Preached · August 18, 2019
Opening: Sabbatical and Superheroes
Good morning. My name is, in fact, Anthony Parrott, and if you've been here for a while, you know me. If you're new, you don't. For the past couple of months, this church has gifted me the gift of a sabbatical — a couple of months off, to restore and renew and refresh, to be reunited with my family and with God. And so, if you don't know me, I hope to get to know you soon. My son is very angry that I'm back at my job. So it goes. I would love to tell you more about my sabbatical, but we have a lot of ground to cover today, so I'm going to write a blog post, put it on our website, send it out in an email, and you can find out about it that way. Because we have some important things to talk about — such as: have you ever wanted to be a superhero?
What superhero did you want to be? Wonder Woman, because she looked awesome. Iron Man — because it starts with "I." Doctor Strange, because he can time travel and go anywhere he wants. (Magic is evil, Josh. Come on.) Batman, because he's incredibly rich.
So I'm with Brandon on this one — I always wanted to be Batman, because with enough money, enough exercise, and, for me, a good pair of platform shoes, even I could be Batman. Batman is this ideal of the perfect human being: that with enough resources and enough aspiration, anybody could be Batman. If you've ever watched the Christopher Nolan movies, you know that Bruce Wayne intended Batman to be a symbol — that anyone could stand up, rise up against evil, and fight back.
Nobody Wants to Be Mediocre
Now, let me ask a different question. Who wants to be mediocre? Mediocre — the worst superhero of all time. I had a friend — I've maybe told this story before — who was at a senior awards night for his high school, watching the kids left and right get awards. He hadn't really gotten anything yet. And then one of the administrators comes up and starts announcing what the scholarship is all about. He says, "You know, this isn't really for the best student, and it's not for the worst student. It's just for the average, middle-of-the-road student." And my friend Chris is sitting there thinking, "I would hate to be the person who gets this." "Chris, would you come up for the mediocre scholarship?"
Nobody wants to be mediocre, for the most part. There are a few things you want to be mediocre at, right? You want to be mediocre at robbing banks. You want to be mediocre at harming your spouse or your children — actually, you want to be bad at that. But for the most part, you don't want to be mediocre. You want to exceed. You want to excel. You want to be a great father, a great mother, a great daughter or son, a great teacher or banker or farmer or next-door neighbor. You don't want to be a mediocre one of those.
And this doesn't happen by accident, becoming great at something. You actually have to move forward. You actually have to intend not to be mediocre. And so today we're going to talk about what it is to not intend to be mediocre — what it is to not intend to be the worst, or even average, but actually to intend, on purpose, to set out to become excellent.
Saints Called to Be Holy
One of my favorite Bible passages is 1 Corinthians 1, verse 2, in which Paul is addressing the church in Corinth: "To those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people." To those sanctified. If you know Jesus, you are already a saint. You are already declared holy in Jesus. And yet you are a saint called to be holy. A saint is what you already are; holy is what you are called to be. God declares you righteous and then calls you into the image of his Son. Which means that we have to exert some effort in living up to that calling. We don't exert effort to get saved — that work is done, already accomplished in Jesus. But we must exert effort in living into our calling, called to be sanctified.
Dallas Willard puts it like this: "[Grace] is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning." We don't earn our salvation. Hear me: we don't earn our way into knowing Jesus. That work is done through the cross and resurrection. Ephesians chapter 2 says that not by works but by grace, through faith, you have been saved. You are Christ's handiwork, called to good works.
And so we know that mediocrity is natural. It happens automatically, without us even trying. We're going to be average; we're going to be at the top of the bell curve. Growth is rarely accidental. You don't grow just by sitting there hoping it happens. Excellence requires pursuit. It requires us stretching ourselves outward, leaning out, pushing ourselves toward excellence. As another writer puts it: the secret to being great is being good consistently — doing the right thing over and over and over again.
So, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn to the book of 1 Timothy chapter 3. The reason we're here is that we've been on this brief little series called Spiritual Gardening. We've been taking a big look at the book of Acts, the first history book of the early church, and we've been talking about leadership and spiritual gardening — what it is to nurture and cultivate a church that is reaching the world for Jesus. Last week we talked about the idea of servanthood, of being a deacon — a diakosunate, a deaconess, in the Greek — which means to serve, to live our lives as an offering to Christ and to the world, so that the world might know Christ. And today we're going to be talking about the idea of oversight, overseeing the church — what some of us, depending on our tradition, might call a board, or elders, or overseers, or bishops.
We're in the book of 1 Timothy chapter 3. I invite you to stand for the public reading of God's word. Hear the words of St. Paul. He writes,
Here is a trustworthy saying: whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil's trap.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let's pray briefly for the word today. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we trust and we know that you have given us your holy Scriptures to instruct us and to teach us, to edify us, to change us for the better, God. And so we submit ourselves to your word. God, we don't want to be masters of your word; we want your word to be master over us, because it is God-breathed — you breathed it out, you inspired it, so that we might be changed. So God, would you use even an instrument like me to help in that work, to be an instrument of peace this morning in this place? We pray in Christ's name. Amen.
An Elephant in the Room: Women as Elders
Now, the main thing I want to talk about today is the idea of reaching out, of growing toward something worth growing toward. But first I want to talk about an elephant in the room, and that's the idea of women elders. Depending on the tradition that you're part of, grew up in, or maybe just things you've heard about the church, perhaps you've heard the idea that women cannot be elders, that they cannot be overseers in the church. I want to talk about a few things about that, just so we're all on the same page.
You'll note that 1 Timothy chapter 3 uses a bunch of masculine pronouns when talking about overseers or elders: "He must be like this, he must do that; he, he, he; faithful to his wife," and so on. The first thing I want to point out is that masculine examples were often given to be representative of both genders. This is a very common thing for Jewish or Greek teachers: they would use a masculine example to represent both genders. Let me give you an example. Jesus says, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5, that if any man looks at a woman with the intention to lust, it's as if he's committed adultery with her in his heart. Now, no one looks at that passage and says, "Oh, that means it's okay for women to be lustful." Right? That's not the intention. It's a masculine example given to be representative of both genders. Or, one time, Peter goes to Jesus and says, "Jesus, how many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?" And Jesus says, "No — seventy-seven times." And again, no one goes to that passage and says, "Oh, that means I don't have to forgive my sister." Even though some of us may want to live like that, that's not what the passage means. So, in the same way, when we read a passage like 1 Timothy 3 that says an elder must be faithful to his wife, must not be given to wine, and so on, it would be wrong of us to assume that must mean women can't be elders. Unless you find a passage that explicitly says women cannot be elders, don't put that onto the text when the text hasn't said it.
Two: gender-specific instructions aren't inherently prohibitive on the other gender. Ephesians chapter 5 talks about the relationship between husbands and wives, and it says, "Husbands, love your wives; wives, respect your husbands." Now, Paul does not want you to read that and think, "Okay, that must mean wives, don't love your husbands, just respect them; and husbands, don't respect your wives, just love them." Obviously not — even though entire marriage theologies have been built around that idea. We know from Titus chapter 2 that Paul tells wives to respect their husbands, and from 1 Peter chapter 3 that he tells wives to love their husbands. So, again, just because it's a gender-specific instruction doesn't mean don't do the other thing. So in 1 Timothy chapter 3, when it says overseers should be faithful to their wives, it doesn't mean that wives shouldn't be faithful to their husbands.
Number three: women in the New Testament functioned as the first evangelists of the resurrection. They were the ones who preached the good news of Jesus being resurrected to the twelve disciples. They were the financiers of Jesus' ministry. In Acts 21 we see them function as prophets. In Acts 18 a woman functioned as a teacher. In Romans 15 we see them function as deacons and church planters and apostles. In Colossians 4 we see them function as house-church leaders. So it would be kind of bizarre to see all of these ways that women function in the New Testament and then say yes to all of that, but no to elders. There's no basis for it. Women, in Titus chapter 2, are explicitly instructed to teach — to teach good things, in other words, to teach the gospel. In 1 Corinthians chapter 11, women are expected to publicly pray and to prophesy. And when Paul talks about spiritual gifts in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, spiritual gifts are never delineated by gender. Paul writes that the Holy Spirit distributes to each one, to every person, just as he — the Holy Spirit — determines. No Scripture says women cannot be elders. And so I want all the women in the room, from little girls to elderly women and everyone in between: if you ever hear someone tell you something you can't do, you'd better make sure there's a scriptural basis for it, or they're just wrong. Don't listen to them.
