The Power of Vision, Part I

A sermon preached August 15, 2004

by The Rev. David Harper

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Today I’m starting a seven-week preaching series on vision. I’ve never used the summer before to talk about vision! Normally leaders do that in the fall, when everything’s starting up again; but I truly believe the time for this is now.

Up to a couple of weeks ago I had planned to preach on something quite different. But after the vestry exchange, where people in the congregation have the opportunity to chat with vestry members, several of you expressed interest in hearing more about what I had said about our church’s strategic plan at the congregational meeting on July 18. I heard the Lord in that, so I scratched what I had been preparing to preach over these weeks.

That feedback told me that our hearts are ready for this. But I want to start today by talking not just about our church’s vision, but about the power of vision.

I’ve seen the power of vision throughout my life. As God has spoken in my life, and opened up various things for me, they were always preceded by a word calling me into a higher place, a new place, an unexplored place—maybe a dangerous and threatening place—but always a place where his word was leading. I’ve seen the remarkable power of vision to make me begin walking in different directions. Sometimes they have been against my natural inclinations and desires. At other times they have been consistent with my natural inclinations or desires. Always, though, God’s word has called me out from where I was.

The most recent example of where I saw the power of vision being released was during a recent trip to England. I was there, as many of you know, in late June and early July with a ministry called SOMA, which I serve as International Chairman. The reason for the trip was to mark SOMA’s 25th anniversary. In celebration of this jubilee, we held a conference in the University of Kent. My wife Margie was with me, along with others from this congregation. The purpose of the conference was not simply to look back with thanksgiving for twenty-five years of extraordinary ministry and fruit-bearing throughout the world-wide church. We wanted to address the future, asking the question: “Where is God going to take us over the next twenty-five years and how can we get ready for it?”

You need to know what had been going on before this conference. Almost two years ago, SOMA began a review process which has involved strategic planning. The review was conducted by a layman—Garry Schnelzer, a former member of this congregation who now lives in Texas. His work for SOMA involved traveling around all the nine nations where its national bodies are located, as well as working with our national directors and international board. When the SOMA leadership met in England in June, twelve or fourteen days before the conference, Garry presented all the work he’d been doing around the world. The goal was to finalize the strategic plan in time to present the new vision to the international audience at the Jubilee conference.

It was quite a challenge to put a strategic plan together with such a diverse group. SOMA’s international board comprises twenty-two people. They meet infrequently, and represent seventeen nations, each with widely different cultures. But by God’s extraordinary grace, we accomplished the task. By the time we had honed and refined the strategic plan, we were as energized and enthused as any group I’ve ever seen.

The Board finished its work only hours before the conference worship team and speakers arrived at Canterbury. The worship leaders—a team from Uganda—and several of our speakers, were all young adults in their twenties. We gathered together for prayer and worship and preparation for the conference. God put something into my heart to say to this gathering, which enabled what He had been doing in our strategic planning to begin flowing out into this group.

A key part of what we had heard from God in our strategic planning was a call to SOMA to pass on the baton to the younger generation. I found myself saying to the worship team and youth speakers, “God has not brought you here by chance. You are not here as a token youth presence at a conference largely comprising people of a different generation from yourselves, God has you here strategically, because He is going to do something in you and through you that’s going to make a difference for the future of the world-side church.” That simple word galvanized the young people. I discovered later that their reaction was, “Wow, we knew that we were to be here ministering at the conference, but we had no idea of its significance.” That influenced how they led the worship, and how the youth panel spoke. So, even before the conference began, the power of vision began to energize some of the key leaders.

On the final night, I was tasked to cast the vision for SOMA, using the Power Point slides which Gary Schnelzer and the Board had refined and honed. When I reached the last slide, I said: “This is a vision worth dying for. In the first twenty-five years SOMA has not had a martyr. We’ve had some near misses: some of our teams have had bombs dropped on them in the Sudan. But over the next twenty-five years, it’s probably inevitable that SOMA’s going to produce some martyrs—but this is a vision worth laying down your life for.” All over the room people were nodding in agreement. The power of vision had now spread out and was touching, not just a handful of board members, worship leaders and speakers, but everyone in the conference, representing forty-five nations.

