We serve a God of abundance and not a God of scarcity. Ours is not a dilettante deity with nothing in His hands. Ours is the God who possesses the cattle on a thousand hills, who flung the stars into space, and who has made all things – all things. All things are made by Him and all things are at His disposal. He gives His gifts in abundance to His people, and asks only that we place these things into the service of His will. He asks us to trust Him to provide us with an abundant life, and out of faith then to give back for His work. He is an abundant Lord, giving us an abundant life, and He wants from us an abundant church. We serve a God of abundance and not a God of scarcity.
Mrs. Verna Royle was very old when I first met her, an incredible 102 years of age. She was the last surviving charter member of the church I served as pastor. Takoma Park Baptist Church had been founded in 1919, and she was there from the beginning. But at the age of 89 her back had given out, and she had been put into nursing care. Now, thirteen years later, she was still in that same nursing home, and, every time I would go visit her, she said the same thing: “Oh, Pastor Smith, I don’t know why I am still here. I am in pain every day, all day. I ask the Lord to take me home, but He has not. I don’t know why I am still here, in all this pain.” I offered words of encouragement, I read Scriptures, I prayed with her, but, truth to tell, I didn’t know either why someone should stay around that long, lying in one bed in one room. Nor could I offer her a clear and convincing explanation of why she should have been in pain for so long. I knew it would be a stiff challenge, every time I visited Verna Royle, to respond to her cry, “Pastor, I don’t know why I am still here, in pain every day, all day.”
No one likes pain. No one volunteers for pain. No one but a psychopath, I suppose, deliberately inflicts pain on himself, and no one but a sadist enjoys creating pain for others. We will do all we can to prevent pain. But life often presents us with a difficult choice: either choose the absence of pain or choose the pain of absence. Either choose to be absent from the places where there is pain, living your life calmly and happily and without a care in the world; or choose to absorb into yourself the guilt and shame of absence. Either choose to let the pains of the world pass you by and live your life in the bubble; or choose to take on the painful guilt of living irresponsibly. Not a happy choice, right? But when it comes to the Kingdom of God and to His church, that is the choice: either elect the absence of pain or the pain of absence. Whichever way we go, we create pain for ourselves and for others.
Or is there another possibility? Is there a possibility connected with this God of ours, who is a God of abundance and not a God of scarcity?
Paul had been in a lengthy and conflicted relationship with the Corinthian church. I rehearsed for you last week some of the issues – factiousness, immorality, disorderly conduct, pride – the whole gamut. And Paul had dealt with these things forthrightly and clearly. By the time that he is writing this passage, he is feeling better about the church at Corinth. He even calls them fellow-workers who stand firm in the faith. So today’s passage is really about Paul working on Paul, not Paul working on the church. It is Paul thinking about his own feelings and trying to explain why he chose not to visit Corinth. He says he did not visit, he was absent, because he did not want to cause any more pain; but he also gives us a glimpse inside his own heart, where we discover that he was tired of dealing with his own pain. Paul struggles in this passage with whether he did the right thing – was it better for him to have tamped down his own pain, the pain that he felt because they had been rejecting his leadership? Or was it better for him to have stayed away and just let them work on their own issues, without his involvement? Except that that too would have been painful, painful because he would not have been able to express his abundant love for the people of Corinth.
To put it all as simply as I can: Paul is struggling, as he writes, with his own painful feelings. Has he, by staying away, dealt with his own anguish? Has he achieved the absence of pain? Or has Paul, by disengaging for a while, just deepened the pain of absence? The absence of pain or the pain of absence. Let’s work on this and see how it plays out.
I
No one wants pain. And so we can choose the absence of pain. Very specifically, we can avoid painful encounters. We can do whatever it takes to make life easy for ourselves, and especially whatever it takes to make church life easy. We can try to be worry-free and live without a care in the world. And it may look possible, for a while. Somebody told me that when I retired I would be free from all worries and struggles. Of course that was before I came to Gaithersburg! But when we choose the absence of pain by disengaging ourselves from the work of the Kingdom, we eventually discover that it does not work. We have within us the pain that comes with being irresponsible.
