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Series:  Vision - Where MHCC is heading in 2007 3.  Priorities - the heart of this church Dennis Mullen  1.21.7

             Clip from 24

            That was Jack Bauer from 24, who I mentioned last week.  In this episode, Los Angeles faces annihilation at the hands of a terrorist who, as it turns out, worked for Jack on a covert military operation in Kosovo.  There was an explosion.  Jack thought everyone had been killed in his unit except for him (I told you last week you don't want to be friends with him!)  But it turns out, this guy survived and was captured and had been tortured for years.  Obviously, he held a grudge, and now he's holding Los Angeles and indeed the whole U. S. hostage, threatening to unleash a horrible virus...and now Jack realizes its because “We left him behind...I left him behind”.  (from 24, season 3).

            Now this story is fiction, and very unrealistic fiction, and yet this scene moves me.  Jack Bauer isn't exactly a touchy-feely guy, but occasionally he pulls back the tough shell around his heart and reveals some serious regret, even pain, over the people he has lost.  In spite of his just-get-the-job-done attitude, he knows that you just don't leave people behind.  You go in together, you come out together and no one gets left behind for the enemy to do with as they please.

            Today as we continue to talk about the vision for where we believe God wants us to go in 2007 and beyond, I want to introduce a theme that I want us to refer to and measure our work by in 2007 and beyond, and that theme is:

            No one left behind.

            Call it a vision statement, a mantra, a theme for the year, but remember it:  No one left behind.  (Thanks to Jason Young, David Pryor). 

            We face an enemy far more sinister than anything Jack Bauer ever faced, and far more powerful too.  And the consequences of getting left behind to fall into his grasp are far more serious than even the awful things that the writers of 24 dreamed up for this soldier who got left behind.

            Today's message:  Priorities – the heart of this church. I want to talk about three implications of the vision No One Left Behind.  Now in your bulletin each week we list seven priorities and we think they're all absolutely vital.  But based on some study, prayer, and discussions with the elders and other ministers, I have been led to focus on three of them, and I ask you help me make improvement in these three areas our top priorities here at MHCC in 2007.  When I consider that we want to make sure that there is no one left behind, these three areas seem like the ones where most improvement is needed.

            First, no one left behind speaks to Community, which was our topic last week.  Acts 2:42-47 describes our goal.  42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.  That is a radical departure from the typical way of life in America, and even the typical Christian way of life.  In our culture, it is exactly in the area of community where many people are left behind.  Sociologists tell us that we are more isolated than ever (and we know it) even if we are “connected” to hundreds of people online.  That's why building community will be one of our top priorities in 2007, and as it says on the objectives and expectations page in your bulletin, we want people to “relate to one another through ongoing small group interaction” and we expect that “people will build deep spiritual friendships through our small groups.”  But this isn't easy.

            To illustrate:  Last Sunday I announced that it would be great if today, everybody could leave church and go to someone’s house to eat and get to know one another, and I asked for people with hospitality gifts to sign up to host this.  Well we did get a fair response, and though we’re doing it on a limited basis, it didn’t turn out like I hoped, and some of the reasons for that illustrate our problems with community (even in a loving church like this where many of us have FOUND community, Christian brothers and sisters).

            One reason this experiment didn’t turn out as well as I hoped was that a few people had other plans.  They said, “We’d like to do this, but we’ll be out-of-town next Sunday” or “We already have something else we have to do after church”.    Very understandable.  No problem there.

            A second reason is that a number of people were simply uncomfortable with spontaneous hospitality, the idea of having a dinner and not being sure who would come.  If I had suggested that we take a few weeks and have sign-up lists and make sure the thing was fully-programmed and given everyone time to get used to the idea, I think we could have pulled it off.  A few people even said that they were afraid that NO ONE would come to their house, and I think the issue isn’t that they would have lots of food and no guests, but that they would feel rejected.  I have to admit that this is a possibility, but I think it’s a small risk compared to the importance of developing community, and certainly is a risk worth taking.

            The third reason that this idea didn’t go over very well is that I sense many folks who don’t have hospitality gifts and who wouldn’t sign up to host something like this also feel that the LAST thing they want to do is impose on someone else and go eat their food, so a lot of us took the attitude:  “I’ll just stay home.  If I can’t provide a meal, I sure don’t want to receive one.”

