Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
Campfire Stories: Romans 12vv1-3- Savannah Charlish: Benediction
Our college pastor, Savannah Charlish, gives a final exhortation to our departing college students.
I thought it'd be really beautiful for Savannah especially as many of our college students are moving on to share just a benediction for the college students, an exhortation, and the rest of us to listen in, because the beautiful thing about Jesus is he is trying to foster a heart that stays young with Him. Our God is much younger than we are. Oftentimes it's us who grow old and calloused in our ways, and God is ever young. And so, as we listen in, as those of us who aren't college students, let us feel the Holy Spirit just piercing us and inviting us into his life. I'm going to pray over Savannah as she opens the word for us, and let us gather around what God has to say to us today.
Speaker 1:God, I bless you for Savannah and for Landon. Lord, they have been pure gift to this community and I pray that, lord, even now you are drawing them into the next season of their life, of ministry for you and with you, god. But now we have the opportunity, lord, as we're here in this place, to be expectant for what you might say to us, to what your spirit has for us, and so, god, would you give us ears that are waiting to hear, and would you bless Savannah's words, as she brings just a sliver of her life with you to bear on this community. Lord, we know your word does not return void, and it's that truth, that promise, that we hold on to here this morning. So, lord, meet us here in the power of your word and the beauty of your name. We pray these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We pray Amen.
Speaker 2:Amen. I'm going to invite our scripture reader up. Katie, who is one of our graduating seniors and a very, very dear friend of mine, will be reading in Romans 12, 1 through 2, if you want to flip in your Bibles or scroll in your phones Romans 12, 1 through 2.
Speaker 3:Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is his good, pleasing and perfect will. Thanks be to God.
Speaker 2:Two weeks ago, ecclesia College celebrated our annual failure party. Every year I invite all of the college students to Matt and Kim's backyard to tell them how proud I am for failing at something. I get balloons and signs and a cake that says happy failure on it, which this year the cake calligraphy person misspelled failure and then tried to fix it and then just didn't finish the word, which couldn't have been more perfect. And to greet everyone to the party of the year, I get the loudest kazoos I can possibly find and I, alongside whoever else is around, blow our kazoos and cheer and hug students as they walk up to the backyard gate, utterly embarrassed and confused, as we yell Happy failure, well done. And I watch as student after student walks past, most of them looking like they wish they could crawl inside themselves and disappear because to have failure celebrated feels wrong, like perhaps it's the closest thing to heresy that I could be teaching them. I think one of the best examples of this is from one of my favorite discussion from this year's party, where some students started imitating their parents' reaction to the party. I couldn't help but laugh as they reenacted their parents' concern and confusion about a party dedicated to failure from a church. One student even said she didn't tell her parents about it because she knew they would so strongly disagree with the premise of the party. She found it easier not to say anything at all and, to be honest, I find it equally entertaining, and I am both proud that I threw a church party that students didn't tell their parents about and, to be fair, I get it.
Speaker 2:Despite the growing body of data that shows that embracing and even celebrating failure leads to greater innovation, productivity and, ultimately, long-term success, the look of skepticism that surfaces every year when I announce the failure party never grows old. I cannot tell you what it's like doing announcements up here, as I watch everyone's smiling faces turn to a mix of disbelief and mild concern, as if somehow I might have lost my mind. The truth is, when I host this event, I know I'm not just throwing a quirky party or simply saying that God loves you despite your flaws. Instead, the truth of the matter is, every time I throw the failure party, I know that I am challenging a core belief here in Princeton head on, and that belief typically goes something like this If I do everything right, then things will go according to God's plan, and if I've failed, I must have done something wrong. And so, while fun and lighthearted, the failure party is truly an invitation to tangible recognition of the worldview that many of us have internalized that being good, lovable and faithful is reflected in our success, accolades and busyness. We do the failure party not just to show that this is unhelpful, but that it isn't biblical. Put simply, I'm asking students to confront the possibility that one of the foundational beliefs they've built their entire lives around is not only wrong, it's keeping them from experiencing the fullness of Jesus' grace.
