Gideon's One Percent

Gideon’s One Per Cent
by Dean J. Seal
For Nordeast Community Luteran Church, Aug. 30th, 2009
(Please read Judges Ch. 7)

God’s peace be with you on this last Sunday in August, and my last Sunday with this congregation.You have been through a lot in my time here, and you have further to go before you rest.

I’m sure you have considered your situation to be similar to the Hebrews, wandering through the desert. You had a home, then you were uprooted, and uprooted again. You are now getting ready to move once more, and for many of you it is an exciting prospect. A modern space, room to grow and experiment, a place to put down roots, grow into partnerships with other organizations, redesign and rebuild in a place where a new message can be heard in a new way.

I’ve been doing some research into modern trends in theology, and there is a thing called The Emergent Church. It seems that we are on the cusp of another huge turnover of ideas. It happens about every five hundred years or so. 500 years ago, Martin Luther kicked off his end of the Reformation. 500 years before that, in 1054, the Catholics broke with the Orthodox Church. 500 years before that, the Vandals destroyed Rome, and the Church was run from Constantinople. 500 years before that, Jesus was born. 500 years before that, the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and took the Hebrews into captivity.

Now we are engaged in a great reshuffling of how the Church operates. Phylis Tickle, editor of the religion section of Publisher’s Weekly, likens it to a giant garage sale that happens every 500 years, where everything is put out, and some stuff is reclaimed and the rest is thrown away.

The emergent church is one way that this is sorting itself out. There are young new Christians who don’t want to be called Christians, because of the baggage attached to it. You look around in here and you might say, Christians aren’t so bad. But when you are outside our circle, and you hear of a Christian preacher who says he goes home every night and prays that President Obama dies and goes to hell, when you understand that the Ku Klux Klan called themselves Christians, when you remember that the guards at Auschwitz took communion every Sunday, and went back to the extermination of the Jews the rest of the week, you might understand their reluctance to call themselves Christians.

These people call themselves Followers of Jesus, and there unofficial motto is, What if Jesus actually meant what he said? They don’t build churches, but meet in schools, or coffee houses, or theater spaces. Some of them meet at 5 p.m. on Sundays instead of in the morning. They focus on missions, like food shelves, or feeding the hungry, or housing the homeless, or visiting those in prison. They are mission-oriented, not theology oriented or building oriented or denominational.

They are having an influence on the denominations, though. There are Luthermergents, Presbymergents, Episcomergents. Those folks meet each other and bring ideas back to their churches. They have an ongoing conversation going on-line, on sites like The Ooze, and they use them to keep in touch.

What I think I am getting is that you folks here are doing all the right things. If you can pull off taking over that school building, you will be in an untraditional setting, with room to engage not just the feeding of the hungry, which you do now, but also partner with other people to make other things happen. You will be the kind of church that the young new Followers of Jesus are looking for.

A congregation that is only looking to preserve the past traditions of its own history is doomed. A congregation that can collect the essential elements of what is meaningful, and then move forward into the future, with the idea of creating something for that future, is going to have a future.

This congregation has traveled through the process of throwing out the excess, packing the essential, and moving to a new place. It has happened again and again. And again. And it will happen, again.
Some of you may feel tired down to your bones. That would not be unexpected. It’s kind of like what they say about the ninth month of pregnancy- it’s so unpleasant that you can’t wait to give birth. And some people have left the congregation because of what has been lost. They may have a stronger feeling about a building than they do about the faith. They may have a stronger feeling about what is in a service than they do about why there is a service. They may have a stronger feeling for the traditions of a church than they do about the future of a congregation.

That is why I love this story about Gideon. He has an army of 30,000 men, and God sends away 99% of it, because he wants them to understand something. When they achieve this victory, he wants them to know it is God’s victory. The traditional interpretation is that Gideon is too scared to go to battle until he hears the interpretation of the dream from the edge of the Midianite’s camp. It is a scared Gideon marching with 300 scared men, who don’t even have swords. Both hands are full- a jar with a torch, a trumpet and a yell is all they have to win the battle. And they do. The victory is not Gideon’s. The victory is not the Hebrew’s victory.

I don’t believe in trying to predict the future. But it is not unreasonable to try to perceive what will happen in a given course of events. I believe that this congregation will achieve a victory. It will not be a victory because of the work of your minister, although he is doing a very good job. It will not be the victory of the committees that have been meeting, although the work they are doing is thorough and fair and being done well. It will not be the victory of the people who are members of the congregation, though you have toughed it out through several setbacks. The victory will be God’s victory. It is God that inspired your minister to tackle this intense process of consolidation and resurrection. It is God that keeps the committees meeting and making painful but necessary decisions. It is God that renews your right spirit as a congregation, to keep moving forward, because you have something to offer to this community and this town and this world.

So I hope you take this message of Gideon, who was scared, and had 1% of what he already thought was not enough, who won the battle without losing a soldier. He won the battle because he was filled with the Holy Spirit of God, and went to where God told him to go, and he listened for what God would say to him. He was open to God’s victory, and God was victorious.

So let me leave you with a doxology that I’ve known my whole life, a text from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 51. When we feel we need some energy, this is a prayer to remind us we are not doing this alone.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not, away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me, the Joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Amen.