Sermon

Does Religion and Business Mix?

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

New Hope Presbyterian Church

Rienzi, Mississippi

March 26, 2000

The Children's Message:
How nice to have all of you here this morning. It is so good to see you. You look like a happy crew. All of you!
You know what? Can you see everything that is around you? What do you see when you look around you? Look around. What do you see? Do you see a table? Do you see this wall? Do you see me? Do you see that person? Do you see that person? You see those, right?

Well now, if I told you there was something around you that you couldn't see, would you believe me? There is something around you -- but if you look, you can't see it. Can you? You can't see anything else around you.

What I planned to do this morning was to show you what I was talking about. Do you believe that I could sit right here and make the telephone ring in that office? Do you? Wouldn't that be weird if I could make that phone ring in that office? I have a little thing in my car that if I punched the numbers into the telephone, in that office you couldn't see a thing, but the phone would ring.

If I brought a radio in here and turned it on and checked the stations, it would start playing. It might play music, it might play whatever, but you don't see anything.

That is the way God is. You don't see God. God is a Spirit. Spirits are kind of like air. You don't see air, do you? But if you don't have air to breathe, you're in big trouble. Without it you'd last about four or five minutes and that would be kadootz -- you'd be gone. You'd be dead.

We have to have air, but we don't see it. We can feel it if it comes in a big blow. Did you go outside yesterday? Uh huh. Did you feel the wind blowing? Yes. It was blowing. Now it's springtime. Yes, it is springtime and it is beautiful out there.

And you know what? You don't even see the sunshine rays, do you? You see the sun. You see light. But what makes it light? It makes it so you can see, doesn't it? Did you ever try to walk in the dark? We need those light things.

So we talk about God as that which you cannot see. So therefore when you say your prayers, you say your prayers to God because God is there. But you can't see God. That's what we talk about when we speak of spiritual things in the church. We talk about Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God's Spirit. God is always around us. So we know God is there, but we just can't see Him. We have to always remember that.

So glad you are here this morning. I want you to remember that you can't see everything that is there, because there's a lot of stuff there that you can't see. Let us pray.
Thank you Lord, for giving children. Help us as adults that we may love them and guide them. And help us as children that we may learn Your Way. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Thanks for being here.

The Scripture:

Our Old Testament reading this morning comes from Exodus. It is a very familiar and powerful passage, one of those sections of which you've probably learned a summary as a child if you are an adult, and if you are a child, it is one of those sections that you need to learn. So let us take a look at Exodus 20:1-17.

The New Testament reading comes I Corinthians 1:18-25. It just so happens that in the evening study today in the continuation of our Journeys of Saint Paul, as the gospel has moved westward, we will be ending up the evening in Corinth. Not the one right up the road, but in another Corinth. I don't know whether Corinth up here -- oh, you might have had some reputation in the past of being similar, but I don't know if that is the case today. You all aren't laughing at anything this morning, so we'll let that be. Anyway, let us attend to this word.

The gospel reading for the morning comes from John 2:13-22. If you can and are able and would like, would you please stand with us as we hear the gospel?

The word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

The Sermon

This has been a big week in a lot of people's lives. It has been one of those weeks when different things happen to us. As I went through that week, I kept running into this thing about taxes. Any of you have to deal with taxes? It seems to be one of those inevitables. If you have government, you have taxes. The old saying is that there are only two things for certain: taxes and death. This week I kept running into taxes, because this was the week I had set to get all my stuff to the accountant so that we can figure out how much I own Uncle Sam.

That kind of drew things together and made me wonder about this business of mixing religion and business. There is a real question in a lot of people's minds about mixing religion and business. Well, there are some things we need to think about because this is the third Sunday in Lent and we are talking about being cleansed and purified and prepared for the coming of Easter. That means cleaning up -- not only our acts but ourselves, our hearts, our spirits, our souls -- getting all those things purged and cleaned and made to be white. Purified. Almost, if we could, on our own strength to become sanctifiable -- if that is a word. In other words, to get ourselves in readiness.

As I thought about this thing of mixing religion and business, lots of questions poured into my mind. But the passage from Exodus also came in very strongly. I want to look at these three passages that we heard this morning -- in passing, as it were. Let's look at the passage from Exodus for a moment, then look at the one in Corinthians, and then look at the one in John. We want to distinguish between certain factors, such as knowing the difference between religion and faith and moral codes and all of those things.

Picture with me Moses. Moses is speaking to the children of Israel. According to the Old Testament, Moses gave this speech in Exodus. He said to the children of Israel, "These are God's words, I'm just going to pass them onto you." So we see Moses and he is speaking to this crowd of folks.

There are a couple of things we need to remember. Moses was dealing with a group of slaves. There is a slave mentality. Slaves were accepted. These people had been slaves, and not only were they slaves, but their parents had been slaves. Not only had their parents been slaves, they went back as slaves for ten generations. They had been slaves! So, how do you expect a slave to act? Slaves set free? What do you expect them to do? In our country we've had people who were slaves, but not necessarily for two or three hundred years. We certainly haven't had any slaves in this country for as long as four hundred years. And when we turn those persons loose, how do you expect them to act? See the challenge?

