Annual Conference 2005 - Sunday Sermon Page

Galen Hackman
Photo by Regina Roberts

Two years ago my wife, Doris, and I were blessed with the birth of two granddaughters. They came into this world within two months of each other, though the second one was two months premature. Over these last two years, Doris and I have had the explicit joy of being a part of the lives of these two girls. I am convinced that never in the course of human history have two such wonderful little girls been born! And we even have two daughters!

I need to tell you that there is no greater joy in my life—no greater blessing—nothing I look forward to more—than having those little ones call out “Baba” and run to me with open arms with a broad smile on their face. Experiencing the smile of my grandchildren makes any day a good day.

But then, that is the power of a smile. Think about it. When someone walks up to you with a smile, you feel something entirely different than when someone approaches you with a frown, or a smirk, or the look of anger. Smiles communicate acceptance and pleasure and welcome.

What does it mean to experience the smile of God? David, in Psalm 4, prays
Let the smile of your face shine on us, LORD.
You have given me greater joy
than those who have abundant harvests of grain and wine.
I will lie down in peace and sleep,
for you alone, O LORD, will keep me safe. NLT

For David, the smile of God brought joy and peace and security.

People smile when they are pleased. People smile at me when they are pleased with who I am or what I have done. I know this is true because I receive my share of other looks indicating a lack of pleasure over something I have done or said.

Naturally, there are some people whose smile means more to me than others. For example, I live for the smile of my wife. Her smile brightens the room and lights up my life. There are times when I have disappointed her and have made her sad. These are never good days. But, Oh, for the smiles. What a joy they are.

What does it mean to experience the smile of God? What does it mean for your life personally? What does it mean for the church?

I’ve been an active Christian for 34 years. By now I should know what makes God smile. The Church of the Brethren is soon to be 300 years old. We should know what makes God smile.

For some years now, I have had the gnawing sensation in my spiritual gut that God has stopped smiling on us as a denomination. He has stopped smiling because he is not pleased with what he sees.

I know this is a very audacious thing to say. I may not even have the right to say it—but then, if I don’t, who does? I am not even totally sure why I feel this in my spiritual gut. But it is there—it is very clearly there—and I have not been able to shake it.

No amount of Brethren religiosity—not frequent attendance at Annual Conference—not serving on denominational and district assignments—not preaching in the local churches of our districts—not mingling with our leaders—probably not even preaching at Annual Conference—none of this has quelled this gnawing feeling. Rather, the shadowy sensation grows more intense.

Let me try to explain.

Under the guidance of the Spirit of God, brother Hardenbrook has called this Annual Conference to “Fix our eyes on Jesus.” What a timely and prophetic theme. In my attempt to define why God has chosen to smile on others in the vast network of the church, and not to smile on us, I would begin right here.

We have forgotten who Jesus is.

How can this be, you ask, when Jesus is mentioned in our hymns and our liturgies and our Bible readings and our sermons? He is even a part of the sound bite that defines us—“continuing the work of Jesus.” Let me explain.

No doubt Brethren remember Jesus.
	We remember him as the one who lived a life of example that we are to follow.
		We remember him as a great religious reformer.
			We remember him as the one who taught us to turn the other cheek.
				He is the one who began a work we must continue and who calls us to offer cold water to the thirsty of our world.

And of course that is Jesus. But he is so much more.

We have forgotten the Jesus who has died to set us free from sinful choices, lifestyles, addictions and attitudes;
	who offers us eternal salvation as a free gift of his grace; whose blood was shed to transform our lives.
		Today, many of us are not sure we can call Jesus our personal Savior, not to mention acknowledging him as the only Savior of the World.

We have forgotten the angry Jesus who cleansed the temple;
	who called upon deeply religious people to open their hearts to a relationship with him or to perish;
		who offered followers a Spirit of power so that life orientations change to reflect the nature of our Creator.
			Today we are not sure Jesus wants us to change, let alone that he is able to change us;
				Or we think change only apples to the attitudes of narrow-minded fundamentalists, and not to broad-minded libertines.

We have forgotten the Jesus who sat at a foreigners’ well and asked for a drink of water, only to invite her to convert from her faith to belief in him, and to leave the destructive behavior that defined her life, and to sin no more.
	Today we are not sure we can or should invite people of other religions to believe in Jesus.

We have created a Jesus in our own image, after the likeness of our own heritage. There is a Jesus in which we believe. But is it the Jesus of the New Testament?
	Is it the Jesus of the Gospels? Is it the Jesus who raises the dead,
		feeds the 5000, hangs out with sinners, sheds his blood as a sacrifice for us all?
	Is it the Jesus who says, unless you repent, you will all perish? Is it the Jesus who rose from the dead and pours out his Spirit so that we might be holy like he is holy? Is our Jesus the One who said, No one comes to the Father except through me? (John 14:4 TNIV) Is our Jesus the One who is coming again to judge the living and the dead?

