I grew up Presbyterian, but I didn’t discover until I
was 19 that God was communicative and could be really felt and experienced and
that Church was more than something people did who were inclined to be “good”. At that time I took an excursion among Christians
of the Nazarene persuasion. It was a
fellowship of about 30 people who met in an elementary school cafeteria on
Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. They loved the Lord and wanted to serve him. They felt in their hearts the worship they
raised. There was a sweet, sweet Spirit
in that place.
That congregation started as a small handful of
people a good 15 years before I ever went there. I was with them roughly three years and in
that time they tripled in number. They raised
enough money among themselves to buy a piece of property and build a church
building with a paved parking lot debt free.
It seemed so easy, effortless.
The Lord was present with them.
That was the ‘80’s, Bible-belt, USA.
I went from that church back to my Presbyterian roots
and became active in a small town Presbyterian church that had a very active
family and youth ministry. We had about
125 on a Sunday. That church overflowed
in hospitality, maturity, friendship, and support. We grew and had to do some building
modification for the afterschool ministry we had. We did it debt free. It was so easy. That was the early ‘90’s.
That was all nearly thirty years ago and I humbly
admit that how we did church back then is my default. Today, I look back on those times and like
Isaiah I say “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that
the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and
the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so
that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not
expect, You came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” That, of course, was Isaiah remembering God
giving the Law to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai.
Isaiah was voicing the lament of a faithful remnant
whom God had brought home to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon. They came home only to find the good ole days
were not a possibility anymore. Those
living on the Land didn’t want them back and were hostile about it. The glory-filled life they had hoped for
would prove too difficult for them to build.
It’s like Canadian Geese returning after their southern migration only
to find that the site of their idyllic northern home has become an adult
lifestyle gated community of condos and the residents don’t won’t their teeny
yards covered in geese poo like Centre Island, Toronto. What are the poor geese to do?
This remnant of the faithful felt God had abandoned
them, that God had hidden his presence from them. It seemed God had acted from a distance to
get them home but God just wasn’t with them because their hopes, their
expectations of the way things could be were not being realized. They struggled sometimes violently to reclaim
their ancestral lands. The Temple, the
place where God would live, lay in ruins for generations. The former glory of Solomon’s Temple wouldn’t
be realized for over 400 years when Herod the Great “restored” it in the years
immediately preceding Jesus’ ministry. Yet, historical accounts tell us that the institution of religion surrounding
Herod's temple was so corrupt that most Israelites did not believe the
presence of God ever graced the place.
But what about Isaiah’s prayer that God would tear
open the heavens and come and be present with great acts among his people? Did it go unanswered? No. Mark
recounts in his Gospel account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordon by John the
Baptist that just as Jesus was coming up out of the water John saw the heavens
torn open and the Spirit of God came down upon Jesus and a voice came from heaven
saying “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.” The heavens did get torn open and the
Presence of God did return to be with his people to live in the new living
Temple of Jesus the Christ. Then,
following Jesus resurrection and ascension, God poured the Spirit upon Jesus’
followers (another faithful remnant) in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, the
national feast at which the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at Sinai.
Well, here we sit like a faithful remnant, waiting
for, longing for a new revival, waiting for God to show up and be present and
make things like they were thirty years ago when we knew how to do church. What do we do?
Well, Jesus promised he would return and he told his
disciples to “Keep awake”. It’s been
2,000 years now. In that span of time
the church has had periods of sleeping and awakening. Today, we are the by-product of a church, a
faithful remnant, that woke up 500 years ago when Martin Luther started the
Protestant Reformation in conjunction with the invention of the printing
press.
As a faithful remnant of the Protestant awakening we live in
the day when the printed page has been superseded by the webpage. Information is disseminated and processed
radically differently now than it was just 30 years ago. Church isn’t where people come to find
religious information. They get it off
the Internet and talk about it in coffee shops among small groups of
friends. This is a huge factor as to why
when our snowbirds return in the spring they find their home churches growing
smaller. We need to adapt but simply
learning how to use social media, though helpful and necessary, won’t bring
people back to church. You can build a
coffee shop and people will come; but build a church…meh.
Just days before his saving death Jesus told his
disciples to keep awake while they wait, so also we who live in the days of the
death of the institutional church need to keep awake while we wait for God to
tear open the heavens and come be present with us today. Awake doesn’t mean be gimmicky like a
multi-national fast food chain that’s the same wherever you go. We need to be a local, slow food, home-grown feast
devoted to Jesus and committed to being his disciples. Facebook and blogging on the Internet isn’t
the highway home for the church. The
road home is the long, slow road of discipleship – the living embodiment of the
Jesus who gave his life for this world to feast. Jesus’ life symbolized, signified and tasted
in the meal of Holy Communion abides in the feast of the Holy Spirit-filled
fellowship enjoyed by Jesus’ disciples gathered around him.
We and the Holy Spirit-filled fellowship we share
rather than the Internet must be the living source of the Jesus whom people
should be talking about in small groups in coffee shops. It would be great if we as a church took the
task to hand of taking a year to equip ourselves for taking our Jesus-embodied fellowship
to where people meet today. I’m talking
a congregation-wide discipleship course.
This will require more from us than Sunday attendance, but will
transform us. Here’s the program – Greg
Ogden’s Discipleship Essentials. This is
not fast food. It is a sit-down
meal. But, it’s the kind of focusing on
Jesus that will wake us up and keep us awake.
Amen.
