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A message by
Rev. F. David Throop, Pastor
August 24, 2008 Scripture: Colossians 4:2-18
Please pray with me:
Loving and gracious God, You have placed in the care of each one of us the wonders of life. And yet, we continue to demonstrate how easy it is to live lives so turned in on ourselves that we as the church often bring boredom to those around us. Help us never to forsake Your invitation to live lives seasoned with the enthusiasm and excitement You have so intended. In the life-giving name of our Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.
I have no doubt that many surveys have been conducted on why membership in the church all across America as well as in many places all around the world continues to decline. The reasons are many and some of them are undoubtedly complex, of course, but I have no doubt that within the larger mix of responses we will certainly hear this one: boredom. In other words, it is not so much that people are leaving the church in anger as some are leaving out of sheer boredom. They are leaving because they have more interesting things to do. They are leaving because personal priorities have changed. They are leaving because of issues of irrelevancy. And they are leaving because the buffet platter the world offers seems so much more appealing. Collective competition for Sunday has never been greater than it is today. Let me say this: when new guests show up for worship, that church has only one opportunity to make a convincing argument that what the church has to offer is either far better or at the very least a little better than what the world has to offer, at least during that time frame on Sunday morning. The church has only once chance to do this.
And so, I hope you are here this morning not because you just don’t have anything else better to do. I hope you are here this morning because you want to be here and not because your cable network is down today. I hope you are here today because you continue to realize the unique difference your connection with the church makes in your life on a daily basis.
While Mary and I remained faithful in our worship attendance in a small country church in southwestern Pennsylvania while we were away these past four Sundays, it does amaze us that this tiny country church still has its doors open. The average Sunday morning attendance in that small church is now about half what it was just one year ago. Last Sunday, there were a total of sixteen of us present, including the organist and lay preacher. In fact, there were more names listed on the prayer page in the bulletin than there were people in worship! Those who are faithful members there I think are doing their very best. In fact, this church is one of only a small handful of churches across the nation in partnership with Jon and Christy Grimes, Wycliffe Missionaries in South Asia. Yet, in terms of worship involvement, all across America and in most places around the world, whether in large congregations or small ones, the numbers are still dropping.
Your call and mine is not only and simply to be faithful in who we are as followers of Christ, but to be those whose lives bring a zest, a purpose, a strength, a unity, a delight, a joy, indeed a special seasoning of Christ to those around us.
In what we have just read from the closing section of Paul’s letter to the people in the Colossian Church, he touches on just a small handful of the many aspects of this special Christian seasoning which should be a necessity in every congregation. “Devote yourselves to prayer,” he reminds them. “Be watchful, as well as thankful. Pray that God will open new doors for His message. Be wise with outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Make certain that your conversations are filled with grace, as if seasoned with salt. And in the midst of everything else,” Paul writes, “continue to extend greetings to our many dear friends.”
Well? Is this how it is as each of you continue your various involvements here as a special member of PPC? Are you, as a follower of Christ, acting as sort of a seasoning agent to others around you, seasoning them with the spirit of Christ? Are you active in your prayer life? Are you keeping thanksgiving out in front? Are you praying and looking for new doors to open in terms of serving our Lord? Are your conversations filled with grace, and are you faithful in extending greetings and kindnesses to others? If boredom is killing the Church, are you and I adding to it, or are you and I using our time as a wonderful opportunity to bring about a new zest, a new zeal, a new seasoning to Christ’s Church?
Because Paul refers to seasoning others, let’s talk about food for just a few moments. In case you don’t know, Mary and I really enjoy cooking, and we especially enjoy cooking together. Mary and I have been married a wonderful thirty-seven years, and if I were to share with you any regrets from our thirty-seven years of marriage, I would share with you right away how much I really regret the years I never shared the joys of cooking with Mary. All of that changed several years ago when this whole new world opened up in front of me. With Mary teaching Language Arts at Valencia High School on a full time basis, and with me taking Mondays off each week, I enjoyed making a special dinner for the two of us, and in part so that Mary wouldn’t need to have any concerns about this part of her day.
And so, I started to get real familiar with our kitchen, and learned the joy of cooking. In fact, if you were to visit our kitchen, I now have my own shelves with special herbs and spices and seasonings. It’s jam packed. Anyone can use them, of course, but it’s sort of my territory. I mean, how can one cook without such things as garlic — minced garlic, garlic salt, garlic powder, grated garlic — as well as thyme and mint and ginger and various peppers and garlic and basil and dill and cumin and bay leaves, and did I mention garlic? And while food preparation is certainly far from being the most important event for us, especially in the midst of a world still experiencing far too much in the way of starvation and malnutrition, it is an activity Mary and I enjoy doing together.
And if you were to be among our guests for dinner, I can assure you that we would not be serving you an ordinary, bland meal. We would do our very best to roll out the red carpet from our kitchen to your plate. In fact, when the Riries visited us earlier this past week while we were back at the farm in southwestern Pennsylvania, we did our best to make our evening meal with them as special as possible. You see, they were our guests, and we wanted to serve the very best “down in the holler” farm dinner we could possibly put together.
And so, this was the menu for our “down in the holler” farm dinner last Monday evening: two beer butt chickens using Emeril’s original rub (you do know what beer butt chicken is, I trust), slowly grilled with indirect charcoal for two hours, a special dish of Mrs. Yoder’s Amish pickled baby beats, a double recipe of my kicked-up home-style baked beans, 18 ears of freshly picked white/yellow combination sweet corn, Mary’s homemade applesauce with cinnamon using freshly picked local grown transparent apples, two large dishes of sliced, home grown tomatoes in seasoned rice vinegar and sprinkled with dill, two loaves of fresh Tuscany bread, and to top it all off, the Riries brought along with them a freshly made blackberry pie. Sorry you missed our meal! It was one of the better ones!
