“Weed, Feed, & Seed”

Hebrews 12:1

Let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

Matthew 5:39

If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

1 Thessalonians 5:11

Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing..

Bad Gardener

I’m really not much of a gardener. Part of the reason comes from living in Texas and Oklahoma for the first eight years of my ministry. In Oklahoma, it took a lot of work to get a good lawn to grow. It’s what the men all talked about during the fellowship hour after church—their timetables and formulas for weeding, seeding and feeding their lawns. What a hassle!

My solution was found in the garden section of Kmart. We’ve all seen “Weed and Feed” products, but I found one that would weed, feed, and seed—one bag to do everything.  Pour the bag into a spreader, walk the yard and spray the formula according to directions, and in a few weeks your lawn would like a golf course. Imagine my disappointment as my Oklahoma lawn floundered. It ended up looking less like Augusta and more an old, lion-skin rug that had worn through.

From literal gardens to proverbial, I want to say that our hearts are gardens. We’d like to bear a good crop and produce fruit for the harvest. We, the Church, are in the growing season of history—and individually, we are all seeking to grow in Christ and make him known.

As healthy as the gardens of our hearts may be, we must all admit to our need for some weeding. Weeding can be tedious work and therefore a great temptation to neglect, but if the garden is not weeded, the whole lot can fall into total neglect and the weeds can take over completely.

The text says to lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, so what does it mean for us to weed the gardens that are our hearts?

Weeding

First, consider what we and Christians throughout history have attempted to do each Lent. Traditional, Christian piety would have us weed the sins out of our lives. Get control: out with the bad, in with the good. Quit eating junk food, stop smoking, stop drinking, try to be more honest and direct with people—you all know the list—and it’s likely the same list you’ve been working on since you were about fourteen years old. For all our weeding, the weeds keep coming back, don’t they? It’s hard to set some things aside because no matter how hard we try, we can’t get deep enough.

Trying to weed out our sins is a lot like pulling nutgrass. Usually, when you try to pull it out you  only get the tops. Sure, it looks better, but the roots stay alive and the weeds return again and again. When we weed just the visible surface, we do ourselves no favor. Real weeding goes deeper, down to the source of the weeds.

We would do well to think of our sins more deeply. Like nutgrass, we can’t just deal with the visible tops without going for the roots. We should not think of sins as bad habits and bad behaviors so much as we should think of them as bad attitudes. Bad attitudes are the root cause of those habits and behaviors. Our sins are not those bad behaviors themselves, but the reality of our general misalignment from the will of God.

Think: Bad attitudes, not bad deeds.

Bad deeds are merely the fruit of deeper issues: chiefly, our distance from God. We act out in ways we may even know to be self-hurtful and sinful because of stuff going on deeper—underground where the roots are. Again, our sins are bad attitudes more than bad behaviors.

The real weeding happens when we acknowledge that Christ forgives our sins—all of them. He gives us his own righteousness in baptism. He righteousness is counted as ours, which means God forgets our sins—and they are really and truly forgiven. Whereas God has no problem forgiving and forgetting our sins, we do. Our problem is that we don’t forget them as easily—perhaps not at all—and this is the real problem. So here is a worthy place to begin weeding.

We only too well remember the things that we have asked God to forgive and forget. The memory of old sins creeps up and we feel the shame all over again. How on earth are we going to convince anyone in the world that God forgives sins if we won’t let him forgive and forget ours?

This may be the hardest part of Christianity for some. We keep regrowing the weeds that God would pull out by the roots. We do not need to keep reminding God of what he has forgiven us; we must rather receive that forgiveness knowing that it is truly over and done with.

Part of the reason for this may be that we are not very good about forgiving others. We’ll say we forgive but we won’t forget; and we ought to forget. Forgive and forget. By forget I don’t mean that we lose all cognitive activity of the past, nor that we fail to learn our lesson, but rather that we must forget relationally. When you forgive someone—really and truly announce forgiveness to them—you permanently forfeit the right to ever bring it up again. Ever. That is forgetting. You may want to bring it up, but when you forgive you must also forgo the remembrance of the sin.

Forgive and forget: just as God does for us.

To make it stronger, consider: whenever you linger on an old sin that God has forgiven, it is an insult to God. Who do you think you are to doubt his forgiveness? Was not the price of his son’s death by crucifixion enough for you? If you doubt his forgiveness, you may not have it. Confess it, receive forgiveness that is true and deep—right through the roots—and let it go.

