The woman answered a knock on her door, and found there a homeless man who said that he was looking for odd jobs to do so that he could earn a little money. “Well,” she said, “around the back of my house I do have a porch that needs painting. Can you handle a paint brush?” He said that he could, and so she gave him a gallon of bright green paint and a brush and said, “Go around back, you’ll see the porch that needs painting, and go to it. Do a good job on my porch and I will pay you whatever it’s worth.”
About an hour later came another knock on her door, and there he stood, smiling, and announcing that he had finished. “Well, “ she said, “that was fast. Did you do a really good job?” “Oh, yes, ma’am. I covered every spot, I really lathered on this bright green paint. But, by the way, there is one thing I’d like to tell you. I guess you don’t know too much about cars. But that’s not a Porsche, that’s a Mercedes.”
Sometimes the message we send is not the message that is received! Paul figured out, when he was just about done lathering the Corinthian Christians with criticisms, that maybe the message he was sending was not the message they were receiving.
Last week I told you I really like to work with the Biblical material about the church at Corinth. I told you that despite its fractiousness, infighting, immorality, and jealousies, I like that church. I like that church because it is familiar. I like it because I know it. I mentioned that its address could be Washington rather than Corinth. And then I proceeded to speak about living in the contradictions, living with mixed feelings. I talked about living in conflict and understanding that when we differ with one another, that is God’s opportunity to make us grow and even to enrich us. I rather laid it out last week, didn’t I? Yes, I laced it with humor, and yes, I told you some good stories, but the bottom line last week was that we need to acknowledge and work with the contradictions in our fellowship. The bottom line was and is that I personally just refuse to be worried or anxious or distraught about our church, because I believe in you and I believe in the Lord of the church.
Some said they heard that message very clearly. Others said, “Ouch, I needed that.” And others, doubtless, went away troubled. But that’s all right. That’s all right. I want to take up where I left off last week, using the same Scripture, but extending it a bit and creating an entirely different mood. I want to do, as best I can, what Paul did with the Corinthian church: I want to make sure that love is heard here. Having spoken candidly last week, having poured out for you some of the issues I see, and, although I insisted that those issues were good news and not bad, occasions for the gospel rather than occasions for, I know that some went away a little scared, a little frightened. The message that was sent was not necessarily the message that was received.
Paul says in this letter that sometimes he has had to be bold and to scold and admonish, and then he turns right around and tells them that he loves them, he cares about them, they are the very hope of the world, they are the apple of God’s eye. Paul scolds them and he loves them, he chastises them and he compliments them. Again, I like that. That’s familiar. I’m right there. I am right there with him when he says, “We have spoken frankly to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections.” I am right there. I have spoken frankly to you, Takomans. My heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in my affections either. The question now is the same as Paul’s question to the church at Corinth: will you “open wide your hearts also”? Will you open wide your hearts also?
I
Have you ever had the experience of being in a climate of love, where not a word was spoken, no concrete gifts given, nothing but the power of love? Have you ever been in a setting where there was a serious problem, nothing you could do, nothing you could say, to help? And yet you knew that love lived there?
About four years ago it became apparent that my mother was dying. She had declined both physically and mentally, and we knew it could not be long. My son was traveling to the west coast from time to time, so he arranged for a stopover on one of his flights, and spent a day in Texas, where my mother, his grandmother, was in a nursing home. My brother reported to me that it was apparent that she hardly knew her own grandson; her responses were limited to occasional grunts and groans; and Bryan ran out of things to say very soon, just because there was no response. But, says my brother, that young man was willing and able just to sit in that nursing home room and just to look at and smile at his grandmother for several hours, in complete silence. And, before it was over, I’m told, she was smiling back, feeling loved and sharing love. But all of it in total silence.
Sometimes, you see, if there are problems and doubts, concerns and pain, the thing that will bridge that gap is a wide open heart. Not programs, not speeches, not material gifts, but a wide open heart. And so I believe that Christ calls us to become ambassadors of the wide open heart.
