Materials
Gospel
of John, #3
The
Second Incarnation Of Jesus
John 1:1-4
by R. Todd Bouldin
For the past two weeks, I have been developing
some basic theology of John from chapter 1 of his Gospel. John dares
to begin where the other gospels resist: not with the human birth
of Jesus but with His existence with God since the beginning of creation.
This Jesus, John says, has become a human being, taken on flesh, and
was full of grace and truth. Listen again to the power of John’s
words as I read from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of this Scripture
text from The Message (John 1:1-4):
"The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from
day one.
Everything was created through Him;
nothing--not one thing!--
came into being without Him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live
by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn't put it
out.
Prayer
For the last two weeks, I have reflected on the meaning of this text
for our salvation and for what we believe. Today I want to address
the meaning of this text for our ministry. I feel strongly
about speaking the Gospel every Sunday, and I rarely address issues
specifically to our church or to its ministries. After a lot of prayer
and thought these past weeks, and as I begin my fourth year of ministry
with you, I want to share some thoughts “from the heart”
that are the product of both my reflection on this text and on our
ministry.
Last week I traveled to Abilene Christian University for the Bible
lectures, and I was given the opportunity to speak with many friends
in ministry from all over the country. Last week I had the occasion
to have breakfast with my roommate from college, who is in his eleventh
year of ministry at a midsize Church of Christ in Texas. Ken has been
a member of “The Church” all of his life, and he has given
his whole adult life to ministry within the church. But this last
year, he had a crisis concerning his ministry because he told me that
he no longer believed in it. He said to me, “Todd, I believe
in God, I believe in Jesus Christ, and I see God doing more in our
world than ever. I believe in the Church with the capitol "C."
But I spend my whole week resolving petty disputes between members,
organizing new programs for increasingly self-focused church members,
and trying to retain the members we have and it just seems like nothing
really powerful or deep or real is happening. The most real and powerful
thing in my life this year was therapy with a secular counselor, not
any relationship or program of the church. I believe in the mission
of God, but I’m not sure the mission of God is happening for
the most part in the congregation but outside of it.”
My friend isn’t alone in his feeling about the church as we
know it. If you don’t believe it, look at the number of churches
in decline, the number of churches throughout our own tradition that
have shut their doors in the last five years, and the deep divisions
that seem to be dividing the church despite our best efforts to stay
together. Some of us find deep relationship and meaning in our churches,
but others feel that they are spinning their wheels but nothing relevant
to our daily lives is happening in church week to week.
The Dean of the Business School at ACU spoke to me last week, and
he begged me to start helping people in our churches talk about real
issues and not abstract ones. He said that the biggest reason we face
unethical business practices, even by Christians, is because no one
in church is helping business people discover the connection between
their work and their faith.
A new order is taking shape that is something different than we’ve
ever conceived before, something that is much more pervasive, deep
and transforming than the way we have experienced the mission of God
in our lifetime. It’s not that the church understand as capitol
“C” Church, the Church as the Body of Christ, the Church
Universal, the Church for which Christ died, is powerless or invalid.
It is the Church understood as those that follow after Christ that
is bringing this new thing.
However, it is the little “c” church, the church as a
local expression that meets in buildings and is sustained by programs
and staff, that appears broken and largely unable to grasp these new
realities or to be the agent of transformation in this new world that
the Church should be.
I want to be clear: This is not a doubt in the Church as God intended
it, but a doubt that most of our churches are the churches that God
intends. When we read about the church at first in the book of
Acts, we find a church that is vibrant, growing, redemptive, and on
a mission.
Today most of us find church to be a sometimes reliable social circle
or a place where we find instruction in the faith, but often it seems
to lack something real and authentic that is making a world of difference
in our communities and our world. How would our communities say that
our churches are making impact? Frustrated with the church’s
seemingly inability to transform our culture, some have sought to
make the church an influence in the world through politics, seeking
through legislation to compel unbelievers in our culture live like
believers. As well intentioned as it may be, even this project neuters
the authority and the mission of the church by associating the mission
of God with a particular type of politics. When this happens, the
church loses its way and the church becomes little more than someone’s
political agenda than a place of God’s presence.
