Scripture readings:
Proverbs 3:5-8; Romans 15:14-33
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| Walking along the Columbia River at Desert Aire/Mattawa WA |
Once upon a time there was
there was a town with a church football league. One of the teams was in their Sunday
school classroom that they used for their locker room, while the coach gave
them a pre-game pep talk. He wrote the words “Being on Jesus’ team”, and he
said, “Always remember, men, there is no “I” in Jesus, but there is an “us”.
By the time I was in high
school, in P. E. class, I had earned quite a reputation in sports. The team
captains always fought over me, to keep me off their team. I think my
un-coordination skills were without equal in the whole school.
I was a geek. I was a
nerd. I seemed to be the only real history geek in my class, so, in order to
spend time with other kids like me, I became a science geek. It really wasn’t
that hard. I liked science too. So, I spent my free time at school in the
science room.
But even when you get to
talk and play together with chemicals and with the strobe light in the back
room you don’t learn a lot of social skills in the science room. Neither was
there any science club where we might work together as a team to win
competitions with other schools.
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| Along the way, I got adopted as a mascot for one of my favorite teams: The Dogs |
So, I was known as the
quietest kid in my class of sixty kids: the shyest kid of them all. Even if we
had a science team, I would have been too shy to join it.
I had one cool friend,
named Chris, who asked me one day, “You’re a lone wolf, aren’t you?” Even though
I was seventeen I really wasn’t familiar with that phrase. I asked Chris what
it meant. He told me. And, so, I knew myself in a new way: yes, I was a
lone-wolf. I still am.
I had made a commitment of
my life to Christ when I was about nine years old; while watching Billy Graham
on television. I loved Jesus, but there were problems with the church. We
stopped going, and though I read the Bible and prayed lot, there was something
missing that I have told some of you about before.
I went back to my old church
when I was eighteen and I went with the youth group to a youth rally at one of
the county fairgrounds. Toward the end of the speaker’s message I knew that the
Lord expected me to go forward to make a new commitment up front. But I was too
embarrassed to do it.
I prayed with agony and
struggle to get out of this, “Lord you know I love you more than anything!”
The Lord was very firm
with me. I felt that he was talking to me from the cross, as he said in my
heart, “Are you willing to be someone who can say ‘no’ to me?” This almost
knocked the breath out of me. I couldn’t face being a person who ever said ‘no’
to Jesus on the cross. I had to go forward.
The counselor up front
coached me to pray things that I knew very well how to pray. I had known for
years what God wanted me to be and how it is that we come to him and let him
come into us. I still commit my life to Jesus every day.
That coaching in a prayer
to commit to, and to receive, Jesus as my Lord and Savior was not God’s point
that night. The point was that I had to surrender what ruled my life. I had to
surrender my fear and my shyness. I had to surrender my way of life as a
lone-wolf. I’m still a lone-wolf, but I’m a “surrendered-to-God” lone-wolf.
Just as alcoholics can
find the freedom of sobriety by surrendering in every way to their higher
power, still that sobriety depends on their ability to say, “I’m an alcoholic”.
This is a kind of surrender of one of the deep and powerful things in their
lives.
There is a surrender that
destroys you, and there is a surrender that gives you life. This surrender
gives freedom, and strength. This life comes from that Higher Power which is
God. But it also comes from joining a team where you take care of each other.
A couple of my nerdy-geeky
friends were also surrendering to Jesus in their own ways. By going forward in
front of other people, including the members of my youth group, surrendering my
shyness, my fear, my awkwardness to Jesus, I became an honest and a
self-surrendered lone-wolf before God.
I joined a team of honest
and surrendered followers of Jesus. You could call it “The Jesus Team”. It’s
been playing and praying together for over two thousand years. This Jesus Team
is a group of people who aren’t afraid to be honest, and humble, and surrendered
with each other. Everyone on the Jesus Team comes from the same place and we
all know how to say, “Hi! I’m Dennis, and I’m a sinner. Hi! I’m Dennis and I’m
rescued and made new by God’s love and grace alone given to me in Jesus. I’m
rescued and made new by his life in me.”
