Taking Jesus Seriously: With God’s Vision
A sermon brought forth from Matthew 7:1-12 preached on February 5, 2023
Jesus wasn’t just the Great Physician. He was also the Great Optometrist. No matter what He was doing, He helped others see. We have only to look back a few paragraphs in our Bible to an earlier point in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to find this:
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.”
Here He is near the end of His Sermon administering a vision test. Jesus is greatly concerned with how we see, and it doesn’t sound like He’s all that confident that we’ll pass. The diagnosis? We might have something in our eyes. Something that keeps us from seeing what’s in front of us. We need regular eye exams.
We should ask, “How is my vision, O Lord of my heart? And can You help me see more clearly?”
Jesus says that seeing well is not something we can do on our own. This is where he resorts to cartoonish images to make His point. He says we should check our eyes for logs. Not for particles of dust that make them water. Planks of wood. Sticking out of our eyes.
The word Jesus uses is even more ridiculous than that. He’s referring to a rafter, a wooden beam we’d use to hold up a roof of a large building. Something the size of a telephone poll. It could be that we’re all walking around with telephone poles sticking out of our eye sockets. How can we even get close to one another walking around like that?!
Then we see out of our good eye some speck of sawdust, some tiny splinter, in our brother’s or sister’s eye, and we make a big deal about it. We point it out to them. All the while we’re somehow unaware that we’ve got a telephone poll sticking out of one of our eye sockets.
Jesus hyperbolizes for a good reason. We should wonder if there’s anything that gets in our way of seeing. Whatever it is could be much bigger than we suppose. What could we see if we took a longer look in the mirror? And even if there’s a chance we might see ourselves better with God’s help, shouldn’t we ask?
Do you see what Jesus is doing here? As He makes this outlandish metaphor, His disciples and everyone else listening in start asking themselves vision questions. Their questions are ours to ask, too.
We should ask, “Lord, what’s going on with my eyes? Is there something that keeps me from seeing?”
We’re calling today “Vision Sunday.” Our Visioning Ministry is tasked with leading the congregation in focusing on Biblically-based, long-range planning for the life and ministry of the congregation. Our Visioning Ministry is led by Randy Houff. The team members are Sarah Birckner, Frank Durso, Lyle Moffett, and Deb O’Connell.
Our goal was to bring forth something new. To prayerfully pay attention to God and one another, as well as to scripture. To study the work done by leaders in the wider church in recent years to help us make sense of this moment in which we find ourselves, with all the unique cultural challenges we’re faced with.
The Vision Ministry began meeting in early April. Since then, they’ve gathered twice a month for conversation and prayerful consideration around this one question. I want to commend their commitment and the work they’ve accomplished. They know they’re not done yet. What I’m most appreciative of is that the team never got caught up in discussions about what’s missing and how to get it back. Not to say we didn’t have our rearview mirror moments, but we didn’t get stuck there because we were convinced that old ways cannot open new doors. It’s easy to descend into despair and nostalgia when we talk about these things.
The first questions we asked each other didn’t start with “what” or “how.” Those could come later. We took in a larger perspective. Our first questions were purpose questions; one that started with “why.” Randy put it well:
“What we do (and perhaps have always done this way) is meaningless if we fail to establish why.”
What’s Tinkling Spring’s why? What’s our purpose? Why are we a church? What is God’s purpose for Tinkling Spring? And what keeps us from seeing God’s purpose for us? Answers to these sorts of God questions do not come quickly, and if they do, there’s a good chance they’re not God’s but our own.
After a few months of study, conversation, and prayer, the Visioning Ministry arrived at what you see in bold on the front cover of your bulletin and in bold within the worship notes. A vision statement and a mission statement.
Our vision statement is our “why.” It’s a clear challenging picture of the future of our church and its purpose as we believe it can and must be. Yogi Berra once said,
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”
This is the direction our Visioning ministry proposes:
“Fearlessly, Tinkling Spring will build a vibrant church that engages all people to faithfully spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.”
A mission statement is our “how.” The Vision team means for it to guide us in toward this vision. This is how we will get there:
“By putting on the Love of Christ, which binds us all in perfect unity.”
You might recognize the Great Commission of Matthew 28 in the Vision Statement, and the Mission Statement comes straight from scripture—Colossians 3:14. That’s a sign of faithful work for a Visioning team, by the way. God brings His people back to His Word when we’re prone to take long, strange trips in other directions.
The Visioning Ministry offers our church a new pair of corrective lenses through which to see. It’s the Visioning ministry’s hope and prayer that you will take up this vision and mission with them. That if we take up this one vision, we can help each other see. It’s hard to stop a congregation that sees through single-vision lenses and works together through one mission to fulfill it.
It’s also the hope and prayer of the Vision Ministry that you pray over these words. Let them run around your mind and heart. Write them down in your journals and prayer books, carry them with you in your phones, and discuss them in your Sunday school classes, at Youth Group, and in ministry meetings. Revisit them before you make any decisions or plans—even the smallest of them. Ask that simple question. Is it—whatever “it” is—is it consistent with our church’s vision?
The Vision Ministry asks that you take this vision statement and get it inside of you. Use it like a pair of corrective lenses. Put them on so you can see what we’re doing together with more clarity. The Vision Ministry hopes that we would adopt both the Vision and Mission statements and let them describe and instruct our way.
Throughout the coming season of Lent, we will be exploring the invitation to renewal and the recovery of sight that the vision and mission statements offer. One thing we may not have imagined is that maybe the goal for both the telephone poll-eyed one and the splinter-eyed one is to help each other see clearly again. The Great Optometrist offers His diagnosis:
“First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.”
The goal of gaining clearer vision is so we will be able to help our neighbor see better. Jesus was always helping others see. Maybe we can ask the splinter-eyed one for help extracting the telephone poll out of our eye. Then we can see clearly enough to help get the splinter out of their eye. We are all called to better vision.
Do I have anything in my eye? And if so, could you help me get it out?
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.