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Sept 7th, 2008 – 17th Sunday after Pentecost – BCP Eucharist
Readings: Exodus 12:1-14; Psalms 149; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
Back to Church Sunday will soon be upon us…
One church I heard of planned a similar kind of day only they called it “No Excuse Sunday”. They announced:
To make it possible for everyone to attend church next Sunday, we are going to have a special "No Excuse Sunday."
Cots will be placed in the foyer for those who say, "Sunday is my only day to sleep in."
There will be a special section with lounge chairs for those who feel that our pews are too hard.
Eye drops will be available for those with tired eyes from watching TV late Saturday night.
We will have steel helmets for those who say, "The roof would cave in if I ever came to church."
Blankets will be furnished for those who think the church is too cold, and fans for those who say it is too hot.
Scorecards will be available for those who wish to list all the hypocrites present. A prominent space will be allotted at the top of the card for the cardholder to write his own name down first on that list.
Relatives and friends will be in attendance for those who can't go to church and cook dinner, too.
We will distribute "Stamp Out Stewardship" buttons for those that feel the church is always asking for money.
One section will be devoted to trees and grass for those who like to seek God in nature.
Doctors and nurses will be in attendance for those who plan to be sick on Sunday.
The sanctuary will be decorated with both Christmas poinsettias and Easter lilies for those who never have seen the church without them.
We will provide hearing aids for those who can't hear the preacher and cotton for those who can!
Hope to see you there!
Well, we won’t be going that far in our preparations for Sept 28th, but just as parents have frantically been getting their children ready for ‘back to school’ so we as the family of God must be preparing ourselves for the special ‘Back to Church Sunday.’
I would like to suggest 2 simple things we need to be doing to prepare.
1. Pray
Jesus spent a fair bit of his teaching on prayer.
He says that prayer is to our loving ‘Father’ and it is a good practice to pray in private to Him, keeping things simple and to the point. “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen…Do not keep on babbling like pagans…” (Matt 6:6-7) Jesus admonishes to pray in his name – that is, by his authority, by our knowledge and relationship with him we are assured the Father would give “whatever we ask” (John 15:16). That’s why we often tack ‘In Jesus Name’ or ‘Through Christ our Lord’ at the end of our prayers – it’s not simply a cue to everyone within earshot that we’re winding down the prayer – it is our recognition that Christ is the assurance we have that God hears and answers our prayers.
Jesus encourages us to persist in prayer – he says, “Keep on asking, and it will be given to you; keep on seeking and you will find; keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you.” (Matt. 7:7). He even tells the story of a man caught out in the street in the middle of the night who knocks on the door of man to let him in. Like most of us who would be angered at being disturbed the man refuses the vagrant. But the man in the street persists and persists and persists until he is allowed in. Strange that Jesus would tell such a story in the context of approaching God in prayer – I don’t think that it’s necessarily that case that God is annoyed with our prayers (granted that sometimes I have to admit my own prayers often sound more like whining than the kind of love-filled words God would prefer to hear) or that he needs to be convinced that we ‘really mean it’. I think it’s that we need the relationship, the bond, to be strengthened between us and God so that we can come to know our own true desires, and the desires God has for us.
The Scriptures tell us that prayer changes things. Jesus tells us to command mountains to move, his brother James tells us the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. So when we think of inviting someone to come to Church, to hear the gospel message, when we recognize all that could come in the way of them coming (work schedules, built-in excuses, guilt, an increasingly secular culture) how can we not pray for them? The power of prayer changes lives.
Nicky Gumbel notes the connection between prayer and a person coming to faith in Christ. “Most of us find, when we come to faith in Christ, that somebody has been praying for us. It may be a member of the family, a god-parent, or a friend. Somebody, I suspect, in nearly every case, was praying that our eyes would be opened to see the truth. James Hudson Taylor, who founded the China Inland Mission, influenced millions for Jesus Christ. He was brought up in Yorkshire, England, and became a rebellious teenager. One day, when his mother was away and his sister was out, he picked up a Christian book, intending to read the story and skip the moral. He curled up in the barn behind the house and began to read.
