Transcript

Well, let me try again. I'll read a different passage. Maybe that'll help Chapter 12. I'll read two paragraphs from that chapter. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. Let us also lay as aside every weight in sin, which clings so closely and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet so that what his lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed strife for peace with all people and for the holiness without which no one shall see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness spring up and cause trouble. And by it the many become defiled, that no one be immoral or irreligious like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterwards when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected for, he found no chance to repent. Though he sought it with tears. I imagine that different letters in the New Testament were sent with different degrees of haste to those who were to receive them. Paul wrote an angry letter to the church at Corin, but I would imagine it lay on the table for several days. It's one thing to write a letter like that. It's something else to mail it. We all have to write those letters. Everybody here writes letters like that, but do we mail them? We don't always mail them. First Thessalonians. First Thessalonians consist almost entirely of prayers, songs, confessions, words of. And I'm sure when Paul mailed that one, he said to the postman, just as long as it gets there by Sunday, they'll want to use that Philemon. When he wrote that brief letter to Philemon and Pus and Apia and those in the church in their house, when he handed it to his friend and brother, former slave onus, he probably said. I want Philemon and Apia and Archus and the church there to have this. Well, I'll mail it immediately. No, I don't want you to mail it. I want you to take it. It'll get there quicker if I, I want you to take it, Jude. I don't know what the writer thought, but if it never got there, it wouldn't hurt a lot. Uh. Hebrews Hebrews very heavy, very ponderous. Put it on the scales. Took three extra stamps. This is heavy, but even though it cost a lot, I'm sure there was stamped by the writer on the outside of the folder that sent it away. Special delivery, overnight mail, federal Express. Get it there, and the moment you open it up, you know why. It's filled with expressions of urgency. Hold on. How many times in the book does the writer say, hold on. Don't fall back. Don't shrink back. Don't despair. Don't give up. Lift your drooping hands and knees. Stir up each other. Encourage each other. Don't become discouraged. Don't stop going to your assemblies and worship services. All the way through those words because the writer, a pastor, is trying to re revive a church. What's wrong with the church? It's obviously, if you read the letter, it's obviously a church that once was full of love and fellowship, enjoyed each other, and very busy, and took delight in serving each other, attending to the needs of all the saints, and practicing hospitality and helping the world around them. But it's not true anymore. Between that wonderful time and the present time falls the shadow of something dreadfully fatal. What's wrong? Well, if you read the letter, there seems to be some heresy in the church. There are some who worshiping angels, obviously from chapter one, and I can understand that. Angels are very attractive. Angels are not born in mangers. Angels are not poor. Angels don't suffer. Angels are not rejected. Denied. Angels are not betrayed. Angels don't carry crosses. Angels don't have scars. Why are we following Jesus? Let's pick us a bright angel and go with that. I can understand that. But I don't think the answer to the despair and discouragement approaching death of this church is to be found in the heresy, because every church has a little heresy. If churches died because they had a little weird doctor. None of you would be here. All of our churches would be there. Just ask around your friends and say, would you tell me what you really believe? It's amazing. What are you doing in this church? I didn't kill it. I didn't do it. The old life is looking pretty good right now. The former life, there's evidence that that's a problem. The former life before I was a Christian, beginning to look a little better every day. And that's understandable. Every one of us has a time like that because in becoming a Christian, my faith doesn't just solve problems. It creates new problems, new tensions, new difficulties, new burdens to bear. Nobody told me that. Just believe they said, and I did. And they said, now I carry this. So the old life is beginning to look pretty good. But that's not killing a church because any church that comes together once a week can't be killed for the old life. Every time I am out the altar and some man or woman hands to me, the bread and cup in the name of Christ says. This is my body given for you. This is my bloodshed for you. The rest of the world just shrinks away stale, flat, and tasteless of no value. That's not it. Persecution, sure. There's persecution you haven't resisted under blunt, but he said you've had your property confiscated. You've suffered social abuse and ostracism. Sure it's painful and suffering, but why isn't that making the church stronger? Roland Ton at Yale used to lecture. One thing that'll make a church strong and galvanize it as a unit is persecution. People who visit Poland, east Germany and Russia come back almost