Sam Adams

The River Mennonite Church

June 17, 2007

The Church: The Gospel as source and proclamation for God’s people.

            Sheldon Burkhalter (our conference minister) suggested a couple of weeks ago that, as our church moves toward full membership in the conference and, as part of that process, establishes and expresses some clear sense of mission and vision, it would be a good idea for me to preach a series of sermons in which I can clearly share the vision I have for our church.   I think that is a good idea and probably long overdue--so here we go.   These sermons will be a little different from my normal sermons—they will not follow from one particular text, but will instead be more informed by theological reflection.   This is of course not to say that these sermons will not be scriptural, but rather that they are informed deeply by the whole of scripture—its grand overarching themes, narratives, and theology.   This is an exercise in what theologians call “ecclesiology,” that branch of theology that has to do with the church:   ekklesia is the Greek word for “church”, “ology” usually means “the study of.”   Hence, ecclesiology means “the study of the church.”   Most of the sermons in this series will overlap, and there is certainly no particular order that I am following—except with this sermon this morning.   Today we will look at the Gospel.   If there is one place we must start when thinking about the church it is at the Gospel, the “Good News” of Jesus Christ.

            Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, recounted this story in a sermon I found printed in one of the seminary’s publications.   He writes, “I heard a story that rabbis tell about ‘Zusya.’   There are many stories about this fictional person, used to illustrate important points in the Jewish understanding of God’s ways with human beings.   Zusya is a holy fool, a village idiot who, in his bizarre manner, comes through with little pieces of brilliance.   [In this story]…the chief rabbi was teaching the Torah to his rabbinic students while Zusya was in the room.   The teacher began to read the first chapter of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’   But when the rabbi read the next words, ‘And God said…,’ Zuysa got up and yelled and danced in a fit of ecstasy.   The rabbinic students laughed nervously, convinced that they were witnessing sheer craziness.   But the chief rabbi chastened them.   ‘Zusya has understood the whole thing at once,’ he told his students.   ‘The rest of you will need to study Torah for several years.   But he grasped the entire picture in a single moment.   He has understood that if you grasp what the words ‘God said’ mean, you have grasped the whole story.”   (Richard Mouw, “Seeking the Lost” in Theology, News and Notes, Fuller Theological Seminary, Spring 2004.)

            When we Christians hear “And God said …” we ought to be reminded that the New Testament identifies God’s great act of speaking primarily with God’s “Word,” which is, first and foremost, the person of Jesus Christ.   Jesus is the divine Word.   The marvelous fact that God spoke and the world came into existence is marvelous because of the wonder of God’s creation, the work of God’s creativity.   But to comprehend that God spoke is to understand that, even more marvelous than the result of His speech, is the speech itself: the Word of God.   This is why Zusya gets up and dances as a holy fool.   In the light of the New Testament, God has spoken--and we have met this speech as his Son.   So, John writes, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”   Should we not then, too, get up and yell and dance in fits of ecstasy as we hear these words?   Would that not be the proper Christian response to God’s great act of speech?  

            In the image of the village idiot, jumping up and yelling, dancing in fits of ecstasy, I want us to imagine the church.   For it is the church that has emerged as the people in the world—the village idiots--that “get it.”   We are those that have grasped, albeit imperfectly, the Good News that God has become incarnate, that he has enfleshed himself in his creation and that when God spoke to us, he became one of us.   This good news, the doctrine of the incarnation, is just the beginning—as Mark begins his gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”   The incarnation is just the beginning, for while Jesus was on earth he taught, he lived faithfully to his Father, was crucified, died and was buried.   On the third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended and is seated at the right hand of God the Father from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.   These words, expressed in many ways and in many creeds, point to the truth that the Gospel begins with the incarnation, and yet in the end the gospel is about the reign of God.   The good news is that God reigns.   That he is seated on his throne and that he is conquering sin and death and saving the world.   We are the people who gather around this good news and spread it to the world.   To comprehend this demands some holy foolishness!

