Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 November 2004 11:53:14
A fantastic sermon (or preach, as our church leader insists on calling them) last night. Quite astonishing (considering who we are and where we were). Chap I've never seen before preaching on the woman caught in adultery. "We all identify with the woman, don't we?" he suddenly says. "But if you can't identify with the crowd then you're missing the point."
And he drew comparisons between the crowd of people who were dragging that woman to Jesus, and saying that she should be stoned, and the local church in his area drawing up petitions against a local sex-shop. So-called 'Evangelical' Christians, he said, are very good at getting together and being against stuff - you know - sex before marriage, homosexual priests that kind of thing. And that's exactly what the crowd were doing - and under Jewish law they felt they had the right. They invited Jesus to join in with their crowd, but by stooping down and doodling in the dust he indicated that he just wouldn't do it. Instead, he got on with 'doing church' the way he always did - in the streets and with the people who really needed him.
Then this guy told us that our job was to walk away from the stone throwing crowd "older ones first", as the passage has it. He said that this wouldn't lead to our particular (battered and bruised and shrunken) church network 'growing' in numbers and converts, but that we shouldn't be "following the crowd that follows god", but following Jesus, even though he might lead us somewhere where there is no crowd.
I don't know whether this particular explanation of it makes much sense, but I found it very moving. He was obviously someone who had been big in terms of new church politics at some point (spring harvest and all), and now he said he had "become older" - and that this had changed his attitude towards a number of things. He said he was less willing to count converts and more willing to spend time with people who needed him, and that he was less happy to do things himself, even if he could see them not being done properly. For us, and where we come from as a church, I think this kind of attitude could prove a massive relief because people are so used to counting success in terms of numbers and meetings. I've never been much of a numbers and meetings person, but it made me realise I'd been feeling vaguely guilty about not being. And I'm determined to at least try not to become part of a stonethrowing crowd now -and look at where Jesus is stooping down in the dust instead.