Don’t you see? In a world filled with not only with fast food but with boring food, we wanted our time together to be exciting, and not only exciting but we wanted it to be memorable. And in this, we do hope that the Riries will return again next summer and that this might become an annual event of sorts.
And in part, isn’t there a bit of a message here for the Church of today? The Church should not be dying out of boredom. The Church should be growing, seasoned with excitement!
Oh, and let me mention a few other special meals we enjoyed as family and friends “down in the holler” of southwestern Pennsylvania. Pizza at Mary’s brother’s place, not just ordinary ordered-in pizza, but homemade pizza using his recently constructed outdoor pizza brick oven, where each of us assembled our own unique pizza choosing from among a variety of toppings set out before us, including a variety of cheeses, tomato sauces, veggies, mushrooms, olives, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, and of course, anchovies.
And then, on another evening while Christy, Jon, and Ellie were with us there, we enjoyed a three-way barbecue rib cook off, featuring Jon Grimes special rub. And boy, did he raise the bar on that one! And then, on still another evening we enjoyed a fish fry featuring haddock, pollack, cod, squid, and hush puppies, each rolled in a special unique variety of seasonings. And who could ever forget the evening we enjoyed smoked, not cooked, but smoked sirloin steak with a home made gourmet morel mushroom sauce. And so, if any of you think for one moment that going back to the farm “down in the holler” where life is simple, is boring, well, speak to the Riries. They’ve now been there, and they’ll tell you differently, I trust! And by the way, not only are the meals we serve back there special, but each meal also comes with a free complimentary tractor ride!
Are you getting just a bit tired of hearing of our eating experiences? Well, I’m not. On the way home, Mary and I had a long layover at the George Bush Houston International Airport. And so, if you are ever at this airport in Houston, Texas, and you have an extended layover, let me recommend a restaurant called Pappadeauz Seafood Kitchen. It’s on the second floor of Terminal E, as I recall, it’s a higher end bar and grill, and they specialize, of course, in seafood. And I assure you, you will not be disappointed. Allow me to recommend to you the special crawfish platter which I enjoyed, with three types of crawfish, served on a variety of rices with special sauces, or, the salmon teriyaki dinner Mary enjoyed. I had never eaten crawfish before, and certainly not the variety they served, and I’m never shy about trying new things.
The dinner, at least mine, sort of reminded me of the scene from the movie, Forrest Gump, as Forest Gump's new found friend, Bubba, describes the variety of ways to eat shrimp. You do remember that scene, don’t you? — “You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, and sauté it. There’s shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, and stir fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. Yah, that’s about it,” Bubba concludes.
Now, as Paul is writing his letter of encouragement to his Christian friends in Colossae, he wants them not only to know but to experience and then to extend that special joy of living in Christ. He does not want them to go down the road of boredom. He wants them not only to know the difference Christ can make in them, but the difference they, as followers of Christ, can then make in others.
In other words, and more to the point, a church which is committed to prayer focused in every direction will never be a church dying out of boredom. A church which is living constantly with a spirit of thanksgiving within will never die out of boredom. A church always praying and looking for the opening of new doors of outreach will never find itself dying out of boredom. A church whose members make certain that their conversations are always full of grace as if “seasoned with salt” will never die from boredom. And a church whose members are constantly extending greetings and encouragements both inwardly as well as outwardly will never ever experience the dangers of boredom. You show me a church doing all of the things Paul describes here and I will show you a church full of life and filled with hope. I will show you a church which is dynamic. I will show you a church with a future.
I like short summer sermons, and so I will close now with one final piece from our recent time away in southwestern Pennsylvania. Each of the four Thursday mornings while we were there I played in a best ball golf tournament at a local golf course. It’s a tournament for men 60 and older. I enjoyed my time each week, especially meeting lots of new friends. And in terms of the golf itself, well our teams didn’t do too bad. In fact, they placed me as the captain of my team each week, a team assembled somewhat at random. How did we do, you ask? Well, my team won the tournament the first and third weeks with eleven under par both weeks, we came in second place the second week, and we made a very respectable showing in my fourth and final week.
But what I really want to share with you is something shared with me on more than just one of those Thursday mornings, comments about one of the participants everyone seemed to have difficulty with. His name is Bill, and for each of those four weeks, Bill was a no-show, and his absence was much to the delight of everyone else. I kept hearing how glad the men were that Bill hadn’t shown up that day, how glad they were that they wouldn’t have to play golf with Bill, how grateful they were that they just didn’t have to deal with Bill that day.
And the reason behind their comments? Bill was always complaining, always criticizing, always putting someone else down. He never had anything positive to say. No one, it seems, enjoyed having Bill around. In fact, I was told that one of the men who used to be a regular participant simply decided not to show up anymore simply because of the possibility that Bill might be there. And isn’t that sad, because each week there were about forty of us, and all it took was just one person to make it a not very good experience for everyone else.
Now, let’s do the math. If all it takes is just one person to make forty others fairly miserable, what would happen, conversely, if some two hundred of us worshipping here today treated others with the spirit of Christ? What would happen if the two hundred of us worshipping together now became the Christ-like seasoning for everyone else in our lives?
I think you and I know what would happen. People would continue to return, people would continue to plug in, the church would continue to grow, and the love of Jesus Christ would continue to expand.
Well? Isn’t this at least a part of our call in a nutshell?
“So, as a Christian, as a follower of Christ, how well are you in seasoning others with the love and the joy of living in Christ?” Copyright © 2008 by Rev. F. David Throop. All rights reserved. No part of this sermon may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of a very brief quotation, which will acknowledge the source. |
