Lord Jesus, we are in church today because you have called us, invited us here. Sometimes we are amazed by your faith in us. Help us have as much faith in ourselves as you have in us. Give us, we pray, what we need to do your work as we strive to play our part in the new world that is coming in you. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s good to see all of you again. Jan and I joined a new club last week. It’s called the Parents of Married Children Club. I love that club. It’s a great one. It’s fantastic – a whole new experience. We received this invitation in the mail about eight or nine months ago. They call it a “destination wedding” nowadays. I had not heard that term before. A note comes that says, “Save this date: January 14. Oakaloa Church in Hawaii; 4:00 p.m.” I love getting cards like that. 

 

Our son Ted and his fiancée Mai decided to respond to the call to covenant, to get married under God’s terms, and to create a family, and we were invited to come and help celebrate the occasion. 

 

I offered the sanctuary here, and a reception in our back yard. You know; the whole thing.  I would have put up a tent. For some reason they didn’t go for that. I don’t understand.

 

So some 50 people saved their money, took vacation time, showed up for a week of celebration. Fourteen hours flying time from here, and a little piece of paradise. It was awesome. I have pictures.

 

What a way to begin. What they call the most cherished moment in their life, a moment that will surely set the course for them individually and collectively together. It was a wonderful invitation to respond to.

 

In today’s text, of course, we read about another kind of invitation. According to Scripture, God has come into the world in Christ. We celebrated that together at Christmas time. You remember that. 

 

We learned from Scripture that this is a world that has belonged to the Creator from the beginning, but as all of us in this room know, it is a world that has, quite frankly, fallen into the wrong hands. This is not new in history. It has fallen into the hands of people who, according to Scripture, have forsaken God, who have rebelled against God, who have turned God’s order upside down, who have rejected the ways of God – the ways that lead to life, and health, and wholeness, and prosperity, and peace, and what the Bible calls “shalom.” They have been, instead, a people who have turned and embraced things like slavery, and greed, and hoarding, and ill-gotten gain. That is the way Scripture describes it. Moreover, the Scriptures say, it has fallen into the hands of people who have defiled the land, taken advantage of the poor, violently consolidated selfish power, crushed the needy, denied justice, accepted bribes, corrupted the court, sexually abused and misused persons. In short, the way the Scripture talks about it, they have “given up the glory that God gave them and have become wild and corrupt, and they have turned their backs on God.” It’s all there. You can read it for yourselves. Prophets: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos – that’s what they had to say.

 

Needless to say, God was not pleased, and so, according to Scripture, God came into the world as the Christ in the person of Jesus. He was Christ with a message, according to Mark, that goes like this: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Turn, repent, believe, accept, live out the good news. The kingdom of God is at hand. God is going to get back what belongs, in reality, to God. Not by force, but by invitation. Not by wrath, but by love.” Isn’t that interesting?

The first thing this Christ does… Well, what would you do? Find investors for an infusion of cash? Maybe send in 100,000 troops? According to Mark, Jesus sees a couple of fishermen mending their nets by the sea, and he simply says to them one at a time, “Follow me.” It’s an invitation, folks. An invitation! 

 

We’re not told these folks have special gifts, have special talents, have special training. We don’t know. All that Mark tells us is that they dropped everything they were doing and followed Jesus. They became – they chose to become – his followers. There was no vision cast that we know of. No goals or objectives laid out. No request for feedback or input. No project cost analysis. No business plan. According to Mark, they just dropped what they were doing and followed, and the kingdom of God, the greatest movement in the history of humanity, began. Isn’t that amazing?

 

One wonders if that’s really the best way to build the kingdom. I mean… Would you run a business or a major movement in that particular way? You know… We are pretty well up to our eyeballs nowadays trying to sell democratic capitalism to the world. I don’t know if they are going to buy it or not. Do you? We shall see. We’ll just have to wait and see. 

 

What I do know, though, is that Jesus gets the kingdom of God in motion by calling – by inviting – a few very, very ordinary folks, a bunch of amateurs, to be his followers. It’s as if to say, “You know, folks, I’m here to change the world. I’m going to transform the future. I’m going to rearrange the present, and guess who’s going to help me? That’s right. You are!

 

That’s what I want to talk about today. Your role – your call – to that. I want to talk about how did you get here this morning? I want to talk about how you got it in your head, how did you get it in your heart that you ought to be a follower of Christ today? Where did that come from? How did you get here? I want to make a case today that I think you are here because you’ve been called. You’ve been invited to be here. You weren’t thumbing through the newspaper last night and saw our ad and said, “Gee, honey, this looks interesting. Why don’t we go to church tomorrow?” I don’t think there a soul here who did that. I don’t think you did that at all.

 

One of the fun things we get to do here with new folks at Broadway is we ask them, “How did you get here?” Do you know what they tell us? They tell us amazing things. They tell us things like, “We were looking for a solid Sunday School program for our kids.” We were looking for a dynamic youth program for our kids.” “We were looking for a church home that is inclusive and welcoming of all people.” And of course, “We’re here because of the wonderful music and the great preach…” No. No! That wasn’t it. I just added that one.

 

But the really interesting question is not “How did you get here?” That’s OK, but the really interesting one is, “How did you become a follower?” That’s a whole different thing. It’s one thing to be a churchgoer, but it’s another thing to be a follower.

 

Amazing stories start to unfold. Someone’s husband died. Life as she knew it was taken from her. She knows she has to start her life over again. She hears the invitation of Jesus, and things change.

 

Somebody else comes with a friend and hears things he’s never heard before, and he decides to commit his life to Christ. He’s been here ever since.

 

Another has been here since she can remember, brought here by committed Christian parents. She was baptized with the rest of them in the fifth grade, accepted Jesus as the Christ, Lord and Savior. She’s still here today.

