Where to begin?

A sermon preached at West End Uniting Church on Sunday, 5 August 2007

In 1994, I spent a fortnight on a little island called Futuna, one of the islands of Vanuatu. 400 ni-Vanuatu people, 6 villages, 7 churches and one white person, me. I was there to do some English teaching in the local primary school, but I was the one who did the learning. Among my more memorable experiences was going to church.

In the 1800s, Vanuatu became a Christian country, primarily through the missionary work of the Presbyterian Church, and so it was that on my first Sunday on the island I worshipped in one of the six Presbyterian churches. Worship, Futuna Presbyterian style, meant men, women, girls and boys all sitting in different parts of the building; it meant singing old Presbyterian hymns unaccompanied in four part harmony; it meant the whole of the service – prayers, bible readings, sermon and singing – all conducted in the local language.

The following Sunday, I was invited to worship in the one church on the island which was not Presbyterian. Just what brand of church it was I am not too sure, except to say it was a recent arrival from Australia, a jazzed up Pentecostal expression of the Christian faith. And worship meant everyone sitting together; it meant singing, not unaccompanied but with an electric guitar, a keyboard – both somehow magically powered by the only car battery on the island – and a drum kit; and it meant the service being conducted in an interesting mixture of local language, pidgin and English.

Now, I don’t want to say anymore at this point about that experience, but I want you to hold the story in your memory until I return to it.

Let’s jump forward from 1994 to yesterday. Yesterday I read A church of passionate disciples … rethinking church membership, a discussion paper from the Uniting Church National Assembly published in March of this year. The opening paragraph of the discussion says this:

God in Jesus Christ turns our lives upside down. As we follow Jesus, God’s Spirit re-centres our lives. Instead of being focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, Jesus commands: “Love God. Love your neighbour.” … Jesus invites us to be counter-cultural, to have different values and to have different goals and priorities from those which may come naturally, or those which may be promoted by our society. In this way, our lives are actually turned the right way up!

Is this not precisely what Jesus is saying in this morning’s gospel story of the rich fool?

God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.

Is this not precisely what our reading from Ecclesiastes is saying?

I, the Teacher… applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven… I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Whenever we are focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, then we are fools and our deeds are in vain. Instead we are called by Jesus to love God and love our neighbour, both of which are truly counter-cultural, because these are different values, different goals and priorities from those which are promoted by our society.

The rich man begins in the wrong place, by placing his needs and desires first. The person in the crowd who asks Jesus the initial question begins in the wrong place, by placing his needs and desires first.

On Friday morning, I went to the Greek Club to listen to the English Christian writer Steve Chalke. Steve Chalke is the founder of Oasis Trust, a Christian social justice organisation which is involved in quite an amazing range of activities around the world. He was here in Brisbane to encourage us to think about how we transform and empower our local and global communities in an increasingly secularized environment.

In the midst of saying a number of interesting and challenging things, the one thing he said which stopped me in my tracks was this: He said, “Our theology must drive our missiology which must then drive our ecclesiology.”

Or, to put it another way, our starting point must be with God – who we understand God to be – which will then determine how we are to respond – what it is we are called to do with our lives – and that will then shape the kind of church we need to be.

Theology is how we understand God. Missiology is how we understand the mission of the church. Ecclesiology is how we understand the shape of the church. “Our theology must drive our missiology which must then drive our ecclesiology.”

Unfortunately, Steve Chalke suggests, too often our starting point is in the wrong place – we begin with us, rather than beginning with God. Just as the questioner in the crowd begins with himself and the rich fool begins with himself, too often the church begins with itself.

We know what our church looks like, so that then determines what we are supposed to do, which then leads us to identify a God who agrees with what we have already decided

Let me explain all of that by returning to my original story – the churches of Futuna in Vanuatu. A question: why did the Pentecostal church in Australia feel the need to send missionaries to Futuna? Answer: because the church which already existed there, which had been there for over a hundred years, it didn’t look right. The Pentecostal church did not recognise what was happening there as real church, real church as defined by their church, by what happens in their church here in Australia. They started with themselves, their church.

And, because the church didn’t look right, then they had to do something about it: they had to send missionaries to Futuna to convert the Presbyterians into their brand of church. Their ecclesiology drove their missiology.

And now comes the interesting bit: their actions, their mission, then shaped God! The God originally introduced to the ni-Vanuatu was a God for all people, not to be restricted to just one culture, but alive in all cultures. And worship in the little Presbyterian churches reflected that understanding: worship in the local language with local practices, worshipping the universal God.

On my second Sunday, however, I encountered a different God: not a universal God, but “God for us and for us alone”, a God of division and strife, a God dredged up from the bible, mistakenly found in Jesus’ words,

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one's foes will be members of one's own household.

Matt 10:34-36 (NRSV)

Instead of God shaping mission shaping church, they began with a church which believed that how it was shaped must apply to everyone, which led to a mission which imposed itself upon an already Christian culture, and which then argued a God who supported their case and who justified their actions. God is created in the image of the church.

Now this morning’s sermon is not one of my shorter ones, and there is a reason for that: I think that the story of the rich fool and the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes are incredibly important for us, not as individuals, but for us as a community of faith, for us the people of West End Uniting Church.

We are increasingly recognising that the world around us is changing. No longer is this church or any church the centre of our community. More and more society is moving away from the teachings of the church and the practice of religion. How are we, as God’s people in this time and place to respond? What are we to do?

We have choices, any number of choices if we think creatively and energetically, but each and every one of those choices depends upon our starting point.

Our starting point could be ourselves. We could say to ourselves, “We know what the church is meant to be like. We’ve been practising being the church in this place since 1885; we know the language of the church; we know how to behave in church. We’re okay in here. It’s those out there who have the problem, and if they just came in here with us, then everything would be okay.”

Or, we could start with the church, but in a different way. We could say to ourselves, “Uh oh. There aren’t that many of us any more. Why aren’t we successful like all of those really big churches like Hillsong? Why don’t we do what they’re doing, and then we’ll be full to overflowing and everything will be okay”?

But if we do either of these things, we are starting in the wrong place. We are not to start with the church. If we do, we are labouring in vain. Even if we toil with wisdom and knowledge and skill, it is nothing more than chasing after the wind. Even if we were to be successful by the world’s standards – church packed to the rafters, so that we had to build a bigger barn and an offering so big that we could all eat, drink and be merry – we would be fools.

Our starting must always be with God. Jesus says, “Love God”. And when we do that, we then discover that God wants us to love our neighbours. Our theology drives our mission. And then, and only then, does our church take shape; we become the people of God, shaped by God to love others.

Let me finish by reading again from A church of passionate disciples:

God in Jesus Christ turns our lives upside down. As we follow Jesus, God’s Spirit re-centres our lives. Instead of being focussed on ourselves, our security, our comfort, our influence in the world and values which serve mainly ourselves, Jesus commands: “Love God. Love your neighbour.” … Jesus invites us to be counter-cultural, to have different values and to have different goals and priorities from those which may come naturally, or those which may be promoted by our society. In this way, our lives are actually turned the right way up!

Amen.