I’ve lived and worked with church people all of my life. And one thing I have seen is that many of us will do whatever we can to avoid the pain of engagement. Some of us don’t want to take the risk of trying something new, we don’t know how to welcome people who are different, and, most of all, we don’t want conflict. So we disengage. I have had people tell me that they don’t go to church business meetings because it is too painful to see people disagree (you understand that that has to be in another church … couldn’t be Gaithersburg, right?). I have had others tell me that they cannot share the Gospel with anyone because there might be a disagreement, and they cannot handle that. I have had church members tell me that they would rather pay someone else to go do missions work than to do it themselves, because there might be conflict. We work hard at avoiding pain, and particularly the pain and the challenge of life together in the church.
But when we opt for the absence of pain, we do not understand what life in Christ is all about. He said that He came to give us life, and to give it abundantly. That means a life engaged. It means a life participating in things. It is an illusion that you can do church without struggle and conflict; for I assure you that if you choose to disengage from the church, if you sit and absorb all that the church has to offer, but without involving yourself in it up to your gills, eventually there will be pain. Eventually there will be disappointment.
Let’s try this: What is your vision of heaven? When I speak of going to heaven, what comes to mind? Well, in the popular imagination – at least what I have seen in the occasional movie or in the cartoonist’s scribbles – heaven seems to be a batch of fluffy clouds populated with folks in white robes twanging on harps. I hope that’s not true, because that would not interest me at all. If that’s what heaven is all about, you can just take my cloud and give it to somebody else! No, my vision of heaven is a vision of engagement and involvement. My vision of heaven is staying busy and still growing. I see myself discussing Romans with Paul, and hammering out theological points with Martin Luther, and maybe getting an organ lesson from Johann Sebastian Bach! My vision of heaven is a vision of growth and of involvement, a vision of learning and doing and becoming.
I do not believe our God, who is a God of abundance and not of scarcity, wants to give us a life, either here and now or there and then, that is dull and plain and placid. I believe that He calls us to embrace the challenge right here, right now, to build His church and foster His Kingdom, pain and all. I believe that our God calls us to full involvement, with all the work involved, to create in His church a little slice of the heaven to come.
Brothers and sisters, this church is worth that effort. This church is worth the pain of whatever struggle there may be. This church is worth the labor it will take to grow it. This church is worth the dollars it will take to pay for it. This church is an expression of God’s abundance, and if it costs us blood, toil, sweat, tears, and finances, it is worth every ounce. Do not imagine that you can keep it without vigorous effort. It will hurt. Choosing to be absent of pain will do neither you nor anyone else any good. It is time to pay the price of involvement, it is time to bear the burden of responsibility, and it is time to make a commitment to giving the tithe – ten percent of our incomes – as painful as that may sound to some of us. It is time to do that, not just because the church budget calls for it, but far more important, because our own spiritual health depends on it. It will not work just to pursue the absence of pain.
II
So if we cannot manage the absence of pain, what about the pain of absence? What does the world feel if we just sit it out on the sidelines and do not give our very best to see that church is done well in this place? Will there be pain involved for anybody if we just take a ho-hum absentee approach to church?
I asked you a moment ago to imagine what heaven will be like, and suggested that it might just be a place of involvement and engagement and not of perpetual harp-twanging. Now, flip that question over with me. If heaven is a place of engagement and growth and action, what then is hell? What is your vision of hell? Never mind the Halloween images of devils with pitchforks. Never mind the picture of naked bodies with the flames licking their flesh. Think of hell instead as a place of isolation. Think of hell as a condition of estrangement from God and from all that God is about. Think of hell, painful hell, as knowing what might have been but never will be. Think of hell, painful hell, as lost opportunities and abandoned blessings.
For us to be absent from Kingdom work is to miss it all. For us to do anything less than our best in this church is to choose tremendous pain, a hell of pain for the world around us. The pain of absence.
This week I had a conversation with my friend Adrien Ngudiankama. Adrien is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation long torn with civil strife. He has not been home to see his father in twenty-three years! Adrien has earned a seminary degree and is pastoring a French-speaking African congregation. He has a Ph.D. degree in anthropology, specializing in health care delivery. He is one of the finest scholars and one of the most genuine Christians I know. A few years ago the Congolese government offered him a position as Minister of Health, but Adrien declined that offer emphatically. He knew it was just a scam and that they wanted him back in the country to imprison him. But now, Adrien has decided that in December he will travel to his homeland, not only to see his aging father, but also to organize a clinic and a school in Mabunga, the village where his father was born. When I heard that, I protested. I said, “Adrien, it’s not practical; you can’t build a clinic in a month’s time. And it’s dangerous; every day the newspaper carries stories about clashes between the Congolese army and the rebels. Adrien, I don’t think it’s wise for you to go to Mabunga.” Do you know what he said? Adrien Ngudiankama, scholar, preacher of the Gospel, cried out, “This is a place where people die for lack of knowledge. This is a village where there is no clean water and no school. This is a town where they still take sick children to the witch doctor. This is a place where they have not heard the Gospel. I must go, I must go. God has told me to do this.”
