Sermon 12.7.25 Always Preparing the Way

Sermon Begins @ 16:44

Good Morning St. Andrew’s

I’m moved to preach to you this morning: Always Preparing the Way.

An old man, who had been very successful in his career, who had even been hailed in his younger days as one of the brightest minds of his generation was once asked why he kept a train ticket from 1933 in his wallet.

He replied that on the weeks when he barely had enough to eat and his ledger book said, “rent overdue,” it was a reminder what the fight was really about.

“anger burns fast,” he declared, “but facts burn longer.”

A few weeks ago now, before Thanksgiving, we met for the first part of our annual stewardship campaign.

My wife, Melanie, with the assistance of our College for Congregational Development team, presented a model of for congregational development called the life-cycle model.

What this model illustrates is the opportunity that churches have for reinvigorating, renewing, reforming, and transforming at almost every stage of life.

It begins with birth.

Every church has a birth and a birth story followed by an initial stage of formation.

This is, as both Genesis and the Gospel of John pronounce, our “in the beginning” moment.

It is when everything is new and fresh and exciting, all of the possibilities…

Once born, we move to Formation.

Formation is about identity: who are we on a Faith level? What are we here for? Who is our neighbor and how do we relate to them?

This time of formation is so critical, because it is what sets the church up for what life will look like: who we will be, who we will serve, what is negotiable, what is not.

It’s so critical, in fact, that it’s something we will come back to over and over, if we are committed to remaining a healthy church,

If we continually come back to it through processes of renewal

After forming ourselves, the life-cycle model shows that the next stage of a church’s life is stability.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Do we all like stability?

The thing about stability is that it is comfortable. We know who we are, we know why we’re here, we have our ministries that we do and the people we serve, we know who is in charge of what, who has power, who really has power, what channels you have to go through to get things done.

The thing about stability is that there are different kinds of stability.

There is healthy stability.

That is the kind where the church has just come out of the formation stage, the time of transformation and possibility, and has come to a time of living out the transformation;

We can’t always be in the exciting transformation stage, because we would all get exhausted and never feel like we arrived anywhere.

So a healthy church has stability, we know what to expect.

There is stagnant or stale stability.

This is when we’ve been stable for a while, we like it, we feel comfortable, and so we get a little complacent.

We don’t like to rock the boat, we’ve had this good thing going for a while, no need to mess with it.

This is the stage where, “but we’ve always done it that way” starts to become the mantra.

This stage, if we decide to re-enter into formation through renewal and revitalization can be the stepping-stone back to a healthy stability.

But, if we decide to stay with, “we’ve always done it this way,” then the next step is not health, but decline.

Decline can happen.

It is when stability is chosen at the cost of revitalization. Church’s in decline are often tired, but the leadership is convinced that if we just keep to stability, we can somehow convince new folks to pour their energy into our vision and our need for stability.

We often get stuck in decline, because we have an idea of a “golden age” where everything was wonderful and we only want new people to come in, if they can help us go backward to that time.

We want to revert to the exciting formation and healthy stability of a bygone era.

The problem is, most people, who didn’t experience that “golden age,” or the people who didn’t think it was that golden, because they were outside of the power structure, really don’t have the kind of investment or experience of that era.

They know that they have no say in how the church operates.

The good thing about decline, if there is one, is that even a church in decline can enter into a process of redevelopment and go back to formation: identity building, if they have the courage.

The other alternative is disintegration.

Disintegration is a stage, where conflict abounds, because people feel hopeless, “nothing we’ve done has worked,” there’s a feeling of being stuck with no energy to try to imagine another way.

At this stage, internal leadership is not able to get a church out of their predicament and outside intervention is needed to get the church back to formation.

If that happens, then there can be new life, but pretty much all of the former leadership has to be changed, almost like starting a new church.

The other alternative is the death of the church.

Of course, as a people who believe in resurrection, we know that burying a seed, after a time of waiting, could birth something new.

This life-cycle model, which we discussed two weeks ago after church is an important model for our stewardship campaign, because it shows us what good stewards do.

Good stewards renew.

Stewardship is not just about budgets or “time, talent, and treasure” as the old trope says.

Stewardship is the understanding, in any system, at any phase of life, that there has to be a balance between stability and coming back to the questions of formation.

Who are we? What are we here for? Who is our neighbor and how are we related to our neighbor?

When the people of the holy land went out to see John the Baptist, he was doing a new thing.

The idea of ritual cleansing through immersion in water was not new in Judaism.

This custom goes back at least a few centuries before Jesus.

In the earliest of times, biblical scholars suspect that people did their ritual washing in places like rivers or natural pools.

We have the example of Naaman from 2 Kings 5 being told by the prophet Elisha to wash in the Jordan to be healed from his skin disease.

There were laws around ritual cleansing after menstruation.

We know the story of the man who sat for 38 years at the pool of Bethsaida trying to go down into the water when the spirit passed by.

What the evidence suggests is that the cleansing rituals of Judaism were well-established by the time John the Baptist came around.

