IS STAYING THE SAME GOOD ENOUGH?

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

January 23, 2000

New Hope Presbyterian Church

Rienzi, Mississippi

It is a changing world and in a changing world we have to get ready for the changes, and I guess that is one way of looking at economic management: What can I get the most of for the least effort?

Jonah had a little bit of a problem with the same. If you will, look with me at Jonah 3:1-5. Jonah is a short book; it covers two pages in my Bible -- four chapters on two pages. So that means that the chapters are very short. That means the whole book is not very long if it only takes two pages, and those two pages are right there in front of me when I open my Bible - from start to finish. Look in the third chapter, the first five verses and we see that Jonah, who has gone on a little trip, comes back to reality. You know the story.

The reading for today from the New Testament comes from I Corinthians 7:29-31. And yes, this is right in the middle of a paragraph, but that is the way the lectionary has it laid out and I will explain that a little later. So listen to the words, if you would.

While you are thinking about that, the gospel reading is from Mark 1:14-20. If you can, would you stand with us for the reading of the gospel?

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

I received in the email this week from a friend a sheet of jokes. I didn't receive that one that I just shared with you earlier, but this is a different kind. It is a kind like this one that says: Just as I was getting used to yesterday, along comes today.

You didn't get that one either, did you? Another said, "The nice part of living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does."

Then one was, "Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness."

That may be the way you felt when I read this mixture of scriptures this morning: the passages from Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; and Mark 1:14-20. Those were the passages selected for the lectionary reading and those are the lectionary readings. You also participated in the reading of the Psalms earlier this morning in the worship service: the 62^nd Psalm, verses 5 to 12. You have four scripture readings today and we do that almost every Sunday. But then, based on these we get to read through the scriptures in a relatively short five or six year time. Things were different in all of those passages. Traditional ministers preach on the lectionary, some people don't. If you ask some pastors what that is, they won't even have a clue. But in the traditional churches, the mainline Protestant churches, the lectionary is laid out for laymen and ministers to use, and so we try to follow it. At least I do. But the sermon title today didn't necessarily come from the readings; it just came from a thought that I had as I was reading through those. That is, is staying the same good enough? Is staying the same good enough?

Everyone who is in business knows that you have to make changes as time passes. And we've been trained with multi-media impacting on our lives in the last fifty years that nothing should ever stay the same. Everything is changing.

This past week, I've been at the Ministers' week for the United Methodist ministers in Mississippi. The speaker and leader was Dr. William Easum. Some of you may have heard of him. He's the author of Church Growth Handbook, How to Reach Baby Boomers - now we have some baby boomers here, I think - those are those people who were born about 1945 or later. Maybe I'd better leave that alone. He also wrote a book called Dancing With Dinosaurs. Now we've had dinosaurs around lately and all of our grandchildren have been into dinosaurs in one form or another, and I have this image of trying to dance with Long Neck. Dancing with Dinosaurs. His latest thing is Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers. But then he has written one called Growing Spiritual Redwoods. You can tell he's into the modern technology and the modern age. He puts out a book every so often and since 1993 this has been his major thrust, that is helping churches get moving and find themselves in the Christian Church, the Church of Christ.

Last Sunday I preached from a passage in Ephesians 4:1-16 where Paul spoke of God's gifts to the churches. He said, "God gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists and some pastors and teachers." I said that those are the church's resources; these are the things the church can fall back on and use to build themselves up. Well, Dr. Easum fits in the category of a prophet. Remember I said that a prophet is one who sees the current situation and can tell you what the spiritual meaning of it is and what needs to be done with it. But his prophetic insight came after years of being a pastor.

He was one of those persons who started out, as I did, in the Southern Baptist Convention, for Southern Baptist churches only he had great success. He started with a small one and made it a big one, but then theology got in his way and he couldn't deal with the specific theology that they were preaching and teaching. Out of that he found his way to another freer kind of church and he came to the Methodist church. In 1969 he was appointed to a small church in San Antonio. The first Sunday there - now you Presbyterian folks don't know about United Methodists and how they do their pastors who come - the first Sunday they are assigned - all the congregation comes to see what they (the minister and his/her family) look like, see what his wife wears, see how his children behave - all those things. Thirty-seven folks showed up on that first Sunday. He laid out in his vision of the church what he could see happening with that thirty-seven folks and when he finished his sermon, he said, "Now, those of you who are interested in seeing this happen in this church meet with us at the parsonage at seven tonight." He had twelve folks show up. He wasn't really discouraged by that because, after all, he said, Jesus started with twelve and he could do the same. So he did. Well, that was in 1969. When he left there in 1973, their average attendance was well over a thousand!

