Jesus Ain’t No Little Bo Peep

Jesus Ain’t No Little Bo Peep

Jonah 1:1-3, 3:1-3a, Luke 19:1-10

Rev. Brian North, Westminster Presbyterian, Chehalis, WA

Nov. Presbytery Meeting

November 18th, 2010

Lord, tonight, right here, right now, speak to us and draw us close to your heart so that we would live more faithfully to you and your calling on us and our churches. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Would it be all right if I start tonight’s message with a question? In Matthew 25, Jesus shares a parable about a landowner who went on a journey and entrusted his property to his servants. One of them did nothing with what he was given. The other two grew what they were given. And those two, upon the owner’s return were told: “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21). Would you like God to say that to you one day? I would. Hold onto that thought for a moment.

In tonight’s passage from Luke, I believe that Jesus gives his mission statement when he says in verse 10 that he came “to seek and to save the lost.” He states and illustrates his mission elsewhere, such as that “faithful servant” parable, the parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son (Luke 15), and a host of other places¹…but this statement to Zacheus here in Luke is about the most succinct. It’s not like the children’s rhyme that goes:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

And can’t tell where to find them

Leave them alone,

And they’ll come home

Wagging their tails behind them

Jesus ain’t no Little Bo Peep, and you and I should be grateful. He doesn’t sit back and wait and leave us alone…he actively seeks out the lost, just as he did with Zacheus. Zacheus thought he was seeking out Jesus, but it was really Jesus seeking out him. That’s why Jesus insisted he come over to his house; he had some things he wanted to say to him.

So if seeking out and saving lost people is Jesus’ mission, and if we’d like to be his good and faithful servants: Then we ought to be sure we are connecting his mission to our work. Jesus is our boss, right? He’s the CEO – the Chief of Eternity Officer – and we’re the rest of the employees of the company. Therefore, his business is our business. And so if we want to be good and faithful servants we would be wise to ask: How’s business?

Most of us would probably agree that business – as defined by Jesus’ mission statement – isn’t so great, lately, in the PCUSA on the whole. But if God is going to move us to carry out his business better, it helps to first acknowledge and identify why business isn’t so good, because ignorance is not bliss. I want to suggest to you four reasons why business has been poor. First, some people in our churches think evangelism isn’t “Presbyterian.” Nothing could be further from the truth. If that thinking does exist in our churches, then it needs to be put to death. The fact is, the Book of Order – and the new proposed form of government, too – puts an emphasis on Evangelism. The Great Ends of the church lists the first purpose of the PCUSA as “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.”

Flip a few pages further back, to section G-10, and what does the Book of Order list first among the responsibilities of the Session of a church? “To provide opportunities for evangelism to be learned and practiced by the church, that members may be better equipped to articulate their faith, to witness in word and deed to the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and to invite persons into a new life in Christ…” (G 10.0102a). That’s great stuff and absolutely lines up with Jesus’ mission of seeking the lost. And while the new FOG doesn’t include this exact language, it does direct Sessions to the Marks of the Church, The Notes of the Reformed Church, and The Great Ends of the Church – all of which emphasize evangelism. So sharing the good news of Jesus Christ is a part of our PCUSA history, and I would suggest to you that Jesus wants us to re-claim it and make it our future, too.

I believe that the second reason business hasn’t been flourishing is that while some Presbyterians do believe it’s important, and we have made efforts to reach lost people, we sometimes reach out in dubious ways. I call this: Inauthentic evangelism. It includes such tactics as approaching someone at their home or in a public setting under the guise of a survey or conversation about some non-faith-related subject and then out of the blue, asking a question like, “If you were to die today, and God asked you ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ what would you say?” That’s not effective evangelism, because it lacks authenticity; it lacks relationship, and Jesus never employed this tactic. He took time to get to know people, as he did with Zacheus.

Because that is not an appealing way to share Christ with others, many of us Presbyterians have distanced ourselves from that as far as we can. As a result, we’ve ended up at the other end of the bad evangelism spectrum, which is…uh, let’s see, I had it here, somewhere…maybe I placed it under here? Maybe it fell off the sheet…I’ll be darned…I can’t find evangelism here; has anyone seen it? You see, “seeking the lost” simply isn’t on our radar screens most of the time. I call this Missing in Action Evangelism. MIA Evangelism lacks intentionality. Our evangelism is lost, and it needs to be found! We have lots of action in our churches…we have all kinds of ministries – oftentimes very authentic ones to help lost and hurting people – but perhaps even unconsciously, we expect the lost to connect the dots, see Jesus, and join us in the journey of faith. So we need greater intentionality, as Jesus did, to help the lost see Him and the new life that he offers them.

Lastly is: Irrelevant Evangelism. Being “relevant” has been a buzzword in churches for at least the last 30 years – especially in the conversations about traditional and contemporary worship. So I’m not going to say much about this. But too often when we do have authentic and intentional ministries to reach the lost, we just don’t connect with them. Jesus and the Christian faith seem too distant, from a by-gone era, or without any application to their lives today.

