Still Under Construction
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
People print all sorts of things on T-shirts, from advertisements to obscenities to affirmations of faith. One fellow was seen wearing a T-shirt with the words, "Christian Under Construction," printed on it. We can all appreciate what he meant by that. We can talk about the difference faith in Christ is supposed to make in our lives and about how it is supposed to work and even about the samples of the new life in Christ that we have already experienced. But, most of us know that we are not yet what God wants us to be. At our best, we are Christians under construction. And, that is all right. That is a good way to be. The changes that God will make in our lives don't happen all at once. It is a good thing to know that we are in the process of becoming what God wants to make us and to participate in that process very intentionally and joyfully.
In our scripture lesson for today, Paul reckons with the fact that the Christians at Corinth, to whom he is writing, are still Christians under construction. He has been talking about new life in the Spirit and about the Spirit interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Then he comes down to earth and says, "But, you folks obviously aren't there yet. If you were, you wouldn't be arguing about petty little things like which pastor you like best." He says, "I could not talk to you as spiritual people. I must speak to you as people who are still in the flesh, as infants in Christ." Paul seems impatient at this and disappointed in the Corinthians. But eventually Paul came to understand that this is just part of the process, something that has to be worked with. By the time he wrote the letter to the Romans, which embodies the most mature statement of his teachings, Paul was able to speak eloquently of the process of growing into Christian maturity, a process through which God leads us. He spoke of the hope that "the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of children of God" (Romans 8:21).
If you really get to know a congregation of the church today, you may have an experience very much like Paul's. When you first visit the church, you may look around at the friendly, attractive people, all dressed up in their Sunday clothes and think, "This is a fine-looking group of Christians." But, as you get to know the people and learn what is really going on in their lives, you will discover that things are not always as they appear to be. You may hear some people expressing some attitudes that do not seem to you to be compatible with the Christian faith, some social snobbishness, some racial prejudice, some impatience and lack of sympathy with the poor of the community and the oppressed of the earth, some hate pretending to be patriotism. You may begin to suspect that some people's lives are being shaped by an anxious pursuit of affluence rather than by trusting obedience to the love of God. You may discover some person struggling to overcome a drinking problem and the whole family having to cope with the effects of that. Some family that seemed at first to be everybody's ideal may turn out to be a blended family made up of the leftovers from two painful divorces and the parents may be working very hard to put something good together under difficult circumstances. Still another family may have an adolescent child who is using drugs. Others may be trying to rebuild their lives after being devastated by some catastrophe like a business failure or the death of a spouse.
When you first discover that the church members are not all what they first appeared to be, your initial reaction may be to think that they are all hypocrites -- and some of them may be. But look again. You will discover that many of these same people actually are taking the Christian faith seriously and that they do hope that it will make a difference in their lives. They really have no other reason for being in church. Each of their lives is a story that is still being written, and God is one of the participants in the action that is going on. They are Christians that are still under construction.
Jesus himself understood that the change doesn't take place all at once. In the first part of his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), he keeps trying to move us up to the next level of spirituality. He said, "You have heard that you must not murder, but I tell you that you must not be angry with another person or insult anyone or call anyone depersonalizing and degrading names. You have heard that you must not commit adultery but I say to you that you must not even lust." Finally he said, "You have heard that you must love your neighbors and hate your enemies. I tell you that if that is the best you can do, you are not doing very much. You need to learn to love everyone whom God loves and to love them like God loves them. Be perfect, be mature in love, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." How is that for a goal? It is obviously something into which we will need to grow -- and it will take a lot of growing. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, took that teaching seriously and made "going on to perfection" one of the important aspects of his explanation of the Christian faith.
So, it's okay to be a Christian under construction. As a matter of fact, a little later on in the chapter, Paul is going to use that very image to describe what is going on in the Corinthian church and among the Corinthian Christians. In this construction project, God is the builder, but there are certain things that we need to do to participate in the process. Let's talk about what we need to be doing to be "Christians under construction."
First, you need to remember where you already are in the process. You are not an outsider trying to work your way in. You do not have to qualify for anything. That is not what this is about. You are already a child of God. You are already a member of the club. That is already yours. God has given it to you because God loves you. If you will remember that, it will completely change the way you will feel about what is happening as you try to grow in faith.
