So Much Foolishness?

1 Corinthians 2:1-11

Ken Whitt                                         March 11, 2007

How do you know what is on God’s mind? How do we hear God’s plan? How do you listen to God? How do you learn of God’s purpose for your life, so that in knowing that purpose, you can direct your energy and time towards this great purpose, rather than some worth much less distraction?

Have you been told, even by Christians, that such questions are so much foolishness? Have you yourself sometimes felt that it was impossible to know God’s thoughts? Have you even been suspicious of people who claim to know the will of God—that they are just using God to justify their own prejudice?

How do we as a church, in coming months and years together, become convinced of God’s purpose for us so that we can direct our limited resources of energy and time and faith and love towards fulfilling that purpose and not some lesser good? Or is this so much foolishness? Is it even possible to know the purpose of God? Is it possible to know the mind of Christ with such certainty that you are willing to bet your life on God? Willing to dedicate your life to following a plan that could be seen by anyone with a modicum of common sense to be so much foolishness?

Concerning the possibility of knowing God’s plan, knowing the mind of Christ, this is the Apostle Paul’s proposal. Paul wrote most of the books of The New Testament. He experienced God’s leading in many ways at many times. His conclusion concerning knowing the purpose of God is found in 1st Corinthians 2:11-16.

“There is a spirit within me, and who can know that spirit and what I am planning better than I do? God is spirit and who can know what God is thinking except God? But what if God decides to tell us? What if God chose to reveal to us God’s spirit and the gifts God is giving us? Then and only then will we be able to know God and we will be able to speak of what we know about God and others who are spiritual and who are open will also be able to understand. We speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gift of God’s spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct them? But we have the mind of Christ.

You may recall that the Sunday before Christmas, I preached a sermon entitled “Angels”, that featured two stories about two people that I love and know well who encountered Angels and were changed, transformed, by their experience. After that service, one of you came to me and shared that you also had had an encounter with Angels like those stories that I told and that some time you wanted to share the story. A while later you wrote me a long letter in which you reflected on your experience and then a document in which you detailed the experience of your encounter with angels.

In one facet of your reflection on that story you told about trying to share that experience with people at church, including clergy, who were not able to receive your experience graciously, with affirmation, but who doubted and asked skeptical questions and left you realizing that you had better not make your story public. You needed to keep it private. It did not belong in church. The most important spiritual experience of your life did not belong in church.

We are going to return to that point later in today’s sermon.

Paul believes it is possible for people to hear God, and in hearing to understand and then to follow. He spent his life doing that and in 1st Corinthians Chapter 2 reflects on the experience of knowing and following God’s plan for his life and for the life of the church.

Let me tell you a story of another experience of spiritual knowing and following as it happened in the life of my mom after her first trip to Haiti. Mom told you about her first mission to Haiti when she preached here about a year and a half ago. She encountered horrific poverty and suffering, some of the worst ugliness and darkness on the face of this earth. But she also told you of the light of Christ that broke through that darkness. Still, mom was smart enough to know she never wanted to go back to Haiti. She had some common sense. She came home from that mission trip to Haiti and told her children and everyone else, and God, that she was not going back to Haiti. No way, never. No.

Well, she got invited to go back almost immediately by American Baptist International Ministries and she said no, and she kept saying no. She had some common sense, after all, as the world understands these things, and she said, “No. I’m not going back to Haiti.”

About a year passed and her prayers were full of this dialog between her and God, kind of a “GO”/”NO” dialog. One day in the morning, a cold winter day, she took her shower. The warm air from the bathroom drifted out through the house--she lived in mobile home--and after she’d gotten dressed she walked out from her bedroom to the kitchen and passed by the backdoor of her home, which had a large window in the center of the door. The hot air from the bathroom had created an etching of frost on the window in the shape of a mountain.

And my Mom said that the mountain looked just like a picture from a children’s book called, Hope for the Flowers, where this caterpillar is trying to fulfill the purpose of his life by crawling to the top of this huge mountain of caterpillars, but there’s a lot of other caterpillars trying to climb to the top and he slips and he climbs, and he slips and he climbs. But eventually he gets to the top but as soon as he gets to the top someone climbs on top of him. Then our caterpillar begins to listen to an inner voice that tells him that life is more than climbing on top of slimy caterpillars. “Climb back down, just climb back down,” the voice echoes in his head. He listens to the voice. Once he crawls away from the pile of caterpillars this creature discovers that the purpose of his life is to become a butterfly.

