“Seventy Times Seven: A Celebration and
Commission of Valley Christian Church,” Week Four
Earlier this week, my mom texted me several photos from her home office, which used to be my childhood bedroom. The photos were of old checks, never deposited, for application fees to colleges I had considered applying to and had apparently left behind seventeen-plus years ago. Because that is the sort of stuff you find in the room of your now thirty-five-year-old son, I guess?
One or two of the checks were to schools I lost interest in and did not think it would be worthwhile to complete the application, but another was to a school that I recall had wanted my disciplinary records from my high school—which I was not too keen on, owing that I had been suspended a couple of times when classmates started fights with me. It had been impressed upon me that a college application had to present the best, most orderly version of yourself, and since my good-but-decidedly-not-great grades already put me off-step, I did not want to shoot myself in my other foot.
As I grew older and increased my comfort level with the notion of a profile of myself—after all, Carrie and I met online—I was able to look back on that time as an up-and-coming college student as a first attempt at building my own profile, for better and for worse. It would be an exercise that I would be asked to repeat over and over again—for jobs, for God School, and, in 2019, to enter search and call in a process that would ultimately land me here.
So too did Valley. Your profile, your orderly account, as it were, is something you have been asked to re-create on occasion for search and call, but as I grow more comfortable with the idea of ‘my’ profile, or ‘Valley’s profile,’ it strikes me as a useful way to share this intimate thing we call faith, because a good profile should always leave you wanting to know more, to know what comes next.
This is the next-to-last installment of a five-week sermon series to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the planting of Valley Christian Church by Birmingham First Christian Church, and especially as a new minister, having been in Birmingham for scarcely eight months, I am especially grateful to have heard from each of my living predecessors in this office: Rev. John Gregory, Rev. Dr. Jim Clifford, and Rev. Gary Edge.
In April 1951, seventy to eighty members of Birmingham First were, with the congregation’s blessing in the form of seed money and a sterling silver communion set, sent forth to establish Valley as the latest Disciples of Christ congregation in the Birmingham area. Valley’s charter membership would swell to over one hundred twenty, and the records of the congregation’s founding have been meticulously kept in our archives. We spent two weeks unpacking Valley’s origin and evolution stories found in those archives before last week stepping back and considering more broadly how we live today indebted to both our past and our future, the past versions of the church and the future versions of the church.
Today, in continuing that pivot, I want us to reflect on how Valley introduces itself—through us—to others. This story that we have, how do we tell it? How does it get handed down? And how can we make it even more compelling to those who have yet to experience life in Christ with us?
That last question is what Luke tells us—or, rather, tells his reader, Theophilus, is the essence of his Gospel. Luke writes to Theophilus, whose name means “one who loves God,” and as such may or may not be a pseudonym, to begin his Gospel and explain his purpose.
Luke makes a few important admissions here. Of all the Gospel writers, he is the only one we explicitly know is not an eyewitness to Christ’s earthly ministry, but rather compiled his accounting of that ministry based upon the testimonies of others. Luke also notes that he himself is far from the first Gospel writer. But for our purposes, the most important statement of fact Luke includes in his preface to Theophilus is that this Gospel is meant to be a “carefully ordered account” to instill “confidence in the instruction you (Theophilus) have received.”
Luke is telling us that what he includes in his Gospel, and how he orders it, is not accidental. We can almost be forgiven for thinking that of Mark, whose Gospel reads like a giant run-on sentence and could well have been spoken orally as dictation and transcribed by one of the relatively few people in the ancient Near East who would have been literate.
But Luke is one of those relatively few literate people, and like Matthew, like John, he carefully orders his Gospel because the purpose of his Gospel is to build up Theophilus’s confidence.
Now, return to Theophilus’s name—which, as I said, may or may not have been a pseudonym. These God-related pseudonyms were not so uncommon in the ancient world. In fact, some scholars believe that Barabbas, the name of the man Pilate freed instead of Jesus on Good Friday, was a pseudonym, a contraction of “bar,” meaning “child of,” and “Abbas,” meaning “the Father.” So Barabbas, like Jesus, may have made a claim to the mantle of divinity. Only very much unlike Barabbas, the claim of Jesus was legitimate. Which is what Luke seeks to instill confidence in us for.