At other times the church seems out of touch, with Hollywood and Washington
more willing to have a conversation about issues that confront our
culture than the church. Why should we have to see the movie Crash
to think about the continuing pervasive racism throughout our city,
or the movie Brokeback Mountain to first confront the issue
of homosexuality? Hollywood often seems so much more willing to engage
the real issues of our time than we are.
Church should be the first place that is willing to confront these
issues with truth and grace, but something about our structure makes
such discussions about real things scary, or difficult, or unspoken.
Either out of withdrawal or naiveté, we are not intersecting
with real people enough to force ourselves to ask these questions
or to have the discussion. We run from conflict when conflict often
is the wound that can heal us, and we pull the blinds on the realities
before us, content for another class or sermon of platitudes than
discussions about things that are real.
Are our Bible studies and our conversations addressing questions that
people around us are asking? Why is this not happening? Because somewhere
along the way we began to care more about maintaining the institution,
our religion, or our tradition than we did about being the living
Body of Christ on a mission in the world.
Let me say that I think our church experience here is different in
some ways. Over and over again, I have seen God do the most incredible
things through us, and in us. I told stories to my friends this week
of how one 80 year old woman in our church took in a woman struggling
with substance abuse and nurtured her back to wholeness and relationship.
I told of how so many of you have been generous with those who are
unemployed or in great need. I told of the way you responded to the
Katrina crisis last year, and the stories of those who have found
faith here. Despite its limitations, God is still working in the local
congregation to bring about His mission. But for the first time in
several centuries, it also is clear that God is working outside the
traditional church walls to do something bigger and more pervasive
than has happened in our experience of church. So there’s bad
news for church as we have known it, but good news for the Kingdom
as God wants it.
How can the church recover its mission and find our way out of this
brokenness? I believe the church will recover its mission when
it again grounds its mission in the mission of God. Rather than
insist that God must do what God does within our four walls, we perhaps
should discover again the mission of God and follow where God is now
working rather than where we wish God were working.
It would be nice if the whole world was flocking to our doors every
Sunday, but they are not. Yet never before have so many people been
open to spiritual truth and to an experience of God. Why are they
not seeking that truth and experience with the local church? I think
it is largely because church as they perceive it and experience it
seems so lifeless, irrelevant and powerless.
Let’s be honest – can you honestly say that the church
is changing our world more than Hollywood, Washington, Oprah, or Bono?
In a busy world that asks for our time and money, why would you give
either to something that isn’t making the difference it claims
to make? You may disagree with that analysis, but that’s how
many people in our culture feel. More importantly, I’m finding
that it is how a silent majority of people in our churches feel too.
I do not think that the church is without hope. I believe that we
can become the most alive, the most transforming, the most authentic
community known in our world if we can root our ministry again in
the mission of God, and we find that mission here in John 1 in the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ. For the rest of our time this morning,
I want to draw four conclusions about ministry from this most surprising
of events, that heaven and earth have met and that all the world is
being redeemed when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
1. The Incarnation of God involves the identification of God with
the whole human race. Jesus did not take on flesh as His outer
garment or robe, but as His true form and identity. He became like
us in every way, Hebrews says in chapter 4, so that we might know
that God is Christ like and to understand God in terms that make sense
to us as human beings. God came on our turf, moved into our neighborhood,
and God began His work from within the world and not despite it or
above it. This means that as a church who seeks to incarnate the person
of Jesus in our ministry and mission, we also must fully involve
ourselves and identify with the culture in which we live. We will
not have done this if our church ministries and worship looks more
Texas than California, if our classes and conversations do not address
the issues raised by complex human situations, and if people feel
a disconnect between their culture and ours when our lives intersect.
I do not think this means that we must accept the values of our culture
but we must identify with it in order to transform it. In a growing
voice of evangelical right wingism, Christians are seen by our culture
as standing in critique rather than in identification.