Paul said to that fractious congregation at Corinth, that could barely keep itself together, “God has entrusted unto us the ministry of reconciliation.” God has called us to be ambassadors for Christ, telling the world that it was no longer necessary to live outside of fellowship with God; proclaiming that is was no longer necessary to live in guilt. Remember, these were messed up folks, but God has given them the ministry of reconciliation, to show the world the glory of living a forgiven life. Now how in the world would they do this? How would feisty, feudin’, fightin’, fussin’ folks like these become ambassadors for Christ and messengers of His love?
They would do so by living in the presence of the cross, that wordless cross where he who knew no sin was made to be sin for them. That silent cross where the innocent paid the price for the guilty. That cross, towering o’er the wrecks of time, where the lamb of God was willingly slaughtered for the sins of the world. The cross where the one who was right, always right, allowed himself to look wrong, terribly wrong, so that we could learn what love does.
“In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us” God is sending a message of love through those Corinthian Christians who at times could barely stand the sight of each other, who chose up sides every time an issue comes along, through those Corinthians who were always adding up their spiritual brownie points. And among them God planted the cross, “making Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. Among folks like that God chose just to create a climate of love until they would love Him back. Among them God lived with a wide open heart until their hearts would open wide too.
I lack the power this morning to say everything that is in my heart. I can’t quite find exactly the right way to say it. But this point about the cross, about the one who even though he was right, allowed himself to be degraded and to look foolish: did you know that it’s possible to be right in all the wrong ways? Did you know that you can be right, so everlastingly correct, that you make everybody miserable with your correctness? I have told you before about a former pastor of mine, who had a history of being so brilliant people couldn’t stand him. I’ve mentioned that he served a church here in the Washington area for a while, but was asked to leave. Well, that particular church has kept on running through pastors, sort of every two or three years there is a new one, with each one leaving more miserable than the last. You might like to know that, once upon a time, in a masochistic mood, and well before I got hooked up with you folks, I was interviewed about becoming their pastor. I asked them if they could tell me just one or two of the important events that had made their church what it was. One person said, “Well, we had a pastor who cost us eight hundred members”. He was so right he was wrong. He was so correct that nobody felt loved. He looked so good nobody could stand him! And, do you know, that same church has been going down, down, down, ever since; and just a few months ago, they voted to disband completely.
God has called us to the ministry of reconciliation. We need to see that in the cross there was one who was indeed always right, but who allowed himself to be treated like dirt, made to be sin, so that others could feel the love in His heart. If you and I can just feel His wide open heart, we’ll open up our hearts too. We’ll become ambassadors with wide open hearts.
II
Let me become very specific now about what a church full of ambassadors with wide open hearts might do. Let me get off the generalities and go to some specifics. In other words, as the old line goes, let me quit preaching and go to meddling.
a
If we can feel the wide open heart of Christ, it will not be long until we have wide open hearts toward our community. We need to believe that God has kept us here for a purpose. We really do need to love this community. But it is going to call for wide open hearts, outpouring love, not just little drips and dribbles.
Ours is a changing community. There is more evidence of crime and violence in this neighborhood. We are hearing about more incidents that tell us we are no longer a safe little enclave of leafy streets and well-kept houses. And we are a changing community in other ways, too; there are more Hispanics, more Asians, more internationals of all sorts and flavors, and that puts a stress on a community. People don’t just naturally get along; it takes work to learn to understand your neighbor when your neighbor is very different.
We are a changing community spiritually, too. I would venture to say that there are more people from non-Christian backgrounds than there were ten years ago. There are more purely secular people, with no spiritual background. And there are also more storefront churches, suggesting that there are more people who are not receptive to our style of church. This is not an easy community to love.
All of this calls for a church of ambassadors with wide open hearts. We need to do a lot more in sharing the good news in this community. We need more evangelism, we need more service ministries, we need new ways and new times in which to worship and teach. Busy as we are, we need to do much more outreach than we are doing! Yes, it will cost us, but, I tell you, ambassadors with wide open hearts are willing to pay the price, because they have felt the wide open heart of Christ.
Something else: if we can feel the wide open heart of Christ, it will not be long until we have wide open hearts toward the world at large. The wider our hearts are open toward Christ and toward each other and toward those around us, the more we will love the whole world. I am going to ask us, in this coming year, to focus on our missionary task. I am going to ask us to look beyond our four walls and our stained glass and see if our hearts are wide open enough to go way out there.
