“BREAKING GOOD”
Text: 1 Corinthians 2: 6-14
Pastor Noel Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland
12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
BREAKING GOOD
About the title. . .yeah, I made a mistake. I was hoping to play off “Breaking Bad,” but it didn’t pan out as I developed the sermon. I’m sorry, but it happens. We can stretch it by suggesting that all legitimate mission is about “good that breaks through”—and in that sense, mission is “Breaking Good,” but I’m clearly trying to salvage an unsalvageable title. Sorry.
Today, we’re going to look at our text with a few comments. We’ll then consider three aspects of mission, and then finish with two illustrations.
BACKGROUND
As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, remember that the environment was thoroughly pagan. Paul uses the buzzwords of gnosticism and popular paganism to proclaim the all-superior revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The pagan world depended upon secrets and hidden wisdom. With each use of words like “knowledge” (gnosis), “wisdom” (sophia), and “secrets” (mysterion), Paul is ringing their bells—speaking directly to their religious longings. He proclaims that only in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, are the real secrets of life and the cosmos truly revealed:
7 But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
The Christian no longer seeks those secrets, because the Christian has direct access to the truth in Jesus Christ.
10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
The secrets of the cosmos are no longer mysteries to be sought out and explained because God gives his Holy Spirit which reveals the truth of Christ as the only means of true wisdom, which is the knowledge of salvation over sin and death.
The Church’s mission comes down to this in all its forms and expressions: mission is sharing the God-revealed secret of salvation and life in Christ.
Mission isn’t just repeating information about Jesus, it is essentially three things: presence, witness, and perspective.
MISSION IS PRESENCE
Very simply, mission means showing up.
It’s about being there. Whether in Papua New Guinea, Marera Kenya, Lima Peru, Mexican border towns, Bridges to Home, or our children’s or youth ministries—mission requires boots on the ground and face-to-face interaction. But it is critical to acknowledge that we don’t merely bring ourselves; we bring God, because 0ur presence equals God’s presence.
God can do it without us, of course, but he calls us to function as his hands and feet. We are vehicles of the Holy Spirit in this world. As we show up, we must offer more than just information; we must be bearers of the Holy Spirit offering the very peace and presence of God.
This is the correct understanding of our bodies as “temples of the Holy Spirit.” Our bodies are temples—not as some glorification of our bodies, but as vessels of the Holy Spirit. As Christ is in us, we become the means by which others come to know and experience God.
How exactly does this happen? That is the mystery—the mystery of Witness.
MISSION IS WITNESS
Plenty of churches and missionary organizations have tried to codify and bottle the process by which the Holy Spirit reaches the lost, but we can’t. We depend entirely upon God’s own mysterious working. The Holy Spirit will do whatever it is the Holy Spirit needs to do, despite our thoughts or ideas about anything. We should never “play God” even as God-bearers.
Many people feel inadequate to the task of mission. They should. You and I should rightly feel beneath the task of bearing Christ; otherwise, we clearly don’t appreciate the true scope of what we’re doing.
Beware the overly-confident soldier of Christ. Too much ego ruins the message and misrepresents Christ. The tragic examples of this are too numerous to list.
Rather, the Christian is to show up in humility with some degree of inherent and self-aware inadequacy.
Many folks fear making a hospital visitation to someone sick or dying and not because they fear for their own health. They fear they won’t know what to say, or that they may say the wrong thing, or that they will fail in their witness and misrepresent God. Good! It is right to feel this way. You and I are not sufficient to the tasks! But we bear the Holy Spirit with us, in Whom is our entire trust and power.
I never preach a sermon without sweating bullets—without knowing myself beneath the task of bearing the Word of God. Seriously, it never relaxes, and my thoughts about it never depart from fear and trembling before God.
All mission absolutely depends upon the mystery of the Holy Spirit. We come forth in humility or we do better to stay home.