Here they were, wandering out in this arid area, sometimes in the marshes, sometimes in the mountains, but always wandering, moving on. And here was Moses, who was going to make a nation out of slaves. There had to be some rules, there had to be some way of guiding their behavior. There had to be some way of setting forth what was really the right way to do it.

One of the things that was in their favor was the fact that they had a god who was not only a god; He was The God. There is a difference, my friends, because as we look at our studies of last week and again tonight, we have gods all over the world. There is a god for everything that is going on and for every people that is around. If you don't believe it, just go look at your studies in archeology and anthropology. People create gods for themselves. But Moses said, "God, the Almighty, the Creator of all of this, has said these things. And because He has done that, we have rules to go by."

There is a great difficulty in trying to capture an experience and a relationship and put it into codified or ruled form. How do you get people to understand the need, the urgency and the appropriateness of having a God who is above everything else, the one and only God? God introduces Himself, "This is who I am. There is one God and there is no other God and you shall have no other gods before Me." That is the first rule.

"Now, not only will you have no other gods before Me because there are no other gods, but you will not make for yourself any kind of image of Me. Not only of Me, but anything in the heavens above or on the earth that you see or underneath the waters of the sea, or anywhere else. You shall not make for yourself any graven or carved images." That is the second rule. Another rule: "You shall have a day of rest. That day of rest will be the seventh day of each week." And He goes on down the list.

"You shall not use my name inappropriately. You can't use my name wrongly. So I am who I am, God of all, no other gods before Me, no graven images, don't use My Name in vain," as we say it in the old translations, "don't misuse it." And He goes on down the list. Then He gets into those social issues on how to run a country or run a community. "You honor your father and your mother." And on down the list.

Moses had the task of making a nation out of a group of slaves. God gave this revelation and the people listened and they tried to obey it. All through, then, we hear and we see their religious faith being uppermost in their lives. It continues to be in their lives very much.

When we go over to Paul, then, in Corinthians, we see a little different slant, for here Paul is talking about how you get your religious faith straightened out. What we will see this evening is that in Athens -- where Paul had been -- there are temples for everything, there are sacrificial places, altars, there are shrines, there are temples. In other words, there is name recognition, there is a place for devotion and meditation, there is an altar for sacrifice to all these different gods.

Now, along the way to Mars Hill, Paul saw one of these altars and it didn't have a god's name on it. It just said, "To the unknown god," because as I've said before, the Greeks wanted to be sure they hadn't left someone out. And if there was another god in all of the creation that they hadn't heard of or no one had brought up, then they wanted to be sure to cover their backs. They wanted to make sure that everything was okay, so they had an altar to the "unknown god," just to cover themselves. To be politically correct!!

Paul picked up on the idea of the unknown god and when he goes up to speak to this erudite group -- philosophers and all kinds of people -- he says to them, "I see that you have an altar to the unknown god." Paul, in his best Greek training, comes forth with his argument. He has a premise, he then builds his proposition one on top of the other, he gets his information in order, and he presents to them the fact that the one who is unknown to them is the One he has come to tell them about. He is the messenger from the unknown god and he is going to tell them what this God's name is and what this God has done in history. He wants to tell them that this God has a people that are His, and that this God loves people enough that He sent His Son to die for them and to be their Savior.

The reaction to Paul's sermon on Mars Hill is a typical reaction we get from everything we do. There are those, first, who mock him and laugh at him. There is a second group who are a little more courteous -- or as we say, socially astute -- and they would say to him, "Well, you have an interesting proposition, a good idea. Tell you what, come back on another day and we'll hear more about it." Not that they really were rattled or shaken by what their positions were or anything else, but they were just being nice. At least he had a right to speak his mind. But they were not ready to say "yea" or "nay." There were a few in the third group. When he was walking away from Mars Hill, they followed him away and said to him, "We want to learn more about this Way. Tell us about Him."

But Paul was disheartened. He had given it his best shot. They did not approve his returning to speak again. Some suggest that he was not given permission to speak publicly in Athens. There is not a church of Athens in the New Testament. (But there is a church of Corinth.) Paul goes back and you can see him walking down the hill. Burning within him is a desire for people to believe what he said, but they don't believe what he said. At least, one group didn't. They mocked him. They laughed at him. Why shouldn't they laugh at him? All the Greeks were familiar with gods. They had all kinds of gods. They knew that the gods had sex with one another and produced offspring. They knew that the male gods had sex with women and had earthly/heavenly combination children. They knew it was the other way around, that the female goddesses had sex with the human males and they had offspring. They knew all of that. So when Paul said to them, "God sent His Son, born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary," he just walked right into their way of thinking. Why wouldn't they laugh? Of all the ridiculous things! You see, in the philosophical world, each has his ideas of gods and philosophy. As a learned person, as a Greek male would be, I have my philosophy. I have my way of believing about things and I can do that and I will allow you to do the same thing. But don't you try to convert me to your way of thinking and I won't try to convert you to my way of thinking. I'll present my cause and you make your own decisions about it.

