12 Brothers and sisters, I want you to know that the things that have happened to me have actually advanced the gospel. 13 The whole Praetorian Guard and everyone else knows that I’m in prison for Christ. 14 Most of the brothers and sisters have had more confidence through the Lord to speak the word boldly and bravely because of my jail time. 15 Some certainly preach Christ with jealous and competitive motives, but others preach with good motives. 16 They are motivated by love, because they know that I’m put here to give a defense of the gospel; 17 the others preach Christ because of their selfish ambition. They are insincere, hoping to cause me more pain while I’m in prison.
18 What do I think about this? Just this: since Christ is proclaimed in every possible way, whether from dishonest or true motives, I’m glad and I’ll continue to be glad. 19 I’m glad because I know that this will result in my release through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. (Common English Bible)
“Sanctuary at Sixty: Five Acts of Worship to Make a Space a Sanctuary,” Week Three
I am so old that to me, TikTok is a Kesha song. You may be so old that you don’t know who Kesha is, and TikTok is simply the sound a clock makes.
But to everyone younger than us, TikTok is a social media platform for sharing short videos of your life. I was gobsmacked at my previous call in Vancouver when a kid in my youth group told me he had over six million followers on TikTok, especially because I knew him as an endearingly goofy teenager, and not as a filmmaking savant (which he also is).
And deep in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, a 22-year-old indigenous woman named Cunhaporanga Tatuyo has accumulated a similarly staggering number of followers by documenting, video clip by video clip, her way of life as a member of the Tatuyo people, who are, along with some of the other indigenous nations in the Amazon, among the people furthest removed from the globalized world, historically having had academics and activists as interlocutors between them and the rest of the world.
But as with so many other things, that all changed with the internet, and Cunhaporanga took advantage of her father’s—the village chief—decision to sign the village up for satellite internet by saving up funds for her own iPhone and then creating her TikTok account. For her, it was not only a way to share with the world her way of life, it was a way to use technology to preserve that way of life in the face of the threats of things like deforestation and anti-indigenous prejudice, which can be very strong there.
And that is an important point here—Cunhaporanga and her family share their lives from a place of vulnerability, from the encroachment on their historical lands to the bigotry they face from anti-indigenous politicians. They are vulnerable to such things, but they proactively choose to share glimpses into their lives because they believe that doing so benefits both them and us.
And in that way, what she offers the world is a form of preaching, of proactive vulnerability that comes from sharing your perspective to without any expectation of reciprocal vulnerability.
This is a new sermon series for a special moment in Valley’s history, the 60th anniversary of our Gothic revival sanctuary, which was completed in October 1961. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of Valley’s planting back in the spring, and this sermon series mirrors that as a five-week celebration, but we will be focusing on the acts of worship that set this space apart as a sanctuary. Our order of worship can be broken down into five such acts, right in order: praise, prayer, proclamation, participation, and finally, partaking.
Each of these acts is interwoven into multiple parts of our worship service, but each of them come to the forefront at a different moment in our order of worship. We began this series two weeks ago by talking about the act of praise, which is at the forefront with our call to worship and, appropriately enough, our hymn of praise (you can’t accuse us of false advertising!). Last week, we moved into an act of worship that, again, is integrated into the totality of our worship service but is specifically named in our opening prayer or invocation and the pastoral prayer: the act of prayer.
This week, we move into the act of worship that entails the children’s message and the sermon: proclamation, specifically of God’s Word. It is the single act that takes up the most time in many worship services across most denominations, and if we consider time as an expression of our value—that is, what we allocate our time towards acts as a reflection of our priorities—then there is a premium placed on the act of proclamation.
And that premium was probably even higher earlier in time—some of us may have stories in the past of sitting through hour-plus sermons, meanwhile I try to keep my messages to a tight 20-25 minutes. There is a reason for that: there are studies that show that after that point in time, people’s attention can begin to wane, unless it’s a Marvel movie or somesuch. And I’m not Captain America!
