Pastor Jonah Sage preached the finale of our “Orientation” series. He said that ultimately, we will change when we see Jesus.
Pastor Jonah Sage preached the finale of our “Orientation” series. He said that ultimately, we will change when we see Jesus.
Last week of orientation, been a great experience for me personally.
This Saturday, 2/10, we have our next step in the membership process, our beliefs class.
This class summarizes our statement of faith into 4 statements, we'll discuss them together.
In that class, we'll talk about things like:
Plenty of time for questions and to interact with staff, deacons, and pastors.
Speaking of questions...over the last 5 weeks now we've been gathering questions.
In total, here's how many questions we had submitted from this series:
ZERO
Have a good afternoon peace be with you.
One question I've had personally from several people is "where did this come from?"
Why are we emphasizing what we emphasize?
One of my most favorite philosopher-preachers is a man named Frederick Buechner. I quote him often. He once wrote:
At its heart most theology... is essentially autobiography. Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, working out their systems in their own ways and in their own language, are all telling us the stories of their lives, and if you press them far enough, even at their most cerebral and forbidding, you find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once.
-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
This orientation material is a spiritual autobiography of Sojourn, of me, of our staff and pastors and members.
There have been some pivotal moments in my 11 years here, and almost 14 at Sojourn
Times of "a human face smiling, frowning, weeping" as Buechner said.
So, I have one story and two verses for us this morning.
These all represent pivotal moments for me, and these all have directly shaped how we are trying to live and love as a church.
The Story: My First Time in Therapy
For my first 3 years on staff at Sojourn, I was pursuing a master's degree full time while working 60 hours a week.
I was newly married, and basically everything was hard.
School was hard. Sojourn was hard. Marriage was hard.
By the 6 month mark, we were overseeing 12 small groups, had no idea what we were doing, I was learning Hebrew and writing sermons for my boss, no idea what I was doing.
But everyday I went to school with 1,500 other kids who all wanted what I had: a job at a cool, growing, influential church.
My first year on staff we were one of the 50 fastest growing churches in the country.
We were writing books. Recording records. Hosting conferences.
And so many people were getting baptized. Felt like I was in the Book of Acts.
So all the weird stuff, all the hard stuff, just felt like the price of doing business.
When I graduated Seminary, and received a full time job offer, I wept.
22k a year, and I wept. I felt like I got drafted by the Lakers.
I felt like the chosen one. I wanted to ride around campus shouting "in your face!"
Now I had an office. More meetings. And...things just felt off somehow.
I started noticing how tired I was, how tired the whole staff was. All the time.
The staff were sick constantly. Chronic illnesses, auto-immune stuff, colds. Constant.
Short temper with Allison. So strange. I would repent, and commit to not doing it again.
And when someone snapped in a meeting, or did something dumb, we told them to repent and not do it again.
And then a therapist came and talked with 10 of our staff.
I felt exposed, scared, and convinced what he was saying to us was true.
It didn't make any sense, but it was true.
At the time, I was helping to write a book on Calvinism. We were redoing Calvinism actually. Let that sink in.
We had a deadline coming up, and we had a debate we were scheduling, and interviews, and we had a world to change.
But everything was hard, so I asked this therapist if I could meet with him.
And a few days later, I found myself meeting with a 65 year old Christian therapist.
You guys know the first question a therapist asks, right?
So. What do you want to talk about?
-The Therapist's First Question
I unloaded. 40 minutes. Crying, not even sure what I said. Nobody likes me everybody hates me I'm gonna eat some worms.
So tired. So scared. But everything should be good.
After my 40 minute speech, he very calmly, very warmly, leaned forward and said
You Sojourn guys are so. Full. Of. [It].
-The Therapist's First Statement
But he didn't say it. Let the reader understand. I'd never paid to be cussed out before.
But...I knew what he said was true. He was right. I didn't know why he was right...
So I asked him why.
"You guys write books on Calvinism, and God is so sovereign in control, right? But every one of you walk in to my office guilty, anxious, and you can't sleep at night. But hey, God's sovereign amen?"
In that moment, I knew I was at a crossroads. Christianity was either going to stay as an idea in my head, a set of beliefs to articulate and argue over, or it was going to be a way of life.
