St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, July 4, 2010

God is Go! – Rev. David Mundy

Galatians 6:1-7 Luke 10:1-11, 16-17

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It is important for ministers to have the stimulation of continuing education events which keep us fresh in our work, and both Cathy and I have participated in programs during the past couple of weeks. I got back this past Tuesday from an excellent course held in the high desert of New Mexico.

I also went to a conference back in January in Victoria, British Columbia, which was a smorgasbord of speakers reflecting many different theological perspectives.

Two of these speakers in Victoria offered an interesting contrast. The sociologist Reg Bibby was one of the first, and he shared with us some of the statistics about church attendance and involvement in Canada during the past decade. He admitted before he started that listening to sociologists isn’t all that much fun, and he reminded us that you never hear sociologist jokes the way you hear doctor and lawyer jokes because no one knows what a sociologist does!

Then he hit us with a barrage of graphs and charts painting a rather sobering shift in our Canadian culture away from involvement in organized religion especially in mainline churches such as the United Church. In fact he told us, a little too cheerfully it seemed to me, that he is the “prophet of doom” for the United Church.

Later in the conference we were entertained by another speaker, an American by the name of Leonard Sweet. He looked like a cross between country singer Kenny Rogers and Chad Krueger, the lead singer for Nickleback. He had his country singer haircut and cowboy boots and he admitted he loves his pickup truck, so he is just like most United Church ministers!

I say Sweet entertained us because he was funny and engaging and didn’t talk about discouraging statistics at all. He did concede that a lot of churches in North America are unhealthy, so he wasn’t disagreeing with Reg Bibby. But with humour and insight he invited us to be Christ’s people, to walk with Jesus and live out the gospel in the most effective ways we can.

I bought one of Sweet’s books and realized that he writes the way he speaks with lots of hook phrases. In his book called So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church he uses the little phrase “God is Go” –only seven letters long. And he points out that two thirds of the word God is the word “go.” He claims that Christians, as disciples of Jesus, are meant to get out there and share the Good News. This is the way he explained “God is Go.”

God is a missionary God, Jesus is a missionary Messiah, and the Spirit is a missionary Spirit. Missions is the family business . . . Disciples of Jesus live a mission-shaped life. We’re all here on assignment. To think that your church exists to provide a pew for you is to forget that one word, mission. Your church exists to love the world and to commission you for a mission of expanding beauty, truth, and goodness upon the earth.

This morning, a sleepy holiday Sunday, we heard a gospel lesson which is, without a doubt, missional and exemplifies the “God is Go” maxim.

We are told that Jesus sends out seventy of his followers, two by two, for the purpose of sharing his powerful message that “the kingdom of God has come near to you.” Only Luke tells us this story amongst the gospel writers, and it may come as something of a surprise that there are this many followers who can be commissioned to be sent out to share the gospel, the Good News. Scholars point out that this number, seventy, mirrors the number of leaders Moses chose to help him as the people of Israel travelled toward the Promised Land, so we aren’t sure if this is a literal number. But both stories remind us that even the most important leaders of faith need those who are willing to work with them to find the way and to share the message.

Don’t you wonder what Jesus was thinking as he sent these followers out on their own? There are times, we are told, when they are really clueless and self-absorbed. So sending them out must have been a little like the way a parent feels when teenagers move from the learners drivers license to the full license. When they head off there is a mixture of pleasure that they are becoming independent, but a healthy amount of trepidation as well!

Jesus tells them they must be willing to take risks, because speaking about faith can be misunderstood or draw hostility. Jesus says that they may be like lambs among the wolves – not exactly a comforting image.

He tells them that they must be adaptable. They are to literally travel light rather than hauling around too much baggage, and they are to accept whatever hospitality is served up, even if that means breaking dietary laws.

And they can’t be sentimental. If people won’t listen, he tells them, “shake the dust from your feet” and move on. This sounds almost harsh, but it is a bold reminder that hanging on where we can’t be effective just doesn’t make sense.

How do you feel about this “God is Go” message? Does it make you a little uncomfortable? Perhaps you are at an age when you’re saying that “my get up and go got up and went” and this sort of enthusiastic faith sharing isn’t all that appealing.

And let’s be honest, this has never been a United Church strength. For many years mainline churches such as ours followed the country’s upward curve of population growth and expected that people would come to us. We didn’t have to think about going into the community or develop a local mission strategy. In some respects our Christian faith is our best kept secret. Those of us who are Baby Boomers are realizing that we haven’t even been all that good at sharing our faith with our own children, let alone strangers. I have so many conversations with folk who lament the absence of their adult children from the faith community.

So, what is the temptation these days? It is to look inward and find comfort in familiar patterns, or to reminisce about another day? While it isn’t a stated strategy, it is one which we choose by default, and it can be deadly.

A couple of years ago we went to the Bowmanville Zoo on the community appreciation day just before the zoo closed in the Fall. It was a lovely day, but rather cool. When the sun was out it felt much warmer, but when the clouds drifted by it suddenly got chilly.

As we walked by the meerkat pen someone called us over and told us to watch. The meerkats were huddled in a ball when it was cloudy, but as soon as the sun emerged they threw their heads up and plastered themselves against the wall to “catch some rays.” It was hilarious but, believe it or not, it made me think of the church!

In these tough and rather chilly days of the changing church we are tempted to be “meerkat Christians,” huddling together to keep warm. This may be okay as a short-term survival strategy, but it has never been the way Christ’s church has flourished. Unless we stand up, “catch some rays” and share our core faith we really have no future.

Surely we want more, and today’s reading suggests that we can have more, if we will demonstrate some courage and creativity.

The encouragement Jesus offers to the seventy at the beginning of this story is that there is a harvest out there, they just need to discover where it is. And the only way to find it is to go out looking for it, not by huddling away from the world.

So what does that mean for us, since Jesus is not physically present to send us out, and we

Part of “God is Go” for us will be the challenge of being honest about our buildings, and where they are located. There may have been a time when it made sense to have two United Churches within a few hundred metres of one another in downtown Bowmanville, although I doubt it. Isn’t it time we go to where the people are in this community instead of insisting that we can continue this way into the future? There will not be two United Churches on Church St. twenty years from now. So why don’t we start the conversation today?

Another aspect of “God is Go” is our willingness to be mentally and spiritually nimble, asking ourselves how we can do things differently than a generation ago. Even though many congregations are in crisis, very few have working groups which address visioning and strategic planning. We can be inspired by the Holy Spirit to develop a new, a new mind-set, and a renewed spiritual outlook. Our Visioning and Strategic Planning committee here at St. Paul’s has worked by fits and starts over the past decade, but it is encouraging that we have had one, and this group can help us look down the road to being a missional congregation. We can be inventive and creative, rather than timid and backward looking, and if something doesn’t work then we follow Jesus’ advice to “shake the dust from our feet” and try something new.

Perhaps most important for all of us is to move outside our comfort zone to speak more readily about our relationship with God and with Christ. Churches tend to think in terms of more “posteriors in pews” and more money to pay our bills. The message we heard today is that Christ’s everyday folk will share a message of hope – God’s reign is at hand! Ask yourself when the last time was you shared your hope in Christ with someone else.

This may all sound rather daunting and scary but it can be Good News if we trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us. We also heard today that when the seventy “God is Go” followers return they are full of excitement about the power of their witness. Good things have happened! Lives have been changed! People have been healed! They return with joy, Luke says, and with an excitement that they have been gospel people.

Let’s live with a joy in being Christ’s followers. God is still “go” and we are the ones who have been chosen.