But in mom’s vision etched in ice on her back door window, the bottom of the mountain was littered with the dead and dying bodies of human beings who could not even begin to climb. Those bodies were Haitians, the poorest of the poor, the most broken of broken humanity. Not even pausing for breakfast, Mom went to the telephone, called International Ministries and said she would go to Haiti, which turned out to be one of the most meaningful experiences of her life. The suffering in Haiti drew her closer to God and transformed her life.

Does God have spiritual ways of telling us spiritual things so that it is possible to hear what God is saying to us and in the hearing to understand and in the understanding to follow God’s plan? Does God have ways of instructing us? Eugene Peterson gives us a translation of 1st Corinthians Chapter 2 that I’d like to read to you, because I want this biblical text to sink in and to become part of our growing confidence that God can lead us.

“Whoever knows what you are thinking and planning except you yourself? The same is true with God, except that God not only knows what God is thinking but God wants you to know what God is thinking so God lets you in on it. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that God has given us. We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We don’t have to learn this by reading books in school. We learn it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus and we’re passing it on to you in the same first-hand personal way. There are some things you cannot teach any other way, but this personal spiritual way. Now, the unspiritual self, just as it is by nature, the worldly self, you might say, can’t hear what the spirit of God is saying. We don’t have the capacity as natural human beings, like we don’t speak that language. They seem like so much silliness, those words of God, seem like so much silliness. Spirit can only be known by spirit. We have access to everything God is doing and can’t be judged by unspiritual critics. Isaiah wrote this question, “Is there anyone around here who knows the spirit of God?” For heaven’s sake, isn’t there someone who knows how to listen to God? And Paul’s answer is “Yes, Christ knows how to listen to God”. And the spirit of Christ is in us, in me and in you, and in all who truly desire to follow him.

You have heard me use the phrase, “deep change.” Its part of a quote from one of authors I’ve been reading lately. “The church has two choices, deep change or slow death.” The phrase, slow death has a number of meanings, but a simple way to say it is that main-line traditional churches are slowly loosing their membership base. The world is changing around us, people of younger ages have different interests, different things that draw them to God. We haven’t learned how to attract them, we don’t know how to get our message to them, so there is a slow loss of members, attendance, finances get tight, we wonder how we can turn this ship around.

That’s what slow death refers to.

Deep change refers to all the things that God will tell us are part of our future if we really listen to God’s plan and follow in God’s way.

I began to understand this process about fifteen years ago, sort of to understand it. I was a pastor in Columbus and another pastor gave me a book to read by Loren Mead, called, The Once and Future Church, Reinventing the church for the New Mission Frontier. I read the book, and at the end of the reading there was no doubt in my mind that the church had to change.

We have to go through a process of re-inventing the church in order to do our mission as we’ve never done it before. Then Loren Mead came up a little bit later with a book called, Transforming Congregations for the Future, and in this book, he began to outline what the changes would look like, what some of the possible changes were, and this brings us back to the story about one of you who had an encounter with God, tried to share it with church people, and found that the church was not a safe place to share deep spiritual experience

Loren Mead writes in his second book, that this phenomenon has been carefully studied by many students of the church and they’ve come to similar conclusions repeatedly across the whole country. He writes:

“Over the past two decades a number of researchers have been surprised to discover a very large number of people who have had what they identify as direct experience with God. Several of us have discovered, and Jean Haldane later discovered independently, that people do not connect those experiences with a religious congregation to which they belong. Headane pointed out that ordinary people who have extraordinary spiritual experiences do not think that their church or their clergy are interested. It is as if people have separated deep personal religious experience from congregational life. They feel the congregation expects support, attendance at worship and activities, but that the congregation has no interest in their religious experience. “

Now, to the extent that this is true, the church has to go through a fundamental process of deep change and here’s the reason. Not only do we all need to know God face-to-face and share and talk and discuss our experiences in church, but when you go to the generations of people who are emerging in our world with a complete lack of interest in the church, you find that they are extremely interested in Jesus. Specific books are being written on this phenomenon. People in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties are interested in Jesus. They want to know about God. They are very committed to spirituality, but they don’t see that the church has anything to do with that.

