Rulz

"Rulz"
Matthew 23:1-12

I was talking with Jennifer a week ago, or so, about some of the results of the survey the Pastor Nominating Committee has emailed out.  According to an early assessment of the early results of the survey, it appears even Jesus may not measure up to what people want of their next Pastor.

So I shared with Jennifer a version of the description of the perfect pastor that has been going around on the internet for a number of years.  The following is a variation of what I sent Jennifer.  This version is a chain letter about the perfect pastor.  This is what it says.

The following is a description of a perfect pastor.  A perfect pastor is one who preaches exactly 20 minutes, but who shares with people the wisdom of the ages.
The perfect pastor condemns sin but never hurts anyone's feelings.
The perfect pastor works from 6 a.m. until midnight, and is also the janitor.
The perfect pastor makes $100 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a nice car, and gives $75 a week to the church.
The perfect pastor is good looking.
The perfect pastor loves to work with the youth, and spends most of the time with older folks.
The perfect pastor smiles all the time with a straight face, has a great sense of humor and is seriously dedicated to the work of the ministry.
The perfect pastor makes 25 visits a day on church members, yet spends most of the time evangelizing the unchurched and is always in the office if and when needed.

If your pastor does not measure up to this description, box up your pastor and send him/her to the church at the top of the chain letter list.  In one week you will receive 1,562 pastors.  One of them should be perfect.  Please follow the instructions closely.  Don't break the chain.  One church broke the chain and got its old pastor back.

I've seen a number of lists like this.  Someone has even made a poster of the perfect pastor with a number of the same details.  What is interesting to me is that I have not seen a similar list, from the Pastor's point of view, of what they think the perfect church member, or the perfect congregation would look like.

I know ministers get together and grumble from time to time.  But the wisest of pastors I know have come to terms with the fact that there is no perfect congregation.  And the wisest congregations I know have come to terms with the fact there are no perfect pastors.

And a further truth is, we are all ministers.  The dividing line between ministers and parishioners is a false one.  We are all trying to do the best we can in the work of Christ in this place.  We all struggle with how to be effective in our own ways in this thing called ministry.

Maybe you have asked yourself, What can I do in service to the Lord?  How can I know that I've made some impact on other people's lives in the name of Christ?  How do I best do ministry?

When I am asking myself these kinds of questions, I turn to the 23rd chapter of Matthew's gospel.  In this chapter, Jesus is frustrated. He is frustrated by people who are trying to be ministers but they're going about it all wrong.  They are asking themselves the same kinds of questions we ask ourselves, but their answers are all wrong.

A businessman decided to move his family to the country because he wanted to be a chicken farmer.  So he got a batch of eggs and started to work.  But all the eggs died.  He got another batch of eggs and tried to get them to hatch.  Not one of them did.  So, he went to his county agent and tried to find out what he was doing wrong.  He looked at the agent and said, "Am I planting the eggs too deep or too far apart."

Jesus is telling the disciples and the crowd that those who are going about the ministry all wrong have the eggs, they have the tools, they have the farm, but they are using the right things in the wrong way.  By listening to what Jesus says the ministry is not, we discover what Jesus thinks the ministry is.  By listening to how Jesus tells the people how ministry is being done wrong, we find out at the same time how to do the ministry right.

One side fact you need to remember is that the Pharisees, to whom Jesus was talking, were not priests, they weren't ordained, nor were they clergy in any way.  They were lay people.  Parishoners.  Church members, trying to be more intentional about being ministers.  They were like you.  So let's turn to Matthew 23 and see what Jesus said about how they went wrong, so that we won't make the same mistakes.

First, Jesus said that the people who were trying to be serious about doing ministry didn't practice what they preached.  The problem wasn't with what they were saying.  It wasn't their preaching.

They weren't like the minister who was preaching his sermon when a man in the back pew turned his head to one side and said, "Louder!"  The preacher raised his voice a notch and continued his sermon, which was not too interesting.  After a few more minutes the man said again, "Louder!"  The preacher raised his volume even more and continued on.  But by now, the sermon had become really boring.  The man in back said again, "Louder!"
At this point a man on the front row turned and yelled back to the man in rear, "What's the matter, can't you hear back there?"
"No," said the man in the back.
"Well," said the man down front, "move over, I'm come back to join you."

The people Jesus was talking about, on the other hand, knew how to communicate.  They were good story tellers.  They had all the right scripture memorized.  In fact, they knew their Bibles from the front cover to the back.  There was just one problem, said Jesus.  They weren't listening to their own preaching and teaching.  They didn't do what they were telling everyone else to do.  They weren't following the advice they were doling out.  They weren't practicing what they were preaching.  There was a huge gulf between what they said and how they acted.

By telling people how ministry should not be done, Jesus is telling us at the same time how it should be done.  If you want to be an effective follower of Jesus, what is vitally important is that how you live be in line with what you profess.  People who are observing you, who may not be believers, are trying to gauge how much you really believe what you are saying you believe.  The only way to figure that out is by how much you put into action, how much you practice, what you say you believe.

My brother in Minneapolis put up a post on Facebook that told about an older couple from that area.  They were found in their home frozen to death.  They had had their electricity shut off.  They were apparently eating dog food out of the can for their meals.  There were two ironies about this frozen couple.  The first was, in their closet, a suitcase was found with $60,000 in cash.  The other irony was that this couple volunteered at the local community health clinic, teaching the poorer people in the Minneapolis area about proper personal hygiene and food preparation.

