for Christian Education Sunday, 2010

I Cor. 10: 1For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 2They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 3They all ate the same spiritual food 4and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. 5Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert. 6Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. 7Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: “The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry.” 8We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did—and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died. 9We should not test the Lord, as some of them did—and were killed by snakes. 10And do not grumble, as some of them did—and were killed by the destroying angel. 11These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. 12So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!

Focus verse: “11These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

If you haven’t yet been to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota, I would highly, highly encourage it. The exhibit runs until October 24. I’ve been to it twice, and could easily go again.

If someone else paid my admission, of course.

For me, the highlight of the exhibit was seeing fragments of the actual 2000-year-plus–old scrolls, found in caves near the Dead Sea some 60 years ago, some of which are from the Bible, many which are not. But they still relate to today’s Bible passage and our focus on Christian education, because there’s a very slim, outside chance that the Rabbi Saul of Tarsus—our Paul–whenever he was in Judah or Jerusalem, might have read or prayed from one of the very scrolls whose parts and pieces are in the Science Museum of Minnesota even as I speak.

Or just as likely, these scrolls could have been the ones from which Paul’s personal collection of Bible scrolls was copied. We know from his Second Letter to Timothy that Paul had some scrolls of his own, when he wrote Timothy and said, ”When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments (2 Tim. 4:13).”

With that, and with today’s passage, we get glimpses into Christian Education of the First Century, or Christian Education as the first Apostles practiced it. It really wasn’t all that different from our Christian Education today, except for the technology available to us. But the subject material was the same: the Bible. Only, in their case, the Bible was what we now call the Old Testament. To that they added their stories and traditions about Jesus, and his way of interpreting and applying the Old Testament in this new dispensation of God, what Paul called, “the fulfillment of the ages.” Those later became our New Testament.

In effect, the first generations of Christian Education were actually Jewish education for Gentile Christian converts. For Christians of Jewish background, Christian Education was, in a way, Jewish re-education, with the familiar passages, prayers and prophecies re-interpreted through their experience of Jesus Christ. This we see in the way Paul writes to the Corinthians about the disturbing and difficult things that happened during the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt. From the tone of it, I get the strong impression that the Corinthians already know these stories, that he is not just teaching them about these things as much as he is reminding them. They would previously have learned these Old Testament stories and passages from him, from Apollos, and from the husband-and-wife missionary team, Priscilla and Aquila.

The point of those particular Old Testament lessons was to draw comparisons between that Hebrew Exodus, 1500 years before, and their spiritual and moral exodus from the world, as Christians. One lesson of the Exodus is that its one thing to get God’s people out of Egypt, its another thing entirely to get Egypt out of God’s people. After all they had suffered there as slaves and scapegoats, and after all that God had done to liberate them from Egypt, still, whenever things got rough and they had to exercise some trust in God, they clamored to go back to the familiarity of their victimhood, oppression and self-destructive indulgence, whether geographically, or spiritually and morally. As Paul reminds them, an entire generation had to die off in the wilderness before the nation was ready to enter the promised land.

Our Exodus in Christ is not that much different, nor all that much easier than it was for our Hebrew spiritual ancestors. Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with deadly snakes, fire coming down from heaven or the earth opening up to swallow us when we grumble and rebel. Jesus has already paid the ultimate, complete price of our redemption. But the stakes are no less high, Paul warns us. The things that provoked these punishments are still just as deadly and destructive to us, in and of themselves.

Nor is the time any less urgent. And we are no less important. If anything, we are extremely, supremely important, Paul assures us. Because, he says, these things, recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, happened as warnings and lessons with us in mind. Not that we too should fear deadly snakes biting our ankles, or the earth opening up to swallow us, or the avenging angel striking us dead like flies. Rather, that we might view our slavery to sin and to the world with no less alarm and disdain than did Moses and his fellow Hebrews. Also, that we might treasure our promised inheritance at least as greatly as did the Israelites, working their way toward the promised land. And that we might fight just as hard for it. Not against other persons, because our enemies do not have flesh or blood. But against our tempter and accuser, and against the spiritual and moral residues of Egypt yet within us.

