We are working our way through the life and ministry of Jesus, as told in the Gospel of Luke. We’re still very early in his ministry. And in today’s text a problem starts to emerge that will come to be a difficulty for Jesus on many days. It’s the problem of too many people wanting to come and listen to him. Too many people wanted to meet Jesus! His problem of the day was crowd control. On that day he solved it pretty neatly, but for us, this morning, I want us to think about crowds, about reaching large numbers of people.
To start us out, will you find our text in your bulletin? We’ll read it together, but let me just say that when you read the lake of Gennesaret, that means the Sea of Galilee, different groups called it different names. Will you read it with me?
“Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.”
So what did he do to solve this problem of too many people? He got into a nearby fishing boat and had them push him out into the water a bit. That way people wouldn’t be clamoring and pushing each other to touch him. They all just sat down on the lakeshore to listen. You may have noticed how well sounds carry over the water, especially when there aren’t any water skiers nearby. They could all hear. And so he taught them the word of God from a boat in the edge of the Sea of Galilee.
There was this strange thing about Jesus. He attracted huge crowds. The Bible mentions the problem many times. There was the day that Kathy preached about 2 weeks ago when a paralyzed man needed to get to Jesus for healing, but there was too much of a crowd for him to get through, so his friends carried him on his stretched up on the roof of the house Jesus was in, took out some of the roof tiles and let him down through the roof to lay at Jesus’ feet.
There was the day when his mother and brothers wanted to see him and even they couldn’t get through the crowd. And he must have had his cell phone turned off, because they had to send a message in through the crowd.
There was the day that he went into a deserted place to be alone with his disciples but this huge crowd followed him and just stayed there listening to him until it became a danger that they would run out of food and start to faint. And they should have planned ahead, but here they were. So he fed them miraculously, 5,000 men, plus many women and children!
In Jericho, there was a tax collector named, Zachaeus, who wanted to see Jesus, but he was too short to see him over the crowd, so what did he do? Who can tell me? He climbed up in a tree to see Jesus.
Sometimes it got dangerous as the crowds started to trample on each other.
Jesus had this problem of attracting too many people! And it was a problem. More than once the disciples told him, “Send the people away.
Maybe we are somewhat like the disciples. To have extra people around means extra work. You get it set in your mind that I’ll do such and such for God, so much, what feels comfortable to me, and then more people come than fit neatly into your plans and it gets much more complicated. But if we want to deal with many other peoples’ needs, that just doesn’t fit into a neat hour once a week on Sunday morning. It takes a lot of work.
If you start attracting crowds, you don’t know who will show up. You lose control of who is there. For Jesus, the crowds started to include legalists who liked to argue about their pet doctrines. Don’t let people like that come into our church!
The crowds brought in tough political questions, what about that rotten king we have, Herod? What about paying taxes to his boss, the Romans? Don’t let people like that in our church!
The crowds had some pretty disreputable people mixed in, people you don’t want around your kids. There were political revolutionaries, crooked tax collectors, prostitutes, people with very unpleasant diseases, especially leprosy. There were very poor people, people who just didn’t dress nice and probably didn’t have polished manners. Don’t let people like that in our church!
Most congregations have very mixed feelings about bringing in more people. It would be nice to have help with the bills and to have all the pews filled and somebody else to take my spot on that committee.
But you start to look around and you see one person, but they wouldn’t fit nicely in our church, and there’s another person wouldn’t fit either, and that other person might, but it’s too risky. So pretty soon it’s just us, the same old people.
But this crazy Jesus just attracted these huge, unruly, disreputable crowds and he didn’t seem to care about the risks or the inconvenience at all. He loved them.
He dared to believe that the kingdom of God was not just for the nice people who had it all together, but for the messy, disreputable people who were not comfortable to have around. He dared to believe that God could touch their lives, too, and forgive their sins and start to mold them into the very image of God, just like he has started doing those things for us.
And if we are going to be faithful followers of Jesus, we need to have the doors wide open like he did, to scatter the invitation to every household we can reach like he did, and to welcome every person, like he did, no matter how obnoxious they may start out. And we can do that if we have the vision of his love for each and every person on earth and his power to make them beautiful.
