The folks who are into real estate will tell you that there are only three factors which enter into the value of a piece of property. Those three factors determine how much you should pay for that dream home, how much you should ask when you have decided to sell out and move up, and how loud you should scream when the new tax assessments come out.
Those three factors, they say, are: location, location, and location.
I think that is really just another way of saying that all homes are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
If you read in the real estate pages that a particular property is in an exclusive location, what does that suggest to you? It may suggest, if it is exclusive, that it is expensive; or it may sound as though it’s off in the woods somewhere, hard to find. Or, in all honesty, it may just sound as though it means you and I need not aspire to live there.
Exclusive real estate, exclusive clubs, exclusive department stores, everywhere they seem to make a selling point out of exclusiveness... which raises an interesting thought.
If you sell something on the basis of its being exclusive, doesn’t that mean that if you are successful in selling a lot of that something, it isn’t exclusive any longer?
There is something in us that wants to be among the elite. There is something deep down inside that demands to know whether we are in and somebody else is out. There is an allure about something which is exclusive, as long as I am not the one excluded. And so we want to know where we stand.
Some of us who live in Montgomery County, Maryland, were drawn there because it seemed a little nicer, a little more exclusive than other places. Well, exclusive is right. The price tag for a good many excludes them. And a few days ago one of our church members came out of a meeting in Montgomery County only to discover that race-baiting slander had been spray-painted on cars and trucks. The message in essence was, “This is an exclusive place: not for you, not for you.”
It must have been something like that which led someone to say to Jesus one day as they were making their way toward Jerusalem, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And I think I hear in that question the plaintive hope, “And will I be in their number?” Do I have a chance? How many get into the Kingdom, and am I going to be one of them?
Lying behind that question was an old Jewish argument, which I guess we are still carrying on in one way or another today, about the size of the chosen. Some argued that the whole nation was God ‘s chosen people and would be saved when the Messiah would come. Others argued that no, it was just going to be a small remnant, those who were obedient, those who were correct theologically, those who kept the Sabbath perfectly. There were many debates on this point, how many would be saved; but on one thing they all agreed: that it would be only the Jews. No Romans, no Greeks, no Syrians, no Samaritans. And they conjured up a vision of a great banquet at which God’s Messiah would preside, and they would all be gathered, wining and dining and laughing their heads off at the rotten old Romans, out there in the cold.
Exclusive, that’s what we want. Mine; my banquet, my savior, my salvation, exclusive to me and my kind of folks. But Jesus won’t have any of that. Jesus is not about to preside over a country club kingdom. Let me tell you, he says, about who will and who will not be saved. Let me tell you about how God counts inclusion and exclusion, how God decides who to choose and who to leave out.
It boils down to this: many of those who think they are in, should be in, and can’t be anyplace but in, will, despite all their expectations, be out. And many of those whom we do not expect to be in, whom we do not feel deserve to be in, whom we would prefer to keep out, they will be in.
I
First of all, lots of the folks who think they will automatically be in will be out. "Many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us’ He will answer you, ’I do not know where you come from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity!” A whole lot of folks who think they have the right to be on in the inside will find out, to their astonishment, that they are out in the cold.
Why is it that we religious folk so easily get to the point where we are busier shutting people out than we are taking them in? Why is it that we expend so much of our emotional and intellectual energy defining things so that we are defined in and somebody else is defined out?
Whole denominations are built around the premise that they and they alone have a comer on the truth. They build up exclusive principles and decide who gets in and who gets out. The only trouble with all of this is that it very rarely coincides with the Lord’s way of deciding who gets in and who goes out
Because the Lord is saying that we will not be included just because we considered ourselves among God’s chosen people; we will not be included just because we had our names on somebody’s church membership roll; we will be not be included just because we held correct doctrinal ideas. We will be included only on the basis of repentance and faith and discipleship. "Strive to enter by the narrow door". And most of all we will not be included in His Kingdom just because we defined ourselves as exclusive and defined others out.
Did you know that one denomination of believers defines itself and its correctness by the fact that they do not use musical instruments in their worship? Did you know that another group of believers split because one group thought it was okay to use buttons on their clothes, but the others thought buttonhooks were God’s way? Did you know that still another group, on the basis of its rather limited and literal reading of a passage in the Book of Revelation, believes that only 144,000 people will be saved? By the way, in regard to that particular group, I saw the supreme irony yesterday: this group happens not to believe in celebrating Advent or Christmas; they argue that celebrating the birth of Christ is not mentioned in the Bible and therefore it should not be done. But yesterday, as I was driving past one of their church buildings, I noticed that they had set up a Christmas tree sales lot!
I guess the next thing will be the Baptists running a distillery and the Catholics will be putting their food into Mason jars!
What am I saying? That far too much of the Christian world is presuming on the correctness of its doctrines, the propriety of its rites, the amount of water it uses in baptisms, and the longevity of its members. And the Lord of the Kingdom says to us, you cannot assume that this will do it. You cannot include yourselves in and exclude others. God will choose whom God will choose, and those who just know they have it made may have some tremendous surprises ahead of them.
Lots of folks who assume that they are in, that they cannot be anywhere but in, are those whom the Lord says have taken themselves out.
II
Oh, but let me hurry on to the good news. Let me hurry on to say what must be said and what can be said for all of us. And that is that lots of folks who think they are out, lots of folks whom others just know should be out, lots and lots of folks who have never had a chance to be anywhere but out …these are the ones our Lord wants to have in and will have in.
You see, what makes Him a beautiful savior is that he is determined to be Lord of the Nations -- all nations. What makes Him a truly beautiful savior in this Advent season is His desire to embrace all nations, all peoples, all sorts and conditions of men.