 

Someone else wandered away from the faith when they were young. They’ve been around the block a couple of times, fought a war, built a business, created a family, but got drawn back to Christ in middle life.

 

Stories abound. Jesus is amazing – a relentless, resourceful, reaching out, constantly to you, to me, to all people. It’s an invitation, folks, and it’s still open.

 

I learned an interesting thing this week. The scholars say the word “religion” (a much maligned word today) comes from the Latin word “religio” which means, among other things, “to connect.” Isn’t that interesting? To connect. We live in a world that is so interested in connecting.

 

One might think the big division today is between red and blue. But no, the big division, they say, involves this business of connection. Scholars like Michael Novak say, “The big divide today is not “red” and “blue.” The big divide today is “secular” and “sacred.” The person with the secular mindset is a person who feels, quite honestly, down in his heart of hearts and soul of souls that he is the center of the universe. “It’s all about me.” “It’s what I want, when I want it, and how I can arrange it.” And yet, this very secular person is likely to suffer, says Mr. Novak, a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance, because he knows all down in his heart of hearts that he is one human among five billion others, all scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet that is circling a very small star among countless stars, swirling in a galaxy of countless galaxies.

 

But the person of a sacred mentality does not feel that she is the center of the universe. No. She considers the center to be somewhere else in the Other – the way you and I and other Christians and other people call “God.” Yet, she is very unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her connection, her religion, her relationship with the Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Redeemer of all that is. Wow!

 

You see… I think you were called here today, because you’ve been invited. You’ve been summoned. I think you’ve been called here by no one less than Christ himself, and I think he’s called you to turn, to connect, to believe, to encounter that Spirit of the Living Christ, and to help change the world by doing the good thing, the loving thing, the right thing, God’s thing. The one thing God calls you to do.

 

William Willimon tells a story about when he was the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. He’s a great guy. He was invited to give a talk at one of the fraternities on campus. Evidently, at that campus, the university administration requires all of these various groups, like fraternities, to have a certain number of programs every year to try to give them some semblance of responsibility and respectability. His assigned topic was “Character and College.” He thought, “This is really going to be fun!”

 

He arrived at the fraternity house at the appointed hour one evening, and he knocked on the door. When the door opened, there was this little 9-or-10-year old boy who answered the door. He thought, “What’s a kid this age doing in a place like this at this time of night?”

 

But the young boy said, “Come on in. They’re waiting for you. I’ll take you to the chapter room. Just follow me.”

 

“So I followed,” he says, “and there they were – all of them – glumly awaiting my presentation. As I began my remarks I noticed that the little boy climbed into the lap of one of the brothers there, and soon he fell asleep with his head on the shoulder of this college kid.

 

“Well,” he said, “I launched into my presentation. I hammered them for all their moral failures as a generation for about 30 minutes. When I finally finished, I asked for questions. Dead silence. So, I thanked them for the invitation and found my way out. On my way out I heard this college kid say to this little boy, ‘Now you go on upstairs, get ready for bed. I’m going to come in there and tuck you in, and I’ll tell you a story in jut a few minutes.’”

 

At the door, the college kid shook Bill’s hand, thanked him for coming. Bill said, “Let me ask you something. Who was that kid that was there – that little boy? Who was that there, tonight?”

 

He says, “Oh, that’s Darryl. Our fraternity is part of the Durham Big Brothers program. His Mom is on crack and having a pretty hard time. Sometimes it gets so bad she can’t care for him the way he needs to be cared for. So we tell Darryl to call us when he needs us. We go over, pick him up. He stays with us until it’s OK to go home. We take him to school, buy his clothes, the stuff he needs. You know.”

 

“That’s amazing, “ said Bill. “I take back all those terrible things I said about how bad and irresponsible you guys are.”

 

“I tell you, Mr. Willimon, what is really amazing. What’s really amazing is that God would pick a guy like me to do something this good for somebody else.”

 

Wow! It’s an odd way to build the kingdom, but it works. By the grace of God it works. And it’s by invitation only, one person at a time.

 

The Bible says that the Creator of all that is became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and that person had an announcement to make. That announcement was this: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Turn, repent, believe, accept, live the good news.”

 

Let me give you an analogy that might help. It’s sort of like being in a big airport. I was in one not too long ago, and this has sort of resonated with me. You know how it is in airports. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people are scurrying in all different directions. There’s sort of a buzz when things are really full in those airports. Above that steady buzz of noise, a voice booms over the sound system, “Flight 362 is now boarding at Gate 23. All passengers holding tickets to Hawaii, please check in at Gate 23. You’ll be boarding very soon.”

 

Now, some people, of course, never hear that announcement, and they just continue on their way. Others hear it, but they have reservations elsewhere for another flight. They just don’t pay any attention to that voice. But some, however, who really want to go to Hawaii, and who have been eagerly awaiting that announcement, look expectantly upwards. They check the little monitor up there to make sure they’ve got the right flight number, and then, with smiles on their faces, they gather up all their carry-ons, and they turn around, and they set out with some degree of urgency for Gate 23.

 

And so if there’s anyone here today who has heard this announcement of Jesus and wants to turn, wants to change directions, but more than that, wants to encounter the Spirit of the Living Christ and give your full attention to connect with the reign of God revealed in Christ – the kingdom that is coming in the name of Jesus Christ – I invite you humbly to make that decision right now.

 

And we all say together… “Amen.” 

 

 

God of the journey, thank you for the invitation to follow you. Thank you for gracing us with meaning and purpose in this life and for the promise of life eternal. Thank you for calling us, for blessing us on our way, and for hearts that rejoice in the reign of God. Amen.