September 12, 2010
Big City, Turn Me Loose! - 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI am a self-affirmed, first class, bona fide country boy. I know that I don’t look like one or even sound like one anymore. I have been too corrupted by urban influences. I have lived, after all, in a city for just under half of my life and will likely live in one for the rest of my life. But I am a country boy. I love being out in the country. I love the smell of the country. I love the smell of freshly plowed soil. I love getting the dew on my boots every morning walking through peach orchards. I love getting up early in the morning and putting in a hard day’s work, outside, even when the weather is rotten. I love the simplicity of the country. I love the people. I love the landscape. I just love it, and I really, really miss it. I long for it sometimes. We had a party for my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary last night at friend’s farmhouse, in the country. It was just beautiful.
So, session is meeting two weeks from today and I am going to propose that we become Amish. We should seriously consider that. I don’t know much about the Amish, but I do know that they’re Christian and, most importantly, they live in some of the most beautiful country in the world. And, it seems to me, that they could honestly live a more holy life up there, away from all the mess in the city. Let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that Charlotte’s a mess. Every city is a mess. How can you drive on I-485 and not get cranky? I read an article not long ago that said that it’s not in our nature, literally, to sit in traffic. It’s like putting a dog on a chain and the dog gets aggressive. The stress of traffic alone does the same thing to us. It literally takes years off our life. The stress of work takes years off our life. The stress of balancing everything that we have to balance takes years off of our life. Charlotte is officially the 18th most stressful city in America .
So, why are we doing this? As the great theologian Merle Haggard once said, “Big city, turn me loose and set me free!” Let’s go be Amish. I know a place, not in Pennsylvania but in Texas, where we can buy land for less than $1,000 per acre, and in some cases half that. In fact, some friends of mine from Texas are here today and I’m sure they can get us some land. Some of ya’ll know some things about raising cattle, and I could help us grow peaches and apples. Ya’ll have wonderful gardens. Sally English, Karen Noblett, and Susan Osmar are nurses and they could provide the health care. We’ve got a couple of teachers out there to teach our children. I could lead worship and do a few Bible studies for us. We could spend more time with each other. We could spend more time with our children. We would eat healthier food. We would get more exercise. We would relieve most of our stress. We would, in so many ways, move back to Eden. You could make a very good case that our faith beckons us to get away from the chaos of the city. We could enjoy God’s creation more, we could enjoy God more, we could glorify God more. It’s a slam-dunk case. What are we waiting for?
Forget Charlotte, and traffic, and smog, and crime, and chaos. Forget this mass of humanity that calls Charlotte home. That sounds awfully harsh, doesn’t it? It does not sound very Christian, and that’s just the problem. It’s not Christian. Paul and Timothy were pastors in the early Church. At the time, Christians were a small minority, and would remain a small minority (well under 10% of the population) until Emperor Constantine in 315. As such, early Christians were viewed with great suspicion. One of Paul’s big challenges, then, was to convince the larger community that Christians were beneficial for the community. So Paul tells Timothy and his Church and our own Church to pray for those in authority. Even if we don’t like those in authority, we should pray for them, which is saying a lot for 1st Century Christians. Paul even goes so far as to tell us to obey the authorities. Paul tells his early Christians and us to get along with the rest of the community, not to burn their holy books (like the Koran) but to interact with and assimilate into the larger community. Yet Paul also demands that we remain distinct.
That sounds awfully complicated to me. It’s one thing, for example, to pay your taxes. It’s another thing altogether when your taxes support things that violate your conscience, like war and abortion. It’s yet another thing altogether when the authorities in power tell you to worship them. Do you still just get along then? When do you take a stand? The Church has sometimes stood over against the larger community (like in slavery and civil rights) and the larger community is better for it. But that’s hard, and very messy. How can you possibly be distinctly Christian in a distinctly non-Christian world? I think Paul should take me up on my advice to go be Amish. Had Paul and the early Christians just become their own world, then it would have been so much easier. And Christianity would have died, and we never would have been Christian today. That’s the problem with secluding ourselves. What about everybody else? Paul mentions the word “all” five times in this passage. Paul tells us to pray for everybody. God desires that “everyone be saved.” God in Christ has given himself as a ransom for all, for everybody, for lotty-dotty everybody. So Paul, then, cannot possibly tell the early Christians to abandon Rome, because God has not abandoned Rome. And God has not abandoned Charlotte, so neither can we. In fact, faith calls us right into the muck and mire that is Charlotte.
