The campaigns are over. So are the celebrations and the inaugural balls. The toasts, the handshakes, the good wishes are about to fade into memory. Today, for George Walker Bush, the work begins. Today, the list of things to do takes on shape. Today, the agenda becomes different. Yesterday he was a president-in-waiting, working on ideas, dreams, hopes, and expectations. Today he is the president, and reality is setting in. Yesterday he had plans; today he has a job to do. Yesterday he had proposals; today there is an agenda. And Mr. Bush will soon find out, if he does not already know, what agenda anxiety is.
Agenda anxiety is the fear that the things you want to see done are not going to get done. Agenda anxiety is the worry that all the things you are about are will be watered down, thrown out, and compromised. Agenda anxiety is the mess you have, when you are trying to move forward with a set of goals, and out there are a bunch of folks who seem bound and determined to sabotage everything you are working for. Agenda anxiety? Have you ever felt that? You don’t have to be the President of the United States to feel agenda anxiety.
I am involved in several groups and boards outside the church. I serve as either the president or the secretary of a couple of these groups, which means that either I am supposed to set the agenda or I am supposed to record the things we did to meet the agenda. Well, these groups give me agenda anxiety! In one group, which is all pastors, and that probably explains it, I find myself sort of shouting, “Wait for me, I’m your leader!”. I cannot pin them down to anything orderly. Everybody wants to talk at the same time, everybody has an opinion, everybody is ready to sound off! There are about a dozen people in this group, and that means there are about a dozen different opinions. Happily, they’re not all Baptists, or else there would be two dozen opinions! But it is nothing for us to come to the end of the meeting with very little settled. I get a bad case of agenda anxiety out of that group!
Have you had this experience? You’re in a meeting and they hand out a piece of paper that is supposed to be the agenda; but everybody goes off on their own? You feel agenda anxiety. You came to discuss issues and ideas, but the chairman just makes announcements, and when you try to talk about some concern, he dismisses you with a wave of the hand and the promise, “We’ll deal with that some other time.” You have agenda anxiety. You want to see some particular problem solved, but it just shows up week after week and month after month, and nobody gets down to doing anything about it. What you feel is agenda anxiety.
Agenda anxiety is what we feel when something is not moving forward as we think it ought to. Agenda anxiety is what I feel when I read last year’s Book of Reports, and see what I said I wanted to lead you to do – and then read this year’s Book of Reports, and see that some of the same stuff is here! Would you do me a favor? Would you promise to do something for me? When you get home with your Year 2000 report, would you first throw away your Year 1999 report, and promise never to look at it again! That might save both you and me from a serious case of agenda anxiety! We are short – far short – of what we ought to be and what we could be. Measured against what Christ wants for His church, Takoma Park Baptist Church is far short of the mark. That’s likely to give us agenda anxiety.
But then, the truth is, that wherever Jesus comes, people get agenda anxiety. Whenever Jesus acts, people find that He does not do what they expected Him to do, He is not what they thought He would be. And whenever Jesus speaks, folks get agenda anxiety, because He breaks the mold, He goes beyond their preconceived ideas, He is more than they can handle. Jesus has always given people agenda anxiety, and I pray that He will continue to do so. I pray that He will continue to challenge our comfort zones, that He will teach us more than we want to know. I pray that wherever Jesus comes, whenever Jesus acts and speaks, we will, like these folks in Jerusalem, end up saying, "Never has anyone spoken like this!" I pray that our easy, relaxed, soft churchmanship will always get agenda anxiety when Jesus is around.
In this complicated story in the 7th chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus gave agenda anxiety to the people of Jerusalem. Let’s see what we can learn from them.
I
First, some folks got agenda anxiety because they saw that Jesus was about equipping people, empowering people, making them confident. Some got agenda anxiety because what they wanted to do was make others dependent. They wanted to make others subordinate. But Jesus was about empowerment. Jesus was about equipping and building up people, and that made them anxious.
When Jesus went up into the Temple in the middle of one of the festivals, and began to teach, they said, "How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?" And Jesus’ response was, "My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.”
"How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?" In other words, who are you? You have not been to our schools. You have not sat at our feet. You have not paid your respects to our authority. How did you get so smart, Jesus, because you didn’t come to us and pay us tuition and ask for our diploma? They were threatened and anxious, because Jesus had not jumped through all the proper hoops, he had not joined the right clubs, he didn’t have credentials. All Jesus seemed to have was Himself. And that wasn’t good enough.
