Sermon:
July 22, 2001
Sunday Night Alive!

Scripture:
Philippians 1:3-6

Tonight I will read from The Message, Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the New Testament in contemporary language:

Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God’s message from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it, and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.

To be honest with you, tonight I’m going to spend a good amount of time talking about me, and talking about the work that God has started in me. You might say I’m getting a little lazy with my research, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of chance to do that in school.

Let’s get one thing clear before I get started. I’m not going to talk about me because I have delusions of grandeur. I don’t look at myself in the mirror and say: “I’m a great apostle. Come at my feet and feed.” The fact of the matter is, I see myself as nothing more than a turtle on a fence post. You see, Dr. Robert Lamont, a Presbyterian pastor, would say: “When I was a schoolboy, we would occasionally see a turtle on a fence post. And when we did, we knew somebody had put him there. He didn’t get up there by himself. That is how I see my own life. I’m a turtle on a fence post.”

In reference to Lamont’s analogy, Charles Swindoll says: “The Bible is chock full of turtles. One person after another who knows that his or her position of power, authority or promotion was given by another.” So why tell my story if I’m simply a turtle squatting on a fence post? The story is worth telling because it’s really about the One who put me on that fence post. The story is really about our Heavenly Father. You see, the One who started a great work in me has also started a great work in you. And the One who will bring it to a flourishing finish in me will also bring it to a flourishing finish in you. And God’s wisdom, grace, faithfulness and love, which surrounds us while all this work is being done, is worthy of us worshiping and celebrating tonight. So let me get started.

The reason I started going to church is pretty typical….my parents made me. Every Sunday, we’d go to church. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to go….we’d go to church. It didn’t matter if I had stayed out late the night before….we’d go to church. It didn’t even matter if we were on vacation….we’d pack our clothes and we’d go to church. In fact, it even got to the point that it didn’t even matter if it was Sunday. It would be Wednesday….and we’d go to church. That’s how I started going to church.

The reason I accepted Christ as my personal Savior isn’t really much better. The fact of the matter is that my brother led me to Christ. You might think: “Your brother led you to Christ. Why isn’t that good?” Well, let me tell you. I was about 12 or 13 at the time. My brother was 16. We took piano lessons from Mrs. Lindow. And she had a daughter, Janice, who just happened to be my brother’s age. So we wound up together at a revival service at her church (myself, my brother, and Janice). To be honest with you, I think we ended up there together because my mom and my piano teacher were trying to work some magic between Michael and Janice. So you knew God was going to be moving in us that night.

So we’re at the service, and it comes to the end of the time together. The pastor invites everybody up to the altar to accept Christ. We all have our heads bowed and we’re praying. All of a sudden, I notice that my brother is going up. And I start to panic. I’m thinking: “I don’t want to be left behind.” Now, when I say “left behind,” I’m not talking about the Rapture, the Second Coming, the Final Judgment. I’m talking about that I’m in a room full of strangers and all these teenagers are crying around me, and I don’t want to be left behind in the pew. So I step forward with my brother and accept Christ at the same time. You probably didn’t know you led me to Christ, did you, Michael?

My relationship with Christ didn’t flourish right away, once I became a teenager. Much of my time in the church between the ages of 13 and 16 was focused on one thing….learning how to sleep in a worship service. When you’re about 13, you can have a little leeway, because you can lean up against your mom and lean your head on her shoulder, and she thinks that’s really tender. So you take advantage of that. Somewhere around 13 or 14, something clicks in a mother’s head, and she says: “You know, my son’s just taking a nap here.” So one Sunday you go to lean your head and she hits you with a shoulder, and instead of a tender mother, it’s more like a cornerback in the NFL coming across on a wide receiver in the middle. I am convinced, if doctors knew back then the effect of multiple concussions, I would have been out of church for four to six weeks.

So you need to change your approach. After that, you go through what we call the bobblehead stage. That is when you’re a teenager of 14 or 15. You’re thinking: “I can sleep. I’ll just hold my head still.” You’ve got to be careful, because you can suffer whiplash from that.

So you move on to the next technique. And that would be the leaning-on-the-pew technique. You can practice this tonight. It really requires you to be seated at the end of the pew. You can fall asleep. It is great. It is very reliable. But unfortunately, it requires you to have that seat. And if you have a wise older brother (which I have), you didn’t get that seat often.

So you have to come up with a better technique. And you get this when you’re about 16. It requires you to sit up in the balcony. What you do is place your elbows on your knees and put your head in your hands and just fall asleep. A very good technique. It does require you to sit in the balcony. But that’s okay.

