Parents are the Lead Actors; the Church is the Supporting Cast

If you have not read the past two weeks’ posts entitled “All in the Family” and “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average,” then I encourage you to read those two posts before reading this week’s.

This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s exploration of the topic of returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. Last week I wrote about how “the Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children.” I made this case through exploring the topic in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in the practice of contemporary observant Jewish families. Today we will bring this closer to home for us as Christians by getting some historical and theological perspective on the appropriate role for parents in “multi-generational Christian faithfulness,” an emphasis that has been lost in the lives of many Western Christians in recent history.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes to his protégé Timothy, “I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” Paul doesn’t take credit for building up Timothy in the faith; it was Timothy’s family who deserved the credit. Surely the early Christian worshiping community that Lois and Eunice were a part of played an important role in raising up young Timmy in the faith, but ultimately it was his family who fulfilled their responsibility to him. Part of a Christian parent’s responsibility is to involve their children in the life and worship of the local congregation, but that is only part of the responsibility. The (usually once a week) interaction between the children and the congregation should be seen as a necessary supplement to what is already going on at home. Sunday morning should be the cherry on top, not the whole dessert.

The 4th century pastor John Chrysostom once preached: “The family…is a cornerstone of faith, a household church and a foreshadowing of the eternal kingdom.” He also writes, “Raise up an athlete for Christ and teach him [or her] that, though he [or she] is living in the world, he [or she] is to be reverent from earliest youth.” For John Chrysostom, as for the Apostle Paul before him, the phrase “athlete for Christ” doesn’t have anything to do with a curveball. It is a metaphor for the life of faith. Like athletics, faith takes training; it doesn’t just happen. The training comes from the parents with additional help from the local congregation. About faith training, Dr. Voddie Baucham goes so far as to say, “If [Christian] parents have raised their children to be great doctors, lawyers, athletes, or musicians, but have not trained them to honor and obey God, they have failed.” Again, while I disagree with Dr. Baucham on many things, the centrality of family in the faith development of children is not one of them. After years of work in youth and children’s ministries, I believe that this is very counter to the contemporary culture of parenting, even amongst Christian parents. I know a lot of Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became good successful citizens. I know fewer Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became faithful mature Christians.

Along the same vein, the 16th Century reformer Martin Luther wasn’t all that concerned about experiencing the church as being a big family. He was actually more concerned about experiencing the family as a little church. He writes, “Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel. In short, there is no greater or nobler authority on earth than that of the parents over their children, for this authority is both spiritual and temporal.” Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn expands on Luther’s emphasis on family by claiming that “Christianity is no longer the dominant culture in the United States. If we want our children to grow up with Christian convictions, capacities, and choices, we must much more deliberately nurture the faith and its concomitant lifestyle.” Am I making my point? Biblically and historically it is the parents’ responsibility to pass the faith on to their kids, not the church’s. The church has a great role in this, but it is a supporting role, not the lead role.

Whenever we stand up in the sanctuary in front of the gathered covenant community of faith to have our children baptized, we, as parents, are asked a few questions. One of the questions that I, as the pastor, ask the parents is this: “Do you promise, through prayer and example, to support and encourage [your child] to be a faithful Christian?” Every parent who has their child baptized in a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, as well as in many other denominations, has stood in front of the congregation and God and promised, not "considered" but promised, covenanted with God and the church, to raise their children up to be faithful Christians. After the parents make that promise, I ask the congregation a similar question: “Do you, as members of the church of Jesus Christ, promise to guide and nurture [this child] by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging [her/him] to know and follow Christ and to be a faithful member of his church?” We’re all in this together!—the parents, the local congregation, and the Church universal. But again, the parents take the lead role, the congregation is the supporting cast.

As a child, I attended church every Sunday. Every Sunday I was in Sunday school and every Sunday I was in worship at Yeamans Park Presbyterian Church. My parents were very adamant about the importance of our participation in the life of the church on Sunday morning. However, there was a very significant disconnect in our family—-nothing was ever said about the Christian faith except for on Sunday mornings and a brief table grace each night. We went to church (endured it is more accurate) but we weren’t being trained in the Christian faith at home. Church was just some place we went to do something we were supposed to do (the definition of empty religious ritual). It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized there was a different way.

