Is Jesus Here?
September 1, 2013 | Anita Retzlaff

Grace and peace to you from God the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus the Christ.  Our journey through the Bible has taken us to the end of the Old Testament and Patrick and I have both discovered that we miss the preparation and study of these ancient texts. Despite the violence and "smiting" of the Old Testament we have, as a congregation, discovered the most important thread that weaves its way throughout the Hebrew scriptures: the theme of God's faithfulness and God's restless and  unrelenting desire for Israel to be people of shalom and witness. Though "the nations", the foreign tribes surrounding Israel, are often seen as the enemy they are also always considered by God to be potential beneficiaries of the faith.  Not only is Israel called to be faithful to Yahweh God Israel is also challenged to be a "light to the nations" and to make special allowances for the foreigners in their midst.

As September moves along we will continue the journey through the Bible into the New Testament beginning with the Book of Matthew.  But today as we stand in the breach between the Old Testament and the New I want us to consider that biblical push of being a light to the nations, a light  to our nation - a light to our own people - NOW!

Last month you might remember news reports about World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  World Youth Day is a global gathering of Roman Catholic youth called together by the pope. This event takes place every two to three years. This year Catholic young people came from over 190 countries to hear and meet their new Pope, Francis.  He addressed a crowd of 1.5 million people on Copacabana Beach and if you saw the pictures of the crowds along that huge stretch of sand; it was absolutely stunning! Later at a smaller gathering of merely 10,000 young Argentineans, Pope Francis stunned the world with this statement: “I want to tell you what I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day,” he said. “I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism (power that favours the clergy), the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves in our parishes, schools or structures. I want a mess…I want trouble in the diocese.” [Prairie Messenger, July 31, 2013, p. 13] 

In fact, the Pope told the world’s youth that the time has come for his church to get rid of a system that only takes care of itself and move out into the world and make a difference where it is needed… and let all the important people in the Roman Catholic system deal with it!  If you have any idea of the extent of the Roman Catholic hierarchy you will understand what a revolutionary call this is.  The article that reported the pope’s challenge also went on to say that Francis apologized in advance to the bishops around the world for the defiance that he is instigating.  The pope is calling for young people to revolt against the religious establishment.  Does that have a familiar ring to it? Just read the New Testament!

My reason for sharing these happenings within the Catholic Church is simply that we are faced with similar challenges.  We don’t have a massive Mennonite hierarchy and our local congregational life is not overly structured however we have become complacent and unwilling to change some very important things in response to the way the world around us is changing. I am really passionate about this because I believe the future of our congregations depends upon waking up to what the pope is saying to his Catholic friends.  If we aren’t willing to fling open our doors to the need around us and reinvent some of our ways of being the church we will not be responsive in the way that Jesus would want his followers to be. 

Jesus was more than a nice guy.  His life and witness was one of profound engagement with everyone who crossed his path.  He had no membership rolls or catechisms to study.  His only criteria for joining his ministry was to respond to the question he asked, “Do you love me?”  And if so, then, “Keep my commandments… feed my sheep.”  It all sounds simple enough until the meaning of this begins to push us out of our comfort zones. The broader church has tried all kinds of things in the last decades hoping to stem the tide of young people leaving the church; change up the music, add a band, provide more entertainment, open a coffee bar – you name it. We have tried some things in the Mennonite Church as well.

Rachel Held Evans, a 32 year-old writer posted a thought-provoking essay on a CNN website. She has written a book A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling her Husband "Master" in which she tries to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as she can. The CNN article given to me by Geraldine Balzer is titled, “Why millennials (15-30 year-olds) are leaving the church.” It lays out with great candor and directness the reasons she feels her age group of young adults is no longer interested in many of the issues that our churches have fought over in the last few decades.  She says,” What millenials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance. We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against. We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers. We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation. We want our Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities. We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.  You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.  Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus.” 

