Funeral services always challenge me. It is always a high and solemn duty to speak a word from God to those who gather to remember someone’s life. I can hardly say that I enjoy funerals; they are a lot of work. But I can certainly say that I find them a challenge, I find them occasions that demand my best and most creative efforts at preaching.
And so when word arrived some months ago that Rev. I. D. Richards had passed away and that his wife and family wanted me to bring the funeral message, I felt challenged. I felt awed, I felt overwhelmed, I felt anxious. I felt all these things because, in addition to my respect for Rev. Richards and my desire to do him justice as well as to speak a word of good news to his family ... in addition to that I also knew that when a pastor dies, the clergy turn out in droves. We are, after all, rather an exclusive fraternity, and so when one of us passes away, we all show up.
And of course you can guess what that means. It means that whoever is preaching has a hundred critics sitting in front of him, most of whom are thinking, "Now if I had this chance …" "Now if I were working with that Scripture text ..." Let me let you in on a little secret: preachers have a hard time listening to preaching; you’d rather hear yourself than just about any preacher you could name, with the possible exception of the Apostle Paul, and even he had some weak spots!
Well, whatever I did for Rev. Richards’ service, I did, and let the brethren go home to evaluate. A few days later, sitting in a committee meeting at the D. C. Baptist Convention office, one of the pastors commented, "I heard you preach at Richards’ funeral. You whooped! You whooped!"
Do I really need to explain to this crowd what a whooper is? A whooper is a type of preacher who will get a certain rhythm going in his rhetoric. Slow and imperceptible at first, but gradually building, his speech will become more like singing and then like chanting. And eventually he will be gasping for air-a, and many of the words-a will have an extra ending on them-a . . . before you know it he’s got you on the edge
of your seat and you can’t help saying "Amen" and "All right". That’s a whooper.
Whatever else it is, it’s entertaining and exciting. We may not remember exactly what was said, but we know it was fun.
If you’re into the whooper tradition, you think that a preacher who can still use his voice on Monday didn’t really preach on Sunday!
Now, everybody who believes that I really did whoop at Rev. Richards’ funeral, would you please stand on your head right now! I couldn’t do a real, down-home, Carolina whoop if a legion of angels were fluttering their wings in front of my face. It’s just not me.
A lot of church folks want whooping. That is, they want entertainment. They want excitement. They want church to be rousing, noisy, filled with unbridled emotion; they want their worship to be unfeigned feelings, with the throttle wide open. A good many Christians expect their churches and their own forms of religious expression to be whoopers ... full of feeling, exciting, entertaining. That’s all. Just make me feel good.
There is another kind of worship tradition, however. There is the worship tradition which expects very little to happen, and usually gets exactly what it expects. There are those Christians who expect the church to be nothing more than just nice guys. Nice guys. Not very sharp, not very exciting, not too extreme. Just nice guys. Bland. Plain vanilla. Don’t rock the boat. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
In other words, some Christians want their religion sort of generalized and middle-class, sort of muddy and unclear, so that everyone goes away feeling vaguely okay about themselves and not too pressed or too challenged on much of anything.
You know the kind of thing I’m talking about -- the sort of church where the pastor preaches regularly and routinely on safe subjects; where the choir sings the same songs all the time; where the teachers don’t encourage questions and, if they should accidentally meet one, will respond, "Well, let’s all go home and think about that for a couple of months."
The kind of church of which it is said, "Our fathers have been churchmen for a hundred years or so; and to every new proposal they have always answered, ’No’"
The kind of church like the one in which a lady got excited one morning and shouted out, "Praise the Lord" a couple of times. And someone in the pew beside her said, "We don’t praise the Lord in our church." Only to be corrected by the deacon, who admonished, "Yes, we do. But only on page 19 of the hymnal."
One church which I know well sat for years under a pastor who could hardly get up an ounce of excitement about anything. He could take the most exciting good news and make it sound deadly dull. "We raised a million dollars last Sunday." Yawn. "Five thousand souls were added to the church in last week’s revival" Double yawn. "The Lord revealed to me that the Second Caning will occur tonight at midnight." Mega yawn. But they endured him because he was such a nice guy. And they were a church of nice guys. Nice guys will not disturb you; they will not push you; they will never, never thunder, "Thus saith the Lord"; and, above all, they will never, never, never commit the sin of being interesting!
The church of the nice guys will be the one in which you and I can congratulate one another on our relative prosperity and our general good health and good looks and can mosey along toward our heavenly rewards in peace and quiet.
So I give you a choice. Which do you want? The church of the whooper, or the church of the nice guy? The church that is entertaining, that gives you a good show every Sunday morning, that pulls off a spectacular every times it meets, but you can’t remember a thing? The church of the whooper?
Or the church of the nice guys, the church that is careful and cautious, the church that avoids all the divisive issues, that takes its worship in carefully measured doses, and is, above all predictable? The church of the nice guys, who stand for something, but you can’t figure out what? Which will it be?
There has to be another alternative. There has to be another choice. And there is. You may ask for the church of the whooper; you may ask for the church of the nice guys; but if you follow the New Testament you will do well to ask for the church of the rabbis. The church of the rabbis.