So, back to Theophilus. If Theophilus is indeed a nom de plume, then that should open the name up to us, to all “ones who love God” to say that Luke is writing this carefully ordered account to us too!
As the audience of Luke’s profile of Jesus of Nazareth, consider what it represents as an introduction to the Messiah. It accounts for His birth, there’s one childhood story, the beginning and end of His public ministry, and subsequent resurrection. There are healings and sermons and miracles and parables. Is there anything missing? What might you hope Luke included more of?
That is the paradox introductions face, right? They are survey-level, and so depth is inevitably sacrificed at least partially for breadth, but even the breadth might not be enough. With Jesus, you are always left wanting to know more.
But perhaps that is what a good profile should do—introduce, but also leave you wanting to know more. That is what Valley’s search and call profile did for me, as a minister in search and call. It is what I hope my profile did as well. And it is what the Gospels—each a profile in our Lord and Savior—ought to do for us.
Each of these profiles in the New Testament contains an array of material—they are not exclusively sermons, or exclusively miracles, or exclusively parables. They are combinations of all those genres. And it is natural for you to feel especially gravitated towards some genres or others in particular. Maybe you feel especially compelled by the Sermon on the Mount, or the Transfiguration, or Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. We are called to believe in all of it, but it is allowable for certain stories to impact us at greater depth, to leave us wanting to know even more about Jesus Christ.
Now, when you think of the church, what about the church impacts you at that greater depth? We are called to value all of it—the worship, the mission and service, the spirituality, the education, the fellowship—but what about living life in the church stands out especially for you? That is a question you are allowed to ask yourself too, because it forms a vital part of the profile of Valley that you in turn share with others, in the hope that they will want to know more about us and our ministry.
Your search team did that in Valley’s profile to me. I saw several dozen congregational profiles during my months in search and call, and I want to share these two items in particular that made Valley stand out, almost uniquely so. One was the extent of Valley’s resources, and your generosity with those resources. Smaller churches are not supposed to have the resources that we do, and even in my short time here already, we have repeatedly and demonstrably put our money where our mouths. I do not imagine many of my colleagues would share my experience of trustees meetings being a lifegiving ministry, but for me, those meetings when we decided to give sacrificially to the community were incredibly lifegiving for me during my first Advent and Christmas here. I cannot emphasize this enough: we cannot permit a feeling of scarcity among us, because at least as far as Valley is concerned—and I am not talking here about your own households and kitchen table issues, but us, as Valley—we live with profoundly fortunate abundance, and God calls us to do right by it.
The other was Valley’s commitment to faith relationships outside its walls, especially with the Disciples’ historically Black and Latinx congregations here in Birmingham. Even though cross-cultural and anti-racism experience is considered one of the sixteen core competencies for a Disciples of Christ minister to attain for ordination, and then maintain to keep standing, it was not one I saw lent prominence in the vast majority of the profiles I read. In Valley’s, it very much was.
The challenge with such profiles is that, like with my college applications, it is entirely natural to want to present the very best version of yourself, or of things, but like the Gospel writers we should be most compelled by truth.
So that is the first part of our pivot in this 70th anniversary celebration: to look at how we share our story in truth so that the ones we share with are always left wanting to know more about us. There are others named Theophilus—ones who love God—all around us. What about Valley will we share with them? What will our profile, our carefully ordered account, look like to them over these next seventy years? What will it sound like? And what will it feel like when they experience life with us?
There is a great deal to Valley’s story that I hope others who find us will appreciate—our worship, our presence as a community space rather than an exclusive club, our commitment to mission and anti-racism, and much more. But comes down to us to make that story known to them, just as Luke makes it known to Theophilus—to all who are named Theophilus, all the ones who love God.
May we each be Luke. May we each be Theophilus. May we each share, and hear, the profile, the carefully considered account, of the church that serves a God who loves us and whom we love back.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
May 9, 2021