Paul wasn't happy with the outcome. He wanted them to understand that what he was telling them was the truth as the world stands and they needed to be paying attention. And not only that, they needed to be reacting and becoming a part of the kingdom because God had sent His Son to die for them. Those who mocked him and laughed at him just fit him in with the other groups of people that had told stories about their gods coming to earth and so on. That group derided him. The second group just said they would hear more next time. But it appears next time never came. However, there was that small group that followed him away and believed. Paul left that scene in Athens and went down to Corinth.

So, you see, when Paul writes to the people about the Wisdom of God, he has had the experience of being on Mars Hill and speaking to that group of people there. He knows about earthly wisdom and he knows about how you reject it if it doesn't fit your plan of thought. Paul was wanting the Corinthians to understand that what he is preaching, and what he has told them when he was with them in person, is much more powerful than all that wisdom. He said, "Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world; for since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom." In other words, deductive reasoning or any other kind of reasoning, won't make you understand God. That has to be by revelation and the Bible is our Book of Revelation. That is how we get to know God. It is that way.

Paul is saying, "You know, you have a stumbling block." He talked about this Son "who came and was crucified. He was a sacrifice." And that's supposed to win friends and influence people? Not in that world! Not in their wisdom. It didn't make sense. So they rejected it. You see, Paul went from Athens down to Corinth and he wanted them in Corinth to understand that God was smarter than all the wisdom of the world. Not only that, he wanted them to understand that even in God's greatest weakness, when he was crucified, that was stronger than anything else in all of the world. In the philosophy -- in the way we look at things -- we have to be careful about what we conclude.

Is there an interaction between business and religion? Indeed there is! If you look, then, at the text from John, you find that Jesus came to the Passover. I have this vision of Jesus at the Passover. He comes, he is watching. It is on a regular workday, and as he comes in, he hears all of these sheep blating. He hears cattle lowing. He hears and sees doves. He sees all of these animals in the temple.

The temple was a beautiful, glorious structure -- a marble structure. If you came from Bethany over that hill of the Mt. Olives looking westward to Jerusalem and you saw the temple glowing in the eastern sun, it was glorious. Herod did a great job. The temple was a tremendous monument to God. It was dedicated to God's use, but when you came in, you heard all the noise. And in that noisy situation, Jesus must have slipped over to the side and was stringing together some cords. He sat there, and as his feeling -- his emotion, his anger -- boiled within him, he plaited a rope out of threads. He took the cords and he made them into a rope. He took the rope and made it into a whip, and when he could no longer tolerate the situation, he exploded and yelled for them to get out and drive these things out of there. Get the animals out of here! Only the sacrificial animals could remain. But these were here not for sacrifice. These were here for sale. He didn't like that. And he drove them out.

Not only did Jesus drive the animals, the doves, the sheep and the cattle -- all that stuff -- out, but he grabbed hold of the tables where they were doing the money changing. You see, you had to take a certain coin into the temple, not just any old coin, not a Roman coin or a Greek coin or an Egyptian coin, but you had to have a certain kind of Hebrew coin. Of course, there was a little bit of profit involved because they were sitting there serving you all day, giving you the right coin. Jesus was furious. He drove them all out. He turned the tables over.

Do you mix business and religion? Religion is a set of religious beliefs. It may not have anything to do with the true God. One can be religious and have no relationship with God's kingdom. And that is what I fear, that too often in our world today we are substituting religiosity for faith in God, for a relationship with God. Jesus said, "My house is to be a house of prayer." And then his disciples remembered that over there in the Book of Psalms, in the sixty-ninth psalm and the ninth verse, there is a statement that says, "It is zeal for your House that has consumed me."(NRSV) So it was with Jesus. His zeal for the House of God being a place of prayer had consumed him, so he created all of this chaos to get rid of all of this commerce in the Lord's house, to make it a House of Prayer.

Jesus' business was to be about his Father's Kingdom and as he was about his Father's Kingdom, he wanted a place for his people to pray. We, too, I hope will be in this season of the year cleaning up, getting rid of those things we don't need and being consumed by the Spirit of God so that we can, indeed, enjoy the House of God for prayer.

Business and religion? Yep, they do mix all over the place. But we need to be sure it is based on a relationship with the God, Almighty God. The relationship with God should mix with everything we do; not religion as a belief in a god, but our relationship with God and faith in God is what I am speaking of. Never, never let it be otherwise. May the Lord bless us as we do that. Amen.

Before we sing our closing hymn, we need to remember a few things and I have an announcement to make.

We will have communion two weeks from today, if that is alright with the ladies. One guy said that he didn't ever do anything in church unless the ladies approve it, because they are the ones who will be doing the work.

Tonight at six at the Booneville Presbyterian Church we'll be continuing with the Journeys of Saint Paul. A meal will be supplied, so be sure to be there.

And the other thing that I have to say is that Martha and I have been coming faithfully and working with you through the last six years -- will be six years come Mother's Day -- and I will be retiring from active ministry in June. So the month of June will be my last month to be with you. We wanted to say that to you this morning, not that it is a downer, but that it is a challenge for you to get someone to replace us and go on with your good life. We've certainly enjoyed it and we'll have more to say about that as time passes.

Amen.