I say that as a backdrop because, you see, he knows something of what he is saying. Using that and other experiences as a backdrop, Dr. Easum reminded us of the work of the church and showed clearly that he knew of what he was speaking. But his major contribution to me was clarifying the world as it is today - the world in which we live -- and my friends, that world is different than that seen by those born before 1950.

That world is different than that seen by those born before 1980. It is a different world altogether. For example, eighty percent of those who were born after 1980 have never been in a church. Get a grip on that one. Oh, in our area and in our community that is not the case - we don't think. But that's because people work to make disciples of those people. He's using the term for the society as a whole: it is a pagan society. Some people have trouble with that word, but it just means those people who do not have a faith or a belief in God or who have a belief in a god other than God Almighty. As we've emphasized to the children and to each of us, we say "the Father Almighty." That's our God. Pagans have their gods, too. They may be made out of sticks or stones or other things. Believing in a god is no big deal; that still makes you in the pagan category if your belief is not in the God Almighty. What makes you a non-pagan is the believing in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ that God sent into the world. So, therefore, if in the population around us all of those babies that have been born and only so few have been inside a church, we cannot speak to them as we once did. We have to speak to them as those who do not know, do not have a living faith, and as pagans.

I said to you last week that the Apostle Paul was an apostle. I reminded you of the fact that the Apostle Paul said he was finished with work in Greece and Asia Minor because the gospel had been preached and the apostle was called to preach the gospel where it had not been preached before. So today, in the twenty-first century, look back to where we were when Paul was here and you will see that the attitudes of the people then and now are very much alike. Watch your TV, pay attention to what you are seeing and you will see that it is so. We have to have people who act similarly to him. We have to have apostles preaching in the wilderness. The cities are in need. The people are in need.

Now go back with me for a few minutes to Jonah. Jonah was living a very peaceful life. He was doing his thing and everything was cool. He was not upset about the world or the situation in it. He had all of his bigotry and prejudices that all the rest of us have, but somewhere in the quiet of all of that good confusion, the voice of God said to Jonah, "Hey, Jonah. Ninevah. Ninevah, Jonah. Ninevah. That's a great city. It is a great city and they are wicked, oh, they are so wicked. I have my scope on them and I see them and they are wicked! But Jonah, before I wipe them out, before I zap them into extinction, I feel like it's right to give them a fair warning. So, Jonah, I want you to go tell them that if they don't repent and change their ways in forty days, I'm going to pull their plug."

Now Jonah was like us. He didn't want to get uprooted; he didn't want to be moved. He didn't want to go off somewhere where he wasn't known, and he had heard their reputation. He knew it was terrible. He may get murdered. He may get mugged. He may get all kinds of perverse things done to him. Jonah decided the best thing to do was to get away from a guilty conscience and move to a different place. So he headed out to Spain. Tarshish, as it was called. But along the way he didn't get very far before he got dumped in the sea and ended up back on shore on his way back home. And when he got back home, God said, "Ninevah. Ninevah, Jonah. Ninevah." Well, Jonah had learned his lesson enough that he went, but Jonah was the same. He hadn't changed. He stayed the same. Oh, his ideas didn't change about Ninevah. His ideas didn't change about God. He didn't change. But he went. He didn't want to go through that sea thing again. So he went.

I can just see Jonah going up to the city, the gates were open and he walked through, looked around at the smelly, dirty place. Lots of noise, lots of carrying on, lots of vulgar scenes, all that sort of stuff. He saw all kinds of things. Perverse people. He didn't want to be there. Wanted to go back home. But he kept walking. He knew it would take three days to get across the city, so he walked a day before he said anything. Then he said to somebody, "Hey, the jigs up. He's fixing to come down on you." So he walked in and said, "Forty days more, and Ninevah shall be overthrown." He might have said it quietly one time, might have said it a little louder the next time - because the first time he said it, the folks around him stopped to say, "What's this guy saying?" Then he held forth again and he got a little louder. There was a hush. You see, people who know their sins know they need release; and the people of Ninevah obviously knew their sins and they knew they needed a release. They feared overthrow. And so, they took the word to the highest order; they took it to the king. And the Bible says that from the greatest to the smallest -- the greatest to the smallest -- put on sackcloth and began to repent. Jonah just walked his way on across, got out the other side, went out to sit down to wait and see what was going to happen. To see what God was going to do. Jonah hadn't changed. He stayed the same.

