Vintage Path—Part One 5-07-06

Pastor Robert Stofel

 

See the chairs you're seated in. Some of the members pooled their money and bought them this week. Nice, huh? Well Cinda and I have a small confession to make concerning the chairs. The chairs you're seated in are really not the chairs we originally purchased. Actually, they're a second batch. We exchanged the first ones I bought.

It went down like this: I met Cinda at Sam's Club on Thursday, and she showed me the plastic contoured folding chair like the ones at Hickory Hills. Then she showed me the ones you're seated in now. And I couldn't make a decision, I really liked the ones you're seated in now, but Cinda, being a salesperson, did a good job of selling me on the contoured ones.

Because she said the ones you're seated in now, she'd heard that Sam's Club had trapped air inside the cushion that would soon collapse and become thin under constant wear. And I don't think it's any secret that Sam's Club has a labor contract with the trapped air in the cushion of your chair. And no one can really say when it ends or if it will be renewed.

So I thought, since Jim Waller weighs himself every Thursday, not any other day, just Thursday, and if he goes over his perfect weight, he does crunches or fasts from Kaye's cooking for a few days until he manages his weight.

So I figured we could keep our eyes on Jim, and if we see him sinking in his chair each Sunday, then we will know that the reason we are sinking in our chairs is not because there's a loud Ross Perot sucking noise around the plate of Nana's fudge, it's because the air is actually going out of the chair as I speak.

But the false air didn't deter me. But before we could load them up, Cinda saw another chair in the lawn and garden area.

“What about these chairs?” Cinda said. And, indeed this chair in Lawn & Garden had so much more to offer. It has a high-back, so you can rest your head.

It reclines, so if you wanted to turn the place into a planetarium, you could. We could project song lyrics on the ceiling.

But the feature that sold me on the chair was when Cinda said, “Heck, you can even take these to Talladega in the fall.” So I pictured all of us in the infield, and I smiled at Cinda and said, “Yeah, I can see us at Talladega .”

But we didn't want our Talladega aspirations to cloud our decision, so we carried our scrutiny further and placed one behind the other and each took a seat, and Cinda yelled, “Can you see over me?” I couldn't, but I thought of Talladega and said, “Yeah.”

So we bought the chairs but covered our butts and asked the man at the door if we could bring them back if Jill didn't like them, not because she's the boss of us, but because she's the boss of me.

So I carried the chairs home and tested them out on my neighbors. And my neighbors, the neighbors that you don't know , (Bonnie & Lee are holding me to the privacy act and I cannot release their names) liked them and said, “Oh, Robbie, I like those.”

So I was feeling kind of smug with my vintage look. Then Sloan came home, and I thought perfect. “Sloan, what do you think about the chairs I bought for the church , and she said—never missing a beat, scrunching up her face —“You bought lawn chairs for the church?”

I found myself getting defensive. “Yeah, we're different. Hip. Cool. Vintage.” She shook her head and walked away. And I knew then if Jill Jr. said it, then Jill Sr. would have the same reaction. So around 9:00 PM, when Jill got home, I sat one up in the kitchen and said, “Tell me what you think about the chairs we bought.”

“No, uh, uh. You can't have lawn chairs in a church. What were you thinking?”

I said, “Well, Cinda talked me into buying them.”

Jill said, “I'd take those back.”

And in that moment my vintage—hip, cool chairs became what they really were, which is a lawn chair. All of the great features came crashing down. I realized I let my Talladega aspirations override my taste, which Jill says I don't have.

Sometimes in life we can't really see our faults or someone else's until we get back to what the original design is supposed to be. The people in China didn't design the chair with Vintage Faith Church in mind. They made them to be lawn chairs, and I twisted them into chairs for church.

And sometimes I think we've twisted Jesus' message into something beyond what he originally meant for it. We can do that, you know. We can misrepresent Jesus' message. So Vintage Faith is simply going back to the original church to see if we've distorted the message over the last two thousand years. As Dan Kimball says, in his book, The Emerging Church, Vintage Faith is coming to the Gospel with fresh eyes, hearts, and minds to see where we've twisted it into a modern design.

Whether we know it or not , we view the church as a place where our needs are met, instead of a place we sacrifice and work for. We want lawn chairs to recline in because God knows we're worn out from working all week, and the last thing we want to do is work at our faith.

When we come to church as a consumer, then we make church into an event that takes place on Sunday, instead of a lifestyle that is lived out seven days a week.

And the problem is we don't always understand what kind of life the Gospel calls us to live, so we build denominations around certain doctrines. We draw the line on jewelry, on hair style, on smoking, on drinking, on being at church every time the door opens, on being successful as the world is successful.

So Vintage Faith is going back to the original to see where we've added man's structure to the Gospel. We're going to get back to what Jesus really meant when he said, “Follow me.”

 

How do you know when you're truly following Him?

1. We follow Him when we have a clear understanding of God's nature.

Psalm 145:18 

The LORD is near to all who call on him in truth.

Why truth? Because we can have a faulty view of God. We can call on God to be a lawn chair God when He's a pew God.

We believe the truth about God is that He's supposed to feed us bread from heaven and perform miracles as a way of making life bearable amid so many pains and disheartening burdens. But what if Jesus doesn't show up like this kind of God? It means that we have a faulty view of God.

Did you see the article in the Decatur Daily about me yesterday? Yeah, the Decatur Daily called me this past Wednesday and left a message on my voice mail. Melanie Smith wanted to talk to me about humor in southern Christian writers, and about the humor in my books.

