RE-IMAGINING THE CHURCH: GET WASHED,
BELIEVE AND LOVE ONE ANOTHER
Text: John 13:1-9

The Deacons are involved this year in a process of reflection and conversation on what it means to be the church in the 21st century. We’re calling it “Re-imagining the church.” We hope soon to involve the whole congregation in the conversation.

Some of the questions we are asking are: 1) How can a large high-steeple church be more of a “spiritual body”? 2) In our program of spiritual formation and Christian discipleship, how do we provide for those who come to us with little Christian formation and little Christian experience as well as those who come with deeply formed Christian identities? A sub-set of that question is how to minister effectively to a diverse congregation made up of people from twenty-plus different denominations. 3) How can we move from “Board Culture” - - where much of our energy is spent maintaining the institution – to “Ministry Culture” - - where more of our energies are spent in direct ministry and mission? 4) How can we make meaningful small-group experience more a part of our common life and make it available to more people?

All four of these questions are responding to a seismic shift in American culture: The church is no longer the chaplain’s office of a largely Christian culture but is now a mission outpost in a pluralistic culture of many faiths and of no faith.

Jesus says that a teacher of the kingdom of God is like someone going to a cupboard and taking out something old and something new (Matthew 13:52). The “re-imagining” process will handle old things and new. We are both stewards and pioneers.

Today I wish to draw on three images of the Christian life from John’s Gospel, images I didn’t have time to explore last week, and put them on the table for what it means to be Christian and to be the church in the 21st century.

I

The first image is “get washed.” It comes from the thirteenth chapter of John.

It is the Last Supper. Jesus does a startling thing. He removes his outer garments, ties a towel around his waist and begins to wash his disciples’ feet.

The washing of the feet of guests was normally performed by the servant of the house or by the wife of the host. But here Jesus becomes the slave, the wife, and begins to wash the disciples’ feet.

Simon Peter, whom we often could call “Peter the Loud,” protests and says, “You shall never wash my feet!” Jesus answers, “If I do not wash you, you will have no part of me.” Then Peter answers in his wonderful childlike eagerness, “Then Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands, my head.” Wash all of me!

It is a great baptismal image. In one ancient baptismal ritual the priest would anoint with oil the candidate’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands and feet, a sign that Christ will bless, guard and guide every part of us. “Not my feet only, Lord, wash my hands, my head.” Wash all of me. (By the way, only in John’s Gospel are Jesus and his disciples pictured as baptizing people themselves, John 3:22-23; 4:1-2.)

Baptism is a sign of the Spirit of Christ washing all of us, his Spirit filling every part of our lives. (This is the meaning of “being born of water and spirit.”)

It is also something done for you, to you, not something you do for yourself. Baptism is something God is doing for you, as Christ kneeling to wash your feet.

Too often we think of the Christian life in the active mode - - what we will do for God. But here is where it starts - - and re-starts. Letting God, Christ, Spirit do something for you, minister to you.
In Mark’s Gospel a blind man in Jericho cries out to Jesus: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Jesus comes near and asks the disarmingly simple and disarmingly direct question: “What do you want me to do for you?” And he replies, “My sight, Lord. Let me receive my sight” (Mark 10:51).

What would you say if he asked you now? “What do you want me to do for you?”

The Christian life begins not with something you do, something you give, but with something God does, God gives.

So the first image: Get washed! It’s where it all begins: Church is where you come to get washed. We may at first protest like Peter. Who wants to need anything? To be seen as “needy”? But where better can God enter than through our need? So stop, and let God’s Spirit minister to you. Let yourself receive.
 

II

Second image. “Believe.” “Believing” is why John wrote the Gospel: “These things are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

And in the prologue to the Gospel we hear:

But to all who received him, who
believed in his name, he gave
power to become children of God.
John 1:12

When Jesus came to Mary and Martha’s home to raise their brother Lazarus from the dead, Martha did not know how to believe this could happen. Jesus said to her:

I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they
die, yet shall they live, and whoever
lives and believes in me shall
not perish forever. Do you believe
this?
John 11:25

Do you believe this? he asks. And Martha answers with the supreme confession of faith in John’s Gospel - - in John it is Martha, not Peter, who makes the great confession! “Yes, Lord,” she says, “I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God who is coming into the world.”

