Did you know that Australians work the longest hours in the developed world? In fact, the average hours we work would be illegal in Europe! Around that we have to fit other commitments like family, friends, chores and... church and outreach are meant to be in their somewhere too!
But most Aussies don’t seem interested in what the church is offering, anyway. Church attendance in Australia is going down. And it’s not simply a matter of finding the right programme, it’s a cultural shift. Right across the board community and recreation groups are finding it hard to recruit new members.
But no matter how busy and tired we are, we’re surrounded by people who are going to a Christless eternity. No matter how indifferent people may be to the church, we still have the God-given responsibility to tell them the gospel.
So how can busy, tired people tell the message of God’s love to an indifferent and sometimes hostile society?
One way people sometimes enter places that are hostile to the gospel is as worker missionaries. They look like engineers or teachers or nurses or students, but in reality they’re God’s secret agents, sent to share his love. They go about their seemingly ordinary lives, all the time building relationships and seeking to share Jesus.
This morning we’re starting a new series on being backyard missionaries - people who look like engineers and teachers and nurses and students and mums and dads on the outside, but in reality are God’s secret agents, sent to share His love.
Sounds a bit subversive doesn’t it? But isn’t this just what God did when he took on human flesh and became one of us? So this morning I want to look at Christ’s incarnation what it means as a model for us being backyard missionaries.
The Bible says, "The Word became flesh and dwelled among us."
THE WORD
Words are powerful things. We say, ’Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me,’ but the reality is that words can leave deeper scars than any physical wounds. They can also bring immense healing and soothe a troubled soul.
Words can carry great authority. They bring laws into being. In some ancient cultures a small child’s voice could command a general if that child was a prince or king.
We learn a lot about a person through words. Words bring information about what we think and how we feel, and we can also learn a lot by the way people use words.
So what do you think it means that Jesus is the Word of God?
Most significantly, Jesus came as God’s self-revelation. When we see Jesus, we see God. The word was God, and in his appearing God told us something about himself. Col 2.9 says, "In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form."
And when Jesus came as God’s revelation about himself, he also came with the full authority and power of God’s Word.
The Word may have returned to the Father, but he is still present on the earth. You know where I’m going, don’t you? We are the body of Christ. The church continues this act of revelation. When we proclaim the Word of God, when we tell others about Jesus, when we live the gospel, we’re revealing God the Word to the world. When we preach the Word, we go with the power and authority of God’s Word to bring life and healing.
The world may not like us doing it - but they didn’t like Jesus doing it either. And in any case, we don’t need to ask their permission, we have authority from on high.
Knowing and proclaiming the Word, God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, is the beginning of being backyard missionaries.
BECAME FLESH
When I was in India I had to preach at this Brethren church. Lovely bunch of people and great hospitality. But what really got me was that in this hot, humid climate I had to wear a long sleeve shirt and tie to church! Do you know why? Because at some point in the past some Western missionaries had come and preached the gospel and somehow given the impression, or even explicitly taught, that this was part of being a Christian.
The most profound act in the entire creation is when the Word became flesh. God became a man. Let that sink in - it never ceases to amaze me. Who is the Jesus?
But it wasn’t simply a case of God becoming human. For that to be meaningful God had to become a specific man in a specific time and place. He wasn’t just a man, he was a first century Jewish man living in Palestine. He could have become a Roman or an Indian or an Aborigine, but he became a Jew.
So he spoke like a Jew - that would have been Aramaic, and with a Galilean accent. He would also have been able to read Hebrew and would have known some Greek. He dressed like a Jew. He acted like a Jew. He thought like a Jew. He was a Jew. God the eternal, universal Word - was translated into Jewish language and customs. The message of the gospel was not an abstract concept or teaching. It was a very tangible, meaningful, lived out reality in a specific context.
I wish those missionaries to that part of India had understood this concept. When the Word becomes flesh it becomes like the people it’s trying to reach.
And nothing’s changed. The gospel constantly needs translating into new cultures and contexts. I mean - how many of you read Greek or Hebrew Bibles? How many of you know the difference between a minim and a drachma? Incidentally, they were coins.
