What is the longest sermon that you have ever heard?  I hope you don’t say this one because all mine are pretty much under 20 minutes.  They may seem long, but trust me, they are not.  It is not that I can’t preach a long one like those other Baptist, it is just I figured out a long time ago that one 45 minute sermon is the same work as three 15 minutes sermons.  And besides, I am always afraid that I am just one week away from running out of soap. Sort of like Forest Gump who ran across America and back several times for no apparent reason until on one trek out in the middle of the desert he just stopped, looked up and said he was tired and he quit running.  So if I preach less, my repository of knowledge is depleted at a slower rate.  One of these days I will just stop, maybe in mid-sermon and not know what the heck to say next.  But friends, today is not that day.

I have heard some long sermons in my day, including the dreadfully long and infamous “Payday Someday” as preached by Robert G. Lee when he was at Bellevue.  He first preached the sermon in 1919 and preached it for the last time in 1978.  He preached this one sermon over 1,000 times and it was long, well more than an hour long. It was something like 78 minutes long, and it was very tough on the sinner.  All I remember from it was that Jezebel was out to exterminate the prophet Elijah, and the PTSDs that resulted from this sermon have left me afraid of women ever since. Many legends surround the preaching of this sermon, such as this oft quoted one:  “The story is told of one man who was mad and was going to shoot his wife. A friend begged the man to settle down long enough to listen to the sermon. The man reluctantly agreed. After the sermon he got down on his knees and begged his wife to forgive him. Come Sunday morning, the man confessed faith in Jesus and was baptized.”  Well, that is great, but I am afraid if I preached 78 minutes somebody might shoot me.  And it might be my wife!

But Lee was a mere sermon simpleton compared to the preacher who was featured in a story at Time Magazine’s online site this very week:

Clinton Locy was a cattle ranch foreman in Southern California when a Baptist preacher persuaded him to go to church. He heard one sermon and decided to be a preacher himself. Last week he gave a sermon that lasted 48 hours and 18 minutes. He went to bed at 3:30 on Saturday afternoon to rest up, but his mind churned so with thoughts that, when he began to preach at midnight, he had not slept a wink. About a dozen of his followers were on hand for his opening words: “Men are on earth to find truth and live it out. Truth is power. Without truth man dies.” Two loudspeakers atop the building picked up his words from a throat microphone and flung them into the night wind. “I’m Hungry.” Three listeners stuck it out until 4 a.m., then left to go to work. At one point on Sunday morning, there were as many as 50. Sometimes there was only one, Carl Heminger. whose specialty is showing colored slides at church gatherings. Preacher Locy preached as he never preached before, sustaining himself with lemon juice and vegetables, refreshing himself with a wet towel around his head, relieving himself at the back of the building, and talking into the mike all the time. After 24 hours he got to the Book of Psalms, and Georgia brought him a plate of hot food from their trailer home next door. Spooning in some beans, Preacher Locy momentarily forgot what he was there for. “Say something there, boy,” said Apostle Heminger. “I’m hungry,” said Preacher Locy. At 12:19 on Monday. Clinton Locy called it quits. He had made his way through all the Old Testament and most of the New, sung some hymns, lectured on the Holy Land, and delivered some reflections on the atom bomb. “If anyone had sat through the entire sermon,” he said, “they would have heard as much Gospel as they’d get in a year at church.” (4/24/2008 Time.com)

            I am guessing that about the time he got to the reflections on the Atom Bomb someone was thinking that they had been hit by one.  It would take me 196 Sundays to preach for 48 hours.  Of course, I would begin with the New Testament, so I might be able to preach on the whole shebang in less time.  It would be fitting to do so and finish with sermons on the book of Revelation.  I probably would have to claim its promise that God would wipe away all the tears from our eyes. 