So here we have one arena of where the deep change has to occur. I think we need to explore this and see if our own growing spirituality will create for us ways to reach out and touch the lives of people that we have not touched up till this point. The future of the church may depend on our finding out how to do that.

As I said, I have been learning about this need for deep change for a long time. I have even begun to learn about the shape of things to come. However, there is still a major problem that I was struggling with and praying about last fall when I attended the annual meeting of the American Baptist Churches of Ohio. We know we have to change and we know something about the kind of changes that are needed, but how do you get a church to change enough so the church can live and thrive and grow again? Up until very recently the conventional wisdom was that older established churches could not be re-born. Resistance was too great. Change was next to impossible. It is with that concern deeply in mind that last October Bill Salyers and Jim Lane and I met Jim Herrington, the primary speaker at the ABC/Ohio convention, whose three books outline the process by which older and established main line churches are transformed. It is happening all over the country and God is showing us the way that it will happen here.

Now, I put up a poster here, “The investments made by our predecessors and the destiny of future generations, are too important not to take transformation seriously.” We have no right, as the inheritors of this church, its building, structures, history, and mission, to let it just slide towards slow death. We have no right to do that. We’ve been given a treasure, in the mission of this church, and its distinctive ways of serving in this city that need to be continued. And there are people out there who need to know Jesus and who need the unique ministry of this church.

But there’s a second phrase I want to add to that poster. The investments made by our predecessors and the destiny of future generations are too important not to take this process of transformation carefully and prayerfully. Some may think that we’re in such desperate straights that we’ve got to hurry, that the answer must be found tomorrow. It’s not going to happen that way. People are going to be heard. The territory is going to be explored fully. We’re going to be praying. We’re going to go on retreat. We’re going to be listening to scripture. It will take time, God’s time. The process will take place as fast as the process takes place, and no one can tell us what that is going to look like, but we are going to begin the journey.

Finally, a thought that I could probably spend a whole sermon or two talking about, but I’ll just put it out there, partly on behalf of the people who are going to be on the vision team. I’ve put an article in the Vision Team Notebooks that I’ll be giving out after we elect the team. The article comes straight out of my doctoral dissertation in which I tried to find spiritual ways of knowing the answer to a spiritual question.

The question that guided my dissertation was, “Can a movement of the spirit of God to reveal a new mission paradigm be identified and embraced by American Baptists?”, The question went on with a few more comments.

Can a movement of the spirit of God be identified and embraced? That’s a spiritual question. It’s a question that has to be answered with prayer, in my relationship to God, and in what God is saying to others in the American Baptist family. It requires a process of spiritual discernment. And there are ways for Christians in churches to listen spiritually. There are ways to hear from God, and there are ways to follow what we hear.

And that is a key element in the entire process of transformation. There is no way for this church to find its purpose under God’s leading if we believe this is so much foolishness. We’re going to be listening and we’re going to be learning to listen, and we’re going to be following and we’re going to be learning how to follow. And we’re going to be finding our way to God’s future. It’s an exciting adventure!

Every once in awhile in my ministry I am blessed to come upon a person who has decided by the power of God that their life is going to go in a new direction and that they’re going to let God lead and empower them, and its always such an exciting process. They become open to reading and to study and to prayer. And its so awesome to watch someone learning with that kind of passion.

Well, that’s the process that our church is going to be going through. And it’s a very exciting time. I absolutely love that aspect of my ministry, that in this time in history when the church needs to be re-born, re-invented, that I get to work with a congregation like all of you, where such transformation is both possible and necessary. It is so exciting to be together when the mission of First Baptist, as we engage our neighborhood and our city and our world for Christ, for justice, for peace, is being recreated.

Let us pray. We all thank you our God that you have called us to this place in time. And we ask you to speak to us, and we call on you to teach us how to listen. And we thank you for being on a mission field, this neighborhood, this city, which needs Christ, which needs justice, which needs peace, which needs compassion, so that we can live this good news of Jesus Christ that has been given to each one of us. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen.