(57) Restless Hearts

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Restless Hearts, originally shared on October 19, 2020. It was the fifty-seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   It has been said that Christianity is always one generation from extinction. How do we generate a model and message of the Church that is humble, transparent, and real? How can we be the agents of renewal in our churches?

   We’re at a point in the Coronavirus pandemic where Johns Hopkins says there have been 60,000 new cases a day worldwide on average over the past week. While California continues to improve, many other states are experiencing spikes in new cases, prompting fears of a second wave or coronavirus even as flu season is just around the corner.

   Some are predicting that places around the world with poor cold storage facilities will get the vaccine at a much slower pace than more developed areas.

   We’ve been isolated and restricted, our worship has changed, our work has changed, our education has changed, we are within two weeks of a divisive national election, and we’re restless. How do we find rest in a pandemic?

   John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard church movement, tells about how he had been a professional musician in Las Vegas and then toured with the Righteous Brothers. He said that, in 1963, when he had first been drawn to God, he was a beer-guzzling, drug abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible Study.”

   He began reading the Bible ravenously like a starving person being given food and, after a few weeks reading about the mighty acts of God and attending what were to him uneventful worship services, he asked a lay church leader, “When do we do the stuff? You know, the stuff here in the Bible; the stuff Jesus did, like healing the sick, raising the dead, healing the blind – stuff like that?” The lay leader told him that they didn’t to that stuff anymore, just what happened in their worship services.

   John Wimber replied, “You mean I gave up drugs for that?”

   I think about that story sometimes. Not because of what have been called the signs-and-wonders “stuff”, but because I think this story raises some important questions about what the Church is and why people have found no sacrifice too small for the Church and its message throughout the centuries, people who ordered their lives by its rhythms, who refused to deny their faith as members of the Body of Christ whatever the cost including of their lives, whose art and architecture, music and poetry, were dedicated to the glory of God.

   Why aren’t more people in our own time active in a local church. Why is the Church no longer a major influence in our society? Not that that’s all bad. It’s better when the church is not so entwined with the culture that people go for the business connections, to feel (and for others to believe) that they are good persons, or to be part of what we used to describe as “cultural Christianity.”

   Some people say its because they are spiritual but not religious (that is, not restricted), they don’t have to go to church to believe in God and that’s true. But it’s inconceivable that a person could be a Christian and not want to be with believers in worship. Christianity is about relationships, our relationship with God and the common relationship that makes with other believers, and the way we treat one another and the world. Jesus said, in

*Matthew 18:20

   To gather in Jesus’ name means to gather in his essential self. The early Christians believed that the essential self of a person was in their name. That’s why God does not have a proper noun for a name. It is inconceivable that we could know God’s essential self. When we gather, we gather in the essential self of God. Jesus is there among us. We gather and meet in relationship between God and among human beings.

   Where are the young people, and by young I mean under say 55? What happened to the children of the saints of the Church? Busy? Gone for entertainment? Seeking fewer expectations on them? Youth sports?

   The reasons are really all the same. Individualism is chosen over community. Christian community.

   When we gather as the people of God, what the Bible calls the Body of Christ, we recognize that each of us has been given a gift, one of the non signs-and-wonders gifts, for the sake of building up that body. That gift is not given to us, it is given through us for the sake of all. We are a community, gifted to build up one another.

*Matthew 16:17-18

   This passage is a defining one for both Protestants Catholics, but in different ways. Peter had for the first time just identified Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God”. Jesus replies that God had revealed this to him. Protestants say that Jesus then said that “this rock” upon which the Church would be built was Peter’s faith. The words Peter and rock are similar in the original Greek. Catholics say that it was Peter himself on which the Church would be built, that Peter would be the first pope.

   But, in focusing on that verse’s important distinction, we often miss the rest of the passage: the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The Church is the means by which the people of God experience the presence of God and salvation. It’s a want to thing, a matter of the heart, not a have-to in order to check all the boxes.

   We experience that root desire, but I think we have done a very poor job of communicating it.

   Have you ever seen a stained glass window? What does it look like from the outside? It’s a lifeless, colorless blob, a void. What does it look like from the inside? Colors and patterns forming meaning and inspiration.

