Preaching Challenge

In my clergy text study group, occasionally preaching challenges are made. Most of them are made as jokes when irreverent comments are made during our bible study of the upcoming Sunday's passages; therefore no one expects anyone to actually take up the challenge to mention such a thing in their sermon.  But sometimes I enjoy a good challenge.  

This pass Tuesday during our text study as we were discussing the gospel John 15:1-8, I said that as someone who has spent little time on vineyards, the vines I think of are poison ivy that strangle the plants.  And a challenge was made that I should mention that in my sermon.  

Later when discussing the 1st reading, Acts 8:26-40, I brought up Deuteronomy 23:1, which shocked a few colleagues when I had them read it.  Hmmm well how can I not mention that if I'm going to preach on the Ethiopian eunuch?  

So enjoy my sermon of preaching challenges.  (Oh and btw I did read Deuteronomy 23:1, but the Message translation "No eunuch is to enter the congregation of God.")

I am the vine, you are the branches….being from not wine country, in fact spending very little time at any vineyard, other than in a tasting room, I get confused by this metaphor.  To me, who knows about poison ivy and kudzu, a vine is a parasite attached to the branch and if given long enough, the branch will eventually die as a result of the vine.  So before we go any further – quick biology lesson about grape vines.

The vine is the solid mass that is rooted to the ground.  And from the vine comes many branches that can then be trellised in order to spread out and grow and produce fruit.  Now the cool thing about grapes is that even though branches can be pruned in order to bear more fruit, branches can also be grafted to the vine. 

Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches.   We are anchored, attached, grafted to Jesus so that we can produce fruit for him in the world.  But we need to be connected to Jesus in order to bear fruit.  And part of bearing fruit is connecting other people to Jesus and to the church.

One of the biggest reasons people stop showing up to worship is because they never felt connected to that community.  Therefore church workers spend a lot of effort trying to connect new members to others within the community in order to attach people both to Jesus and to the church.  In order to make each person who officially becomes a member of the congregation to also feel like a member of the community.

So let me ask you, how do help connect people into this community?  What are your ideas to get people to not just come and worship with us, but to actually be part of this community?

These are wonderful ideas and I want to honor them and respect them, but I also want to challenge them a bit. Most often when we try to connect with people we try to find things in common with them – there is nothing wrong with that, it is human nature.  However a natural extension of that is for us to want the people who are new to change, to conform to be like us, without us, those who have already belonged, to not have to change at all. 

You can see an example of this in our first lesson today from Acts.  This story is most often referred to as the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch.  And in the little introduction in the Celebrate makes it seem as though it was only the Ethiopian who was changed by this encounter and not Philip.  “Led by the Spirit, Philip encounters an Ethiopian official who is returning to his African home after having been to Jerusalem to worship. Philip uses their encounter to proclaim the gospel to him. Upon coming to faith in Jesus, the Ethiopian is baptized by Philip.”  We assume that it is the Ethiopian solely who was changed by this encounter, that he has been converted to following Jesus and Philip, who was already part of the “in-crowd”, a follower of Jesus, left unchanged. 

But what if this is really the conversion of Philip and not the conversion of an unnamed Ethiopian Eunuch.  Here is this guy who would not have looked like one of the people whom Philip normally hung out with. He is a foreigner, and not just any foreigner but a distant foreigner, a different race entirely.  Plus he was a eunuch, someone who was mutilated at a young age in order to set him apart for service to the queen. As a result he would have been considered not a full man, and therefore unfit, unworthy, to worship in the temple.  DEUTERONOMY 23:1

And yet the man keeps trying!  He went to Jerusalem to worship, even when he wasn’t able to enter the temple.  He read from Isaiah and asked Philip what it meant.  He sought God even when the world was telling him that God didn’t care for him. 

So what if it wasn’t the Ethiopian eunuch who was converted that day by the side of the road and was baptized, but Philip?  What if it was Philip who changed the most from this encounter?  That because of this encounter, Philip realized that you didn’t have to look like everyone else in order to be a follower of Jesus.  That you didn’t have to be from the right part of town, or even the right country, to be baptized.  That the old temple rules didn’t matter in following Jesus. That the Spirit can use everyone, even the ones who don’t look like us. Especially the ones who don’t look like us.

We judge people right away – their accents, their clothes, their hairstyle, their family, their jobs.  And we start to make connections, trying to see how they are like us or who we know already who are like them.  But maybe it is when we are with people who are not like us, in fact people who pull us the most outside of our comfort zones, whether they be of a different gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, sexuality and sexual identity than us that we most experience God.  So yes it is wonderful to make these connections, to help people not just to become a member of this church but to this community.  Though we should also realize that we shouldn’t do this in order to conform the one individual to us, but so that we can all be changed by God’s presence in the new relationship.