As many of you know, just before my seventeenth birthday, I moved in with my best friend’s family. His parents were the volunteer youth sponsors at the small Southern Baptist Church in town. It took some adjustment but I started to have fun in youth group and eventually came to claim my own faith in Jesus Christ instead of just going through the motions. But it wasn’t the instruction I was getting at the church that made the real difference. Remember, I’d been getting weekly instruction at church my whole life. It was the instruction that I was now getting at home that made the difference. My friend’s parents modeled Christian faith every single day. Often times, through a partially opened door, I would see one or both of my friend’s parents praying or reading the Bible. “The Lord” came up in conversation all the time. Every conversation we had took place within a Christian worldview. It wasn’t close-minded; it was faithful. Prayer wasn’t just something we did before we devoured our supper. Discipleship in Jesus was a way of life in the home. The ministry of the local church supplemented that, but the church didn’t carry the brunt of the weight in our Christian upbringing.

For example, there were a few of us among the church’s youth who were light years ahead of the others in the maturity of our Christian faith. Even I, after just months of active involvement, found myself on a different level of discussion than many of the other kids. I’m not bragging, just stating an easily observable fact. How could this be? After all, we were all smart kids who attended the same public high school, the same Sunday school class, the same worship service, the same youth fellowship gathering, and the same summer camp. So what was the only difference between the kids who seemed to “get it” and the kids who didn’t? Those who “got it” were getting instruction from their parents at home and those who didn't weren't. That’s the only difference. Presbyterian pastor and youth ministry author Mark Devries writes, “Parents play a role second only to that of the Holy Spirit in building the spiritual foundation of their children’s lives.” He goes on to remember his own training, “In my childhood, my faith was formed as much around the dinner table as it was in the pew.”

In his book Family Based Youth Ministry Mark Devries also discusses a large study about the role of parents in multi-generational Christian faithfulness. He writes, “The Search Institute’s National Study of Protestant Congregations indicated that the first predictor of adolescent faith maturity was the level of ‘family religiousness.’ The particular family experiences most tied to greater faith maturity were the frequency with which an adolescent talked with mother and father about faith, the frequency of family devotions and the frequency with which parents and children together were involved in efforts, formal or informal, to help other people. As might be expected, the Search study’s first recommendation for change in Christian education was to ‘equip mothers and fathers to play a more active role in the religious education of their children, by means of conversation, family devotions and family helping projects.”

It is my personal opinion that if our kids are only getting Christian training in Sunday school, fifteen minutes of Sunday worship, and then in Junior Church, then we are failing as Christian parents and not fulfilling the promise we made at their baptism. Please don’t get me wrong, I love my parents dearly, but I have seen the negative result of the disconnect between Sunday mornings and the rest of the week. I have seen that it generally produces adults who are either a nominal Christian with little involvement in the church or who are not even Christian at all. Because I have seen the results of this way of raising kids hundreds of times in my short ministry career (as well as my own family), I have chosen a different path in raising Wyatt and Josselyn. The path that I am leading my family in is a path closer to that of my best friend’s parents, but actually I am committed to being even more intentional about it than they were. In other words, I’m building upon their faithful example.

Next week we will explore: “What is Family Worship and Why Should We be Doing it in Our Home?” In the weeks following I will write about resources for family worship, about the ways that a local congregation has often inappropriately taken the lead in raising Christian kids instead of a supporting role, and I will eventually write about why I wholeheartedly believe that it is paramount to “multi-generational Christian faithfulness” that children (at least children of school age) participate fully in the main Sunday morning worship gathering of the congregation instead of leaving the sanctuary after only a portion of the service.

I hope everyone who had kids at the Christmas Eve service took home the Story of Jesus book that had been provided by Jennifer Shaw and actually took the ten minutes to read it as a family on Christmas day. I encourage you to make a point to pray with your family today, not just over your food but for other areas of life as well. Sing songs of praise to God today. Read the Scriptures together today. Take the time you were gathering for the Advent stickers and keep on doing something worshipful during that time. Not sure of the best way to do this? We’ll get into that next week.