Second, accept yourself as someone who still has some growing to do. God knows all about you and God still accepts you as you are and loves you just as you are. You must learn to accept yourself and to love yourself in spite of all you know about yourself. Now there is a big difference between accepting yourself as you are and deciding that you are as good as you need to be. You need to be very aware that you still have a lot to learn and a lot to become. But, knowing that God already accepts you and loves you and being able to accept yourself and love yourself as you are will actually make it a lot easier for you to be honest about who you are and to reckon with the things that are wrong and to be willing to let go of the things that you need to let go. Acceptance takes the threat and the shame out of the process and sets you free to get on with the construction project.
It is good to look forward to all that God still has to give to you. But it is best not to be tied to any particular notion of what that is. Our perception of the goal may change as we move along. Early in the process, we may be looking forward to liberation and blessedness, happiness, and maybe goodness. Later, we may find ourselves hoping to love more completely. Then later on, we may be more concerned about being more able to serve the purposes of God. All of these hopes are appropriate in their times. Just keep looking forward to the new visions that God will show you and to the new fulfillments into which God will lead you.
Be careful to do your part. Growing spiritually is something that God helps you do, but you have to do your part. Keep on practicing spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study and participation in the worship life of your church. Participating in prayer groups and growth groups with other growing Christians can help a lot. These things give God an opportunity to get through to you. They help you to keep on interpreting the meaning of your daily life experiences in the light of your Christian faith. Keep on asking what God is trying to show you. Keep on asking what God is doing in your life and in the world around you. Keep on asking how you can become a participant in what God is doing. That will keep a growing edge on your relationship with God.
And keep on making the big moral and ethical decisions of your life in the light of what you know about the Christian faith. It would be nice if we could count on ourselves just spontaneously to do the right thing in all of the different situations of our lives, to do what is right because we want to, because it comes naturally to us. But most of us are not there yet. It will often be difficult for us to know what is the right thing to do in the important situations of our lives and it will often be stressful and costly for us to do it. We will have to keep on doing the hard work of making moral choices. We will have to consider all of the factors involved and ask what Christian love requires us to do. It will get easier as we go along. But most of us will have to keep on making ourselves live like we know Christians ought to live until we come to a place where doing what is right comes naturally.
We can never separate the moral and ethical decisions that we have to make from our spiritual life. If we try to do that, it will separate us from God and cause us to drop into shallowness, artificiality, and hypocrisy. Christians under construction have to keep on working at doing what is right.
Now, if you want to increase your theological vocabulary, you may want to know that the name theologians give to the process of growing in faith is "sanctification." It is part of the process of salvation. The first step in our salvation is called "justification." That is the joyful discovery that Christ has died for you and that God loves you and has forgiven you and accepts you just as you are. It is the experience of having been freely given the status of a child of God. The process of sanctification moves us on from there as God works in our lives to help us learn actually to live like children of God. Both of these are very important.
An older pastor once gave a talk on the subject of sanctification to a group of growing Christians. Then he invited them to ask any questions they had on the subject. One person asked the pastor to give his personal witness and to tell what the doctrine of sanctification has meant to him. He asked if they wanted him to tell how he had gone on to perfection. While they were laughing, he had a chance to think about it. Finally, he said, "Even though I have been a pastor for many years and have earned a doctor's degree and have written books, I still consider myself spiritually a work in progress."
He went on to say that this had meant the most to him during some really bad times in his spiritual life when some major disappointments had caused him to drop into anger and depression and to live in a secret gloom for a long time. He said those experiences had forced him to reckon with the shallowness and limitedness of his own spiritual life. He had known people who had lost their faith in times like that. But he said he was able to hold on to his faith because he believed that God would eventually lead him through to a better time. He knew that he could not just indulge himself in feeling bad. He recognized the fact that he was off the track and he would have to accept responsibility for getting back on it. He said God frequently gave him a boot and said, "Come on now, get over it." But he knew that he would not have to do it alone. God was working in his life and God would help him to get over his bad experience and to move on to wholeness.
Then the pastor thought for another minute and added that he had long since stopped thinking of himself as climbing some kind of a spiritual ladder. That was no longer important to him. But, even in his old age, he was still looking forward to the future expectantly, believing that God still had more to show him, believing that God would keep on making his life an experience of discovery and becoming. And he said he expected that to continue even after his death.