The final reason we see that anyone can be an elder is right there in 1 Timothy chapter 3, where Paul says, "Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task." And in the Greek, it's the word tis — a neuter pronoun, which means it can apply to both genders. Anyone, everyone, whoever aspires to be an overseer — not anyone except the women, not anyone except the men — whoever aspires toward oversight of God's church desires a noble task.
Aspiring to a Noble Task
This is where I want to focus our attention today, because this one verse — "whoever desires this noble task" — has implications for how we all live our lives.
Let me ask you another question. What's something you wanted really badly, worked really hard to get, and then finally got? A goal you set, an object or a position or an idea or a place — something you really, really wanted, worked really hard for, and then got.
The kids had answers: an animation tablet, saved up for with allowance; earrings, saved up for with chore money and birthday money. (What's your least favorite chore? Doing the laundry. Amen to that.) And the grown-ups had answers too. A mission trip — they aren't cheap, but Angie wrote a bunch of letters, did the fundraisers, and got to go, and it was worth it. And education. Education's really cheap, right? If I remember correctly. (I'm not still paying off my student loans. Sarcasm.) For a lot of us, we had to pay our own way, so we saved up, or we went into debt that we're still paying off, but we got the degree, and we were able to get the job because of it.
For me, when I was in third grade, it was the Batman Forever Batcave. (Do you see a Batman theme in my life?) It was this big house-looking thing — Wayne Manor — and you'd open it up, and inside was the Batcave, and a Batcar, and the Batsuits, and the Batarang, and the Bat-shark repellent, and all of it. So I saved up my money. I did the chores. I smashed the pop cans and put them in the bag so we could recycle them. I did all the things, saved up my piggy bank, and then was able to buy the Batman Forever Batcave. Now, that's a good feeling, right? When you yearn for something, and you work toward it, and with your own abilities, with your own saving up, you're able to achieve that thing.
And we see a similar word here in 1 Timothy 3, where Paul says, "Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task." Whoever aspires to be. And the word "aspire" is the Greek word orego — not oregano, orego — and it means to stretch oneself out in order to touch or grasp something. It reminds me of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Indy is hanging onto a cliff and the Holy Grail is just inches away, and he's leaning, he's stretching, he's reaching out, because it's so important to him — he would even risk his life to get it. And that is what it is to aspire toward something.
And how many things do we aspire to when it comes to our Christian life, our walk with Christ? When we say that we don't want to be mediocre, none of us is going to raise a hand and say, "Yes, I want to be a mediocre Christian, a mediocre Christ-follower." And when none of us is willing to say that, it means we have to aspire toward growth, aspire toward becoming more Christlike. We could go through each one of these things in 1 Timothy 3 that we could aspire toward: being above reproach, a one-woman man or a one-man woman, temperate and self-controlled, hospitable (literally a lover of strangers), able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a money-lover, guiding their family well, not a recent convert, having a good reputation with outsiders. All of these are worthy of talking about, and all of us know one of them that we struggle with. "Oh, I'm not a great teacher." "I am actually not all that gentle." "I tend to get angry." "I love money a little too much." All of us have one of these on the list that we could say, "I wish I weren't so mediocre at this thing." So how do we move forward?
Vision, Intention, and Means
Dallas Willard had this acronym called VIM, and VIM stood for three things: vision, intention, and means. In Willard's theology of Christian growth, of spiritual formation, the idea is that we need a vision of what we want to become. In other words, we need people around us, lives around us, worthy of imitation — mentors and people to look up to, that we could say, "I want to be like him, I want to be like her, as I grow in Christlikeness. As they imitate Christ, I want to imitate them so that I can be more like Christ." So we need vision.
We need intention. We need to actually get up in the morning and say, "I will not be a mediocre Christian. I will not be a mediocre Christ-follower. I will not be a mediocre fill-in-the-blank."
