Back to sermons

Phil Blackwell

“Offer Them Christ”
I Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:21-39

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download

The city estimates that 60,000 people every work day pass our corner at Clark and Washington. 60,000 . . . Jesus might never have seen that many people in his lifetime. 60,000 people every day Monday through Friday . . . I wonder how many of them know that there is a church here. Up close we look like a bank. From the plaza across the street we look like a business tower. It is only when you walk past the Picasso and look back up that you see the steeple.

A couple of Decembers ago I was strolling through the Christmas marketplace in Daley Plaza at night and saw a couple, sipping their gluwein, gazing up at the illuminated steeple of the Temple. He said to her, “That used to be a church.” “Used to be!” I said to myself, and then I said to them, “It’s still a church.” They continued to sip their gluwein, undoubtedly appreciative for my correction.

One summer night I was walking near Randolph and Dearborn. It was after a Goodman Theatre performance. The couple in front of me stopped and looked at the steeple from a block away. He said to her, “See that over there all lit up? That is a very famous building in the Loop.” I puffed myself up with pride, only to be deflated when he added, “Yep, that’s the world famous Chicago Water Tower.” I hope that she did not believe anything else he told her that night.

In 1784 John Wesley was worried about his Methodist enthusiasts in the new United States because the Church of England had been sent home after the Revolutionary War. Methodism was a subset of Anglicanism, and without the mother church the Methodists were without the benefit of the sacraments and other pastoral oversight. So, Wesley irregularly ordained (he did not have the authority to do it, but he did it anyway because the people for whom he had responsibility needed clergy), he ordained Thomas Coke, Richard Whatcoat, and Thomas Vasey. And as they set sail to America from near Bristol, Wesley’s last words were, “Offer them Christ.” Offer them Christ . . . that is still the charge to us Methodists today. So, the question specifically before us is, how do we offer Christ to 60,000 people a day who are oblivious to there being a church here?

As the apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, “I proclaim the gospel . . . for it is an obligation laid on me.” It is our obligation, too; how do we do it?

Let us start with this answer: we offer Christ free of charge. Without obligation, without coercion. So often Christians offer Christ to others as a commodity. It is a business transaction. “Here, receive Christ and join our church.” “Receive Christ and then give us a donation.”

The people who stand on the street corner and hand out leaflets do not bother me. Their theology may bother me, their narrow-mindedness, their arrogance that they have it right and no one else does. But they offer their version of the Christ, and we can take it or leave it. But the street corner preacher one block from here in front of Old Navy bothers me because he charges for his leaflets. I find his theology and worldview offensive, too, but when I took one of his leaflets that he had in his extended hand, he immediately asked for money.

“No,” says Paul, we offer Christ free of charge so that there is no reward in it for us except the joy of fulfilling an obligation. How do we offer Christ freely to 60,000 people a day?

A second response: we offer Christ with dexterity. We keep moving. The gospel account tells of Jesus entering a synagogue on the Sabbath to teach, and everyone is amazed at his authoritative interpretation of the scripture. But then, a frenzied man possessed by an “unclean spirit,” as was the diagnosis of those days, disrupts the proceedings, and Jesus stops teaching long enough to quell the man’s distress. And that amazes the people even more.

From the synagogue Jesus goes to the home of Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law is confined to the bed with a fever. Jesus tends to her, her fever breaks, he helps her out of bed, healed . . . and what does she do? According to Mark, she goes into the kitchen and cooks supper for Jesus, along with Simon and Andrew, and also James and John, the whole crew Jesus had recruited from the seaside. What does that tell us about the power of patriarchy in Jesus’ day?

The word gets out that very day so that by nighttime the whole city brings every demented and ill person to the house so that Jesus can expel the demons and rid people of their maladies. Jesus and the disciples could have chosen right then and there to set up a clinic and go into the business of healing. That would have been a legitimate business and apparently much needed in Capernaum. But that would have severely limited the reach of God’s good news, and we would never have heard of the good doctor Jesus of Capernaum and his able interns.

No, Jesus is up before dawn to pray, and when his disciples find him, he says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” The obligation to share the message of God’s love with as many people as possible in as many ways as possible for as long as possible.

What does Paul tell the Corinthians has been his strategy? Corinth was a major seaport with people from all over the Mediterranean world passing through. The residents there would have known what diversity looks like as much as we do here in the middle of Chicago. Paul says, “To the Jew I became as a Jew in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law . . . so I might win those under the law. To those outside the law (we need to know that he is talking about the levitical laws of the faithful community, not the civil law) I became as one outside the law . . . so I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”

Offering Christ with dexterity, looking for all means to share the good news with all constituencies so that God can work through what we do to accomplish what God desires. How do we offer Christ to 60,000 people a day in new ways by engaging new people through breaking down old barriers?

We offer Christ freely, with dexterity, in community. We include a “Statement of Welcome and Inclusion” in everything that we print. You can find it on the back of today’s bulletin. This is a commitment that this congregation made explicit years ago, before I was appointed here and during Gene Winkler’s time as senior pastor, and abides by to this day. It begins, “We welcome all people to the life of this congregation.” It concludes with a specific reference to an unresolved issue today for many Christian constituencies, “Holding true to that belief, we welcome and encourage all persons, including persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities, in every aspect of our Christian life together.”

