On Sunday, February 28, 1993, at age seven, my son Griffin wrote his first book.  It had five chapters and he started and finished the project during my morning sermon.  The title was, “The Book All About Church.”  The chapters were, “Today We Went To Church and Sang a Song,” “Today I Went to Sunday School,” “Today I Went to Big Church,” “My Dad Glen is a Pastor,” “The Name of the Hymnal is the Baptist Hymnal.”  Appropriately, at the end he wrote, “The End.”

On the one hand, his book was sobering.  Our children are watching.  It may just look like they’re coloring or drawing or going to the restroom when the pastor starts his sermon.  They’re actually writing a book we’re dictating to them more by what we do than what we say.  At least for a while they’ll mimic the way we sing, preach, pray, organize and even relate to each other and the world around us in this place.  Our children are watching and taking careful notes. 

How do we want that book to read?  When the apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonican church, he commended them for the way their chapter in the book was coming along.  In particular, he said he was remembering their “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Sounds like Paul, doesn’t it?  Faith, hope and love.  The cornerstones of all that it means to be Christian, as it so happened, were forming the thesis of the book they were writing.  If our children wrote chapters in their books all about church, would one of them read, Today, we encountered the living God?

The cornerstone word is “faith.”  But, listen again to the way in which faith dictated a chapter in that first century church.  Not just as a set of doctrines or neatly organized ideas about God but as a way of living out a personal encounter with the living God.  “The gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction . . . (and) in every place your faith in God has become known . . . how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”

Systematizing a way of thinking about God, organizing our ideas or beliefs about him in rational ways, has its place and its value.  The danger lies in trying to organize God according to our thoughts instead of the other way around.  The New Testament definition of faith, even in the ways Jesus called people to follow him to the point of death, leans heavily on faith as something we do, not just know.  James would go so far as to say that, if you don’t do faith, you don’t have faith (James 2:26).  In Thessalonica, their faith was proven in the way they “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”  Faith for them was an encounter with the living God that transformed the way they lived.  What is it for us?  When was the last time we were so overwhelmed by the presence of God in our lives that, instead of just organizing our ideas about him more accurately, our lives were reorganized? 

Even as we speak, the Hindus and Muslims in India are doing unspeakable things to each other all in the name of the God in which they believe.  The Palestinians and Jews the same.  But, we don’t have too many fingers left to point at them, do we?  Even some Baptists are hung up on defining faith more in terms of a right way of thinking and shoving aside all who disagree.  That’s what happens when our ideas about God become more important to us than the people he gave us to love.  And, our children are watching.  People for whom faith is an encounter with the living God find their lives transformed by that power.  Their thinking is different, but so is their living.  They forever relate differently, not only to God, but all of his creation.  Our children are watching how we treat others who don’t believe as we do.  How will they write this chapter?

For that matter, do most people who visit us here want us to help them get their spiritual index filed properly according to our Baptist alphabet?  Or, are they looking for, seeking, hungering for an encounter with the living God?  The kind the prophet Isaiah described when he said, “Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool . . . cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:18 and 1:16-17).”

During this month of March, we are giving ourselves to prayer.  We’re doing that specifically because, in these days of redefining our mission and values, we want more than just to reorganize what we already know more neatly.  We want an encounter with the living God that transforms the way we live.  One person wrote of that kind of life-changing experience as she came to know it through prayer.  “I have not ever been very good at keeping a list of prayer requests.  I’m not even any good any more, at knowing what to tell God to do!  More and more I fall back on the profound sense of knowing that I do not know, but that I am called simply to draw near to the heart of God so that God can draw near to me and instruct me in the way that I should pray.  The challenge (for me is) learning to abide in the presence of Christ who abides in us.  It is out of abiding in Christ moment by moment, that it becomes more important to be with God and to listen to what God is saying to me than for me to tell God what to do with his creation and his children.” (Jeanie Miley, “Prayer: Encounter With the Mystery of God,” cbfnet.org, February 25, 2002.)  Our children are watching the way we pray and whether it makes a difference in the way we live.  When they write this chapter in their book all about church, will it be entitled, Today, we encountered the living God?

And, will their second chapter read, Today, we shared hope?  The apostle celebrated the way the Thessalonians “in spite of persecution . . . received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit . . . to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.”  In short, they were people whose lives were transformed by, hope, the confident assurance that God is consistent.  In just four short weeks we’ll be celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  God has saved his son from death; he will do the same for all of his children.  That ancient hope is this day’s hope, too.  Take that out of the equation, there’s nothing left worth believing.  With it in the equation, not much else matters that we tend to think matters so very much. 

