April 25, 2010
What’s Right with It? - Revelation 5
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadAs I am sure that you know by now, our baby boy, Jack, was born last Tuesday, April 13th, two days before the tax deadline. I was on pins and needles the last time I was here, waiting for his – or what may have been her – arrival. I cannot possibly describe the joy that we have had since I saw you last. Watching your child come into the world is always a beautiful thing. The delivery was almost picture perfect. There were no complications at all with either Leah or the baby. Everything was perfect. And, of course, I would be remiss to say that I wasn’t just a little bit proud that we had a boy, some more testosterone in the family, somebody to take my side in family disputes and to carry the Maybry name into posterity. To say that I am proud of John Robertson Maybry, of Jack, is quite the understatement.
We took Jack home last Thursday. We thought that we’d all go to sleep around 10:00 that night. Jack had other ideas. Jack had his days and nights confused for a few days, which is par for the course for infants. If you have talked to me any over the last several days, I have told you that the baby is healthy, that his mother is recovering nicely, that his sisters have adjusted very well to him, and that we are very tired, even “bleary eyed.”
There’s just something wrong with that whole thing. Why do we go so quickly from positive, ecstasy almost, to negative? It happens all the time, actually. I cannot tell you how many couples come into my office for pre-marital counseling just to tell me that everything is groovy. “How do you resolve your conflicts,” I’ll ask. “We’ve never had a conflict,” they’ll respond. “What about your future in-laws,” I’ll ask. “I love my future mother-in-law,” they’ll respond. “Do ya’ll ever get on each others’ nerves,” I’ll ask. “Never,” they say. And then, ten years later, it’s all negative. Everything is negative. Young couples engaged to be married are almost always overly optimistic, and couples who have been married for ten or so years are almost always overly pessimistic. The same thing happens at work. Why do they tell you in your reviews about all the bad stuff? And the same thing happens in churches. It is very true that pastors have honeymoon phases, and after that phase ends, it’s so tempting for both the pastor and the church just to see the negative in each other.
In this Revelation that he has shared with us, John certainly sees the negative. This letter was originally written to seven churches in Asia. Everyone of them was messed up, big time. The one thing that makes me feel better about the Church in America today is seeing how messed up the Church in Asia was then. Ephesus had lost its first love. Smyrna was about to suffer. Pergamum had upheld false teaching. Thyatira had tolerated fornication and food sacrificed to idols. Sardis was not obeying God’s Word. Sardis had only a few people who had not “soiled their clothes,” John said. John said that said some at Philadelphia were of the “synagogue of Satan.” Laodicea was neither “cold nor hot.” I am about to “spit you out of my mouth,” John says.
Negative. It’s all negative. I shudder to think what he’d say about Central Steele Creek. I like to think that things are going pretty well here. I hear we have a pretty good preacher, anyway. And I know for a fact that you take care of your preacher very well. I assure you that if John’s Churches had fed him as well as this Church has fed me, then he would have been much happier. What do you think John would find here? What are our negatives? We need more Bible study, for one. We’re working on that. We need to reach out to the community more. We’re working on that, too. We need to build our children and youth programs. We’re working on that, too.
Before I got here, in the interim period, I understand ya’ll spent some time filling out surveys and self studies and mission studies and community studies. What did you learn? What are your negatives? And, what are you good at? Maybe that’s the question that we need to consider. Any old Tom, Dick, & Harry can tell us how we’re messed up, and the way to get better is just to fix how we’re messed up. But maybe the thing we ought to consider is not what is wrong with us, but what is right with us. Maybe instead of trying to be something that we’re not, we ought to be who God says that we already are.
Now to be fair, John does focus on the positives with all the churches. It’s certainly not all negative. John really focuses on the positive, though, in the chapter that we just read. The positive is not so much something that they, the people, have done, but what has been done for them. The positive in all seven of those churches, and in this church, is Jesus. It may be a blinding flash of the obvious, but Jesus is the lynchpin that makes a church a Church. Jesus is what separates us from other organizations. Jesus is the center. We exist for nothing else than to enjoy God, and worship him, and glorify him. “I believe that,” according to the Heidelberg Catechism, “from the beginning to the end of the whole human race, the Son of God (Jesus), by his Spirit and his Word, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself, a congregation chosen for eternal life. Moreover, I believe that I am and forever will remain a living member of it.” Jesus is the lynchpin of us. We may have a few things wrong with us as a Church, and we may do a few things well, but Jesus is what’s right with us.
Much of the Bible depicts God as being very intimate with us. In fact, in the second Chapter of Genesis, God walks with Adam through the garden and talks with him. We like that aspect of God. “I come to the garden alone, while the due is still on the roses,” one of our favorite hymns says. “And the voice I hear falling on my ear the Son of God discloses. And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own. And the joy I share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” We talk about our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which is very intimate. In fact, a popular country music song says this about God: we fit together like two peas in a pod, me and God.
And yet much of the Bible talks about God as being wholly other. When the shepherds saw the angels in the Christmas story, they were terrified. When Isaiah encountered God in the Temple in Isaiah 6, he was afraid because nobody had ever seen God and lived. “I’ll bet Isaiah had one heck of sunburn,” a friend of mine said. Moses met God on the top of the mountain and came down glowing red. Elijah saw only the back of God, but could not face the front.
John’s Revelation of God is one of those, where God is completely other. There’s none of this two-peas-in-a-pod stuff. The very idea of God makes you do a face plant in fear and awe. In this passage in Revelation 5, the whole world, every creature that ever was, on the earth, above the earth, below the earth, and in the sea bows down to worship God. That has to be a really big Church. This God, this Jesus is totally other, and we aren’t even worthy to utter his name, much less behold him.
And yet this wholly other God has acted on our behalf. This God has given us the time of day. In fact, John sees in this Revelation that nobody is able to unroll the scroll and fix the human story, so he weeps. But then he sees this lamb, this slaughtered lamb, this God who is able to fix us and does fix us. The outcome of what Jesus fixes is the Church. And that, friends, is what’s right with us. That’s what I think John is saying to those churches in Asia and to this church. We have all kinds of negatives, but the Church has this other aspect to it. The Church has Jesus. How else do you explain Central Steele Creek? Our history is one of fallible and flawed people, and our future will be, too. We don’t have a bright future, we don’t have any future at all simply because we have a great preacher, or because we have nice family life center, or a nice pipe organ, or a nice choir, or because we’ll find a way to be hip. We have a bright future only because God has called us together to be his people. We who once were not a people at all, we who were nothing, according to Hosea, are a people now, even a royal priesthood. That is something that God has done, and not us. And that is what’s right with us.
I know as well as you do that Steele Creek has changed drastically in the last twenty years. Steele Creek will never be the rural area that it once was, the place that we once knew. That place is gone. So who are we going to be? We’re facing that question in so many ways right now, and there is no magic answer for it. We’re not going to call a preacher or get a DCE or hire a consultant or take a survey that will answer that question. You’ll never find anybody who will “save the church.” In fact, that very idea is blasphemous, because only God can save the Church, and in Jesus God already has saved the Church. So let us all in everything that we do together turn our eyes upon Jesus. That’s the only answer that I have. We have a few things we need to improve and we do very many things well. But Jesus is what’s right with us. Hallelujah!
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