And three, means. Intention will only get you so far. We can sit and grit our teeth about the things we're not going to be and the things we want to be, but without means to get there, intention will not take us anywhere. And so Acts chapter 2, which my wife Emily preached on a few months ago, gives us those means: teaching, and fellowship, and breaking bread together, and prayer. When we have those practices in our lives, and when we have lives worthy of imitation, then our intentions will move us toward Christlikeness.
Two Callings
Now, what does this mean for us? There are two different groups in this place right now. There are those of us who either are elders or have served as elders, and there are those of us who have not. There are those of us who maybe didn't have the official position of elder in your church, but you have been following Christ for a long time, and you have been offering your life up as a life worthy of imitation. And there are those of us who are imitating you. What does Scripture have to say about that?
I invite you to turn to 1 Peter chapter 5. It says,
To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ's sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them — not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd appears — I love that title for Jesus — you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away. In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders.
So we see these two groups. Elders — those who are either in official places of position, or maybe not so official, but we know that you are Christlike — live lives that are worthy of imitation, lives we can look at and say, "Wow, you are following Jesus so closely, listening to the heart of God so nearly, that I want to follow you as you follow Christ." And for the rest of us, we have to submit ourselves to imitate those who imitate Jesus. Those are the two callings: to live lives worthy of imitation, and to imitate those who are living lives of imitation.
Let me put it as starkly and boldly as I can: if you're not aspiring toward being an overseer or elder of Christ's church, you're opting out of God's best intention for you and opting into mediocrity. The call for all Christ-followers isn't that there would be some spiritually elite and then the rest of us. We are all saints called to be holy. And so the work of oversight — of being a shepherd, an elder, an overseer of your church — isn't to lord it over, isn't just to be making decisions. It's the role of living lives worthy of imitation. And the role of the rest of us is to live our lives so that we, too, have lives worthy of imitation.
A Prayer for Elders and Deacons
Now, I want to conclude with two prayers. First, if you are a deacon or an elder, or have been, in this church or another church, can you please stand up? An elder or a deacon, currently or before, of this church or another church you've been a part of. Can we thank these people? Stay standing — we're going to pray for you. If you know them, go ahead and lay hands on them, or ask permission to lay hands if you're nearby. Otherwise, reach your hands out toward the one closest to you. Let's pray for these people.
Father, Son, and Spirit, we thank you that you have given us living examples — not perfect examples, but living examples — of following you. We know that none of us can do it perfectly, none of us can do it absolutely faultlessly, and yet we're grateful that you didn't just leave us with your word, God; you left us with people that we can imitate. And so, God, would you protect them from all spiritual harm, from the schemes of the devil and the enemy? Would you send your protection on them and their families and their loved ones? And would you continue to equip and empower them, that they would not grow weary of fighting the good fight, of running the good race, that they would never grow faint or weary of doing good? God, would you bless them and keep them, and make your face shine upon them, because they're so important, and we need more and more folks like these — that none of us may be excluded from being considered for an elder, an overseer, or a deacon of our church. We thank you, God, that you have shown your love through Christ and through people, even those standing up right now. We pray in your name. Amen. Go ahead and be seated.
A Prayer for the Children
Now, there's one other example that Jesus explicitly gave us for those we're meant to imitate, or be like, as we continue on in the Christian faith — and those are children. So if you consider yourself a child — you be the definer of that — go ahead and stand up. Stand up on your chair if necessary. And now we're going to pray for you. These are the people we're also meant to imitate. Jesus said, "If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become like a child." And so that's why we include them in our services. We don't push them out; we don't exclude them. We need to look at them and see how they love Jesus, see how they love others, see their wonderment at the world, so that we can become like them. So let's pray for our children.
Father, Son, and Spirit, we thank you that you have given us children as examples to follow — that even more than elders and overseers, Christ himself, you yourself, Jesus, said, "Become like children and enter the kingdom of God." And so, God, would you raise these children up in the truth and admonition of your word, that they may know you and praise you and work for your glory and honor and fame, God. And may we become more like them — not them like us, but us like them, as they follow you. God, protect them as they enter back into school soon, as they go off to college, as they go off into their neighborhoods, God, to play and to work. God, may we treat them as the saints that you have declared them to be. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.