Well, before I called back I took a moment, which is what I've learned to do when the Decatur Daily calls. So before I called back I sat down and wrote a couple of paragraphs about why I think humor is important. Now these two paragraphs took me about 45 minutes to devise. As I typed, I thought, This will sound great in the paper. Wait till my congregation reads this. They'll be so proud of me.

Then I called Melanie back, and she said, “Thanks for calling me back I'd like to talk to you about the humor in your books. I'm doing an article, “You might be a Redneck Preacher If…”

Now this hurt me. To be a humorist in the line of Mark Twain or Flannery O'Conner is ideal, but to be in the line of rednecks like Larry the Cable Guy, now that was something entirely different than what I had in mind when I wrote my two paragraphs. And I was thinking, You should've told me that it was an article on redneck humor. By the way, do y'all see me as a redneck?

The problem with God is that we always sit down and write a couple of paragraphs in our minds of what we think God is like.

So I thought I'd do a little experiment here. I want you to finish this sentence for me. God is like __________.

Can God be all of those? Sure. But the problem occurs when we get a view of God that happens to us in life:

The death of a loved one, the uncertainty of health complications, a bad business deal, believing someone has your best interest at heart—only to find out that they've lied to you, cheated on you.

Did any of you go to the cancer walk down on Bank Street Friday night? You should go some year. It's fun, and I had forgotten about it until my doorbell rang about 7:30 PM, and I opened the door to find the neighbors that none of you know, standing there like two Jehovah witnesses. They said, “You want to go down to the cancer walk? The Blues Brothers are playing.”

So we go and Jill starts talking to this neighbor that you don't know about the chairs, and they laugh and laugh about my desire of lawn chairs for church pews. During this little walk to the cancer walk, the neighbor that you don't know starts telling Jill how she was trying not to laugh when I told her I'd purchased them for the church, about how she was holding in little snickers that wanted to bubble right out in my face.

Then the neighbor that you don't know , said she told Lee, the guitar man to go out there and tell me how much he liked them. And while the Blues Brothers are playing they kept on and on about how funny it was that I purchased lawn chairs for the church.

So Saturday morning at 5:30 AM, the neighbor you don't know, met me at the back of my house. I was letting the dogs out, and this neighbor that you don't know , said, “I saw some theatre chairs in the newspaper at a yard sale in SW Decatur . We should buy them.”

“Buy them for what?” I said.

She said, “To put in the church.”

And I was thinking to myself Yeah, right. Ho-ho. You're not getting me again. You lying next door neighbor that none of you know.

When she said this, I was thinking about the night before. I was thinking about how Jill would team up with them and laugh about how I thought theatre seats would be hip. Cool. Vintage. You can make mistakes and will make mistakes in church. Never allow the mistake to define you.

If the Event defines you, it controls you. If you define the event, you choose what to think about the event. Never allow the event to make you feel a certain way.

If the event has power over you, then it can cause a faulty view of things. This is why experience when it comes to God is not the final answer about His nature. The Bible is the final answer to how you experience God. Because God is trying to make us into people who won't be comfortable here, but will be at home in heaven.

I told you about being blindsided as a kid. What's creating an emotion in you? Discover this and you will be able to assign truth to it.

Getting Over It vs. Getting Off It

1. We follow Him when we have a clear understanding of God's nature.

2. We follow Him when we trust Him.

Psalm 27:14 Wait patiently for the LORD; be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.

When you believe you will never obtain the thing you most desire in your life, you must remember that God works behind the scene. Wait patiently for the Lord. The way you do this is by doing what Henri Nouwen says to do in his book.

Nouwen says he became friends with some flying trapeze circus people. He was fascinated by the way they moved through the air, flying and catching as elegant dancers. He even traveled with them for a week, watching, viewing what it is that makes them so unique. He writes in a section of his book, called Let the Catcher Catch , these words:

One day I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troupe, in his caravan, talking about flying. He said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am a great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe,

my catcher. He has to be there for me with spilt second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in a long jump.” “How does it work?” I asked.

“The secret,” Rodleigh said, “is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catch bar.

“You do nothing!” I said, surprised. “Nothing,” Rodleigh repeated. “The worst thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It's Joe's task to catch me. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms that his catcher will be there for him.”(end)

Most of our problems are a result of trying to catch God. We get desperate and grab for a limb and we're hanging there wishing we could let go of our spouse's behavior and stop controlling; we wish we could let go of the job we hate and find another one, but we hold on to it out of fear; we wish we could just let go of fear.

It's like the man who got too close to the edge of a cliff and fell

off. As he was tumbling down the side of that cliff, he just happened to grab a tree limb. He stopped instantaneously.

Hanging there, he began to cry out, “Is anybody up there?” God answered him and said, “I'm here.” The man said, “Please help me, rescue me.” God said, “Let go and I'll catch you.” The man said, “Is anybody else up there?”

To believe in God is “to let God be the catcher.” This is the chief business of Vintage Faith. It's about going back to that moment when God was real to you, when God was so clear and so near that the hairs stood on the back of your neck, because, over time, we can write a faulty two paragraphs about God.

Because when God doesn't answer the way we want him to we keep trying to work life behind the scenes and start catching what he's supposed to catch.

So what are we about around here? We're about going back to that moment when God was so real to us.

Stand. I'd like for us to read our creed together.

Titus 3:3-7

Vintage Faith Church of Decatur's Creed:

Titus 3:3-7 - “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, we might have the hope of eternal life.”