“Our Citizenship is in heaven”
Thursday of this week, St. Giles Presbyterian Church in St. Catharines hosted a mission night. The guests were David, Linda and Chelsea Webber. (Chelsea was the one who was home-schooled, and is now going to school, her last year of high school before she heads off, I think, to university, subsequent to that.)
Now, I was the only one from St. Andrew’s to be at that evening, which is a shame, to some degree, in the sense that it was a very worthwhile evening, hosted by the Webbers. (I’ll mention a bit about what they do shortly.) However, since no one from the congregation was there, it means that I am happy to share with you what I discovered there, and to tell you about the Webbers and the ministry of which they are a part.
David, Linda, Chelsea Webber, join with another couple, the Wymingas, and Charles McNeil, to handle fourteen ministry points in the central part of British Columbia, I guess somewhat in the vicinity of Prince George, Quesnel, north of Kamloops, certainly. Fourteen ministry points—I think that there is one actual church building; most of the rest are forms of ministry that meet at houses.
I would like to read the beginning of what David Webber had to say in the newsletter [of the ministry] which came out at the beginning of the year. He says, “Eighteen years into this mission, and God is still constantly surprising us as a mission team. We make our five-year plans and then God gets involved and wonderfully messes them up. It’s exciting stuff as long as one keeps the perspective that God is the one who is supposed to be running things.” And I thought, What an admirable way of expressing it—God is the one who is supposed to be the one running things.
David Webber, on this theme of “God the one running things” told us a number of stories—led us in worship, to begin with, however. The first song he had us sing was, “Just a closer walk with Thee”. And he and his wife played guitars, but his daughter played an electric piano, and is a person who will be pursuing music—at least music education—as a career. So they led us in “Just a closer walk with Thee”, and then, they moved on to, “In the garden”. And he commented, “Those songs are pretty old, aren’t they? And they are not in this hymn book.” But he said, “In the Cariboo ministry, we sing those old songs.” But then, from there, he went on to a song by Brian Doerksen, from Langley, B.C.—a contemporary composition. And then another song from—I think the persons’ name was—John Mark from Belfast in Northern Ireland—another more contemporary song.
He [David Webber] was introduced to the church by his wife. He had not been in the church before he was married in the church. Some time later, he became involved with ministry. But the first experience he had of what he called a brouhaha in the church involved, of all things, music—whether it should be “old-fashioned” or “modern” or whatever. He couldn’t see the point himself. As an outsider coming in, he said, “All of this is to praise God—so what is the problem?” What is the brouhaha all about? And, moreover, he made the point that the main reason we sing is to worship God rather than maybe [to dwell on] personal preference or our own experience. It is worship of God that we are engaged in.
So that is, I guess, one way in which he talks about “God as the one who is supposed to be running things”. Let’s not put in place of God something else.
Also, he gave us a sermon which began with a story concerning fly-fishing, and a fish that got away. And the comment that the fly fisherman made to him was that, “It’s not over yet.” And then he went to tell us how, in the story of the Bible, over and over again, we learn that God is not finished yet. Abraham is called; he is a promised a son. He tries to make a little end in the story by having Ishmael, his son by a concubine, his heir through whom the promise would come. But no, that’s not the end that God has in mind. God is not finished yet.
We have a human tendency to want to put happy ever-after endings on things, to fix things according to how we feel they should be fixed. But, with us, personally, with us, as a church, God is not finished yet. And we need to let God be the one running things.
In his presentation, you couldn’t help but notice what has happened to the forests in central British Columbia. We have heard on the news about the Asian Pine Bark Beetle. This beetle has devastated the pine forests of British Columbia. There is some fear that it will go beyond British Columbia into the Boreal forest that, of course, is north of us, and will effect, say, Jack Pine or White Pine, in those areas. We certainly hope that that will not be the case.
As David Webber indicated to us, part of the reason for this situation—the devastation of the pine trees in that part of the world—is the forestry practices that actually had been used. Tress, pine trees, in particular, were allowed to grow until they were about seventy years of age. As it turns out, the pine bark beetle attacks trees just that age. So, what has happened is that whole areas are just brown or now grey, with needles dropped. And logging is going in a frenzy, in order to cut down these trees, in order to salvage some of them, because, otherwise, the forest fire hazard is extreme to say the least, with all these dead trees, these brown pine needles and the like.