The experiences that show us that we are not yet what God wants us to be sometimes feel like unhappy experiences to us. But they should not. They are just the experiences that remind us that we are still Christians under construction. They teach us to keep looking forward with joyful anticipation to the new experiences and to the fuller life that God still has yet to give us.
In our scripture lesson for today, Paul reckons with the fact that the Christians at Corinth, to whom he is writing, are still Christians under construction. He has been talking about new life in the Spirit and about the Spirit interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Then he comes down to earth and says, "But, you folks obviously aren't there yet. If you were, you wouldn't be arguing about petty little things like which pastor you like best." He says, "I could not talk to you as spiritual people. I must speak to you as people who are still in the flesh, as infants in Christ." Paul seems impatient at this and disappointed in the Corinthians. But eventually Paul came to understand that this is just part of the process, something that has to be worked with. By the time he wrote the letter to the Romans, which embodies the most mature statement of his teachings, Paul was able to speak eloquently of the process of growing into Christian maturity, a process through which God leads us. He spoke of the hope that "the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of children of God" (Romans 8:21).
If you really get to know a congregation of the church today, you may have an experience very much like Paul's. When you first visit the church, you may look around at the friendly, attractive people, all dressed up in their Sunday clothes and think, "This is a fine-looking group of Christians." But, as you get to know the people and learn what is really going on in their lives, you will discover that things are not always as they appear to be. You may hear some people expressing some attitudes that do not seem to you to be compatible with the Christian faith, some social snobbishness, some racial prejudice, some impatience and lack of sympathy with the poor of the community and the oppressed of the earth, some hate pretending to be patriotism. You may begin to suspect that some people's lives are being shaped by an anxious pursuit of affluence rather than by trusting obedience to the love of God. You may discover some person struggling to overcome a drinking problem and the whole family having to cope with the effects of that. Some family that seemed at first to be everybody's ideal may turn out to be a blended family made up of the leftovers from two painful divorces and the parents may be working very hard to put something good together under difficult circumstances. Still another family may have an adolescent child who is using drugs. Others may be trying to rebuild their lives after being devastated by some catastrophe like a business failure or the death of a spouse.
When you first discover that the church members are not all what they first appeared to be, your initial reaction may be to think that they are all hypocrites -- and some of them may be. But look again. You will discover that many of these same people actually are taking the Christian faith seriously and that they do hope that it will make a difference in their lives. They really have no other reason for being in church. Each of their lives is a story that is still being written, and God is one of the participants in the action that is going on. They are Christians that are still under construction.
Jesus himself understood that the change doesn't take place all at once. In the first part of his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), he keeps trying to move us up to the next level of spirituality. He said, "You have heard that you must not murder, but I tell you that you must not be angry with another person or insult anyone or call anyone depersonalizing and degrading names. You have heard that you must not commit adultery but I say to you that you must not even lust." Finally he said, "You have heard that you must love your neighbors and hate your enemies. I tell you that if that is the best you can do, you are not doing very much. You need to learn to love everyone whom God loves and to love them like God loves them. Be perfect, be mature in love, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." How is that for a goal? It is obviously something into which we will need to grow -- and it will take a lot of growing. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, took that teaching seriously and made "going on to perfection" one of the important aspects of his explanation of the Christian faith.
So, it's okay to be a Christian under construction. As a matter of fact, a little later on in the chapter, Paul is going to use that very image to describe what is going on in the Corinthian church and among the Corinthian Christians. In this construction project, God is the builder, but there are certain things that we need to do to participate in the process. Let's talk about what we need to be doing to be "Christians under construction."
First, you need to remember where you already are in the process. You are not an outsider trying to work your way in. You do not have to qualify for anything. That is not what this is about. You are already a child of God. You are already a member of the club. That is already yours. God has given it to you because God loves you. If you will remember that, it will completely change the way you will feel about what is happening as you try to grow in faith.
Second, accept yourself as someone who still has some growing to do. God knows all about you and God still accepts you as you are and loves you just as you are. You must learn to accept yourself and to love yourself in spite of all you know about yourself. Now there is a big difference between accepting yourself as you are and deciding that you are as good as you need to be. You need to be very aware that you still have a lot to learn and a lot to become. But, knowing that God already accepts you and loves you and being able to accept yourself and love yourself as you are will actually make it a lot easier for you to be honest about who you are and to reckon with the things that are wrong and to be willing to let go of the things that you need to let go. Acceptance takes the threat and the shame out of the process and sets you free to get on with the construction project.