            Reasons 2 and 3 illustrate the problem, the attitude of individualism that we talked about last week.  We say:  “If I’m going to do this, I want to be in control.  I don’t want chaos.  I want to know who will be coming and what they like to eat and I want to plan where everyone will sit.  AND:  I don’t want to take someone else’s ‘charity’.  If I could feed someone else at my table, I would, but no one needs to feed me!” 

            I’ll simply say that those attitudes generally don’t enter in when you’re thinking in terms of family.  If your mom or your son or daughter invites you over to eat and you can go, you don’t worry about “charity”, you just take it as a blessing of grace!  And if you’re making sandwiches for lunch and a sister or brother walks in, you don’t worry about etiquette, you just say:  “Why don’t you join us?”

            Now I’ll admit that all of this comes a little harder when the family we’re talking about happens to be brothers and sisters in Christ that we don’t know yet, or don’t know very well.  But that is the very attitude we need to work on, one that some of you have overcome already, but one that many of us still haven’t gotten past, that attitude of individualism, of “I provide for myself and I don’t let others serve me. 

            Well, the bottom line for today is that we took the 8-9 people who signed up to host and assigned them as many visitors and new MHCC people that we could, and told the host families during this past week to give people a call and invite others over.  So today we DON’T have the opportunity I hoped we would have to say to you “Go out into the Atrium and find someone who is hosting, and go eat with them.”  Now you could still make that happen, at least on a smaller scale.  Grab some people (some you know and some you don’t) and get pizza or go to a restaurant or go home and make sandwiches and eat together and get to know one another.  You could do it ANY Sunday.  But I hope you see the hurdles we need to lift ourselves over.

            (A good start yesterday at a men's breakfast....thanks to Doyte Hay...and don't forget the women's tea tomorrow night).

            Community is hard, but it is harder than it should be.  I’m reading a book right now by Shane Claiborne called The Irresistible Revolution.  Claiborne is a 31-year-old Christian, an ordinary radical he calls himself, who with friends started a different kind of community in inner-city Philadelphia, and he says in his book:

 

"Once we...muster up the courage to try living in new ways, most of us find that community is very natural and makes a lot of sense, and that it is not as foreign to most of the world's population as it is to us.  Community is what we are created for.  We are made in the image of a God who is community, a plurality of oneness."

 

            If God is relational and we are made in his image, then we were made for community.  And Christ designed his church as a body – not a philosophical school, not a series of weekly self-improvement seminars, but a body of interdependent parts.  That is how the NT teaches us to live.  So community should be natural for us, and it is in the sense that something inside us cries out for it.  But SIN separates us and isolates us and makes us value rugged individualism more than community, and it keeps us apart, and so we have the situation where people want community, they need brothers and sisters in Christ, but they are left behind.

            So “no one left behind” reminds us that building community needs to be a top value here at MHCC.  And to build it, we need to be willing to tear down the idol of individualism, and mock it, and live in a way that opposes it and pulls people out of isolation and into community.

 

            Second:  No one left behind speaks to Evangelism as well.  “Evangelism” is a churchy-sounding word, and because of the way people talked about evangelism in the church where I grew up, I always thought of it as some sort of sales pitch where you pinned down some stranger on a plane or some relative at a funeral and laid out the plan of salvation and told them that it was a limited-time offer that they’d better accept today.  But understand that “evangel” is simply the message of good news.  We have good news about peace with God, forgiveness and freedom from sin and its consequences (eternal and temporal) and also good news about being joined together in a Christian family in real community with sisters and brothers in Christ.  So evangelism simply refers to sharing that good news.

            Matthew 28:18-20 contains Jesus’ instructions to his church right before he ascended into heaven.  We call these words “The Great Commission” which may be why I thought that evangelism was a sales pitch - "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

            We think that obedience to the Great Commission is so important, that our FIRST objective is to - Reach...our neighbors and world with the relevant message of Jesus Christ, and the corresponding expectation is that “Lost people find Christ through our witness.”

            And yet:  If ever there was something that we talked about more than community yet practiced less than community, it is reaching our neighbors and world with the good news.  Why do we have this problem?

            One reason is that I’m sure many of us do not really understand what the Good News really is.  If we were in a small class right now, I’d give you a minute or two to write down in 50 words what the essence of the Good News really is, the heart of it, the indispensable core of the message that we just KNOW people need to hear.  Now you DID know it at one time.  You responded to it.  It’s just that you’ve heard so many other things in the meantime that you know are true and maybe even important and the heart of the good news has gotten a bit fuzzy.