Is Jesus here? Do we know what we want to become? Do we long for Jesus?  When we are at risk of losing our way the scriptures can help reorient us.  The text for this morning is such a text.  If you are not sure that what you are doing is faithful, if you are not sure that our congregation is living up to its potential and its calling, read this manifesto in Colossians. “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience… bear with one another… forgive each other…clothe yourselves with love… let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts… do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.” These are trustworthy guidelines that direct us beyond ourselves and our church organizations into the messiness of the world around us and into the needs of individuals whom we rub shoulders with every day.

Carol Howard Merritt, a youngish writer (meaning that she is between 30 and 50 years old) shares stories of new hope and vital ministries in our changing spiritual landscape.  She offers alternative models of building Christian community. In struggling neighbourhoods where poverty, crime and violence is the dominant reality, ministry is not carried out in a church building on a Sunday morning. Rather, Christians gather neighbours together to share food, heal broken relationships and get lives back on track.  I need to pay attention to a statement Carol makes about such need in relation to our business-as-usual churches.  “Many people would rather gather with friends than spend a lot of energy propping up an institution.” [Carol Howard Merritt, “Reframing Hope: Vital Ministry in a new Generation”, p. 133] So, our challenge as I see it, is to extend friendship to others in various ways through our church but it can’t be a church that needs to be propped up. We can’t continue to try to fill committee positions just for the sake of maintaining committees. We all want to be part of congregations that are outward-focused and strong because our inner structures and ministries naturally reflect the presence of Jesus; the peace of Christ. If our committees aren’t engaging the needs of the world and our community the committees have to go! That is but a very mild version of the pope’s cry for revolution.

I gleaned some further wisdom from a couple of young researchers and writers commenting on faithfully communicating our faith in a noisy world.  In attempting to be open and invitational to others who aren’t die-hard regular church-goers (like us) they state with boldness, “Do not tell us that your church is welcoming, and do not tell us that it is like a family.  The first is a platitude (trite, cliché) and is too often what we gently term “aspirational (meaning that what is hoped is not in fact, the reality).” Proof of this is the experience that these two, Jim McNaughton and Rebecca Wilson, have had when they go into congregations to lead workshops on communicating faith.  On Saturday in their workshop sessions they hear that the congregation is welcoming but when the two of them return on a Sunday morning for a church service no one greets them or speaks to them at all.

The second statement that they advise as less than useful is the one about a congregation being like a family. This image, they write, “invites unspoken and unrealistic expectations, emotional wounds, and uneasy guests.  When was the last time you felt entirely comfortable walking into a gathering of someone else’s family?" (or even your own for that matter. [Jim McNaughton and Rebecca Wilson, “Speaking Faithfully: Communications as Evangelism in a Noisy World”, p. 22]

Everything that I have been reading and hearing makes me suspect that we must look to something much more radical than the band-aid solutions we have hoped would prop up our institutions.  Truly a revolution in thought and action are needed.  The Bible continues to provide for us the way into this messiness. Ray Fast recently sent along this quotation from Thomas Huxley, a 19th century scientist!! “The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed. Down to modern times, no state has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account; in which the duties, so much more than the privileges of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Nowhere is the fundamental truth, that the welfare of the state, in the long run, depends upon the righteousness of the citizen, so strongly laid down. The Bible is the most democratic book in the world.”

We are in a time when, counter to what many are suggesting, we need to return to the traditions of our faith; not "traditionalism" and the way of doing things for the sake of familiarity but our Tradition firmly based upon the Bible and our Anabaptist/Mennonite heritage. Is Jesus here? The pope’s call for messiness and trouble is not so different from the compelling directive of Menno Simons some 500 years ago: “True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people." Set this challenge within the words from Colossians that we read today and there opens before us a way into new ministries and our reason for being the Church. We need not despair about knowing what to do in the future.  The call is clear. Jesus is here and we follow his lead.

In his own translation of Colossians I leave you with a few lines of today’s text from Eugene Peterson: “Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness.  Let the Word of Christ – The Message – have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.”

May the Spirit of the Living One grace your lives.  AMEN