John Wayne, Batman, and The Lone Ranger
Expedition Groups • Sermon • Submitted
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· 17 viewsCommunicate Dinner table theology and the fact that discipleship happens best within the context of relationships.
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Big Idea: We have a very individualistic view of our faith in the West. Family and community were primary in the near eastern world of the Bible. Is that simply a cultural thing or are we meant to emulate some of the communal practices we see in the Bible? God forms His people in community and around the dinner table. Community is the soil of discipleship and in this community we are grown. The dinner table is like the fertilizer in soil that propels discipleship forward. GOING TO CHURCH is nowhere in God’s description for His people; it has always been about BELONGING TO A COMMUNITY OF FAITH transformed being transformed by the Gospel of Jesus.
Introduce the series:
Expedition 1
Briefly explain expedition groups as a cross between small groups and missional communities.
People will be asking you…No (good answer), Yes (Good answer), I don’t know/maybe (bad answer…and why)
12 hours per week & 36 hours over the course of this series in sermon prep… My hope is to have 90% or more of our Sunday attendance involved in an Expedition Group
Let me see a show of hands in here as I ask this question:
Who played team sports? Who played individual sports?
Talk about my unhealthy level of competition and how it drove me to compete mainly in individual sports…
That’s really great when things go well. You can really soak up the glory knowing it was solely you who is responsible for your victory. And honestly that really fed the beast of my rugged individualistic competitive nature. The problem, however, is that if you lose…you have nobody else to blame but yourself.
This is sort of the overarching mentality of western society.
In the West, we typically view rugged individualism and personal sovereign autonomy as a marker of success.
Who are our heroes here in America? John Wayne, Batman, and the Lone Ranger could sum up just about all of them. We love their rise to glory against all personal odds stories. We love the orphan billionaire loner turned super hero. We love the wild west vigilante gunslingers who don’t need a posse but are tough enough to ride into town and take down the entire gang with just their side iron and their grit.
Talk about how I’ve struggled with this idea as a son making his own way...
The problem, however, is that we have adapted this mentality into our view of our faith. We have taken a very individualistic view of our faith journey. Here in America we would say that we “Go to church.” Can I just tell you that concepts isn’t found once in the entire Bible. You can ‘go to church’ alone actually. Let me tell you what is all over the Bible though…it is the concept of belonging to a community of a faith.
And so we have reduced our entire faith journey down to about three or four things in an attempt to pattern our faith after the rugged individualism that defines our culture:
We’ve turned our faith into just the Sunday morning experience.
We’ve come to value Personal Bible study/quiet time/& (rather infrequently) worship.
For a lot of people, if you were to ask them the end goal of their faith (beyond some expression about the afterlife), you will likely get something moralistic equating to: Being a better person . (be that cussing less or just handling difficult circumstances better)
We also love causes that allow us to express some modicum of altruism or benevolence. (for some people there is a little bit of missional component to their faith. Perhaps that is linked to some aspect of community service or a cause you care deeply about)
Here is the deal…none of those things are bad things. All of those things are good things that I absolutely want to encourage. But did you notice that all of those are things are things that you can do alone. None of those things require any aspect of community. The Sunday gathering, although we are sitting in a room full of other people, honestly offers little to no opportunities to engage with other people. We sit in rows staring at the back of someone else’s head. In fact, you might be sitting right next to someone who’s name you don’t even know.
I think this is a really good exercise we need to do for a second. I want you to look around the room and count the number of people in here that you know things about that you couldn’t know by just walking through their house. Things that would require at least a base level of relationship to know. EXPLAIN.
Personal Bible study and quiet time literally have personal in the name. This is about your own walk and faith with Jesus. How is God speaking directly to you through His Word and what are you as an individual communicating with Him?
Here is a question: How often, when and if you read your Bible, do you think about how it applies to a community of people not just you as an individual? I don’t just mean: “this verse is talking about forgiveness so I need to think about someone I need to forgive.” I mean, how often do you read your Bible thinking of what the application looks like if everyone at The Outpost were to live it out?
Being a better person is an individual pursuit as well. Who in here would say they are completely known by someone in this room that isn’t your spouse or immediate family member? Only you know your secret sins and patterns of brokenness. The sort of rugged individualistic view we take is that it is our job to somehow clean up our behavior and be more moral this week than we were last week.
Out of this, we have set church attendance, personal Bible study/quiet time, and giving financially up as the measure of a devoted follower of Jesus.