It reminds me of my father-in-law, who taught at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville for many years. He was supremely confident of that seminary’s quality, and that’s a good thing; but whenever he heard about some pastor who was making a name as a preacher or some professor who was writing outstanding scholarship, my father-in-law would always say, “Well, but, is he one of OUR men?” If he wasn’t one of OUR men, a Southern graduate, well, how could he possibly be any good?!
"How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?" Jesus’ reply is as powerful today as it was when it was first uttered. It is as powerful for us as it was for the people of Jerusalem. "My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” Jesus brought then and brings now a fresh, first-hand experience of God. Jesus comes to us and urges us into first-hand fellowship with the Father. He wants us to be equipped. He wants us to be empowered. He wants us to know, not because somebody has fed us facts, but because we have encountered for ourselves the living God. Jesus wants a church full of people who can do more than say, “My pastor says …”, more than, “My Sunday School teacher says…” Jesus wants a church full of people who know the truth directly, up close, for real.
Friends, this is the glory of a people’s church like ours. We do not depend on any human authority to tell us what to think. We do not look to pastor or priest or pope or professor to force us into anything. We use them to help us learn, of course; but ultimately it is up to each one of us to discover God’s truth. It is up to each one of us to become equipped and empowered.
An agenda anxious church will be one where somebody wants to make sure that no one except the powers that be knows anything or teaches anything. But the church of Jesus Christ will be an empowered church, where each of us enjoys the high privilege of learning God’s word and God’s way for ourselves. There is no agenda anxiety any longer when you know that what is in your mind is not second-hand, but fresh from the Lord Himself. "Never has anyone spoken like this!"
II
But that’s not the only source of agenda anxiety. There is something else. Jesus creates agenda anxiety because when He teaches and when He acts, He works toward compassion. When Jesus teaches and when Jesus acts, He is interested in helping others become whole. He is not interested in perpetuating their brokenness.
The context here in the 7th chapter of John is that only a few days before, Jesus had healed a sick man on the Sabbath Day. The trouble with that is that it was the Sabbath Day. And on that day, according to the strict interpretation of the Law, no work was to be done. None. Not the least. You could not pick up food and prepare it. You could not build a fire to keep warm. You could not walk more than a few steps. No work at all! That was what got them upset – they weren’t at all interested in the fact that Jesus could heal a sick person! The power of that escaped them entirely! What got them wound up was that he did it the wrong way, at the wrong time.
It’s like someone said about a pastor friend of mine: “He did all the right things in the wrong way.” It offended them. It gave them agenda anxiety. It wasn’t done according to the rules.
Friends, too many parts of the church of Jesus Christ today are no different. Filled with legalism, floundering in self-righteousness, rejoicing when others fail, proud as peacocks of our own goodness, too many Christians and too many churches have a vested interest in keeping people wounded. Too many churches want only sanctified saints, and not seeking sinners, in their midst. Too many churches want to be rest homes for tired saints rather than hospitals for sick sinners. So no wonder that when Jesus speaks, He creates agenda anxiety. Too many of us want people to stay wounded. Jesus wants them to be healed, and the neat little rules will just have to bend!
“ … are you angry with me because I healed a man’s whole body on the Sabbath? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment." Oh, that we may become a church consumed with helping and healing people! Oh, that we may learn how to care for the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely, even when they don’t fit the mold of what we’d like them to be. I was talking with another pastor this week, a pastor who has only a few months’ experience. This pastor said, “Do you know what I’ve discovered? I’ve discovered that there may be only one couple in my church who are still in their original marriage – everybody else has been divorced and remarried two or three times. And, in addition to that, I’ve found out that several families have people who are in jail, and many of my families have alcohol problems. I never expected church to be like this.” Do you know what I said? Can you guess what I said? Did I say, you need to get rid of them and bring in some real Christians, some nice people? Did I advise this pastor to start screaming and shouting about the evils of divorce and demon alcohol? I did not. I said, “But just think; the good news is they are in church. They want something better. They want to be healed. Now go and preach the good news.”
If you think church is a society for the preservation of perfect piety, then you are going to have a serious case of agenda anxiety. Because when Jesus speaks, it is about compassion. It is about healing. It is not about putting people down; it is about lifting them up. It is about working with the drug abuser. It is about listening to the alcoholic. It is about intervening in the scattered family. It is about counseling with the pregnant teenager. It is about getting help for the abusive father. It is about wholeness and healing and not about putting people down. "Never has anyone spoken like this!"