            I don’t know who preaches the longest sermons these days, but I am proud to preach some of the shortest.  But I may not be the shortest winded in town.  Have you seen the ad for the Church in town who is marketing the 30 minute service?  They have advertised in the paper, the radio and TV and a few of those local magazines that are at newsstands for free.  I won’t call the name of the church, because you might run right over there for the 30 minute special, and we can’t afford to lose anybody.  Their ad says “Get in. Get out. Get grounded.”  It goes on to say, “Do you have more on your to do list than time to do it?  Need to jumpstart your week with a high energy focus on connecting with God?  In a fast paced service lasting only 30 minutes, you will experience connections (for 8 minutes, contemporary worship), teaching (15 minutes– a focused practical message with life principles that you can use now), and involvement, (5 minutes– an opportunity to respond to God through prayer and giving).”  Of course by my math that is only 28 minutes, so I guess they have a two minute contingency plan.  My guess is the life principles may take more than 15 minutes some Sundays.  Most of the principles my life needs would take more than 15 minutes.  They would require a sermon longer than Bro. Locy’s just to get to my problem, let alone whatever principle that might be out there that might fix me.

            Well, I have never set foot in this 30 minute church, so I am not going to pick on them for a short service any more than I am going to pick on the ones that go an hour and a half every week.  Of course if they go an hour and a half, we at least will beat them to the line at Luby’s.  Heck, our church is usually only 45 minutes, and that includes the 30 seconds it must take for all of us to hug each other during the passing of the peace.  What I am going to knock is that there must be more to our faith than carving out a measly 30 minutes a week.  I am not sure that is what this church intends, but I am sure that we have to be about more than spectating, about more than being entertained, about more than not messing up our schedules.  But meeting for 30 minutes is not necessarily any worse than meeting for two hours.  In fact, it sounds way better to me.  I don’t know that we are anymore spiritual if we are in church an hour, if we worship a certain way, or if we dress up or not.  Sure, 30 minutes isn’t much of a commitment, but it is enough if it motivates you to Kingdom living.  For me that is the point, and that brings me to our lectionary passage today.

            Jesus very plainly says in verse 15, “If you love me you will obey what I command.”  And in verse 21, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”  Can you do that in 30 minutes?  Maybe not.  But can you do it in two hours Sunday morning and one on Sunday night?  Probably not either and that is my point. You see the problem comes in when we define our spirituality in terms of our church attendance and how well we support the programs of the church. While our churches need some supporting, ours especially, it should never substitute for our relationship with God.

            People attend church for a lot of reasons.  I suppose we go to be entertained, we go to get a pick-me-up, to de-stress (unless we are the pastor) we go to find something that impacts our real lives and problems and we go to get our social and relationships met by like minded folk.   We also in this day and age go to get out pet agendas and values validated. We also go to do our good deed for the week, to make up for living like hell the rest of the week. We interpret faithfulness to God and faithfulness to the church with the same criteria.  And truthfully, I go to church for those same reasons. 

The problem is that these reasons often do not change me in anyway, and I walk out the door the same exact way as I walked in the door. And there is a second problem with these reasons, they are egocentric, they are all about me and what church can do for me, and maybe that is the issue in my mind about those who are too busy for anything but the 30 minute church.

            And while we are at it, how faithful we are to the local church has little to do with how much we love Jesus.  This passage of scripture says plainly that we love him when we obey his commands, period.  And through the history of Christendom we have tried to tie the love of God to so many other kinds of things.  We make it about church and Sunday school attendance, about giving, about promoting programs, and even about politics.  It is as one anonymous blogger posted in a website called stupidchurchpeople.com:

On one hand, I can blame much of the teachings of this church for giving me a staunch black and white conservatism regarding people that “are not like me” in religion and society. They also were the foundation for much of my misconceptions about sexuality, personal relationships, gender roles, movies, books and the arts in general. I became a product of their system, where church attendance and keeping up appearances bordered on addiction.