We are also important, and our situation is urgent, Paul says, because we are the people upon whom “the fulfillment of the ages” has come. By that Paul means that we are living in that period of salvation history for which all the previous stages were preparatory, like the Exodus and the kingdom of Israel. Those events were the appetizer; our age is the entree. Those were the foundation; we are the building. Those were the overture, this is the show. That was the introduction, Jesus and the Kingdom of God are the opening chapters, and our mission to the nations are the last chapters. That’s how we fit in, as the people for whom “the fulfillment of the ages” has come. The task and the time are urgent, because the only thing after us is the answer to our prayers, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

For all Christian Education workers and teachers today, that means that each of our students and disciples are also extremely important people, because upon them has come “the fulfillment of the ages.” And because all that came before us was for their sake. And ours. In the economy of God, every student, every attendee, every inquirer and seeker and disciple in our Christian Education classes is worth the whole of salvation history story before us, each one is even the goal and object of the whole salvation history story, even if there was only one of them. The same is true for ourselves. I hope that in our classes, our lessons, and our lesson planning, that we prepare and pray and pay attention to our students with that same degree of urgency and with that same extravagant sense of everyone’s importance in the household of God. Teachers and sponsors, we would do well to pray for our students and prepare our lessons with this sense of urgency and of everyone’s supreme importance. If it is true that, “whatever we have done for the least of these,” Jesus’ brethren, then this church exists for the sake of our youngest, most tender, vulnerable, impressionable people in their most tender, vulnerable, impressionable stages of life.

By the way, if we as teachers—and we’re all teachers by example, at least—if we wish to impress all the learners here with this sense of urgency, and of their supreme importance, especially the youngest and most impressionable learners, the most powerful way to do that is by modeling it. Adults, the children and youth of our congregation are watching us. If we tell them, “Now go to Sunday School,” and then don’t make any similar effort ourselves, or worse, if we do like some people I’ve heard about, who always dropped their children off at Sunday School and then went back home or to Starbucks to read the paper and drink coffee, what are we saying to our youth and children?

I’ll answer that one. We’re saying that Christian Education is important because its a free, volunteer baby-sitting service. And that its only important for children and youth, but not at later stages. That’s why I prefer to use the phrase, “Christian Education,” or even “discipleship education,” and fairly choke over the phrase, “Sunday School” any more. I’ll recommend even dropping the phrase “Sunday School” from our vocabulary, because as Christians, we’re in school every day of our lives. Frankly, “Sunday School” makes it sound like kids’ stuff. And that reinforces the idea that, once you get past, say, 6^th grade or 8^th grade or high school, then you’re done. Congratulations! You’ve graduated from …Sunday School! Now that you’ve colored in the rainbows over Noah’s Ark and you’ve pasted little cotton balls onto construction paper to represent the prodigal son and his father, you know the Bible!

No. We need Christian Education for as long as we intend to be Christians. The only graduation ceremony we’ll ever get from Christian education will be our memorial services.

This is just as true for teachers as it is for students. In fact, its critical for teachers, that we remain students of the Bible, the whole Bible, and that we teach from the stance of learners and students, not as masters and experts. That’s why most of my monthly reports to the church council include some sort of notice about what I’ve been reading, and what I’ve been doing to further my own Christian Education.

People sometimes tell me, “I could never be teach Christian Education, because I don’t know much about the Bible and the faith.” Well, I have a confession to make: I don’t either. The Bible and the Christian faith are kind of like mathematics, in the sense that, the deeper you get into it, the more you’ll understand that there is much more to know that you don’t know yet. And the more we learn how much more there is yet to learn, the more we’ll want to learn, the more it will delight us and intrigue us and transform us.

Yes, if you have a basic working knowledge of mathematics, you have more than enough to get along through life. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide, you already have all you need to know to go shopping, balance a checking account and invest toward retirement. Likewise with the Bible. If all you know is John 3: 16, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life,” you already have enough for this life and the next. But go in a little further and you’ll find that the Bible is not only a book, or a collection of writings, but a world in itself that will require– and inspire– a lifetime of study, reflection, prayer and action.

So, there’s no basic Bible knowledge entry exam to be a Christian education worker here. We want our teachers to know something, but more importantly, we also want our workers and teachers to keep learning and growing, seeking and learning some more. If we don’t know something, or understand something, or have questions, then don’t be afraid to say so. Because you’re probably not alone. It may even heighten the interest and enthusiasm of your class to say, “I don’t know the answer to that question; what do you think?” No less a giant in Biblical scholarship than Claus Westermann, an Old Testament scholar, said, “The first requirement in our reading the Bible is that we still our tongue and permit the Bible to speak. This could be little more than a pious phrase, but it is intended to make a demand of us: that we respect the Bible because it is always beyond us—simply because God is always beyond us. That is to say, we can never fully comprehend the Bible. If we did, we would no longer need to listen to it.” So the most important qualification of a Christian Education teacher here is that he or she is also an avid, eager Christian Education student.

Here’s a good moment for me to put in another plug for our Bible-reading program. If you’ve started it, keep it up. If you haven’t, start it any time that works for you. And if you drop if for a while, you can always come back to it. The weekly reading schedule will always remain posted online. If you haven’t done so yet, please take one of our brochures so that you can mark off the chapters as you go along and keep a record. They make great Bible bookmarks too. If you don’t understand everything in it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. But you’ll find, as you read along, that the Bible is the best interpretor of itself.

