Several hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a crucial battle
occurred between the Greeks and the Persians upon the plains of
Marathon. The battle raged for hours. In many respects it was a fight to
the finish. Finally the numerically inferior Greeks, the underdogs,
managed a tremendous tactical win, but there was a problem. Soon the
Senate, many miles away in Athens, was to vote and would most certainly
ratify a treaty of appeasement. In desperation they sent a runner in
full battle gear to go the twenty-seven miles to tell of the news. By
the time the young boy got to Athens he had run a Marathon. It is said
he was totally spent, that he literally ran himself to death. In his
exhaustion he was able to utter only one word to the Athenians:
"Victory."
Today we come to church with the sound of the Easter Cantata still
resonating in our ears. We have been to the empty tomb. We have heard
the glad news of resurrection. And now it is time for the church to send
a message back to the world. What should that message be? May I suggest
that it could be a single word: Victory.
Unfortunately, that single truth is not so self-evident to many
people today even as it was not initially to the first century
disciples. We fall short of victorious living. We must learn anew to
live out the reality of the resurrection.
We are one week past Easter Sunday, and as we examine the disciples
in our passage today, I think we will find some words for us too.
Tom Long teaches preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory
unviersity. In a sermon preached from our New Testament text, he said,
"Have you ever noticed the church ads on the religion pages of
the newspapers? There you can find some impressive sounding places of
worship. There, with sleek graphics and Madison Avenue phrases, a few
select churches boast of their assets -- their choirs, their
friendliness, their powerful preaching, their singles ministries, their
ample parking, their family life centers, their sensitive child care,
and their compassionate spirit. Some churches, it seems, have it all.
"Other churches however, appear by contrast to have nothing,
absolutely nothing. Take for example, the church depicted in our text
for today. Here, we get our first glimpse of the disciples gathered
together after the resurrection, the first glimpse in other words, of
the church in its earliest days, and all in all, it is not a very pretty
picture. Near the end of his life, Jesus had carefully prepared his
disciples to be a devoted and confident fellowship of faith. They were
to be a community of profound love with the gates wide open and the
welcome mat always out, but here we find them barricaded in a house with
the doors bolted shut. They were to be the kind of people who would
stride boldly into the world to bear fruit in Jesus' name, a people full
of the Holy Spirit performing even greater works than Jesus himself
(John 14:12), but here we find them cowering in fear, hoping nobody will
find out where they are before they get their alibis straight. In short,
we see here the church at its worst -- scared, disheartened and
defensive.
"If this little sealed-off group of Christians were to place one
of those cheery church ads in the Saturday newspaper, what could it
possibly say? "The friendly church where all are welcome?"
Hardly, unless one counts locked doors as a sign of hospitality.
"The church with a warm heart and a bold mission?" Actually
more like the church with sweaty palms and a timid spirit.
"Indeed, John's gospel gives us a snapshot of a church with
nothing -- no plan, no promise, no program, no perky children or youth
ministry, no powerful preaching, no parking lot, nothing. In fact, when
all is said and done, this terrified little band huddled in the corner
of a room with a chair braced against the door has only one thing going
for it: the risen Christ. And that seems to be the main point of this
story. In the final analysis, this is a story about how the risen Christ
pushed open the bolted door of a church with nothing, how the risen
Christ enters the fearful chambers of every church and fills the place
with his own life. "
For the past few months, our church has been discussing long range
planning through our Visioning Process in the fall, and through many
committees related to our facility and its future. We don’t know what
our future holds; we can’t gaze into any crystal ball, but we can plan
and prepare. We can be pro-active rather than re-active.
The disciples locked themselves in the upper room, that place where
Jesus had shared his last supper with them. Mary Magdalene was honored
with being the first to see the risen Christ and although she had shared
that great news with the ten disciples gathered, they still sat fearful
in isolation. They reveled in the memory of what had taken place in that
room, of how their leader had served them and later offered his life for
them. But the future was ahead of them, and they sat paralyzed.
Our history records some fine days for Hampton Baptist Church.
Recently, we have enjoyed an increase in new members. Our church staff
has become stabilized with the addition of our new Administrative
Assistant and Interim Associate Pastors. The aesthetics of our physical
facility have improved dramatically over the past year. For the past
couple of summers, we’ve had 45 people to go to Belize, 49 people to
serve in Mississippi and I am hopeful that we have 50 to go to East
Tennessee in July for this summer’s mission trip. Those are huge
numbers for a church our size. As a church, we could become complacent
and say, "Isn’t God good? Hasn’t God blessed us bountifully?
Aren’t we fortunate to have so many new faces? Haven’t we done a
great job in helping those who need assistance." We could become
satisfied with the number of folks who have made professions of faith in
Jesus Christ and for those who have joined our church. We could revel in
the memory of wonderful worship experiences like Maundy Thursday or
Easter Sunday. We could glow with delight in having extended our A
Nights Welcome ministry two more nights to house and feed the homeless.