            When you really stop and think about it, we have learned all kinds of stuff from church that some of us have had to unlearn.  And unlearning toxic religious things is tougher than getting communion grape juice off of that white table cloth we set the Dixie cups on after communion. 

I do wonder about the lessons learned in church.  I can think of what I have had to unlearn and it has taken years.  Some lessons were indelibly ingrained in my psyche, and it is with fear and trembling that I ever challenge their conventions.

            I have had to unlearn the fallacy of church attendance.  Now obviously if y’all don’t come, we won’t be here very long.  But it is the reason that we so assemble ourselves that should matter. Because all Jesus would have us do is to obey his commands, and they have nothing to do with attendance or a certain kind of church service.  But to be shamed and guilted into coming with the threat of the divine displeasure is not right either.   I do remember hearing that it was pleasing to God to go to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, that it was God’s will and that if we were obedient to him we would be there every time the doors were open.  But the truth is, there is nothing in the Bible about church attendance and a scant anything in there that resembles the modern church anyway.  Find the model for FBC Anytown in there for me please, and I will repent. Whatever church was in the New Testament era, I am pretty doggone sure that it would not be mistaken for the 21st century church.  Theirs, ours, anybodies rendition– it doesn’t matter.  It is indeed liberating to realize that whatever obeying Jesus means, it is not obeying this church or any other.  Correspondingly, I have had to unlearn that what the pastor says is not the same as “thus sayeth the Lord.” 

            I have also had to unlearn what sin is all about according to the church.  Where I grew up the seven deadly sins were cussing, drinking, gambling, sex, playing cards, going to movies and mowing the yard on Sundays, and not necessarily in that order.  Of course, the list grew over time and all kinds of things were added to help point out what an inferior and worthless worm I was, and thank God if I just ask, I could go from hellfire to a child of the king in an instant.  These temptations allowed the church to have a death grip on us so that we could counterbalance our propensity for wrong with our pledge of allegiance to the right.

            And because of that, I had to unlearn faith consisting of belief, as in information.  I was brought up to believe that the magic formula of faith was nothing more than mentally assenting to certain propositions about myself and about God.  Those who did so were saved, and those who didn’t were lost forevermore.  There was tremendous rewards for spitting out the words, and eternal torment if you couldn’t recite them. Never mind that they were better people and more active in their church than I, it was what I was taught.  And once I was saved, nothing else mattered. Except the fact remains that I still better not mow the yard on Sunday.

            So it follows that I had to unlearn the teaching that Baptist were the only ones who were Christian, and I had to unlearn a bunch of stuff about the Bible. I had to unlearn that when bad things happen, God is behind them or at least controlling them.  I had to unlearn what love is, and what relationships are all about.

            But the very first lesson that I had to unlearn is that loving God is not the same as loving religion. They are independent realities.  That fear, guilt and manipulation that follows religion around just doesn’t exist in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. 

            You see, we’ve got it all wrong.  People may want a 30 minute service, or a slightly longer one like we get here.  I know many like to hear me preach (well, 20 of you anyway) for my 15 minutes every Sunday Morning. And heck, we are church-lite, as we have nothing else to offer during the week most weeks.  So we probably have less church than that 30 minute place. 

That 30 minute church is just trying to attract people like all churches attract people.  Now we don’t “market” Providence, but we would sure get the word out about our distinctives if we have the money, so same difference.  We would not ever be “seeker sensitive” that is we are not likely to tailor our church in such a way for the sole purpose of luring customers in from other churches. That is not what we are about.  But we all feel the need to feed the monster, and it is losing ground.

We need to understand that there is a lot of concern that the younger generations don’t see the value in the traditional church, and a lot of us old folk are asking why not?  And I don’t know why not, because one, I am an old guy, and two, I am not that interested in it myself half the time, I am still working on that one.  I believe though, whatever the answer is, it lies in the fact of relevance.  People’s time is at a premium now, and we want to use it judiciously on things that matter.  Being brow beat into conformity, or being told how to think or how to vote, to get all whipped up over petty things has lost its appeal in today’s world.   People don’t have time for hypocrisy, and are tired of the same old shtick.

