Setting Sail: Following the North Star
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Setting Sail: Weighing Anchor
Matthew
8:18-22
June 15, 2014
Now when Jesus saw great crowds around
him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and
said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes
have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to
lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and
bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their
own dead.”
This is an odd passage. It really reflects badly on Jesus,
making him seem very insensitive. One guy steps forward, pledging to follow
him, and Jesus basically responds, “I’m a
wanderer. You don’t want this kind of life.” Why would he discourage
someone who wants to follow? The other, a disciple who goes unnamed, is
grieving over his dead father. Jesus basically says, “So sorry for your loss. Now,… either come with me or forget it.” Is
this how you treat the people who like you,… who want to follow you?
Why do you think Jesus was so mean? This seems to go
against the whole image we have of him as a man of deep love and sensitivity. Was
he really that insensitive? Was he trying to discourage his followers? Is this
the way to build a lasting movement?
Actually, I think he was trying to give a very blunt
message to those who say they want to serve God: If you’re going to sail with me, you have to pull up your anchor, serve
God, and trust the ways of the Spirit.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this phrase, or said it
yourself, but when I was younger I used to hear people say, “I want the church to be my anchor.” I
don’t know that people still say or think it, but it’s still a common sentiment
among many Christians today, even if they don’t say it the same way.
What do you think it means when we say that we want the
church or our faith to be an anchor? It means that in an ever-changing world,
people want their church and their faith to be the one thing that’s constant.
They don’t want change. Why? Because in a world of change, where else can we be
safe? Think about the way the world is today. Everything constantly changes.
For example, those of us who, in the 1970s and 80s were up on the latest audio
technology, who had the best turntable, the best tuner and amplifier, and the
greatest set of Boston Acoustics speakers, are now intimidated by our smart
phones because we feel like they are so much smarter than we are. There has
been more change in the past 40 years than in the previous 200. The change from
horses to cars, or from radios to televisions, has not been nowhere near as
dramatic as the technological changes in terms of the sheer access to
information, entertainment, news, communication, travel, and so much more. When
life changes this rapidly and dramatically, what are the constants? People want
something safe.
The desire for the church, religion, and faith to be an
anchor is a problem, though. The problem is that if your faith or your church
is an anchor, your ship really isn’t doing what it’s intended to do. What are
the reasons you drop an anchor? It is to be in the harbor as you either load up
or unload cargo. Or it is to be repaired and repainted. When a ship is at
anchor, it is not really serving its purpose. The purpose of a ship is to be at
sea—either going to new places, bringing goods and services to new places, or
bringing people to new places. A church that is an anchor is doing none of
those things. It does not serve others, it does not bring God to others, and it
does not help us to move to where God is calling us to go.
The Christian life is meant to be like a ship at sea
where we’re willing to go where the Spirit takes us. But if we stay at harbor,
we never really fulfill our purpose. In fact, if we stay at harbor, we are in
one of the most dangerous places to be. It may feel safe, but if we are at
anchor and a storm hits, we increase the danger of shipwreck and destruction
exponentially. We are too close to shore, which means our ship could be tossed
onto the shore and broken. The anchor also holds us in place while the waves
crash, meaning that there is also a significant danger of the ship being pulled
under the waves.
Even if the ship goes a bit offshore and anchors near the
shore, it can be dangerous. There’s the possibility of being tossed onto the
rocks. The safest place for a ship is actually out at sea in a storm. It is
frightening. It can make us sick from the motion. It can feel extremely
dangerous. But it is much safer than being at harbor and at anchor. It is also
much truer to the spiritual life. Sailing on the winds of the Spirit can lead
us to stormy times. Just because we say “yes” to God doesn’t mean that
everything will go well. It does mean that God will be with us to see us
through. If we try too hard to keep the church at anchor, or our lives at
anchor, we end up serving little purpose and not serving God.
We’re called to be a people who are willing to sail on
new adventures with God. A ship’s purpose is to serve, and so is ours. I see
how members of Calvin Church keep the church sailing all the time. For example,
two of our members, Kim Boyd and Kathy Efaw, are heading to Ghana on a mission
trip this summer. They are willing to pull up anchor and set sail for a
completely new place with completely new experiences. In the next month we will
be sending mission trips to Camp Westminster in Michigan where are our teens will
help the camp in its mission to reach out to inner city children. Then we’ll
send another mission trip to the Wayside mission in Louisville, Kentucky to
help in their ministry to the homeless and broken.
