We have a garden at our house. Or should I say, we had a garden. It was carefully planted, lovingly tended for a time, it was nurtured through the searing heat of July and watched over during the thundershowers of mid-August. But something happened to that garden, something awful and terrible, something disastrous and devastating. Weeds! Weeds grow there. Weeds that climb, weeds that entwine, weeds that choke and weeds that send out creeping root systems so long that when you pull them out you pull out three carrots, two tomato vines, and a very healthy zucchini all at the same time. Weeds have taken over the garden.
The moral of that story, of course, is that it's not hard to get things to grow if growth is all you want. It's not hard to get things to blossom and flourish and shoot up straight and tall, if you are not particular about what it is that shoots up there for you. Weeds are not hard to grow at all. Takes no effort whatsoever to grow weeds. Take it from me; I’ve been doing it for years.
Ah, but to grow something that you are proud of, to grow veggies for the salad and greens for the table, that is another matter. To grow the succulent squash and the perfect tomato, to produce the ripe rhubarb and the juicy blueberries we aspire to at our house, that takes something else indeed. And do you know what that takes? Do you have any idea what it costs to get good produce from gardens laid out in backyards made of garbage fill?
Well, it takes care, that's what. It takes care, lots of tender loving care. It may also translate into money and sweat and time and energy, but when you boil it down, it takes care. It involves care if you are to grow anything of value. And if my garden is now a jungle and tangle of unwanted weeds, I have no one to blame but myself; the schedule became too full and the discipline too small and I did not take good enough care of my little plot. And so because I did not care for it it did not grow what I wanted.
The point of my little parable is perfectly obvious when you apply it to church life, to Christian work and to the life we live in Christ. Whatever I do not care for, whatever I do not tend, in my spiritual discipline, soon is choked and clogged and full of spiritual weeds. But if I care about who I am under God, if I take care of the gifts God has given me, then I have half a chance at least of seeing something develop there that will honor my Lord.
And if this is true of us as individual Christians, it is also true of us as a gathering of Christians, it is true of us as a church. God's church, however much we may claim it is of divine origin, however much we may like to glow and bask in the work of the Spirit within us -- and that's fine, I certainly am not putting that down -- but however much, you see, we may talk of being here as a church by the grace of God, it is still true that He has given into our hands its care. He expects us to take care of what he has planted and watered and worked and suffered for; to us God gives the care of his church, and if we care for it, it will grow.
You have already heard me say a fair amount about the theme we are picking up on in this church, the theme of “Grow By Caring.” This is a theme being used by American Baptists across the nation as a means of focusing the kind of planning a church might do. It's very simply a succinct and easy way of putting into a framework all the many things a church may want to do in order to become a dynamic growing church. And you know already that we are looking for some of those kinds of things as clues to the way we ought to be living out our lives together as Takoma Park Baptist Church. The idea is really very simple: that through the elected leadership of the church, through its committees, its deacons, its staff; and most of all through you, the friends and members of the church, we would commit ourselves to some things we can accomplish is the next several months together, so that whenever a full-time permanent pastor comes, he will find already going a dynamic and witnessing Christian community. That's simple, at least simple to state, if not so easy to put into action. But you can read in the bulletin insert some of the principles we'll be going by in these coming weeks. You can read these and you can put yourself into them and begin to ask how you can put these same principles into action in your own life.
But what I want to do today is to focus you on the overarching truth, the great embracing reality that ties all these ideas together. I want us to identify what it means to be a caring, growing church. I want us to think of ourselves in terms rather like that garden of mine, where sometimes you grow good things and sometimes, without even trying, the weeds pop up. But the difference is made when you take care. And in the church, too, the difference is made when you take care.