You see, the bottom line is that people don’t want to come to church because they are expected to, because they have to, because they feel guilty or pressured, or even to be entertained.  Even the best of church worship services are not very entertaining, they are not what we would spend date money on Friday night.  If you think so, try charging 75 bucks to come to worship like people pay at a rock concert and see if you sell out the house.  People need more than entertainment week in and week out. I truly believed the key is that people don’t want to just come to things; people want to join groups who are doing things.  That is where we find significance.

I am on the CBF of Arkansas Coordinating Council, but for years I stayed away from all things religious, denominational-like and political.  I wanted to not join the CBF simply for the reason that “they are not the other guys.”  I had no interest in that kind of thinking. But somewhere along the way, I heard about their work in the Delta.  I heard about the construction of the New Light Missionary Baptist Church there.  I learned about their concern with the poor right here in our backyard. I heard about their efforts in disaster areas.  I heard about their strong desire to really impact race relations in this city.  And I heard about the potential move which is now reality of relocating our offices from West Little Rock to the campus of Arkansas Baptist College on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, the most dangerous crime infested zip code in Arkansas.  And now I am hearing about the plan to revitalize the entire neighborhood as others are jumping on the bandwagon and the money is coming in to rebuild that area.  Millions are being given to renovate and build not just the college, but many, many houses in the neighborhood.  The story that CBF Arkansas is a part of is starting to gain national attention as even John McCain visited there this week.  And a part of town that had the stench of death in the air is now breathing the fresh air of hope.

You see, the 30 minute church has at least one thing right, people do have busy lives and the church has competition from many arenas.  We all have many things pulling us for our time and money.  We all have those who want us to volunteer; we have organizations who are trying to actually trying to change some things tangible and needed who are asking us for our money.  We have a multiplicity of options that allow us to soothe our conscience, that allow us to do good, that allow us to make a difference, that make us feel good, that help us belong and meet our relationship and social needs.

So what are we to do who are still invested in church?  Maybe the key is in this passage of scripture, that we are to obey the commands of Jesus.  That is the only way to prove our love according to this passage. It doesn’t say we love him if we believe the right things, go to the right church, or give a certain amount of money.  If doesn’t say that we prove our love by our style of worship or even that we have worship at all.  Jesus doesn’t say that we have to meet any obligations to prove our love, save one – to obey his commands. And his commands were simple: to love the Lord God with all you heart and mind and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself.  To walk the second mile when you are only required to go one; to love your enemies, because anyone can love a friend;  to put people above the rules, do unto others like you would have them do unto you; to care for widows and orphans, and for the down and out and those marginalized by society;  to speak up for justice, to liberate the captives and to free the oppressed, and to administer a little grace to all those needing forgiveness and redemption, which just so happens to be everyone of us. To practice true humility and to seek to make peace. But above all, to put the law of love in practice.

To put this command of love into practice in our lives and in our churches would truly transform our very lives.  We would be about something because we would be doing something. It is as Brien McLaren says, that a church should not be measured by it attendance but by its deployment.

You see, to be transformed you don’t even need 30 minutes.  You only need to take five seconds worth of advice.  And that is this: “if you love me, you will obey my commands.”   And that simple advice is the key to living in the Kingdom of God.  Understanding what Jesus is saying here is the difference between irrelevance and significance. And to put these words into practice takes far longer than 30 minutes, it takes 24/7.  And it doesn’t begin in here, or over at that other church, it begins when you walk out that door today, seeking to put the love of Jesus Christ into practice, everyday and in everyway.  It really doesn’t matter what you say, it is what you do that will change the world.  And that is Good News that people are hungry to hear.  Thanks be to God! Now excuse me now, because I need to get home to mow my yard.  Amen.