Do the Monty Python coconut horses bit...
What’s hilarious about that example is that the King doesn’t even see a problem with this. It’s like it is just normal for him. I feel like we are a lot like that when we take this view of our faith. We don’t even realize how much we are missing out on because this view of our faith is so culturally pervasive. We can’t see the forest through the trees.
We have somehow managed to take the communal aspect out of Church and now church has become A PLACE YOU GO and not a PEOPLE YOU BELONG TO.
I want us to fix that here at The Outpost. I will explain why we have to fix this here in just a moment, but first let’s talk about our mission.
Draw mission statement visual up on the board.
Explain that we are going to be discussing the how and why behind the engage piece over the next three weeks and at the end of this, everyone will have a chance to respond by finding a place in one of our smaller communities of faith that will meet each week.
I am about to ask you to give up a couple of hours bit...
We are not about the business of doing things just to do them here at The Outpost. It’s not that I don’t love serving the church, but I try not to make it a habit to start ministries just for the sake of having a lot of activity going on. If we are going to start something here at The Outpost it has to meet a couple of criteria: First, is that thing called out in Scripture as being important? Secondly, does that thing serve the overall mission of reaching the One in our community?
And so, I want to begin this morning by looking at why we would place such a huge emphasis on our expedition groups. It is no small thing to ask you to engage in something that will cost you at least a couple of hours out of your incredibly busy schedule each week.
So, I want us to open up our Bibles and ask the question:
Why Expedition Groups?
We were created as communal beings.
Genesis bit READ THIS:
The Bible shows us that we are communal creatures, made to be lovers of God and of others. When it comes to humanity, God does not simply speak a word of command; he engages in conversation. Listen to what God says about how He has created us.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Are the words Us and Our capitalized in your Bible? Good…they should be.
In this, we see that God himself is a social rather than a solitary being. As a side note, If you are interested sometime a great study is to see all three persons of the trinity and their different roles in creation…its fascinating. And so, by extension, we should understand that his image cannot be borne by an individual, but by man and woman together (mankind):
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Do the broken glass fractals bit...
Genesis 2 underlines this as the writer tells us that the only thing in all creation that is not good is the man on his own:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
Notice that it did not say that it is not good that man would be single…but alone. Divine personhood is defined in relational terms. The Father is the Father because he has a son. God is persons-in-community. Father, son, and Spirit. Human personhood, too, is defined in relational terms. You can no more have a relation-less person than you can have a childless mother or a parent-less son. The trinitarian understanding of our humanity suggests we should define ourselves by the network of relationships in which we live: I am a father, husband, church member, and child of God.
This makes me unique (no one else shares the same matrix of relationships), but it also defines me in relation to other people. I am not autonomous. I am a person-in-community. I cannot be who I am without regard to other people. God has not created me to live a solitary life or live out a John Wayne/ lone ranger faith.
And so, this is how we were created to live… in relationship to others. How did we get to where we are now with individualism and isolation being elevated as strong cultural values? To understand that, we have to talk about two different concepts: Group Identity and Individual Identity.
Group identity - an individual's sense of self as defined by group membership. The main idea is that the individual self needs are secondary to that of the group you belong to.
Examples: Who in here has a Peleton? Make joke about Cross Fit and Peleton owners (a lot like vegans…can’t be around one for more than a few minutes without them telling you about it. One of the reasons we have such a hard time understanding the situations in Afghanistan is that Afghanistan has a tribal and not a country identity. LGBTQ community.
Honor shame culture
Individual identity - is the concept that you are an autonomous and self-governing person who is solely responsible for the outcome of your life. The main idea is that the needs of self are primary over the needs of any group you might belong to.
Examples: Make the joke about the home gym guy who uses cement filled coffee cans glued to a metal bar because gyms are too mainstream. It’s the American dream…you can be anything and do anything you want.
Which one is right?
Look at this with me:
‘Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
Give brief backstory about this verse and then go into Group Identity vs. Individual identity critics…“of course a bronze age near eastern society would claim this about themselves”
While there are some things in the Bible that were cultural…meaning they may have been true for a particular group of people in a particular time, what it looks like in our culture and time may be a little different. This idea of community is not cultural however…here is how I know.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them,
And a little farther down, we get this image of this new creation city:
The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
This is the end of the story. We end on a heavenly community full of people. We can safely say community because the Bible uses the word “nations” emphasis on the plurality of nations there is incredibly important. This isn’t just an aggregate of individuals (explain aggregate as a bag of marbles - America is an aggregate). This is a congregant (explain cluster of grapes - a Crossfit gym is a congregant). A congregant is a collective group of people bound in relationship with one another where all members derive their identity from a singular unifying source.