Well, I guess one of the things you could say about that story that David Webber told us is that, when human beings interfere with the natural order of things, sometimes it comes back and bites us. There can be a negative effect in what happens [when we interfere].
Well, those were some ways in which David Webber illustrated that “God is supposed to be the one running things”.
I think that there is some connection, here, with our passage from the Book of Acts, where we meet Paul and Silas trying to preach the gospel. But, first of all, they have someone mimicking their words—a person who has a “spirit” of fortune-telling and the like, who is sort of their “echo” as they go around, and makes a mockery of what they are trying to communicate. But one of the things we learn in that passage is that Paul casts out this “spirit” that is responsible for this mocking of his message, and casts it out in the name of Jesus Christ. In essence, the one who is in charge is God who has made himself known in Jesus Christ.
Sometimes, in our church life, in our personal life, we set up, as David Webber did, “five-year plans”; we set up programmes; we set up all sorts of ways by which we think we are serving God. But we need to be ready, as he said, to have God involved and messing up those plans, those programmes, because, ultimately, it is not plans and programmes and schemes that we devise that we wish to have as part of our Christian life, or the Church, but God running things.
I mentioned also our very human tendency to want to wrap up things in neat endings, to fix things, whereas, in fact, we need to recognize that God is not finished yet. So the next part of that passage from Acts tells us that Paul was in prison along with Silas. They were put in prison, apparently, because people wanted to somehow contain them, to contain the message that they were communicating, that already had resulted in a loss of livelihood among some people who had employed this young woman to be a fortune-teller for them.
Paul found himself in prison along with Silas. They sang. There was an earthquake. Eventually, the jailer—of all persons—ends up being baptized, and he is baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. So, instead of our plans, our programmes, our schemes, or our ways of trying to finish things up neatly, we find God active, messing things up, having a jailer baptized and all of that. As that jailer was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, so we find God is the one running things when we allow openness in our endings, we allow him to be ruler of our lives, of our church, of the world in which we live.
At the end of that passage from the Book of Acts, we read about the apostle Paul and the readiness of some of the authorities to free him. The night had passed, and the authorities had decided that they had given sufficient punishment to Paul and Silas. They [had] stripped them of their clothing, they [had] flogged them, they had thrown them into prison with stocks, and the like. And the authorities said to the jailers, “Well, free these men; they can go their way.” But Paul would not have anything of it. He was incensed that these people had imprisoned them, Roman citizens, and were going to set them free without a due apology for the treatment that they had received.
It is interesting to compare that passage from Acts with Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he says that we are to “honour the authorities, pay to those who are due, taxes, give honour and the like.” Here, we see, how Paul actually practises that message. He questions the authority that had put him in jail. He questions the authority, because these people are to be servants of God, not just their own masters.
And, likewise, in our congregational life, in our individual lives as human beings, in order to have God running things, we need to lead lives that respond to the commandments that God has given us, the commandments to love one another, to honour the one whom he has sent, and so on. And, it is by such means that we find the wonderful reality of God running things, rather than ourselves, or [ourselves] giving our freedom away to some power that really does not deserve such authority.
David Webber and is group devised this motto, I guess, to follow—namely, that their ministry, their mission, is a place where God is supposed to be running things. Well, let that be the case, in our individual lives and for us as the church. Let not our own schemes, our own programmes, our own plans, substitute for God getting in the mix and messing up those things, and opening us to something much more wonderful. And let us not try to fix things according to the way we would like them to be “fixed”, but let us leave it open-ended what God wishes for us as a church, and for us, individually. And so let God be running things. And, finally, let us keep an eye on the commandments that God has given us through Jesus Christ—that we love one another, that we honour the One whom he has sent, in order that, again, we may have God running things in our midst.
It is a wild and wacky life that we lead, it’s an open-ended life, it is a life which is not contained by human plans. But we can give thanks that, by following Jesus Christ, that we can let God run things, and be part of those wondrous purposes that he is bringing about through Jesus Christ our Lord.