Speaker 2:And the reason I do this and I know that I've preached on this many times is because I've watched over and over again how the framework of values that define Princeton University for better and for worse, become deeply intertwined with people's beliefs about who God is. Over the last two years, I have watched as student after student, in genuine earnestness, comes to me wracked with anxiety, guilt, confusion, anger or a mix of all of them, as they tell me that they feel like they are doing everything right and yet somehow they are still plagued by burnout, exhaustion, fear, loneliness, and before I can even respond, most of them jump straight into their series of qualifiers. I know I should be reading my Bible more. I know that I should be praying more. I know I've been reading my Bible more. I know that I should be praying more. I know I've been late to church recently. I know that I should come to things more consistently, and so on, and so on, and so on, as if they have to cover every base of confession before I can say anything.
Speaker 2:And in this, what I've learned to ask is just one simple question that seems to bring to the surface every false belief we might hold about God When's the last time you took a day off? Now, if you ask any of my college students who have spent more than five minutes with me, they'll confirm that I talk about the Sabbath more than anything else Since starting this job. I genuinely cannot think of a week that has gone by where I haven't brought it up to at least one person. It's become such an ongoing joke that one of the most constant refrains in this ministry has been if God can take a day off, so can you. And while I love to poke fun because I think humor is the spoonful of sugar that helps hard truth go down, I know that encouraging people to take a Sabbath goes against every principle of maximization, efficiency and productivity that they've built their lives around.
Speaker 2:Just the other day, I sent a podcast episode to a college student who I knew would have brilliant and wonderful things to say in response, and when her and I sat down to talk about it, she ended up confessing that she'd listened to it on double speed which is not something I knew you could do while getting ready in the morning and then sent me all of her thoughts in a voice memo so that she didn't have to stop and write down anything. And naturally I made fun endless fun of her for her absolute perfection of time maximization, because, even though it was genuinely an inconsequential act, I think it gets to the core of how many of us orient our lives. I think it's fair to say that most of us here not all, but most believe to some degree the narrative that the outcome of our actions is one of the best indications of whether we're living a good life or not. What I mean by that is most of us genuinely look to the success of whether we're living a good life or not. What I mean by that is most of us genuinely look to the success of what we do to gauge whether or not. We're getting things right.
Speaker 2:What this looks like, and what many of us would probably agree with, is the idea that good grades are a reflection of hard work. So if you're working hard enough, you'll have good grades. Anyone in engineering will tell you that that is a lie. Another version of this could be raising good kids is a reflection of good parenting. So if you parent well enough, your kids will turn out good. Or even the most insidious version of this God blesses those who are faithful, so if I'm faithful enough, he will bless me. And you fill in the blank with what you think those blessings are.
Speaker 2:And just to be clear, I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't work hard and not to abandon your kids or anything like that, especially not on Mother's Day. Instead, what I'm trying to bring to the surface is that many of us, without maybe even realizing it, believe in a paradigm that tells us that what we produce is the best indication of whether or not we are good and loved by God. And, like any worldview, you don't have to go far in the Bible to find verses that supports it Matthew 7, 18-20, or perhaps look to James 2, 26,. For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead. Or even just look at the entire book of Proverbs, which seems to be making one consistent promise do good things and good things will happen. Do bad things and bad things will happen on the surface.
Speaker 2:If you look at these passages, it seems obvious that the Bible is explicit in teaching that the outcomes of our actions reflect what God thinks about them, and so it follows from this that if the outcome is bad, it means that you've probably not worked hard enough or not yet smart enough or not disciplined enough or not good enough yet yet smart enough or not disciplined enough or not good enough yet, and so the work is ultimately on you to do less of certain things and more of others, and wait until the outcome is different. What happens, though, is when it feels like your entire life sits under the weight of constantly doing things and never feel like you've ever done enough. It becomes harder and harder to ignore the quiet, nagging voice that questions whether or not this God is really all that good. The problem with this view, however, is that the Bible also gives us the book of Job. Now, if you're not familiar with this story, job is described as blameless, upright and God-fearing. He's wealthy, with a large family, he has a lot of livestock and he's described by the Bible as the greatest of all of the people of the East.
Speaker 2:And so the story begins with the scene where Satan goes before God, arguing that Job only honors God because of Job's prosperity and protection. Consequently, and for reasons widely debated, god permits Satan to test Job, and so, one by one, messengers bring news of disaster. Thieves steal Job's oxen and camels, fire from heaven consumes his sheep, a wind collapses the house where all of his children were feasting, killing them all. His body is wracked with boils, and after this, three friends come to see him and they become distraught at the sight of their friend. It says Job 2,. When they raised their eyes from afar and did not recognize them, they lifted their voices and wept, and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven.
