Sermons

“Have You Heard for Yourself?”

John 4:7-19, 28-29, 39-42 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 9, 2018

The “Peter, Paul and What’s-Her-Name” Sermon Series

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might recognize your presence and power in our lives and proclaim that good news. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

You might have thought from the title of this sermon series that we’re going to be talking about Paul today, but we’re not. He’ll get his turn next week. Instead our focus today is what’s-her-name. Some of you may have been guessing her name was Mary, and maybe it was, but we have no way really of knowing. In my opinion, there are already more than enough Marys in the gospels, so let’s call her Wafa instead, for one of our missionary partners working with refugees in Lebanon.

The sermon series, as you will recall, is aimed at refreshing our focus on our commitment to cultivating growth in ministry and members. During these three weeks, I will be sharing with you what I’ve learned about evangelism in the context of small-membership churches. And each week, we’ll be using one of these biblical characters to frame our lesson.

It’s really not fair that Wafa isn’t named, since she’s the first evangelist, beyond the disciples themselves, to be mentioned in the gospel of John. And there is a very simple, but very fundamental lesson we can learn from Wafa about evangelism: the way you bring people in to meet Jesus is to tell them about your experience of Jesus. It really is that simple. But it’s not necessarily easy, is it?

Let’s be clear about what happened to Wafa: Jesus met her, discussed theology with her, and then had a blunt but apparently not unloving conversation about the unconventional twists her life had taken up to that point. Commentators like to point out that Wafa may have been something of an outcast because of her complicated relationship history, as evidenced by the fact that she’s going to get water in the heat of the day, rather than earlier when it would have been cooler. So to have this man speak with her about what was likely a source of some embarrassment, with what seems to me like a smile, was as much of a revelation as anything Jesus said about water or God or proper worship. The subtext here is the real gospel: Your life is a bit of a mess. That is not a barrier to knowing God and being loved by God. Jesus is doing the work of the shepherd in the 23^rd Psalm and restoring a soul here. And what happens next? “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”

When is the last time you exaggerated that much? Do you remember? Do you remember what you were talking about and how you felt? It was excitement, wasn’t it? You were excited because something had happened, but it was just the right thing to make you feel like everything that ever needed to happen had happened, and you wanted the world to know. That’s what is happening here. That’s what it’s like sometimes to experience Jesus. It changes everything and it makes you want to shout it from the mountaintops, as the song goes. That’s what evangelism is about: You’ve got a good thing, something so good you simply can’t keep it to yourself. Sounds simple, right? Well, for some folks it is. And that’s awesome, and y’all need to keep telling those stories with as much enthusiasm as they deserve. But for other folks, the line from here to there isn’t quite as clear. Some of you haven’t had five husbands and a plus one, or whatever the equivalent of that would be in your life. Some of you grew up in church, maybe even this church, and you don’t know how meeting Jesus changed your life because you don’t remember a time before you knew him.

This is one of the major challenges of evangelism for churches like ours, according to researcher and author Martha Grace Reese. In her “Unbinding the Gospel” series, she explains how if you’re convinced anyone who’s not in church is destined for a fiery eternity and you really do love those people, you’re going to be pretty motivated to talk to them about Jesus. But if you’re not convinced that everyone outside your church is going to hell, it’s not nearly as clear why you should be trying to bring them in. Now there are a lot of nice reasons I’ve heard you share about why you like it here at VLM. People are friendly. We make a difference in people’s lives. This church is like my family. There are people here who like to do the things I like to do. But there are a lot of places where people are friendly and groups where you can share interests and hobbies. Unless you can connect why you’re here to Jesus, your invitation to church isn’t going to sound much more compelling than an invitation to a Bunco club or a political meet-up or a Rotary meeting or a baseball game. And where does that lead? Probably to one of those, maybe-I’ll-check-that-out-sometime, noncommittal responses you get from someone who just isn’t that into whatever you’re talking about. So if you’ve been here long enough to forget what life was like without Jesus, how do you work up passion about how Jesus changed your life?

Well, I can’t promise this will work for you, but here’s what worked for me, the first time I read Reese’s book. It’s really kind of an exercise in creative thinking. First you think about what you consider the most important things about Jesus, the things about Jesus that you think of when you’re trying to act like Jesus, things like love and grace and patience and generosity and protection and strength and comfort and whatever else comes to mind when you think of Jesus. Then you think about yourself and what you know to be true about yourself, the good and the bad, and the ways in which they’re often the same traits, depending on the context. You think about the tendencies you have that you’re not proud of and the streaks of pride or selfishness or cruelty you’ve occasionally noticed within your heart. Then you combine those two things by considering what you might have turned into if you’d had all those unpleasant characteristics and none of them had ever been tempered or tamed or transformed by the love of Jesus that you’ve experienced throughout your life.

Let me share my own alternative story as an example, the one I imagined when I was on retreat at a convent in East Central Alabama, reading “Unbinding the Gospel” and trying to figure out what my life would have been like without Jesus. It’s no surprise to any of you that I’m a bit of a Type A personality. I’m opinionated and creative and bossy and high energy, and usually convinced that doing things my way is what should happen. What you might not know about me is that there was a very brief period in my childhood when I thought about pursuing a career in advertising. Because I was sure I’d be pretty good at it. As soon as I started picturing this Jesus-less version of my life, I knew I would have been working in advertising. I was also pretty sure that I would be living in New York City. And I would be really good at my job and wear high heels every day, and I would be stressed-out all the time and miserable. It’s a bit of a caricature, but bear with me. It wasn’t easy to figure this out, since my family has been active in church for generations, so I had to guess what it might be like to have all of that be different. As I was imagining this alternate life, I suddenly noticed that my whole body had tensed up. My muscles were experiencing with me what it would be like if I’d never had the presence and influence of Christ in my life. It was horrible, and I felt it down to my very bones. That was what Jesus saved me from. Suddenly, it became possible to access the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm our Samaritan friend Wafa had, because now I understood how Jesus had changed me.

This is a pretty elaborate imaginative exercise, but if you can’t clearly explain why you’re active in church in a way that connects to Jesus, it’s one you need to engage in. You need to know what you believe about Jesus. You need to know how that has changed who you are and how you live your life. And you need to understand that in a way that makes you excited enough that you want to tell people about it. This is the lesson Wafa has for us today. It’s very simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. If you know how this part of your story goes, that’s great.

If you don’t, you need to spend some time in imaginative reflection. Dress the story with the details that will make it so real you feel it in your muscles and your bones. Take a deep dive into your psyche and your understanding of Jesus, and use your imagination to discover what it is that Jesus has saved you from. A few of us knowing why Jesus makes the difference isn’t enough. Wafa got the rest of the town to come out and listen to Jesus, but that isn’t where the story ended. “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

You have to hear it for yourself. Your grandmother’s faith isn’t going to get you there. And neither is your spouse’s or your neighbor’s or your brother’s or sister’s. You’ve got to discover how your own soul is being restored, what it was that Jesus is saying to you, in your heart, with that loving smile that communicates how deeply you are known and how unconditionally you are loved. What will it take for you to get to the point where you’ll run back into town exclaiming “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”? How has Jesus touched you? What is the spark you need to set fire to your heart, so you’ll want to shout it from the mountaintops? If you don’t know, it’s time to find out. That is the call and the lesson of our friend Wafa, old What’s-Her-Name. May her story, unlike her name, not go unheard. Alleluia and Amen.