Messages from the Body

Here is a sampling of some of the messages that have made a special impact at CCiPH, and that have been transcribed or written in manuscript.

Most weeks in our equipping assembly, at least one man has been asked to prepare a message that will build up believers. Often, the message is taken from the liturgical Gospel reading of the day, or it is a life message that God has been working into the fabric of that man. It is included here to build you up.

Learning to be Last: Hard Sayings

Message from Ben Gregory on September 21, 2003

Mark 9:30-37

I have a friend at work (let’s call him Bill) who was in Vietnam 30 years ago.  Da Nang mostly, which I’ve heard was an unpleasant place to be.  We’ve had some interesting conversations about it and Bill’s an interesting guy.  The kind of interesting that makes me wonder who he might have been had he not been sent to fight a war in a jungle when he was eighteen years old.  He was there for 373 days.  It was supposed to be a year—365 days—but his unit was so surrounded when his time was up that it was an extra week before they could get him out.

Thirty years ago it all happened and he remembers it like I remember the football game I went to last night.  He told me about two of the three times that he thought his life was over.  About being literally blown off the chair he was sitting in and hiding under a desk clinging to his buddy waiting to die.  About a time-delayed bomb that landed in the middle of their compound and terrified everyone.  About the one that blew his barracks away at a time when he was supposed to be in them.  About being gassed in a bus and thinking that was it.  About stuff I’ll never begin to be able to identify with.  But there’s one particular incident he won’t talk about.  Thirty years ago Bill saw something that still haunts him literally everyday, but that he’s never even been able to tell his wife.  Something so bad that he’s sure no one would want to be around him anymore if they knew.  And every time we talk about Vietnam I stand there and wonder what the answer is to a life that’s been altered so painfully.

As you read Mark’s gospel, this bit we’re looking at can feel, at first, like a lull.  Earlier in the same chapter we’ve witnessed the dazzling, terrifying transfiguration and we’ve seen Jesus exorcise an evil spirit from a young man—spectacular.  And now we catch Jesus and his disciples walking along the road and then in a house in Capernaum—not so impressive.  But I have a friend who likes to say that “on the ordinary, common path of every day are the extraordinary steps we take in grace.”  And here we find them, having talked along the road and now arrived at the house where they’ll stay.  They sit down and maybe have the road washed from their feet.  Maybe something to drink to wash the dust from their mouths and throats.  And just when they think it’s time to relax, Jesus brings up a conversation that they were hoping he hadn’t overheard (which never works out).  He says, “what were you talking about on the road?”  And they’re too smart to lie to him and too ashamed to tell the truth, so they just stare at their feet.  They’re embarrassed because they’d been arguing about who was the greatest, and they know better.

Jesus gets everyone’s attention—calls them all together and drops a bomb on them right there in the living room.  Now, whether he'd said anything this explicit to them before or not, their silence in verse 34 indicates that they know where he stands on this whole ambition thing.  The things that we argue about are very often not important. But it’s easy to get comfortable with Jesus and forget.  And as soon as you think you know him well enough to start making plans he’ll blow you up.  He gathers everyone together and says, essentially, “You don’t know nothing.”  Which is okay, because that’s not what any of this is about.  (Parenthetically here, my life began to change the day I heard Louie Weber say that it’s not my job to be right about everything, but to love people and be obedient.)

Jesus tells them, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”  Apparently this point hadn’t come up in their conversation as they walked.  And why would it? Thinking like this goes against the way our flesh operates left to its own.  The pattern at work seems to be that if you want to be promoted (which is where the money is) you do everything you can to make yourself look better than the people around you.  You take credit for their ideas and for work they’ve done in the store overnight, and you run them down in your conversations with management—because they’re your competition.  And it works.  That seems to be pretty typical of how the world treats people (it’s not just where I work).  And Jesus leaves no room for that in the Kingdom.  In fact he stands it on its head.  And, as always, his timing is impeccable, because it’s in the walking down the road (more than in the spectacular) that we decide who we will become.

