Word Gets Around - Feb 5, 2006
Mark 1: 29-39Last Saturday was a quiet day at our house. Sometime in the afternoon I was, believe it or not, sitting in my favorite chair in the living room reading the Bible. Yes, I read the Bible even when I'm not here at the church.
Suddenly Tanner went wild, barking and standing in front of the front door. It seems Tanner has one job in our house - poodles are working dogs, after all - and his job is to bark loudly when someone comes to the door. If you heard his barking, but could not see him, you would think perhaps that he is much bigger dog than he is. Tanner barks with passion you see. And no amount of shushing or asking him to hush will stop his barking. His job is to tell us that someone is at the door.
I opened the door on this very cold, rainy, windy day to find a young man standing there in a very wet rain poncho. It's a strange thing in suburbia in this day and age to have a stranger standing on your doorstep. The neighborhood my family and I live in is the kind - maybe your is like this too - where it is mostly deserted during the weekday. As soon as I opened the door, the young man introduced himself, giving me his name and handing me a piece of paper on which was printed the name, address, and mission statement of his church.
The young man wasted no time telling me what he was there for. Earlier in his life, he told me, he was involved in a life of drugs and crime. His mother had done the best she could, but he got mixed up with the wrong crowd, and his life had spiraled out of control, until he had found himself incarcerated. After paying his debt to society, he found the church, which helped him to find Jesus Christ, who helped him to find sobriety and a new purpose for his life.
Now, perhaps you know and I know what brought this young man all the way from the South side of Milwaukee to Pewaukee. He was asking me for help in supporting his church. I knew as soon as I heard what church he was from that I would be writing a check for a small gift, because I knew that his organization was legit, and I've supported them before. But you know what? I took my time letting the man talk his spiel on that rainy day - partly because I knew that as long as he was standing on my porch he was relatively dry, (and it was miserable outside that day) and partly because I just liked hearing somebody talk about what a difference Jesus had made in his life. And this particular young man had a lot to say on the subject.
After the young man had gone, wishing me a blessed day, I was thinking of a time when I was a young teenager, maybe 12 or 13 in youth group at church, and we spent a week in the summer witnessing door-to-door in the neighborhood around my small church. We were sent out in the very Biblical two-by-two, male and female pairs to knock on doors, tell whoever answered what church we were from and ask them if they were saved. We were told two rules: stay outside, and don't accept any money. Obviously it was a different time, a different place, a different world. I couldn't imagine sending 12 or 13-year-olds door to door in this day and age, even out here in relatively safe suburbia. But we did it. I was trying to think of what bribe the youth group leader promised us to get us to do this, and I can't honestly remember if there was a bribe. The church was next doot to Dairy Queen, so it could have been ice cream. I just went door to door, telling people about Jesus and inviting them to church.
When we meet Jesus in today's portion of the gospel according to Mark, his fame is beginning to spread. The authority with which he sent the demonic spirit out of the man just a few verses earlier has caught the attention of the Galilean countryside. Jesus went to see Simon's mother in law, and he healed her. The next thing Jesus knew, there was a crowd of sick and possessed people, waiting outside to be healed. Clearly word had gotten around.
Several years ago, when we lived in San Anselmo, some scenes from a movie were shot right on the main street, on one of the main corners of town, a few blocks from where were living. Now, the Production Company didn't broadcast exactly where and when filming would take place. But we saw trailers parked in the vicinity of the bank building on the corner, and a new façade went up on the building, with a different bank name (a phony bank name), and word got around. Suddenly one day the main street through town was blocked off from traffic, and people put the pieces together and figured out that the filming was taking place soon. I came home from classes that day to hear stories of how Andrew and Allison had gone down to the set, with a video camera and a regular camera, and had somehow gotten both video and still shots of themselves with one of the actors in the movie. They tell me the street was packed with onlookers. Some how, without publicity, without taking out an ad in the local paper, word had gotten around that something unusual was happening in our little town, and people had to see what it was all about.
I try to imagine what it must have looked like for those Galileans, to see miracles wrought right in front of their eyes. It must have been incredible, and at the same time irresistible, kind of like when a movie star comes to town. Seeing something like that is not the kind of thing one keeps to oneself. It seems as if it is human nature to get the word out about seeing miracles with one's own eyes.