As he read he was struck by the phrase, ‘the finished work of Christ.’ He thought Christianity to be a dreary struggle to pay off bad debts with good. He had long since abandoned the struggle. He owed too much. He sought simply to have a good time. This phrase broke open his mind to a sudden certainty that Christ, by His death on the cross, had already discharged this debt of sins: ‘And with this dawned the joyful conviction, as light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees and accepting this Savior and His Salvation, to praise Him for evermore.’ No Luther, Bunyan, or Wesley had a more complete sense of the rolling away of his burden of light dismissing darkness, of rebirth and the close friendship of Christ, than did Hudson Taylor on that June afternoon in 1849 at the age of 17.
Ten days later his mother came home. He ran to the door ‘to tell her I had such glad news to give.’ She replied as she hugged him, ‘I know, my boy. I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me.’ Hudson was amazed. She had been eighty miles away, and on the very day of the incident in the barn she had felt such an overwhelming desire to pray for Hudson that she had spent hours on her knees, and had arisen wit unshakable conviction that her prayers had been answered. He never forgot the importance of prayer.”
We must pray for those we are inviting back to church, and pray for all who walk in these doors.
2. Invite – we must find one or two people that we will not only prayer for to come to Back to Church Sunday, but we must actually invite them.
All of us here today were most likely brought to church by someone else. A parent, grand-parent, or friend would have brought us to church at some point in our lives and something made us stay. Jesus was also inviting people – his ministry wasn’t to a closed community. He invited smelly fisherman to be his close companions, he welcomed a despised tax collector into his little circle, he ate with ‘outcasts and sinners’, and invited prostitutes and other women of questionable reputations to be his friends. He demonstrated his knack for hospitality by performing his first miracle at a wedding party, turning the water into wine.
Amazing things can happen when we follow Christ’s lead of invitation and warm hospitality.
I heard a story told of a 16-year old young man who came from a Christian family, but he himself (like many teenagers) couldn’t have cared less about religion and chose to spend his time chasing girls and drinking. A famous evangelist, Mordecai Ham, came to town for one of those ‘tent-meeting’ crusades. Friends of the young man were interested in going, though he himself was not. His friends had no way of getting there and managed to convince the young to drive them – he could wait in the truck if he wished. Perhaps it was the music or the rowdy preaching but something drew the young man into the service. There he heard Ham declare, “There’s a great big sinner in church tonight!” Terrified that his mother had warned the preacher of his arrival the young man hid behind a woman with a large hat.
The preacher continued and the young man became moved by an equal sense of guilt for his sins, and the love of God. When the invitation to ‘accept Christ’ was given and converts were invited to come forward, the young man stoically marched to the front. He felt awkward as he watched those around him moved to tears – he was not so emotional. But as God warmed his heart he committed himself to following Christ. That young man would later become the most famous preacher of our century, Billy Graham.
We may not be comfortable with the means by which Graham ‘came to Christ’ or may not ever use the method he’s employed throughout his ministry. But the principle of invitation must be ours as it was his. We are Christ’s ‘ambassadors’ on earth and must continue to call out his words of invitation: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden.” If it’s one thing I know, it’s that we are all busy, tired, and exhausted with trying to live life on our own strength. Let us share the refreshment we find in Christ to the world all around.
Our gospel today reminds us that when we are united in common purpose that the heavens and the earth are changed – “whatever you bind on earth, will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth, will be loosed in heaven.”
Let us bind the attitude of complacency and conformity, the mindset that ‘evangelism’ is ‘somebody else’s job’. And let us loose a spirit of excitement and joy with the part God would have us to play in helping a loved one discover the love of the Living God. Let us bind the consumer mindset that says that church is only good so long as I ‘get something out of it’ and is seen as an infringement on ‘our’ time. Let us agree to loose a passion for growth in Christ and a commitment to community of the kind in God’s kingdom. Let us bind hatred, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and let us loose the law of love, which leads us into freedom and the flourishing of our lives.
And let us “put on Christ’ – clothed in his goodness and righteousness, a brilliant covering over our nakedness, our shame, our sin. So that as we interact with one another and worship our God in this place the light of Christ would illuminate our faces, transform our lives, and draw those around us deeper into the arms of God.
Back to Church Sunday prayer:
Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. We remember that we are created and loved by you. We welcome you now as you have already welcomed us. We pray that we may know the power of your personal invitation in our own lives. Give us confidence to offer a friend (Your friend's name here) your personal invitation.
We pray for Back To Church Sunday and thank you for the gift of church as community. Make us aware of you. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen
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