Climaxing his sessions with an “epic” story of his friend
Al, Sweet posed the question of how churches can turn to becoming ovens again,
using their sourdough starter to keep the gospel fresh and relevant to a
changing postmodern culture.
He illustrated his point by telling the story of his friend
Al, a retired real estate investor who shares the neighborhood on the San Juan
Islands in the state of Washington where Sweet and his wife, Elizabeth, are
setting up an Advance Center (Christians don’t retreat, so it isn’t a retreat
center!). Al, a gregarious sort who loves to entertain and relate to people, is
in the habit of baking bread each day and delivering it quietly to his
neighbors.
“Any
day of the week, a different kind of bread can appear on our doorstep,” Sweet
said, arousing his curiosity as to why Al, who has many other interests and
involvements, would take the time to dutifully bake and deliver bread to all the
neighbors of this tiny island.
______________
“We have this 2000-year-old sourdough
starter
to keep fresh
and to bake bread
for our neighbors every day.”
______________
Turns out, Sweet continued, that Al said he was compelled
to continue a tradition of baking bread from a sourdough starter that goes back
many generations, perhaps as far back as to a great-great-grandmother in
Alaska. Al, feeling duty-bound to keep up the family tradition, faithfully
keeps baking bread from the sourdough starter, even though he really doesn’t
like to bake bread.
He has gone so far as to have a brief case custom-made to
carry his sourdough with him when he travels to California to look after his
investments. When at home, he carefully nurtures the starter in his
refrigerator, keeping the 200-year-old dough well preserved and healthy. “He
knows how healthy it is by its smell,” remarked Sweet, “so bound and dutiful is
he about keeping this family jewel alive and intact.”
What a great epic lesson for the church, instructed Sweet,
referring to Jesus’ characterization of himself in John 6 as the Bread of Life.
“We have this 2000-year-old sourdough starter to keep fresh and to bake bread
for our neighbors every day.”
Sweet then revealed the last couplet from Scripture that
completes what he considers the essence of Christianity. Reading from
Lamentations 4:3/4, he focused on the passage that says “. . . the children beg
for bread, but no one gives it to them.”
Interpreting the passage to mean that the only way
Christianity will survive and grow is to be there for the starving (spiritual)
children, to give them water for their “dry mouths,” Sweet said the third
two-word couplet is simply be there.
In summation, the three two-word couplets are:
The simple language of these straightforward couplets, he
said, is putting our 500-year-old reformational language into something the
natives of our postmodern world can understand and relate to.
Sweet
left the attenders with the challenge to see their church, their “tribe,” as one
in the universe that reflects the face of Jesus, that bakes his bread for a
postmodern world hungry for relationships and thirsty for a God-experience.
And the only way to keep this “treasure,” he said, is to
give it away, like Al gives away loaves of bread every day to his neighbors. A
church this is customized for different and changing cultures doesn’t exist for
itself but for its mission to “be there” at all times.
