By Rev. Chris Jorgensen
May 2, 2021
Video of entire service: https://www.facebook.com/hanscomparkchurch/videos/828959424705810
Scripture: John 1:35-46
As I mentioned last week, much of this sermon series is inspired by the business leadership book Good to Great by Jim Collins. Also, like I said last week, business leadership books are not usually where I go looking for sermon material. This one, though, has much to recommend.
BUT.
But, like all texts and ideas and approaches we consider, we are called to do that thoughtfully. God gave us these wonderful, large human brains, and here at Hanscom Park church, we use them. So, like always, I read this week’s chapter in Collins with a critical eye.
The chapter title is “First Who…then What.” It is about essentially building the vision and strategy of your company only after you have gotten the right leaders in place. As you heard in the Children’s Time today, it uses the metaphor of a bus. Collins says, “You have to get the right people on the bus!” Awesome. Of course. In order to accomplish any mission in the world, you need the right people. Talented people. Disciplined people. People who bring a diversity of skills and perspectives. Absolutely. The right people on the bus! I am all for it.
Unfortunately, Collins is also quite adamant that alongside getting the right people on the bus, you have to get the wrong people off the bus. He’s talking about firing people, getting them out of the company. If they can’t cut it, they are out.
Well. I think as Christians we have to push back on this idea of getting people off the bus. I’m sure as you have heard me say, everyone is welcome here. Here in this particular church, in this particular expression of the body of Christ, we want everyone who is called to join us to have a place. It’s not a small bus. It’s a very large bus. It’s like those fancy new accordion buses you can see running up and down Dodge Street…except maybe God’s accordion bus just goes on and on and on.
That is to say, there is room for everyone on the bus here. There is room for everyone to be part of God’s mission in the world. However, I do think Collins can offer us some helpful advice when it comes to getting people on the RIGHT PLACE on the bus.
As I shared during Children’s Time, I was an average campus minister. I was okay. But I wasn’t using all my gifts, and I found myself just exhausted at the end of the day and starting to feel burned out.
So…I had to find a better place on the bus. As you know, I asked for a new appointment and got appointed here at Hanscom Park church. I’m thinking this is a pretty good spot for me, and I hope to be here for quite some time. Even internally here at Hanscom Park church, I think we need to be flexible about moving people around on the bus as well. According to Collins, to really be successful at our work in the world, we have to get the right people into the right roles. We all have different gifts for the work of God, and we thrive best as individuals and as a community when our gifts match the specific tasks we have to do in the church…and in whatever work we do outside the church.
There are a variety of ways that we can serve God through the church and in the world.
However, our scripture reading today does show us that there are some non-negotiables when it comes to what the people on the bus, we who follow Jesus, must do.
So let’s look at this story a bit, shall we?
Today we heard some “call stories.” Those are the stories in the bible where Jesus invites the disciples to follow him. In these eleven verses, we hear the stories of how five of the first disciples were invited to get on the bus.
It starts with John the Baptist. We’ve got two guys hanging out with John the Baptist, and John sees Jesus walk by. John says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
So the two brothers leave John, and they follow Jesus.
Jesus turns around and asks them, “What are you looking for?”
They say, “Teacher, where are you staying?”
And Jesus invites them with three simple words, “Come and see.”
They hang out together, and then one of the guys (Andrew) goes off and finds his brother Simon. He says, “Simon! We met this guy Jesus, and we have found the Messiah! The one who has come to save us!”
So Andrew brings Simon to Jesus, and Jesus welcomes Simon and gives him the name Peter.
Now I want to pause on this detail. We know this guy, this Simon Peter. We did a sermon series on him last Lent. We learned that the word Peter means rock and that Peter was this flawed but faithful disciple. Yet he turned out to be the rock on whom Jesus built his church. Peter is known as the first Pope. He has a pretty important place on the bus.
I had never noticed before this week that here in the Gospel of John, Jesus does not call Peter directly. Peter’s brother Andrew brings him to Jesus. Andrew is the one who invited Peter to come and see what Jesus was all about. The rock. The first pope. Someone…some mere human invited him onto the bus.
