When I was in seminary, there was a guy I knew named Allan. Allan was a little younger than I am, but he’d also come to the ministry later in life; he’d been a chiropractor before going to seminary. The fact that we were both going to be second-career pastors gave us something in common, so we became friends.
There was one thing, though, that Allan and I did not have in common at all. Allan loved to work on cars. In his spare time, Allan would restore classic cars and sell them. He always had at least one car that he was working on, sometimes two. He could literally talk for hours about the car he was working on at the moment and what part of it he was working on and what he’d to do to find the exact right parts for it and so forth. He’d take pictures of the cars as he was restoring them and show them to me in their various stages of restoration.
Now, if you know me, you know that I know nothing about cars. I know how to drive one, and how to put gas in it, but that’s about it. I have no real idea what happens when I turn the key that actually causes the car to run. I just have no aptitude whatsoever for anything mechanical.
Now, given that, you might think that when Allan started going on about his cars, I’d be bored to death. The truth is, though, that I was not bored at all. I loved hearing Allan talk about his cars, simply because he was so fired up about them. His love for what he was doing, his enthusiasm for it, made it interesting to me, even though a lot of the time I did not really understand what he was talking about. I’d get caught up in his enthusiasm, asking him how his car was going and asking to see the latest picture. I was not just being polite; I really wanted to know. His passion about cars was contagious, even to someone like me who normally had no particular interest in the subject.
We talked last week about what it means to be the church. One of the things the church needs to be is enthusiastic. We need to be passionate about our faith. We need to be enthusiastic about our church. We need to be eager to tell people about it. We need to be as fired up about our faith and our church as Allan was about those cars, because that kind of fire is contagious. As the founder of the United Methodist church, John Wesley, once said, when you’re on fire about something, people will come a long way just to watch you burn.
The thing is that a lot of us don’t necessarily think of ourselves as enthusiastic people. After all, we’re from the upper Midwest. We’re the kind of people that Garrison Keillor makes fun of. We’re the kind of people who get a little afraid about getting too fired up about something, because it might make us stand out from the crowd. Here’s what I mean: remember Neal Wanless, the guy from Winner who won the Powerball jackpot a couple of years ago? He was asked how he felt about getting all that money. His response was, basically, “Well, that’ll be nice, I guess.”
At the same time, though, we all have something that gets us enthusiastic. We talked about that a few weeks ago. We all have something we just love to do and love to talk about, whether it’s cars or gardening or music or sports or animals or crafts or whatever. We may not jump up and down and shout about it, but we do have it within us to be enthusiastic and passionate people when we let ourselves be.
The thing is that most of us don’t think about our faith in that way. We don’t think about church as something to get all fired up and enthusiastic about. After all, in our society, enthusiasm about religion tends to get caricatured as something that’s not really a good thing. We think of some televangelist getting all wound up, or some street preacher yelling about how we need to repent because the world is about to end. People who are fired up about their religion tend to be thought of as either phony or crazy, and who wants to be thought of that way? So, we pull back and keep our faith to ourselves.
That’s wrong. We’re not supposed to keep our faith to ourselves. Listen again to our reading from Isaiah today: “Sing to the Lord a new song…Let the sea roar… Let the desert and the towns lift up their voice…Let the inhabitants of Sela sing for joy, let them shout from the tops of the mountains.”
That’s enthusiasm. That’s what how we’re supposed to feel about our faith. Passion and enthusiasm are not things that are somehow foreign to our Christian faith. They’re essential to our Christian faith. We’re not supposed to keep the good news of Jesus Christ to ourselves. We’re supposed to shout it from the mountaintops.
Listen to what Paul wrote in our lesson from Second Corinthians. He writes about how eager he is to spread the word about Jesus. He’s excited about the fact that God gave his friend, Titus, that same eagerness. Paul says he’s sending someone else to the people of Corinth, too, someone who’s shown lots of times how eager he is to share the gospel and now is even more fired up about it. Paul knew that if we’re going to be the people of God and bring people to Christ, we need to be passionate about it. We need to feel that enthusiasm, that fire that attracts people, as John Wesley said.
