“More.” Sum up what is defined as better in American culture in one word, and that word would be, in my humble opinion, More.
One
is good, three is great, five is better.
More
means “newer”. Why settle for the Apple
Iphone 4 when the Apple Iphone 5 is naturally superior? Why?
Because it’s got more. And rumor has it the map app is fixed…
In
2001, the first version of HALO came out, and it has been consistently amongst
the best first person shooter games on the market. In 2014, HALO 5 is on its way.
You
know why? More. Every new version has more. More guns, more apps, more enemies, more
death and destruction, more realism, more and more and more.
More
is built into family life. Start off in
the apartment, save up for more, the starter home, with the expectation that
you will sell that house when the kids come along…why? Because you need more! More family, more kids, more!
Consider
the armed forces. Built into the culture
is the quest for more rank. You rise in
the ranks or you die. Period. If you are an amazing major, happy in the
role, excellent at fulfilling the duties required, it will be a death knell to
your career if you choose to stay there.
Take an amazing major, and you promote him or her. And who knows, an adequate lieutenant colonel
may then become an incompetent bird colonel.
How do you fix that? Brigadier
General!!
There
is even a phrase for this phenomenon, not just in military life but in every
organization where “more” is expected.
One “rises to one’s level of incompetence.” There is a certain humor in that statement,
but there is also enough truth to make it uncomfortable.
MORE
also affects the church. What do we want
in church? More people and more
money. That allows us to do more things,
appeal to more demographics, to do more programs, to appeal to more folks, to
get more people, who bring more money.
See how the spiral accelerates?
More
is better. It’s a cultural mantra.
Today,
we define our churches today by the “more” standard: A: healthy-which by
definition means more people or B. unhealthy, a shrinking population-NOT MORE
people. More is health, more is success,
more is better.
And
at first glance, the Bible seems to promote the ideal that churches must have
more.
Consider
the Great Commission. Go out and make
disciples of ALL the world. Put that
together with a cultural expectation that more is better and is it any surprise
that More is the “magic bullet” for the church?
And,
as if to reinforce this ideal, there are, in our country, the mega churches,
where “more” is enshrined, places with thousands of members, flexing great
power and influence in their communities.
They are the ones you see on TV, the ones I hear about in the seminars
and courses offered to pastors for the growth and expansion of their churches.
Is
“more” what a church has to do in order to be a success? By the world’s measure, are we of the small
churches just a collective failure?
So
now we come to Peter, chief of Jesus’ apostles.
He is writing a regional letter, to be carried to the churches across
the sections of the empire where he has traveled. Unlike his comrade Paul, who wrote so to
individual churches, Peter provides us with more general information, a wider
point of view of the how and the what and the why of church.
And
after his introductions, here is how he starts off his discussion about being a
successful church: Rid yourselves of
malice, guile, insincerity, envy, and slander.
Let’s discuss these terms:
Malice: the wish or intent to do harm
Guile: cunning and deceitfulness
Insincerity: not reflecting true feelings,
often of resentfulness
Envy: wanting what someone else has
Slander: the act of saying something false
or malicious to damage someone else.
For Peter, the first step is to clear the
spiritual decks of our lives of all these things that hurt and undercut other
people. Every term he puts out describes
people cutting down other people. Once
these things are gone we are like “newborn infants, longing for the pure,
spiritual milk, so that by it we may grow into salvation.”
Did
you know this is how we start worship each Sunday? It is why we have a Prayer of
Confession. We lead off worship with
praise to our God that we can come to Him, but then we recognize the
accumulations of sinful garbage and corruption that builds up in our lives,
and, by our group and individual prayers, we ask the Lord to flush it out of
our lives.
And,
as tempting as it is, I am not going to build on that flushing metaphor.
Instead,
I am going to go for the cheap laugh and tell you the metaphor in the passage
is about getting stoned, Jesus-style. To
quote: “Jesus is the living stone and we are called to be living stones as
well, built up by Christ.”
With
Jesus, it is not about the numbers, not about the more.
The
verses of our stone metaphor set two groups of people in contrast to one
another, believers and unbelievers. Now,
in the modern church, the following interpretation seems to carry forward. The world is divided into believers and
unbelievers, the heaven-bound and the hell-bound. Their dividing line is Believers and
Everybody Else. The race is to bring as
many unbelievers into the fold as possible before the game is over and they are
all condemned.