Now, the Good News for us is that I believe there’s hope to find our lost evangelism and to carry it out in a way that is relevant and balances authenticity with intentionality… And I believe God wants us to do exactly that.

And Jonah gives us a model for doing that. Jonah got a new attitude with a fresh start at the business before him…and he was obedient to God’s mission the second time around, and an entire lost city was saved. We can do likewise in our churches. 1. We need to make God’s business our business – again. We’ve already seen that evangelism is a part of our Presbyterian roots. We just need to rediscover it, as Jonah did, and make it job #1 in our lives and our churches, as a step of obedience to Jesus Christ. 2. We need new ways of evangelism in the 21^st Century that balance authenticity and intentionality – and proclaim Jesus. Those hallmarks of evangelism are not new – that’s actually a return to the old. But how we do it has to be new, because this is a new era.

Do you know what the last seven words of a dying church are? “We’ve never done it that way before.” In Luke 5, Jesus told Peter and his buddies to cast their nets out in deeper water. Apparently they hadn’t done it that way. It was new to them. You’d think they’d do everything they could to catch those fish, because that was their business, and they’d gotten skunked on that fishing trip. But lo and behold, when they were faithful to Jesus’ command, they caught a boat-load of fish, because they were faithful and tried something new and different.

Perhaps some of us hear that, and we think, “New? Different? That sounds a little uncomfortable.” And if those of us here tonight aren’t concerned about our comfort in the church, then there are others in our churches who most certainly are. “Comfort” is a valued commodity in our churches: we want our services a certain way, our facilities to look as they have for decades, our pastor to visit us every time we catch a cold, we want coffee with the same folks after church every Sunday, and Lord have mercy if someone’s sitting in “our spot” on Sunday, where the wood pew has been worn down comfortably to the shape of our own rear end! The familiar is comfortable – and new people in church isn’t familiar, and therefore, not comfortable. Jonah, as you probably know, struggled with this. In chapter 4, after he carried out God’s mission and the people of Nineveh repented and turned to God, Jonah got angry at God for extending his grace to Nineveh. He went and had his own little pity party. Jonah shows us that new people stretch us – especially people new to the faith. So our personal comfort, which is expressed in our desires and expectations of how we “do church”, can come in direct conflict with the mission of the church. But personal comfort didn’t stop Jesus from going to the cross to take care of business. So let’s not let our comfort stop us from taking care of his business, either, because his mission is more important than our comfort.

I want to close with a final story to illustrate, and then wrap this all up. This is a true story about barbecue ribs. This did not happen to me, but here’s how the person relates what happened to them: I remember hearing about this particular restaurant that had amazing ribs, and a bunch of my friends and I drove fifty minutes to get there. The place was packed, and the food was great. It was “all you can eat rib night,” and rib bones were piling up as fast as the line to get in. Eating ribs is messy business. Barbecue sauce gets on your face, fingers, and clothes; dirty napkins pile up next to half-eaten bowls of baked beans and coleslaw. When our crew had eaten all we could eat, we paid our tab and waddled out to the car.

That’s when I reached into my pocket for my keys and came up with nothing but lint. Starting to feel panicked, I looked through the window at the ignition. I was hoping that I had locked my keys in the car, because in the back of my mind a more disgusting possibility was taking shape. When I saw that the ignition was empty, I knew exactly where my keys were—the keys to my car, my house, and my office. Only seconds earlier, those precious keys had slid right off my tray and followed a half-eaten corn cob and several bones to the bottom of a trash can. I had thrown away my keys on ‘all you can eat rib night.’

There was only one thing for me to do. So I dove in [to the trash]. I fished through bones, beans, barbecue, corn, cake, coleslaw, and a host of saliva-soaked napkins. A shiny layer of trashcan slime had coated my arms before I finally grasped hold of those precious keys.”

That’s not unlike what God has done for you and me. Jesus got uncomfortable, and left a pristine, sinless heaven to search through the filth and rubbish and the garbage of this fallen world for something precious to him—and that’s you, me, the people in our churches and many others who aren’t.

Jesus did that for us, and then he tells us that if are to come after him, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him (Luke 9:23). That’s not comfortable. But it’s the invitation Jesus gives to you and to me, and he’s not asking us to do anything he hasn’t done himself. So now his business of seeking out lost people is our business. That is our mission. And we don’t have to go very far to carry out our business. Unlike Bo-peep and her lost sheep, Jesus has shown us where to find them. Many of them are even within walking distance of our churches. And Jesus wants to reach through all the filth, rubbish, and garbage that’s in the lives of those people – just as he does for you and for me – and find them, save them, and hold on tightly to them just like he does with us. The way he wants to reach them is through faithful servants like you and me, and our churches. So let’s not go all Little Bo Peep on him, but rather let’s actively carry out the mission and business of our CEO, Jesus Christ, and be his good and faithful servants.

Let’s pray: Gracious God, help us to remember that your mission isn’t just for us, but it’s for the world, even right next door. Give us the courage to be your faithful servants in seeking the lost and inviting them to experience new life in Christ. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.