CONNECTING THE DOTS... The Upside Down Life
1 Corinthian 12:12-31a & Luke 4:14-21
Epiphany 3
Pastor Paul Swartz - January 23 & 24, 2010

Like most pastors, I’m always looking for ways to improve our church. Recently I ran across a list by Pastor Grant MacDonald of what he calls “Ways to Promote Growth in Your Church” These suggestions are offered with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I thought you might enjoy some of them. These are ways we might grow our church:

1. Offer free frequent flyer miles with every visit!
2. Use “Big Gulp” communion cups!
3. Issue “Get Out of Hell Free” cards!
4. Or how about this one? Reclining pews!
5. Every fourth week raffle off the offering!

Eugene Peterson is a Presbyterian Pastor and an outstanding writer whose Message translation of the Bible offers masterful insight in expressing the powerful truth of God’s Word. Here is one of Peterson’s simple, matter-of-fact expressions of truth that may speak to those kind of suggestions.

“There is no such thing as successful churches. There are,
instead, communities of sinners, gathered week after week
by the Holy Spirit, in towns and villages all over the world.
And in these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is
called Pastor...and it is his or her responsibility to keep the
community attentive to God.”

That’s who we pastors are—sinners like you—and our task along with staff, elders and deacons is to keep the community attentive to God, being focused on the mission He has entrusted to the Church.
That’s exactly what Jesus was doing as He rose to read the Scriptures in His home synagogue in Nazareth that Sabbath morning. He was keeping the community attentive to God’s purpose for them. But the people gathered there started to see more than they perhaps wanted to see. Even though these worshipers were impressed with Jesus’ learning and reacted to Jesus’ words with amazement, they could not take to heart what He was saying as He sat down and began to comment on the text. “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” He went on to “connect the dots” by describing how God had sent Him to minister to those the worshipers that day despised. I have discovered in nearly 45 years of preaching that people don’t get offended at Bible readings—in fact they probably don’t really hear them. The trouble comes when you begin to spell out what the text means. By the end of Jesus’ sermon they were ready to lynch Him, but now I’m getting ahead of the story which is for next week.

Jesus goes into the Synagogue, and He opens the Book (Scroll) to announce His mission…His purpose for coming!
“God’s Spirit is on Me; He’s chosen Me to preach the Message of Good News to the poor; sent Me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind; to set the burdened and battered free; to announce, ‘This is God’s year to act!” (The Message)

Like Jesus, the Church must have a clear understanding of what it is about. We must not forget that the Church is not our idea, but God’s. The Church, like the Jews in Jesus’ day, strays and misses the mark whenever we have sought to shape the Church apart from God’s vision. God called Israel to “be a light to the nations,” to recognize that they were “a chosen race. a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”

Jesus was clear about it. His Church would be built on the faith commit-ment that He was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This Jesus is more than just the boy down the street now grown up, more than a young man trying to make his mark. Jesus is making the bold claim that He is the Word become flesh—the words of God through the prophet Isaiah were personified, and had now become alive in Him. John put it this way in the prologue to his Gospel: “The Word became flesh among us, full of grace and truth”

From His baptism to His death upon the cross of Calvary, Jesus understood what He was here for. That is the one essential question whose answer should govern everything we do individually as well as the church: “What are we here for?” If every experience you—or we together as the church— had in life was registered as a dot, what kind of pattern would those dots begin to form?

The mission entrusted to the Church to “Go make disciples, baptizing and teaching” has only been given to the Church. It must be the heart and center out of which emanates everything we do, just as Jesus’ mission governed and directed everything He did and how He did it. Isn’t it interesting how He did not allow tangential issues or concerns—no matter how worthy—to divert His mission...not even hunger...not even healing? He didn’t even permit governmental issues to subvert the purpose for His coming, nor the death of his friend. Not that any of those issues or concerns are wrong in and of themselves, but they were not going to be the lenses through which He saw His mission to save. His mission to save would be the lens that focused light and love upon the issue, not the issue dictating what the mission really should be. How easy it is for us to get the cart before the horse!

Bill Hybels shared in a wonderful teaching given during his days when he was meeting with President Clinton, how his visits to Washington D.C. impacted his understanding of the Church’s unique mission. All the huge buildings representing governmental power, Andrew’s Air Force base and the Pentagon representing military power, and it dawned upon him that God did not grant to government, to the military, to education, to business, to industry, to no other establishment what He bequeathed to His Church: to proclaim Good News to all who are poor and captive—that there is One who loves and forgives them more than they could ever imagine. Only to the Church did He grant this mission…and it is the Church that is the hope of the world!

“You are the Body of Christ,” says St. Paul in the lesson today. Did you hear it? We, the Church, are the Body of Christ! That means His ministry is our ministry. In defining who He was and what He was about, He has defined who we are and what we are called to be about. And that’s where it gets tough. Nevertheless, the world needs to see Christ clearly! That means the world needs to see the Church clearly! It’s not first and foremost what we do that defines who we are. Who we are should define what we do and how we do it.

Think for a moment, if before every church meeting or gathering we were to ask the question right up front: “Is what we’re about to discuss right now worth the death of Jesus on the Cross?” “Is what we’re proposing, is what we’re doing right now, or fighting over right now, worth the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross?” “Did Jesus fulfill His mission dying on the cross so that we could be this kind of church?” Maybe it’s really time for us in this 50th anniversary year to re-connect the dots…to re-discover what it means not just to be called His disciples, but what it costs to really be His disciples in mission with our Lord.