inevitably amazed at the strength of the Christian people. Why? Because they're not a bunch of fat cats. So why isn't it strengthening the church? I don't think that's it. It may be theological problem. It could be that their pastors and Sunday to school classes haven't prepared them theologically for the life before them, that they're finding something out of joint, some radical disjuncture that they're not able to put into perspective. I know it's easy enough whenever. Suffering and pain and persecution follows disloyalty and infidelity, then the word is repent. Straighten up, get with it. But if suffering and pain and abuse follow loyalty and fidelity, now what? Maybe that's it. I am the vine and my father is the vine dresser. And the vine dresser comes into the vineyard with the great big hooked knife. And starts whacking away on the vines, and some are cut off and some are cut back. But if you're being cut on, you don't know whether you're cut off or cut back. The pain is the same. Am I being prune so I'll be more fruit fruitful, or am I being cut off to be burned because I am fruitless? People who experience the knife of God don't know what it is, and that's it. I don't know. I do know that the church is tired. I don't usually have being tired as a theological category, but it is. It really is. And we should never say to each other, nor to ourselves. I was just tired. Well, you are just tired. We don't say just tired. You are a different person when you're tired. Temper fuse. The way we talk to our children, the way we talk to spouse. Someone asked to do something at church. Hmm Hmm. How many years am I gonna teach the juniors? This is my 36th year. I was promised a substitute when I started keeping the nursery. That was in 1943. Tired, I mean, bone. We retired. Most of the people I know in the church that turn in the key. Don't have a sharp pain. They just have a dull ache all over. I am tired. Well, what happened? Well, nothing happened. What went wrong? Nothing went wrong. Do you not like that? No, it's not that I'm tired. And for the Christians. In the letter to the Hebrews, the letter, the road was longer, the pilgrimage was longer than they thought. When they first started meeting together, they ended every service with that marvelous prayer. Come Lord Jesus. But they've just had now their 65th anniversary, little cemetery out back of the church is filling up. And where is the promise? Of his coming. I didn't think it would be this long. So here is a church for none of these reasons, for all of these reasons, for some of these reasons. Here is a church that has lost its amen. Now, a lot of churches do that now and then, but the difference is this church is not down on, its all fours looking for it. It doesn't care. The writer of this letter is a pastor. A pastor, the like of which it's rare to find. If I only had a pastor like this all my life, I would make it. There is in your New Testament, no, no document that represents the mounting of so strong, an effort to save a church as the Hebrew letter. I know we get hung up on all that sacrifice and tabernacle and high priests and brazen lavers and all like that. But read the letter all through. Read it all through. There is not in Paul, there is not in the gospels, there is not in Revelation, there is not anywhere in your New Testament. An effort mounted by a pastor that even approaches this effort to save a church and restore to it again, its joy. It's love and it's delight in the service of God. Just think what the writer does holds up. Jesus Christ is superior to all other beings. Moses, Joshua, even angels superior than angels. I know. I know. He says, I know he suffered death. I know he was crucified, but that was just for a little while. He came from God. Through him all things were made. And after he made purification for sin, he sat down at the right hand of God. Greater. God never said to an angel, you are my son. This. Look what you have folks. And then with this gentle turn, the pastor says, and the one I'm talking about is your brother made in every way just as we are. We don't have a high priest that can't be touched with the feeling of your infirmities. Never makes appointments. We have one who can be touched with everything you know, because in every way except sin, Christ is like us tempted in every way. There is no more human Jesus in the New Testament than in Hebrews. He cried out for godly fear. He wept and cried, and God heard him. For godly fear, of course, he suffered death. Did he stop short of tasting everything that you taste? He tasted death for every person. He is like We are sure he is from God and can help us, but he is like us and will help us see what the writer's doing. Don't give that up. The writer talks about a Promised Sabbath. We're going to enter the promised Land. We're going to enter the promised land. There is a Sabbath rest that's prepared for all the faithful holds that out in front of these weary pilgrims and says, it's out there to be claimed it's yours. There will be a Sabbath recalls, former ministers and former leaders. Remember your former leaders recall the way they conducted their lives and the nature of their deaths. Remember them as models. You see what he's doing? He's taking the congregation up down in the corridor of the education building where all the pictures of the former pastors are hanging. You remember him? Marvelous. Marvelous. Never a better, couldn't preach very well, but one of the best pastors we ever had, you know, that's one. Organized the church. He's kind of an old, you gonna let them down. Isn't this an amazing letter? Just that's what he's doing. Remembers the good days. You remember when you served each other with joy and gladness, and some of you still do, but do you think God has forgotten all that? God hasn't forgotten all that? The cloud of witnesses, my, my goodness, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, they're all around in the bleachers. Watching to see what we'll do. We are surrounded by just such a cloud. Now, these all died in faith, and they died before they received the promise and apart from us, they will never be perfect apart from us. They're unfulfilled apart from us. They will never know the completion of their own pilgrimage. You're gonna quit for their sakes. For God's sake, pick yourself up. Once in a while, it gets a little stern. Once in a while, he says, I wanna warn you, if you turn this loose, you may not be able to pick it up again. You remember Esau? Esau sold his birthright for a mess of potage, and afterwards he warned it back, but it's too late. Some things, you turn 'em loose, you don't take hold of them again. He sought it with repentance. He sought it with tears, but it was too late. Because the iron once heated, when it cools, you can heat it again. If you have tasted the good word of God and the Heavenly gift and known the Holy Spirit and toss them out, you can whistle and beckon and call and pray and cry and repent, and they don't come back. That's what he said. It's tough. This pastor is mounting this extraordinary effort to save a church. Why? Why? Anybody, anybody know why doing this? A lot of us wouldn't do this. Nail up the door. I mean, I've had it. I've tried everything. I've used all my bag of tricks. We've had guest speakers, we've had music groups, we've had choirs. We've had projects. And everything is as dead as four o'clock, and I have had it. So nail it up, sell the building. And some of us who are not that radical feel that way sometimes, just turn them loose. And we have good reason. We are taught not to interfere in people's lives. People are adult and they're free. If they make decisions. If they wanna quit the church, let 'em quit the church. It's her decision. His decision. Let 'em go. Don't interfere in somebody's life. If somebody says, I'm not coming back, let 'em go. It's wrong. Church. Where I belonged years ago, we had a most unusual thing happen. In fact, I have never experienced it since. There was a woman in our church, a young woman, early thirties, whose story is very detailed and very painful. She had married, she had been a student of mine. She had married their first child. Was severely brain damaged and died less than two years old. Her husband unable to take the new emotional demands as sometimes is the case when you need someone most. He laughed. He divorced her. Most of the folk in town thought she'd gotten back on her feet. She'd gotten a job as a good job. She looked professional. One Sunday morning, they closed the service. She came down the aisle. Everybody was just filled with joy. She's gonna rededicate her life. And she turned around to our little congregation and said, I wish today to unjoin the church. She said, I don't know if there is a ceremony for this. I don't know if there is any way our church can practice this, but I want you to know that all the things that attracted me to this church no longer exist. I don't believe a word of it. And she walked out. The minister fumbled around for his benediction, finally found it and said it. We were all standing there bumping into the furniture. Somebody has just unjoin our church. She didn't really know how to do it. The way you do it is just don't show up. Quit going, don't pledge, drop out and all like that, and mutter to your neighbors over coffee. Well, she tried to be. She made a big ritual out of it. She says, I think it's the only honest and fair thing to do. I saw the minister later. I didn't know whether he knew her story as well as I did because she had been a student of mine. I said, have you talked with. Her lately, he said, I haven't talked with her at all. I said, you haven't. He said, it's her decision. Let her go. I don't go running after anybody board up the doors and windows. I don't go chasing after anybody. Why? Why is this pastor doing this here? It is evident to me that the pastor is doing it because the pastor care. Not all the arguments mounted by this writer for staying Christian really warm. The cockles of your heart. Some of them are strange. Some of them hardly apply anymore. Some are so related to Jewish rituals, we can't really identify. But everything the writer is doing is out of care, out of care for the church. It's been my observation that care frequently is wrong. Interferes, intrudes says the wrong thing, has the wrong timing. Disrupts makes mistakes. Frequently feels it needs to apologize, but one thing, care never does care. Never lets anyone go completely room. Yes. Let go. No, never. The pastor of the Church of the Hebrew letter cared for the church. It is not limited to him, nor is it limited to pastors in my experience. Or sometimes people think others don't care. And the church I belonged to before I came here, it was a large church, could kinda get lost anonymous in the church. And I recall one Sunday I had to leave early to go to a district assembly or rally of some sort. So I told my family goodbye and I started through the back way to the parking lot to get outta there. As I started out the back way, had to go in the choir room, choir members putting up the robes. I passed by this woman I know quite well, and she was putting up a robe. I said, I really enjoyed the anthem this morning. She said, well, I hope so. 