Now in the earliest Christian church there is a matchless example of what I'm talking about. All the way back at the very beginning of the Christian movement they had discovered exactly what I'm talking about, and they fleshed it out for us in ways that we can learn from. Almost from Day One of the early church they had learned some lessons that speak to us about what it means to be a caring, growing church. And I'd like us to follow that story through and see what it says to us – not that the early church had no weeds in it; they did, as a careful reading of the Book of Acts will show. But they understood this concept, they hammered home this essential principle: that if you grow to be a caring people, then your care will issue in growth, healthy growth. Let's watch.
I
The passage in the second chapter or Acts which I read just a few moments ago begins not long after the Pentecost experience, when the believers received the empowering warmth of the Holy Spirit. And it begins immediately after Peter, warmed up and given boldness and courage by that same Spirit, had spoken with fire and with conviction to all of Jerusalem. The brunt of his message, the core or what he had to say, was this: You crucified and killed Jesus Christ, in whom God was at work; God raised him from the dead, and, well, you've got a problem. You've got a problem, and the name of that problem is sin, the name or that problem is faithlessness, the name or that problem is that you have flown in the face or very God. Peter laid the issue out on the line, he names it for what it was, and our Scripture tells us, "Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Brethren, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized everyone or you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness or your sins.”
“Repent and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” And in a preachment like that I learn from old Peter, old blustery, straightforward Peter, the first lesson about what it is to be a caring, growing church: I learn that a caring growing church cares enough to tell the truth about the human condition. I learn that the church's first task is to be the church, it is to proclaim to dying men and women the ultimate truth about who they are and what they need. The church which wants to grow will begin by caring enough about people to tell them clearly, unequivocally about their desperate need of a savior.
You see, what I suspect has happened to so many of us is that we are frightfully busy proclaiming the kind of evangelism we don't like. We are busy announcing that we don't like hell-fire and brimstone preaching; we are busy announcing that this or that television evangelist turns us off; we are able to critique the inadequacies of the Four Spiritual Laws or the Roman Road or whatever witnessing gimmick you've seen pulled on yourself. And I won't quarrel with our doing that; I have many a problem with all of that myself.
But when we get finished deciding what kinds of evangelism we don't like, have we decided what kind of evangelism we do like, what kind of witnessing we will do? When it all boils down as to what we are about here in this church, are we going to decide that we care enough about people to tell them the truth about who they are and what they need? Are we going to speak with candor and with urgency about the sinful human condition? Oh yes, we have to speak the truth in love, with tact and with good sense, but speak the truth!
O let's learn to be a caring church, let's learn to care so much about dying humanity that we cannot get it off our minds and off our hearts that countless thousands have not yet heard. Let's learn to care about a church in which there are ever a thousand members on the roll, but we do well to have many more than 200 on a given Sunday. Let's learn to care about the real spiritual condition of a lost world, and then we'll grow, we'll grow in a healthy way and maybe even decide that some of our weeds could be nurtured into healthy plants.
II
Then there's another aspect of the life of this early church that appeals to me, there's another sense in which their experience marks them as a growing, caring church. And that is that they invested themselves in a full diet of sharing and learning and praying and worshiping. They cared enough to do it all, they cared enough about the quality of their life together that they invested themselves in a full and balanced diet. Listen:
“So those who received Peter's word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” (I'd call that a growing church, wouldn't you?). But listen to what these converts did now: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” In short, they cared enough to prepare themselves in every way possible to be the church in the world: they gave themselves to teaching, to fellowship, to breaking of bread (that is, to the very special kind of worship that happens when we gather around the Lord's Table) and to their prayers.
What I’m hearing in this passage is this: that a church which cares, a church which cares enough to grow healthy Christians and not just a pious weed patch, that church will care enough to offer its people an ample diet. It will care enough to insist that they attend to the apostles' teaching: well, we may not have an apostle around here, they are a little hard to find these days, but we do have the teaching, we do have the scripture. And there is so much to learn; not just the Bible itself to be learned, but if we are to be effective Christians we need to learn about human psychology and we need to know something of contemporary culture and we ought to be a bit aware of world history and on and on and one. We need, every one of us, to care about learning, about devoting ourselves to the teachings of the faith.
