Luxury

What is the strangest sermon you’ve ever heard? I’ve heard some pretty weird ones: I heard a Christmas Day sermon all about Noah’s nakedness and an Easter sermon on how easy it was to go to hell. Robert heard a memorial service about how the parable of Lazarus and the rich man didn’t say a thing about riches. On the same note, I heard a sermon on Job, claiming Job only suffered because he didn’t trust God; he could have walked away if he’d only said the right words. Oh, and there was the sermon claiming that even though we couldn’t know the day or the hour that Jesus was coming back, we could know the year! That would be 1996. The strangest one of all was in a Mixtec village years ago when a visiting preacher claimed that in Russia there was a big hole, and if you let down a microphone on a wire, you could hear the people in hell screaming down there. That got their attention.

Most churches guard against strange sermons by vetting their speakers, but still, some strange ones slip through. Thankfully, we don’t shut down our pulpits to visitors in order to avoid such error, we just hold the reins. Once I was on a mission trip from college to inner-city L.A. and our group was standing around in a big Baptist church after the service, waiting for rides. Without thinking, I climbed up behind the pulpit and stood there with my hands on each side of the podium, staring out over the empty auditorium. I sensed power there. An usher walked up and shooed me out from the privileged spot—I was undeserving.

Power. It’s not always where we think it is. Although we might let the occasional deserving visitor speak, there is one thing in the church we hold onto even more tightly than preaching, and that is sacrament, the sign of the sacred, the holy ceremony, the outward mark of an inward grace. Strange. In the New Testament there is no sign anywhere that our sacraments were controlled by the powerful. People broke bread in their homes (no mention of pastors); people were sent to be baptized (Paul couldn’t even remember if he’d baptized anyone, and Jesus never did). These holy moments were not controlled because it was God who baptized and placed people in the church and Jesus who showed up in the bread and wine. The disciples were just witnesses. In conversation with a missionary in Guerrero once, we asked him what new baby churches did about serving the Lord’s Supper when they didn’t have the credentials to be labeled “church” (his denomination in Mexico holds a strict definition of the word). He said, “You have to control them somehow.” Many denominations in Mexico require that new baby churches send for the pastor of the mother church for sacramental times. Power. It’s just a serving of food and drink, just a bathing in clean water, yet sacraments are so rich in meaning and grace that people use them as reins.

Ironically, how wrong can you go in serving flat bread and grape juice? In dipping someone’s head under water as a sign that new life has begun, connecting them to everyone else in the room and to God himself? How wrong can you go? Can you change their doctrines of money, suffering or the second coming? Ah, but you can. You can teach all about power—who holds it, who doesn’t. Who gets to speak. Who doesn’t.

I think this power does not belong to us. We hold it at our peril, the peril of the body of Christ. If two or three have gathered in the name of Jesus to worship him, who are we to deny them sacrament? If a person has turned from wrong and clung to Jesus for redemption, who are we to hold them back from baptism? I think holding onto this power has cost us many, many baby churches in new places that have need of God. We here in Canada have such easy access to the sacraments. We don’t realize how, for some, it’s a luxury beyond their means.