We truly need to fix our eyes upon Jesus. But first, I fear we need to rediscover Jesus. By faith we need to know the Jesus of the Gospels.

Remember, when Jesus came up out of the waters of baptism, God said,
This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.
Matthew 3:17 TNIV

I believe God smiled that day; he smiled at Jesus. Where there is no Jesus—or where there is a distorted view of Jesus—there is no smile of God.

A great cloud of witnesses surrounds us today. We have biblical examples to follow. We have people from our own heritage to follow. And we have a cloud of contemporary believers to inspire us.

Ask the believers in China’s emerging Church who Jesus is.
	Ask our brothers and sisters in Nigeria and rest of Africa who Jesus is.
		Ask the church in the Caribbean or South America who Jesus is.

We marvel at the explosive growth of Christianity in these areas of the world. No doubt, God is smiling. At the same time we almost completely ignore the downward plight of our denomination as we get grayer and smaller each year. And we wonder why God stopped smiling on us.

Rediscovering the smile of God involves rediscovering the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Not only have we forgotten who Jesus is, but…

We have forgotten what Jesus asked us to do.

Hebrews 11:6
	And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. TNIV

God smiles on those who earnestly seek him. He smiles on those who seek out others and invite them to, by faith, seek God’s smile on their lives.

God is pleased when we forget about ourselves and focus on others with the goal of leading them into the Promised Land of a relationship with God in Jesus.

It seems to me that Jesus was crystal clear about his purpose for being here on earth. He said:
	For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.
		Luke 19:10 TNIV

It seems equally apparent to me that Jesus was clear about his purpose for the church. Just before his departure back to God he told his followers:
	go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
		Matthew 28:19-20 TNIV

And …
	you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
		Acts 1:8 TNIV

Jesus did not say go preserve a heritage.
	Jesus did not say go feed the hungry.
		Jesus did not say go establish institutions of learning and caregiving.
			Jesus did not say teach people to live at peace with one another.
Jesus said, go and make disciples of all nations.

Now all those things I just mentioned—they have their place in the ministry of the church, but only as a means toward the end of accomplishing our primary mission. These things should never be an end in themselves.

We are called to offer Jesus to a broken world. Everything we do must be about the purpose of proclaiming Jesus. He is really the only thing we know and the only message we have.

It is not our church. It is the church of Jesus Christ and we are honor and faith bond to fulfill his purposes for the church. God forgive us when we impose our agenda on the church.

Our business is Jesus; and until he and his message permeate every level of our church and all of its associated agencies—
	Until his mission for us fills our vision at every horizon of ministry
		—until then, God will not smile on us.

God is not pleased when we divorce evangelism from service.
	God is not pleased when we educate without grounding that education in Jesus.
		God is not pleased when we help alleviate poverty of body without working to alleviate the poverty of the soul.

And it is not enough to think that as long as someone in the church is fulfilling this mission of making disciples than it is OK if we do not.
	In other words, until reaching Jesus is the primary mission of everyone who sits in our pews
		and everything the church does through every one of its ministries, at every level of its life—congregational, district, denomination, and agency—
			until then, God might be smiling, but it will not be on us.

God is not pleased when we care more about preserving our heritage than we do about joining him on the mission field of our world.
	God is not pleased when the central focus of our work is anything other than introducing a dying world to the Son in whom he is well pleased.

The roll call of the faithful we find in Hebrews chapter 11 is full of people who said goodbye to their families and their heritage and their culture, because God was calling them to be something different for him and to do it in different places and in different ways.

Somehow we got stuck as a church. We are stuck in the mud of our own heritage. When Alexander Mack and his 7 cohorts walked into the Eder River to obey God in the waters of adult baptism, they had no denominational heritage to preserve. All they had was the call of God on their lives to obey, no matter the cost.

Today we are shackled by our own heritage and by our belief that it must be preserved. The very heritage that once set people free to follow Jesus has now imprisoned us.

Friends, there is only one heritage worth preserving—that is the heritage of Jesus and the faith of New Testament Christianity. That was the only passion flaming in the heart of Alexander Mack. I believe it is the passion that pleases God most.

Finally, there is a third area of concern for us.

We have settled for something less than effective Christianity.

So far one might interpret this message as being rather hard on the segment of the church that might be viewed as straying from a radically biblically rooted Christianity.

However, the sad fact is that even in those pockets in our denomination where the biblical, evangelical faith of our forbears has been preserved, even there one sees very little real passion in the church.

Most of the leaders and congregations among us who would now be saying amen to this sermon have little themselves to show for their faith. The churches who want to see themselves as evangelical have far too often lived unto themselves, withdrawing into an enclave of isolation from their world.

Few of us can count even a handful of people who have been brought into the church from a truly unchurched background. Few of us can show in any tangible way anything that has changed our community to make it more godly.