            Ask folks outside the church to tell you what evangelical Christians are all about, and what do you think you’ll hear?  Republican politics.  Opposition to gay marriage, opposition to abortion.  If you ask them:  “What’s the heart of the Christian message?” they might say:  “That you’re a sinner who needs to get right with God or face hell.”

            Now, my faith teaches me some important things about social issues, which BTW also include war, violence, commercialism and of course poverty, which Jesus spent so much time speaking about and living in!  But the heart of the Good news, the essence of it which makes it GOOD...do we know what this is?  

            How about these truths:  Forgiveness of sins, but with it FREEDOM from our sins and addictions; peace with God; the love of a heavenly father; a community of sisters and brothers, purpose in this life, eternal life for this age and the age to come.

            Wouldn’t you agree that these are pretty close to the heart of the good news?

            The other reason why we emphasize evangelism more than we do it is that we don’t really know how to do it.  And in a way, I have tricked you here by listing the central truths of the Gospel message, because doing that (which is important) is what makes the Gospel sound like a sales pitch.  How many times do you see Jesus sit down and tell someone the essence of the Good News in a list, or even list the steps to salvation?  He didn’t.  What he did was use stories, word-pictures and especially his life – which exuded love, forgiveness and the power of God – to draw people to follow him.

            I’m thinking of a couple of times when Jesus actually did sit down with people, when he had a chance for some one-on-one evangelism.  With Nicodemus, one of the established religious leaders who apparently had a genuine heart for God, Jesus told him:     JN 3:3 … “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

            Next chapter, to the woman at the well:    JN 4:10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."  Each of these led to an interesting and partly confusing conversation that did not end in an invitation to accept Christ but DID invite these people to follow Jesus into the Kingdom. 

            Jesus talked all the time about the good news, and it was usually in stories, and the one that gets the closest to summing up the essential core of the Good News is in Luke 15 where Jesus says:  “A certain man had two sons…one demanded his inheritance and went off and squandered it in wild living…and decided to return home and ask forgiveness…and while he was still a long way off…”

            And more than anything, Jesus communicated the essence of the good news not through his words but through his life, his love, through his friendships with outcasts, by eating dinner with them, and through the power of God revealed in the miracles he did. 

            My point in all of this is that what we call evangelism, sharing the good news, is probably more organic and less clinical than we realize, meaning that it flows out of a life that is lived FOR God WITH people (here’s that emphasis on community again) and some of the people here who do it best may not even think of it as evangelism, but they are intentional about serving others in love and giving glory to God.

            We’re going to devote March to talking about sharing the Good News, and we’re going to emphasize the relational aspect of it with Bill Hybels’ idea of “Just Walk Across the Room”.  But I want you to understand how important it needs to be here at MHCC.

 

And third, no one left behind also speaks to our fight against poverty and pain, that which exists around us and that which exists around the world.  Another of our objective is that we:  Relieve...the pain of those who suffer.  Jesus said in Matthew 25:40 that “...whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”  (And of course a few verses later, whatever we neglected to do, we neglected to do it for him).  Therefore we expect that “people who are hurting find relief and help here.” 

I heard Tony Campolo speak in 2004 on gay marriage, and after a 70 minute talk, which was very important and enlightening, he said:  “We know that Jesus didn't directly speak about gay marriage.  But he did speak about the poor”.  And then he went into a brief but powerful appeal about supporting the poor through the ministry of Compassion International (and I have posted a short clip from his talk on my blog at morrisonhill.com.  Jesus didn't speak directly about many of the important social issues of our day, some of the things we evangelicals major on.  But he not only spoke about how we treat the poor, and his own lifestyle was one of voluntary poverty and his ministry was an example to us of ministry to the poor. 

I won't say more about this now, but it will come up later and it will be a strong emphasis here in 2007 so that it can continue to be a strong emphasis here in the years to come, right up until the Lord returns. 

 

Let's close by thinking about that Day when the Lord returns, or (if he tarries) the day you and I pass from this life.  In either case, we will come before God, and the only thing that will matter is what you and I have done about Jesus Christ.  Did you admire him from a distance?  Did you pick and choose from among his teachings to enhance your lifestyle?  Did you say “Thanks for the sacrifice, but no thanks, because I'm pretty decent?”  Or did you surrender your life completely to him, accept his payment for your sin, and claim him as your Savior and Lord?

This is the day to do that...

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