This isn’t just about Israel or the New Creation though. This has an outworking in the here and now.
John chapter 13 is the story of the last supper of Jesus and his disciples. But chapters 14-17 happen in the span of just a couple of hours as Jesus gives his final instructions to his disciples and then it records Jesus’ high priestly prayer. Do you know what Jesus want for his disciples?
He wants them to preach really good sermons. No...
He wants them to be sure and have incredible worship services. No...
He gives them instructions about how to have the best quiet time and Bible study. No...
John 17:11 actually sums up what Jesus wants for His followers.
“I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.
Listen to me really closely here:
The fullest expression of that communal ‘oneness’ this side of eternity is the Church.
Jesus prays over and over again that they would love one another. Jesus prays for our unity. Jesus knew he was leaving. In his absence though, Jesus wanted the mission to continue. Jesus was sending his followers out as individuals. No. Jesus’ grand plan was the church. It was a congregant of people where all of its member derived their identity from Jesus through the Gospel.
Jesus realizes if there will be any victory over the world and if we are ever to carry out the mission of Jesus effectively, it will be as we come together in community drawing our collective identity from Him through the Gospel.
Jesus knew the hope of the world wasn’t going to be an engaging Sunday morning experience. He also knew it was going to take more than his followers having a good quiet time and giving their time and money to a good cause. The hope of the world is the Gospel and the reality is that that message is far to big to be carried by any single person. The most effective picture of the Gospel is the one that can be seen lived out in the lives of Jesus’ followers…namely how we image the Gospel. Think back to our mirror example…this Gospel is far too comprehensive for any one person to image well.
The Gospel is best seen as we image it’s multifaceted truth in community with others.
In light of this, I think the really important question begging to be answered is this:
Why have we settled for sitting in rows on a Sunday morning as a substitute for real, life transforming, world changing community?
Don’t get me wrong…this isn’t bad. There are plenty of the places in the Bible that outline this as a critical part of what the church is (we will even touch on a little of that today)...It’s just that this isn’t all there is to our faith expression. Surely there is more than three songs and a sermon.
If we settle for this we are a lot like the knight in Monty Python. We are all gussied up in our shiny suit of armor with our sword strapped to our side but we are just clapping coconuts together… I honestly believe that is how God sees us when we try and take the communal aspect out of Church. We are missing something critical that is meant to propel the church forward in its Gospel effectiveness and life and world transforming abilities.
I think we have settled for this for a few different reasons. I want to look at a few of those really quickly and then we are going to take a sharp left turn and then land this plane.
Our culture has shaped us into consumers.
Please don’t hear this as a sleight against you. In a capitalism based economy, consumers are a really really good thing. Consumers make the world go round. But much like the group identity vs. individual identity issue, I believe we are called to live countercultural to the world around us in this issue.
Look at me really closely here because I want to diverge from where this narrative typically ends up. I want to go a different direction. I am honestly not putting the church consumer culture on you sitting in the seats this morning. This is my fault and the fault of other church leaders. Because of our ego’s which get really inflated when there are a lot of butts in seats and dollars in the general fund we lead towards the Sunday gathering being the ultimate expression of the Church. And so we have turned church attendance and giving percentages into the true marks of a committed believer. Come, sit, and listen have become the new marks of a committed believer instead of go into all the world, share, and die to self enduring persecution if you must.
Talk about how a true worship gathering is incredibly participatory:
Worship is about so much more than just singing along with the couple of songs before the sermon. Worship requires a heart actively seeking to thank God. It requires an active, putting-aside-of-self and focusing on God. And yet we are often left looking for worship that can generate the greatest emotional response in us…this is the antithesis of what worship is supposed to be. And so we will constantly be seeking that worship that can ‘speak to me’ or that can engender that emotional response…in doing so we become consumers of worship not producers of it.
Prayer requires a mind seeking to connect with the God of the universe to be fully known and to fully submit. Ya’ll I am just going to be dead honest with you…my mind wanders. I don’t just mean that my mind wanders off topic…although it does do that sometimes…I mean my mind wanders into what I can get from God through prayer…consumer. It isn’t that we can’t ask from God. It is that prayer’s primary function is to align our hearts with the heart of Jesus.
