August 13, 2013
Mini-Sermon
Sunday morning a
transient came to church and during the welcome time the preacher offered him a
doughnut and something to drink. The young man sat his backpack down, leaned
his tattered cardboard sign against the wall, shook hands with a couple of people
and said his name was Chris. As the worship service began Chris was noticeably
edgy looking around the room and over his shoulder. When it was time for
communion the preacher sat down next to our guest, put his hand on Chris’ shoulder
and quietly explained the emblems that were being served. The young man nodded
his head in understanding and joined the congregation in communion. It was only
a few minutes into the sermon that Chris, acting like he was burning daylight,
picked up his belongings, and made his exit. I have to smile when I think that
Chris may not have heard a full sermon, but maybe my preacher’s explanation was
the only sermon he needed to hear. “For
whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death
until he comes.” (1 Cor 11:26 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----We don’t know anything until we really know it. Everything else is assumption and working hypothesis. You really knew Chris’s first name, or at least what he told you it was. Why he left, or even why he was there in the first place can be no more than reasoned guesses. Only he knows.
-----If we are honest about our surroundings, this is the way we live most of our lives. We learn the small piece of it we encounter regularly and a little bit about the people who come within it. We assume the rest according to our experiences. The more correct are our assumptions, the better we are able to interact and the more we then experience and truly learn and effect. This is another small way the truth sets you free. Using it can better help us present truth for other’s freedom too.
-----The beginning of truth is admitting to yourself what you don’t know and abiding to that truth until you‘ve come to actually know. Deceit is like mental Styrofoam. It takes up the space truth could benefit and provides little substance beyond the feeling of being full. Refusing to know until thorough testing demonstrates that you’ve come to know keeps mental space empty for truths to fill. I think this is somewhat Paul’s meaning in I Cor 4:6, “…that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written,” and I Cor 8:2, “If any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.”
-----The church setting is not the best personal evangelistic time. Getting a message across to another person is like putting corn through a knothole, to use one of Erl Heald‘s metaphors. The church setting just throws the whole handful of corn at once. Even if it perchance was flung in the knothole’s direction, only a few kernels might get through. Church is for the folks who have opened their gates wide and placed them in the path of the throw, for they have tested and know that what is written is true.
-----Personal evangelism, on the other hand, clears all assumptions about where the knothole in another’s gate might be. It then learns what might get it close to that knothole, wherefrom it selectively pokes each kernel through until the gate swings open, if it will.
-----Did the preacher’s short explanation of communion and the first few minutes of his sermon fling all the kernels of corn through Chris’s knothole? Maybe Chris even came with his gate a bit open. Did anyone get to know him well enough to say? Knowing that life in the Lord is first and foremost a thing of relationship with God, with others, and with stuff all structured upon truth, and that this relationship is magnetic from the Spirit outward, those who are alive tend to get caught up in its field of relationship. Yet, it sounds like Chris was almost repelled, like the kernels of corn smashing against his gate stung more than he could bear.
-----But this can at most be the tentative conclusion of a reasoned guess. Sometimes the evidence of truth looks completely like what it is not, because its conclusive bit is remote and seemingly unrelated. Maybe Chris came with his gate wide open, but soon remembered that he had hurriedly left his tent with the propane toaster on.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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