What's Your Story?

John 20:30-31

July 12, 2015 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Well, six months ago, I was minding my own business and going through my day when John Groves called me and changed everything about my life and the life of my family. I had heard of Terre Haute, but before six months ago, I had been here exactly one other time in my life. I had no idea I would be standing here today before you. And that’s okay, because six months ago, you had never heard of me, and probably didn’t expect me to be standing here today, either. In some ways there has been a lot of change for me and for you over these last few weeks, and in other ways it seemed as if this day would never get here. But, certainly, for all of us there is a generous amount of uncertainty in the air. Who is this new pastor? What’s he going to do in our church? Or maybe the question is…what’s he going to do TO our church? How much change will there be? From my vantage point, the questions are different, but similar. What’s this new congregation like? Will they laugh at my jokes? What do they expect out of me? Will they accept and love my family? (Actually, you’ve already done that and shown us that you do.) How will we do ministry together?

Uncertainty and questions are nothing new among the followers of Jesus. Every time you turn the pages of the Gospels, you find disciples who aren’t quite sure what Jesus is up to, what he’s doing, why he’s upsetting yet another group of Pharisees, why they’re going to Jerusalem when people are out to get him. Why aren’t they, instead, hiding in Galilee until the whole thing settles down? Much of what Jesus did didn’t make sense to the disciples, and it seems like, for those twelve men, uncertainty was the way they spent most of the three years they walked with Jesus. And yet, when they looked back, every one of them could see the ways in which Jesus transformed their lives—in fact, the way he transformed their world. Despite their uncertainty, Jesus had made a difference in their lives, and then, quite surprisingly, also used them to make a difference in the lives of others. So when the time came to tell others, and especially when the time came to write down the stories of Jesus, it seems like they went out of their way to emphasize the uncertainty they had felt in those days, almost as if to say, “Look! We were confused most of the time, and if Jesus used us, he can surely use you as well.” That’s a great comfort to me, and I hope to you!

John was one of those who wrote down Jesus’ story. In fact, John was the last one to write, as best as we can tell. His gospel is very different from the other three; very few stories from the other Gospels are repeated in John. It’s as if he knew that most of his readers were already familiar with the story as told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so he sets out to tell the same story from his own unique vantage point. He leaves out the birth, the childhood, a lot of the teaching, and all of the parables. There’s not a parable anywhere in the Gospel of John! Instead, his gospel focuses on seven signs that are meant to point toward Jesus being the Messiah, to help us understand that Jesus is the Savior. John also focuses heavily on the death and the resurrection of Jesus, on themes of life and death, light and darkness. But then, at what many scholars think is probably the original ending to the book, John writes what author Michael Card calls, “the most frustrating verse” (The Parable of Joy, pg. 245). It’s verse 30, which we read a moment ago: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.” John says, in effect, “There are lots of other wonderful and entertaining stories about Jesus I could tell you, but I’m not going to.” Now that drives someone like me crazy. I want to know the whole story. I want to know what happened! Tell me more, John. Tell me about the time Jesus saw a little child crying, picked her up and without a word, calmed her little soul. Tell me about the time you skipped rocks with Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Tell me about the time you caught Jesus looking at the stars, almost as if he could call every last one of them by name. Tell me about the time you went with him to visit his mother, Mary. Did you have any idea you would be caring for her one day? Tell me what their relationship was like. Tell me what happened to Joseph, and Jesus’ brothers and sisters. I want to know. I want the deleted scenes! I want to know the stories you left out.

But John doesn’t tell us any of that. In fact, it seems that he intentionally leaves it out…and he takes time to tell us he left it out! Instead, he tells us why he wrote his Gospel in the first place. It wasn’t to give us a biography of Jesus. It wasn’t to record every detail of his life. Instead, he told the stories he told so “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). The original text isn’t clear whether by “believing” John means first coming to faith or deepening your faith, but I think he’s ambiguous on purpose. He means both. He passionately wants people to come to know Jesus, both for the first time and for the hundredth time. He wants people to find initial faith in Jesus, and he wants them then to find ever-deepening faith in Jesus (Burge, NIV Application Commentary: John, pg. 564). More stories might be interesting, but they would not help people believe more. John has made his case; it’s now up to the reader—up to us—to decide what difference Jesus will make in their—and in our—lives.

There’s another place in the Gospel, at the very end of our present book, where we hear that theme echoed again. In 21:25, we read this: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” That’s another fascinating and frustrating statement, but I think it’s there for one primary purpose: to remind readers that Jesus’ story doesn’t end with his death or even with his resurrection. Certainly those events are central—they are the heart and soul of Jesus’ work and ministry and the absolute non-negotiable core of our faith as Christians. But Jesus’ story doesn’t end there. It continues, right up to the present day. Jesus’ story is still being written—in your life and in mine. Those “many other things” include the ways Jesus has transformed and touched each and every one of us—because his work and his story continues. There is a story told of the day Jesus returned to heaven following his resurrection. The saints who met him at the gate asked, “What plans do you have for continuing your mission?” Jesus told them, “I have left it in the hands of my followers.” The saints were shocked and understandably concerned. “But what if they fail?” they asked. Jesus said, “They cannot fail, for I have no other plan.” As we say in the Emmaus Walk: Christ is counting on you, and me. Jesus’ story is still being told through you and through me, through the ways Jesus takes our broken and messed up lives and makes us into something new.