Listen to the good news: "Men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last."
What a beautiful savior He is, reaching out to include the unloved and the unlovely from all places and from all backgrounds! From east and west and from north and south.
What a beautiful and glorious savior He is, bringing justice to those who have been left out and offering a warm embrace to those who have felt like nobody’s nothing. What did the angel tell Mary before He was born? "He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hat sent empty away.”
What a mighty and beautiful savior, who in His own time will take those who were left out and will bring them in to become sons and daughters of the king. If you know your black history, you know that the slaveholders were reluctant to allow anyone to preach the Gospel to the slaves, because they knew that then these men and women in servitude, the left out of this world, would discover that they were not slaves but were children of God... and the slaveholders knew that Christ was the ultimate enemy of exclusion. What a beautiful savior.
What a beautiful savior, who will in our time raise up for himself out of east and west and north and south, all over the world, a church faithful to Him. And if we in the old church, we in the churches of Europe and North America would only wake up and admit it, we would see that we are running around most of the time imagining that God has to take us in just because we’ve been around for a long time. But the spirit is blowing elsewhere; God’s spirit is raising up a faithful church around the world, and He will be lord of the nations.
Did you know that the Christian faith is growing more rapidly in Africa than on any other continent? Did you know that some scholars are predicting that one day Africa will send missionaries here?
Were you aware that in Latin America now the spirit is spreading like wildfire in the various Pentecostal churches, so that among the peasants and the workers and the tenements of some of the world’s largest cities, there is a vital, vibrant Christian movement? Did you know that? Our beautiful savior is on His way to becoming Lord of the Nations.
If I were to ask you where the largest church in the world is located, where would you guess? Texas, maybe? Or Rome? Not at all; it’s in Seoul, Korea. It has well over one hundred thousand members and has become the focal point of study for everybody concerned with church growth.
What is happening here? I believe it is that our beautiful savior wants a rainbow of peoples for His Kingdom, and if you and I have sometimes turned up our noses at those whom He chooses, we have an unpleasant surprise ahead of us. For He warns us that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that the only ones excluded from the Kingdom are those who have presumed that they just belong on the inside.
What a beautiful savior, who will embrace on the road to Jerusalem a prostitute, a tax cheat, a revolutionary, a thief, and a Samaritan woman, and blend them into a rainbow coalition. He will become Lord of the Nations, savior of all peoples, savior even of folks like you and me.
III
Bottom line, folks, I guess that all says to you and me that we need to work with Him and not against Him as He becomes Lord of the Nations, savior of the excluded. "Strive … strive to enter by the narrow way".
I believe that all this means that you and I need first of all to be certain that we have responded to Him in repentance and in faith, that we’re not just here because we’ve always been here, that we’re not simply presuming on having been baptized and having attended church and all of that …but do we know Him? Have we discovered that the only way to come to Him is to acknowledge that we have no right to what He has to give, that we don’t deserve it, but that we trust Him to give it.
And when we get that straight, I believe that it also means that we will want to help Him build this including Kingdom, this embracing beautiful-savior household.
It might mean we’ll get serious about reaching people in this community for Christ, all kinds of people. One church leader said the other day that Takoma Park Baptist Church used to pride itself on being able to include everybody from the Ph.D. to the semi-literate. Can we still do that? Can we include those whom the Lord wants to include? Someone else told me that he considered the fact that several storefront churches have sprung up all around us a kind of indictment, that we have left out a whole segment of this community …left them out, said, “Unwelcome". What do you think? The beautiful savior would not leave them out.
And I would also say that all of this means that we’ll get serious about engaging in the whole missionary enterprise. Missions at its best is our cooperating with the beautiful savior who wants flowers of every variety and fragrance in His garden.
I was so taken with the poster and the bulletin cover that Southern Baptists came up with this year to promote the foreign missions offering, taken with it because at last, at last, it pictures several of the races of humanity among the missions force. Our missions force has been for so long so white that I was about to despair that we would ever embrace what Christ embraced. But thank God, our beautiful savior is working even with us and look: a black American missionary, a Chinese American, a Japanese American whom I know personally -- the beauty of his story is that they sent him to work not with other Japanese people but to the nation of Zambia in Africa. Why not? Why not? A beautiful savior wants all men and women to discover one another in him.
It’s time as Jesus says to "strive to enter by the narrow way." It’s time to exercise some discipline about this business of being Christian. Did you realize that in the next twenty years the population of this globe will reach 10 billion? And if it remains true that only about a third of the world even claims knowledge of Christ, there are going to be more lost people in the next twenty years than there are people of all kinds today.
And did you know that right now -- not twenty years hence, but right now -- one and a half billion have no health care system; 800 million are illiterate; 500 million are near starvation? We have created an excluding world, but Christ wants to be the Lord, the savior and the Redeemer of all nations. What a beautiful world our beautiful savior wants to create!
"Some children see him lily white, The baby Jesus born this night, some children see Him lily white, with tresses soft and fair. Some children see Him bronzed and brown, the Lord of heaven to earth come down; some children see Him bronzed and brown, with dark and heavy hair. Some children see Him almond-eyed, this savior whom we kneel beside, Some children see Him almond-eyed, With skin of yellow hue. Some children see Him dark as they, Sweet Mary’s Son, to whom we pray; some children see Him dark as they, and ah! they love Him too! The children in each different place Will see the baby Jesus’ face Like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace, And filled with holy light. 0 lay aside each earthly thing, and with thy heart as offering, Come worship now the infant King. ’Tis love that’s born tonight."