Seeding

When we talk of seeding, we are likely to think of the Parable of the Sower who goes out to sow the good seed of the gospel. We’ll get to that in a few weeks, but we’ll at least preview it here.

Jesus’ story of a man sowing seed all over the place—good ground, bad grounds, rocks, path—would have drawn some laughs from the farmers of his day. Back then, you couldn’t just run down to the hardware store and buy a big bag of seeds. Seeds were terribly precious—gathered painstakingly, counted, carefully preserved, and protected. Ancient farmers in Israel would never fling handfuls indiscriminately; rather, they knew every bit of fertile soil on their bit of land which had been handed down generation after generation. They planted carefully and painstakingly because farming was never easy. 

When seed is precious and farming risky and difficult, you don’t throw it onto ground that is rock hard, where birds wait to eat it, or thick with thorns; it’s just not smart to sow there.

I want to show you a clip of something many of you will find disturbing. It’s a few years old—from 2008, I think—and I’ve watched it many times. It’s about a group of Christians who gathered in the Castro District of San Francisco during the Proposition 8 push.

[Video]

What happened to these young Christians is terribly wrong. To have been punched and kicked just because you were praying or singing—not even preaching—is crazy. But, I have to wonder if in some degree they looked like they were asking for it. What they did was intentionally provocative, but not necessarily helpful.

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” —Matthew 10:16

Jesus tells us to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. They got the doves part right, but was it wise? You have to be ready to take a few hits when you jump into the fire, and then be prepared to turn the other cheek.

When it comes to turning the other cheek, our intention is to respond to aggression with non-resistance. The end purpose is not to draw infractions, but to communicate a positive, winsome witness. I wish that prayer group would have spent one more hour strategizing before hitting the streets. 

Feeding

As to feeding, I’ll remind you what kind of a gardener I was. I wanted one bag, one application, apply-and-forget-about-it gardening. Unfortunately, gardens don’t work that way. It’s one thing to weed and seed, but it may be most important to tend to what we’ve planted. Water, sunlight, protection from  bugs, covering from frost—all these are more the work of gardening that simply weeding or planting.

Americans invented one-night-stand evangelism. In the first and second Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, we birthed a particular kind of evangelism that has shaped American Christianity. The circuit-riders, revivalists, and soul-savers—sweeping into the countryside with circus tents and a traveling band—one night only, bring the whole family. Hot August nights and big name preachers swept through towns to set the country on fire.

“Tomorrow may be too late! You only have tonight—right now! Choose this day whom you shall serve: God or the Devil! Fear the wrath of God; it could drop tonight! Now, as the organ plays ‘Just as I am,’ you come forward and give your life to Jesus. Say the Sinners’ Prayer and you will be guaranteed eternal life in Heaven with God—pass up  this invitation and, well, let’s not go there.”

This kind of hot-sales/seal-the-deal evangelism does not exist in the New Testament. There are no high-pressure, turn-or-burn tactics used. Usually, evangelism happened in community. Paul did not save souls; he started new churches—new congregations where more than two were gathered.

The problem with circuit-rider evangelism is that it is only one piece of the operation: it is planting. The care, the watering, the light, the debugging and protection from frost are all what happens in community. It is best to sow seed where you have the opportunity to tend it. Go back to it again and again: water, fertilize, pull weeds: tend the garden.

Evangelism must be relational.
         It must be communal.

Many evangelists want to play soul-saver and rack up points against other evangelists. They want to add notches to their Bibles marking all the people they’ve converted. This is evangelical ego—not the work of the Holy Spirit. Again, the biblical model is the one which shows that Christ saves through his Church. The Church is Christ’s provision for salvation and conversion. The Church is the good soil wherein Christ grows every seed to its full maturity.

We need to see ourselves together, collectively, as God’s instrument through which the good news of Christ’s salvation is proclaimed. The Church is the body into which Christ unites us, and we are watered, fed and fertilized in the Word, and in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

The Church is the theater for conversion, which is enacted by Holy Spirit (people save and convert no one; only Christ saves and converts). The Church is the fellowship within which we belong and become deeply-committed, ever-growing, deeply-connected, and ever-sharing followers of Jesus.