That one specific example illustrates the general point that everyone is welcome here . . .people of different races, of different cultures, of different church backgrounds, of no particular religious background, of different economic levels, of different theological and political preferences, with a variety of handicapping conditions – physical, mental, emotional. “We all are one in Christ Jesus,” Paul claims as he summarizes a different list of particularities.

But, having said that, people are watching to see if we really mean it. Last week we hosted a three-day conference looking at ways to end homelessness in Chicago, a visionary consideration led by the Corporation for Supportive Housing, the Alliance to End Homelessness, and the City of Chicago. Hundreds of people filled our sanctuary to imagine how this dream could come true. We could say that hosting this event, one of ninety that we host each week, was a living example of our Statement of Welcome and Inclusion.

But it was the comment from a woman who arrived early on Wednesday to take Communion before the second day of the conference that proved to be the litmus test. Every Wednesday between 7:30 and 9:00 a.m. we serve the elements of the Eucharist and have a prayer with anyone who comes forwards and kneels before the altar. After I served this woman and prayed with her, she stood and said, “What I love about this church is that I can come in here and see people who stayed outside all night or spent a sleepless night at the mission now in a safe, warm place where they can sleep for a few hours.”

In her eyes for that moment we were true to our calling. She saw Christ offered in the communal welcome to people who so often are unwelcome. People are watching to see if we mean what we say when it comes to Christian community. There is some grace offered when we strive but fall short of the ideal, but there is no tolerance for hypocrisy. If we say it, we mean it; if we mean it, we do it. How we do offer Christ in community to 60,000 passers-by a day?

Let us dig a little deeper. We offer Christ as wisdom. We do not offer Christ’s wisdom, pithy little sayings in calendar form, one saying for every day of the year. It is not like much of the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, which is a compilation of nuggets of good advice most likely given by an Egyptian upper class to their erstwhile children seeking to succeed in life. No, Christ himself is the wisdom of God. In him we discover how to understand life.

Proverbs 8 is one of what I identify as four creation stories in the Bible. In Genesis 1 we have the six days of creation in all of its grandeur. In Genesis 2 we have a complementary story of Adam and Eve in the garden, bringing God’s work down to earth. In Proverbs 8 we have wisdom personified as Sophia, God’s helpmate in creation; it is a wonderful story. But in the opening verses of John’s gospel, the fourth creation story, he recasts the place of wisdom when he claims that Jesus Christ was “with God,” and “was God,” in the beginning. Through Christ we can see how the world works.

This wisdom personified has been given to us in the scripture, which chronicles the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We have wisdom personified bequeathed to us in the tradition of the Church, how earlier generations have understood and lived out that wisdom. We have wisdom personified as a part of our own reasoning as we try to make sense of life. And we have wisdom personified in practical terms through the lessons we learn from our own experience.

In May there will be the G-8 and NATO summits in Chicago. It will be a tumultuous time. The 60,000 people a day on our corner will be increased in number and duration and volume as the government tries to showcase the city, as the protesters try to counter the delegates, and as we, the church at the heart of the city, try to be the heart of the city. How do we offer the wisdom personified by Christ so that a voice of faith can speak to evaluate the agendas of the G-8 and NATO? And what do we say about what makes a public space “public” and free speech “free”? It will be a test of our faithfulness as we seek to offer Christ, God’s embodied wisdom, to over 60,000 people, almost all of whom are not expecting our voice to be heard.

Finally, we offer Christ as life itself. What was the miracle of Jesus healing the possessed man in the synagogue and expelling the fever from Simon’s mother-in-law, both taking place on the Sabbath, contrary to religious law? The miracle was the restoration of life. It is a testimony to the fact that God is still creating. Our good friends in the United Church of Christ have a wonderful public affirmation they make with the symbol of a simple comma. It is based on the statement, “Don’t put a period where God has put a comma,” made by that profound theologian, Gracie Allen. (Some of are old enough to remember her as the wife and sidekick of George Burns.) Don’t put a period where God has put a comma. That is, God is still creating, and Jesus Christ is our gift to the world that embodies that affirmation.

This is not triumphalistic. We are not saying as Christians that we have the answer and others do not. We share the urgent call to live life fully with all other of the world’s great religions. Miroslav Volf at Yale Divinity School, writes, “A critical challenge for all religions in a pluralistic world is to help people grow out of their petty hopes so as to live meaningful lives, and to help them resolve their grand conflicts and live in communion with others.” (A public Faith, p.100) We offer Christ, to use Volf’s terms again, as, “an integrated way of life that enables the flourishing of persons, communities, and all creation.”

When we offer Christ to the world we are offering life in which we find fulfillment as individuals and assume responsibility for the flourishing of all.

We have a wonderful gift to offer the world, the world that passes by each day. We offer the Christ to all without charge, with great dexterity, in community, as wisdom, that leads to life itself, the abundant life. That is the general answer to the question, “How do we offer them Christ?” The specifics are still an open question that needs to be answered by all of us together. Amen.