The next day Jesus goes to Galilee. He finds a guy name Phillip and says, “Follow me.” So Phillip does, and then he goes to find Nathanael. Phillip tells him, “Hey we found the savior, the messiah, the one that Moses told us about. It’s Jesus – the son of Joseph of Nazareth!” Nathanael is dubious. He doesn’t really trust what Phillip is saying. He responds with suspicion and a little derision, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Phillip doesn’t argue with him or even try to explain anything. He replies exactly like Jesus did to the very first disciples: “Come and see.”
In light of these stories, a commentator I read this week wrote that the call to be a disciple, the call to get on this bus of following Jesus, requires two things: 1) an encounter with God (specifically the God who we see revealed in Jesus) and 2) a response of inviting others to come and see so that they too might invite even more people onto the bus.
As disciples of Jesus, as people on the bus, we must invite others.
Tell me the truth: how many of you are uncomfortable hearing that?
I understand. I feel you. I know it is hard to invite people onto a spiritual path. I know many of us have experienced what I call “bad evangelism.” You know – the kind where someone tells you that because of who you are or who you love or what you believe, that you are going to hell. I am afraid to ask you to raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced it. Like maybe they don’t tell you that up front, but when you get there, you find out. I’ve gone to that church. “Like, come for the rock band, it’s such good music. Oh, and by the way, you and everyone you love are going to hell.”
I get it. Sometimes evangelism is not very winsome.
Here’s the deal though. It doesn’t have to be like that. Jesus himself is not walking around being like, “Andrew, you better follow me or you are going to hell.” Andrew does not say to Peter, “Peter, come meet Jesus or you are going to hell.” They also, for the record, do not say, “Come to my church because we need more money and more people to serve on committees.” Which, to be fair, is better than telling people to come to church because they are going to hell, but not exactly what we are going for.
Invitation is hard. It’s hard to know what to say and when to say it. You might get rejected. It feels very vulnerable. So why would we ever try to do it? Here’s why. Because we as human beings have an innate longing for connection with something greater than ourselves, for connection with each other, and connection with the divine. The disciples saw God in Jesus. They found that connection. They found that hope. I mean, they didn’t even really understand it at the time. They had just met Jesus. But they experienced that glimpse of God, and because they loved their family members (in the case of Peter), their friends (in the case of Nathanael), they said “Come and see.”
Even now, we are longing. One commentator Joseph J. Clifford writes this about what modern people come looking for when they come to church. He writes, “Some are looking for community, for a place to belong, to connect with other people, and connect more with God in the process. Some are looking for a foundation on which to build their lives; others for a connection with the Divine; others for a connection with the past, with what life was like when they were growing up. Some are looking for the healing of body or soul or both. Some seek redemption, new life on the other side of mistakes made or opportunities missed. People come to church looking for many things.”
As you certainly know, more and more in our world, people don’t come to church looking for these things. They carry all these longings but don’t think church is a place to fill them. Now, some folks like to blame church decline on Sunday-morning sports or the boogeyman of “secularization.” But I don’t buy it. I just think that maybe for too many years they experienced church as a place of harmful judgment or pointless ritual.
Friends, I can’t guarantee that you are going to have a palpable, memorable encounter with God every time you worship or pray or serve here at Hanscom Park church.
But I will tell you that’s what we are doing on this bus. We are doing the same thing that the first disciples did. We are sitting at the feet of Jesus, we are hoping and longing and waiting for a glimpse of the living God, and when we see God – we are saying to anyone who will listen, “Come and see.”
Because we love our neighbor, we want to invite them onto the bus. We want to share with them the taste of God’s presence we have experienced.
We also invite because we’ve got a big job to help Jesus with. With God’s help, we have a job to transform the world into a place of shalom, of peace and prosperity for all of creation. And, to say the obvious, that takes a whole lot of people. It takes a whole lot of people who have been personally freed and transformed by God to do the difficult work of transforming the whole world.
That’s why we invite. Even though it is scary. We invite through our loving actions, and yes, we invite through our words.
But those words are not, “We have all the answers.”
They are, “Come and see.” Come and see hope. Come and see Jesus in every person in the church and in each sacred face in our beautiful Omaha community. Come and find purpose. Come and see God.
Come and see and follow.
May it be so.
Amen.