Let's Take Jesus' Ministry out of Our Boxes

Text: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43; Colossians 1:11-23

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:16, “We are the temple of the living God.” The Trinity comes to dwell in us – his own, his church - in the midst of our fellowship, indeed in each of us. The Triune God of grace, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lives in us by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ (his presence with us, his favour poured upon us, his acting on our behalf for our good) in the communion of the Holy Spirit due to the love of the Father. We, the church, have got to get a handle on that. If we don’t have God right as the Triune God of grace and what he has done for his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ, what we are as congregations will be something other than the church of Jesus Christ. God is the communion of the personal, relational love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who so powerful that he can raise the dead, so powerful he created and holds the whole universe together, and so powerful that he can and will put it to rights.

Humanity, on the other hand, bears within itself in its relational way of being a very marred image of the Trinity. Yet, in us, the church, the Trinity is restoring his image within humanity through the reconciling work of the one true Shepherd, Jesus Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father. As the fullness of the loving communion of the Trinity dwells in Jesus in his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit, so also his fullness dwells in us as we are his body sharing in his relationship with the Father by the communioning work of the Holy Spirit.

           Sharing in Jesus' fullness of God the Trinity (his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit) exhibits itself in and through us as we share in Jesus' ministry of reconciling the world to the Father in the Holy Spirit. His ministry is relational which means people oriented and geared at real needs and healing in all its forms. Jesus' ministry is not programs for this and activities for that which we pay staff to come and do for us. It is each of us entering into real relationships with people in authentic, self-giving, self-sharing, and unconditionally loving ways. Jesus ministry is the ministration of God’s love for each of us personally, a love marked by the way of the cross. This means we must enter into the lives of others through our own weakness and do so sacrificially at our own cost expecting nothing in return.

To give an example and since the mayor of Toronto has brought substance abuse and addiction to the fore lately, Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that no doctor, preacher, friend, spouse, counselor, etc., can get through to an alcoholic as effectively as another alcoholic in recovery who is willing to once again share his own humiliating story. A common feeling and thought pattern that comes along with the mental illness and chronic disease that alcoholism is is a profound indeed shame-filled awareness of “nobody knows what its like to be as unlovable as me.” What an alcoholic finds in Alcoholics Anonymous is an unconditionally loving community of people who know damn well how that feels but are getting better, healing and who have by an act of God had the compulsion to drink taken away. Outside of AA alcoholics will be perpetually stigmatized, but in AA alcoholics are always welcomed in the hopes that they will find/be given sobriety. The Trinity is powerfully and visibly at work in AA. I can think of no better example of how the church should be in and amongst humanity.

Similarly, we who know the healing love of God in Jesus Christ because he has built a loving, healing relationship with us by bringing us into himself through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit are to go to those who suffer our same, common human weakness and share his ministry with them. Indeed, let Jesus minister to them through us. Jesus ministry is his presence with us in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit bestowing care to each of us by which he then compels us to love one another as he has loved us so that he then continues his ministry beyond us through us. This is the communion of the Holy Spirit. I would dare say if the life of a congregation is not marked by this ministry of Christ’s cross–bearing love so that it reflects the Triune life of God, it is not the church. Any organization can give money and do things to help the poor and so forth. We, the church, on the other exist to get to the heart of the brokenness of all people. As AA exists to get to the particular brokenness of still suffering alcoholics, so we disciples of Jesus Christ, the bearers of his ministry, are here to be the unconditionally loving community where any person can find welcome and healing in the new humanity that the Trinity has wrought in, through, and as Jesus Christ.

Christ’s ministry has a purpose. Michael Jinkins Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Theological Seminary in Texas defines ministry like this: “the purpose of our common ministry is the transformation of persons into the likeness of Jesus Christ whom humanity crucified and God raised from the dead.” The transformation of persons into the image of Christ Jesus as exhibited in his life and death is what our shared ministry in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is all about. We do this transformational ministry by building one another up in love, speaking the truth to one another in love, worshipping with one another, praying with one another, even simply just sharing a cup of tea with one another yet meeting one another in our weaknesses, rather than our strengths. This transformation of our very being happens in the context of our relationships, which includes our relationship with God, and it comes about as we learn by the Spirit’s prompting to choose to be compassionate with each other until it becomes our nature.

Learning to love one another is the cross we all must bare. In the face of all brokenness from the depths of our own weakness we must choose to love as Christ loves us. He gave up his strength and became weak not only for us but with us. So must we and so also he is still with us. Carrying this cross of sharing and bearing our weaknesses with one another will put to death in us all those things that are contrary to God’s nature and we will find ourselves raised to a newness of life that we know can only come from the Trinity. We are not here to cater to the insecurities of one another or to avoid conflict at all cost. That’s not love. Rather, we are to augment each others giftedness and to expose each others flaws and to help each other past them. We are here to bear one another’s burdens. It hurts when our flaws get exposed yet this is exactly what happens in the life of the church as we learn to love one another. The cross is our standard and unfortunately it is typically the case that we want to judge each other according to it rather than examine ourselves.