Over the next couple of months, my goal is to get around to many of the life groups and other small groups that meet regularly so that we can have a chance to get to know each other. Cathy and Rachel will come with me sometimes, depending on their availability, but my main goal in coming to those is to get a sense of the heartbeat and life of the church. And in those gatherings, or even in other places, you may hear me ask something like, “What’s your story?” Now, by that, I’m not trying to dig out all the dirt of your life. What I’m asking and what I’m always interested in is this: “How has Jesus touched your life? How has he made a difference in you and your family? How does your story intersect with Jesus’ story?” So, to get the ball rolling this morning, I want to spend a little bit of time sharing my story with you. Beginning next week, I want to share with you some of my understanding of who the church is and what the church is called to be, but this morning, I’m going to simply share some of my story, the place where Jesus’ story and my story intersect.

To quote John Mellencamp, “I was born in a small town…and my parents live in a small town…” The small town that is my home is Sedalia, Indiana—anyone here know where Sedalia, Indiana is? It’s about halfway between Lafayette and Kokomo on highway 26. When you’re driving through, if you blink you will miss it. My parents still live (half of the year, anyway) in the same house where I grew up. You used to have to slow down to drive through Sedalia because we had the worst railroad crossing in the state. You either slowed down or left behind your undercarriage. Now, the tracks are gone, and people go so fast they rarely even notice they’re going through a town. Sedalia was a wonderful place to grow up—about 150 people lived there, half of them related to me, and the other half well-known to me. On summer evenings, my dad would get on his bike about dinner time and ride around town until he found which backyard my brother, Doug, and I had landed in that day. I had a great childhood, the sort of childhood that doesn’t really exist anymore it seems.

I’ve been a lifelong Methodist, baptized at the Sedalia Methodist Church, and after they baptized me, they figured their ministry was pretty well over, so they closed the church. One of my treasures is the cross that used to hang in the sanctuary of the Sedalia Methodist Church. It will soon hang in the living room of our home here. When the church was torn down, the cross was saved and its owner gave it to me as an ordination gift in 1995. So I grew up at the Rossville United Methodist Church, and I first turned my life over to Jesus during Vacation Bible School. One of the down sides of this year’s move is that I missed Bible School in both places. We moved before it happened in Portage and after it happened here. But next year, you’ll find me at Bible School. Ginger can write that down! It’s so important. It was through the witness of a loving VBS teacher that I gave my life to Christ in the fifth grade. I can’t tell you a thing she said all week, but she loved us and she showed us the love of Christ. I’m absolutely passionate about making sure the children and youth know, whether it’s in Bible School or Sunday School or on a mission trip—wherever!—make sure they know, beyond any doubt, that Jesus loves them.

Well, back to the story. I really only had one pastor during my childhood and teenage years. Pastor Amos McGinnis was at Rossville for eleven years. He and the church let me do ministry even as a teenager. I was president of the UMYF (United Methodist Youth Fellowship, as it was called in those days), and I also directed the children’s choir for four years while I was in high school. They let me put together the Christmas program for a number of years (probably because no one else wanted to do it) and I helped with worship from time to time. I look back on those days and I can see now how God, through the church, was preparing me for ministry, calling me, not in a loud, booming voice, but in still, small, quiet ways—which, as Elijah reminds us, is the way God very often calls (cf. 1 Kings 19:12).

Then, in 1985, when I was preparing to go to Ball State, I had to have a physical for the admissions process. The doctor listened to my heart a long time, and then told me he heard a murmur. He didn’t know how serious it was, so he wanted to wait two weeks and check it again. During those two weeks, the people at Rossville Church prayed, and they prayed hard. Esther Beard, who was the grandmother of the church and my Sunday School teacher, laid hands on me and prayed for my healing. I knew without a doubt that when I went back to see the doctor my heart murmur was going to be gone. After all, Esther was as close to God as anyone I knew. Surely God had to listen to her if he was going to listen to anyone! But I went back to my doctor, and the murmur wasn’t gone, so I went to see the cardiologist, who told me my heart was enlarged. The murmur was fairly serious, though not bad enough at that point to fix. That’s hard for me; I’m a fixer. I was ready at that point, in the brilliance of my 18-year-old understanding, to have the doctor fix it right then. But that wasn’t the plan. I had to wait. And trust. And learn to find peace in an unfinished story.

At Ball State, I met this cute girl from Syracuse, Indiana. Her name was Cathy. We were in the same Christian ministry group together, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and we ended up in leadership together. It took me a long time to work up the courage to ask her out, and she’ll tell you that after our first date, I didn’t call her for a month. That’s not true, and since I’ve got the microphone this morning and she doesn’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it! But we got a chance to do ministry together, to reach out to college students, and to go to Chicago and work in the inner city at a summer day camp in a place on the west side called Circle Urban Ministries. I think I’d been sensing nudges all along the way, that God was moving me, calling me, pointing me toward ministry of some sort, but I don’t think I really began seriously thinking about it until that summer we spent on the west side of Chicago. When we went back to Ball State for our senior year that fall, I knew I was called to some kind of ministry. So I began looking around and trying to discern what, exactly, God was calling me to do.

