The vocation of the Church – Marilyn Zehr – Oct. 24, 2010

Your will, your decision-making, your politics, your emotions, your purpose, your deepest identity, your life-paradigms, your intellect, your rational thought and planning, your determination, your courage, your desires, and your identity-shaping memory must reflect shalom (integral well-being) as lived, taught, and demonstrated by Christ; because this, after all, is the non-negotiable vocation to which you were formed into one people and is why you were mandated to function as the body of Christ in the world.  And this is possible only because of the free grace and multitude of gifts that have been given to you by God, and converts you into a Eucharistic community of wisdom, celebration, discernment, and gratitude.

(SAV:  Suderman’s Amplifed Version)

This morning we’ve been talking about the church, primarily the broader church we call Mennonite Church Canada.  And you may have noticed that there is a multitude of ways to do that.  We can talk about Mennonite Church Canada statistically.  We can talk about it financially.  We can talk about it by sharing stories about people and relationships.  And we can talk about the church using the words of the apostle Paul.  Jack Suderman talks about the church using his own words to tell us his interpretation of what Paul is saying.

In all of these ways, we are trying to articulate not only what the church is but what it is called to be. 

Jack Suderman, recently retired General Secretary of Mennonite Church Canada spent his tenure as General Secretary listening to who we say we are and then prophetically urging us, reminding us, prodding us, and imploring us to know and live into what God calls us to be.

Many of you may know, but for those of you who don’t know, as soon as he was appointed general secretary, Jack Suderman knew what he needed to do in order to do his job well.  He needed a firsthand, up-close look at the challenges, activities and the spirit of the life of our 221 congregations nation wide.  And so in the company of a few colleagues and occasionally his wife, Irene, he visited over 200 congregations in seventy-one days.  His listening tour was framed by very simple questions:
How are you?
What are you doing?
What are your concerns?
What are your needs?
The very act of listening provoked responses that Jack and his companions did not anticipate.  They did not anticipate the tears that flowed so often and so deeply. They did not anticipate the sacrifices people would make to meet with them.  They did not anticipate that our church, meaning the church broadly,  would talk about itself so honestly, passionately, fearfully, sorrowfully and joyfully, and he did not anticipate that the very act of listening served as a catalyst for further conversations within the churches themselves.  And finally, he did not anticipate that what he was doing would be viewed as a significant act of leadership in the church.  Jack’s summary of his listening tour is contained in the book, “God’s People Now: Face to Face with Mennonite Church Canada.”   I will leave my copy in the library so you may borrow it if you wish.

In this book, he talks about the challenges he heard us articulate, he talks about unity and diversity and the role of the confession of faith, he talks about young adults and seniors and the future of the church.  There is much wisdom and hope in these chapters. But in my estimation the most powerful chapter in this book is his articulation of the calling of the church.

The calling of the church was also the core of his message at the Mennonite Church Canada Assembly in Calgary this summer.  It was there that he shared with us his amplified version of our text for today. At the Assembly this summer Jack took three Bible study sessions, on three consecutive days to talk about these three verses in Colossians.
I invite you to take out your bulletin and compare for yourself the two versions of Colossians that you see there.  The first one is the NRSV and the second one is his amplified version.
As you can see by what he’s done, he struggles with most contemporary translations of this text.
Jack has two main difficulties with the translation and common interpretation of this text.
Let’s consider the first line in the NRSV
“Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart.”
First – the word “heart” is not a warm fuzzy valentine that expresses feelings of romantic emotion and love.  In Hebrew thought, the heart is the seat of the will, the locus of decision-making, the hub of commitment, the nucleus of reason and determination.
Second the verb “rule/control” in this text is an imperative.  When the translations use the word “let,” or “may”,   as in “Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart,” or “May the peace of Christ rule in your heart,” the meaning is considerably weakened.
In our polite Canadian society and context it would be like saying,
“It sure would be nice if you would kindly decide to have the soothing peace of Christ in your heart.”
Hence Jack counters that interpretation with his amplified version:

Your will, your decision-making, your politics, your emotions, your purpose, your deepest identity, your life-paradigms, your intellect, your rational thought and planning, your determination, your courage, your desires, and your identity-shaping memory must reflect shalom (integral well-being) as lived, taught, and demonstrated by Christ; because this, after all, is the non-negotiable vocation to which you were formed into one people and is why you were mandated to function as the body of Christ in the world.