To be able (all of us) to
say such things together is a sure give-away that however different our lives
may be, we have prayed, pretty much, the very same prayers, and made the very
same deep offerings of our heart, and soul, and life to God.
At one time that offering
of ourselves cut so deep that it seemed like a human sacrifice of ourselves:
almost like an amputation. But now we see that this offering is the greatest
thing we have ever done; and, far from losing ourselves, we have gained a new
self we would never part with, because we see that our life has become a gift
from God. God has given us our new selves as his gift, through the cross and
the resurrection; through dying and rising again.
It isn’t only Jesus who
dies and rises. Now we can do it with him, in our heart and mind. Now we are
free and whole, because we can die to ourselves, and rise in the love of Jesus
every day.
For me, this particular
lone-wolf became part of a team; the Jesus Team. That team meets and struggles
together in a lot of places, and the Jesus Team meets here, right now. Prayer
is a necessary part of this.
We are a team partly
because we have all needed to say much the same kind of prayers for much the
same reasons. We are also a team because we all take care of each other through
our prayers for each other. We pray for our performance in the most important game
in the world.
Paul shows us this kind of
team prayer in his request to his team members in Rome. He asks them to pray
for him, but not just for anything. Paul asks them to pray for his ministry: to
pray for Paul as he carries out his mission, his program for the game, for the
team.
Paul has a difficult and
dangerous play ahead of him. Paul is running to a part of the line where he
will draw their fiercest opponents to himself.
There was talk of a famine
in the land of Judea. The Christians there would see the worst of this because
those with the biggest resources to give to those in need would refuse to give
that relief to Christians. The biggest resources to buy food and other aide for
the famine victims were kept in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Christians
were considered heretics and traitors, and they would receive no help in Judea.
Paul was going where he
was very well known as one of the team captains of the heretics and traitors.
Both he and the money, or the bank receipts he brought with him (in the form of
a scroll, or a tablet of wax or clay) were huge prizes in this game.
Paul was running willingly
into danger, and he needed all the will-power he could muster. Paul had been
imprisoned, and shackled, and beaten, and tortured, and nearly killed more than
once before. If you ever had a surgery that really didn’t make you better, and
your doctor was recommending another try at that same surgery that hurt you so
much and never helped you, then you would look forward to that surgery just like
Paul was looking forward to running to the relief of the Christians in
Jerusalem.
So, Paul asks for prayer.
“I urge you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of
the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me. Pray that I may
be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service in Jerusalem may
be acceptable to the saints there, so that, by God’s will I may come to you….”
(Romans 15:30-32)
“Join me in my struggle by
praying to God for me.” The way that this is translated, here, teaches us that
our team, with our teamwork together, gets strong when we pray for other team
members for their work on the Jesus Team. Prayer makes us sweat together for
our teamwork.
On this team we take care
of each other by praying to God for the work, and for the effort that the
others are doing for the team, and for Jesus, the captain of the work.
Imagine that you’ve been
assigned to be a member of a team of two. Your other team member needs you to
take care of them because of some weakness in their health. Your part, on that
team, is to play the care-giver position.
It’s a common experience
that the care-giver grows closer and closer to the one needing care simply
because of their devotion to care-giving. Prayer-giving is care-giving that
strengthens whatever weaknesses our other team members struggle with.
But the translation could
be better. Paul is saying something like: “Agonize with me in your
prayers for me.” I remember, when I was in high school, going by the
football field in August, when the temperature was often close to one hundred
degrees, or more, and I could see the football team working out. I knew
something about the agony they were going through because P. E., in September,
would find me playing football in gym class, and sometimes September was hotter
than August in my home town.
That team was sweating
together. They joined with each other in the same agony, and that made them a
team: sweating together. They were becoming more and more the team they needed
to be in order to play their game and win. Their sweat and their sore muscles
were building team work.
As the Jesus team, we have
important work to do. Taking care of each other in our sacrifices together, and
in our sacrifices for each other, through agonizing prayer, helps us to grow
strong together. This prayerful agonizing together makes us the team we need to
be in order to play with Jesus and win.
