SERMON DATE: May 18, 2003
GREATER THINGS
Let’s stand for our scripture lesson, John 14:12
This short verse doesn’t need a lot of theologizing, it’s pretty much self-explanatory. Jesus is speaking to his disciples.
“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father.”
Dear friends this is the word of the Lord. May God send his holy spirit to bless it to our heart as we gather in his name today. Please be seated.
Today I want to invite you to dream of greater things. I want to ask you to think about your life and your Church and think of greater things. Some of you who are here today, I am praying that God will use these words for you to hear the call to full time ministry. I am praying that God will use these words today to call some of you to a greater understanding of commitment to a broader mission field. Jesus asks us to do, to think about, to be about greater things.
Oh, look who’s up there. [a power point picture on the wall of missions director Jennifer Biggs in the trailer of donations for the Milan transient shelter.] That’s Jennifer Biggs, the Missions Director. She led the prayer today. She’s in the truck to Milan. She didn’t actually ride there, but I want to start with this point. There are many fine things that we are doing in Mission and the things that I am going to share with you today in no way denigrate what we are doing. Five years ago we dreamed about doing many things and today we are doing many of those things. They are wonderful, they must continue. Okay. We celebrate the level of Mission involvement that you have brought, all of you, to the Woods Chapel United Methodist Church. But I ask you a couple of questions today.
[a new picture is on the wall….a power point picture of our new church] Oh that’s our Church, isn’t it pretty. Isn’t it great. What a good story about what has happened to our Church in the last few years. Do you ever sit down with your friends and kind of tell them about how our Church has done well and you feel good on the inside. I want to ask you a question. Has our Church fulfilled its potential? Are we done with the things that God has called us to? I don’t think so, and just because it’s beautiful, and we have so many wonderful stories to tell, doesn’t mean we should ever stop. We always must ask, what is God asking of us? We don’t want to just scratch the surface of our potential. We want to dig deep into God’s storehouse of talents that he has given us and use every part to affect the world.
[a new picture on the wall of a large group of Woods Chapel people.] Oh, what a happy bunch of people. Are they beautiful! That’s us. You all are beautiful, happy people. And we get together and we have a good time. And you know, that’s a good thing. We get together and we have Sunday School class and we learn and we grow and we’re comforted when we hurt. I want to say today that all of that is important. All of that is a very important part of being a Church family. We come together and we are comforted and we are helped and we’re encouraged. But here’s my question. Do we spend more of our time living out our faith in ways that we’re comfortable with or ways that are uncomfortable to us? In other words, when was the last time you left your comfort zone to do something God had asked you to do? And if we only find those things that we are comfortable with, are we truly hearing God’s call to change the World? Do you think that God calls us to do the things that we like and that are easy, or is it possible that he calls us and challenges us to do things that might be frightening to us? Are you living inside or outside your comfort zone?
[a picture is on the wall of a tombstone] Oh my, how will you be remembered? What’s that say? How many people get to read their own tombstone? This stone says, “Here lies Jeff Brinkman; he was a preacher, so what.” Think about this when you go home. We live, we die. Our families miss us greatly, but how many people, how many Churches, how many groups of people are remembered 5, 10, 20, 100 years later as people that had a dream and truly did miraculous things?
[A picture of a different stone is set on the wall.] Maybe this could be your stone. Your name there. This person sent missionaries. This person was a missionary. This person didn’t talk about sacrifice, this person truly sacrificed. Yes, you are right, this would be small wording on a tombstone, yeah. They didn’t just talk about taking up their cross. They took up their cross, the world is a much better place because he or she lived. You know, I want my children to say Dad was a nice guy, Dad was a good guy. But this is just as important, if not more important, that we left nothing on the field. When the game was over we had used every resource we had, every dream, every possibility, thrown at the world to try to make a difference.
[a new picture of a lightbulb] So, you ever had an idea? Ford had some ideas. Remember the light bulb thing? Ford has a better idea. One of their better ideas was Mustang. Of course, they also had Edsel. Not every idea is God’s idea, okay and in a few minutes I’m going to share some ideas with you and some of them you might go, well those aren’t God’s idea. I’m just throwing some ideas out to you today. I want to get your brain started thinking, because at some point you will see God’s idea and God’s ideas come to us like the bright sun shining through the forest of doubt in our lives.
[a new picture of a light shining thru the forest] No one has to convince us, the preacher doesn’t have to convince us, we just know down in the bottom of our heart. This is the thing we must be about. It’s audacious, it’s huge, it’s impossible, but I have this thing. Boy, when it’s God’s idea, you just know it. So listen to some of these things and dream with me a little bit this morning.
Well, first I want to share this. I always thought a politician said this. This was said by George Bernard Shaw. “Some people see things as they are and ask why. Why is it like that? I dream of things that never were and ask, why not?” I’ll give you an example, poverty. Some people look at poverty and say why does it have to be that way. Is it possible that God would call a group of people in Kansas City to ask the question, why does it have to be that way? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we can do something different. Let’s leave that one up [slide with the quote] for awhile.
