Be Gentle!

Text: 1 Peter 3:13-22

Focus: Sharing our Faith

Function: To help people approach evangelism in a post-Christian culture.

Form: Storytelling

Intro:

On the first Sunday of this month I mentioned how Tony Compolo preached against legalism by exposing how the Christian prohibition of going to movies didn't serve the purpose of sharing our faith to outsiders.

I remember how this was played out in a odd way in my ministry. In the late 1990's TBN produced a move called “China Cry.” It was the story of a woman in China whose job was to indoctrinate young minds to communist ideology.

While doing a background check on her, the thought police discovered that she attended a Christian mission school when she was a child.

While at school, she placed her trust in Jesus. And then forgot about it.

However, the officials wanted her to recant her profession. In the process of her making up her mind about it, she realized that she was indeed a Christian and she refused to deny Jesus.

The colonel in charge of the Secret Police had her arrested and eventually she faced a firing squad.

True story, BTW.

The colonel said “what God can deliver you out of my hands?”

At the moment that the men fired their rifles to kill her, an electrical discharge happened which disoriented all the executioners and every single bullet missed her.

A great story.

So, a Sunday School class decided to go en masse to the movie. However, one of my parishioners would not go because she was afraid that if someone saw her enter the theater Saturday night, and then show up for Church on Sunday, her “Christian witness” would be blown.

We heard that a lot growing up. God's only plan for sharing the good news of His love is through the Church, us. Wherever we go, we are the visible representation of Jesus to the world. And I was constantly challenged with remembering what I displayed to the world as a Christian.

So, Christians, don't “Blow your witness!”

And there was/is several ways that was described. All of which were great sermon fodder: dress, alcohol, tobacco, language, movies, acquaintances, hair cuts, music and etc.

What this parishioner probably failed to realize is that a non-Christian, and most Christians would have never thought anything was wrong with that behavior.

She lived as a Christian and that is good. But she was so caught up in Christian sub-culture that her concept of non-Christian life was disconnected from modern culture.

I am not saying that is bad, but it is important to live in the world that Jesus has called us to be His agents to redeem.

If she were to judge non-Christians for going to a movie, how can she open a door to them to share the hope she has inside of her?

So, I remember a similar incident happening to me when I was a child. I was sure that my family had completely blown our witness.

I grew up on the South Side of FW and attended school with all the traditional, or orthodox, Jewish children whose families lived within a Sabbath Day's walk of the Synagogue off of Old Mill road near Foster Park.

Converting them to Christ was part of our mission statement.

And I was friend with Rabbi Gebhardt's daughter.

And to explain this story, one must remind people younger than me that beer used to come in these little squat brown bottles that didn't look anything like soda bottles.

And as an advertising gimmick, a root beer company decided to package their root beer in bottles that looked like beer bottles.

I was 13 and I was in the checkout line with my father at the Kroger store in Southgate shopping center.

And my dad, a preacher and on staff at FWBC bought a six-pack of that root beer.

In the line next to us was Rabbi Gebhardt and his daughter.

I remember the panic I felt because I was sure that she would see the root beer, think it was beer, and then think that we were not Christians at all, I would lose my chance to witness Christ to her, she would die and go to hell and it would be all my (or my dad's) fault.

I worried about how I would face God at that moment.

I had no idea what the Jewish religion was all about until later that same school year when I was invited to her bat-mitzvah and they served wine like it was kool-aid.

The point of both of these illustrations is that we do not really know what ideals, ideologies, practices and traditions make up the spiritual and social values of our neighbors.

And, as we increasingly become a less Christian culture, we cannot assume that people know what we think proper Christian behavior actually is.

We cannot assume that people know about all the ways we have sought to define our faith.

People on the outside will judge our sincerity by what they perceive the teachings of Jesus to be.

Let me repeat that. People will judge the sincerity of our faith, our religion, by how they understand the teachings of Jesus.

I think this can be a very good thing because it is causing us to re-focus on Jesus' love for humanity instead of our own religious practices which might have devolved into Christian legalism.

So know, when I remind myself that I am Christ's representative to a hurting world, or to use the old term, when I concern myself with my witness, instead of legalistic principles, I concern myself with how well I show Jesus' love.

Do I respect people who are different from me? Am I kind to the clerk at the grocery store? How do come across when negotiating the price of my car, or contractor services to my house?

So let me repeat verse 15, as we are looking at the Gentle Shepherd: “...Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect...”

This passage is about our Christian testimony, our Christian witness.

