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I do believe that Simon bar Jonah, a fisherman from Capernaum, who was renamed “Peter” by his friend, Jesus, would be quite shocked to discover that he was deemed to be a saint after his demise. Obviously, “grave” changes bring lasting impressions.
Whatever the circumstances of the bestowal of the title, I was delightfully refreshed to be at St. Peter United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, yesterday morning. Now, I happen to enjoy a congregation that is blended like a great fruit salad, with a few nuts thrown in for good measure. St. Peter did not disappoint. I watched closely as they struggled with the enigma of how to use spirituality to benefit human beings without ending up inhaling the stale sourness of religiosity. Quite a dilemma.
The pastor was an insightful fellow with a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step, who is certainly ready for a new birth of energy and inspiration. The congregation is peppered with talent, creativity, generosity and human qualities which would make them very appealing to others of their kind.
So what’s the problem?
It’s really quite simple. It’s just difficult to try to create a revival of fresh ideas when you are insisting on maintaining traditions that have long since lost both their nerve and their verve. You can’t haul a corpse around and pretend that you’re anything but an undertaker. So we’ve got to get rid of the body of Christ that’s dead and stinky in order for the real flesh and blood of Jesus to come out and be alive to humanity.
So if those good, new friends at St. Peter will allow me to make a suggestion for their burgeoning awakening, let me just sum it up in three simple statements. As it turns out, these ideas i’m about to present could be classified as heading for each of the chapters of Matthew 5, 6 and 7–dubbed the Sermon on the Mount. Because when you take the trio of principles and join them together, they not only create a message sensitive to the human heart, but one that also stirs the innards of the Almighty.
1. Happiness is our goal. Jesus takes the whole beginning of the Sermon on the Mount to talk about happiness. If you’re willing to sacrifice happiness, you must be prepared to lose contact with mankind and end up with a mere dribble of souls who are determined to be miserable. So, St. Peter’s, we choose to believe that happiness is the natural state that God wants his children to possess. Because we know that Eden, had it been absent sin and rebellion, was full of ecstasy and joy.Happiness is our goal. We work towards happiness. We don’t merely invite people to church, but rather, encounter them outside the building, pray for them, work with them and counsel them until they see a miracle in their lives that makes them want to come in and add their giddiness to the bliss. If happiness isn’t your goal, why do you have a church? There are plenty of places to make people subdued, somber, miserable and to foster malcontents. So, St. Peter’s, tipping our hat to Jesus’ beatitudes, we establish our first principle for operation: happiness is our goal.
2. Moving over to that 6th chapter of St. Matthew, we come up with our second precept. “NoOne is better than anyone else.” Jesus makes it clear that we should stop stomping around, acting like we’re freakishly holy because we fast, pray and give alms, and instead, find a way to do it with joy. (There’s happiness again!) In so doing, we will remove the piety from loving God and replace it with the equality that we have with our fellow-men and women. You can’t have a church if you think you’re better than other people. In that case, what you have is a cult of personality. So the second step in our process is to realize that NoOne is better than anyone else. Even when we’re tempted to feel that we’ve established some new standard of excellent human behavior, we need to laugh at ourselves and realize there are footprints all around where we’re standing.
3. And the final insight I offer to my dear friends in Kansas City is a sound-byte-rendition of the 7th Chapter of Matthew. I feel it is an adequate, if not accurate, representation of Jesus’ thoughts. We don’t judge. We don’t even think about judging. We refuse to have opinions on things that involve dissecting the character of another human being. We giggle at folks who assume they have achieved some sort of supernatural authority to evaluate the deeds of others. We don’t judge. It isn’t that we could judge and we’re deciding not to–it’s that we finally admit that we suck at it, and rather than continuing to offend other people due to our short-sighted views, we have selected to not judge.
These three steps:
- happiness is our goal
- NoOne is better than anyone else, and
- we don’t judge
create a holy environment which proclaims, “We are a church which wants to show you the Father, and then let people be people. If there’s a need for change in them, let the Spirit convict. We’ll keep our eyes on the road so we don’t ‘tail-gate’ our fellow travelers.”
Those three initiative right there will keep you busy with teaching, instruction and edification for years to come. Just finding new reasons to be happy can fill up a month of Sundays. Pointing out the value of “NoOne is better than anyone else” will grant you the material for a dozen series of sermons. And maintaining the starship of “We don’t judge” will launch you into a galaxy of new frontiers.
St. Peter UMC–I love you dearly. But as Jesus made clear–the letter kills but the spirit gives life. In other words, any religion you maintain in your format will eventually drag you down–until you allow yourself to be humans, prompted by the Spirit.
Thank you for granting me your ears, and I relish your prayers as I journey on–and I certainly would love to hear what part of my little scenario you might deem worthy of your consideration.
For I will tell you this: No district office or national headquarters of any denomination will criticize anything you do if you are growing, prospering and helping people.
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