So, how do we get it? How do we get that enthusiasm, that fire, that eagerness to tell people about our faith and our church and our Savior?
Well, first of all, we need to recognize that enthusiasm and passion are not the caricature. They’re not someone jumping up and down and shouting and screaming. We can speak quietly and still be enthusiastic.
Think about those things we’re enthusiastic about: cars, gardening, music, farming, whatever. We don’t go up to people and start shouting about those things, do we? Here’s what we do. Maybe we don’t even realize it, but here’s what we do. We look for ways to turn the conversation toward those things. When there’s a lull in the conversation, those are the things we bring up. We look for openings to talk about the things that interest us. We don’t do that because we’re self-centered or anything; we do it because those are the things we’re fired up about, and we want to share our enthusiasm with the people we know. These are the things that give us a lot of joy, and we want to spread that joy to others.
See where enthusiasm starts? It’s not something that’s phony or fake. It’s a real feeling that comes from deep inside each one of us. You know how we talk about the Holy Spirit coming into each one of us? In Acts, when the Holy Spirit came into the apostles, what did people see? They saw fire. The Holy Spirit gets us fired up. That fire comes from the joy we feel about our faith in Christ. It comes from the joy we feel about our church. It comes from the joy we feel when we come together to worship every Sunday.
This is not something that’s foreign to us as United Methodists. It’s who we are. When John Wesley started the Methodist movement in England in the 1700s, the early Methodists were criticized by the established church. You know what the main criticism of them was? “Those people are too enthusiastic. They’re just a bunch of enthusiasts.” Being enthusiastic is not something that should be strange to us as United Methodists. Being enthusiastic is part of our heritage. It’s part of our DNA.
So here’s what I’d like you to do. Think about what it is that gets you here on Sunday. It’s different things for different people, but it’s something for each of us. It’s more than just the fact that we’re Christians; lots of people claim to be Christian and don’t go to church. It’d be easy for you to sleep in, or to read the Sunday paper, or to go to the river, or to watch the football pre-game, or do whatever it is you like to do. There is something about this church, something about worshipping here, with these people, that gets each one of us here on Sunday morning. There is something that makes coming here, to this church, important to each one of us.
Each of us needs to think about why this church is important to us, why we make the effort to come here, why we get that feeling of joy from coming here, why it helps us each week to come here, to this church, on Sunday. When we do, we’ll realize that it’s not just us who need this church. Other people need it, too.
They need it for the same reasons we need it. There are lots of people right outside these doors who are hurting. They don’t advertise it, but they feel it. There are lots of people right outside these doors who need some joy in their lives, who need to feel what we feel when we come here. There are lots of people right outside these doors who need our help and our support, the kind of help and support that only the people of God can give. That’s why I said last week that I can see a time when we regularly have a hundred, a hundred twenty-five, a hundred fifty people meeting in this church: because there are a lot of people in this community who need this church.
When we think about it that way, it’s not being self-centered to tell people about this church; it’s the exact opposite. The unselfish thing, the loving thing to do is to share this church with others. The unselfish thing, the loving thing to do is to reach out to people, so we can be there for them. Jesus did not tell us to go out and make disciples for his benefit of for our benefit; he told us to do that for the benefit of others, because everyone needs Jesus in their lives.
We have this kind of enthusiasm inside of us, or we would not be here. All we need to do is let it out, the way we do for our sports teams, or our garden, or whatever else we get fired up about. Look for chances to tell people what’s going on in this church. Look for chances to tell people why you like to come here on Sunday, and why they’d like it, too. If we’re enthusiastic about this church, people will not get tired of hearing about it. Our enthusiasm will get them fired up, just like Allan’s talk about cars got me fired up.
This church has a lot to offer people. It offers them love, a love that comes from God. It’s the greatest thing any of us can ever have. That’s something to get fired up about!
No comments:
Post a Comment