October 21, 2001
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Renewed Heart for a Renewed Ministry Prayer: Eternal and loving God, help us to remember that you are with us now. There is no place where you are not. Wherever we go, there you are. Now and always God encompass us, look upon us with mercy, and stand ready to hear us when we call. Amen. As we begin to think about what it means to be renewed in heart and ministry, I want to begin with some basic biology. We know that the heart is one of the muscles that works to keep us alive. We can feel the blood pumping when we take our pulse and feel the rhythm of our heartbeat. I am sure that Thom and Bob will take their pulse a time or two as they run the marathon course of 26 miles, 385 yards. As it pumps blood throughout our bodies the heart becomes one of the indicators of the state of our health. We also know what it takes to have a healthy heart. We need to exercise, to eat right, and not overindulge in any of the activities that can be harmful to our bodies and to our hearts. A bowl of ice cream is a wonderful thing. Eating a half-gallon of ice cream in one sitting is not so wonderful and is quite unhealthy. We need healthy hearts for our bodies, and we need them for our souls. In the Bible, the heart served both body and soul. Jeremiah lived in a time when the heart was considered to be the “seat of emotions, feelings, moods, and passions. So the heart can be broken, or made glad. It can be disappointed and it can soar. Equated with the heart are joy, grief, ill-temper, love, courage, and fear. A swollen heart breeds arrogance, which stands in contrast to the gentle and lowly heart of Jesus. Since the heart is the center for decisions, obedience, devotion and intentionality, it represents the total human person” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, Harper and Row, 1985, p. 377). Sometimes the total human person needs renewal. Jeremiah says to the people of Jerusalem and Judah, it is time for your heart to be renewed. You have forgotten the covenant that was made with your ancestors and affirmed by you. Even though you have heard it all your lives, you have forgotten its most important point. You will be my people, and I will be your God. Instead, you became idolaters and worshiped other gods; made bad military alliances, forgot about the law, and forgot to treat others as people created in my image. You forgot to praise, to pray, thank, and to worship. You just plain forgot. It is time for renewal. Then I can say again, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.” So it is for us. We have the same need for renewal because like the people in Jeremiah’s time, we forget what is valuable, and what we have promised God. We become separated from God, and out of relationship with God and others. It becomes sin, and if we do not look for ways to renew our relationship with God, our sin can become part of a destructive pattern of behavior. The pattern can be broken because this time the covenant, the agreement between us and God will be planted in our hearts and will be as close as our heartbeats. That’s how close God wants our covenant to be. When it is we will do some things differently. This time we will internalize our renewed covenant and when we do, we will find that even our words have renewed meaning. You know how people speak in easy platitudes to you and you know they really don’t quite mean it? “Have a nice day, God bless you, I want to help, I will pray for you” become easy to say but difficult to do. But once our hearts are renewed, “Have a nice day,” will become a blessing given. “God bless you,” will become a prayer offered. “I want to help,” will become a commitment. “I’ll pray for you”, will become a promise fulfilled. This new covenant in our renewed hearts means we can all know God, from the newest to the most seasoned among us. We can know the promise of forgiveness, we can live in the hope that is out there. We will that hope in the next chapter, when as we shared last month, Jeremiah buys a field because he knows the day of restoration is coming. The next question for us, is what do we do with renewed hearts? Here is where the reading from II Timothy is helpful. As he writes to Timothy, Paul is nearing the end of his life. He speaks of himself as being poured out as libation, he is about to be poured out in honor of God. He can reflect on a life that led him first to persecute the church then to find his own renewal of heart. His own renewed heart led to become one of the leaders of the church of Jesus Christ. Now Paul wants to leave Timothy with some ways to renew his ministry in light of the challenge of people who did not have the best interest of Timothy or of the church at heart. There were people in Timothy’s town teaching and preaching what Paul calls “profane chatter.” Whatever your challenges, he says to Timothy, and to us, be persistent. Keep doing what you learned as a child, keep believing what you learned, remember all the people who loved God enough to share the good news with you. Like many of us, Timothy learned his lessons from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, from the Paul and other mentors, and from elders and church school teachers. We can hear Paul saying to us what he says to Timothy. “Do not forget what and from whom you have learned. You have already experienced these truths of the witnesses to know that they are not just abstract concepts. They are thoroughly tested in your own experience. Do not lose touch with those who taught you, who all along have been prepared to suffer for the truth they taught. Every Christian can remember the name of at least one person through whom the faith was delivered…retain that name in memory. Hold that name up in prayer with gratitude. We know how earnestly that one prayed for us, patiently bore with us and enjoyed our presence.” (Interpretation series, I and II Timothy, and Titus. Thomas C. Oden, p. 23). Who do you remember when you think about your teachers in the faith. Your list may include teachers, parents, grandparents, godparents, and other relatives and friends. Remember them and all they taught you with gratitude. Timothy’s memory is important