Retro (Part I)

I can't remember a Sunday at newhope more enjoyable than this past week. We are in the middle of a sermon series titled, "Retro - Always in Style." newhopers came out in force with their best Retro costumes. We gave away 5 I-pods to the best dressed. In the picture above, you see Grant DeBerry (AKA Moses) and the Jeff and Brenda Bourn family. :>) These guys rocked and won the prizes for the first service. We will do it all again this coming Sunday as we bring closure to Retro and get ready for our Christmas series. (More pics forthcoming)

More often than not, the church is wise when she looks back before she moves ahead. That is what retro is all about. You see this in the apostle Paul all the time. As he reached out to people, he often took them down memory lane so that together they could take note of the way in which God had been faithful in the past. We glean strength from God's faithfulness. We learn of God's ways by noting how He has moved in the past. That strength and knowledge helps us move ahead into the future.

The timeless vision of God is Reach people, Teach them the Word and Release servants for ministry in the world. That is also the vision of newhope. That passion to reach, teach, and release will never go out of style in the life of the church. God has set that course. Christ, before He died on the cross, set that trajectory with His final words in Matthew 28.

A congregation of disciples committed to making disciples, which has become apostolic in its style and passion and sees itself as a missionary community in the world, will inevitably also see itself and become a community of aliens who are in, but not of, the world.

In September of 1997 there was a groundbreaking service for a Roman Catholic cathedral to be constructed in Los Angeles. The Diocese of Los Angeles had commissioned the famous Spanish architect, Jose Rafael Moneo, to design the building. Their hope was that the cathedral, to be completed by the beginning of the millennium, would be a peculiar witness to the glory of God.

There were models of the cathedral at the groundbreaking service, and on the basis of the models, a Los Angeles reporter wrote a review of the cathedral. This is a part of what the reporter said:

“Moneo is creating an alternate world to the everyday world that surrounds the cathedral, a testimony to the grandeur of the human spirit, an antidote to a world that is increasingly spiritually empty.”

Then he wrote this sentence:

“The cathedral, set in the midst of the secular city, will be an enclave of resistance.”

What an image…the Church, an enclave of resistance. "Resident aliens” is the term Will Willimon and Richard Hauerwas used to describe this aspect of the nature of the Church. Jesus, Himself, provides the model. He was fully in and with the world, but He lived by a contrasting set of realities and was always in tension with the world—and to a marked degree, always in resistance to it.

In one of my favorite Peanuts cartoons, Lucy demands that Linus change TV channels and then threatens him with her fist if he doesn’t.

“What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over?” asks Linus.

“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they are nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.”

“Which channel do you want?” asks Linus. :>)

Turning away, he looks at his fingers and says, “Why can’t you guys get organized like that?”

The universal Church, unfortunately, has never been able to get organized in her resistance to the world. In fact, the Church has never been consistently able to understand what it means to be “in the world but not of the world.” We’ve known in every period of our history that the very nature of the Church provokes some form of resistance. There’s always a sense in which Kingdom ideals are in conflict with the world in which the Kingdom is set. This expresses itself in different ways. We have to be careful about the nature and focus of our resistance—of how we live as “aliens.” We must not deceive ourselves into thinking that if we can get the right king on the throne—that is, if we can elect the right president, the right congress, the right governor—if we can put “our people” in places of political power, then we can win the battle. There can be no kingdom without a king, and the Kingdom to which we are committed has only one King—King Jesus!

The Church, newhope, must think more in terms of transformation than of confrontation. That means we must overcome what we have mastered altogether too well — the art of talking to ourselves.

We need to think more about “a long obedience in the same direction” than about a quick fix that might bring superficial change. Our task, as an enclave of resistance, is to subvert the callused, materialistic, secular, godless culture of which we are a part — to subvert that culture at its root by living as though we believe that “persons do not live by bread alone,” that there is a kingdom reality of love in which all those things that are expressed in Romans 12 are operative. Our love is without hypocrisy. We abhor what is evil and we cling to what is good. In honor we give preference to one another. We are able to rejoice in hope, but we are also able to be patient in tribulation. We attend to the needs of the saints and we give ourselves to hospitality. We bless those who persecute us; we rejoice with those who rejoice and we weep with those who weep. We associate with the humble and we do not see ourselves as wise in our own opinion. We don’t repay evil for evil; we seek to live peaceably with all persons. We feed our enemies, we give them drink—we don’t confront evil with evil but we seek to overcome evil with good.

As resident aliens our mission becomes incarnational. It takes seriously the words of Jesus, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Our efforts at making disciples, being apostolic in our style and passion, seeing ourselves as a missionary community, incarnates the love of Jesus Christ Himself, serving others in their need, and at the same time, ready to tell the story of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

Like Retro, that will never go out of style.