Speaker 2:After this week of silence, together Job and his friends have a theological exchange, trying to make sense of Job's sudden, inexplicable suffering. And if you read it closely, you'll begin to see that Job's friends are putting forth reasons for Job's suffering. That reflects an interpretation of the wisdom of Proverbs, specifically that bad things happen to bad people. It begins with his friend Aliphaz, who puts forth that Job has sinned and is being disciplined by God. And he insists on this despite Job desperately saying that he has not sinned. Adding insult to injury, his friends Bildad and Zophar push Job to repent, arguing that the outcome of Job's life must be the product of his own sin. I mean, as it says in Proverbs 3.33, the Lord's curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the house of the righteous. If that's the wisdom of God, it would seem undeniable that Job must have done something horrible to elicit God's curse over his life. And yet, despite the chastisement of his friends, job desperately and honestly insists that he has committed no sin. The Bible says that he was blameless and thus warranted no discipline.
Speaker 2:And in the midst of his friends' insistence, job turns to them and says in chapter 16, I have heard all of this before. What miserable comforters you are. Won't you ever stop blowing hot air? What makes you keep on talking? I could say the same things if you were in my place. I could spout off criticism or shake my head at you, but if you were me, I would encourage you, I would try to take away your grief. Instead, I suffer if I defend myself, and I suffer no less if I refuse to speak.
Speaker 2:I think the lesson is here that the next time someone starts throwing out Bible verses at you, feel free to quote this section of Job in response. I'm kidding, but I do find it utterly hilarious the idea of next time someone tells me where God closes a door, he opens a window and looking at them and saying what a miserable comforter you are. I'm not saying it's my pastoral recommendation, just that it's biblical. In all seriousness, though, this moment is shocking because it's Job's rejection of his friend's explicit and widely held, religiously supported belief about who God is. And yet in this, the Bible and its brilliance once again takes something that seems so obviously true and inverts the whole paradigm, revealing who God truly is against the backdrop of who he's assumed to be. In this case, what it looks like here is that we're given two texts that were meant to be read together yet seem to be full of contradictions. On the surface, it seems that Job obliterates every piece of wisdom put forth in Proverbs, and yet the book of Proverbs is unequivocal that these principles are worth living by, and so we're left in the tension of not being able to make sense of how these two paradigms fit together, and unfortunately it's not a question that the text neatly answers.
Speaker 2:If you've ever read the end of Job, it's a striking and somewhat infuriating end to the story. After chapters of rising tension and unresolved debate, the whole thing is interrupted by God himself. But instead of answering a single one of Job's questions, god responds instead with a series of his own question after question, revealing his vastness, mystery and authority. Initially, upon reading, it can seem like an insufficient and uncompelling response by the questions raised by the text. And yet somehow, in the midst of encountering God, job is utterly transformed and moved, giving only a short response to God's presence. He says this line in his response, and I think it's one of the most beautiful things written in scripture my ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you, and the story ends with God restoring back multiple times over what had been lost. Now you might be asking yourself, after all of this, what is the point? And the book for that is Ecclesiastes. We know who reads their Bible, because that is a very funny Bible joke.
Speaker 2:If you have not yet read Ecclesiastes, go and read it and you will laugh out loud in hindsight, but for this morning in particular, there are three things that I want to emphasize about the story of Job. That it teaches us are three things that I want to emphasize about the story of Job that it teaches us. First, we can have well-intentioned but wrong beliefs about God. Second, what we believe about God is essential. And third, a changed belief is transformative. A short word on age To begin. We can all have well-intentioned but wrong beliefs about God.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned earlier, one of the most striking things about the book of Job is the way that Job's friends put forth a theology that almost perfectly mirrors the book of Proverbs. And yet, despite the never-ending ambiguity of the book of Job, it does make one thing clear the men who seem to be so confident in their views about God were the ones that God himself rebukes for their foolishness. If you doubt me, look at verses 42, 7 through 9. And what I find so extraordinary about this and humbling is that this forces us to examine areas where our theology has been more influenced by our worldview than the other way around. And it's hard, because often the things that get intertwined with our beliefs are things that are actually really good, like a strong work, ethic, ambition or love of community, and we can often find genuine examples in the biblical text that makes it really seem like we're pursuing and embodying Christian teachings. And so the point here, what I really want to get at, is that following Jesus doesn't mean that you can't be diligent or passionate or motivated. Rather, the question is examining where those principles, where those values in your lives are not fully yet under the authority of Jesus Christ and are inhibiting you from experiencing his grace. Put simply, an example of this is that if we mistake Christian culture for Christ himself, we risk becoming like Job's friends, earnestly pursuing God, yet missing him because our loyalty was more to our views about Jesus than to Jesus himself.