We may think the Ephrata Cloister is dead, but the evangelical wing of the church lives cloistered lives—lives so far removed from the life and issues and culture of today’s post Christian world that we cannot even relate.

Many among us preach the biblical message of salvation by grace through faith and we personally know the Jesus of the Bible. We have experienced first hand his touch of grace in our lives. We might even talk about him at work or at school.
	But we are nearly oblivious to the fact that people today cannot even understand what we are saying, because we are unable to identify with them in their context.

God forbid the message ever changes. The first part of this sermon dealt with the fact that I think we have already changed the message too much. We must know and proclaim the biblical Jesus. But we must do it in culturally relevant ways.

I find it amazing that when the preference of only a small percentage of the people in our culture is for classical music, we still primarily use organ and piano in our worship services.
	We sing hymns written to communicate with cultures long gone.
		We preach from translations of the Bible not even written in the dialect we speak.
			We hold protracted “evangelistic meetings” when most of our own people don’t even come, let alone any unreached families.

You see, it doesn’t matter that I like the organ; it doesn’t matter if I like Shakespearean English; it doesn’t matter if we always have a spring revival meeting;
	what matters is, are we reaching the lost for Jesus.

And the fact is, we are not reaching people for Jesus.

The evangelical church is often missing the mark just as much as our less than evangelical brothers and sisters. But for us it is even more tragic—we think we have the right message—that we have held the line on doctrine—but we are still sinking in the mire of our own issues while the world is dying around us.

And no matter how much we say we care about those living outside of a relationship with Jesus, our actions prove that we really do not care—at least not enough to do what has to be done to reach them.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. These witness include Christians and churches that are being effective.
	There are people from own heritage, who gave leadership during a time when the church was actually growing;
		There are churches in other cultures where their ministry is transforming towns and cultures;
			And there are churches in our very neighborhoods that are showing explosive growth.

Unfortunately, we are often too proud to go to them for help, because, we think, they do not understand our heritage. We are afraid that they will corrupt us; that we will lose something. As a result, we will die defending a heritage that has much to offer, but which has lost its ability to relate to our world.

When we truly care more about the people who are not yet in the church than we do about taking care of ourselves;
	When we are willing to lose our identity to be found in Jesus and to be shaped into his likeness;
		When we are willing to die to church, as we know it, so the next generation might have a church;
Only then will we rediscover the smile of God.

When we really get serious about radically following after Jesus—not the One we made up, but the One revealed to us in the Gospels…
Then, we might once again feel the warmth of God’s smile on our lives and on our church.

What is the path back to feeling the smile of God?

Perhaps we need to rediscover the power of faith.
We are called to walk by faith, not by sight.

By faith, we need to believe that only when we lose ourselves in Jesus will we find ourselves.

By faith, we need to believe that only when we are willing to abandon our heritage for Jesus will any vestige of that heritage survive for the next generation.

By faith, we need to repent from the religious arrogance that thinks we have an edge on God’s truth—that we as Brethren have somehow heard God a bit more clearly than the Lutherans or the Fundamentalists or the Baptists or the Charismatics or the Methodists or the Mega-churches.

By faith, we need to walk away from the many good things that have occupied our time, but have fallen short of Jesus’ mission for us to proclaim the good news of salvation.

By faith we need to rediscover the biblical Jesus who heals the sick, restores the broken, gets angry at sin, and offers us changed lives of holiness.

By faith we need to move beyond mediocre, ineffective, Christianity and rediscover the Jesus who says, unless you love me more than these, you cannot be my disciple.

By faith, we need to fix our eyes on Jesus.

Is there a future and a hope for this denomination? I really do not know. But I know this:

God is always ready to smile on his people again.
Like my grandchildren run to me with open arms and a broad smile yelling Baba, so God runs out to meet his repentant children. With outstretched arms he calls out the names of his children even while they are yet a far way off. God loving restores the lost and the fallen and the prodigal. God always smiles when we bow before him in humble confession.

As we truly we fix our eyes truly on Jesus—
		when that happens in my heart, my congregation, my district and my denomination—
	then, God will be smiling;
		and instead of continuing to grow grayer and smaller and more myopic,
			we will experience a new era of vitality, growth and abundant life.

Fix your eyes on Jesus and seek to see him in all his biblical fullness. Allow him to change your life. Then step out in faith and experience the smile of God.

Members of the 2005 Annual Conference news team, a ministry of the General Board, contributed to this report: Regina Roberts, Jesse Reid, Hannah Edwards, and Sarah Kovacs, photographers; Kathleen Campanella, Karen Garrett, Jill Kline, Frank Ramirez, Frances Townsend, Sarah Leatherman Young, and Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, writers; Amy Heckert, technical support; Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford and Becky Ullom, editors.

219th Annual Conference Peoria, Illinois July 2-6, 2005