Great End of the Church 5: Stewardship

Let us pray.

Your word, O God, is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

So as we hear your word this morning, God, we pray that you would show us your light.

Amen.

Our second reading is from Paul's other letter to the Corinthian church,

2 Corinthians, chapter 4, starting with verse 5.

2 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

Let us listen together now for God's word to us.

For we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord,

and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake.

For it is the God who said, Light will shine out of darkness,

who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in clay jars,

so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God,

and does not come from us.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

One of the results of the English Reformation was the creation of the Westminster Confession,

which for a long time was the central statement of faith for the Presbyterian Church

here in the United States, as well as other denominations and Presbyterian bodies in the world.

It grew out of an assembly that met in the 1600s at Westminster Abbey in London.

The Westminster Assembly came together in 1643, and as they began their work together,

it was theologians and church leaders and pastors gathered together,

one of them stood up and asked this question, What is God?

And no one was immediately willing to answer, so they decided to ask the youngest one among them to answer first.

Probably a sign not of humility, but of spite or punishment or something.

So, George Gillespie, poor soul, 30 years old,

Scottish minister, happens to be the youngest among them, he stands up and he says to them,

I need God's wisdom. Will you join me in prayer?

And then he prays with these words,

Oh God, thou art a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable,

in thy being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

And someone there had the presence of mind to pick up a pen and to write down these words as they were being prayed.

But as you might know, and as Presbyterians know very well, when something gets written by a committee,

it never stays in its purest, most elegant form.

It grows, sometimes it metastasizes.

And such was the case here.

These simple, beautiful, honest words, by the time they make their way into the Westminster confession itself, have become these.

There is but one only living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection,

a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible,

almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, I'm not even halfway done,

working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory,

most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving, iniquity, transgression and sin,

the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments,

hating all sin and who will by no means clear the guilty.

The fourth great end of the church, the fifth one in our series, thanks to Bill, who mixed everything up on us,

is the preservation of the truth.

And this sounds an awful lot like what the Westminster assembly was doing.

Here is a Christian body needing to define for itself what it believes and for the church that it is forming.

And so it states its faith clearly, it sets out the markers of truth, and it aims to preserve that truth.

This is probably pretty close to what Presbyterians in the United States had in mind

when they added the great ends of the church to our constitution, and among them the preservation of the truth,

that it is the church's duty to take the truth that we have received, that we have inherited, and to safeguard it,

to preserve sound doctrine.

And I would guess it probably also lines up pretty well with what many outsiders believe about the Christian church,

that we gather together in our sanctuaries to fine-tune and perfect proper belief

so that we can tell the difference between who belongs and who doesn't.

Now we could certainly adopt this attitude and even understand it to be central to our purpose and our identity,

and many Christian bodies throughout history have done so, and many today still do.

It's not a hard view to imagine that there is divine truth, absolute truth,

that this truth has been revealed to us and that over the centuries we have carefully developed

a proper understanding of the truth, and having developed that proper understanding,

it is now our sacred task to preserve it, to guard it from heresies within,

to shield it against godlessness from the outside, and to make the church a fortress,

a keep, the world is a threat to the truth, an enemy to the truth that needs to be convinced, converted, conquered.

All of this sounds very much to me like what it would look like to preserve the truth.

There's something easy about this, there's something comforting about this.

We like the clarity, the certainty, we like firm lines and sharp distinctions,

but does it sound to you like the church of Jesus Christ?

The apostle Paul says, we have this treasure in clay jars so that it may be made clear

that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

The treasure he's speaking of is the truth of the gospel,

which he had just said in verse 2 of that chapter which we didn't read.

The treasure is the truth. He says it is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

And the clay jars, well that's Paul himself and his other apostles.

It's the church, it's you and I, fragile, simple, earthen vessels as King James says.

We don't have to be perfect, we don't have to be right, we don't have to be indestructible.

Frankly, a clay jar isn't all that important, it's dispensable, it's not especially valuable.

It's easy to replace. What gives a clay jar its value is not the jar itself, but what the jar contains.

So what does it contain? What are the contents? What is this treasure? What is the truth of the gospel?

Is it something like the rigid formula of Westminster but just dressed up in humbler garb?

Do we still get to be right as long as we're kinder about it?

Do we still get to judge the rightness of others as long as we do it with love?