We are involved with the Division of Family Services. They are strapped for man and woman power because of budget shortfalls. A couple of times a year we bring in bags of food. That’s a good thing. We need to keep doing that, but how can we help them in more significant ways. I want to invite you today to think about that sack of food on that Sunday, but I want you to learn to think in terms also of cases, pallets and truck loads. What a great phone call. DFS this is so and so at Woods Chapel Church. We have a ½ of a tractor trailer full of peanut butter and we are going to have a forklift drop this off. Huh? You know what, I bet somebody here knows somebody that would love to give a pallet of peanut butter and it’s not for us, it doesn’t benefit us. It is just that we are believing big enough to network beyond the dreams of today and find ways to solve really big problems. I hear the stories of the caseworkers, and I’m going man, how do they ever get anything done? I don’t know if they take volunteers, but maybe we could provide volunteers to 2 or 3 DFS workers in our area. I bet our Church, if we wanted to, could provide somebody 40 hours a week. Now, it might be a different person everyday, it might be somebody for a ½ day here and a ½ day there, but I think we could significantly affect the ability of the DFS workers to do their job affectively, if they had a little bit of help.
The free health clinic. It’s been open 1 night a week. Many of you have volunteered. It’s been a wonderful thing. They’re getting close to getting a building. And you know if they get a building and they had volunteers, they could be open every night of the week. They would really like to have an x-ray machine. I’ll bet there is somebody that either was or is or is going to be in this Church today, that could figure out how to get the free health clinic an x-ray machine. Why would be want to do that? Because there are people that can’t afford health care and Dan Purdom and others have a dream and they are working hard and you may not be able to personally find the x-ray machine, but maybe you know someone who does. How big of dreams are we dreaming?
At Hillcrest transitional shelter, right now we sponsor one apartment for a homeless family. They have some dreams. They have dreams for an expanded program of mentoring, where people would go teach the homeless people or those in transition about the Bible. They have a dream of new carpet. They have a dream of new windows. They have all kinds of dreams, and you know, I don’t know if I would know how to get windows, but I sure could help put them in. Maybe we know someone that would give 20 windows to that big old house in Independence.
Listen to me, I’ll tell you something. You go to a lot of people and ask them to give to your Church. Your Church is just a Church to them. Most ideas we have people go “oh yeah, every Church wants money for that”. When you go to somebody with a big dream and explain to them something that is beyond the thinking of most people, all kinds of people want to get involved with stuff like that.
At Children’s Mercy Hospital, our team dreams of not just providing meals and collecting prayer request, but having an ongoing team of people that prayed for the children in need. An ongoing team of people that talk to the families and stayed up with them and cared for them.
At Hope House, we have had drives for different things. Some of our Missions people are dreaming about holding retreats that will help the women in those situations escape and empower them to make better choices.
Speaking of empowerment. Been down to the inner city lately? We’ve done a lot of good things at Grace United. But there are huge problems in our inner city. We have nurses that work for hospice programs and they go calling places and they go into the home and they see roaches crawling on the walls. You know something, I think we can stop that. I think we could find an exterminator company or somebody and send them to exterminator school. I don’t know. We could figure out a way. I’ll bet we could get the product donated. I’ll be we could get a license. I’ll bet somehow we could find someway to get somebody down there and spend 6 months spraying for free any house that wanted it. And I’ll bet if we thought about it, we could find ways to help the women in poverty get educated. And I’ll bet if God called us we could look at the young men and find someway to teach boys what it means to truly be a man. And then poverty begins to change.
For our USA VIM trip, we went to South Dakota. We are going to Oklahoma in a couple of weeks. These are great. My dream for those is that they get bigger than the canoe trip and the ski trip. That when we call for a Missions trip, instead of the ski trip going boy that was great, we had 4 buses full of people, the Missions trip will go, man that was great. We had more people there than went on the ski trip. Now, I love the ski trip and I love the canoe trip, but you know I’m just thinking. I mean these are good times for people to get together and really do something to make a difference and I’m just thinking that we can dream like that.
In Milan, we’ve sent up truckloads of stuff. You did. You personally furnished the entire house where the migrant workers live. You should be commended. We need to keep helping them. But I’ll bet in North Missouri, since many people are moving out of North Missouri, there are trailer homes we could buy real cheap. You could probably find them and pull them down to Milan and park them there behind that house and quadruple the capacity of the transitional home for the migrant workers. Now you couldn’t do it in Lee’s Summit because of the zoning, but you could get away with that in Milan.
We sponsor an orphanage in Russia. You have sponsored the 35 children that live there. Do you know anybody in Kansas City that might want to adopt a child? How many of you know somebody in Kansas City that maybe would want to adopt a child. Go ahead and raise your hand. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, okay, that’s a start. I’ll bet if we worked on it, we got 6 in about 30 seconds. I wonder if we could adopt, maybe I can’t, maybe Jeff & Cindy Madden can’t, but maybe we can find people. Maybe we could close that orphanage. Maybe every one of those young people could come here to live. “Well,” you say, “it would just fill back up Jeff.” Yes, it would. But wouldn’t it make a lifetime of difference to those 35. The orphanage ministry dreams of hiring tutors, hiring activities directors. There are many things that are on their hearts that we can continue to do to expand that ministry.