On the way to a funeral once in Arkansas I found myself sitting in the hearse with the bi-vocational preacher who’d helped with the service.  Since his church was too small to pay him a living wage, I asked him what he did to put bread on the table.  “I’m a chicken-catcher,” he said.  Northwest Arkansas is a chicken and turkey raising Mecca.  There are thousands of hen houses everywhere, each of which holds tens of thousands of birds.  The air is often “fowl,” if you will.  Harvesting those chickens still has to be done by hand.  This old preacher held up his worn out hands and proudly showed me how he could catch as many ten chickens at a time by pinching their feet between his corncob fingers.  Most of all, I was struck by his humility and how much at peace he seemed to be, even proud of how hard he worked.  Simple lifestyle.  Simple gospel. 

Maybe it doesn’t take much to challenge some people.  But, it doesn’t take much either to fret most of us into an earlier grave than we deserve.  If we’re constantly sweating over how to get and accumulate more of this and that, then our children will never be able to write this chapter about how, at church, today, we shared the joy of hope because the atmosphere at home was so hopeless.  Do we really believe, have hope that life is about more than what we can get and hold between our fingers?  Do we really believe that it’s about losing and dying and then, miraculously, being given life again?  How will our children write this chapter?  Can they honestly say, Today, we shared hope?

Finally, can they write one more chapter, Today, we loved each other?  Paul could not forget, as he said to those folks, “what kind of welcome we had among you.”  The Thessalonians were Greeks.  The first Christian missionaries to carry the gospel to them were Jews, nothing at all like them.  The Greeks welcomed the Jews.  The evidence that they were people of “love” was that they practiced hospitality toward those so very different from themselves.  How will our children write this chapter?

There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t struggle with our humanity.  The reason church is for so many such an artificial experience is because we leave that struggle at home out of fear that someone will find out how often we lose.  Too many of us live with the nagging guilt that always comes with the sense that we are living double lives, because we are.  What would happen if this was the place we could bring all that we are, to worship and serve and confess?  The first casualty for most of us when we walk through these doors is our humanity.  It is not that we don’t come to church but that we leave too much of our real lives out there somewhere instead of bringing it in here. 

This is a particular danger for preachers.  They go to church to play whatever role of minister their church demands for what they pay; they have to go somewhere else to be human.  That is also the reason so many preachers ultimately fail in such publicly immoral ways.  I preach with my humanity the way I do because I need something from you.  Something I can get only if you know the truth about me, genuine relationship.  If I only tell you about that part of myself that I have under total control and in perfect working order then we are going to always have a very artificial relationship, if we have one at all.  That may or may not mean much to any one of you.  It means everything to me. 

Preachers, by and large, are the loneliest people I know even though they do what they do with crowds of people around them.  If I only ask you to love the part of me I’m sure you’ll love, I’m the loneliest guy in town.  I'm Tom Hanks on that South Sea island, with only a volleyball I’ve decorated to look like someone I wish was my friend for companionship.  And, if I live that artificial way, then I will also be asking this church to write its next chapter in ways contrary to the gospel we are coming to know.  A gospel that teaches us that love is hospitality, making room for people who come to discover the gospel with us who aren’t like us and who we might not naturally like.  Gay or straight, black or white, rich or poor, our gospel to a lost world means absolutely nothing if people have to be what we want them to be before we will love them as they are.

One of my favorite public golf courses is Tenison Highlands, one of the oldest in the city, out on I-30, east of town.  It’s a strange place in some ways because some of the fairways wind between what look like ancient forests, just a few miles from downtown.  Out in those trees, on occasion, we’ve spotted some stray dogs that make the woods their home.  I couldn’t help but think about them this weekend when it got so cold.  No one to feed them.  No one to give them love.  I suppose they just find a way of surviving.  You know me and dogs!  Truth is, this town is full of strays.  Stray people, that is.  In a city of millions, not one other person cares they exist.  No one loves them.  They’re just trying to survive.  Strays who would will fill these pews if word got out, like it did about the Thessalonians, that in our company, they could come as they are and be loved.  That they can have an encounter with the living God here.  Most of all, that they can journey with us in hope to the other side of death. 

All this values work we’re doing.  It’s not just a program.  We’re writing a book all about church.  We just dictated one more chapter this morning.  I wonder how it will read when our children write it someday.