I’m very pleased that our denomination is initiating a major effort to reach the crowds, a television advertising campaign aimed at those who are not going to church now. It’s called Igniting Ministry. You’ll hear more about it in coming months. It will be the largest TV advertising campaign ever done by any religious body. The major push will be during three months of the year when people tend to be more open, in September, when school and Sunday School are just starting, in December, while people are thinking about Christmas, and in the weeks leading up to Easter. The ads promise that people will be welcomed if they visit in a United Methodist Church.
I have heard again and again from visitors that they have been very welcomed here, but I want to reinforce today how important it is that when someone comes in this door, they be received, not with just social courtesy, not with neighborly friendliness, but with the love of Christ, that treats every individual as precious in God’s sight, because that’s what they are. When someone visits our worship services, don’t wait, wondering if they are your kind of person. Don’t let yourself get distracted with just welcoming people you already know. Welcome them with the love of Christ.
TV ads by themselves never make churches grow. If they hit someone at just the right moment in their lives when they are feeling a spiritual hunger, an ad might motivate someone to get out the phone book and look up the nearest United Methodist Church. But more likely, it will just make them a little more open, and they won’t come until they actually get an invitation from a real person, face to face. That’s you and me. So a few may come once because of the ad alone. More may come, only if they are invited personally. But if they come and they don’t experience the love of Christ here, then they won’t come back. The ads won’t do it alone.
So I want to look quickly at how Jesus attracted the crowds, how he brought people in and kept them participating.
On the day described in this morning’s Bible passage, what did the crowds come to hear from Jesus? It’s right in the second line in your bulletin. “The crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God.” They came to hear the word of God. I want you to know that I will work very hard every Sunday to understand myself what is going on in the Bible and to present it to you in the most faithful way that I can think of, so that you have every opportunity to hear the word of God in our sermons. And I hope that you hear it as the word of God, and not just something pious sounding so that we can say we heard a sermon today. I don’t believe in going through the motions of playing church.
And my vision is that all of us will be students of the Bible, reading it ourselves at home, studying it, digging to find the answers to our questions and the guidance it gives for how we should live. I hope that we will all be in groups that study the Bible and apply it to life issues. I hope that we will all find ways to share the lessons that have been life to us with our neighbors.
As an example, we had a wonderful time last spring studying a book on how to care for aging parents. The book was filled with practical steps to follow as well as a theological framework that helped us see our service to elderly parents as part of our worship to God and to cope with all the emotions that caring for aging parents can stir up and the questions of priorities and values and all.
I would love to see all sorts of groups like that to help people find God’s answers for the struggles that are on their minds. They might be divorce recovery groups; groups for parenting skills, grief recovery groups, the list can go on and on. Let this be the place where people come to find the word of God for the struggles of their lives. May our study and struggle to conform our lives to the wisdom of God be a blessing to many others.
We live in a time of great spiritual hunger. People are hungry to hear the word of God. Will they hear it from us, on Sunday mornings, in our homes, in our workplaces? People came to Jesus to hear the word of God.
It’s very clear from other places in the gospels that people often came to Jesus for healing of their ailments. I know that I don’t have anything close to the healing gift that Jesus had, so maybe I won’t set my heart on crowds as big as he had.
But I’m sure that there are many here today who would say that this church has been healing for their hearts as they have found friendships, and purpose for life and experienced God’s presence. God’s love is the most healing thing on earth, and when we make the effort to be agents of God’s love for one another, real healing does happen. The more we share our lives together and really care for each other, the more we will experience the God’s power to heal broken hearts. And people will see that and they will come to receive for themselves.
The most powerful thing that Jesus did for the crowds was to love them. In last week’s text I loved the emphasis of the wording that as Jesus healed people, he touched them, one by one. Many of the lives that were most dramatically changed by Jesus were the ones that most everybody else would think were hopeless cases. It was Jesus’ love that broke through to them. When others threw stones at lepers to chase them out of town, Jesus touched them and prayed for them. When women had lived lives of immorality, Jesus still had time to talk to them as real persons and not by the stereotypes of what society said about them. When things were especially busy with adults, he would drop everything to focus on a child. And they remembered that love. And they came back for more.
Can we dare to dream that God would draw large crowds to hear the word of God and experience the love of God in this place? Can we dare to dream that we would have crowd control problems, having to schedule extra services, maybe put up folding chairs in the narthex to fit them all in? If we dare to immerse ourselves in the word of God. If we dare to love people like Jesus did, then they’ll come. AMEN