We do come equipped. We bring the proclamation of the gospel: the good news that Jesus has conquered sin and death for us. We bring faith—our own faith, such as it is. Sometimes, a weak or infant faith is more effective at reaching outsiders than a mature faith.
We also bring endurance, which the Bible calls long -suffering. That’s patience, but long-suffering says it better. The gift of patience and long-suffering is that it dissolves pride and ego. It is critical to mission.
Endurance may be the most underrated virtue in the world; it is perhaps the most important virtue in mission. Keep at it, keep at it, follow through no matter what.
MISSION IS PERSPECTIVE
Perspective is that weird worldview that makes Christians an oddity to the rest of the world. We have been an oddity to the world since the year one—our peculiarity is part of our salt and light. We do not live by the spirit of the world, as Paul says in our text, but we live by the Holy Spirit. We see things differently.
We live by faith, not sight. We not only believe in Jesus, but we trust in Him. We commit and invest who we are and what we have to him. We trust in his providence and his final victory in this world and the next. That is the substance of the Christian perspective, and it makes us peculiar, weird.
LIVING OUT THE TRUST 1 FRANCIS OF ASSISI SICK AS A DOG
One of my favorite pictures of the unique perspective that comes from trusting in God and trusting in God’s providence is the example of St. Francis of Assisi. He started out like most: self-absorbed, self-gratifying, and self-pitying. Christ worked a transformation in his life and he became a model of selfless devotion and prayer. The legends say wild animals would come to him and birds perch on his shoulders without being fed. It was as if something in his character—something so excellent and warm—effected a kind of transformation on everything and everyone around him. But the truth is that Francis was the one who had been transformed and he would be the first to say it.
As the story goes, Francis was very very ill. We don’t know what it was, so I’m just going to ask you to imagine the worst flu or food poisoning you’ve ever had. Your head hurts, your eyeballs ache, and you feel like you might die, or worse, that you won’t. Francis was ill, and he was so concerned that he not infect his brothers in the abbey that he forced himself away—off to the ruins of an old chapel.
Now must of us, when really sick, depend upon others—even if we don’t like to—but Francis wouldn’t burden others. I imagine him creeping his way into a miserable little corner of this ruined chapel with its caved in ceiling. Imagine yourself there, curled up with the chills with one blanket on a stony floor. You start a pathetic little bonfire for light and heat. You look through the roof right at the stars as your head throbs. I think most of us would fall into deep self-pity by this point, but it gets worse.
Next, Francis hears noises—scurrying from the walls and soon around him on the floor—the place is infested with vermin: rats and or mice in fair numbers. Great, right? I would have been praying, “Come on, God—gimme a break—after all, I’m doing for the safety of others!” And then comes the storm: strong winds, torrential rain, and the very earthly picture of misery—alone, sick, and beset by rats and storm-showers in this miserable, broken-down ruin of a building.
But Francis was one whose life had been transformed by Christ. He didn’t whine or complain, he sees the world from the eternal perspective.
Looking at the mice or rats around him in that bleak little chapel, he felt grateful. He had a little congregation and a church to host them in. It is said that he preached the good news to his furry little congregation, and apparently, all external events notwithstanding, he remained full of joy and affirmation.
The words he wrote in remembering that occasion reveal a perspective that can only be called things like weird or bizarre:
To the mice he says:
All creatures of our God and King
Lift up your voice and with us sing
Through the collapsed roof and ceiling he says:
Thou, burning sun with golden beam
Thou, silver moon with softer gleam
O praise Him! O praise Him!
The night-time cold pours in on him. He sings:
Thou rushing wind that art so strong,
ye clouds that sail in heav’n along,
hallelujah, hallelujah!
And as it rains through the ceiling, He sings;
Thou flowing water, pure and clear,
make music for thy God to hear,
hallelujah, hallelujah!