Have a wonderful Christmas week and enjoy the snow! I’m headed home to pull my kids around on the new sled that Santa brought them yesterday.

Grace and Peace,
Everett

All in the Family

Last week I wrote about it being the responsibility of Christian parents to make the worship of God and fellowship with the covenant community of faith a priority for our families. I am sure that I ruffled more than a few feathers, but I stand by every word I wrote. My role as pastor is not to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. As Rev. David Rohrer wisely writes, “The temptation is strong for us as pastors to settle for providing people with the religion they want rather than the truth they need. Yet prophets have nothing to sell. Our job is not to get people to buy Jesus as if he were some product. Our job is to give witness to the truth. What folks do with that truth is a matter between them and God…Truth may hurt, but it also liberates.”

Had I planned this out instead of just going with the flow I would have probably written last week’s post second and this week’s post first. Here’s how I would have organized this series of posts had I really thought about it beforehand:

Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next.

Topic 2: Making the Lord’s Day worship and fellowship of the covenant community of the church a priority. As I mentioned, I already covered this in last week’s post entitled, “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average.”

Topic 3: Having children, at least those of school age, present throughout Lord’s Day worship is a must for any congregation that is serious about passing the faith on to the kids.

So this week I will actually be addressing what should have been Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. This topic may actually take more than one week, several weeks actually.

Before I begin, let me say something important. Some people don’t have families or have been cast out from their families. For many of these folks, the covenant community of the church has become their primary family. That is wonderful and biblical, and we should strive to bring in more and more people who have no other family so that we can love them with the love we’ve received from God. A family did that for me once and through doing that for me they taught me what the gospel looks like when it is lived out. The Church is a family of families and individuals who become one big family through baptism. That being said, however, for those who do live in families, especially those who have children at home, the family at home is the primary vehicle for bringing children to faith and helping to form them into mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Voddie Baucham, an avid proponent of both “family driven faith” and fully “family-integrated churches” in response to the statistics that show that between 75-85% of young people have ceased active participation in a local church by the end of their freshman year in college (and very few of them are returning as they used to) writes, “I believe we are looking for answers in all the wrong places. Our children are not falling away because the church is doing a poor job—although that is undoubtedly a factor. Our children are falling away because we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home. At best, the church is to play a supporting role as it ‘equips the saints for the work of ministry’ (Ephesians 4:12, ESV).”

Although there are a lot of things that I don’t agree with Dr. Baucham on, the overall thesis of his work is something with which I agree wholeheartedly. I really do feel that “we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home.” It isn’t Dr. Baucham’s work (or anyone else’s work), though, that brought me to that opinion; it has been my own experience over the past decade in youth and children’s ministries. Once I started feeling this way I went out looking for resources to see if anyone else was thinking the same thing. I found that there are quite a few folks who, based on their ministry experience, have come to the same conclusion. So that’s what I’ll be spending the next few weeks on. I hope that even if you don’t have kids at home that you’ll read these posts anyway. Just maybe you will be blessed through something that may seem irrelevant to you on the surface but may either convict or comfort you at a deeper level.

In the overall epic narrative of Scripture, God has always worked through families. The promises to Abraham were family promises. It wasn’t that only he would be a blessing; his family was going to bless the whole world. It was Moses’ family that saved his life, and when it came time for Moses to live into God’s call on his life, God didn’t expect him to do it alone. God brought him back together with his family and they did it together. When the Israelites were about to enter into the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness, God commanded Moses to review the Law with the people so that they’d know how to live once they were surrounded by other people who did not care about their faith or way of life. “These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God.” The purpose of the Law being recorded and reviewed is so that one generation can pass it on to the next and to the next and to the next. How is this supposed to happen? Moses says, “Hear O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door

frames of your houses and on your gates.” The faith is to be passed on by parents who love God and God’s Word teaching their children to love God and God’s Word. This will happen by having the faith present in all aspects of family life, even in the way their houses are set up.