(I want to clarify one thing right now, because I’m going to be sending a copy of this sermon to Dr. Quick. He was the senior pastor at Metropolitan while I was growing up. I want to clarify that all this sleeping had nothing to do with his preaching. It just had to do with where I was in my faith that I slept so much in church.)

So we’re now about 16 years old. My life was changed….and you might even say it was rearranged….while I was on a weekend Chrysalis retreat. This is a weekend retreat that the Conference sponsors for youth in the Methodist church. I was about 16. To give you a glimpse as to how God impacted me on this weekend, I’m going to share the response I had to two questions that were asked of the group.

The first question was: “How has Christ impacted your life this weekend?” My response was that I realized that Jesus loved me. That meant more than just a silly bumper sticker or a simple chorus that we sang around the campfire. I realized that the Creator of this universe, the almighty God in heaven, loved me. And, as Matt would say, I realized that Jesus loves me as if I am the only one to love. If I was the only one in creation who had sinned and separated himself from God, Christ would have died on the cross for me. That is what I realized.

The second question was: “What are you going to do about it?” My response was: “I don’t know. But I’m going to share his love.” I had no idea what was in store for me.

Following my experience at Chrysalis, I sought opportunities to share this love. I became active in Chrysalis retreat weekends that followed. I would take two weeks out of my summer to be a camp counselor at Lake Louise and Bayshore Camps. And as I got into these experiences, I began to see God working in me. I started to discover that He was giving me gifts and nurturing gifts that He would later use in His ministry. For example, I would have the opportunity to do a talk before a group or lead a worship service at a camp. And I’ve got to tell you, it just felt right. It was like, in that moment, I realized why God created me. And as much as I loved playing soccer, as much as I loved walking my dog at night, it was when I was doing His work…. preaching….that I thought: “You know what? This is why God has put me here.”

At that time, I also became aware of God’s plan for my life. I realized that He was calling me to be a pastor. And I think there was definitely some excitement in that. But for the most part, it caused a great struggle in me for a couple of reasons. First of all, that wasn’t my plan. I had hopes of becoming a hockey player (although, to this point, I don’t think there are any Filipino hockey players). Race car driver was high up on the list. That wasn’t going to happen. So I was pursuing a career in hotel management.

I also struggled with God calling me to be a pastor because I wanted reassurance from Him. I would take a shower in the morning, and all the steam would build up on the mirror, and I wanted to get a note from God: “I will take care of everything.” If I was going to do this, God, you’d better give me pretty clear sign it was all going to work out. I also wanted compensation. Not compensation in the way of money, but I wanted things. I wanted a dog. I wanted a family. Absolutely in that order. I wanted a house. I wanted certain things, and I didn’t know if God was going to provide them if I went into the ministry.

I struggled with God working in my life for the next nine years. I was unsure whether He was going to fulfill his promise, the promise He gave to “keep at it, to bring it to flourishing end.”

This would all come to a boiling point about two years ago, in 1999. At that point, I had earned my bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. I had served as a youth minister at Fraser Christ United Methodist Church for three years. (I also served as their second baseman, but that’s beside the point.) I also served at Utica United Methodist Church in Sterling Heights for one year. By that time, to be brutally honest with you, I was fed up with God. I had grown tired of trying to work out a compromise. “God, I’ll be in ministry as long as it doesn’t require me to go to seminary to get a master’s degree. I’ll be in ministry as long as I don’t have to move away from my family, because I love hanging out with them. I’ll be in ministry, Lord, as long as you don’t make me give everything to You.” After nine years of struggling with God’s call to be a pastor, I was ready to walk away from it.

Then, in the spring of 1999, the opportunity came to do just that….walk away from it. It came in the form of my dad seeing how unhappy and frustrated I was. He gave me the opportunity to get into a business venture. The business venture was to open up five coffee shops in five years, and own and operate these coffee shops with a partner and his son. And I was ready to jump on board. I had a desire to go into business and run away from full-time ministry in the church. It was perfect. I was ready to leave full-time ministry and go into business. It gave me an opportunity to be with my family. It gave me an opportunity to provide for my family. If things worked out, maybe I could help pay for my sister’s education or help pay for things that our family needed. And then God crossed my path again.

(I don’t usually interrupt a sermon to acknowledge one person, but I really believe that as we’re looking to worship God and all that He has done here, I want to tell Matt Hook and share with the congregation that I thank God that He has crossed our paths. I am convinced I wouldn’t be where I am with God right now in my call to ministry unless Matt and I had crossed paths. I know that Matt’s ministry has impacted many lives, lives that are sitting in the back pews there. But if it ended up that I was the only person that his ministry impacted, I would hope that he would feel it was worth it all. I really hope you know this.)