To ensure that this transformative ministry occurs in the church (and indeed this learning to love one another is most certainly what the reign of Christ looks like), to ensure his ministry in the church Christ calls forth shepherds in the church. In the Presbyterian church we call them elders and ministers (not pastors. There is only one Pastor.). Everything one would expect from a minister is the shared responsibility of the elders and ministers. The nature and task of church leadership is to bestow Christ’s care upon the people. The Hebrew word in Jeremiah’s text which is translated as “bestow care on” very well suits the concept of being personally present with God’s flock at the point of their needs, needs judged according to cross. As Jesus Christ is our Pastor and his reign over us is his compelling us to love one another as he loves us according to the cross, so church leadership is to live his ministry, his reign, before and for his people. They are here to listen, to pray, to bear with us our burdens, and to see to it that the transformative work of the Holy Spirit is happening in us. Church leaders are here to ensure that we are carrying the cross. Never ever should a minister and church leadership be seen as the CEO and Board of Directors of an institution. To sound archaic, let that idea of church leadership be anathema.

I believe that small churches are truly privileged with respect to Jesus' ministry. I say privileged because their size helps them to resemble more clearly the church of the New Testament...yet, with a basic difference which too often can become fatal. The early church was house based rather than church building based. Early on, the church was basically a few households getting together in someone’s house to worship, pray, study, and share the Lord’s Supper. It wasn’t until the 300’s AD that church buildings began to appear and that was because Emperor Constantine made it legal to be a Christian and saw
Christianity as beneficial to holding the empire together. It would not be a stretch to say the church moved into church buildings so that we could have a temple just like all the other religions. We are apparently reluctant to think of our fellowship and our very selves as being God's temple.

In hindsight and in my opinion as a soapbox historian, moving the church from homes into church buildings wasn’t a good idea. Inevitably, the more institutionalized the church became the more religious and superstitious things became. I would even go on to say, (and this according to my tailgate expertise on the subject,) that our associating the church with buildings makes it easy for us to separate the Trinity from our daily lives, from our homes, from the fellowship of families; away from the people and rather way off somewhere. Then we begin to believe that we need the special boxes which we now call “our church” to meet with God. Inside these special boxes, the Christian “faith” tends to be simply the Christian “religion”. Inside the boxes we turn what should be a living faith, a life-trust in a personally present God among a transforming fellowship of believing friends, into being a system of religious rites and rules owned by a priesthood; a system where faith actually becomes magic. A priesthood pontificating rules and administering rites is a far cry from the ministry of “bestowing care upon” the flock of God’s pasture. The history of Christianity demonstrates well that when the ministry becomes a priesthood dealing in rules and rituals, that’s when the flock begins to get destroyed and scattered and God’s own sheep get driven away.

Jeremiah mentions God’s pasture. God’s pasture is the Kingdom of God and it is everywhere Jesus Christ is. It is Jesus’ personal ministry to each of us, among us, and through us into the world. I could be accused of being overly simplistic here but I surmise that one of the beliefs that hinder congregations from being living revelations of the Kingdom of God where there is peace and healing in the presence of God is that we believe the pasture is inside the building rather than out there in our homes, our jobs, the neighbourhood, the marketplace, indeed, in the whole universe. The Apostles in the early church took the Good News to temple courtyards and marketplaces, indeed house to house, and there proclaimed that God has created a new reality that was evident in the midst of their fellowship in which everyone was welcome, a new way of being human ordered according to the way of the cross. Jesus Christ has reconciled this whole creation to the Triune God and especially humanity, estranged as we are. It is the work of the church not to get people in its doors to get a confession of faith out of them so that the institution of the church will continue, but rather to go out into the streets and announce the Good News that the Kingdom of God has come near so that people can know what God is up to and believe and have hope and turn and be transformed. It is to take the transformational ministry of Jesus Christ to all people by sharing how Jesus made himself weak for us to be with us and heal us in our weakness. It is to meet others in their weakness by taking the humiliating step of saying “I am weak too, but Jesus is changing me. Come and see.”

God has made peace with us to heal us and out of this new reality he is causing a sprout of righteousness, of peace, of true justice to begin to grow here on earth and guess what? It’s here. He’s here. He pours his heavenly reign upon us and enables us to be a fellowship which echoes the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a fellowship which strives to be a blessing to the world, that strives for peace and justice and righteousness in this world full of fear and dismay. We are the temple of the living God. We carry a remarkable hope in our midst. Let’s not keep it behind the walls. Let's take the ministry out of our boxes. Amen.