Before we go on, let me give you what I think is a good summary of the Gospel from theologian Joe R. Jones. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News that the God of Israel, the creator of all creatures, has in freedom and love become incarnate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to enact and reveal God’s gracious reconciliation of humanity to Godself, and through the Holy Spirit calls and empowers human beings to participate in God’s liberative and redemptive work by acknowledging God’s gracious forgiveness in Jesus, repenting of human sin, receiving the gift of freedom, and embracing authentic community by loving the neighbor and the enemy, caring for the whole creation, and hoping for the final triumph of God’s grace as the triune Ultimate Companion of all creatures. --from Joe R. Jones, A Grammar Of Christian Faith, 27.

This is the content of the Good News.   I like to think that I preach some aspect of this Gospel weekly, so I want to step back a bit and focus more on how the church is formed by the Gospel and what the church is called to do with the Gospel.   I have decided to begin with the Gospel because I agree with Jones that the church is “a community of people called into existence by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”   He makes the claim that “at the heart of the church is the Gospel, which requires the church always remain clear and decisive about who calls it into life.” (A Grammar of Christian Faith , 26-27).   The church is “called into existence by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”   If we are going to reflect on the nature of the church, we must first begin with the Gospel.   There is no church without the Gospel, and likewise, no Gospel without the church.   This tautology demonstrates two aspects of the gospel that I want to become clear from this sermon:   first, the Gospel is what has called us into existence.   It is revelation.   It is God’s work.   It is God’s gift.   It does not come from us, but it comes from God.   And as such it gives birth to us: it is that which brings us as a church into existence.   Second, the Gospel is proclamation; it is good news.   In this sense, the Gospel is something we are called to proclaim and to bear witness to.   The Gospel gives us a mission.  

            Now I admit that this may seem obvious.   Of course the Gospel gives birth to the church and the church proclaims the Gospel.   Yet, it has been my experience that the cultural temptations for the church to abandon this calling and mission are insidious.   The temptation to be a social services organization, a social club, a political action committee, and other such culturally relevant institutions is readily apparent everywhere we look.   In our case the Mennonite emphasis on peace and justice can lead us to become little more than a political club and draw us away from the Gospel—for it is the Gospel which gives rise to our peculiar understanding of justice and our radical notions of peace.   Without the Gospel our good intentions are shallow and without genuine content.

            So, the Gospel must be received.   It comes as revelation, as a gift from God.   As such it calls the church into existence:   this church, these people, you and me—we are only here because of the Gospel.   And yet we receive the Gospel in different ways.

Some receive the gift as news of God’s mercy at a very low point in their lives.   The good news comes as a light shining in the darkness, as hope in the midst of despair.   The Gospel comes as the answer to questions that seem to have been ready made to be answered by God’s work of salvation.

For others, the gospel comes when things seem to be going fine.   I remember one early morning in college when I was awoken in my dorm room by a phone call.   I was too slow and groggy to answer it, but when I did manage to make it out of bed I checked my voice mail and found, to my surprise, that it was my uncle who lived in Maine.   I am pretty sure he never had called me before, and I was at a loss to understand why he was calling me that morning.   The message he left was simply, “Sam, this is your uncle John.   Your parents wanted me to call and let you know that they are okay and that they will call you as soon as they can.   Bye.”   Now this was good news.   But it took a while for me to figure out just why it was good news.   I had assumed everything was okay, and to receive a call at 5:00 in the morning to confirm my suspicions, seemed a little odd—unless the good news I was receiving was part of a whole story that I had missed.   As I began to try and figure out what was going on I went to the lounge and learned that there had been an earthquake in Northridge, a suburb north of Los Angeles, and that it had been quite strong.   The phone call began to be good news indeed.  

So it is with the gospel.   The gospel is good news, but it comes with an alternative understanding of the world that must be comprehended in order to perceive it as good news.   Sometimes the story is known and felt—as when someone knows their guilt, knows there must be a God, and wants desperately to make things right.   This seems to be, to a large extent, the types of people that the missionary impulse of the Apostles was directed toward:   people who knew the story in which the Gospel came as Good news.   These were the broken, the oppressed, the sick, the outcasts and also the people of Israel—those who knew that they were awaiting a Messiah.   The gospel comes to these people as a gift, as the continuation of their story, of their history.   For these people the Gospel fits as the crucial piece in a puzzle ready made for it.    