III
There’s more. There are other ways to get agenda anxiety. There are other ways to discover how this Jesus, when He speaks, gives us a rough time. For this Jesus also gives a bad case of agenda anxiety to those who are more concerned with correctness than they are with God’s dynamic presence. This Jesus will worry you to death if you have to have everything exactly right, nice and neat, signed, sealed, and delivered. He will worry you because He will explode your images of what we are supposed to be.
They said, “Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Messiah? Yet we know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from."
In other words, hey, we know what we have always been taught. And it says right here, in black and white, in plain and simple Hebrew, that no one will know where the Messiah is coming from. And since we know that this Jesus was born in Bethlehem and since we know that he grew up in Nazareth, well, voila! He cannot be the Messiah. It doesn’t compute! It doesn’t fit in with the way we’ve always read our Bibles!
But Jesus replies, and I imagine with a touch of irritation in His voice, "You know me, and you know where I am from. I have not come on my own. But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him.” Jesus said, you may know my geography, but you do not know my heart. You may know my latitude and my longitude, but you do not know about the Father who sent me. You are so captured with the need to protect your precious doctrinal ideas, you cannot see what God is doing around you. Agenda anxiety.
This troubles churches today. It certainly does. You do not have to go very far from here to find people who will argue that women ought not to be pastors or deacons. They argue that on the basis of their reading of the Bible. And of course it is quite possible to read the Bible that way. But you are now in a church which years ago discovered that God was doing a new thing, calling both women and men into His service. We knew that because we were less interested in protecting doctrine than we were in discovering what God was doing now.
We can be proud of that. We can be proud of thirty-seven years as a multiracial church; in those days there were plenty of people who could quote you Bible chapter and Scripture verse to prove that it was not God’s will for black and white to be together. But you saw that God in Jesus Christ was doing a new thing, a reconciling thing, and you responded.
Takoma, do not be pulled backward on anything by anyone who is more interested in protecting ideas than in going where God is at work. We were taught in our “Experiencing God” discipline that God is always at work around us, and is inviting us to join Him in His work. Jesus spoke it, " I have not come on my own. But the one who sent me is true.” He is always up to something, this God, this Christ. "Never has anyone spoken like this!"
IV
And finally, strange as it may seem, awesome as it may appear, some got agenda anxiety around Jesus because they were afraid He was going to reach out and include new people. They got worried about Jesus’ agenda, because maybe, just maybe, He was going to touch some lives that were, well, not their kind of people. His agenda was too big for them to stomach.
"Where does this man intend to go …? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?”
This Jesus .. He seems to want to reach out beyond the usual boundaries. Does He want to go over there where the Greeks are, and teach them? Does He want to get down and dirty with people who are not like us? Will He bring them here and mess things up? Will our synagogues ring with the sound of an alien language? Will our sanctuaries be taken over with people who do not do church like we do church? It’s natural to have agenda anxiety if you think that the things you’ve spent years building will be discarded.
Takoma tomorrow. Will there be drums instead of a pipe organ? Will there be praise music instead of stately hymns? Agenda anxiety. Will there be dialogue sermons instead of three points and a poem? Will there be videotapes in every corner instead of stained glass on every wall? Agenda anxiety. Will they wear jeans instead of suits and have rings dangling from assorted body parts? What is going to happen to my church, the Takoma I have always cherished?
I do not know. I cannot predict. All I know is that I am haunted by the Jesus who stands in the Temple and boldly announces, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ’Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’"
All I know is that I am haunted and challenged, driven and compelled by the Jesus who raises agenda anxiety in me, but then announces that He is living water. Who bids me come and be loved by Him. Who offers me refreshment and hope. Who brings my heart rivers of living water. Not a trickle, but a river. Not a little drop, but rivers. Not just the tiny image of yesterday’s church, but living water. Not just protecting the past, but a glorious church, without spot or wrinkle or blemish; a church which embraces all people and empowers them. A church which leaves no one out. A church which cares about the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely. A church which cares about you and me, with our anxieties, our shortcomings, our fears, and our disappointments. A church which gets over its agenda anxiety, because of this Jesus. This Jesus. "Never has anyone spoken like this!"