I also try to imagine what it was like for Jesus to find a crowd of hurting and needy Galileans right out side his door at sunset; a whole city waiting for a miracle. Mark doesn't tell us how long it took Jesus to heal everyone who showed up. Suddenly the scene switches, and we find Jesus needing to get out of town for a short while to pray. That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? After all, he has just healed every sick or possessed person in the whole Galilean town; a little time to re-charge seems to be in order. I know that after preaching and leading worship on Sunday morning, I am spent. I am ready to collapse into my favorite chair and read the Sunday paper, and not do much else. Most preachers I know take at least a two-hour nap on Sunday afternoons. So it makes perfect sense to me that Jesus needs a little Sabbath time.
Only...word had gotten around. And while Jesus was off trying to have a little quality time with God, Simon and those with him were off looking for Jesus, because more miracles were needed. And Jesus must have realized in that moment that this was going to happen everywhere he went, for he decided to hit the road. He says, "This is what I came here for." And we can imagine that it is starting to sink in to Jesus exactly what his ministry is going to be about.
Last month at Presbytery, our Executive Presbyter, Gregg Neal, threw down a gauntlet of sorts. You see Gregg's idea of the mission of the church, (which I happen to agree with), is that the church has three purposes. To quote Gregg's letter to the Presbytery:
"Churches call people to faith,
Equip and feed people for ministry,
Send persons out to serve the Lord."
During his years of working in middle-governing bodies of the denomination, and so far in his getting to know Sessions and congregations here in the presbytery, Gregg has discovered that, while the modern church is proficient at the last two purposes, equipping and feeding people for ministry, and sending persons out to serve the Lord, we collectively struggle with the first one - calling people to faith. The truth is, evangelism is a tough nut to crack in the Protestant mainstream. It's tough, in part because we try to separate evangelism from evangelical. And "evangelical" has become a code word, hasn't it? Evangelical has become code for fundamentalist, narrow-minded, self-righteous, bombastic. We see famous evangelicals in the media, and we'd do anything to not be one of those kind of Christians. But truth is, the word evangelical or even evangelism, doesn't mean any of those things. This is the dictionary meaning for evangelical: Of, relating to, or in accordance with the Christian gospel, especially one of the four gospel books of the New Testament. Now, that's not scary at all! I think that if we cannot claim this, we are in trouble as a church, aren't we?
Well, brothers and sisters, I think it's time to take back the word evangelical. Maybe it's time to reclaim an enthusiasm for the gospel. Because word gets around, and perhaps we should be part of that effort.
So Gregg has challenged us to concentrate as a Presbytery on how we call people to faith. His challenge is for each church to have one adult baptism in the coming year. Now, you might ask - what is so magical about one adult baptism? The answer is that there is nothing magical about one adult baptism. But there is a lot of power in talking about and thinking about and praying about how Jerusalem can bring one brand new Christian into the fold. If the same people had shown up for Jesus to heal them, over and over, the church would have been confined to Galilee, and we would not be having this conversation this morning.
So...the natural question is this: how do we do this? Perhaps you'll all be relieved to hear that I don't think that forming teams of two's to go door-to-door passing out tracts is the way to go about it. And I certainly don't plan to send your children out into the neighborhood to ask people if they are saved. It was said to me soon after my ordination and installation here that Jerusalem was the "best kept secret in Waukesha County." I'm pretty sure the person meant it as a good thing. I was, however, a little taken aback by that comment. No, my visions this week for evangelism at Jerusalem have not been not standing soaking wet on someone's porch handing out tracts, nor is it sending out children to do our dirty work - what we as adults are unwilling to do. The image that kept popping up in my head this week is that of my little yapping dog. You see, the dog barks to make its presence known. He barks because barking is his job. No amount of trying to suppress the barking works, because the dog is predestined to bark. I can warn visitors that the dog will bark, but the dog is still going to bark, no matter what.
What would happen if the best kept secret in Waukesha County became the place about which people would say, "If you go there, or if you associate with people from there, you're going to hear, or see, or feel the Good News of the gospel, and not just from the preacher, either. Those people are like a dog that just won't stop barking when it comes to God. And they publicly live their faith like they're hard-wired to do it."
One of the great things about publicly living one's faith is that there are as many different ways of doing it as there are faithful Christians. You don't have to have a degree in theology, you don't have to be a Bible expert, you don't have to be good at public speaking. You just have to be passionate about the good word, the word of grace. After that, word gets around.
Thanks be to God!
