May 17, 2015
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When it’s time for the Nominating Committee to recruit persons to serve on boards and committees, we often hear the response, “I like coming to worship, but don’t ask me to serve on a committee.” Some who have served on a board have said that they would never serve again. What makes serving on the business side of the church so unattractive?
We can all remember the times in our church when we have felt that the church is no better than a business. Perhaps after a long-drawn out meeting with people arguing on multiple sides of an issue might say that the Body of Christ is no better than a Chinese restaurant or any tech company on Market Street. Isn’t this just the worst thing we can say about the church?
Surely we know how it feels and we know that our church moderator is always concerned that we have a quorum at any membership meeting in order for us to officially conduct business. We come to church, the place where souls are saved, God is encountered, the reign of God is advanced, and there we are met by differences of opinions, financial reports, planning meetings for upcoming events, planning for Sunday school classes, cantankerous people to be mollified, donations to be counted, and bills to be paid.
Haven’t you said to yourself at least once, “Can’t we get beyond all this—business—and get on with the real work of the church?”
Real Work of the Church
What is the real work of the church? Where is the real church? During the last few Sundays after Easter, we have been reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Acts narrates the first days of the church in those wonderful but scary days after the resurrection of Jesus. The beginning of Acts tells of two weird, mysterious, but wonderful events.
First, Jesus ascends into heaven. He leaves us and goes to heaven to rule at the right hand of God. Second, the Holy Spirit descends, empowering Jesus’ followers. “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem…and to the ends of the earth,” the risen Christ promises his apostles (1:8).
In Acts, we see these ordinary men and women will be Christ’s witnesses into all the world. They will no longer have his physical presence among them. Yet, when Jesus leaves, he makes plans for mediating his presence, his teaching, his way, to future generations. Now how did Jesus do that? We’ll see in this lesson that the church has a business meeting.
Election of Matthias
The election of Matthias is an important matter for the preservation of the post-Easter community. The writer of Acts is Luke who defines an apostle is someone who has been with Jesus from the “baptism of John until the day he was taken up.” For Luke, apostles are eyewitnesses who can give an accurate account of Jesus (Lk. 1:1-4).
It’s a bit strange that after the excitement of Easter that we have this rather mundane account of the election of Matthias to take the place of Judas, the betrayer. This humdrum election of a replacement apostle is so businesslike.
Rather than all of the exalted talk about the resurrection and all the wonderful things going on in the community, Luke has this sober talk about the betrayal of Jesus. The church is made first to ponder the tough truth that Jesus was betrayed by one of his own followers. This election of a new apostle has followed the joy of Easter with nitty-gritty details of church business.
Obviously, something big is going on here in Acts, right at the beginning. Apostles are so important that the community cannot go forward without someone being selected to fill the vacancy left by Judas. They pray about it, take a vote, and Matthias becomes a leader of the church. Why didn’t they just have prayer, sing some hymns, and praise God? Why this business—this nitty-gritty business in what ought to be the exalted body of Christ, the church?
Today’s Institutions
Our generations are inherently suspicious of institutions and organizations, viewing them as dishonest and incongruent to personal human freedom. We think about Enron and big banks that made bad loans in the housing market. We question the UC system that was once dedicated to the goal of everyone in California getting a higher education to now often unreachable to middle- class families because of exorbitant administrators’ salaries. Most of us have lost faith in the institution of government when publically elected officials are beholding special interest groups who have funded their campaigns over the needs of the citizens they are supposed to represent.
When it comes to individual human freedom, we see that the individual is good but the social structures are repressive. Great hope is placed upon the shoulders of the individual who somehow, from out of nothing, is supposed to singlehandedly leave the world better than, when he or she found it. We say, “We rather do it ourselves.” We think that serving or working on a church board or committee would not permit me to doing things just by myself.
We would like to see the church to be a pure fellowship without law, ordinances, and bylaws. We don’t necessarily like to see the church to be too fleshy, too bodily to be divine, too much like a business.
Instead, we wish, of course, God would be easier to obey if God never took human, specific, fleshy form. It would have been a lot easier if God was some vague thoughts that we can have while walking in the woods, is much less demanding, less intruding than the God who meets us on the faces of our adopted brothers and sisters in the church.
Body of Christ
Jesus Christ did not come to us as some noble, abstract idea, some mushy inner feeling that we came up with ourselves. He came to us in the flesh, as a Jew from Nazareth. Furthermore, he didn’t work alone, touching people’s hearts on earth and letting people touch him. From the first, Jesus called real flesh-in-blood people like you and me and called us to follow, to visibly, daily, take up our cross and follow.