Let me pose some “what if” questions. What if somebody. maybe somebody who has been through the “Experiencing God” groups, got excited about starting some support groups for people with special needs, and folks got some real Christ-centered help? What would you think of that? What if we started a Bible study in some apartment complex nearby and people who don’t know Christ or who have been away from the church for a long time got into serious stuff in their spiritual lives? Would you support that? Want to go bolder than that? What if we found a spot in some neighborhood where we could begin a Bible study and grow it into a brand new church? How about that? Are you ready for more? What if we actually sent a team of workers somewhere overseas to do a missions project, just as we sent a team to North Carolina several weeks ago?! Expensive, you say? Yes. Hard work? Of course. But ambassadors with wide open hearts are willing to pay that price, because they have felt the wide open heart of Christ.
Are we having fun yet? Am I completely crazy? Oh, look out! I even believe that if we can feel the wide open heart of Christ, we will get wide open to the future. I believe that we will figure out how to love the future, not just our historic past and not just our dynamic present, but our future. Wide open hearts will do some things to love those coming after us and assure our future. We are not just working for today; we are working for our children and our children’s children. For the future.
This building is an instrument for our future; we’ve spent a lot of money improving it, building systems that should serve for a long time. And we do need to pay for them; paying down our debt is a way of loving the future. This building still has lots of problems, more than most of you could even imagine; moving on to take care of those things is a way to love the future. We may need additional staff workers in the future, just because some of our staff are finding it hard to keep up now with everything we are doing. We may need new equipment, new materials, new transportation facilities, new musical resources. All kinds of things we may need in the future. And I will not hide the fact that all of these things can be expensive. But we will love the future with wide open hearts because we live in the wide open heart of Christ. We are going to be ambassadors with wide open hearts, willing to pay the price, because we have felt the wide open heart of Christ.
Oh, of course there is another choice. The newspaper this week told the story of an old country store in Fairfax, a store that was boarded up almost twenty years ago, and now it’s being sold and removed. When they went in, they found a relic of the past. Something that served well twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. Something that meant a lot for its community and gave meaning to its owner, back then. But when the owner could no longer operate the store, and her son just didn’t want to, it was closed. What struck me was this: they found cans of food, left tightly sealed and unused on the shelves, now burst open, and they spewed smelly decay all over the place.
In other words, you may possess resources, you may have something that could nourish and help someone else. But if it’s hoarded and boarded, and there’s no wide open heart, that stuff spoil and stain and smell and be utterly pointless.
“We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians, [Takomans]; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections ... open wide your hearts also.” Message sent; message, I hope, received as intended.
There are two little girls in this congregation, sisters, whose reactions when you offer them affection are as different as night and day. These two little sweethearts, raised in the same family, given the same kind of care from their parents and their grandparents, are just in two entirely different places as to how they respond to others. One of them soaks up love in a very open way. She will race down the corridor with her arms flung wide and will shriek her greetings when she sees you, and, if you aren’t careful, this mighty mite will tackle you and almost knock you over with her embrace. She soaks up love in a very open way.
Her sister, however, is completely different, at least on the surface. Her sister ducks her head when you call her name. Her sister begins to whimper when you reach out, and, if you are rash enough actually to touch this child, she runs off to hide behind anything convenient, whether it be a chair, a door, or grandma’s skirts. On the surface she does not want attention, on the surface she does not respond to affection. But we know that that is just a front, and it will go away. We know that behind that frowning face there is a young heart that wants love just as much as her older sister does. We are not fooled. We know that, as different as night and day as these two young ladies seem to be, they want the same thing. They want what every child wants. They want to be loved, they want to taken into somebody’s wide open heart. And so we’ll keep on giving them our hearts, free and open, until the day comes when each of them, in her own way, responds. Because after all, they are not only sisters, brought up in the same family. They are church family, our family. They get our wide open hearts.
Family responds to the wide open heart. So we’ll keep on giving our hearts, free and open, until the day comes when each of us, in our own way, responds. Ultimately we will respond to the wide open heart. Ultimately we will become ambassadors of the wide open heart.
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