God crossed our paths in April or May of 1999. I was in one of the parlors leading a meeting for an organization of youth directors here in the Detroit Conference of the Methodist Church. And it just so happened that First United Methodist Church was looking to fill the position of Associate Director of Youth Ministry (and I wish I knew what that title meant back then). The amazing thing is that Matt and Diane saw the Jesus in me. They saw something they felt would bring fruit to the ministry here. But that day, Matt and I really didn’t talk much about it. So I left.

A couple of weeks later, Matt happened to be at the Detroit Annual Conference in Adrian. That’s where a bunch of folks from the Methodist Church meet together, and it’s all cool. Anyway, it happens that Matt ran into Jackie Euper (who eventually became my sister’s mother-in-law). Jackie told Matt I was leaving the ministry to go into the coffee business. Matt said: “Oh, that’s interesting, because we’d like Jeremy to look into the possibility of being in ministry here.” And Jackie said: “Well, you’d better hurry up, because he’s going into the coffee business.”

And then, it just so happened, that Matt was at a worship service at Annual Conference and he ran into my father. We can’t quite recall how the exact conversation went. I think it’s a post-traumatic stress disorder between my dad and I. But the truth of the matter is, Matt mentioned once again that this position in ministry was available. They left it at that. My dad told me: “I know we’re doing this coffee venture, but I ran into Matt Hook. You might want to look into it.”

So I set up a meeting with Matt. Matt, Diane and I were hanging out. I was hearing about the ministry here at the church, and getting excited, but in the back my mind I was saying: “So what? I’m going into the coffee business.” But things then took a rocky turn. Matt and I went to meet Dr. Ritter. I should tell you that the Saturday beforehand, I had spent the whole day on a boat, so I was actually still experiencing some vertigo or seasickness when I walked into Dr. Ritter’s office. He was asking me everything from why was I leaving the ministry to why I’d be interested in this position in the ministry. I was just trying to keep the room straight. I remember walking down the hallway with Matt after the meeting and asking if I sounded like an idiot, because I was trying to keep the room straight. So I left thinking this would be an awesome opportunity in ministry, but it was just not my plan.

So we went ahead with the coffee venture and purchased a coffee shop in Howell. Its name was Sufficient Grounds. It was right next to the courthouse, so that was a good name. We purchased the coffee shop, and two weeks afterwards, we were running it. It was a grueling schedule. I would wake up at 4:30, be on the road by 5:30, get in the shop by 6:30, throw on the morning coffee, serve the customers all day, get done at 7:00 at night, close up the shop and hit the McDonald’s down the road….thankfully, they had McDonald’s. I would have dinner on the road. At 8:30, I’d get home, go to sleep, and start it all over.

June 16. I’ll never forget the day. I got up at 4:30, got ready, and was on the road by 5:30. I realized that I had not been talking with God for quite a while because of how busy I had been with the coffee shop. So I decided to take a moment to pray. I can’t remember anything specifically that God and I shared, but it just got us talking. And something tripped my memory that morning that I had forgotten to call Matt Hook at Birmingham First to tell him I was no longer interested in being in youth ministry. Then my dad happened to call me that afternoon, and he asked how things were going. I said: “You know, Dad, I’ve never called Matt to tell him that I’m not interested.” And he said (remember, he had put quite a lot of money into this): “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” I said: “I don’t know.” You can imagine my dad at that point.

So I hung up the phone and got just to the point of being physically ill. Because God had clearly said to me: “Every day that you spend in this coffee shop is going to be a day that you walk away from Me.” I couldn’t do that. So that night I called my dad. And to be very honest with you, I was so worried, because I was hearing sounds out of my dad that made me think: “Man, I hurt him.” But I told him, “I can’t do this. I need to get back in the church. I need to answer God’s call.” There is one question that I still remember him asking of me: “What are you running from? You weren’t happy at Fraser. You weren’t happy at Utica. And now you’re not happy in business. What are you running from?” And I knew. I said: “I’m running from God’s call to ordained ministry.” But I’m done running. You can’t outrun God.

It was a tough time. We had signed on with a franchise to open five shops. But I had made the decision to leave the coffee shop and go back to ministry and start here at Birmingham First United Methodist Church. And that’s how I got here.

I want to share two conversations that I had in the midst of that, one with my mom and one with my dad, because this is the opportunity that God gave me to catch a glimpse of Him in the midst of it all.