He struggles to re-light his pathetic little fire against the chill, but says,
Thou fire so masterful and bright,
that givest all both warmth and light,
hallelujah, hallelujah
And for the whole scene—the rain, the wind, the sky, the little fire, and the congregation of mice, he proclaims:
Let all things their Creator bless
And worship Him in humbleness
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit, Three-in-One
O praise Him! O praise Him!
That fire—so “masterful and bright”—is not his little bonfire, nor it is the sun or moon; it is power and presence of God in whom Francis trusts. That masterful and bright fire is one lit from the Christian heart and soul. It ignites when we know Who God is and to Whom we belong in Christ.
That fire is in each one of us, enabling us to share the presence, witness, and transformed perspective of the Holy Spirit
LIVING OUT THE TRUST 2: PASTOR CHANG IN A CHINESE PRISON
A pastor friend of mine, on a missionary trip to Red China, gathered in Shanghai with a large group of Chinese pastors. Particular respect and interest was paid to one pastor in particular—an elderly pastor with otherwise unremarkable features—who, because of his faith, had spent nine years in a concentration camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Between 1965 and 1975, China was undergoing its so-called Cultural Revolution. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoism as the dominant ideology. During that revolution, churches were shut down or otherwise destroyed, and many pastors were jailed simply for being pastors.
Life in prison is never easy, but when someone like a pastor is labelled as a backwards thinker with misguided loyalties, the treatment was worse than usual. Being abused, struck in the face or on the body with clubs, denied food and most every other natural human right was the norm.
Pastor Chang, in his nine years, was certainly singled out from the crowd. He was a leader, and by his profession one who sought to lead people away from centralized loyalty to Chairman Mao and give their hearts to Jesus instead.
As an act of routine humiliation, the guards consigned Pastor Chang each day to a specialized duty. In the prison courtyard was an open latrine into which all the human waste was dumped—a room-sized pit 10 feet deep—I would say “just imagine the smell” but we shouldn’t dare. Each day, Pastor Chang was thrown into the pit and commanded to dig. He was to dig and deepen this pit into which all of the raw human waste was dumped.
For nearly a decade, this kind Christian man spent most of every day standing waist high or, sometimes, chest high in raw human sewage. Often, he would be digging away in the bottom of the trench while buckets of sewage were poured over him. The good news, said Pastor Chang, is that the smell was so overpowering that few guards ever came near. It was the time when he knew he would not be struck or punched. Nine. years.
My pastor friend, aghast at the details, met Pastor Chang after hearing his story. He hardly knew what to say through the interpreter. What could be said? He simply said, “How awful for you!” But Pastor Chang smiled a big smile.
“Oh, no! Those were my most glorious times with the Lord,” he said. “Whenever I was in the pit, Jesus was with me.” We should not doubt this.
He added, “Furthermore, in that pit I was able to pray and sing hymns out loud.”
“What hymns did you sing?” asked my friend.
“Many, but I had a favorite for my time there. It is called, ‘In the Garden.’”
I have this image locked in my head of sainthood. It is of Pastor Chang in that pit, digging away with a song on his lips and love of the Lord in his heart. Guards are silhouetted in black on the ground above the pit walls with menacing grimaces. Pastor Chang, though he appears to be alone, is working side by side with his Lord and friend. His song is truth:
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
Like Francis, Pastor Chang lives a transformed existence. His life was and is a witness. It is worth adding the report that the entire prison population became followers of Jesus, certainly drawn in part by the shining witness of that singing pastor/gardener down in the pit. †
SOME QUESTIONS
- Why isn’t the feeling of inadequacy a bad thing when it comes to mission?
- Name some examples of how ego or pride can ruin an otherwise worthy mission project?
- Above all else, what is it that each Christian brings to the mission field—whatever that field?
- What is it that enabled Francis and Pastor Chang to find such joy in their afflictions?
- Why is patience—long-suffering—a critical and all-valuable virtue in mission?
- What is something you need to keep at for the sake of others?