What Jesus is saying here is clear.  What it really comes down to is not what you teach.  You can still be an effective teacher just spouting information, Bible verses, theology, or, evidently, hygiene and food preparation.  But you can be much more effective in your ministry if you make sure that how you live is the same as what you teach and what you profess.  That's called integrity.  Integrity is the best witness.  Integrity is that quality where what you believe comes together with how you live.  Integrity, says Jesus, is the most profound way to do ministry.


The next rule Jesus addressed had to do with the rules themselves.  How'd we get so many rules?  That's the question Jesus is asking.  Who made up all these rules, and why are people trying to carry them all around like a burden strapped to their backs?  Why do religious leaders push so many rules at people, and why do people accept those rules as the gospel?  What is Christ's ministry and teaching and sacrifice on the Cross all about, anyway?

Let me read to you a list of verses that answer those questions and see if you pick up on the most important word in all of them:
For freedom Christ has set us free.  Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.  (Galatians 5:1)
God has called you to a life of freedom.  (Galatians 5:13)
You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.  If the son set you free you are free indeed…  (John 8:32, 36)
Live as free people… (Hebrews 2:16)
My friend, the message is that Jesus can forgive your sins!  Trying to follow all the religious laws to the letter could not set you free from all your sins.  But everyone who has faith in Jesus is set free.  (Acts 13:38-39)
The Holy Spirit will give you life that comes from Christ Jesus and will set you free from sin and death.  (Romans 8:2)

Did you catch the key word in all those verses?  What was it?  (Free/Freedom)  You are free!  Free from what?  You are set free from a tyranny of shoulds and oughts, rules and regulations, heaps of expectations, loads of guilt ridden intimidation.  You are free because God in Christ has forgiven you.  God has forgiven all those who make too many religious rules and those who break too many religious rules.  God has forgiven it all.

If it is forgiven, then why are we still carrying it around?  Let it go.  In fact, what I think Jesus is saying here is that those who want to be effective in their ministry are the ones who loosen burdens, not add to them.  Ministry is not about pushing burdensome religiosity.  Ministry is not about loading people up with guilt and then saying, "Have a nice day."  Ministry is about helping each other become relieved of all that, ripped off of us if need be.

As ministers to one another, we can't allow each other, in the name of Christ, to take our Christian beliefs and turn them into a bully stick of do's and don'ts, and beat each other over the head with it.  Why do we do that to ourselves?

I attended a preaching seminar in Dallas early in my ministry.  Someone asked the minister who was leading this one particular workshop why his loud, more forceful preaching of his younger days had given way to a quieter, more persuasive manner of preaching. The minister laughed and said, "When I was young I thought it was the thunder that convinced people; but when I grew older I discovered it was the lightening.  So I determined that in the future I would thunder less and lighten more."

That's the role of effective ministry, says Jesus to the disciples and the crowd.  Ministry is about the business of lightening people's loads, not adding to them.  Don't carry all that stuff around:  guilt, confusion, shoulds and oughts, a sense of unforgiveness.  Be free.  Get together with another follower in this sanctuary and through confidential, prayerful conversation, help each other take the load off.  There is no greater ministry than that of lightening people's loads.

The last point I would make (since I need to come close to my 20 minutes for this to be a perfect sermon) is that Jesus is telling people that to be effective in ministry, you must make proper use of Scripture and prayer.  That is, the spiritual life, the life of scripture and prayer, is more internal than external.  Those doing ministry in Jesus day got this mixed up.  God gave the following commandment:
And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.  (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

People thought God meant this literally.  I think what God wanted the people to do was to put God's teaching foremost in their minds and hearts.  Read it as often as possible.  Read it not just to read it, but so that it will become part of your thinking and feeling and daily living.  Make sure God's word is in front of you, visible, and attention grabbing.  Read it.  Pray it.  Live it.

But instead, people were wearing little boxes tied to straps that dangled right between their eyes that had tiny scripture verses inside.  They literally wrote scripture on their door posts and gates.  They wrote scripture on their wrists and hands.  They did all that because they took this verse in Deuteronomy literally.  They made their spirituality a matter of external scripture boxes, tattoos and graffiti rather than an internal matter of the heart and mind.

The spiritual life of scripture reading and of prayer is something you do like eating.  If you just paint scripture on your door post, you can walk by it everyday and forget it's there.  But if it's like eating you chew on it, you digest it.  You let it become a part of you, nourishing every part of you, informing every decision you make.  Scripture, in this way, must also be allowed to subvert, if necessary, our prejudices, our laziness, and our half-hearted commitment and faith.

Doing effective ministry means not treating our spiritual life of prayer and scripture reading as simply some adornment.  We are not to let our spirituality become only a piece of jewelry, or a bumper sticker.  To do that is to make a gross miscalculation of the purpose and power of scripture and prayer.

There are lots of ways to do ministry.  The key is not to get side-tracked into doing ministry in an ineffective way.  We all want to be faithful.  We all want to be ministers for Christ in some way.  Paying attention to Jesus' assessment of what effective ministry is NOT, here in Matthew 23, helps us see what Jesus thinks effective ministry really IS.