All of these are positives which our church has experienced, but to
remain reveling in those achievements would be living in the past. Just
as the future was ahead of those ten disciples who sat with fear in that
upper room, the future awaits us too.
We, like the disciples, are in regular need of the refreshing renewal
of the Holy Spirit. It is the empowering of that same Spirit that
encourages us, motivates and moves us to action. The mission of the
church was given to those disciples by the risen Christ. The power to
forgive sins belongs only to God, but Jesus claimed to have this power
and right. What he commits to the disciples and to us is the power and
privilege of giving assurance of the forgiveness of sins by God by
correctly announcing the terms of forgiveness. (A.T.Robertson. Word
Pictures in the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker House
Publishers. 1932. p. 314-5) We are given the honor and privilege of
sharing the good news of salvation with others.
Having a pretty facility and offering activities for children are
great. Helping those who are less fortunate is a privilege. But these
should be an avenue pointing toward a greater prize, that being a
personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Establishing funds for the
renovation and work of the church is a super idea, but the funds should
point to the One who has given the strength and wisdom for work, rather
than to individuals who have given the money.
In the late 1800s, no business matched the financial and political
dominance of the railroad. Trains dominated the transportation industry
of the United States, moving both people and goods throughout the
country. Then a new discovery came along—the car—and incredibly the
leaders of the railroad industry did not take advantage of their unique
position to participate in this transportation development. The
automotive revolution was happening all around them, and they did not
use their industry dominance to take hold of the opportunity.
In his video-tape The Search for Excellence, Tom Peters points
out the reason: The railroad barons didn’t understand what business
they were in. Peters observes that "they thought they were in the
train business. But, they were in fact in the transportation business.
Time passed them by, as did opportunity. They couldn’t see what their
real purpose was." They failed to ask themselves any of the
foundational questions.
A foundational question is one that penetrates to the very essence of
a person, business, or organization. For the railroad industry,
foundational questions would have included "What business are we
in?" and "What is the ultimate goal of all our efforts?"
In other words, the railroad barons needed to get at the heart of what
it was they were trying to do through the railroads. Answering such
questions would have led them to realize that they were not really in
the railroad business at all. They were in the transportation business.
Their ultimate goal was not the preservation of a particular system of
transportation but transportation itself.
Ron Pohuda of the National Audiovisual Association provided a
contemporary example of this same idea when he said, "If Sports
Illustrated magazine understood it was in the sports information
business, not the publishing business, we would have the Sports
Illustrated Channel, not ESPN. This is the power of a foundational
question: It gets underneath momentary methods, tools, and fads, keeping
an organization focused on its most basic identity and objective."
(James Emery White, Rethinking the Church, Baker Books, 1997,
p.23.)
Again, a foundational question is one that penetrates to the very
essence of a person, business, or organization. For the church,
foundational questions should include "What business are we
in?" and "What is the ultimate goal of all our efforts?"
In other words, we need to get at the heart of what it is the risen
Christ has called us to do through the church.
I was deliberate in seeking to "bait and switch" with today’s
sermon title. Are you familiar with "bait and switch?" It is a
sales technique used to lure shoppers into a store under the pretense of
advertising one product and actually selling another one. For some,
"Minding Our Own Business" indicated that we should not butt
into another person’s affairs, that we should remain focused on what
concerns us rather than trying to govern another’s behavior. Minding
our own business is a more grammatically correct way of saying
"Taking care of the business we are in."
The church’s main objective, the church’s primary business is for
people to know Jesus as their Savior. The main goal of the church is to
assist folks in establishing a relationship with the risen Christ.
Fellowship is grand; activities certainly have their place. But if the
church ever loses sight of that vision, then the church fails. Jesus did
not die so that we could enjoy each other’s company and feel good
about having nice furnishings. Jesus died so that we could have abundant
life, eternal life with him, a relationship which would not end.
There are by-products to this relationship: fellowship and nurture
from other believers may highlight that list. But if we become like the
railroad barons and forget what business we are in, if we place too much
emphasis on items of lesser importance and not enough emphasis on the
life-changing experience that Christ died to give us, then we will
forfeit our reason for being.
A church’s value system is a combination of the value systems of
the individuals within it. So in reality, we don’t start with the
church as a whole, but with each of us as individuals. The church’s
main objective becomes the main objective of the individual members. To
reiterate the main objective for the church as establishing a personal
relationship with Jesus, individuals have to make that their main
objective.
The Chairman and CEO of Home Depot is reported to have said the
following:
"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up: It knows it must
run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning, a
lion wakes up: It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will
starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle:
When the sun comes up, you'd better be running. When your feet hit the
floor running in the morning what motivates you? Fear or a sense of
mission? The effectiveness of your Christian life and the life of this
church depends on the motivation: fear or a sense of mission. My prayer
is that our sense of mission will continue to grow out of the
understanding that the church is in the salvation business.