I decided pretty quickly that I really didn’t want to be a pastor. That didn’t seem very interesting. In fact, I remember my mom many years ago asking if I had ever considered being a pastor, and I told her there was no way I would do that; it was too boring. I mean, after all, what was there to do between Sundays? So I set my course in another direction. I knew college ministry with InterVarsity, and I believed that was where I should be. And yet—you know how God has a way of gently changing our course (sometimes not all that gently)? That’s what happened to me, and it’s all Cathy’s fault because she said yes when I asked her to marry me. After that I pretty quickly learned that InterVarsity (wisely) did not allow your first year of ministry to overlap your first year of marriage. The stress, they felt, was too much to deal with all at once. So what’s a young man, deeply in love, going to do? I got married, and decided to go to seminary for a year, to see if they knew anything, and then I’d go do what I really wanted to do. Three months after our wedding, we packed up all our belongings, looked a little like the Beverly Hillbillies, and moved to Wilmore, Kentucky to study at Asbury Seminary. I thought we were just going to be there for a year. But at some point during those first few months, God began to very clearly speak to my heart about becoming a pastor. God changed my heart toward the local church. I remember one evening sort of quietly saying to Cathy, “What would you think if we pursued pastoral ministry?” And Cathy said, “I was wondering when you would realize that is really your calling.”

Four years later, I had a Master’s of Divinity degree and I was on track to be ordained an Elder in the United Methodist Church. God put within me a passion for pastoral ministry. All along the way, God led me gently, slowly, until God’s vision and my desire lined up. And in May 1995, at the Elliot Hall of Music on the campus of Purdue University, Bishop Woodie White laid his hands on my head and said, “Take thou authority as an elder in the church.” All the threads of the tapestry Christ began weaving in a Vacation Bible School in fifth grade, and even before that, all came together in that moment. A new chapter, a new story, a new passion.

I absolutely love being a pastor. (Most days!) In the last twenty-two years, serving three churches in Muncie, Rensselaer and Portage, I have been privileged to watch youth turn their lives around at camp, to sit beside and pray for people who are dying, to baptize those who are just beginning to live, to serve the bread and the juice of communion, to preach, to teach, and to live out grace. I’ve had the privilege of praying with people before surgeries, and of standing by both gravesides and wedding kneelers. Oh, and I never finished the other story, the one about my heart, and how God brought about healing through the hands of a skilled surgeon in January 1999. Early in that month, I had heart valve replacement surgery in Indianapolis and six weeks later, I preached the Ash Wednesday service. God didn’t bring healing the way I asked; he brought healing the way he chose. I’m sixteen years post-op and haven’t had any further complications. God is good.

Many roads we have been down, and now the road has brought us to Terre Haute. I’m excited that you and I now have the opportunity to walk together, to serve Jesus Christ together. We are so glad to be here, pleased to be your pastor, anxious to build on the wonderfully strong ministry that Pastor Aaron Wheaton began with you. Today’s vote on the ReBuild project is just one more step in building on that legacy, and I’m so thankful for all the groundwork Pastor Aaron laid in his last year before retirement. That was a gift of love to me and to this congregation! And even more than that, I’m proud to be an unfinished work of grace. I’m not perfect; I will make mistakes. I will probably disappoint you at some point, but here’s the good news: I’m one of the stories of Jesus’ life and work that John couldn’t put in his book, because it hadn’t been told yet. You’re one of those stories, too. You, too, are an unfinished work of grace. You are a story being written by the amazing grace of Jesus Christ each and every day. In the midst of our mess and our muddle, Jesus writes our story. He loves us and uses us, amazingly so, in spite of our imperfections…or maybe because of our imperfection.

So what’s your story? How has Jesus changed your life? Have you chosen to let him, to allow him to work in you? You see, John wrote his gospel for one purpose: that everyone who hears it or reads it might come to know Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, that they might find everlasting life—here and in the hereafter—in his name (20:31). Jesus continues to tell his story through us for that same purpose—that others might see Christ in us and find life in that name above all names. That’s why Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church is here—to be storytellers, to be grace-givers, and to tell the greatest story of all: the story of lives changed by Jesus.

I look forward to hearing your stories in the weeks and months to come. But you don’t wait for me to ask. Part of what Revive Indiana has been about and continues to be about is sharing the story, sharing your story, telling someone what Jesus has done for you. People can argue with a lot of things, but they can’t argue with your story because it’s yours. It’s what you’ve experienced. Your story doesn’t have to be in flowery words or well-prepared sentences. In fact, it’s probably better and more authentic if others simply see Jesus in us before they hear us talk about him. In fact, I like these words that are often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Share the gospel always; use words if necessary.” So what’s your story? How are you living out the story Jesus wants to tell through you? How will we live out his story through this church in the weeks and months and years to come? That’s our calling; that should be our life. Amen.