Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
Wearing Jesus
James Sledge September
10, 2017
The
first church I served as a pastor was in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was part
of New Hope presbytery, and I served on the presbytery’s mission committee. One
of the issues facing us was a call to participate in a boycott of the Mt. Olive
Pickle Company.
The
cucumber growers in eastern North Carolina used immigrants in the “quest
worker” program to harvest the crops Mt. Olive used to make pickles. These
migrant workers moved from place to place, following the harvest seasons up the
coast. The wages were low, and the conditions in the camps that the growers
provided were often appalling. But the workers had little recourse other than
to return to their home country.
The
boycott emerged through the efforts of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, or
FLOC. They wanted to Mt. Olive to buy only from growers who paid a decent wage
and provided minimal working and living conditions. But Mt. Olive said they
couldn’t do that. They did not buy cucumbers directly from the growers. In a
system that seemed to serve little purpose other than to provide for such an
excuse, growers sold cucumbers to grading stations that in turn sold to Mt.
Olive. They could then say, we don’t deal directly with any growers. How can we
tell them what to do?
And
so FLOC called for a boycott. The National Council of Churches, which many
mainline denominations belong to, got on board, and so New Hope Presbytery’s
mission committee met with representatives from FLOC, Mt. Olive, and others in
order to make a recommendation to the presbytery about whether or not to join
the boycott.
We
held a Saturday event in the town of Mt. Olive, at Mt. Olive Presbyterian
Church, where various folks spoke for or against the boycott. One of the
stronger voices against was the pastor at Mt. Olive Presbyterian. Pickle
company managers and executives were faithful members there, and their pledges
kept the church going. This, he claimed, meant the church had no right to
criticize their employer. The denomination, he said, had no business judging
their employer or them. They were people of faith who supported their church.
What right did the church have to turn around and criticize their means of
earning a living?
The
presbytery didn’t agree and ended up supporting an, ultimately, successful
boycott. But Americans often do view faith as a private matter of the heart,
not open to judgment, even from the church. This idea showed up in last year’s
presidential election. Pope Francis commented on a proposed border wall, "A
person who thinks only about building walls... and not of building bridges, is
not Christian.” Candidate Trump fired back. “For a religious leader to question
a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian. No leader,
especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s
religion or faith,”[1]
I
suspect a lot of Americans, even ones who don’t like President Trump, tend to
agree, but Jesus and the Apostle Paul do not. Jesus makes clear in today’s
verses that the faith community should confront members who live contrary to
his teachings. It is to be done as kindly as possible, seeking reconciliation
and restoration, but it must be done. Previously, in his Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus said that calling him Lord does not matter if you don’t do God’s will. “By
their fruits you will know them,” he says. That raises an interesting
question. What is it that Christians are known for?
The
answer is a mixed bag. Christians are known for all manner of things: hospitals
and private schools, buildings and steeples, hymn books and choirs, food
pantries and soup kitchens, faith statements and doctrines. We’re are also
known for lawsuits over buildings, fights over full inclusion for women,
African Americans, or LGBT folks, as well as fights over worship style and
carpet color.
It
would be interesting to go through our community, or any community, and ask
people what they associated with Christians and the Church. Presumably, they
would speak of the concrete things, perhaps good fruit, perhaps bad. They would
speak of things they can see, not private, heart things they cannot.
These
concrete things they can see have surely contributed to the institutional
church’s struggles in our time. In an increasingly unchurched world, Christians
are too often known for hatred and bigotry, ignoring the teachings of Jesus to
gain or maintain power, and an un-Christ-like willingness to see wealth as
God’s blessing and poverty as personal failing.
We
Mainliners and Progressives may be less inclined to engage in overt hatred and
bigotry, but often we’ve been so focused on ourselves, on our worship, our personal
faith and spirituality, that we’re known for little more than our buildings.
FCPC’s Welcome Table is a wonderful exception to this. Still, when we took the
Congregational Assessment Tool or CAT a while back, one of the areas we scored extremely
low on dealt with how faith makes a difference in our daily lives. That seems
to me a question of how faith becomes public, how it bears fruit.
The
Apostle Paul sometimes gets the blame for notions that faith is a private,
heart thing. He is the one who says we’re not saved by works but by faith, but
that hardly means he doesn’t expect faith to bear fruit. For Paul, to experience
God’s love in Christ is to be transformed. For those “in Christ” the old passes
away and a new creation is born, and so Paul’s letters typically include verses
like the ones we heard today. These are part of a much longer section on what
new life in Christ looks like, the fruit is will bear.
Paul
speaks of love fulfilling the law because “Love does no wrong to a neighbor.” No wrong to a neighbor... The decision to end
the DACA program for Dreamers does great harm to our neighbors, and our
denomination’s stated clerk rightly condemned the action, going against the
wishes of many church members who want faith to stay private, not political.
But
harming neighbors is a non-partisan activity. Many of us have chosen where we
live based on the school system. We’ve spent lots of money on homes and
countless other things so that our children will have every advantage. That of course
means that children of people with less means become even more disadvantaged.
It is truly difficult to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself and
your own.
_____________________________________________________________________________
At
the very end of our passage Paul says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Put
on Jesus. Wear Jesus. Now when I hear of someone wearing their faith on their
sleeve, the images that come to mind are not good ones. I think of obnoxious people
who throw their faith in my face, but that’s not what Paul means by wearing
Jesus. Paul is talking about being so filled with Jesus, so animated by the
Spirit, that Jesus becomes visible from the outside. Others experience God’s
love in Jesus through those who are “in Christ.”
I
wonder if the Spirit isn’t guiding us toward this in the Renew Groups process. Based
on the input from Renew Groups, the Session put out a document that says,
“Perhaps we are called to be a church for recovering perfectionists, a church
of Sabbath keepers. A place where we can rest, where we are enough, where we are fully known, where we are wholly
and completely loved by God, and where we experience true joy.” The Christian
Development theme, “Resting in God’s Word,” mirrors this.
But
this rest, this Sabbath keeping, this recovery from perfectionism, is not about
collapsing from exhaustion. It is an active resting, a resting in Christ, a
resting in God’s word, a resting that transforms and remakes us into something
new, something that others can see in us, something that is not private and
hidden, but that bears fruit for others.
And
so the statement from Session continues. “From this place of deep
acceptance, joy, rest, and love, we reach out and invite others into this
alternative, counter-cultural way of being together, sharing God’s love,
acceptance, and hope through concrete acts of love and service to those who
most need to experience it.”
I truly think that this is the Spirit guiding us, helping us see what
wearing Jesus looks like for us at this moment. And I pray that you will join
us as we seek to be the church God is calling us to be, as we put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, as we Rest in God’s Word, so that we are transformed and made new,
enabling us to share God’s love with the world.
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