Speaker 2:Second, what we believe about God is essential to our faith. One of the greatest and most poignant tensions in this text is the meeting of who God really is with who he is expected to be, and the reason why the stakes are so high in this tension is because what you believe about God is essentially important for how you orient your life. The reality is our vision of God. Whether or not we realize it drives how we live. Our view of him shapes our expectations, our relationships, our fears and our hopes. It means that, whether we picture God as a distant judge, a cosmic force or a present and loving father, these images direct the choices we make and the way we respond to the world around us. Put simply, the reality is who we believe God to be, forms the foundation from which we act. As AW Tozer puts it, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. Or, put simply by Dallas Willard, everyone's practical theology vitally affects the course of his or her life.
Speaker 2:Lastly, a changed belief is transformative. I think that one of the most poignant lines in scripture, as I said, is Job's simple statement that my ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. In the beginning of the story, we meet a Job who believes that God gives good things to those who are good. But, like we read in chapter 16, job realizes that he can no longer simplify God into this paradigm. Instead, his experiences force him to face a reality that he couldn't account for, and in doing so, job encounters God. It's this moment that transforms Job, as God begins to reveal who he really is, moving Job from a place in which he thought about God, to a place of being in actual relationship with God. This change shifts Job's entire orientation to the reality around him, taking his wrestling and his questioning and turning it into peace. What we see happen in the text that is captured so profoundly in Job's one line, is that, in encountering God, job's situation doesn't change, but rather Job himself is changed, and this change shifts his entire experience of reality. It's this transformation of belief that leads Job to see the world in a way that was unavailable to him before, leading him to reinterpret and reexamine both the world around him and his experiences through God's mercy, in a way that was beyond his own understanding. Put simply, in letting go of who Job thought God was, job was able to be formed by who God truly is, changing his whole perspective and relationship to the world.
Speaker 2:Now, at this point, I realize that using Job as the focus of a benediction or a blessing sermon might seem a little odd, and so I want to clarify the reason why I've spent all of this time up until this point honing in on these lessons. It's because I think that they best set the context for why I've chosen Romans 12 as my benediction for the college ministry. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's fair to say that sometimes, when reading some of Paul's most famous lines, we can unwittingly breeze past the heart of the message without getting past the surface. However, the lessons that Job's life teach us can bring out the themes that I think Romans 12 is getting at Specifically. I think Romans 12 is going so much further than simply stating that we should avoid sin. Instead, it seems that Paul is putting forth a view of formation that requires our active participation in the invitations of Jesus.
Speaker 2:Look back at the text with me Romans 12, 1-2. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as of a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's perfect will is his good, pleasing and perfect will. If we look at the structure of the text, there are two things that Paul says turn us into people who know God's will, offering our bodies a sacrifice and being transformed by the renewing of our minds. And while a wonderful promise, I think it can sometimes feel hard to see how these two things would make us into someone who knows and enacts God's will. The number one question I get in every college meeting I have ever had is yes, great, but what do I do? Tell me how. There's a feeling that in avoiding sin and going to church on Sunday, there is still something missing. We are still left with lots of questions about who God is and what he wants us to do with our lives and how I'm supposed to follow him faithfully. This is why I think Paul is going so much further in the invitation that he's putting forth.
Speaker 2:When we think about giving our bodies in worship, paul is relying on the truth that how we spend our time forms the basis of who we are. This means that if your life looks the same as the people around you, if you attach your worth to your performance, if you only ever put work in front of other relationships, if you're constantly busy, whatever version of it is for you, you will only ever end up experiencing the inevitable limitations of what those values offer you. By contrast, paul invites us to reorient our whole lives around practicing the ways of Jesus. It's an invitation to a radical restructuring of our priorities, values and beliefs in ways that will not only transform us but also act as an invitation to the culture around us. Now, if you've ever tried this, you know that reorienting your life brings to the surface habits and beliefs that you might not have realized were at odds with your faith.