Another key part of these verses in Colossians is their emphasis on Gratitude – three different times and three different words in the original text.  At the end of vs. 15.  “and be thankful,” at the end of vs. 16, “and with gratitude in your hearts sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to God,”  and vs. 17, “do everything in the name of Jesus – giving thanks.

And so if you look back at the amplified version, starting with, “and this is possible… the rest of the amplified version attempts to express the importance of gratitude.

And this is possible only because of the free grace and multitude of gifts that have been given to you by God, and converts you into a Eucharistic community (eucharist means Thanksgiving) converts you into a Eucharistic community of wisdom, celebration, discernment, and gratitude.

As I said, at the Assembly this summer Jack took three Bible study sessions, on three consecutive days to talk about these three verses in Colossians.  At each of these sessions he provided a question and answer time at the end.  At the last one a bright young adult woman, a student from CMU stood up to the microphone and asked an important question.
She identified herself as a Peace and Conflict studies student at CMU.
She commented on the current state of the world by comparing it to the Roman Empire.  “The current empire has colonized our imaginations,” she said, “and th
at makes me feel pessimistic.  How in the face of that are we able to be grateful? How do I reclaim what I have heard from you (like gratitude) in the face of the pessimism that awareness of the empire can generate?

Jack responded,  “dedicate everything to building communities like this!!! And then he asked her,
What are you learning in Peace and conflict studies at CMU?
And she replied,  – I’m learning that the world is not that!!! And that’s what causes my pessimism.
And Jack asked,  “But, are you learning that,” and he pointed to his amplified version of Colossians that was projected onto a screen.  “You need to be learning how to build alternative communities that look like that and then you can be more thankful.  You will be more thankful.”

Their conversation reminded me of how much easier it is to describe the world that has captured or colonized our imaginations than it is to describe the type of communities that the church is mandated to be in the world. The kind of community where Christ’s rule encompasses everything we think, do, decide and desire.
The message of Colossians and even more so the message of Ephesians  reveals the mystery of God’s strategy to transform the world.  According to these texts all things in heaven and on earth will be gathered up into Christ.  All things are reconciled to God through Christ. And the apostle Paul was on a mission from God to let the churches know that the church in the world will continue what God started.
And what God started was not a new or post-Jesus strategy.  God’s strategy to transform the world began at the beginning and all throughout the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament with God’s attempts always to form “a peoplehood that is covenantal in character and communal in personality” and continued when God revealed God’s nature in Christ.  This is what we call incarnation: God becoming flesh in a person and a peoplehood.  Salvation is salvation of an entire people. God mandates the church as Christ’s body in the world to continue to be God’s incarnational presence in the world with gratitude.

And how is this possible?  We are all too familiar with the power of the forces of this world to capture our thoughts, decisions, desires and our imaginations.  We understand the young woman who questioned Jack and spoke of her pessimism. 

Colossians responds with “the peace of Christ rules” (not might rule or maybe rule if we would be so kind as to let it rule) the peace of Christ rules and so “the church with Jesus as its head, has more power than any ruler, authority, power, dominion, and any name in this era or any era to come.”  As Jack would say, as he interpreted these words of Paul, “there are unseen resurrection forces ready to support the dream and vocation of reconciling the world, if we can only think big enough to engage them.” We need only use our spiritual imagination to see what God is doing and longs to do in our world through the church.

Jack took his spiritual imagination with him to the World Religions Summit in Winnipeg in June.  I told this story already in a sermon this summer, but the planning committee for this morning’s worship asked me to tell it again.
At that summit, Eighty leaders of the world’s religions, with 13 youth delegates from 20 countries representing Aboriginal, Bahá’í, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, and Sikh traditions gathered to create a statement for the G8/G20 leaders meeting in Toronto.  The summit called the world’s leaders to be accountable to the United Nation’s 8 Millennium Development Goals.

Jack Suderman had five minutes to address the summit on issues of  peace and justice. With his spiritual imagination in hand, He suggested a 9th Millenium goal: that world religions resolve to stop teaching and justifying the use of violence among faith communities. As he tells the story, he thought his suggestion was “pie in the sky,” but before he could sit down an orthodox priest shook his hand saying, “that’s exactly what we need.” Behind him was a Jewish Rabbi, who told Suderman “that’s exactly what we need,” and behind him was the Archbishop of Canterbury who said the same. This proposal became part of the official statement they sent to the G8/G20 leaders.