Now do you see what the pain of absence is about? My good friend has been away from a place that needs him for all these years. And the pain of not going and not doing what he is capable of is unbearable to him, just as the consequences of not going and not doing something would be unbelievably painful for those who suffer in Mabunga. He can no longer live with the pain caused by his absence, pain for him and pain for the villagers of Mabunga.
And in exactly the same way, for us not to do church with every ounce of our strength would be to create immense pain for ourselves and a terrible travesty for our community. I am persuaded that Gaithersburg and Montgomery County need a church like this one, and that if it is not here or if it is done only half-heartedly, the pain will be tremendous. Tremendous pain for us, because we know what we are capable of. And tremendous pain for the people around us, because there is nothing so sorely needed as a grace-giving, life-transforming, mind-respecting, heart-touching congregation. That is what you are, that is what you can be, in abundance. God has gifted you in unique ways; God has planted you exactly where you are most needed. And in this crucial time, for us not to step forward and embrace our calling would be tragic. For us to be absent when the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely call on us would be hell indeed – the hell of shame for us and the deeper hell of lostness for them.
No, brothers and sisters, we cannot simply stand idly by. We cannot have nice, sweet, calm, peaceful church, and be absent from the pain. That is not the way the world is wired and that is not what our God expects. Nor can we just stay home and hunker down among the wide array of human needs, for to do that is to cause the pain of absence.
III
Let me then be abundantly clear. You are facing a very challenging time in your life as a congregation. You have attempted and achieved great things for the Kingdom of God. You have reached people for Christ, you have discipled them, you have built a beautiful facility, you have inspired new ministries, you have engaged in missions. All to the good.
But there is more to be done. Much more. There is a world to be won out there. There are souls dying without the hope of salvation. There are lives being ruined and wasted. There are minds being turned toward crime and not Christ. And I, for one, cannot abide the thought of sitting idly by while they die. We must have church; we must have this church; and we must have this church better and more equipped and more passionate than ever before.
That will take a lot from us. That will take time and effort, work and money. In a word, that will take abundance. But I do not for one instant believe that the abundance needed is not here. I believe that our abundant Lord has given us abundant lives, so that we may build here an abundant church. Let none of us indulge in thinking we can be absent of pain, for there is too much to do. Let none of us delude ourselves into supposing that our absence would cause no pain, for there are many waiting for us to reach them. Trust the abundance of God; trust Him. And if you trust the abundance of God, there will be enough, and more. Ours is a God of abundance and not a God of scarcity.
For we serve the same God who took a nation out of bondage and led them through the waters of the Red Sea into the wilderness, there for a while to know hunger and confusion. But He was to them a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, and to the land of promise they came. For their God was a God of abundance and not of scarcity.
We serve the same God who, through the hands of Jesus, took five loaves and two fish and fed a hungry throng. A God of abundance. We serve the same God who, through the voice of Jesus, commanded Peter to cast his nets into the deep, and thus brought up a great catch of fish. A God of abundance. We serve the same God who, at the wish of Jesus, turned ordinary water into rich wine. A God of abundance and not of scarcity.
And most of all, we serve the same God who hovered over a green hill far away without a city wall, where they crucified and killed His only begotten. Profound pain, not only in the crucified one, but also profound pain in those left behind. But on that third day He burst forth, the One who was dead and is alive forevermore. Our God is a God of life. Our God is a God of abundant life. Our God is a God of abundance and not of scarcity. And when it pains us to give, He will supply our needs; when it pains us not to give, He will supply us with a place to do the giving. Abundance!
My friend Verna Royle? The aged saint who wondered why for thirteen years God had let her live in that nursing home? She lived there four additional years, finally expiring at the age of 106. At her funeral men and women of every nationality, speaking every language, all of whom had been workers at that nursing home, gave one consistent testimony: they had come to know the Lord through the loving witness of Verna Royle. Then we knew why the Lord had let her live in pain all those years. She had a mission to perform, she had a calling to fulfill, and through the pain, yes, even because of the pain, she was the very love of God for everyone who came into her presence.
“For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.”
God’s abundant love; who would ever have known it had it not been brought through pain?