And the Scripture says these early Christians cared enough to devote themselves to fellowship, to koinonia, to sharing; more about that later, but it means that a church which wants to grow will help people find one another, love one another, be with one another.
And they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and the prayers. What a magnificent picture of three thousand new Christians finding that only in communion with one another and with their Lord could they grown into healthy, authentic persons. You see, I am convinced that our greatest failure lies here: that we do not yet know how to worship, we do not yet fully understand all that is available to us when we gather in this room Sunday by Sunday. Just a few weeks ago the religious press carried the story about one of the great Baptist preachers of our day becoming an Episcopalian. John Claypool, for many years the pastor of great churches and a preacher widely respected, has decided that the Baptist way of worship is too sterile, too preacher-centered, too personality-oriented. He says he wants to be in touch with the great minds and spirits of the ages and so he has become an Episcopalian because he cares so much for worship.
Well, clearly I do not agree with the step he has taken. But he does have his finger on an issue of importance to us. When we think of worship as “going to the preaching service,” when we measure the effectiveness of worship by the number of decibels the preacher's voice hit or the number of times he stepped on our collective toes, then I am afraid we have robbed ourselves of some of the awesome power of worship. The church which wants to grow will care about its attention to worship, it will care about leading every Christian to devote himself to teaching, to fellowship, to breaking bread and prayers.
III
And finally, if you and I take seriously what happened in this ancient church, if we are able to learn from these fascinating early Christians, they have another and even more astounding lesson to teach us. Watch what they do now:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.” Oh, oh, now the preacher really has begun to meddle. Oh, oh, now he's going to talk about possessions and goods and distributing: trouble!
Well, whenever I preach at the chapel at Howard University, I notice that there is always a group of students – in fact I think they are some of our Baptist students -- who come in to the service so late that the offering has already been collected. And there is no small suspicion that in fact they have been standing around outside trying to be too late to share in the offering! Money talk hurts, doesn't it? This is the tough part.
Well, that's the bad news; but here's the good news. I'm not approaching this part of the text quite that way. Instead of talking about how we need to give – even though we do – and instead of talking about how much we ought to support missions, even though we do need to do that -- I'm not going to say one word about giving our money, not one little word about being good stewards, all right?
Instead, in all seriousness, here is what I learn from these early Christians, in such a beautiful way: that the church which grows, grows by caring so much about its people that they enter into one another's everyday lives. Real church, authentic church, for me, happens not just on Sunday when we gather for worship; real church happens when people care about one another, when people get involved in one another's lives; real church happens when you find that your best friends as the folks you know at the church; real church happens, caring church happens, when you are in trouble and the first people you think about calling on are your fellow church members.
For me, authentic church happens when I enter a hospital room and I find that others of you have already been there, offering your prayers, meeting needs, lifting burdens. For me, authentic church happens when someone is in trouble – financially, personally, emotionally – and it is the church people who hold him up. James said it, “Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the Law of Christ.”
Oh, I don’t know that we can quite achieve what those early Christians did when it says that they held all their possessions in common, that they sold everything they had and gave it to those who needed it. That seemed impractical even in the church of the first century and it didn't last. But can't you catch the beautiful spirit behind it all? Can't you get excited about people who knew so profoundly that because of what God had done in them that they belonged to one another, heart and mind and body and soul?
The church which grows to care, you see, cares enough so that it grows -- it grows because others are attracted to a love like that. It grows because others see that there is meaning and purpose and joy and redemption in a community like that. Day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.
O my poor garden, you have so many weeds along with the lovely flowers; you have so much that needs tending and caring if you are going to bring forth much fruit. But if only we will understand that we must care for this garden – that we must speak the truth about human sin with urgency; that we must offer a full and satisfying diet for a hungry humanity; that we must enter into one another's lives and love one another without reserve -- then, and only then, will the second chapter of Acts close the accounts on our church too: “The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