I call this third kind of church, this third kind of religious expression, the church of the rabbis because I think of a friend of mine who came to Washington some years ago to serve one of our churches. He was trying to tell me how his sense of himself had developed. He said, some Christians become exciting evangelists, some Christians become quiet counselors, but I have developed into a rabbi! He meant, of course, that his style was like that of the rabbis, the teachers, who taught God’s people in Jesus’ day. He meant that he had taken as his model the Master teacher himself, Jesus, for they called him, rabbi, teacher. My friend meant that he had determined that no occasion would pass without his trying to teach some lesson, no meeting would meet without his attempting to help somebody see some great truth. He was going to be a rabbi. The church of the rabbis.
There are whoopers, there are nice guys, and there are rabbis. There are churches who entertain, churches who try to keep everybody blandly happy, and then, thank God, there are churches who teach. There are churches and there are Christians who have decided to listen to the Great Commission, as it says, "Teach them to obey everything that I have commanded.” "Teach them .. teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
In the first century, the church at Corinth found itself divided and tom. There were a whole lot of issues. Some of these were moral issues, some were doctrinal issues, and some had to do with the style of Christian witness and worship. Some of the issues were centered around personalities.
To paraphrase the situation, some said, "I like Apollos. I like it when Apollos leads us in worship. He’s entertaining. He speaks so very well. When he comes to lead us, things happen. Bells and whistles, lightning and fireworks. Apollos is a whooper. Apollos gives me my weekly religious fix. I like Apollos. I want the whooper.”
And others said, "I’d rather have Cephas. Cephas, Peter, is predictable. Cephas stands for the old tried and true ways. You’ll not find him changing things or experimenting. Cephas, you know, sort of papered over an argument they had in another church about receiving Gentiles. Cephas chose not to stand up for a principle if it would upset somebody. I like Cephas, because we can go home feeling comfortable. Cephas is a nice guy."
But to each of these the Apostle Paul says, "I fed you. I fed you. I fed you first with milk, rather than solid food, because you weren’t ready for solid food. Like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation.” Paul told the Corinthian church he was going to be their rabbi. And you can enjoy your entertaining whooper if you like, you can stay with your bland, comfortable nice guy if you prefer, but the commission of the church, the Great Commission given to every Christian is to teach. To be a rabbi. To teach.
Oh, this morning, if there is anyone thing I would love to move us to do and to be, it would be to move us to become a teaching church. If there is anyone thing I could urge each of us to see about ourselves, it would be to urge each one to teach - to teach somebody something about life. The truth is that everything we do teaches some kind of lesson; somebody is watching you and learning from you. The issue is not so much whether you will teach, because you will teach accidentally. The issue is whether you will decide to teach intentionally and to teach something positive and valuable and life-changing.
Christians must teach! Christians can be rabbis! Find in every relationship that you have, in every encounter that you have, an occasion to teach something. Let no encounter go by which does not result in someone learning something from you. Be the church of the rabbis, for the Lord says, "Teach them.”
And the Lord says further, "Teach them to obey". Christians who are rabbis and not just whoopers, not just nice guys, will care about what happens with their teaching. We will care about whether those who listen to us do something with what we have taught.
Christians who are rabbis don’t teach lessons, they teach people. Do you catch that distinction? Christians who are rabbis don’t just teach lessons; they teach people. If you are just a whooper, all you care about is that you shot off your mouth and got said what you wanted to say. If, on the other hand, you are a nice guy, all you care about is that you not make others feel challenged and pushed. But if you are a rabbi. then it matters what happens. It matters what people do with the truth. It matters to you whether their lives change, and you get invested in people. You care about what they do with truth. That’s Great Commission Christianity. Go and make disciples and teach them to obey, teach them to do something with what they have learned.
And finally, the Lord’s word to us is, "Teach them to obey everything I have commanded" Everything. Teach them to obey not just a drop here and a smidgen there, but everything. Teach them to go beyond a few basic ideas, teach them to
grow in the knowledge of Christ. Teach them to obey everything I have commanded.
The Apostle Paul told the Corinthian church, "I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food" But the implication is strong that eventually they would be ready for more, for solid food and maybe even for dessert.
You see, Paul is talking to baby Christians. They have to have milk and aren’t ready for something solid yet. And there’s nothing wrong with eating baby food when you are a baby. But if you’re still nursing at five years old, something is wrong. If you’re still dabbling in Gerber’s strained peas when you’re a teenager, you have a problem. And if as an adult your idea of an adequate meal is milk and graham crackers, you are on the puny side.
Yet some Christians will look for whoopers to entertain them and give them that old down-home feeling, learning nothing. They will literally resist a new idea, a new teaching, as if it were an infectious disease.
Or some other Christians will seek out nice guys, bland mashed potato and boiled chicken churches, in order to avoid getting stretched. These Christians will avoid the tough questions, the touchy issues, just wanting to keep the peace.
But I hear our Christ commanding that we become the church of the rabbis. I hear our Lord insisting that; the world needs to know, the world must come to grips with truth. I hear our Lord’s command that we start with milk and work on up to solid food and learn and grow and teach.
For you and me that means Bible study. For our church that means spiritual disciplines. For Christians like us that is going to mean life-long learning. For believers such as we it will not suffice to face today’s issues with yesterday’s insights. It will not work for us to be on the cutting edge with dull and rusty tools. You and I must be learners, we must demand that our church be the church of the rabbis, the teachers, and we must complete the Great Commission .. whose ultimate plea is, "Teach". Teach them to obey.. and teach them to obey everything. The whole Gospel. The entire truth.
"Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