This is our mission...†

“Salted Soil”

Jude 1:3-4: 20-22

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. 4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

20 But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, 21 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. 22 And have mercy on those who doubt; 23 save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

Intro to Series

From Easter to Pentecost, we focused on the nature of our witness—of how we reveal Christ to the world. Our next step can be compared to gardening—planting seeds and tending to their growth; but before we do that, we need to tend to the soil and do what we can to prepare the ground for the gospel we intend to plant.

Today we start with a fairly fierce challenge: what to do when the whole ground is bad. Salting the soil is an ancient battle tactic meant to truly destroy one’s enemy. After the town is ransacked and pillaged, warriors added insult to injury by dumping salt into the fields, preventing re-inhabitation.

But salt was also used ceremonially, to consecrate or to declare separated whatever was salted. So salting a conquered city was a gesture of final, complete triumph by the conquerers, like spiking the football in the end zone. It is a kind of gloating.

Jude writes and changes his tone mid-sentence. He says he would like to write about common salvation—something nice and upbeat—but he must rather call them to “contend for the faith” which was under attack by false teachers.

Jude’s Concern

Jude writes to a number of congregations to warn them about the Godless teachers who have wormed their way into the churches. Their interest is in their own pleasure—what they can manipulate out of the people to get for themselves. This is likely the ancient version of the prosperity gospel, or early libertinism. Hey, if we’re all forgiven—if it’s all about grace—then let’s party!

The threat was that the true faith—that is, the faith handed down from Jesus and the Apostles—was suffering distortions and corruptions. Jude makes clear what is true in all times; namely, that faith must be contended for. In human society, truth is not guaranteed to win out just because it is true. Similarly, the Christian faith is subject to all the ravages of a fallen humanity, and without the followers of Jesus standing up for true faith, the message is prone to distortion and exploitation. People will take the good news and twist it to their own ends. It happened in the first century; it happens today.

Today, contending for the faith takes place across the vast American plain of tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism—which we value—and even within Christian orthodoxy there are hundreds of denominations comprising legitimate, varying interpretations. It has become increasingly difficult to say that someone is distorting the true faith without sounding like we’re being close-minded or theologically bigoted. So we practice a generous orthodoxy—thinking the best of one another and expecting our brothers and sisters of all denominational stripes to holding at least the core truths in common.

That’s the internal struggle, but we also have an external challenge—that of how Christians altogether interface with American society in general. And not only in general, but how is your and my Christian witness perceived by our friends, neighbors and colleagues?

The New Atheism

How is Christianity seen by world society today? The answer is probably as broad and diverse as there are people, and many of the responses would be positive and grateful. There are people outside of the faith who do appreciate Christians being Christians, but for the sake of the series we’re going to start with the hard cases—the salted soil—those who have rejected Christianity and are pride-bound to never set foot inside a church.

Some call themselves atheists, but pushed to the wall, most won’t say that they are firmly convinced that the existence of God is utterly impossible. Most, I suspect, are simply stating that they disbelieve in the God of Scripture. They are rejecting the Judeo-Christian narrative. They have come to disdain religion in general and disdain an idea of Christianity they’ve built up in their minds (Hollywood and pop culture have helped advance the caricatures for many decades).

The majority of research from pollsters (Pew, Gallup, Barna) have shown a common thread. Among Baby Boomers, Generation Xers and Millennials, religion is down, but spirituality is steady. We have a majority of Americans shaking their heads and religion but nodding their heads at spirituality, which is not well-defined.

The New Atheism, as it has been called, has gone from angry reactionaries like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, to a kinder, gentler atheism that—while not angry at Christians and Christianity—nonetheless dismisses Christian faith as irrelevant or inferior—a product of the iron age, suitable enough for people who grew up in the 40s and 50s.

What do they see when they look at Christians and Christianity?

What They See

Those who disbelieve see a world ravaged by religion. They see crusades, repression of personal freedoms, and centuries of domination—religious leaders holding people in control with religious myths.

They see hypocrisy—people claiming the moral high ground who are just as morally compromised as anyone else. They see people preaching a code they themselves do not practice.

They see artificiality. Plaster statues, flowing robes, big pointy hats and enormous financial endowments. They see. Christianity in exactly the same way you and I might see Star Trek enthusiasts attending a Trekkie convention.

They see commercialization. Mega builidngs, multimedia empires, book sales, clothing lines, bigger buildings with bigger sales.