In one moment, I felt like I could never go back again. The world changed.
I was either going to leave Christianity or find out if it could actually be real.
One of my great companions on that journey was Eugene Peterson.
He talks about this sort of thing all over his writing, here's one way he articulated what I was waking up to from an interview a few years ago:
Spiritual theology is simply theology lived. A great deal of theology has to do with doctrine, with getting it right. Spiritual theology aims to bring that together within a lived life. The conviction behind spiritual theology is that the Bible—and all of Christian belief—is livable. It’s not just something to be held in your head or performed through your actions and ethics, but actually embodied. The model for spiritual theology is the incarnation, and spiritual theology is understood in the context of the Trinity, where everything is relational. There is no disembodied Christian truth. There’s no abstraction about the Christian life. It is all intended to be lived in a coherent way.
-Eugene Peterson from IMAGE Journal, Issue 62
I wanted that. I wanted to live, and I wanted to experience the rich promises of God.
In my early years at Sojourn, everything I ever thought I wanted from a career in ministry had happened...and it left me anxious, exhausted, and guilty.
So there's my story...the journey from Christianity as an idea, to Jesus a person.
From a set of truth statements, to an embodied way of living.
And there were two verses in particular that I have returned in the 12 years since that first meeting with the therapist. I'm sure they'll be familiar to you:
Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.
-Matthew 11:28-30
The first 5 days of my life as a Christian proved this verse was true. And the 15 years made them seem like a lie.
This promise didn't apply to me because I was in ministry. I was serious.
But I could find no exception for church staff in Jesus' words.
I can find no exceptions for this invitation for anyone who follows Jesus.
I've been reading, praying, and thinking about this verse for a decade.
It does not say life will be pain-free, or free of all difficulty.
But it DOES say following Jesus will not be heavy.
There's a difference between difficult and heavy.
Jesus is not angry, or aggressive, or showy, or busy.
So here are some questions I've had to wrestle with over the last decade:
Why is everyone I know on a church staff so tired, guilty, and anxious?
Why are most of the Christians I know tired, guilty, and anxious?
Why are community group leaders so tired, guilty, and anxious?
Why are kids' servants so tired, guilty, and anxious?
Why are we all so busy...and tired, guilty, and anxious?
I could do this all day, but here's the point: if the way our tradition does church makes Jesus look like a liar, I want to change our tradition.
I do not believe Jesus is a liar. So, we're trying to live like Jesus' promises are true.
We're striving for our shared life together to show Jesus was right, Christianity is livable, this works.
I don't want to only teach that Jesus offers peace, I want to be at peace.
I don't want us to only tell people Jesus can heal, I want us to be healed.
If we aren't living and experiencing the promises of Jesus, it will make our words hollow and it will make Jesus look like a liar.
Which brings me to my second verse for us. I was feeling really stuck on some of this stuff at one point, and my wife shared this verse with me. It was a moment as profound as that day in the therapist's chair.
Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.
-1 John 3:2
I was very familiar with not knowing what I was supposed to be like.
I was very familiar with all the things I shouldn't do, and how hard I was working to not do them.
But this verse from the mouth of my wife led me to ask God "how do people really change?"
And so I looked to people who suffered greatly or changed dramatically in the Bible.
Noah. Moses. Daniel. Hannah. Jeremiah. Job. Samuel. Mary. Paul. Peter. In every story, there was one common thread: they encountered the presence of the living God.
And so John tells us that, ultimately, we will change when we see Jesus.
I won't find peace by trying hard to be at peace.
I'll find peace in the presence of Jesus.
I won't find rest by working really hard on my plan for rest.
I'll find rest in the presence of Jesus.
I won't find healing by figuring out the perfect way to pray for healing.
I'll find healing in the presence of Jesus.
So we decided to pursue the presence of Jesus together, as a church.
This is where our orientation material came from, these burdens, these desires, these longings.
Changes we've made to what we do and don't do as a church in the last ten years...born from this desire.
This is how our church became a refuge for tired, stuck Christians.
Because we want more, not of all this church business stuff, but more of Jesus.
If you want the same, I hope you find a home here.
Next week, we'll return to our series in Mark, chapters 9-10, and consider how we live in the Kingdom of God, a descent to Greatness.
Let's pray.