Not long after Moses reviewed the Law with the people and commanded them to pass it on to their children, Moses died. Joshua, who took over for him, gathered the people together before they went into the land and said, “If you refuse to serve the LORD, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD.” In other words, Joshua was telling the people that they needed to make an intentional choice as to who they are going to follow because it is of utmost importance and because it is going to be hard work to keep up the faith in a surrounding culture that is filled with elements that are contrary to the Hebrews’ faith in God. Just “seeing where the journey takes you” isn’t going to cut it, Joshua is saying. As Dr. Baucham writes, “Raising Godly children is not a matter of luck; it is a matter of work.” Joshua’s family, not just Joshua, is going to follow the one true God because faith is a family affair, especially when living in the midst of a culture that doesn’t care what your faith is or is even hostile towards it.

The Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children. The institutions of the faith exist for communal worship and to assist the family in fulfilling their central role. To this day, the observant Jewish family will both prepare for and celebrate the Sabbath together as a family.

The entire family prepares together for the festive family meal held in the Jewish home on Friday night, and the children are very much involved in the celebration itself. Also, children take roles of leadership in the celebrations of religious holidays like Purim and Passover. The family is the center of faith; the synagogue supplements what is done in the family. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of my favorite authors, writes “It is important to me that [my children] have a solid grounding in their Jewish heritage and customs, and that they live by the Jewish values of holiness, community, charity, hospitality, and humanity. Within the great tradition of Orthodox Jewry come many smaller traditions that are an intrinsic part of our lives: we study the Bible daily, pray three times a day, observe biblical festivals, have mezuzahs on our doors, and keep a strictly kosher home.”

Jesus was, of course, Jewish during his years as “the Word of God made flesh.” All of his first followers were Jewish. The Apostle Paul, who spread the faith and wrote a great number of the documents in our New Testament, was Jewish. Therefore, it is not a stretch to say that the model for Christian families should be very much the same as the Hebrew model. It is true that Jesus said some things about the family that might not seem to point toward the centrality of the family in the life of faith, but when we read those sayings of Jesus in context we see that Jesus’ point was that if your family stands between you and discipleship in Jesus then you must choose Jesus over family. However, if your family is fulfilling its role as building one another up in your discipleship then this is as it should be.

This will have to be continued next week on December 26...

Keep doing those Advent sticker books together each day as a family, read the biblical Christmas story to the kids, and take time to pray together as a family, even on Christmas morning before the gifts begin. Over the coming weeks I will share with you a lot of resources for "family driven" faith and I will even promise to help you obtain those resources. You will never have a pastor who cares more about families and kids growing in faith than you do now. I promise you that.

Jesus Doesn't Care about Your Kid's Batting Average

Spending all of last week with Malachi, Director of Prophetic Ministries, (listen to my sermon from December 9 if you don’t know why I’m calling him that) really got me thinking. I’m going to warn you: I’m about to get on my soapbox.

I remembered how a few years ago I was at a large museum that had a little town inside of it to show you what it might have looked like in a frontier town in the Old West. The group I was with looked inside the train depot, the jail, the doctor’s office, and then the school house. On the blackboard was the Pledge of Allegiance.

Someone at the museum hadn’t done their research because even if we assume the frontier town represented a settlement after 1892 when the pledge was composed, the pledge as it was written on the blackboard was still an anachronism because it included the phrase “under God.” As many of you know, the phrase “under God” was not a part of the pledge for the first sixty-two years of its existence. A grassroots campaign to add “under God” to the pledge started in Illinois after World War II and the addition wasn’t passed into law until 1954 during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Presbyterian by the way.

That little history tidbit isn’t really the point, however. The point is that someone who was with me, someone I had known for decades, said to me, “That’s when everything went downhill, when they took God out of the schools.” I understood what this person was saying, but I had a little trouble swallowing it coming from this person. While only God can know the heart of a person, I knew that this person had not stepped foot in a church in at least fifteen years, never read the Bible, didn’t raise their own kids in the church or with any recognition of God, had no prayer life, did no charitable service of any kind, and didn’t even say grace before meals. I turned to the person and said, “I can’t really speak to that since there’s never been prayer in any of my schools since I’ve been alive, but I think the bigger problem is that we’ve taken God out of our own families.”