What had changed, however, is that as wealth began to accumulate and the Temple had been rebuilt.

Urbanization into Jerusalem and the surrounding area meant that city dwellers and pilgrims alike needed places in or near the city to become ritually pure enough to take part in Temple offerings and festivals.

Sometime in the 1^st century BCE, the 100 years before Jesus was born, a new phenomenon came along to accommodate these needs.

People of means began to build mikvot, which were private baths in which one could immerse their whole body. Interestingly, it’s kind of like when you go to a Baptist church and they have the big pool at the back for baptism.

This church probably had one of those right where the choir sits now before we bought this building from the Evanston Baptist Church.

If you had a mikveh, you could either use it for your family, or like the people selling wares in the temple courtyard, if you were a priest, you could charge people to get pure before going to the temple.

By the time of Jesus, the mikveh had a stability of cultural practice; a “we’ve always done it this way.”

What we see in John the Baptist then, is a type of reformation movement.

What is it that makes people ritually pure, or forgiven of sins?

Is it a genealogy from Abraham, a ritual bath and an animal sacrifice, or is it a contrite heart, the repentance of turning back toward God, and the bearing of good fruit?

John shows us the importance of asking the questions of the life-cycle model.

Who are we? What are we here for? Who is our neighbor and how are we related to them?

Historical evidence suggests that people were coming from all parts of the mediterranean and down into Africa to worship at the temple.

Judaism was expanding to encompass believers from different ethnic backgrounds.

Paul’s particular focus on the inclusion of the “nations” and the “circumcised vs. uncircumcised” divide is one such evidence.

The Elephantine community of Africa are another.

The dispersion of languages at Pentecost, trade routes, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman occupations all paint a picture of a Jerusalem as very diverse place by ancient standards.

John the Baptist, then, represents the idea that “the way things have always been,” were actually not the way things had always been,

That the “golden age” wasn’t golden for everyone,

That a time of renewal was in order, and most critically, that his job was not to set in motion something permanent, but to prepare the way.

Looking back to the prophets of old, he proclaimed “someone more powerful than I is coming after me.”

A king who brings peace… real peace.

A judge, who would rule with equity not by what his eyes see, or his ears hear, the one who judges for the poor and the meek, the one who sets the predator and prey on equal footing so that harm is not done on all the holy mountain.

A Messiah for all peoples near and far.

On May 17^th, 1954, Thurgood Marshall, later to be Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, still had that 1933 train ticket in his wallet as he heard the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land.

A man, who like the prophets averred, “I look for the person who has the least. If the law doesn’t protect them, it protects no one.” And that” the constitution is not a shield for the powerful. It is a promise to the powerless.”

Justice Marshall like so many prophetic voices before him was a voice in the wilderness calling out for righteousness and justice, pointing toward and preparing the way.

But here is the thing, the critical connection between life-cycles of churches and people who prepare the way, like all of the civil rights leaders of his generation, Justice Marshall knew that the fight wouldn’t stop with him.

That there were new generations that would need to take up their own cycle of renewal and reformation, their own questions, “who are we now? what are we here for? Who is our neighbor and how are we related to them?”

 This is the ethos of those who prepare the way.

They are oriented toward the future. Stability is nice, when it is balanced with the vitality of a transforming spirit.

What I want to say to you today, St. Andrew’s, is that we are always preparers of the way, we just decide whether we’re preparing the way for decline or reformation.

As we stay after the service to continue our stewardship campaign by looking at our plans for a new building project with LeStavion Beverly and Chaatrik Architecture,

I ask you to think about your stewardship of this church.

Who is it that we are being called to become? Who will be our neighbors and how will we relate to them?

We’ve already seen our afterschool program begin to blossom as kids from the block, whom – if we’re honest - we have neglected for too long, have begun to overcome their hesitance to enter a building they’ve rarely been invited to enter.

We haven’t always done it this way, but actually, if you look back out our history, it is the way that St. Andrew’s was under the Rev. Edmund Oxley, it is something that we have done.

It is totally legitimate to have some fear, when we disrupt stability.

It is necessary to move into change aware of what the cost could be.

But, it is also the only way to remain a vital organization and to stay in tune with where Jesus is calling us to serve.

Like John the Baptist, those who prepare the way bring hope that tomorrow can be better than today.

Like the prophet Isaiah, those who prepare the way know that fearing the Lord is not just being afraid of calamity, but standing in awe of what God can do through us, if we’re brave enough to take the first steps.

Like Justice Thurgood Marshall, those who prepare the way look to the “least of these” and ask how we can make all of our lives better by attending to them.

Someone in your life prepared the way for you, so that you could be here right now.

Our St. Andrew’s ancestors prepared the way for this moment and all those moments yet to come.

St. Andrew’s, I challenge you to always be preparers of the way, in this place and in your lives outside.

Embrace the ways that God is calling us into his plan for renewing the face of the earth.

God is doing a new thing in Evanston.

After 130 years of ministry, we are blessed that God has included us in this continued work of becoming.

Let’s be good stewards of these gifts.

Amen.