So the key about proclamation is not so much quantity, it is quality. And that goes for all of us, for all proclamation, of which preaching is just one expression. You are able and equipped to proclaim the Gospel in so many ways in your life, by verbally sharing your faith by word of mouth, to using social media to reflect your faith values, to your good deeds, which James, the brother of Jesus, writes in the New Testament can make known our faith. All of that can be seen as proclamation.
We can understand all of it as proclamation because there’s a common denominator of vulnerability. Proclamation involves us putting something of our own faith out there, into the world, for the world to accept, reject, or remain indifferent to. The first feels great. The second and third, not so much.
And that is what brings us to Paul’s words in Philippians 1. As he makes clear to the church in Philippi, he is writing this letter while incarcerated in prison. So he has already experienced the second outcome of rejection, and this has made him even more vulnerable, because when you are in the custody of the state, you lose a whole lot of your own personal autonomy. That is by design, that is how we have engineered prison to work. So Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel in Philippians—and it is a letter overflowing with love and affection in spite of Paul’s present circumstances—is an act of proclamation made from a place of very real vulnerability.
The vulnerability for you does not have to be so dramatic as Paul’s to still be vulnerability. If you are worried about how someone will react, that is a form of vulnerability. If you are not sure what someone will say in response to your testimony, that is a form of vulnerability. If you worry the world will not follow your acts of charity and justice on behalf of the impoverished and oppressed, then your proclamation for them is an act of vulnerability.
And I do not say all of that to try to make myself into some sort of vulnerability martyr here by preaching to you every Sunday. I want to offer you a theology for your own acts and words of proclamation of the Gospel that validates maybe the feelings of hesitation you may experience, or your wondering what the best way to share the love of Christ in a particular moment is. Because what you are doing is weighing how to minister from a place of making yourself vulnerable by putting yourself out there without any expectation of reciprocation or reward.
That, to me, is at the heart of preaching, ever since I was ordained. It does me no good, it does the church no good, and it certainly does God no good if I have stumbled upon a crumb of capital-T Truth and either refuse to share it or do a bad job of sharing it. Because rewind to how I talked about the time we set aside for preaching, teaching, and proclamation is an expression of value. That value comes from you, from you giving of your time to listen. So I need to have something to say that is worthy of your time. Having a few kernels of the truth is not enough; I need to be able to share them with you in a way that holds your attention for however long I have asked for your time.
This is why Paul emphasizes in Philippians 1 that preaching Christ must, absolutely must, be motivated by love and not by selfishness. Because preaching, proclamation, is about the listener. It is about making yourself vulnerable to the listener, so that the listener might hear God’s voice. God is not interested in pushing up against the walls we put up around ourselves, God is interested in the vulnerability that comes from bringing those walls down and opening ourselves up to God’s Word.
Paul knew something about that by this point in his ministry—his walls were of a prison, and within those walls, he was vulnerable. We put up walls to try to keep ourselves from being vulnerable, but the truth is, an absence of vulnerability is not what gets the Gospel shared. If Jesus had not allowed Himself to be turned over for crucifixion, there would be no resurrection and there would be no Christianity—He would have gone down in the annals of history as a footnote, yet another Israelite who was a problematic thorn in Rome’s side.
Without vulnerability, we do not get Christianity. And so sharing the Gospel from a place of vulnerability is deeply, foundationally Christian. It was in vulnerability that God came to this world as a tiny baby, it was in vulnerability that God left the world as Christ crucified, it was in vulnerability that all manner of people came to God in between, and it is in vulnerability that we worship God, preach of God’s love, and proclaim, as John the Baptist did, that God’s kingdom is indeed near.
We do not reach such places or people with walls, but with words and deeds. Each of those preaches. Each proclaims. Each is vital to our witness.
And so you, you in all your vulnerability and capability, how will you choose to share God’s Word today? This week? Next month? How will you choose to proclaim that God?
May it be, as Paul says, always out of love, for each other and for the God who saves us and loves us.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Valley Christian Church
September 19, 2021