Paul's most articulate statement of the shape of this truth, the truth of the gospel,

comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 1, words that we heard.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

He says, the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,

but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Greeks,

for God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

When I was a kid I wanted nothing more for Christmas than a Super Nintendo.

I had a regular Nintendo which we had bought second hand, but my friends all were getting their Super Nintendo's

and I've never envied something so much in my life and every year at Christmas time

I would scan below the Christmas tree for a package that was of just the right size and shape.

I never asked my parents for it because I knew it was too expensive, but I still dared to hope.

And every year I found a package under the tree that was just the right size and shape.

And on Christmas morning I would open it up and I would find a toy or a science experiment or God forbid clothing.

And my hopes would be dashed. I never did get my Super Nintendo, but I'm okay. You don't have to worry about me.

When we look at the Gospel we think we know exactly what's inside.

We think we know exactly the shape of that Gospel.

It is something that affirms or justifies the choices that we make in life and the people that we have become.

And certainly it is something that rejects the same people that we reject.

And certainly it is something that assures us that we are on the right track or that we are on the right side of history

or that we are on the right team and on and on.

But if we open it up and we look at it, we really look at the Gospel.

What we find is messy. It's contradictory. It's hopelessly naive and idealistic and it trips us up.

Paul says, I preach Christ crucified.

It's important to remember Christ is not Jesus' last name, but it's a Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah.

Paul is saying that I preach a crucified Messiah. This is a plain oxymoron.

The Messiah was supposed to come and restore Israel's greatness.

So for the Messiah to die on a cross is an impossibility.

Paul says, I preach a crucified Messiah. The core of the Gospel truth is a self-contradictory idea.

It is the idea that God's love is expressed through sacrifice, that God's victory over all evil comes through defeat,

that God's great immense power is demonstrated in weakness.

To paraphrase Paul, this is a stumbling block to good religious folks and it's utter foolishness to the unchurched or the de-churched or the anti-church.

So to recap, as a vessel of the truth, the church is fragile and disposable.

And the truth itself is contradictory, paradoxical, unsystemizable, and it trips us up.

You see, nothing of what it does to those on the outside. We are frail containers of a foolish message.

The preservation of the truth. If we are disposable vessels and the truth is an upside down trip hazard,

then where does this leave us in responding to this great end?

It was Paul who got us into this mess, so it's Paul who should get us out.

And in 1 Corinthians chapter 4, Paul says this, think of us in this way, by us he means the apostles.

1 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries.

So finally we come to the subject of stewardship.

And on Generosity Sunday, this is probably not what you expected.

Financial stewardship is an important part of the life of discipleship,

but it is only one part of the kind of stewardship that the church is called to live out.

Today we're talking about the stewardship of the truth, or to put it better, to put it the way Paul does,

the stewardship of the mysteries of God.

This is how Paul wants the church to think about him and the apostles.

And I think this is also how the church should think about itself.

We don't need to be preoccupying ourselves as guardians of sound doctrine.

We have done plenty of that throughout history, and it has borne the bitter fruit of fragmentation

and sectarianism and even violence.

That is a hermetically sealed Tupperware jelly jar kind of preservation

that just puts Christianity up on a shelf, a relic, an artifact, a historical curiosity.

But if instead we believe that there is a living mystery at the heart of our identity

and that we are stewards of that mystery, that we are custodians, caretakers of that mystery,

that is something altogether different.

There is so much loneliness in this world,

and we are stewards of a special kind of community.

There is so much fear and anxiety in this world, and we are stewards of a unique vision of hope.

There is so much coarseness and cruelty in this world, and we are stewards of radical grace.

There is so much self-interest in this world,

and we are stewards of a generosity of spirit.

We are stewards of the gospel of a crucified messiah.

We are frail containers of a foolish message.

We are stewards of self-giving love in a world that so rarely gives and is forgetting how to love.

And this is the mystery at the heart of who we are,

at the heart of what God has created us to be and what God is calling us to do.

The church is called to fan the flames of this living mystery,

not to lock it up, not to seal it in, but to keep it alive, to stoke it, to feed it,

with the fuel of our gifts and our lives.

But we have this treasure in clay jars

so that the world will know that this extraordinary power is from God and does not come from us.

Let us pray.

God, may we be your faithful stewards,

stewards of the mysteries that have been entrusted to us as your church,

stewards who take care faithfully of your good work in our lives and in this world.

We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.