This setting sail isn’t just about going somewhere else.
This fall we are starting a new partnership with EnCompass Point, an
afterschool program for teens between the ages of 12 and 16. It is a ministry
to children who are often left alone at home in the afterschool hours—hours
when teens are most likely to engage in risky behavior, drug experimentation,
and crimes. We are trying to create a safe place for teens to be during those
critical hours in a program that offers adult mentors, tutoring, games,
teaching healthy living, and more.
How did this program get started? It got started because
one of our newer members, Rich Gigliotti (he and his wife, Ashley, just had
their first baby this past Monday), felt a calling to help teens who were
basically being ignored. He has taken a chance to set sail rather than to stay
safe at harbor. This is an opportunity for you, also, to set sail. During the
summer we will be looking for volunteers who can offer to be part of the
program for one, two, three, four, or five afternoons a week. All you have to
do is to be a person who cares about making a difference in teens’ lives.
Another group that set sail is a choir that many of our
members belong to, the Circle of Friends Choir. This is a choir that developed
out of a very bad situation when they felt they could no longer continue as a
church choir in another church in the area after their director, David English,
was asked to step down. Many members of that choir felt they could no longer
remain in the church. The fifteen-member choir, no longer part of a church,
could have folded up and licked their wounds, looking for any safe harbor to
plop anchor in. Instead, they decided to become a community choir serving as a
mission to other churches, organizations, and charitable opportunities. Many of
their members, including their director, belong to Calvin Presbyterian Church,
but many don’t. It is not our church’s choir, even though they rehearse here.
They have grown to be a choir of almost forty members who are incredible. They
sing old songs. They sing new songs. They have a creative flair that is
wonderful. And they make a difference for others by being a choir intended to
serve others. This is weighing anchor and setting sail, even if it means
setting sail out of the storms.
This kind of pulling up anchor and setting sail is what
our passage is all about. Jesus wasn’t trying to be mean or insensitive. He was
simply telling the scribe that sailing with him in serving God was going to be
difficult, not easy, and he had to be ready to sleep on the ground, eat crappy
food, and wander as they served God together. To the other disciple he was
saying that there is little time, and they had work to do with the living to
prepare them for life after death, as well as for life in this life. He wasn’t
being insensitive, he was telling them all to make sure they had their
priorities.
This passage arrives in Matthew 8 amidst of a series of
passages about faith. First there was a passage in which a leper, an outcast,
comes to Jesus for healing. Then a centurion, a soldier in command of over 80
men, comes to Jesus asking that his servant be healed. Jesus tells him that it
will take time for him to get to his house. The centurion replies that Jesus is
a commander much like himself, and that all Jesus has to do is to command that
the servant be made well and he would be healed. Jesus proclaims this man, a
pagan, to have more faith than all the Jews of Israel.
Then comes our passage, telling us that we need to be
ready to follow in faith no matter what happens. This is followed by a passage
in which Jesus and the disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. A
terrible storm rises up, and the ship is tossed to and fro as Jesus rests in
the bow asleep. The disciples wake him up, asking him to still the storm. Jesus
stills the storm, and then criticizes them for having such little faith and not
trusting that God would care for them.
Our passage for today comes in the midst of all that, and
it is a passage that tells the scribe and disciple that if they are to follow
in faith, they need to be willing to make faith in God the priority, not
security and safety. This is our call, too. We are called to pull up our
anchors, whatever that means for each of us, and to find a way to serve God.
Amen.
Setting Sail: Catching the Wind
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Following Visions
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Act
16:6-10
June 1, 2014
They went through the region of
Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word
in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia,
but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went
down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of
Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia,
being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
Have you ever read a book that changed your life? I’m not
talking about that self-help book that got you through a crisis, or a technical
book that helped you figure out your career. I’m talking about the book that
changed everything because after you read it you no longer saw life the same
way. Your perspective on people, work, the world, and God changed. For me, that
book was Catherine Marshall’s book, Beyond
Ourselves.
What made this book so life-changing for me was her basic
premise that God is here, God wants to make a difference in our lives, and all
we have to do is open up, which she then demonstrated through story after story.
At the center of her book were these three basic ideas:
1.
God knows the
past, present, and future, and knows what’s best for us.
- God loves us so much that God wants to guide us to what’s right.