because he served the church when Christianity was a still emerging religion, they were bringing new people into the church. We serve the church in a time when we cannot assume any more that our experience is as usual as it once was. Our challenge is that not everyone has had a warm good experience of church. We see all around us a generation of children who do not have a relation with God, Jesus Christ, the church or any religious group, and neither do their parents. Timothy was a second generation Christian, and we live in a time of second generation non-believers. Because it is directed to a particular pastor, this passage is usually heard as part of an ordination or an installation service. Though it was written to one person, there is a word for all of us in the church here. Paul’s advice to Timothy reminds us that a renewed heart leads us to renewed ministry. Another vision and mission statement may emerge when we study in detail the information from the One to One conversations, but for right now, our mission statement says that we: “celebrate our diversity as we share the good news of the love of Jesus Christ; support our members [and friends] spiritual needs through prayer, study, fellowship, and understanding, and serve our community through ministries of reconciliation and justice.” That’s a ministry worth renewing. We are rightly proud of who we are, of our diversity, our youth, the wise people, the creative people of every age among us. Every time we gather here, we give lie to the notion that in order to be the church, we have to look alike, think alike, and be alike. We know how, in this place to stay alert, to suffer with each other, as well as to enjoy each other, we can share the good news, and do ministry as we are called to do it. It is possible to renew our ministry, serve the community outside the church and encourage those of us who are already members. There is a way for us to get strong and stay strong. Think of them as spiritual exercise. We can read over and over the sacred texts of the faith. Our sacred texts are not even in these days when we crave news, the Dispatch, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Teen People, or Newsweek. Those are good sources of information but our sacred text begins with Genesis and continues to Revelation. It tells the story of God’s unconditional, redeeming, renewing, love for all humanity. In other words, read the Bible, not as many are as many in these days to look for signs of the end of the world. Instead, read it for the inspired, God-breathed words of hope, help, and wholeness to be found there. Draw strength from the Psalms, from the story of God of leading, guiding, judging, forgiving always with the people. There are high expectation and great hope in our sacred texts. We can be prepared to share our faith. The purpose of being biblically literate, of knowing the Bible is not to prove how much scripture we can quote by heart so that we can win a particular point. Anyone with a good memory can do that. The purpose is to be equipped, to have the tools we need for ministry. Once we are prepared and equipped, we can work toward faithful ministry. Paul practically begs Timothy, “I solemnly urge you.” There is a sense of urgency in Paul which is clear in other versions of these verses. “I charge you, preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season.” Don’t take that word preach to mean only the work of the pastor. The word to be proclaimed is for all of us to do. With a renewed heart, our renewed ministries help us to offer the words of good news to people Paul describes as having itching ears. They are only comfortable hearing what they want to hear. They do not want to be challenged, or enlightened, they just want to be told that they are right no matter what. We all want to feel good and to be soothed. We all have our moments of wanting to be affirmed and told that we are right and that we will be alright. Our ears have itched and ached in recent weeks to hear that we are still invulnerable and invincible and immune to attack; that we do not have to worry about opening our mail. We want desperately to hear that we do not need to discern, sacrifice, anything to gain the church we believe God wants us to be. We sometimes even want to believe we are more blessed than others, and that in whatever we do, it is all up to us. But we are not called to feel good all the time. Sometimes life and faith are hard. What we are called to do is to live out our faith in Jesus Christ, to remember that he sacrificed himself for us as we come to the table. We are invited to care for the least and the greatest among us and reach a point of valuing everyone. We are called to celebrate the countless gifts among us, to reach out beyond these walls, and to tell the story of the gospel in word and deed, and to know that Jesus Christ has promised to be with us every step of the way. We can find renewal for ministry in the totality of these times. We can be renewed in good times when everything is easy and in tough times when things are not well at all. We find renewal as we go about doing the work of ministry patiently, lovingly, and gently, as we will this evening at the Racial Unity Service, and as members of the church did last week when they participated in the CROP walk. We can celebrate today that God has entered into a new covenant with us, and that the agreement is written on our hearts. We can celebrate and remember that Jesus himself proclaimed another new covenant, that if as a final act of earthly ministry he would go to the cross for us, we would remember and not only eat and drink in his name, but do excellent ministry in his name too. We will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and live peaceably with people. We will live as if our faith matters. May our relationships with each other reflect our good relationship with God. May we find renewal, energy, power and all that we need to do ministry in his name. May we feel God close to us, as close as our own beating hearts. Thanks be to God to whom we will give glory forever and ever. Amen.
Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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