I
don’t think this is exactly what Peter is getting at.
For
believers, the modern interpretation is spot on with Peter. Jesus is the living stone, the cornerstone,
chosen and precious in God’s sight. We
are called to surrender ourselves to Him, to allow him to build us as living
stones into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. We are believers.
But
modern interpretation diverges from Peter when it comes to defining the
unbeliever. For Peter, the unbeliever is
not “everybody else” once you’ve separated out the believers. No, the unbeliever is the one who heard the
message and rejected it.
Good news for those who believe, bad news for
those who rejected him. Peter defines
the unbeliever specifically. They
rejected the cornerstone, they disobeyed God, and now the living stone of Jesus
is for them a stumbling block, something they fall over. They have been destined for rejection by God.
This
is so critical in Peter’s thinking.
There are believers and unbelievers.
Both sets have heard the gospel message, and they made their
choice. There is a third group that
Peter does not address and that modern thinking lumps with the
unbelievers. It is the great mass of
those who have not made a choice, who have not truly heard the message, what we
may call non-believers.
So
here is the takeaway. If I, as a Christian, divide the world
into two camps, the believers and the unbelievers. If
I brand everyone who is not a believer as unbeliever and therefore hell-bound,
I have misinterpreted what the Scripture has to tell us.
And
if my belief is that I have to get
the gospel message to every person by every means necessary. If
I have gotten caught in the trap that more is better in church, because of that
thinking, more in heaven is better than more in hell, I have missed the point
of what Peter is trying to say to us. If I have done all these things, what I
have done is taken the control of the church out of God’s hands and decided
that I know better.
What
Peter says is that the unbelievers are already condemned for the choices that
they have made. For him, unbelievers
have rejected Christ completely. Can
they change their minds? Sure, but that
is God’s purview, not ours.
What
Peter does say is the following:
1.
God
builds the church. We are simply called
upon to let him.
2.
God
is building us into a holy priesthood, a spiritual house, not as individuals,
but as a community, as a neighborhood.
3.
We
are built up into this holy priesthood so that we can offer spiritual
sacrifices.
That is the endgame. For Peter, the definition of successful
church is how that church connects its people to the power of the Living God.
It
isn’t about winning souls for Christ, it isn’t about building our numbers, it
isn’t about achieving status as a ‘mega-church’. It is about offering spiritual sacrifices.
So,
“What’s a spiritual sacrifice?” It is
based on the Old Testament system of sacrifice.
Here is a quick summary of what sacrifices were offered for: During the
harvest, the first fruits of the gifts God gave his people were offered back to
the Lord in a sacrifice. Sacrifices were
made in dedication to the Lord, for a newborn child, for a marriage, for a time
of personal retreat to come closer to the Almighty. Perhaps best known was that atonement was
made for sins committed by an animal sacrifice.
The penalty for sin was an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, blood for
blood. The animal was the substitute for
the person in question-blood for blood.
The
final sacrifice of blood for blood was made in Jesus Christ, who died on the
cross for our sins. His atonement was
sufficient for the sins of the world and carried within it the grace that leads
to our salvation.
The
blood for the sacrifice has been given once for all, but the need for the
sacrifice remains. We still need to
thank the Lord for the blessings that we have been given. That has not changed across the bible. We still dedicate things to the Lord, like
our children when we have them baptized.
We know God is the giver of all and we celebrate that. And we continue to sin, we continue to hurt
others, and ourselves. And our spiritual
sacrifices are what we do to overcome those sins with good.
Our
spiritual sacrifices are how we seek forgiveness and forgive other people. But our spiritual sacrifices are not just
reactive, but proactive. We feed the
hungry, we cloth the naked, we visit the sick.
Our faith has been at the vanguard of very socially progressive movement
designed to help the basic plight of humanity.
Because of that, we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, God’s own people, in order that you may
proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his
marvelous light,
Proclaim them by the words we
speak, and proclaim them by the spiritual sacrifices that we offer to our God
in a world do very much in need.
And
the bonus is that as we touch the lives of nonbelievers, as we invite them into
the priesthood God has set for us, we do see people coming in, not because of
the fear of hell, but we, as God’s church, are seeking to bring people closer
to God, through the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.
More
is defined in each of us, more sharing, more spiritual sacrifices to reach out
to others, more giving of the faith that Jesus builds within us, those are the
things of true spiritual growth.
Amen.
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