It is good to look forward to all that God still has to give to you. But it is best not to be tied to any particular notion of what that is. Our perception of the goal may change as we move along. Early in the process, we may be looking forward to liberation and blessedness, happiness, and maybe goodness. Later, we may find ourselves hoping to love more completely. Then later on, we may be more concerned about being more able to serve the purposes of God. All of these hopes are appropriate in their times. Just keep looking forward to the new visions that God will show you and to the new fulfillments into which God will lead you.
Be careful to do your part. Growing spiritually is something that God helps you do, but you have to do your part. Keep on practicing spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study and participation in the worship life of your church. Participating in prayer groups and growth groups with other growing Christians can help a lot. These things give God an opportunity to get through to you. They help you to keep on interpreting the meaning of your daily life experiences in the light of your Christian faith. Keep on asking what God is trying to show you. Keep on asking what God is doing in your life and in the world around you. Keep on asking how you can become a participant in what God is doing. That will keep a growing edge on your relationship with God.
And keep on making the big moral and ethical decisions of your life in the light of what you know about the Christian faith. It would be nice if we could count on ourselves just spontaneously to do the right thing in all of the different situations of our lives, to do what is right because we want to, because it comes naturally to us. But most of us are not there yet. It will often be difficult for us to know what is the right thing to do in the important situations of our lives and it will often be stressful and costly for us to do it. We will have to keep on doing the hard work of making moral choices. We will have to consider all of the factors involved and ask what Christian love requires us to do. It will get easier as we go along. But most of us will have to keep on making ourselves live like we know Christians ought to live until we come to a place where doing what is right comes naturally.
We can never separate the moral and ethical decisions that we have to make from our spiritual life. If we try to do that, it will separate us from God and cause us to drop into shallowness, artificiality, and hypocrisy. Christians under construction have to keep on working at doing what is right.
Now, if you want to increase your theological vocabulary, you may want to know that the name theologians give to the process of growing in faith is "sanctification." It is part of the process of salvation. The first step in our salvation is called "justification." That is the joyful discovery that Christ has died for you and that God loves you and has forgiven you and accepts you just as you are. It is the experience of having been freely given the status of a child of God. The process of sanctification moves us on from there as God works in our lives to help us learn actually to live like children of God. Both of these are very important.
An older pastor once gave a talk on the subject of sanctification to a group of growing Christians. Then he invited them to ask any questions they had on the subject. One person asked the pastor to give his personal witness and to tell what the doctrine of sanctification has meant to him. He asked if they wanted him to tell how he had gone on to perfection. While they were laughing, he had a chance to think about it. Finally, he said, "Even though I have been a pastor for many years and have earned a doctor's degree and have written books, I still consider myself spiritually a work in progress."
He went on to say that this had meant the most to him during some really bad times in his spiritual life when some major disappointments had caused him to drop into anger and depression and to live in a secret gloom for a long time. He said those experiences had forced him to reckon with the shallowness and limitedness of his own spiritual life. He had known people who had lost their faith in times like that. But he said he was able to hold on to his faith because he believed that God would eventually lead him through to a better time. He knew that he could not just indulge himself in feeling bad. He recognized the fact that he was off the track and he would have to accept responsibility for getting back on it. He said God frequently gave him a boot and said, "Come on now, get over it." But he knew that he would not have to do it alone. God was working in his life and God would help him to get over his bad experience and to move on to wholeness.
Then the pastor thought for another minute and added that he had long since stopped thinking of himself as climbing some kind of a spiritual ladder. That was no longer important to him. But, even in his old age, he was still looking forward to the future expectantly, believing that God still had more to show him, believing that God would keep on making his life an experience of discovery and becoming. And he said he expected that to continue even after his death.
The experiences that show us that we are not yet what God wants us to be sometimes feel like unhappy experiences to us. But they should not. They are just the experiences that remind us that we are still Christians under construction. They teach us to keep looking forward with joyful anticipation to the new experiences and to the fuller life that God still has yet to give us.