The first conversation is one that I had with my mother across the dining room table. It was fairly soon after I had told my dad that my decision was final to leave the coffee shop. We discussed it. She was very honest with me that I had put my dad and the family through a lot of strain with the decision I had made. I tried to tell her that I really believed it was all God’s plan. And she shared with me that, from the very beginning, she thought it was a devastating mistake for me to leave the ministry. I said: “Mom, if you knew that, why didn’t you tell me?” She told me: “You know, I had a discussion with my friend. And this friend told me that sometimes, if you love your kid enough, you’ve got to let them make mistakes.” And that was absolutely true.

Romans 8:28 says: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him who have been called according to his purpose.” Notice that this scripture says “all things,” not just the good decisions and the obedient decisions and the wise decisions, but all things. We tend to think that because we made a mistake, because we’ve chosen to go away from God, because maybe we’ve sinned, we somehow have this irreparable stain or brokenness in us that God can’t repair. You’re not listening to God’s word if you believe that. You’re listening to Satan whispering in your ear that God can’t use you. If we fail to appreciate all the nooks and crannies of our journey with God, if we fail to appreciate everything that is outside the straight and narrow, we fail to appreciate the work that God is doing in us.

Second Corinthians 4:7 tells us that God chose to carry his treasure, the light of his good news and love, in not perfect crystal vases but in jars of clay that can be pressured and cracked. We don’t have to be perfect for God to work in us. We can make mistakes.

The second conversation is one I can remember having with my dad on the way to a family event. This must have been two or three months after I had left the coffee shop and our partners had taken it with the intention of selling it. Occasionally I would ask my dad, when I thought he was ready: “What’s up with the shop, do you know?” So one day I was surprised to hear we had sold it. And I said: “What did we get for it?” He said that for about every five dollars that we put in, we lost two. The hard thing for me was knowing that the money that we invested in the coffee venture could have paid for my room, board, tuition and books for three years at seminary, with a little left over for a dog. And I talked to my dad in the car and said: “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And my dad said: “Don’t worry about it. Just take care of what you need to take care of. Take care of your school. Take care of your love for God.” That was it.

Matthew 7:11 says: “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?” We think that if we pursue what God wants for us, we’re not going to get the good stuff. The fact that my dad would give this to me and say, “Don’t worry about it, just take care of business,” just made it click in my mind and I thought: “My gosh, what does my heavenly Father, who is perfect, who is loving, want to give to me?” You’re not giving up the good life if you allow God to complete the work in you.

So where am I now? The God who began the good work in me 28 years ago has kept at it. And during my time at First United Methodist Church, this is what has happened to my call in ministry. First, I am certain, absolutely certain, that God has called me to be a pastor. Second, I want this more than anything else. I shared with the morning services a prayer from Stanley Kresge, a man in the church where I grew up: “O God, thy will. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else. Thy will.” For me to be able to pray that now, is just awesome. I enjoy being at this point. Last, I’m certain that the God who started this work in me is going to be faithful in completing it.

Where are you? What work has God begun in your life? Maybe He’s calling you to do his work in your workplace. Maybe He’s calling you to leave your work for the ministry. Maybe He’s calling you to simply accept his gift of salvation. Are you willing to embrace God’s work in you? Is that something that you want? Do you have faith that the God who began it all is going to complete it in you? Do you believe that when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be worthwhile?

Let me end with this essay by Shaun MacDevitt, a student at Marquette Senior High School. I don’t know what year, but on a Saturday morning, he died in a car crash along with three of his friends. His mom asked the newspaper in Marquette to print this essay which he had submitted for his English class, in hopes it would comfort those who loved him in the community, who were reeling from this car accident. Tonight I read it as an encouraging reminder of what is important when it’s all said and done. It is entitled “Goals.”

I guess I don’t really have a goal, or one thing I need to do before I die. I just want to do what God wants me to do. I’m not trying to sound preachy, but that’s where I am right now. I want to be an imitator of Christ and glorify God in any way possible. I want to spread the gospel and do the will of God.

And when the end comes, whether it be death or the second coming, I’m going to be more than happy to take the Father’s hand and go home.

Unfortunately, I’m not even close to being as bold as I’d like to be, and as I should be. Even now I find myself looking around to make sure nobody is reading this.

* * * * *

Why am I so ashamed and embarrassed about something that I feel so strongly about? My life is based on God. That’s the meaning in my life. What keeps me going. So why does my stomach tense up and my face turn red when I talk about God to my non-Christian peers?

I guess it’s human nature and my irrational, but very natural, want to be accepted by this world. It’s stupid, but no matter how hard I try it just won’t go away. So I guess my only goal is to do better and glorify God more in my everyday life.

* * * * *

Sure I’d like to grow up, get married, have many beautiful children and a fun job that provided me and my family with as much money as we could ever need. But those are all worldly wants and aren’t very important. For this life is just a journey. The mode of transportation is trivial, it’s our final destination that counts.