Sermon Manuscript071006

Sermon Manuscript – 7/10/2006                         Robert Hutcherson, Jr.

Sermon: “NOT Meeting Needs at Church”

TEXT

Mark 6:1-13

Among his own people, in his hometown, Jesus encounters rejection and conflict. Mark suggests that they rejected him because they thought of him as an unimpressive "hometown boy." Interestingly, we are given no content of his teaching here, only a report that encounter with Jesus provoked fierce resistance, even among those who were closest to him.

Mark links this story of rejection with the sending out of the disciples as if to say that the crisis which Jesus provoked will also afflict those who follow Jesus as Jesus gives his disciples instruction on how to handle inevitable conflict.

From this text I gain a simple, straightforward, but sometimes overlooked insight: Jesus provoked controversy; his followers also provoke controversy. Something about Jesus, something in his teaching or in his person, turned away more people than he attracted.

As a preacher, I once thought that about the worst thing in the world was for you to reject what I said in a sermon. After all, if I were really an adept preacher, I ought to be able to find some way of saying anything about Jesus which would lead you to accept what I had to say.

Then I listened more carefully to stories like this one. Jesus, it appears, was willing to suffer rejection, was quite content to be misunderstood. Jesus preached away more people than he won.

In a Bible Study some years ago, we were reading some of Jesus' parables. "Why did Jesus speak so many parables?" Our leader asked.

"Well," said one of the smart “Super Christians”, "he was trying to communicate with simple, rural people so he had to tell them everything in these little stories, so they could get his point."

"If that's so," spoke up another, "then Jesus failed. Most of them didn't get it."

After much discussion we ended up agreeing that Jesus must have been using parables for some purpose other than to ensure that everyone got his point. He was willing to be misunderstood, rejected because the point he was making was not dependent, for its validity, on their acceptance.

"Not long ago, a pastor of a small congregation entered a supermarket and ran into a woman who only the Sunday before had visited with her husband and three children in the church that he served. After exchanging pleasantries, he told her how much the church appreciated her visit and how he hoped they would return. She replied, 'We enjoyed the service, but right now we're just shopping around for the church that meets our needs.'" After all, what is the church about if not about meeting our needs? Perhaps that is why you are here this morning, to get your needs met.

Of course, the church wants to meet peoples' needs. But that begs deeper questions: Which needs should the church attempt to meet? Who determines which needs the church will not attempt to meet? Does the church's meeting of specific needs serve a larger goal or purpose even more important than people's needs, as we define those needs?

We live in a day when many are convinced that the church should get into marketing, that the church should take its cue from business and be more "consumer oriented." Pastors are enjoined to create "user friendly" worship, worship in which people have their needs met. Churches should devise their programs after they have first defined folk's "felt needs."

In this view, worship is a product that congregations offer for consumption, with the primary concern being how to attract and satisfy more customers (or how to keep the ones you've got). The supermarket doesn't tell you that you should prefer Romaine lettuce over Iceberg. Rather, the grocer discovers which products you want and offers you those products cheaply and efficiently. So, when we at my former church sought to improve our Sunday service, what did we do? We filled out a questionnaire with lots of questions about what we thought of our worship, what we liked and didn't like.

What if a congregation believes its worship is not a product for consumption, like lettuce, but an activity that it engages in to the glory and honor of God, like prayer?

Say, for instance, that you tell us that you are left cold by the laborious reading of two or three lessons from the Bible every Sunday. If we refuse to offer a more appealing product by shortening or cutting out a lesson, then we appear to be incredibly insensitive to the needs of our "customers." But there may be reasons for not letting the customer and the customer's needs determine the shape of Sunday morning, reasons which are not merely related to our insensitivity or the antiquarian attitude in the church.

By living in a society in which most daily choices are consumer choices, people have come to view their relationship to the church in similar ways....But once people come to view choosing a church in ways similar to choosing among competing brands and styles of basketball shoes, then enormous pressure is exerted among the church to conceive of itself in those terms as well. And this tendency toward consumerism may be the most detrimental contemporary temptation for the church.

Years ago, the great sociologist, Ferdinand Toennies, criticized the role of the market in creating a society in which there was no real community, but rather only individuals who approached others with the attitude "I give so that you will give back to me."

"What I do for you, I do only as a means to effect your simultaneous, previous or latest service for me. Actually and really, I want and desire only this. To get something from you is my end; my service is the means thereto, which I naturally contribute unwillingly."

What if the church serves people, not as a market transaction, but because it is the people of God? What if our choir works hard on their music, not because they hope you will like it and be inspired by it but because the choir knows that we are called to be a sign, a signal, a foretaste, a beachhead of God's Kingdom in the world? What if I'm preaching this sermon, not because I think it's uppermost on your list of weekly wants, but rather because I believe this is what God wants?

What you get out of what is done here should not be as great a concern among us as fidelity to the peculiar nature of God's Kingdom.

What is the greatest service the church can render the world? Perhaps the service we render is not necessarily what the world thinks it needs. But the church is not only about meeting my needs but also about rearranging my needs, giving me needs I would never have had had I not come to church.

Some time back, I departed from my usual practice and threw points in my sermon which might have been seen as judgmental and negative, downright critical, prophetic even.

At the end of the service, as we were filing out, I froze when one of your greeted me at the door with, "Your sermon!" But then you said, "Thanks for telling it like it is. It's rare, these days, that someone speaks honestly about our situation. Thanks, I needed that."

That's rather amazing. We need comfort, reassurance, a sense of peace. Yes. But we also need truth. Honesty. In church, when it's at its best, we get not what WE think we need but what GOD thinks we need -- which IS what we need.

While we are asking what people want, we ought to ask the more frightening question, What does God want? "What does the Lord require?" is a fundamental question.

The church is not here to meet people's needs. The church is called to the counter-cultural activity of serving God in a world that does not worship God. As Americans we are deeply formed by this market place of created desire, spending vast fortunes in an attempt to satisfy those insatiable needs. It seems that faithfulness to the gospel would call the church to challenge the very essence of our culture by identifying that many of those felt needs are illegitimate. Instead, churches too often cast themselves as one more social institution dedicated to legitimating this marketplace of desire. Such churches, by catering to the whims of “discriminating consumers”, encourage their constituents to expect the church to function as another service agency whose purpose is to woo them by providing a smorgasbord of programs and services.

Instead of marketing, our primary metaphor ought to be formation. We ought to spend more energy worrying about how the church ought to form its community and its members as "concrete embodiments of the gospel such that it, and they continue to offer a profound, perhaps even radical, alternative to the popular structures and institutions of the day.

We must not place too much confidence in consumers' ability to determine for ourselves what we really need. People cannot be trusted to know what is best for us. God has graciously given us something which we could not have by our own devices, namely salvation in Jesus Christ.

In my experience, most of us come to church for the wrong reasons. That is, we come seeking confirmation of our preconceptions, help with our problems, fellowship with people like us.

Many of you can testify that, thank God, church often turns out to be more interesting than our expectations. In worship, in the life of the church, God tends to take our wrong reasons and reform them, redirect our desires, give us more than we would have known how to ask for. In the reading and preaching of God's word, our preconceptions get challenged and changed. What we thought were our problems are revealed to be trivial and we are given problems we would have never had before we met Jesus. We come seeking mere fellowship with other people and are astounded to receive friendship with God.

I am positive that someone surely left that day saying, "I'm sorry, that new preacher just didn't do a thing for me."

I am equally positive that someone, a few, not everyone, surely left that day realizing that “Jesus is about something considerably larger than me.”