It is not the mission of Christians to stand in critique of those
who are unbelievers but of ourselves as believers, and in so doing
we will both identify and offer an alternative story to our world.
2. The Incarnation means a real and abiding Presence with people.
God came among us, and He “dwelt” with us. He did not
go away to a desert monastery, nor did He form a holy huddle of disciples
and erect a building expecting the first century world to come to
them. He “lived” among people, and He confronted complex
human stories that did not always match the rigid confines of the
law as the religious leaders understood it.
If we are to become the second incarnation of Christ in the world,
we cannot huddle away in Christian enclaves of home schools, Christian
schools, Christian gyms, Christian radio stations and Christian movies.
All of those things have their place, but they cannot move us towards
the mission of God if they become a means by which we withdraw from
the culture on the grounds that it does not share our values. For
example, there are good reasons to send children to Christian schools,
but those reasons, for those who follow after the Christ who became
incarnate, should not be cultural derision. Cultural derision is a
far cry from engaged identification.
Incarnation is a radical identification of God with us, and if we
are to be the light of Christ in the world, it will mean that we must
first love the world including its cultures as God does, then seek
to identify and engage with it without losing the Gospel or our own
identity. This will not always be easy, and as my mentor Stanley Shipp
said, it will often be “fuzzy” because life is fuzzy.
But Jesus does not avoid the messy and fuzzy places, and neither should
we.
3. The Incarnation of God involves a sending rather than a coming
orientation. God came to us, and He did not wait for us to come
to Him. God came to where we were, and God took up residence there.
The church who finds her mission again will be a church that eliminates
the permeating philosophy of ministry that our goal is to attract
people to come here. In the words of the authors of the book The
Shaping of Things To Come, the church who will find her mission
again will be a church that is less attraction than incarnation.
A church serious about incarnating Christ in the world will eliminate
from its thinking the ways in which it can attract more people to
its services, classes and building and will instead involve itself
in radical acts of “going to” where those not yet Christian
already are, seeking to understand their questions, eager to engage
the conversation and confident of its Truth. Eventually, they will
come here as their lives become more deeply rooted in our community.
I want to challenge our congregation to become a missional
“going to” church, rather than an attractional “come
here” church. I want to challenge every ministry
leader here to think of ways that you could accomplish your ministry
outside our church building.
For example, could Creative Homemakers meet at the local Starbucks
rather than in a home? Even more radical, could the same group or
something like it meet at a bookstore or a coffee shop where others
are invited to join in the common struggle to parent as a Christian?
Could one of our Sunday School classes meet at the Coffee Bean rather
than here at the building? What if we hosted a Vacation Bible School
type experience at a local park rather than in our building? Rather
than hosting a coffee house here at our building for youth, what if
we rented a space and ran a coffee house in a safe environment for
the youth of our city?
If we are serious about reaching 18 to 35 year olds, why don’t
we host a church service at 5:00 pm on Sunday for this generation
who notoriously refuse to come to a morning service?
Incarnational mission does not ask others to know God by finding their
way to our church and its services. It brings the Presence of God
into all of life by helping people know and find God in all of the
places they already are.
Those are just a few ideas, but I hope you can see the difference
in a “going to” church and a “come here” church.
A going to church meets our culture and its people on their turf and
not ours because that is what God did with us when He came and dwelt
among us. Incarnation allows people to experience God in the midst
of life and not in the confines of a church building or program.
I am hopeful about the future of the church, and I believe more than
ever that God’s Kingdom is breaking out in the most surprising
of places all over the world. It is breaking out where Christians
are making the connections between their worship and their work, where
Christians are serious about enfleshing Jesus again in every part
of society, the workplace, and culture. It all begins with people
who have embraced a God who does not confine Himself to Temples and
church buildings but who created a world that He then inhabits, loves
and redeems.
The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory,
the kind of glory that comes from God. May the Word become incarnate
in us again.
February 26, 2006
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