They see arrogance—fingers pointing and wagging at them in judgment. They hear no one comes to the Father but through the Son as a condemnation. They see us as the ultimate insiders happy to be inside and vengeful or vindictive against those who will not follow. Certainly that impression has been made by some Christians, but it is also a caricature—a way of demonizing Christians so that their message can be easily dismissed.

What they see in people of faith determines what they say about us.

What They Say

In the words of Jim Morrison of the Doors: “Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection.”

Christianity is not popular. Negativity toward faith—Christianity in particular—is gaining popularity every year. The cultural chorus is singing a new song, and it isn’t “How Great is Our God.” The lyrics sound more like:

1. You can’t be intelligent and Christian. Those with religious faith of any kind have abandoned all reason. Therefore:

2. Religion itself is an abomination. It is not good and it does not make people or society a better place.

3. The Bible is a work of fiction—fiction or fantasy, anyway. Therefore it is not worth reading or taking seriously.

4. If the God of the Bible exists, then he is neither good nor all-powerful. Look at all the Old Testament bloodshed!. If God were good, he would not allow people to suffer.

5. This world would be better without Christianity. Without religion in general, and Christianity in particular, we might all live in peace and harmony.

Remember the song, “Imagine” by John Lennon? It’s now 45 years old and reflects the continuing sentiment of progressivism. The idea is that the age of religion has passed; belief is a relic or the Iron Age. Remove them all and the world will be happier.

Question is: Would the world be better without Christianity?

You may have heard the story of a debate that took place in Chicago a few years ago. A leading, sophisticate atheist professor was debating a Christian pastor. The pastor asked him: “Really? Do you really believe that the world would be better without Christianity?” “I do!” said the professor.

“Let me ask you one more question. Imagine you are driving through the south side at two o’clock in the morning. You’re in a bad neighborhood and your car breaks down. There is no one around. You get out of your car and begin walking to find a phone. Suddenly, out of building ahead of you steps a group of young men in their teens and early twenties. Here is the question—answer honestly!—would you feel any better seeing that two or three of them were holding Bibles in their hands? Would you feel any safer knowing they were coming out of a Bible study?” The atheist professor declined to answer.

How to Contend

My brother, who once served a church in Lubbock, was fond of saying, “Faith is like a tree in west Texas: if you don’t water the thing it’s going to die.” We may think of truth and faith as solid and eternal things, but all things in this world are subject to a fallen humanity and are therefore prone to distortion, corruption, erosion and perversion.We need to know what to believe, why we believe and how to speak of it. We do indeed need to contend for the faith. I want to suggest two ways we can contend for the faith immediately.

1. Outshine the Caricatures

Caricature—the art of distortion— is politics. It is a system of cheap shots taken to whip up the crowd. It may win elections, but it does not serve the interests of truth. 

Religion today is subject to constant caricature. All Muslims are terrorists, all Catholic priests are pedophiles, all Evangelicals some version of flat Earth fundamentalist or snake handlers.

“The suicide bombing community is entirely faith-based” —Christopher Hitchens.

If the world we are trying to reach with God’s love sees us through the distorted lens of caricature, then it is up to us to outshine those pictures. We must be aware of the details which trigger their negativity and work toward whatever openings they may present.

Furthermore, we too must not resort to caricature. We mustn’t think of all atheists and disbelievers as bad people. They are like us—they are our countrymen and sisters—and God loves them as much as he loves us.

2. De-demonizing or “Them”-ing

Part of being the Church is celebrating our unity in Christ and our oneness as a congregation. The shadow side of this is that we build up a cozy idea of “us” against which we tab others “them.” We think of ourselves as the good guys and them as the problem or the enemy to be overcome. Let’s work to get beyond this.

There is no “them”; we are all part of the same humanity and the same flesh which God sent his only Son to save.

We are all more alike than different.

Atheists don’t really hate God so much as they have unresolved conflicts with someone or someones who tried to push faith onto them. We know they need God and we know God loves them. We should stop thinking of them as the enemy and start thinking of them as the beloved for whom Christ died.

Most of their resistances are cultural, not theological.

We must reach them in the ways that Jude suggests: having mercy on those who doubt and doing what we can to snatch whomever we can from the fire. That will never happen with pointing, wagging fingers.

Our witness is most effective—most winsome and compelling—when flavored with the gifts of the Spirit for which every heart longs: kindness, patience, gentle persistence, and a grand generosity of love..†