Life on Purpose
July 5, 2009—Mark 6: 1-13
Today we celebrate two incredible spiritual leaders who each brought to their life’s work incredible purpose, a real sense of mission. With their purposes they matched that with power to accomplish their purpose. As you might guess one of these spiritual leaders is Jesus. Jesus is central to our Christian spirituality.
One little Sunday School girl was asked by her teacher, “Who comes out on February 2nd to see its shadow—and depending upon what it sees, determines whether or not there will be six more weeks of winter?” The children hemmed and hawed, and finally the little girl raised her hand. The teacher prompted her. “Okay, Sally, what’s the answer?”
Sally replied, “Well, to be honest I think the answer is the ground-hog, but in Sunday School, it seems that the answer to every question is Jesus.”
The people of Jesus’ day did not believe Jesus had all the answers, nor was he the answer. Jesus had begun his ministry and was attracting crowds because people discovered that Jesus knew what he was talking about. So, he went home to be the guest rabbi in the local synagogue.
The home-folks reaction was not a five star rating. They literally ran him out of town and heckled him with the taunt, “He’s just a carpenter, a blue-collar working man. His birth was a scandal. He has no credentials. Who does he think he is preaching to us?”
The words of wisdom echoed loudly that day, “A prophet is without honor in his own hometown.” Perhaps, that’s why today we label a person an “expert” if he or she lives at least an hour away.
While the rest of the country-side was amazed at the wisdom Jesus was conveying, his own neighbors could not get beyond judging him based upon former pre-conceptions and biases about his family. Jesus learned two important lessons that day in Nazareth.
(a) With all the power in the world available to Jesus, no person can be healed if they refuse to be healed. Neville Chamberlain, Great Britain’s Prime Minister before WWII had a policy of appeasement dealing with Nazi Germany. How that policy turned out, broke Chamberlain’s heart. An author doing a biography of Chamberlain accused his doctor of being incompetent. After all Chamberlain was only a few years older than his successor, Winston Churchill and was a strong, healthy man. The author confronted his doctor about whether or not he liked his patient. The doctor’s reply was revealing, “I was very fond of Neville. He suffered from shyness. He did not want to live; and when a man says that, no doctor can save him.” We may call it faith or the will to live, but without it no person can survive.
(b) Jesus also learned that preaching is ineffective in the wrong atmosphere, or to the wrong congregation. Our churches would be very different if people remember that they preach more than half of the sermon. In an atmosphere of expectancy the poorest sermon can catch fire. In an atmosphere of coldness, or bland indifference, the most spirit-packed words will fall lifeless on the floor.
Many people believe that Christian spirituality is living each day with no thought about what that day can offer. Their life purpose is “Wherever I shoot my arrow, there I will draw a circle around the arrow, and I will always hit the bulls-eye.” But that was NOT how Jesus lived and carried out his purpose.
He had a purpose and a plan and it was packed with power. His purpose was to proclaim the “good news” of a relationship with God and that the heavenly realm was a “here and now” reality, NOT something in the future.
Coming out of his rejection in his hometown, Jesus set his purpose into action. He sent his 12 disciples out to carry out Jesus’ mission: to proclaim the good news, to defeat the demons that held power over people’s lives, and to heal the sick. We who are McDougall United Church need to ask ourselves the question: “Are Jesus’ purposes of proclaiming the good news, defeating the demons of fear, anger and pain, and healing the body, mind and spirit our purposes too?”
Jesus strategy to accomplish his purpose was to target the “God-fearers” of the 1st century. The “God-fearers” were folks who were spiritual, but not religious. They did not fit into any of the legislated religious boxes. The “God-fearers” were spiritually hungry and thirsty but the rigidity of the religious systems gave them no open doors to pursue their spirituality.
Jesus purpose also expected to see results. He wanted to see lives transformed and changed. He instructed his disciples to go and just bring themselves to their task, but if people did not respond to their efforts, to wipe the dust off their sandals and move on to approach others.
Jesus did not want them to just go through the rituals of going to church, doing their duty and then forgetting their purpose until they came back to church for another pick-me-up shot in the spirit.
One of the main criticisms of mainline churches today is that we are simply going through the motions, doing the same old, same old, with the same old declining results. Today’s “God-fearers” are the younger generations who have no religious background. They are the folks who do not comprehend any connection between their spiritual longings and that a church as a spiritual community can empower them to find their own spiritual purpose.
I believe that many of the parallels between the 1st century and the 21st are in our faces. And the parallels mean that here and now is a time pregnant with opportunity and also filled with lots of seductive distractions than call us from living our lives with purpose.
Finally, who’s the other spiritual leader I promised to tell you about. He’s a man whose 500th birthday we celebrate this week. John Calvin was born July 10th, 1509. Calvin was a magnetic but often mis-understood leader of the Protestant Reformation.
Rick Warren has written a best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life. The first line of that book is , “It’s not about you.” He goes on, “If you want to know why you were placed on this planet (to find out your life purpose) you must begin with God.” The book is a very God-centered agenda, that states the belief that we cannot discover our life’s purpose by starting with a focus on ourselves. Instead, we are called to turn to our Creator and discover the divine purpose for our life. Why were we put in this world. It’s not about us, it’s about God.
This idea came from John Calvin. Calvin and Rick Warren believe that knowledge of self requires our awareness and knowledge of God. God created the world in love and as Calvin wrote, “there is not one blade of grass, no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.”
Calvin was a brilliant young man who intended to become a Catholic priest but entered law instead. After encountering the writings of the Protestant Reformers, Calvin had a conversion experience. He wrote, “God subdued my heart to docility.” Calvin broke away from Catholicism, left France and settled in Switzerland as an exile. In 1536, Calvin published one of the greatest theological works ever written, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This major systemic theology begins with God, the Creator and ends with reflections on civil government. Not bad effort for a 27 year old.
His writings impressed the people of Geneva, Switzerland and he was invited to move there and help with the Reform Movement. His workload was tremendous: he pastured a church, preached daily, wrote commentaries on almost every book in the Bible, authored many pamphlets, trained and sent out missionaries and influenced schools and the civil government. No wonder he suffered chronic migraines.
Geneva became a magnet for Protestant exiles and the city tried to live according to the scriptural ideas Calvin laid out in his writings. He was serious about his purpose and that seriousness caused some to criticize him. His influence ripples through the 5 centuries since his life on earth.
His lifting up the primacy of the sovereignty of God (it’s about God and not about us) had a very powerful impact on a group of faithful Germons used his ideas to create the “Theological Declaration of Barmen” This rejected attempts of the Third Reich to “become the single totalitarian order of human life.”
Two J.C’s, John Calvin and Jesus Christ, lived with purpose and power. Not their own power, but Divine Power because each of them held the primacy of a strong, healthy relationship with God as central to a purpose-filled life. What about you? Are you living on purpose or are you simply going through the routines of daily existence?
I believe that the world, the “God-fearers” and the structures of our society, need and hunger for the good news we are called to proclaim and live. This capital city, needs a vital and faithful and healthy McDougall Church.
There’s lots of discussion about power these days: the rising cost of power, electrical power distribution in the province; the change of part of Epcor into a partially traded public company. But the power Jesus and John Calvin proclaimed and lived is much deeper and ultimately more important. So, answer for yourself the question: Am I living on purpose?
The future depends on our answers.