Oh, he delivered his message, but he didn't do anything about it. He just went on through town and sat down on the other side to watch and wait out his forty days. He sat down and then decided he'd better get a little something over his head, so he built a little lean-to sort of thing. And that night a vine grew up. A bush, as it were. It made a nice shade the next day when the sun was bearing down on him. He was very glad about that. He hadn't changed. The next day he got up, expecting to enjoy his waiting and watching to see what happened to the city. But then, the leaves weren't as wide as they were the day before. The vine, the leaves, were shriveling up. Something had killed the plant. It made him mad. He was angry. Man, was he angry! Some blanked-blank worm had come along and killed his vine. It was his vine, it wasn't anybody else's - and now something had killed it. He had not changed in his heart. And God said to Jonah, "Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" "Yes, angry enough to die."

The Lord said, "You're concerned about the bush for which you did not labor and you did not grow it. It came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Ninevah? That great city in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left? And also, many animals?"

The book of Jonah leaves us right there. He leaves us with a question. "Shall I not also be concerned about a great city?" That's a terrible question to leave with us, because you have to change to make something happen differently. Now look with me for a few moments, if you would, and let's jump over to the apostle Paul. It won't take long. What I read was a funny kind of reading. It starts in the middle of a sentence. It's just funny, at least to me it is odd in a funny sort of way. Because what we're talking about is how should people who have never been married behave. And then it deals with people who are married. I don't want any of you to think that the Lord gives you permission to go out and act as though you didn't have a wife or husband when you have one. That's what it literally says, but you have to read the whole text, and that's what I read to you.

The apostle Paul says, "I have no command of the Lord," and I think we need to pay attention to that. "But I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I don't have a command on this," he says, "But I think that in view of the impending crisis, it would be well for you to remain as you are." The impending crisis is the end of time. Paul, you see, when he was writing to the people in Corinth, in this particular place, believed that the end of time was here, immediately here.

And as you read on through it you find that his emphasis is to stay as you are. If you are married, stay married if that's agreeable. If you are single, stay single if that's possible. Now if you get to burning so much with passion and desire that you can't contain yourself, then find a mate. "There's nothing wrong with marrying," he said; but he thought it was better if you didn't change your status. Why? So you could attend fully to the work of the Lord until the day of his coming.

Now for a higher view of what Paul believed about marriage and its place, look at Ephesians 5:21-23. There you will see a much more elevated passage because by this time he has lived three or four more years and the end hadn't come. He's also found himself now in prison in Rome and he's writing back to the Ephesian church. He knows that the coming of the Lord may be delayed, so his later emphasis was on doing that which you could for the kingdom.

Then in Mark we have that exceptional passage in which Mark tells us about Jesus. He tells us about Jesus and how he recruited people. You have to look at that. Jesus came preaching after John was arrested and he went by the Sea of Galilee, and he personally touched the people that he called to follow him. Jesus did one on one recruiting- or in the case of these two, brother and brother together -- he called them together.

What is the church to do in this coming age? It has to reach out and disciple people for Jesus Christ. The church has to ask people to come and follow in the line of the church. Jesus preached that the time of the kingdom of God had come and he said, "Repent and believe in the good news." He sought and found his workers. He had already met Peter and Andrew. You remember Andrew was the one who brought Peter to Jesus. So you see, he knew them already. But on this day he went to them personally and said, "Follow me." He invited them and they responded immediately. Together, Jesus and his disciples revived the constantly changing world and he still does. The Pharisees wanted the world to stay the same, and Jesus got killed in the process of changing it. Through the ages the gospel of Christ has prevailed. That shouldn't surprise us. Jesus promised to build his church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

"Oh, the times they are a changing." They are always a-changing, and the world we are going into now in the twenty-first century, we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. And linear thinking we have been taught from childhood, for my age and me, has now been changed. Newtonian physics to quantum physics, and more than one thing can happen at a time.

So what are the lessons in these passages? One is very clearly from Jonah that God is at work in His world. Another is that Jesus calls us to follow him, those who have understanding of him and those who have been His disciples. The third is that the Spirit of God sends those called into His world - this world. The fourth thing is that we can't be the same if we are going to meet Jesus in the world and help him bring the good news to that world. We can't stay the same. The last thing is we have to get ready, and go, to stay up with Jesus in the Kingdom. We can't stay the same.

Is staying the same good enough? Not for the church of Jesus Christ, it is not. It is the change that is critical. The change to being a follower of Jesus Christ. And immediately they dropped their nets and left their father with the hired man, and followed Him.

And as the little joke I began with said, "Just as I was getting used to yesterday, along comes today." And I might say, "Just as I was getting used to today, along comes tomorrow." Change is inevitable. We have to change with change. May the Lord bless us as we do that. Amen.