In Russia we have a sister church. We send them money. We send them e-mails. Occasionally we go and we worship there. Sending someone to seminary in America is very expensive, but in Russia it is very reasonable. Since the walls came down 100 United Methodist Churches have started in Russia. I wonder, could we find 10 young Russians who wanted to go to Seminary in Moscow? Could we figure out how to pay for that? And do that every year for 10 years. If we did, at the end of 10 years the Woods Chapel United Methodist Church would have effectively doubled the size of the United Methodist Church in Russia.
In Mozambique, a long way away, it’s hard to communicate. We don’t always know what’s going on. We send them a little bit of money. We have a sister Church. I don’t know, I had this idea that maybe we should send someone to go there for 3 months at a time, our own missionary on the ground. There are millions of problems with that, yes there are. No we don’t get anywhere by considering the cannot, the can’t do parts of life. I’ll bet there is someone here right now that would be willing to go to Mozambique for 3 months, maybe Andy Arnold. [someone raises their hand] There you go, there’s Emily. Imagine somebody on the ground picks up their world wide cell phone which we’ve leveraged from somewhere and they call us up and they say Jeff, if I could get 5 cows, I could double the standard of living in the village where our Church is. I’ll bet we could find an agency, I’ll bet we could find 5 cows. I’ll bet we could get them there. And you know what, besides doing real things that really help that Church and those people. If Emily goes there, she’s never going to be the same. She’s going to come back from there a completely different person. I received a letter this week:
Dear Pastor,
We’ve been very blessed in our lives and feel we should give something more than just our weekly giving and time. Our families’ lives have been greatly enriched from the experiences we’ve had on mission trips and we would like to provide others with the same opportunities. Hopefully we have connected others to Jesus Christ. We want to establish a Missions Scholarship Fund with an initial donation of $4,000.00 to help provide support to people going on mission trips.
Gosh, those are big ideas. Those are greater things. If God spoke to you and gave you a light bulb in your brain, maybe it wouldn’t be the preacher’s light bulb, but your own. You know we have a lot of questions. How could we possibly be a part of something like that. Someone asked me the question, those are great ideas, how does just a normal person think about those things? Well, I have 10 ideas I want to share with you of how regular people or ordinary people do extraordinary things.
1. Ask the hard questions. You go home and think about this stuff I’ve laid on you today, there are a million hard questions. You know what I’m talking about. We have to think this kind of stuff through, from the beginning to the end. All the ins and outs so that we’re not just throwing resources at things that make us feel good, but if we have a dream and we want to strike while the iron is hot, we’ll ask the questions and seek to be doing things that are making a difference in the world.
2. You can pray. You can find a place to kneel down and pray and you can pray until all that matters is God. You ever done that before? You have something on your mind, something bothering you, something tearing you up. Go find a place to pray and stay there until when you get up the only thing that matters in your heart is Lord I come to do your will. That will open your mind to new possibilities. You might find ways to network with friends and agencies. Sometimes it is not about what I can do, sometimes it is about what other people can do and I just happen to know them and ask them. I was talking to someone about this a month or so ago and they said well, I can’t go and I don’t have any money to give and all of a sudden they scratched their head and they said but you know what, I have frequent flyer miles. I could send Andy Arnold to Mozambique. What can you do? Maybe you can’t adopt, but maybe you know someone who would like to. How many of you are in small groups in the Church? Lots of good small groups in the Church. How many of our small groups have taken on some kind of mission project as a class or a small group? Some. But one of the ways that our Church can make a significant difference immediately in our level of Mission involvement. Let me tell you something, I am so proud of the way that you have stepped up and reached out to others in missions, but if each of our small groups said we’re going to take this on. We’re going to work on this. I think our level of commitment goes up at least 20%. You could support the missionary scholarship fund, you could find empathy and feel the suffering of others. I’m not sure who sent those words to me in an e-mail, but I want to tell you something friends, it makes all the difference in the world when you can get into the heart of another person and feel their suffering. Suddenly, what you had in mind for tonight at 5:00 is not near as important. How long the grass is, how much that needs to be mowed, isn’t near as important. One of the most important things that we can do, if we want to take up our Cross and make a significant difference in the world, is find a way to understand and feel the suffering of other people. Finally, if you want to talk about this, Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. in the Library, we are going to have kind of a meeting. Find out if there are good ideas or roads we can start down.
I want to close with a quote. This is from T.E. Lawrence. Actually, we stole it and adapted it from T.E. Lawrence.
“All people dream dreams. Some people dream in the nighttime, only to wake in the day but forget their dreams. (Has that ever happened to you and you woke up the next morning and you forgot it. It happens to us all the time) But, beware of those who dream in the daytime, they are truly dangerous people, they might act out their dreams with their eyes open and cause the impossible to become possible.
What is our future? What is your future? What impact will you leave on those around you? I invite you today to dream greater things.