See, the Word continues to reveal himself in the flesh, through the flesh and blood of his people - you and me. He continues to seek to make himself known in ways that are meaningful to specific cultures and languages and times and places. And that means speaking like the people we’re trying to reach - less the profanities. Dressing like the people we’re trying to reach. In short, becoming like the people we’re trying to reach. It means identifying with them.
OK, not everything in a culture is good and we’re not to lose our distinctiveness. But we’re not meant to convert people to our middle class white Christian sub-culture either. Some of you will remember John’s visit last year. He’s with a mission that is trying to figure out what Jesus looks like among the Yao. What would Jesus look like amongst a community of Sudanese refugees In Perth? In a Lebanese Muslim community? In Cullacabardee? Or your workplace or school or community group?
Backyard missionaries make the gospel real and meaningful, flesh and blood, like Jesus.
MADE HIS DWELLING AMONG US
When I was in my early teens mum and dad joined a mission called Missionary Aviation Fellowship and took us up to Papua New Guinea. For two years we lived on a compound with a number of other missionary families. It was a great time, but I never really mixed with the local people. My wife also spent time in PNG, but she was born there and spent the first few years of her life pretty much growing up among the local people so that they were her friends and she could speak some of the language.
Which do you think Jesus would have done? The thing with the incarnation, with the Word becoming flesh, is that he didn’t do it at arms distance.
Before Christ you pretty much had to become a Jew and come to the temple in Jerusalem if you wanted to worship God properly - that’s where God’s house was. At certain times of the year Jerusalem was awash with pilgrims.
But with the coming of Jesus that changed. He didn’t become a priest, he became a carpenter and then an itinerant teacher. He went to where people were. We no longer had to go to the temple, the temple came to us!
Yet so much of the church’s history has been ’come to us’. We build these immense buildings and say, ’come to us if you want to worship God.’ We design great programmes and say, ’come to us if you want ministry.’ We build elaborate theologies and say, ’come to us if you want to understand God.’
What would Jesus do? I think he’d actually come to our churches - he went to the synagogues in Israel. But he’d spend most of his time in the same places you probably do. Around people who are far from God. Don’t you do that - in your workplace or the shopping centre or community group or neighbourhood?
Every time you walk into your workplace, every time you go into a friend or neighbour’s house, every time you go into the school yard, Jesus is there. The Holy Spirit is present. There’s potential for the Kingdom of God to be manifest there. There’s potential for ministry and a God encounter.
God made his dwelling among us and he still wants to do that - not in the four walls of the church meeting, but in the world.
Backyard missionaries make a dwelling for God among the people.
FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH
All of this is only possible if we catch the heart of the Word - which is grace and truth. We seem to have such a hard time catching this. We gravitate to the extremes of anything goes liberalism or nothing goes legalism. But Jesus came full of grace and truth. He never condemned, he always loved. And yet he called sin out where ever he saw it.
Jesus gives a despised tax man the honour of hosting him for dinner, and the tax man’s life is turned upside down. He breaks every social more by speaking alone to a woman of bad reputation and a whole village is saved. He rescues a prostitute from being lynched by an angry mob, and sets her free urging her to leave her life of sin. Tradition says that was Mary Magdalene who became one of his disciples.
Grace, not law. Mercy, not condemnation. Love, not indifference. But also truth without compromise. Calling sin, sin, but giving a way out.
If only we could learn the freedom that comes from knowing grace and truth. The law says, ’No’. Grace says, ’Yes’. Let’s learn to be people of grace and truth.
Backyard missionaries understand it’s the only way they can get the job done.
CONCLUSION
The Word became flesh and dwelled among us… full of grace and truth.
You know, if that was God’s best plan to bring the human race into relationship with himself, why do we think we can come up with a better one?! It’s liberating and challenging and scary. To be Jesus where we are. To put flesh on the gospel and take it into our every day world in real and meaningful ways. To go in uncompromising love.
I don’t know about you, but if we could nail that, it sounds to me like something that could change lives.
