? Oh…yeah.”
So we drop back to plan B.
“Ah, Lord God, Truly I do not know
how to speak, for I am only a boy.” “I
don’t feel comfortable with what you are asking of me! And you know how important it is in this day
and age for people to feel comfortable with everything. Besides people won’t take
me seriously. I’m too young or
too old or the wrong gender or too short or too thin or too little of what a
prophet ought to look like and sound like.
This just isn’t my gift; I have other gifts and graces, but this isn’t
one of them.” But God didn’t say it was
our gift; God just said to do it! God
didn’t choose us because we already had skills; God chose us because God CHOSE US! God doesn’t have to give reasons…or even be
reasonable. “Don’t make excuses;” God
says, “for you shall go to all to whom I
send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you.”
Oh, how we want to be the silent evangelists, the wordless
witnesses. We want to do God’s will
without ever having to mention God or God’s commandments. You have heard it in eulogies at funerals you
have attended, “He was a person of a strong but quiet faith. He never spoke of his faith to his family and
friends, to any of us, but we know he believed.” My dear friends, when this is said of
someone, it is not a compliment. “He
lived the faith he professed”—now, that is a compliment. “You could see the truth of her beliefs in her
actions.” That is a fabulous tribute. But “he/she knew what he/she believed but
never spoke of it to us,” that leaves out an essential element of God’s charge
to us. Okay, we knew that person
believed, but did we know WHAT he believed?
We knew that she had faith, but did she help us build OUR faith? Did he or she give us any instruction, any
counsel in matters of the spirit? Yes,
faith grows personally, but it is intended to be made public. Seriously, when is the last time you ever
told someone what Christ means to you? When
did you tell your children or grandchildren?
A neighbor?
A stranger?
Even your spouse or your best friend? Do we not want them to have what we have had,
to have the same benefit of knowing Christ’s love, of having a Christ-like
perspective on life, of feeling forgiven and accepted by God, of sensing
something greater to life than A NEW CAR, or iPhones,
or celebrities in jail?
The usual excuse for the deafening silence of the Church and
church people is that we don’t want to offend anyone. There are enough offensive people out there
like the gay-bashing Fred Phelps or the super-egotist Pat Robertson or the
never-found-a-confrontation-I-didn’t-like Al Sharpton. And so to keep from being lumped with the
worst we confine the telling of the gospel to silent, enigmatic smiles. We mainline moderates are the Mona Lisa’s of
the modern church. We look pleasant and
no one knows what we are thinking.
I liked him from the very moment he sat at our table at the
wedding. He was bright of eye, loud of
voice and rough in nature. Laughter came
easily to him and he was a story-teller extraordinaire. That he had been a life-long fireman endeared
him to me even more. We were having a
blast exchanging tales and smart-aleck comments. It was easy to see that we had connected,
instant friends. When we went through
the buffet line, he was in the middle of a funny story about building a set for
his church’s Easter play. He said that
when it was obvious that they were not going to finish the set in time if they
continued with the standard rules of carpentry, they decided to…to… Then he looked about furtively, leaned over
my shoulder, dropped his voice to a near whisper and said, “You have to be
careful who’s around when you talk. We
had to ______-rig the rest of the set,” using the N-word for black people which
we don’t use anymore and which we are trying desperately to erase from the
planet. I was so shocked, so repulsed,
so offended, that I couldn’t say a word.
Isn’t that odd—to be shocked into silence at exactly the moment when one
is appointed to speak, to witness, to stand up?
Since I had felt a real friendship building here,
would it not have been the honest, constructive thing to do to just gently tell
him that I was one of those people
that objected to that word. He
probably would have said, “Oh, sorry about that,” and launched into another
tale, but aware now that someone he likes thinks that that language and
attitude are inappropriate. It could
have been a growing moment for him and a character building moment for me. Instead silence fell over our budding
friendship and doused the coals of our connection. We barely spoke the rest of the evening.
Like me that evening, most of us want to fly below the
radar. We don’t want to cause a scene or
call attention to ourselves. But we are
appointed by God to call attention to Christ, no matter the cost to
ourselves. I would like to tell you that
Jeremiah, the appointed prophet, wrought great change and brought his society
back to God, earning love and respect as his reward. But he didn’t. He was ignored and dismissed for the first
half of his life. He was revered for a
while, but soon after that fell into disfavor again and was imprisoned. He finally escaped prison only to die in
exile in a country he abhorred, away from his beloved