- God can communicate to us what’s right, but we have to listen
Marshall discovered these principles almost by
accident. She says that her first big, and somewhat trivial, experience of
these ideas came about when she tried to hang some curtains. She had seen
curtains hung a certain way in a magazine and wanted to hang them in a similar
way. No matter what she did, though, the curtain rod kept bowing. She invited a
friend over to help her, and after an hour neither could figure it out. After
her friend left, she tried again, but soon became discouraged. Going up to her
bedroom she cried in frustration. She lied on the bed very still, and she heard
a voice inside her say, “Do it this way,” and she sensed a series of steps she
was to do. She went downstairs and did it. It was perfect. She felt that it was
God.
She even admits that this is SO trivial, yet she noticed
in it that God seems to want to be part of even the trivial moments of our
lives. She discovered God’s presence more profoundly in a healing experience
she had that changed her life. In her thirties she contracted tuberculosis, and
it slowly degraded her life. Tuberculosis is a disease of the lungs that slowly
kills. It’s rare now because of the many antibiotics we have that cure people
of tuberculosis. When she got it in the 40s, there wasn’t much treatment for
it. For her, it eventually rendered her bedridden. She became helpless.
She had been reading about the need to relinquish and
surrender ourselves to God, so she decided to do so. Mustering all the strength
she had while spending the summer in Cape Cod, she forced herself out of her
bed. With all the energy she had left, walked to the beach. There she started
praying. She began by confessing to God, telling God about her doubts, fears,
and lack of faith. She offered herself to God and said that she would serve God
no matter what happened in her life. Finally, she asked God for healing. Afterwards,
feeling a bit more energetic and as though God was in her life, she walked back
to her bed.
Over the next few months, she continued to pray for
healing, and as she did she slowly recovered. The strength returned, and one
year later there was no sign of the tuberculosis in her lungs. She was healed.
What made an impact on me wasn’t just this
experience, but how she reflected on it afterwards: “It was not until after my entering-in experience in 1944 that the inner
Voice became a reality to me. Apparently this surrender of self is necessary
groundwork, since not even God can lead us until we want to be led. It is as if
we are given an inner receiving set at birth, but the set is not tuned in until
we actively turn our lives over to God.”
Catherine Marshall led me to discover amazing Christians
I hadn’t heard of before--people like George Müller, who started an orphanage
based on prayer in the 1850s, and over 40 years grew from 4 orphans to over
2050. She led me to people like Brother Lawrence, who wrote about turning
everything into prayer—sweeping floors, washing dishes, and more.
Her writings led me to experience similar things,
and it led me to try her approach to life and ministry, which led us at Calvin
Presbyterian Church to experience similar things. The fact is that Calvin
Presbyterian Church has been a church that has grown because we live by Catherine
Marshall’s principles.
It’s these principles, and others like it that, have led
us to our mission to Trinity Presbyterian Church, which we are embarking on
today. We are helping Trinity to recover from a crisis that’s led them to
shrink from 200 members to 17 over a three-year period. And we are doing it
because we believe God is both calling us, and because God has great things in
store for Trinity if we are willing to join God in what God is doing.
One of the people who has also inspired me the way
Marshall did is a Southern Baptist writer (a Canadian one,… go figure) named
Henry Blackaby. He has listed Seven
Realities of Experiencing God that have guided me in my life and ministry,
and that speak to both what we try to do at Calvin Church and are going to try
at Trinity Church. He realities are:
1.
God is always working around you.
2.
God pursues a continuing love relationship that is
real and personal.
3.
God invites you to become involved with Him in His
work.
4.
God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible,
prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His
ways.
5.
God’s invitation for you to work with Him always
leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.
6.
You must make major adjustments in your life to join
God in what He is doing.
7.
You come to know God by experience as you obey Him
and He accomplishes His work through you.
I want you to focus most on numbers 5 & 6. Too
many people think doing what God works with us, life gets easier. What this
says is that often doing what God wants leads us to a crisis, and that crisis
moves us to number 6. When we seek to do what God wants, we have to adjust our
lives.
This is what we are doing with Trinity Church. They’ve
gone through a crisis of faith and action. They’ve prayed. We’ve joined them in
prayer, and we are adjusting ourselves to join them in what God is doing there and
here. We have to change. Trinity has to change. We all have to adjust to what
God is doing.
God has plans for Trinity Presbyterian Church. God has
plans for Calvin Presbyterian Church. What we are doing there isn’t the
beginning, but it is the next big step. We are all being called forward, and
God has great things planned, but we can only go forward if we are willing to
join God in what God is doing.
Amen.
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