And again, what Jesus seems to want his people to become is very connected to the way they treat each other.  Jesus tells them that if they want to be first they have to be the last and then he illustrates the severity of what he’s talking about by applying it even to children.  This is hard enough to understand from our perspective in 2003 America, but in that culture children had the same problem women had—they were barely considered people.  For Jesus to equate welcoming an insignificant child to welcoming himself (and therefore God) was revolutionary.  And humble.  And humbling.  And probably added to their embarrassment.  And it still sounds a little uncomfortable, doesn’t it?  For Jesus to shift the focus from himself here and put it on my relationships with the people around me makes me a little nervous.  Because I’m pretty good at going to church and not taking the Lord’s name in vain and whatever else I think God needs from me, but loving consistently is a lot harder.  People can be annoying, and I get tired and selfish and lazy and mostly distracted.

You’re probably familiar with Matthew 25:35-40.  Listen to Jesus:  “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.  Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’  The king will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”  Brennan Manning says, “The way we are with each other is the truest test of our faith.”  This becomes a familiar theme with Jesus—the idea that our relationships with the people in our lives are of critical importance to our relationship with him.  In fact, Jesus hardly distinguishes between the two.  Why is that?

I don’t know everything that’s involved here, but some of what’s going on is that God isn’t as vulnerable as we are.  God is able, willing, even eager to handle your doubt and anger and mood swings and addictions and weaknesses and pride.  The people we need to be careful with are each other (and not just within the body).  And the beginning of taking care of each other is my deciding to be last--to be a servant.  Which means that what I want emotionally, or in a conversation, or physically isn’t as important as what you need, which sounds rough.  But in the Kingdom, if we’re all operating that way, you’re all treating me like that too, and each of us goes from being small and alone at the top our own little universe to being served by the whole big family.  Pretty cool.

Paul told the Philippian believers, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.”  So what happens when we all start approaching our relationships with one another as if they were our relationships with Christ himself?  Well again, I don’t know, but here’s what I think: I think we’ll begin to see lives not just saved, but redeemed.

My friend Bill saw things as an eighteen-year-old kid in Vietnam that he can’t tell anyone about because, he said, no one would want to be around him if they knew.  Is that true?  Is that true here?  How much of the real me are you prepared to love?  “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last.”  I think that if that ever becomes reality people like Bill (no, not people like Bill, but Bill) will be safe to talk.

I have another friend whom I have known for years and whom I have never known to be happy.  He’s a believer like me, walking the same road I am.  Conventional wisdom has always been that he needs to find a girl.  My response to that for a long time was, “No, he needs to learn to be okay with himself and with God (I put that “God” part in there to sound spiritual) before he involves himself in a relationship.  But what if, instead of that kind of independence, God provides people in our lives to be bridges to grace?

I have another friend (last one) whose life has been so colored by sexual abuse when he was young that it’s hard to know who he might have been.  Lotta pain in the world.  Lotta mangled lives.  You can get pretty beat up along the road, but I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you that.  Lotta stories in this room.  And to the degree that we, as the Body of Christ, consider others better than ourselves, and consider ourselves as the very last, and treat the people around us the way God does, we’ll see these war-torn, lonely, traumatized lives redeemed—made new.

It happens here.  It happens here.  We are finding redemption in Jesus, through one another—here, as we live life on the road together.  That’s why we talk so much about needing our house churches.  God seems to be into redemption here, where we’re pilgrims together, and he’s invited us to be involved in this reconciliation  (check out 2 Corinthians 5:18).  But you can’t be a part of that until you get this “first shall be last” thing.  So I’m here this morning to encourage you to keep it up.

I read in a book recently (I don’t remember which one) that it’s time to stop being preoccupied with having a gift and start being one.  “‘Cause on the ordinary, common path of every day are the extraordinary steps we take in grace.”

---------------------------------

Along the Road

By dan fogelberg

Joy at the start, fear in the journey

Joy in the coming home

A part of the heart gets lost in the learning

Somewhere along the road

Along the road your path may wander

A pilgrim’s faith may fail

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Darkness obscures the trail

Cursing the quest, courting disaster

Measureless nights forebode

Moments of rest, glimpses of laughter

Are treasured along the road

Along the road your steps may stumble

Your thoughts may start to stray

But through it all a heart held humble

Levels and lights your way

Joy at the start, fear in the journey

Joy in the coming home

A part of the heart gets lost in the learning

Somewhere along the road

Somewhere along the road

Somewhere along the road…