'cause that's it. I, what do you mean? That's it? I'm hanging it up. She was hanging up a robe. I said, you're hanging it up? And she said, I'm hanging it up. And I said, well, what's the matter with you? And she said, this is my last Sunday. I thought maybe she was retiring. She's been in the choir about 103 years, and her voice beginning to crack a little, but uh, she said, no, I'm not retiring. I'm quitting. Well, why are you quitting? She said, I finally accepted the question this morning that's been haunting me for years. I sat up in the choir this morning and I just looked at all the people out there and. I looked at the minister and I looked at the elders at the table and all the ushers and deacons doing things, and it finally just sunk in on me. Who cares? I said, who cares? And she said, who cares? Who cares whether I'm in the choir or not, whether I'm even here or not? I said, oh, you're just feeling bad. Go on home. Take some aspirin. Have a nice lunch. I left, but I couldn't, I couldn't get it off my mind because you see, I was a member of that church and what she had just done was indict us all because whatever our accoutrements, however beautiful, our choir mammoth, our organ big, our budget, if we didn't care for her, we were not a church. We could not assemble in the name of the one who did not break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flags. It worried me to death. I went to the rally, didn't have my mind on it. Came home, called her that afternoon. May I come over and talk to you? She said, if you want to. I said, well, I want to. So I went over there. We talked. I said, you're wrong. She said, I'm not wrong. I said, do you know what you did? You said to me this morning that we were not a church. Well. I told her a little church history. I said What you said of our church used to be called in the old days, one of the seven deadliest sins. Ah, Kaia. It's translated sloth in church history. That's not a good translation. That's like lying in the bath water too long or something. It's not sloth. The word ADA means I don't care. It is possible. It is possible for a person to walk by the old man among the pigeons in the park and say, he's not my dad. It's possible to see a child cold curled up in front of a store hungry, say, he is not my kid. It's possible to see a recent widow staring out from beneath the gray Shaw. Upon a grayer world and say, well, she's not my mother. It is possible to hurl one final insult at the world. I don't care. I said, lady, you, you realize what you did. You have charged me and our church with one of the seven deadly sins. She said, so. I had heard, I had heard the criticism before, not from her. I, I heard it, I think most forcefully ever from my father. My father didn't go to church. My mother took us, but once in a while, the pastor came to the house. Try to talk to my father. It made my mother nervous because she knew that my father was capable of talking like a Philistine if he got a little pressure. And sometimes the pastor would bring a guest evangelist by to see my dad and introduce my dad and say, now, sick him. Uh, get him, get him. And, uh, always, always, my father's expressions were the same. I heard them a thousand times. Church doesn't care anything about me. Another name, another pledge. What are you after? Another pledge. It's matter of budget, a little loan. Another name, another pledge. Huh? You don't care about me. Another name, another pledge. Thank you, Reverend. I heard him say it a thousand times while my mother wept in the kitchen. One time. He didn't say it. He was in the hospital in Memphis Veterans Hospital. He had gone down to 71 pounds. Cancer of the throat. Too late they said. He shouldn't have been smoking. They said they'd taken out everything, put in a little metal tube. He could put his finger over it and make some noises, but mostly he wrote, I walked in the room having flown in there to see him in every window, flowers by his bed. A stack of cards 20 inches deep. Even that thing, they swing out over your bed to put food on. Fresh flowers. I looked at the cards sprinkled in the flowers. I looked at the cards beside his bed, and every one of them, you listening, every one of them from groups or persons in that church, he couldn't speak. So he got a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it. And it's because of what he wrote, which I took as an ordination. I tell this, he wrote on the side of the Kleenex box line from Hamlet in this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story. I said, I will. I said, what is it? And he wrote, I was wrong. It was wrong. I got up to leave the lady's house. I said, you're wrong. In my work, I get to travel around all over the country and I never go to a town. I don't care how big, how small, but whatever you find need, wherever you find need, wherever there's a house in distress or pain or bereavement. If you look, you'll see the footprints of Christians who came with something, a word or pie, a gift, something. I said, people everywhere care. And she said, really? I said, yes. She said, name, some name song she wants name. Yes, may I, may I give her your name? May I give her your name?