We’re willing to blame anyone and everyone besides ourselves for the deterioration of Christian faith and values. My friend, who was surprised that I (a pastor!) didn’t agree with the statement about the schools, blamed it completely on the schools, which really means the courts that have made rulings are at fault, which in turn means that the government the courts serve are at fault. Others will say that it is the liberal pro-violence, pro-sex media that is to blame. While I do think that we’ve allowed our entertainment industry to produce massive amounts of filth, really we’re the ones who are at fault for consuming it. They wouldn’t make shows, movies, books, and music like that if nobody bought them.

Others blame our communities for putting children’s sports and public school activities on Sundays and at other times that used to be reserved for worship, prayer, and rest. My question in response to this one is: “Who’s forcing you to participate?” The answer is no one. What would happen if Christian families “went on strike?” Could athletics in our community survive if all the Christian families refused to participate until Sundays and Wednesday evenings were reclaimed? I doubt it, but we just continue to acquiesce passively. Maybe we should form a Fellowship of Christian Parents in Fayette County that will serve like a Christian families union that can put pressure on the schools and leagues in town. We aren't going to participate until it is changed. Even if that didn’t work, and a coach wouldn’t let a kid play on the team because they’d miss some practices or some games because of worship, eventually we have to set our priorities in ways that reflect our Christian faith. The ministerial association doesn't have any pull here. Everybody expects us to be opposed to anything that conflicts with Sundays. That's our job. It has to be parents who take a stand. I promise you, if you take a stand the ministerial association will be there with you to support you but we can't do it for you.

You all know me. I played baseball for twelve years, I’m a huge baseball fan, and Wyatt and I play in the backyard whenever the weather is nice. But what is more important—playing baseball or worshipping God? Oftentimes the parents of my youth at my former church would complain in ways like, “I’m so mad at that cheer coach for requiring a practice on Sunday. This is out of control! But what’re you going to do?” Then they would shrug in resignation. “That’s just the way the world is these days,” they’d say. Let me ask this: if the coach scheduled practice for 2 am would we allow our kids to go? No, I don't think so. We'd say, "2 am is time for sleeping. My kid won't be there." So why can't we say, "9:00 am until 11:30 am on Sunday is for Bible study and worship. My kid won't be there."

I don’t buy it that we are slaves to the way the wind is blowing in our culture. The Apostle Paul didn’t buy it either. In Romans 12:2 he writes, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.” When we are transformed by the renewing of our minds we will very often find ourselves at odds with "this world" (read "our culture"). When will we stop blaming everyone around us for setting our priorities? It may be “the pattern of this world” to place Christian worship and fellowship as a lower priority than sports, academics, fundraisers, or a teenager working a part-time job but is it God’s “good, pleasing, and perfect will” to place Christian worship and fellowship as a lower priority than those things? I believe, based upon the Scriptures and the witness of the Church, that the answer for a Christian family must be a resounding “NO.”

Many Christians seem to say, “How could we ever live as Christians in a culture that doesn’t pander to us? I’m sorry, Everett. It just can’t be done.” To that I say, “Open your Bible and read it. Then read the writings of the early Church fathers.” As far as we can tell, Jesus, the apostles, and the early church never lobbied for discipleship in Jesus to be the cultural milieu. To me, it appears that the assumption is that the government and culture will always be either hostile or apathetic toward the gospel. We’ve simply lived in a fairy tale land in the West for centuries, but the fairy tale is ending. The government, the schools, the community organizations, and the sports leagues are not going to hold our hands anymore. We now actually have to grow backbones and live out our faith in ways that swim against the current. This is nothing new. Jesus was rejected and ended up on a cross. The apostles ministered in hostile cultures and all but one ended up being martyred. Read about Irenaeus of Lyons, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Perpetua and Felicitas of Carthage.

Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be eaten by wild animals as a spectacle in Rome, wrote, “Christianity is greatest when it is hated by the world.” In other words, Christianity is at its greatest when Christians actually have to make our own decisions instead of having our decisions made for us. True Christian faith only flourishes when we have true convictions and we act on them in ways that are both charitable and unswerving in our commitment to God. Read about Arabic Christians in Palestine or Iraq, or about Christians in China or Indonesia. Paul wrote to the Romans, “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” Our Christian brothers and sisters of past times, as well as in other lands in present times, faced and continue to face, mortal danger for our shared faith and we can’t even be bothered to face not having our kid start on the volleyball team? What are we teaching our kids by acting like this? What we’re teaching them is that everything is more important than worshiping God and being in fellowship with the family of believers. How can we be surprised that they’re leaving the church and never coming back? Why would they care about something that they’ve been taught doesn’t matter even as much as practice for middle school wrestling or bagging groceries at Community Market to earn gas money?

Unlike a lot of my Christian brothers and sisters, I actually don’t think we should have public prayers in government funded schools. Groups of Christian students (or students of other faiths or no faith) should be able to assemble voluntarily in their free time; students must be allowed to read their Bible just as they’d be allowed to read any other book during reading periods or study hall (when their work is done); and a student or teacher must be allowed to pray silently whenever they’re not supposed to be doing something else. I don’t buy it that the problem is our government, our schools, or our culture. I wholeheartedly believe that the problem is Christian parents, which includes me. We’re not fulfilling our biblical responsibilities. We’re not fulfilling the promises we made at our children’s baptisms. We’re not being good examples for our kids. I believe that we parents aren’t getting the job done. George Barna writes, “Everyday the Church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change.” That is the tragic reality and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re being guided around like the groups of little kids I used to see walking around the daycare centers in Norman holding on to a long rope, going wherever they were led.

Don’t get me wrong, sports are of value. Academic success is of value. A part-time job is of value. Raising funds for an organization is of value. These things are of value, but not of enough value to keep us from worshipping God and being in fellowship with the covenant community. It is time for us to stop blaming everybody else and to start living out our convictions. As I read recently, "Do not fear failure. Fear wasting your life suceeding at things that don't matter."

Another great quote comes from the book of Joshua. "Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." I ask you to pray for me as a parent that I might live that out and I will pray the same for you.

We really do reap what we sow. When we plant corn, corn grows. When we plant tomatoes, we shouldn't be surprised when tomatoes grow. So if what we sow is kids who think everything else is more important than worship and fellowship with the community of faith then what we will reap is adults who think everything else is more important than worship and fellowship with the community of faith. That is much more of a concern in regard to the future life of our congregation than how much money remains in the investment accounts.

There is so much more to say about the role of parents in setting priorities and passing the faith on to their kids, so this will be continued next week…

From the Cutting Room Floor

I remember a conversation we had during a short story workshop I was in once. We were talking about how quite often we will begin writing a story and then realize about five or ten pages in that this story is just actually beginning, that really those first five or ten pages are prologue; they aren't really necessary. So they end up on the "cutting room floor." Our professor called it "writing your way into the story." That happens with sermons too. Very often I will cut a good five minutes worth of material from my sermon each week after realizing that, while it might be interesting (at least to me), it is really more like scaffolding on the outside of the sermon. Now that the sermon is done, that scaffolding should be taken down. I usually realize that when a little voice in my head on Friday or Saturday says, "You don't need that; so cut it." Strangely enough that voice sounds a lot like Paul Johnson!

Anyway, this past week (late on Saturday night) I cut a good bit of material from the beginning of my sermon. It just didn't need to be there and the sermon was tighter and more powerful without it. But its still interesting and edifying information about early church history. So I want to share it with you. When you read it you'll know why I cut it. It's not sermon worthy. But it's still worth reading. Here it is:

