This is the eighth in a series of eight sermons based
on Greg Ogden’s book Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions
for Mentoring and Discipleship.
You have probably wondered why in the last few years
ministers don’t preach from those grand elevated pulpits such as we have here
and rather prefer a lectern on the floor.
Part of the answer is that hovering about up there, above the
congregation makes us feel conspicuous, overbearing, and stuffy. Being down here on the floor makes us feel
like we’re one of you. It’s more
personable and chummy. Down here we feel
more like a coach while up there we feel more like a pontificate.
The rest of the answer has to do with what the
location of the pulpit says about God to people visiting a church. The high pulpit can give the impression that
God is above us, always watching, and unapproachable no matter how much grace
we preach. One can make the argument
that the high pulpit is for reasons of visibility and acoustics. Maybe so originally, but couple a high pulpit
with an obsequious, ashen looking, dower, pompous pontificator telling you that
God is a voyeur to your every sin and indeed your every sinful thought. Woe and curses. Some people soften that impression saying God
is watching from above making everything go hunky-dory for you. But what happens when things don’t go
hunky-dory? Well, a distant God is just
as easily kept at a distance and then just as easily dismissed…as has happened
in Western Christianity.
Preaching from a lectern on the floor at the level of
the congregation on the other hand says that God is with us. Jesus did not make the promise, “I will be
above you always, until the end of the age.” His promise was that he would be with us.
Just take a second and think about this. What if Jesus’ promise to us was rather to be
above us than to be with us? The effect
of placing Jesus above us rather than with us is profoundly deadly to the
church. If he is above, then he is not
with us. He is not presently involved
the work of his church or present to us in our individual lives. He has simply left us, down here, to fend for
ourselves trying to figure out what God wants from us. Trying to forge a way for the church in the
21st Century in the wake of the death of cultural Christianity
simply becomes our task rather than participating in what he is doing. It is like he has left us to our own efforts
to save his church from oblivion. That’s
just wrong.
If that’s what happens when the church thinks Jesus
is above us, then what does it do to us as individuals? If Jesus is above us, distant from us, a
non-participant, then faithful living is just a matter of our own efforts, of
doing what we think best hoping that God will bless it from above. If that is the case, then no wonder we conjure
up some sort magical power we call faith, invent rituals, and negotiate
contracts with God (“I’ll do this for you God, if you do that for me.”). If Jesus is above us, we are left to our
own. That’s scary. But praise be to God! Jesus is with us. He is not above us. He is with us. We are not alone and abandoned to our own
efforts.
Maybe the most significant change that needs to
happen in the church today is a change in our thinking, in our way of
understanding the very fabric of reality.
Everything about the way we do church and practice our own personal
faith in Christ, I believe, is based in an understanding of reality in which
God is above us, in which Jesus is above us.
Our perception of reality needs to effectually change to that of Jesus
is with us. For our churches to make the
switch from being the religious institution that undergirded our culture in
these days when the culture doesn’t want us to be that anymore to being a
church that is out in the world in a missionary kind of way in this nation
which is now a mission field, we must cease thinking of Jesus as being above
and let Jesus retrain our thinking by letting us know he is with us.
I had this change of thinking and this is how it
happened with me. I was raised as
Christian. We went to church on and off
with irregularity. Going to church was
something you knew you were supposed to do.
It was the super-daddy of all New Year’s resolutions. It was a good habit to be into; one that
would make the rest of life better because God, who was way off somewhere up
there, would bless you for it.
Well, on New Year’s Eve when I was almost twenty I
threw a party and nobody showed up.
Things got dark for me that night.
I started to think that if this was the sum total of my life Jesus could
do a better job with me than I was and I decided my life was his. I called my best friend’s mom the next
morning and asked if she was going to church.
She said, “yes.” And I said, “I’ll see you there”. That’s when I made the decision to start
going to church on my own.
I also started sensing that God was calling me to the
ministry and so I made a bargain with him.
I said, “God, I will go this route as long as I don’t have to go it
alone. Bring me a wife…the sooner the
better.”
A year later
I was in university and I just got dumped by the girl I thought was “the one”. I knew I was called to the ministry, but it
looked like I was going alone. The
bargain I made with God ended through no apparent fault of my own. I sat there in my dorm room, all alone,
having a pity party. It is hard to
describe what happened next. All I can
say is that it was like a door opened in my sense of reality and Jesus stepped
in. From that moment on I have had the awareness
that I am not alone. That he is with
me. Jesus is always with me. I’ve nothing to fear. It was also during those days that I really
began to realize that God loved me, that I was one of his beloved children.
I always feel like people look at me like I’m
mentally ill when I tell that story. That’s
odd because the only place I ever really tell it is at church. We church people should say that an awareness
of Jesus with us, his disciples, is something we should all have. Truly, we should expect disciples of Jesus to
have an awareness of Jesus being with them and celebrate it when it happens. It would also be great if we as congregations
really had the awareness that Jesus is with us and that by the power of the
Holy Spirit he is leading us. But, like
the song says, we persist in believing “God will be there, watching from above.
Go now in peace, in faith, and in love.”
It would help us to change our way of thinking if we sang, “Jesus is
here, leading forth in love. Go now in peace, in faith, and in love.”
Jesus presence with us isn’t something that only
crazy people sense. It is something he
has promised to his disciples. He is
with us. Like a presence in an empty
chair, he is with us. Amen.