There’s a team word hidden
from us by our English language. It’s the word about the contribution to God’s
people in Judea. The contribution to the poor Christians on the Jesus Team in
Judea wasn’t merely financial.
In Greek, the contribution
is called a “koinonia”. “Koinonia” means communion. It means fellowship. But
those are old English words that sound strange to modern ears, and to those who
don’t know the slang and lingo of Christians. Koinonia, communion, and
fellowship can mean “partnership”.
The contribution was the
teamwork of the Jesus Team. To work as a team, they needed to agonize with
Paul. To work as a team with the poor in Judea, they had to agonize with them
as well. Doesn’t that sound terrible?
I was never on a team
willingly until I joined the Jesus-team and, even then, I wasn’t sure I wanted
to have anything to do with it. The Lord told me, when I was twelve years old,
that I had to be something like a pastor on this team, and with all my heart I
wanted nothing to do with it.
That’s what was really
wrong with me, until God asked me for something that I couldn’t refuse. I had
to be a person who would no longer say ‘no’ to God. It went against my very
nature, and against everything I had learned by experience.
I had to take the position
in the line that I feared most. I had to take the position of agony. I had to
play a position in which I would agonize for the team in order to become a
member of the team.
At the University of
Dubuque Theological Seminary, every September, there would be a football game
between the married students and the single students. That was unfair in itself
because, obviously, the married students had to be more studly than the rest of
us. And there were more married students than unmarried ones, so they had a lot
more team members to choose from.
Fred Halde, one of my best
seminary friends at the time, was our captain. Fred put me in the line opposite
Dave Ulum, who had played college football before coming to seminary. It was
one of those tiny, Christian, Liberal Arts Colleges that you find all over the
Midwest, but Dave was still a big kid. The lines would hit each other, and I
would hit Dave as hard as I could, and hitting Dave would always send me flying
through the air backward flat on my back. Over and over again, I would hit Dave
Ulum so hard that I would just fly; fly through the air backwards.
This bothered me a lot. I
asked captain Fred to please let me take some other spot on the line, but Fred
said that I was the only one on the team that could free up the better players
to play at their best for the team. So, I went back to face Dave.
Dave looked at me and his voice
almost cracked as he pleaded with me, “Please, Dennis, please, go somewhere
else!” Dave was a softy despite having been in college football.
My answer was, “Sorry
Dave, I have to stay here.” And, so, we played on, until the Singles lost to
the Marrieds.
Dave was a friend too. I
know that he was praying about this. That would be just like him. And I was
praying too: a very agonized prayer. And this is what builds us together as a
team for the work ahead.
You have work to do on the
Jesus-team. This work is much more than church-work. You have Jesus-work to do.
Church-work is important,
but it’s designed for the support of the Jesus-work. Our church-work can be a
place where we can sweat together because it’s one part of our training places.
It’s like the weight room is there.
We’re glad if we can do
our church-work together, but the church-work is for the sake of the
Jesus-work. Sometimes church-work makes it possible to give the hospitality
that we want to offer the community around us, in Jesus’ name. And church-work
is like the locker room where you do the team-work of psyching up together for
the game, or the cooling off for half-time and for later.
My position in the line-up
requires me to take care of you in such a way as to strengthen you, and train
you, and teach you whatever you may need in order to do your Jesus-work, not by
yourself but bringing in the whole team, praying for each other because we know
and share your Jesus-work just as well as you know and share our own.
If we do this we can cut
against the grain of so much that the conventional wisdom tells us. The
conventional wisdom of our time tells us: “Go your own way. Take care of
yourself. Be a lone-wolf. If you happen to be a Christian, then be a Christian
lone-wolf, but not a surrendered one. Be a hold-out lone-wolf, not fully stuck
to God, not fully stuck to others.
Let’s learn to tell each
other what the Jesus-work is that Jesus is calling us to do on the team. Then
we can know how to pray for each other. Then we can know how to build our line
of the team in Desert Aire and Mattawa. When we know everyone’s position, then
we can plan our next play: and the next, and the next. And we can hit our work
and fly through the air with it: only forward and not backward.
We have Jesus work to do!
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