The earliest church did not have the New Testament. This makes sense because you cannot have something until it exists. The New Testament is a collection of scriptural documents that came out of the life of the early church. Over the decades as letters were written and accounts of Jesus’ life authored, some of those new documents came to be viewed, for many reasons, as more important than the others, even as important as the Hebrew Bible. But, while the earliest churches surely utilized the new writings from Paul and the others in worship in different ways, for the first several generations Christians had only the Hebrew Bible (in its Greek form which was called the Septuagint), what we call the Old Testament. And that, interestingly enough, was in many ways sufficient for those first generations. The original apostles were passing on the stories of Jesus and then after the apostles died those who had known and learned from the apostles continued to pass on those stories. But those stories of Jesus were always viewed through the lens of what we call the Old Testament. In fact, the Old Testament is quoted by the New Testament writers around seven hundred times, and the trend continues as you read the documents written by the leaders that came after the deaths of the apostles and even for the first few hundred years of the Church. In their writings, they rarely quote what came to be known as the New Testament, but there is one passage after another from the Hebrew Bible quoted in their letters and sermons. In fact, the first use of the term New Testament is found in the writings of the early theologian Tertullian who lived from the year 155 to the year 220. So never think that the Old Testament is unimportant—-Jesus and the apostles certainly did not.

In the gospels, Jesus speaks about his own ministry and identity in terms of being the fulfillment, the natural fruit born from the promises made by God to God’s people, promises that are recorded in the Hebrew Bible. During his temptation in the desert, Jesus counters Satan by quoting from Deuteronomy. He stands up in the synagogue in Nazareth and introduces himself through reading from the prophet Isaiah. He rides a donkey into Jerusalem because hundreds of years earlier the prophet Zechariah said that a great peaceful king would do that. As he is dying on the cross, he quotes Psalm 22. These are just a few examples, and he surely spent time with his inner group of disciples searching the scriptures with them, showing them the promises that had been made which had pointed to him all along. He does this after his resurrection even, with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. And then after Jesus is gone and the Holy Spirit has come, the apostles and other early church leaders, in trying to explain to people what happened in Jesus, feel the need to dig even deeper into the Hebrew Bible. But reading the Hebrew Bible is different for them now that they are on this side of the incarnation of Jesus. They see things in the scriptures now that they didn’t see before, although those words were always there. It is like when you watch a movie with a lot of plot twists. Then when the surprising ending is revealed, you think, “Wow, I never saw that coming.” So you watch the movie over again, but already knowing the ending this time, and all of a sudden you realize during this second, third, or fourth viewing that all the clues were there. You just didn’t know what to look for the first time you watched it. The way that Jesus lived through teaching and healing, how he died on the cross, the earth shattering reality of his resurrection from the dead, and his eventual ascension to heaven made a lot of people, even the apostles I believe, say, “Wow, we never saw that coming!” So after it was over they went back to the scriptures again, but already knowing the ending this time, and they realized that all the clues were there. They just didn’t know what to look for before they’d experienced Jesus.

When the apostles and other early Christians read of the ancient hope of the people of God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures they saw all those prophetic hopes wrapped up in the person of Jesus. So before the gospels were ever even written, and even before Paul may have written any of his letters, it is believed that the first documents (none have survived) produced by the earliest Christians were lists of prophecies from the Hebrew Bible that the church believed had been fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These lists would be copied and then carried around by early Christian evangelists who would use these lists, known to scholars as testimonia, to “give specific examples to support their claim that Jesus had fulfilled the traditional expectations concerning the Messiah.” Those prophecies then made their way into the documents that would later make up our New Testament. Our New Testament is very much a collection of inspired writings that proclaim that Jesus is, through some strange, unexpected, God ordained way, the fulfillment of the hopes not only of the ancient Israelites, but of the world.

We take the New Testament for granted. It is essential and priceless to us. It is hard to imagine that the faith of the earliest Christians was supported by the Hebrew Bible, the oral traditions of the apostles' stories of Jesus, and letters that occasionally showed up, which they would read over and over again when they met together on Sundays. Maybe that will give us a little more sympathy for those early Christians that writers like Paul, Peter, James, and Jude were writing to because they kept screwing up. Also, it helps us to understand why there were so many letters being exchanged (surely far more than we know of) and why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, finally thought, "It's probably time to write some of this down." But knowing this about the early church should also help us to remember the immeasurable value of the Old Testament for growing us in our faith and even in pointing us toward our Lord Jesus.

I hope that was worth picking up off the cutting room floor. Enjoy this first week of Advent. Take some time to be quiet. Christmas is still several weeks away. It will be there when we get there; I promise. Just be quiet. God just might meet you in the silence.

In the love of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Everett