And it springs first from doing good.

You know how dads always have the same joke that they repeat over and over and the kids get a little tired of it?

My dad would say: “I am a preacher, so I am paid to be good. And you are not a preacher, so that means you are good for nothing.”

But there is a difference between being good and doing good.

Good people do good things.

But doing good is a big part of our witness.

Ephesians 2:8-9 reminds us that we are saved by grace through faith and not by our works. But then verse 10 tells us that we were saved to do good works.

And I keep pointing out, Christians, we are not saved as a fire escape from hell so that we can live for ourselves here in this life and go to heaven anyway. But we are saved to do good things for God toward others.

We are saved to take part in God's great adventure of restoring the world to wholeness and healing through the good news.

I like this perspective on evangelism. It reminds me of St. Francis of Assisi. He said, “preach the gospel always, sometimes use words.”

Our lives preach the good news that God is still in the world. Our lives demonstrate God still loves people.

The whole passage tells us how to preach with our lives.

Verse 15 tells us how to share with our mouths.

Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.

It springs from faith. It springs from our faith. And it springs from the way our faith brings us hope.

I bought a Christmas tree from the Optimist club one year. It was a great tree and a good value.

And the volunteer selling it to me said to me: “next year is going to be a bad year, I am going to die next year.”

I switched into preacher mode right away and gave him some time to talk about his problem, but before I got there, I was tempted to chuckle at the irony that the optimist was so gloomy. As it turned out, he wasn't gloomy, he was realistic about his health and had a very positive attitude about dying.

Always be ready to give an account of the hope...

Do we have hope? Do we show hope?

But most importantly in this passage, how do we communicate it with words?

This is an important aspect as we are sharing hope with a post-christian world.

Always be ready to share... ...with gentleness and respect.

The operating principle is “...with gentleness and respect.”

I wonder if that is where our message breaks down?

I am convinced that the reason the message is so readily embraced on our Kairos weekend is because of the respect shown to the inmates at the prison.

We always refer to them as resident. We do not allow the use of their prison slang name, and we rise above the correctional officers use of a number instead of a name when referring to the residents.

England is much more a post-christian nation. And an evangelist that I was talking with who was from there explained to me the subtle shift in the “gentleness and respect” concept.

He said, “In Seminary I was taught to teach the doctrines that we believe and there was always an implication afterward to question the person this way: `why don't you believe what I am teaching?`

“Don't hear me wrong. It wasn't supposed to be a teaching tactic that placed the person on the defensive with the implication `what is wrong with you that you don't understand what is so clear to me?'

“The gist of the question was designed to ask the person what I could to to help them see the light the way that I saw it.”

But my friend, Johnnie March, said “Now I ask the question this way: `this is what I believe, what do you believe?'”

And he was telling me that it is a subtle difference between what happens when Christianity is no longer the dominant religion in a culture.

We haven't gone as far as most European nations, yet. But the concepts of gently sharing our hope in a pluralistic culture apply to us.

My friend who didn't want to go to a movie assumed that everyone in our culture knew of a religious prohibition of which only a subset of Christianity knew.

Tell the story of Cat.

Cat, short for Cathy, a waitress at the diner I attended was scared of me.

She was young, but her face showed the lines of a hard life.

I was sharing with another waitress about my reaction to the movie “The Passion of the Christ.”

I was so moved that I was in tears.

And Cat overheard us. And started inching closer to the conversation.

First, while passing by the counter, she said: “my uncle was a preacher” and then she just sort of ran off.

Then, she got a little closer with the statement: “my grandfather was a preacher as well.”

But again she ran off. She reminded me of a puppy slowly coming closer and closer to see if I was safe.

I got the chance to ask her about her grandfather, she told me a little and when she discovered that I was not going to attack her, or preach at her she told me the rest of her story.

She was heavily involved in church until at 16 she got pregnant. She was kicked out of her church because they didn't want that kind of girl with their youth.

At this point, Cat was starting to weep.

I looked her squarely in the eyes and said to her: “on behalf of that church, on behalf of preachers everywhere, I apologize for the wrong done to you.”

She broke into tears and that moment started the slow salvation of Cat.

With gentleness and respect is the operating word. We have to be humble and admit our mistakes.

I love the way the Lutheran Church has recently apologized for the anti-Semitic language that Martin Luther.

If we are going to share the hope inside of us, then instead of being upset about the changing of our culture, the loss of genuine Christian values, we need to remember that this is our Father's world and regardless, the good news is entrusted to us.