Beyond About

Recognizing the Spectacularly Unspectacular

 

#6 in the sermon series:

 Jumbo Shrimp Christianity

Oxymorons for Christian Living

 

That is not the way you learned Christ!

(Ephesians 4:20)

 

 A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the 22^nd Sunday after Pentecost, October 28, 2007

Volume 2 Number 17

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

On the 17^th of December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright sent their sister in Dayton, Ohio a telegram from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  It was a simple telegram of only two sentences. “Sustained flight for 59 seconds.  Hope to be home for Christmas.”  What fantastic news!  Orville and Wilbur’s sister excitedly rushed the telegram to the local Dayton paper.  Sure enough, the next day a small headline on the back page reported the spectacular news.  “Popular bicycle merchants to be home for Christmas.” 

 

Imagine that!  Dayton, Ohio’s first news release reporting the events of Kitty Hawk was “Popular bicycle merchants to be home for Christmas!”  The paper misunderstood what the message was “about,” finding the news of a 59 second flight to be “spectacularly unspectacular.”  Their eyes were not prepared to see 59 seconds of flight as important.  The spectacular was unspectacular because it was so new, the first hint a change that would forever redefine the human journey.  Sometimes, blinded by the ordinary, we miss the extraordinary. 

 

Reading the telegram to be “about” two of Dayton’s own coming home for Christmas, the newspaper missed what the telegram was all “about.”   Eyes conditioned to see the ordinary, they never got “beyond” what they thought the telegram was “about.”   Beyond.  About.  I want us to ask ourselves a very odd question this morning.  How do we get “Beyond ‘About?’”

 

For example, I love to teach about things.  Before coming back to the pulpit from academia, I loved teaching about Hebrew and Greek, about the literary mechanisms at work in ancient Semitic literature, about biblical history, about any number of things related to religion and philosophy.  About, about, about.  It’s that word “about” that pastors must seek to transcend.  How do we get “Beyond About?”  Because while it may be the educator’s function to teach “about” things, pastors can’t be content merely to teach people about things.  We must aim higher, not for education, but for transformation.  The most meaningful pastoral moments are those sweet glimpses that our ministry has changed one single life.  That’s only possible when we’ve get Beyond “About.”

 

Which led me to focus this final sermon in my series, Oxymorons for Christian Living, to Ephesians 4 and 5, a passage in which Paul calls the church to transformed lives.  Paul urges the Christians in Ephesus to leave their “former way of life,” their “old selves,” to be “renewed in mind and heart.”  What drew me to Ephesians 4, however, is the phrasing of verse 20.  Referring to the pagan world’s impurity, Paul follows, “that is not the way you have learned Christ!”

 

Notice how Paul, in spirit and syntax, has moved Beyond “About.”  He didn’t say, “that’s not what you have learned ABOUT Christ.”  Instead he said, “that is not the way you have learned Christ.”  If you ask me, “about” needs to be missing more often.  Getting Beyond “About” helps us transcend some of those pesky theological disputes -- what do you think About baptism, About predestination, About church government, About the Second Coming of Christ?  Easy to get lost, for sure, in a forest of Abouts.

 

What we’re really talking about is the difference between becoming acquainted with a subject, and becoming acquainted with a person.  We’re talking about Relationship.  Getting Beyond “About” is natural in any Relationship.  It would have been one thing for me, 36 years ago, to learn about Sherry.  I could have studied her from a distance (in fact, come to think of it, I did study her from a distance!), conducted a stealth investigation finding all I could about her.  I could have built a data bank of “abouts” with respect to Sherry – address, phone number, car, etc. All this would have been information “about” Sherry.  Genuine relationship transcends “about,” not content with less than learning the person.  Relationship is the transcending of About.

 

Christianity is About Relationship.  We share, and invite other to, not merely a bank of philosophical information, but to a Person.  Getting Beyond “About” is why the sacraments possess such power.  While words from the pulpit necessarily communicate something “about” Christ, the sacraments call us to engage Christ at a level of Presence that has nothing to do with intellectual assent to the varied “Abouts” of the faith.  The sacrament leads us to engage Christ as flesh and blood, to receive, not the message “about” Christ, but to possess Christ in our lives through a faith animated by image and liturgy and symbol.

 

This difference can be highlighted in the important shift in our day between Christian Education and Spiritual Formation.  When I went to seminary in the early 80s there were myriad class offerings in Christian Education.  I don’t even recall the term Spiritual Formation.  Christian Education focuses on the “Abouts” of the faith.  Spiritual Formation gets Beyond “About,” aiming at changing lives through Relationship.  Traditional church staffing called for a position in Christian Education, an important function, to be sure.  Churches are recognizing now that a Spiritual Formation Director can creatively work to enhance relationships, both within the faith community itself and, most importantly, with Christ. 

 

If it’s about Relationships, then commitment follows naturally.  If you are committed to a Relationship, you joyfully invest in that Relationship.  Those married for long years couldn’t have imagined, in the days when you were first dating, how that Relationship would eventually become, not only worth the total investment of yourself but, truly, all that really matters.     

 

In this Fall season we are in the midst of our annual Consecration emphasis.  Frankly, if all our church offered were classes “About” Christianity, that’s not a strong motive to invest in what we do.  But to the extent that the church calls us Beyond “About,” to learn not so much “About” Christ, but to learn Christ, that Relationship leads us to invest our talents and resources. 

 

We are learning to ask, not simply “What does it take to get a person to believe, to affirm intellectual assent to the message about Christ?”  We are learning to ask a deeper question of the heart, “What does it take to make a whole new life?”  The evidence for the church’s miscalculation is clear.  The church, especially in the Bible Belt, is haunted by statistics indicating that in areas of human hurt – from divorce rates to sexual promiscuity to diseases caused by smoking, to addictive behaviors of every sort, to racism – the church fares no better, and in some cases worse, than the surrounding culture.  What good does it do for our culture’s “bible knowledge” meter to be sky high?  We know much about Christ.  But have we learned Christ? 

 

The famous actor Gregory Peck was once standing in line waiting for a table in a crowded Los Angeles restaurant.  They had been waiting for some time.  Peck’s friend became impatient.  He was, after all, with someone famous.  So he whispered to Peck, “Why don’t you tell the maitre d’ who you are?”  Gregory Peck responded with wisdom.  “No,” he said, “If you have to tell them who you are, then you aren’t.”

 

What a great lesson for the church.  We shouldn’t have to tell them who we are, what we are all About.  “If we have to tell them who we are, then we aren’t.”   If we’ve only learned About Christ, we will tell people all of our “Abouts,” wanting them to know what we are all about. If we’ve gone Beyond “About” to actually “learn Christ,” our lives reflect a Relationship that has been transformative. 

 

 

Sources and notes:

I am indebted to Leadership (Spiritual Transformation: What it takes to make a whole new life, Summer 2005) for several essays contributing to the development of this sermon, including, “From Information to Transformation,” by Brian McLaren and “New Journeys on Well-Worn Paths,” by Eric Reed.

 

The Wright Brothers/Dayton newspaper story is from the sermon “Paper or Silk?” in HOMILETICS, July August 2005.

 

The Gregory Peck story is from “Extraordinary Faith for Ordinary Time,” Larry R. Kalajainen, CSS Publishing Company, Inc.