Charlotte is not a bad city. I love this town, but it’s a town, and like any town – big or small – it has problems. I was talking about Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools earlier this week to some friends, and they just have a myriad of issues. Should first grade students have ride on a school bus for an hour to the other side of town? Think about how hard it would be for a six year old to get to a school bus stop at 6:00, ride for an hour to a place he doesn’t know, go to school, and then ride back for another hour. That’s two hours on the road going to school in a community to which he (the sis-year-old) does not belong. But, it’s one way to keep schools equal. Or should we have neighborhood schools, where the community can be more invested, even if schools will not be equal, even if some schools have 90% free lunch and other schools have nothing but wealthy kids there? That’s a messy question, and I’m not sure how to answer it. But according to Paul here, Jesus died for everyone of those children, rich or poor, black or white or Hispanic. Jesus died for the kids that we really don’t want our children to go to school with. God cares deeply for everyone of them. As easy as it would be for us just to abandon the place, we have to remember that God has not abandoned it or us or them.
So here we are, and of course it’s spiritually dangerous. I was in the Army for four years, and I learned a lot there. One of the things I learned was how to cuss, really, really well. Nobody cusses better than our friends in the US Army. Even the chaplain cussed. I don’t see how you can be in the army and not cuss. I also don’t see how you can live among sinful people and not become more sinful yourself. “The uncomfortable fact,” according to James Dunn, “is that such concern for all God’s children involves a fair degree of openness and acceptance of the other in very broad terms.” That’s hard. How are you going to be in the Army and not cuss? How are you going to love a sinful world, as God has, and not become like that sinful world?
How are we supposed to live in, but not of, the world? How can we be distinctly Christian in a distinctly non-Christian world? That’s a balance that I haven’t figured out yet. What I figured out, though, is that God loves Charlotte, North Carolina, and everybody in it. God calls us to love Charlotte, too. We have a whole host of people living around us today who were not here just five years ago. We have the whole Ayrsley development to our north, low-income apartments to our west, and we likely will have low-income apartments to our east, none of which were here ten years ago. God loves everyone of those people. In fact, Jesus Christ died for everyone of them. Like Paul, we have all been appointed in some form or fashion to proclaim the Gospel to them. If we are hindering some people in this community from hearing the Gospel, then, in the words of Sam Roberson, we may be a great institution, but we are not a great Church. Are we hindering people from hearing the Gospel? Are we setting barriers up for some people? Does this robe hinder people? Does our music hinder people? Does our attitude hinder people? A friend of mine was invited to the opening of the NASCAR museum lately and he discovered that the biggest NASCAR fans were not allowed in. They were blocked out by barriers outside. The people who appreciated NASCAR the most were not allowed in. Do we do that as a Church?
Does anything that we do keep us from being fully engaged with the people for whom Jesus died? I don’t know of any congregation that is seriously considering moving out west and becoming their own little world. I do know of a few who have moved to the other side of town, with varying degrees of success. I know of many congregations, though, especially congregations like ours that have been around for hundreds of years, who have walled themselves off from the rest of the community. They do things the way they want, regardless of everybody else. If people around them don’t like how they do things, then they can go to the Methodist Church down the street, or the non-denominational Church, or they don’t have to go to Church at all. In fact, this sounds harsh but it’s true, they can go to hell for all we care.
Fish swim. Birds fly. Dogs bark. And cats meow. Christians proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. That is what we do. That’s what the Church does. If the Church does not do that, then it’s not really a Church. If we call ourselves Christian, then we’ve got some proclaiming to do. We’ve got some heralding to do, as Paul said. That’s exactly where this text leads us. We’ve got to get engaged. Now that’s messy. It requires that we get our hands dirty. It gets us out of our comfort zones. It may require that we knock on a few doors. It will force some very difficult questions on us. It will force us to sacrifice some things that we like. But it’s not about us. It’s about God, and God has this thing for everybody, for us, for them, and for the people who have not come here yet. That’s the whole story of Scripture, isn’t it? God loves us and never, ever lets us go, even though we give him numerous opportunities. God loves this place, and God keeps engaging us, and saving us. So whatever we do, we’ve got to find a way to reach a badly broken world for the Gospel. How do you think we ever heard the Gospel? Had Paul simply made the Church an exclusive, gated community then we never would have heard of the Gospel. But Paul went right out in the world. Even though it threw him in prison a few times and probably killed him, he never quit preaching the Gospel. It is only through God’s grace and gutsy disciples like Paul that we are Christian today. So as much as we’d like for the big city to turn us loose and set us free, we’re staying here, because God is staying here. And we’re going out there, beyond these walls, because God is out there beyond these walls, too. God loves this big city, every last ounce of it, and we’re going to love it, too.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