Not even the sermon is a passive activity. Listen ya’ll I really do try and make the sermon as engaging as I know how and as interesting as I know how to. I don’t want to put any barriers to peoples ability to listen and engage with the biblical text. The problem, however, is that we have come to see both listening and reading as passive activities. They aren’t! Real listening is a very active activity. It requires personal reflection and very self-aware introspection. It is constantly asking the questions of how does this challenge and affect me? How do I need to live, think, and speak differently in light of this information? Reading is also a very active process. Real reading is done with pen and paper in hand and asking questions as you seek to hear from God through His Word.
Listen to this…Because all of those require internal participation, we can easily drift. You know the sort of autopilot church mode I’m talking about. Dial the friendliness knob up two clicks and the smile knob up three. Raise your hands at this part of the song and don’t fall asleep during the sermon. We can nod our head in agreement and even Ya’ll I’m not making fun or being despariging to you…how do you think I know these things… It’s because it’s me…explain.
I drift from active participant to passive consumer. And because we’ve made the Sunday Gathering the epitome of our faith expression we can somehow think that because we sitting in a room full of other people and are friendly that we are really carrying out the community aspect Jesus intended for His followers.
2. People are messy...
On a good day I can be messy bit...
People have messy marriages, kids, finances, etc., and it is honestly dangerous messy work when you choose to involve yourself in other peoples stories. And yet, that is exactly what God intended for His people to do.
Can I just speak a word of good news to you out of the Bible? Look at this: (explain)
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
This is called the incarnation. This is about how Jesus came and entered into our world. The king of the universe stepped off of his throne and came to walk the dusty streets he created and die on a tree made by men he created. It sounds really beautiful and regal when John writes about the incarnation in chapter one but let me show you what the incarnation of Jesus really looked like:
“If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.
“For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him.
“If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
I love how the kids stories about this moment typically do a really good job talking about this part of the story...Talk about Jesus washing poop off His disciples feet…
And because of the mess whether that is other people’s mess or our own…we don’t engage in real community. Instead, we settle for the Sunday morning community. Can we just be real for a second…nobody is messy here on a Sunday. One reason is, I think is because there isn’t typically a lot of room for it on a Sunday morning…perhaps that just means we are doing the Sunday gathering wrong.
But I think the other reason is because in order to see people’s messiness, you often have to show your own messiness. That leads us to the third reason we have settled.
3. If real community can exist, you have to bring my true and unfiltered self to the table.
I want you to close your eyes for just a second. I want you to imagine the deepest darkest worst secret you have. That secret sin you would be mortified if it got out. That thing you did maybe years ago. Now when you open your eyes up, I am going to have a chair up here on the stage where you can come share it with everyone. Who would rather shave the eyebrows off a grizzly bear in a dumpster with a piece of glass than do that? Yeah…I’ll go ahead and raise my hand on that one too.
We very carefully curate an image of ourselves that we approve for the rest of the world to see. It’s social media. It’s the conversational talking points we have put together that help others think we are ok. It’s the aspects of our character and parts of our story that we keep hidden because if other people really knew that side of us we fear they would go running for the hills.
I am going to make a statement that is going to be where we spend the rest of this series in:
Community is the soil in which disciples are grown.
Do burn cream on a broken leg bit.
And so instead of opening ourselves up and actually being vulnerable so that God can do work on us through the words, comfort, rebuke, affirmation, love, and help of our brothers and sisters in Christ, we posture. We settle for Sunday being the full expression of our faith because its really easy to look nice and put together on a Sunday morning.
Explain how we’ve forced Sunday morning to be something it was never meant to be.
So what is our takeaway? How do we begin to live into something more? How can we free the Sunday gathering up to be what it is meant to be by engaging in relationships outside of this place? I think it comes as we realize this truth right here:
Real community requires intentionality.
First:
We have to be intentional where we are investing our time in community.
Jesus had the masses, the twelve, and the inner three.
Explain that there were different purposes in each of those and how/why we should engage in those here.
Second:
We have to be intentional with our tables.
God shapes His people as they sit around the dinner table together.
Explain passover
Explain feast of tabernacles
Explain Shabbat (stop) dinner.
Kids have a place at the Shabbat table.
I want us to Shabbat for a couple of hours each week...
Have you settled for a personal faith?