   During a time of illiteracy, they became the teaching graphics of the Church. They told the whole story when, on any given Sunday, the people of God only heard some of it. They inspired and lifted people up with a sense of God’s majesty and glory. But only on the inside. (Or, on the outside at night when the church is lighted on the inside.)

   The difference is the light.

   I wonder if all the compromises, the desire for relevancy, the concern for professionalism, a place of respect in the community, and having the marks of success in our culture, have not put us in a position where, except for a few eccentricities, we are indistinguishable from the world around us.

   I wonder why our political advocacy is based on the coercive threat of our numbers with no reference to our spiritual authority whatsoever.

   I wonder if all our attempts to adapt to the world have not, ironically, pushed it away.

   I wonder if we have so little expectation that people will repent, receive the gift of faith, and believe in the Good News of Jesus, that we don’t even think to provide the mechanisms for a person to come to Christ and be nurtured as a new disciple.

   I think that we, as a group, are afraid.

   We are afraid of offending people and losing friends and family members, even our closest family.

   We are afraid that our faith is actually so fragile that we might be challenged in such a way that would break it.

   We are afraid of losing our traditions and cultural identity.

   We are afraid that someone might rightly point out our sinner’s hypocrisy.

   We are afraid of being accused of being intolerant or judgmental.

   We fall back to rationalizations like: I don’t talk about my faith, I live it. I lead people to Christ by example. I love them until they ask me why. The Evangelicals or the Baptists get them born again while we raise them up into maturity.

   All of these would be fine, if they were happening. If not, they are just the armor we put on to protect our fragility.

   What do we say to people when they come to us without knowing the rules of church behavior that everybody else there knows, when they come from lifestyles, jobs, friendships, or beliefs that are inconsistent with the Christian life?

   Are we prepared?

   How would we communicate the basic message of the Church in our elevator speech, the speech we make when there is only a very short time of contact?

   At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives his disciples what we call The Great Commission, not The Great Suggestion. The Great Commission:

*Matthew 28:16-20

   We are called to go to where the broken people are, and to be ready when they come looking for something and possibly not even knowing what questions to ask. Not knowing what they are missing in life, only that something’s wrong with the way they are living their lives now.

   How do we start an evangelical conversation? Would we recognize an opening for sharing the Gospel if we heard it?

   What mechanisms do we have in our church for feeding, nurturing, and encouraging a new believer to live the Christian life and to grow in it?

   Our power as a Church is not based on our numbers, but on the power of the Holy Spirit within us. We are called to live in humility, pointing to that power, and not to our own.

   We cannot adapt to the world and expect the world to see in us another way, a better alternative, a more real worldview.

   Recognition that we have made lots of mistakes, that we are sinners, but that we believe in a great and perfect God who has made us saints by his grace, even as we are sinners, that God accepts us as we are but never leaves us as we are.

   Our confidence does not come from what is seen, but what is unseen. We must regain our confidence in a loving and gracious God, we must believe and what we glibly preach, that God is real, that God has made and continues to make a real and transformative difference in our lives.  

   It has often been said that there is a God-shaped hole in each of us. We try to fill it with money, or sex, or status, or personal development, or whatever, but nothing in this world, no political, no economic, or social system, can fill that hole. Only God can.

   Augustine of Hippo, a father of the Church, and someone who knew something about living without God and then coming to faith, wrote. “'Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.'

   For that to happen we must become more than a shell of an institutional Christianity and more of a Body of Christ, point to Jesus, name the name and invite fearlessly (or fearfully) unbelievers to come to Christ and to do the stuff…the transformational “stuff” that puts Jesus in a place that defines every part of our lives, that make of us a new Creation, born again, that gives us rest in Him. That’s the real “stuff”, not the show “stuff”.

   Pray, read your Bible, worship, serve others, be ready to defend the hope that is within you, and sometimes to go on offense.

   We are called in The Great Commission to “go, make disciples, teach, baptize, and remember”.

   We are not alone. Jesus promised to be with us. We are a community in his name.

   We are called to be the Body of Christ, and to point restless hearts to God.