Are you familiar with “inversion therapy?” Not “aversion therapy” where
you train your dog not to leave your yard, or not dig, or not bark, with a collar that shocks the dog when it does run off, dig, or bark.

“Inversion therapy” helps alleviate back and neck pain by taking the usual gravitational press we live with and literally “standing it on its head.” One method is to strap your feet into boots and hang upside down like a big bat. Rosie O’Donnell once did this on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, I’m told. An-other method is to strap your whole body to a flat surface that then com-pletely flips upside down, the body suspended head down, feet in the air.

Inversion advocates claim when you exercise while in this upside down position — in other words, when you do sit-ups or torso twists upside down — you are helping your squished, painful vertebrae to expand, realign, and even regenerate. Strengthened by exercise and set free from the constant compression of gravity, sore backs, stiff necks, arthritic hips, can all relax and literally “take a load off.”
But here’s the rub: When our perspective is turned upside down, it is not usually very comfortable. Things look different. Things feel different. Things work different. Things ARE different.

The world of the Haitian people has turned terrifyingly and tragically upside down. What used to be ceilings and roofs are now floors and heaps of rubble. The center for Haiti’s commerce and government has become the center for devastation and loss. Where there had been roads, there is now impassable ruin. A 7.2 earthquake is no respecter of persons. Both the rich and the poor are homeless, helpless, and hurting. Port-au-Prince is gone. Nothing is the same. Things ARE different.

What turned Haiti upside down has changed our world as well. Last week the perspective of America was also forced upside down. Remember the tyranny of terrorism and the muscle-flexing of military might that has kept our eyes and energies focused on the far away middle east? Suddenly overnight the natural disaster in Haiti snapped our hearts and hands back to this side of the world.

Remember the national debate on the need for “full body scans?” Suddenly we were frantically trying to help free bodies from the rubble and ruin.

Remember obsessing over how to keep airliners in American airspace terrorist free? Suddenly we were rushing airplanes filled with emergency supplies and rescue workers to land at an airport that for a few days didn’t even have any air traffic controllers. Pilots had to guide themselves in by chatting with each other, and the tarmac looked like a shopping mall parking lot on Thanksgiving weekend.

Remember sending our troops into a country armed with the latest weaponry? Suddenly we were sending our troops into a country with food, water, medicine, rescue dogs, earth moving equipment, communications devices.

Who among us has not had our hearts breaking at the horror of the new realities confronting Haiti? But being turned upside down has released a healing spirit of humanity and compassion around the world. And as we identify with the Haitian people, we know we all stand on fragile crusts of earth that can shake us up and shake us down, at any time and any where.

Turning things upside down, shaking up perspectives, shaking down assumptions, was Jesus’ specialty. Jesus taught “inversion therapy” from the moment he began to speak in public until his final breath on the cross.

In fact it is when Jesus was held most upright that he most turned the world upside down. When power and prestige, fear and hate, nailed Jesus to the cross, forced his body into an unnaturally upright position, that is when Jesus finally and fully inverted the universe.

In weakness he found power. In brokenness he found wholeness. In death he found eternal life. It’s the same for us. In weakness we find power. In brokenness we find wholeness. In death we find eternal life.

So we have the Word—the Word of God in Person—Jesus Christ. It is He who provides release for us from whatever bondage enslaves us. He will enable us to recover our sight so that we can see clearly what He would have us see…and see it from His perspective! Through us He wills to proclaim it, and with His love and with His very life, He upholds us so that we may know God’s favor is available to us and that this is the year for us to act!

I close with this…a beautiful story about a great chieftain who lived on the southern border of the empire of Cyrus. His name was Cagular. He was a mighty warrior who tore to shreds and completely defeated various detachments of armies sent from Cyrus to subdue him.

Finally, running out of patience, the Emperor amassed an entire army who marched down and captured Cagular and brought him to the capital for trial and execution. On the day of the trial, Cagular and his wife were brought to the judgment chamber. Cyrus was most impressed when he saw this magnificent looking warrior. Apparently Cyrus began to reconsider his course of action and asked Cagular, “What would you do should I spare your life?”

Cagular responded, “Your Majesty, if you spared my life I would return to my home and remain an obedient servant as long as I live.” Cyrus then asked, “What would you do if I spared the life of your wife?”

“Your Majesty,” Cagular said, “if you spared the life of my wife, I would die for you.” The Emperor was so moved that he freed both Cagular and his wife, returning them to their province.

During the trip home Cagular reminisced with his wife. “Did you notice the beauty of the palace and its opulence? Did you notice the marble at the entrance…the tapestry on the wall? Did you see the chair on which the Emperor sat. It must have been carved from one lump of pure gold.”

“I really did not notice any of that,” said his wife. Cagular was amazed. “What did you see?” Cagular’s wife looked deep into his eyes and said, “I beheld only the face of the man who said he would die for me.”

Jesus is the Word made flesh. In Him the message of God’s love for us is fulfilled. If we hear the words only, and do not accept the Word, we will not connect the dots. We too will miss it all!