There is something crucial about believing. But what does it mean to believe? It may take the form of a creed, a credo: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” But it means something more, something deeper than the recital of a creed - - if it is to mean life for us.
In John faith is a verb, a believing in, a relationship of trust in God, in Christ. Marcus Borg speaks of faith as the way of the heart. To believe God means to belove God, and to belove what God beloves.1 Believing is the way by which you join your life with another’s life.

William Sloane Coffin says: Credo best translates “I have given my heart to.”

There are different layers or dimensions of faith. Borg outlines four.

First, there is assensus, the assent of the mind - - the belief that certain things are true. This is important, but faith means more.

Second, faith is fiducia, faith as trust. Trust is a matter of the heart. It is a relational thing.

Third, faith is fidelitas, fidelity, faithfulness. It sticks with God to the end. It is a matter of the will, a lifelong devotion.

Fourth, faith is visio, vision. It is a way of seeing the world.2

I remember a man in his forties working hard with a therapist to stop seeing the world through the eyes of his mother, who was paranoid. She had taught him to see the world as an endlessly threatening place with everyone conspiring to do him harm. He was having to un-learn this way of seeing the world in order to see it as God wished him to see it.

The posture of faith Jesus taught is that the world is gracious because God is gracious. “Look at the flowers of the field, the birds of the air,” Jesus said. God takes care of them. Jesus lived with radical trust in the goodness of God and invites us to do the same. Faith is vision.

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that thou art.
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Being Christian involves some bed-rock beliefs, some foundational affirmations. I would start where Borg starts, with these three:3

1) Being Christian means affirming the reality of God. This is more than a material universe; it is also a spiritual universe. And God is the maker, the creative sustainer and the redeemer of it all. The world is the mystery of God.

2) Being Christian means affirming the utter centrality of Jesus as the decisive disclosure of who God is and what a life full of God looks like. He is the norm. By him we interpret all scripture and all life.

3) Being Christian means affirming the centrality of the Bible. If Jesus is God’s word disclosed in a person, the Bible is God’s word disclosed in a book. The Bible - - the Hebrew scripture and Christian New Testament - - is our guide for life and faith. Baptists have called themselves a “non-creedal” people and have said, “Our only creed is the Bible” - - which is another way of saying, we will not reduce God’s ocean of truth to a thimble full of chlorinated water. Christ and scripture: Without those we shall be as a ship without an anchor, without a compass!

But as I’ve said above, believing is more than beliefs: It is also trust and faithfulness and vision. And let me add one dimension.

As we re-imagine the church for the 21st century we need to explore another dimension of believing: Believing as “practice,” as a way of living the faith that seeks to pay attention to God and to the way of living God’s life in the world. We are a body/mind/spirit unity. “Practice” involves worship and prayer, learning and service. The Christian way is most of all a way. In fact that was the first name given to Christians in book of Acts, “The Way” (Acts 9:2).

Perhaps that is why we begin our church covenant with the words: “We...are a people on a journey of faith.”

III

The last image I want to give is again from the Last Supper, the thirteenth chapter of John. “Love one another.” After washing his disciples’ feet Jesus said:

A new commandment I give to you,
Love one another; even as I
have loved you.... By this all
people will know you are my
disciples, if you have love for
one another.

Earlier in chapter 13 we read: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

That’s how we want to love, isn’t it? Loving each other to the end. Through it all. As Joni Mitchell once sang, with a “love that sticks around.”

That is how Jesus loves us and calls us in his new commandment to love one another.

It’s almost an embarrassment to hear, isn’t it, given how we sometimes treat each other in this church, but here it is. The measure of our being Christian: That we love one another as Christ loved us.

However we re-imagine the church, we cannot get far away from that.

Can we do this? Love as Christ loved us? Not unless we are washed by Christ and filled with Christ’s own spirit. This is why we keep coming to church, keep asking to be washed and to be filled.

The church should set its goals so high that the only way to reach them is if God is with us. If we set goals we can reach on our own steam, we are aiming way too low.

I don’t think our Founders set their sights low. Neither shall we this 64th year of our life together as the people of God called Myers Park Baptist Church.

1 Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2003), p. 41.
2 Ibid., pp. 27-36.
3 Ibid., pp. 37-38.