Matt Chandler - Our Moment

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those; that will be our passage. I mentioned last week that I have two things happening: the Beyond sermon series, which Josh set up and I elaborated on last week, serves as an invitation to engage with the work of God in this place at this time. Additionally, we have The Campaign, which addresses the reality that we have been turning away from this church for close to 20 years. In fact, I have done this each weekend. If you are here this morning and at one point or another have felt turned away here—either from the parking lot or while entering the room—would you just lift up your hands? Look, all of a sudden we’re like a Pentecostal church! This is a reality that we are trying to address. So, these two elements are occurring simultaneously. Here’s the invitation from last week: we started with you. You are uniquely you; you didn’t just show up here today out of nowhere. You have a background and a history. You have things you love about yourself and things you hate about yourself. You have been uniquely wired by God, uniquely placed by God, and uniquely gifted by God. There has never been anyone like you in the history of the world, and there will never be anyone like you again. You are spectacular and enough.

Then we discussed three stories, and that was the first: your story. The things you hate about yourself probably have some roots in your background and history, whether that be family of origin, some epic failure, or some epic victory. Then there’s our story as a church; we didn’t just spontaneously pop up here one day. There is a long history of sacrifice, prayerfulness, and courage that has built us into the community of faith we are now. Finally, there’s the one story that truly sits at the center of reality: a Creator God has created all things for His glory, that sin has fractured, and that God has sent Christ to redeem and rescue us and creation from the effects of the fall. One day, all will be made new. In the space between, you and I are meant to live lives of holiness and righteousness, pushing back darkness and establishing light. I made the argument that the more your individual story and our story as a church align with that story, the more we can experience real life—life abundantly. Conversely, the more we try to live out our own stories, even as a church attempting to do our own thing, the more we rob ourselves of levels of joy and grace that only come when we orient ourselves around the story of God. He is Ultimate Reality.

Now, what I want to do today—the only thing I want to do today—is explore how our story intersects with your story. It is happening in a very specific time and place. Our lives are, I would say, contextualized; we are in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which is located in a part of the United States called the South, with its own values and belief systems. We also find ourselves in a specific moment in history. I want to unpack some of this for us today, but allow me to nerd out for a second as we get started. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Fellowship of the Ring, or if you’re not a reader, Peter Jackson’s movie, the first of the three Lord of the Rings series (let’s ignore The Hobbit), there is a moment where Frodo is lamenting. He is already exhausted, even though he doesn’t know that it has hardly begun. He is beginning to lose heart before anything truly challenging has even occurred. He is on the side of a mountain, having missed second breakfast, lamenting that he is not in the Shire; he wishes he were at home, where Hobbits are not Baptists, hoping to flirt with a girl, get married, and live a peaceful life in the Shire. Instead, he finds himself caught up in a global catastrophe. He laments to Gandalf the Grey—not the White, but the Grey; you’ll have to wait a bit longer for Gandalf the White. Here’s the conversation between Frodo and Gandalf: «I wish it need not have happened in my time, ” said Frodo. „So do I, ” said Gandalf, „and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.“ That is where I hope to take us today: what will we do with the time given to us?

Now, the passage that Charles read earlier, and that I will read again, is set in its own context. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount can be found starting in Matthew 5, but it is also mirrored in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Mark. Here in Luke 12, we find…