But to others, the gospel comes as a whole new world. Like the early morning phone call I received—the Gospel needs context.   The story needs told, the crisis must be made real.   Either way, whether you inhabit a world primed for the Gospel or live ignorant of such a world, the Gospel calls you into a world that is determined by the Gospel itself.   The church, called into existence by this Gospel, is the assembly of those people who are supposed to live according to a world in which the Gospel makes sense.   We must live a life together that is governed by the logic of incarnation, service, sacrifice and resurrection.

All of this is to say that before anything else, it is the Gospel which we are about.   And if it is the Gospel which calls us into existence, then it is the Gospel which we are to proclaim.   The Greek word from which we translate “Gospel” is euaggelion , a word that was used to signify good news of a sort beyond the typical “good news” we might tell our friend, or the good news we might occasionally hear on the evening news.   This word “Gospel” carried a more technical sense that referred primarily in the 1st century to the declaration of salvation that came by way of the Emperor.   The Emperor’s birth was considered the beginning of the gospel:

Joy and rejoicing come with the news.   Humanity, sighing under a heav[y] [sic] burden of guilt, wistfully longs for peace.   Doom is feared because the gods have withdrawn from the earth.   Then suddenly there rings out the news that the swth/r is born, that he has mounted the throne, that a new era dawns for the whole world.   This eu0agge/lion is celebrated with offerings and yearly festivals.   All cherished hopes are exceeded.   The world has taken on a new appearance. (Friedrich, TDNT , 725). 

This description of the good news of the emperor’s birth is an excellent description of the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.   So, as I quoted earlier, Mark’s gospel begins with the Imperial announcement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”   The Gospel of Jesus and the Gospel of Caesar are qualitatively different, but are proclaimed similarly.   To understand the Imperial context of the Gospel, is to understand the magnitude of the proclamation in that day.  

I am not sure anything in our own day would qualify as a comparison.   In our own time it seems that good news of this magnitude has been made unlikely by the general refusal to believe anything with any depth.   What could be announced today that would change the appearance of the world—or at least claim to change its appearance?   Countless advertisements make such large and sweeping claims, as do political campaigns, but neither Coke nor Obama have the authority or position to make us take them seriously.   We are numb to the claims of advertisers—even though we wishfully follow their suggestions, and we are cynical toward politicians, even though we may hope that they can deliver us.   The Gospel, on the other hand, is grand and sweeping, it both promises and delivers at the same time.   The world that is proclaimed in which God reigns and has given his Son that we may have peace with Him and pursue a path of peace with our neighbor, a world in which death is defeated, is both announced and realized in its proclamation.  

It is this grand announcement that is both spoken and enacted, that is our mission as the church.   If we begin anywhere else we have failed as the church, if we have any other proclamation, we have failed as the church.   If we claim a mission for ourselves that settles for political effectiveness while abandoning faithfulness to the God who reigns, we have failed as the church.   If we have any other hope than the hope of the Good news that Jesus is the Savior of the world and that he has come to announce his kingdom, then we have put our hope in something that is dying.   But, if we put our hope in the good news of the Kingdom, then we have put our hope in life.   And if we have put our hope in life, then we know that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Rom 6.4b).   

The Gospel is our starting point and our proclamation.   It is our beginning and our hope.   It is what we are about as God’s church.   Anything less and we cease to be the church.

So, here is the gospel as Peter preached it at the beginning of the church, in Jerusalem on Pentecost:

            Jesus of Nazareth

            A man attested to you by God with deeds of power,

                        Wonders, and signs that God did through him among you,

            This man you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.

            But God raised him up,

Having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.

            This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.

Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the

father the promise of the Holy Spirit,

He has poured out this that you both see and hear.

            Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made

                        Him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.  

And here is the response to that Gospel, appropriate today as it was 2000 years ago:

            “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’   Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.   For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.’” (Acts 2.37-39)