That’s the church. It’s real. It’s earthly. Of course, the church sets our minds on eternal, heavenly things. But we don’t live in heaven yet. We live here, among real people who are sometimes lovable and sometimes exasperating, sometimes faithful and often foolish, and this is exactly where God meets us in the risen Christ.
Two weeks from today, we’ll have a special Membership Meeting on May 31st. The Deacons have called for this meeting to mainly conduct three business items. Each one of them will challenge us to take a vote for the purpose of strengthening our ministries in Chinatown and to embrace what the future may hold. Each one of them will most likely invite you to think outside of the box and pray to God on how you hear God calling us to decide to advance his kingdom work through FCBC.
The Deacons upon the recommendation of the Community Outreach Minister Search Committee will present you a name of a person for you to approve. You will be asked to affirm that this person has the gifts, talents and experiences to help FCBC to become more effective in reaching our neighbors with the Good News of Jesus Christ. We know that whoever fills this position won’t be successful unless all of us are in support and in partnership with the person to reach out to our community.
The Deacons upon the recommendation of the Search Committee for the Transitional Senior Pastor will present you a name of a person who will serve not just as the preaching pastor at the 11:20 English Worship and provide pastoral support to this congregation upon my retirement but the transitional pastor would also function as the “Senior” Pastor providing staff supervision and church administration. You will have an opportunity to learn about this person and to approve the person to serve at FCBC during this interim period.
And finally, if you have read the May church newsletter and have attended one of the four “Regional Affiliation Forums,” you may know that you will be asked to consider changing our regional affiliation from Growing Healthy Churches to the American Baptist Churches of the Central Pacific Coast. Not only is such a change normative and have been done by a number of churches already, abiding with the churches that make up the ABC-CPC will allow us to practice our Baptist way of church life that we have not been able to do for quite some time.
You may think that this would be an easy decision to make but it appears that we may have some substantive discussions about this at the meeting. I believe the most important point to be aware of is that as an autonomous Baptist church, we have the freedom to choose with whom we want to associate with that would comply with our own understanding of the Christian faith. No one church or a regional organization can commit us to work with people or churches that we don’t agree with. Baptists have always said that being free in Christ we are free to practice our faith.
You may think that what I have just shared don’t belong in a sermon and especially not in a worship service. But in light of this lesson from Acts, the church is real and earthly because Jesus himself called real flesh-and-blood people like his disciples and called them to follow. Since we don’t live in heaven yet, we live here, among real people who are sometimes lovable and sometimes exasperating, sometimes faithful and often foolish.
Church Business
So when you think about it, the election of Matthias—all that nitty-gritty business right after Easter—was a thoroughly Easter act. Thereby the resurrection was given bodily form, extended, preserved in the life of the church, offered to future generations, made real and present in the lives of believers with names like Mary, Martha, Peter, and Matthias.
You and I don’t live on cloud nine. We don’t make our homes yet in some never- never land of divine bliss. We live here, among real people who have bills to pay, and children to raise, and parents to be cared for, and questions to be answered. And the beautiful thing is, in Jesus Christ and his church, God meets us here and gives us thoroughly human, visible proof of his continuing care for us.
Karl Barth says that, to rise on Sunday and affirm, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” is to believe that, “At this place, in this visible assembly, the work of the Holy Spirit takes place. By that is not intended a deification of the creature; the church is not the object of faith, we do not believe in the church; but we do believe that in this congregation the work of the Holy Spirit becomes an event.”
I hope that you will plan to attend the Membership Meeting on May 31st knowing that it’s a church business meeting. But it’s also the working of the Holy Spirit. We may not be electing any church officers or filling any board vacancies. But we will be conducting God’s business in which we believe is holy.
The risen Christ told his followers that he would not leave us alone as he returned to sit at the right hand of the Father. He would give us ongoing guidance, comfort, and presence. And to our great surprise, Christ gave us the church!
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we pray for your church, your distinctive way of loving people by working through people. When we look at the church as we know it, often timid, frequently lethargic, set in our ways, uncertain and unsteady, we wonder what you see in us.
Give us eyes to see the church as you see it. Help us to witness to your presence in the world, a sign of your determination to have humanity for your own, signal that you have not left us to our own devices. Give us patience with the church as it is, vision to see our church as it can be, and a renewed conviction that, by your grace, we can be the church you mean us to be.
Rekindle in our hearts a new commitment to the church. Push us beyond our self-imposed boundaries, out into our community to invite others into fellowship. Show us what a gift it is to be in this church, sent forth in your name, a sign of your love for the world. Help us to be the body of Christ with important church business to do. Amen.