With that, you’re on the lifelong journey of Christian Education. A very similar journey to what our Hebrew spiritual ancestors took, getting out of Egypt, and getting Egypt out of themselves. For us its a pilgrimage in place. Its not enough to get Egypt out of our heads. Something else, something better must take its place. And that, again, is why we must be lifelong, avid and eager students of Christian Education, of the Bible. For this moment in salvation history is so terribly urgent, and our students are so very important. As are we, as both students and teachers. Whether we teach by word, or only by example.

I Cor. 5:1It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. 2And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? 3Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. 4When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.  6Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? 7Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.  9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. 12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

Focus verse: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

1. The Christian life is meant to be a Festival, not a carnival, nor an Inquisition
2. Whether a carnival or an Inquisition, the same sin is behind all other sins at work: “proud” defiance, resistance against repentance and grace & dependence upon God
3. Our Passover festival is celebrated with bread of sincerity & truth, i.e. openness to correction and repentance, honesty, transparency and mutual accountability (not sinlessness and perfection)

When we looked at this passage over breakfast last Tuesday morning, two questions immediately popped up: 1) What does this passage have to do with today’s baptism and new membership, when its about kicking someone out of church membership?; and 2) How good do we have to be lest we too get dis-fellowshipped or expelled? Since none of us is perfect, wouldn’t this passage set us on some sort of feeding frenzy, at the end of which, no one would be left on our rolls, or in our pews, or…. in the pulpit?

Well, to answer the second question first, today I have commissioned several big, strong bouncers standing in the back who are going to go through the sanctuary this morning taking every known and suspected sinner out of the pews and escorting them out of the sanctuary, and….

Now, why do they seem to be heading for the pulpit first?

Just kidding.

But some of us here have had experiences with just that kind of judgmental feeding frenzy, and sometimes over the oddest of things, like the length of your hair or the color and style of your clothing. All the while that they were fixating on those things, they were overlooking the real sins of fear and hostility that fueled such a feeding frenzy. When I pastored in Kansas, I got to know many who were kicked out of the Holderman Mennonite churches for such alleged sins as having pictures of their family members up in their house or at their work sites. It showed pride, they were told. Some of them joined our Western District Conference Mennonite churches, while others were so badly hurt that they left church all together.

That kind of feeding frenzy is not what Paul is encouraging in us today. He’s encouraging us to think of the Christian life, and the Christian community, as a festival. In particular, the Jewish Passover Festival. The Passover is a festival celebrating God and his work of freedom, redemption, liberation, and the restoration of human dignity from Egyptian slavery. Its celebrated in family, with friends, with the sharing of food, love and faith. An even greater freedom, redemption, liberation and restoration of human dignity is now possible for all of us because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the final, perfect Passover Lamb of God. We, his disciples, get to celebrate such a festival of freedom, dignity and liberation not just once a year but every day of our lives through eternity.

But somebody in Corinth had turned the new Christian passover festival into a carnival, worse than the most lewd and crude Carnival/Mardi Gras images you might ever have seen in the evening news from New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. It was so bad that people outside of the church would blush and barf at the mention of it.

But it would be no better if we turned the new Christian Passover Festival into a Mennonite version of the Spanish Inquisition. That was five hundred years ago, when Catholic church officials were prying into everyone’s homes and lives and burning people at the stake who wouldn’t repent of being Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Anabaptist, atheist, agnostic, pagan or whatever. They don’t do this today; the Pope even apologized for it, so we shouldn’t hang it about the necks of our Catholic friends anymore, except to recognize that, in this day and age when anything goes, we are likewise tempted to circle the wagons in a fearful, defensive stance against the world, and to seek security by controlling all sorts of external things about each other.

I suppose that’s why I occasionally get phone calls from people who are interested in checking us out, as long as our church imposes some sort of dress code, especially upon women, and that we don’t do any contemporary, upbeat music. I understand their fears and can sympathize with them. But I don’t think that controlling dress or styles of music will get at the things they really fear most. “Come see the beautiful African clothing, especially around Easter,” I say. “And we have a pretty good worship band, plus a full string orchestra.” But they don’t come. I figure its better to tell the truth and disappoint them over the phone than to have them go through all the trouble to come and get disappointed.

As grievous as was the particular sin mentioned in Corinth, the there is a more grievous sin behind that sin. Paul tells us what it is in verse 2 when he says, “And you are [even] proud!” He means “you” plural. So it wasn’t just a person at fault; there was an entire church faction in his corner. With those words we look beyond the unmentionable sin to the sin behind all sins, the proud, willful, stubborn, defiant resistance to God and his gifts of counsel, repentance, forgiveness and restoration, manifested by pride in the sin and its acceptance. It was the sin of believing himself, against all evidence to the contrary, to be not a sinner.