Speaker 2:Most of you have probably experienced the challenge of reading scripture every day, only to find the busyness of the morning more demanding than the slowness that the text requires, or the constant distraction we hear in our minds as we try to pray, or maybe even the anxiety that comes up when taking a Sabbath because of the pressure it puts on our view of self-worth, when taking a Sabbath because of the pressure it puts on our view of self-worth. If we attempt to live as sacrifices, not only keeping our bodies out of sin, but intentionally orienting our time and giving our attention to Jesus, we will begin to realize that there are aspects of our lives and our beliefs that Jesus is asking us to give up for the purpose of transforming us and reorienting us to the world through his love, like Job. If we believe some version of the paradigm that tells us that the outcome of our actions is the best indication of God's favor over us, then we will orient our lives doing things in worship without ever necessarily encountering God in worship. It's for this reason that Paul tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, because he understood that what we believe and think about God is essentially formative in the ways that we orient our lives around him. It's this premise, this belief that what we believe is essentially important, is the premise that I want to use to begin offering my benediction to the college ministry, which has truly been one of the greatest privileges of my life. So, if I can many of you are sitting in on a sacred moment I would like to speak to my college students directly.
Speaker 2:When I was asked to plant this ministry two years ago, I came in with a deep conviction that the most important part, one of the most important parts of you was your mind. My desire for all of you as I have prayed for you and met with you, laughed with you and grieved with you was that in your time in Princeton, this church would serve as a testimony to the fact that what you believe is essential to your faith and that the pursuit of your questions and your beliefs is a worthwhile pursuit is a worthwhile pursuit. I've intentionally tried to irritate you all in my relentless asking of questions and challenges to your paradigms, because my deepest desire for all of you was that you would know in the quietest and deepest places in your soul that you are loved by God. As I invite the worship team up to pray, I'm going to pray a prayer of blessing over you, inspired by the words of Paul.
Speaker 2:When I pray these words over you, my prayer is that when you think of giving your body in worship, when you think about imitating the life of Jesus, you think of one in which Christ laughed with his friends, pursued the truth, asked others endless questions. It's a life in which he rested and sat in people's home over a meal. I pray that you look to the cross and, with utter trust that Christ followed the Father with give up control in your own lives where Christ is calling you. I pray that, as you wrestle through formation, that you are bold in letting go of the old beliefs that you have and that you find joy and peace in Christ's redemption and what you once believed. I pray that each one of you will experience Job's praise that once only his ears had heard of God, but now his eyes had seen. And when you move from here. My prayer is that you will be a completely different person than the one you came in, as I pray that you become confident in discerning God's will, pursuing Christ alongside others with the full humility and grace that comes with knowing that you are the beloved of Christ.
Speaker 2:Every week, I stand up here and I pray that God would make Ecclesia a church that pours out onto the streets of Princeton, calling his people back to him. And now I hand this prayer off to you. As you reorient your lives, as you are transformed, you will be the hands and feet of Jesus in this place, you will be the thing telling people that they are the beloved of God. And so, while this particular season of this ministry ends and I am honored to hand it off to you it seems fitting that the verse that was the cornerstone of the last two years be the blessing that I give to all of you. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Speaker 1:You know we don't often think of Jesus' last words on the cross as a benediction. We can see the agony in the words. We puzzle over what some of them mean, but when you look at Jesus' last words before he breathes his last breath, what we see is that, colored in all the hues of death and suffering and abandonment, is truly God's deepest blessing to the world. And one of those last words that Jesus prays is Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit With Jesus' last breath. He invites us into true humanity, which is entrusting ourselves fully to the hands of God. And Jesus invites us into this kind of life that tells us the truth in a world full of scripts that tell us we have to build a life for ourselves, that we're only as important as that which we can achieve as other people see us. Jesus says I give all of this to you as pure free gift, and all you have to do is join me and say I trust you, god. And so, as Savannah has invited us into, the way that we see, god is fundamental to who we are, and maybe you didn't know that until you walked into this room today, and so we want to invite you to just consider a couple things. First of all, if you've never received the invitation to this life, that is not a life that is the product of your hands or your achievements, but it's a product of the gift and the grace of God we want to invite you to receive that here today. Second of all, as Savannah so beautifully outlined for us, there is purpose, there is meaning.
Speaker 1:If you haven't considered that God has a will for your life, that he's inviting you to step into, to participate with him in his redemption of all things and allow God to meet you here, I'm going to invite you to stand. We pray welcome Holy Spirit. God, we acknowledge your presence here. God, would you help us to see the beauty of your Son, god, lifted high, given for us. Jesus, lord, we welcome your presence as we worship. Be with us. We pray, amen. Friends, we're going to respond in worship through song for just a few moments.