That sin is uniquely dangerous and destructive because, unlike other sins, it amounts to slamming the door on community, counsel, forgiveness and reconciliation. It amounts to painting ourselves into a corner where the gifts of counsel, of repentance, forgiveness and a change of life cannot reach us, where we would remain alone, thumbing our noses at God and others. Because of his pride in the sin, and not just the sin itself, Paul calls for the de-membership of the Corinthian offender until the fruits of his conduct affect him and confront him with the need to repent and reform. After all, the person in question, by his unwillingness to receive counsel, by his certainty that he had nothing to confess or be forgiven, was already distancing himself from God, the community and its mission.

And, like yeast in bread dough, this defiance of God’s grace was contagious and had begun infecting others with this same spirit of defiance and divisiveness. Others in Corinth were boasting about their acceptance of his conduct. That boasting indicates something else more destructive than the sexual misconduct, as bad as it was: it means that they were turning their inner orientation away from God and toward the world, making themselves actors for hire on the world’s stage, seeking to please society, more so than God. Since no one can act toward all sides of a stage, some will then play to different sides of society’s audience, such as for the right or the left, for the revolutionaries or the reactionaries. When that happens, a bridge club can’t stay together, let alone a church. So, defiance of God’s grace leads inexorably to divisiveness in the church.

And this is just as true if we should also turn the Christian life into an Inquisition. Its just as divisive and destructive whether we’re drinking ourselves silly, or snooping in each other’s refrigerators. Whether we’re committing theft, or auditing each other’s check books. Whether we’re dressing immodestly, or whether we’re enforcing a dress code. In either case, its the same temptation and the same sin: to abandon our trust in God in favor of self-reliance and self-justification, whether through a carnival, or an inquisition.

So, to the second question, How good do I have to be to not get kicked out of the community of faith? Well, that would happen only if we weren’t sinners. Actually, when it comes to God’s household of faith, people really, finally don’t get kicked out. Or they shouldn’t. But people may eventually remove themselves, through this willful defiance I have described, to the point where the community must finally acknowledge their leaving, and grieve it. And the surest way for anyone to remove themselves from the community of faith would be if we stopped being sinners in need of God and each other. Or at least, if we were sure we were not sinners, like the Corinthians and their poster child. In the spirit of I Corinthians 5, church membership is only for sinners.

That’s even what our church’s Mission Statement says. It begins by defining us as, “a community of sinners redeemed from the guilt and bondage of sin by the grace of God and the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ.” No sinless people need apply.

But the other side of the coin is expressed in our annual membership covenant, where we promise each other “...the compassionate giving and receiving of counsel among all members and attendees…” So don’t anyone join this church, or attend it, if you don’t want to start growing from sinners toward sainthood. Don’t join if you don’t want to give and receive help along the way. The old saying, “Every saint has a past and every sinner a future” is the plot line of our worship, our songs and our hymns. Its our life stories. And that of the man who wrote today’s Bible passage. He called himself, “the chief of sinners.”

And that leads us back to the first question: What does this passage, about church discipline and expulsion, have to do with today’s celebration of baptism and a new church membership? Well, look again at the focus verses, 7 and 8: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

At Emmanuel Mennonite Church, our baptismal vows and our membership covenants commit us to those two things: sincerity and truth. Not to sinlessness and perfection, because we’ve probably all missed our chance at those, but to sincerity and truth. The truth I take to be God’s Word. Sincerity I take to mean honesty, transparency and openness with each other in a spirit of care and compassion for each other. In our life-long Passover celebration together, our “bread of sincerity and truth” is made of our willingness to review our lives, honestly and compassionately, by the standard of God’s truth, to repent and make amends however often they’re necessary, to give ourselves and each other as many chances as we need to get up from our falls and failures and start over, and to accept the gracious, compassionate help of our brothers and sisters to do just that. It may not always be wise to spill everything about our lives before everyone all the time. But hopefully, to some trusted people in God’s household of faith, all of our lives are an open book to someone. Without this regular diet of truth and sincerity, our spirits starve and die.

I hope that every time someone is baptized and embarks on a new Christian life, all of us reflect anew upon our relationship with God and each other. Today, Rediet is joining the new Passover festival in Christ, to purge any of the old leaven of hostility and wickedness, and to share with us the new bread of sincerity and truth. She is committing herself to Christ and to us, to join us on the life-long journey of growth in godliness. Let Rediet’s decision today remind us to keep sharing and feeding on the bread of sincerity and truth, of honest counsel, repentance, forgiveness and newness of life. Its a matter of life and death. Especially for those who need it.