As I drew my presentation to a close, I said, “Over these last days I believe that God has been incubating in some of your hearts a desire to form a SOMA in your countries. The last one was formed in Uganda two years ago, but God hasn’t finished yet.” Ben Kwashi, Bishop of Jos in Northern Nigeria, was sitting behind me on the platform. Jos is located in a very, very dangerous and difficult part of that land. When you hear Ben’s stories you understand the suffering and the trials that they have endured. As I spoke those words, Ben stood and approached the microphone. “Could I say something?” he asked. With permission granted, he declared, “We are forming a SOMA in Nigeria! Over these last few days I’ve been talking to some of my Nigerian colleagues here at the conference, and we agree that God is calling us to form a SOMA in Nigeria.” His face was shining, and as he raised his hands in praise of the Lord the place went wild. People stood to their feet. They applauded; and they raised their voices in a great cheer, “Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus.”

That’s the power of vision.

That night God did something else. He began to take what was happening among all the young people there and started to move us to the place where we symbolically passed the baton on to them. We gathered all the young people at the front of the auditorium, prayed over them, anointed and blessed them. And then, instead of the designated prayer ministers coming forward to offer prayer ministry, as we had done each night, it was the young people who formed the prayer team. The images of that were unforgettable. One of the most memorable for me was of two young women in their early twenties—one African, and the other English, laying their hands on and praying over a retired Canadian bishop. He was kneeling on the floor in front of them, his hair white as snow, humbly receiving prayer from two kids young enough to be his grandchildren.

That is the power of vision.

Vision releases tremendous power in many, many ways. I want to mention three of them this morning.

First, vision points us towards a new future.

You heard the words of Jesus in today’s gospel: “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” He was speaking to men who had spent all their lives—from the time they were little boys—on the water with their dads, helping them run their family’s fishing business. They loved the lake. They knew it well. It was usually full of fish and a great place to make a decent living. They knew how to fish because they had seen their fathers do it—and now they were adults and were partners with their fathers. Their vision of the future was the day when they would take their fathers’ place when they became too old to ply the waters and to pull nets out of the sea—and ultimately pass the baton to their sons. It was a good vision.

Their vision was born out of how society worked. It was how the generations continued, from father to son. But now Jesus interrupts it. “Follow me!” he says. Because they only dimly understood what following him would mean, he lifted up a new vision “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men! I will take your skills—your ability to look into murky places where you can’t see down very far, your ability to read the water, to know the climatic conditions, to put your nets down and pull up an economic harvest. I’m going to teach you how to do that with people. I’m going to teach you how to go into the dark corners of the world where you can’t see very far. You don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives, you don’t know what’s going on in those societies, but I’m going to give you the skills, just as you have as fishermen, so you can let down your nets into the places where you can catch people. I want the whole world to come under my saving embrace. I don’t want one person to be lost—and you’re the ones who are going to make it happen. I’m only going to be with you for three years. The rest of history will be in your hands. Follow me!”

All of a sudden it dawned on these disciples, who had never envisioned anything beyond the fishing business, that their lives could be about something infinitely greater. They caught a vision for something far beyond what they could ever have seen before

Vision calls us into something higher. It calls us into the impossible place that now, because of the power of vision, becomes possible.

At the University of Kent, many conferees had come thinking, “The last twenty-five years of SOMA has reaped a harvest throughout the world-wide church. Let’s rest on our laurels. Maybe the best is now behind us!” They had good reason to think that. Many regions of the Anglican Church attribute their phenomenal growth, and the spiritual dynamism of the global north, to the ministry of SOMA. We here are beneficiaries of its ministry, as these Anglicans from the global north are now coming alongside us and holding up our arms in our hour of need. SOMA has been a key player—not the only one to be sure, but a key player nevertheless—in what God is doing in the world-wide church. By the time we left that conference, any sense of complacency and even smugness had yielded to a sense of awe: “God is holding out a new vision; the best is yet to come! “I’m willing to give myself to this in a new way even if that is costly.”

Vision gives us something that points us towards a new future.

Second, vision gives us something beyond ourselves to live for.

We all long to give ourselves to something bigger than ourselves. We’re not satisfied with petty dreams and paltry vision. We don’t want to live lives that are principally preoccupied with making a living and passing on to our children some economic advantage when they begin to set up on their own. We don’t want to be like the servant Jesus talked about in the parable of the talents, who only had vision for taking what he had been given, digging a hole in the ground, and burying it. When he was asked to give an account of his stewardship, all he had to give back was what he had received—no more and no less. We don’t want to live lives like that, where our legacy is simply passing back what we were given. We want to multiply it. We want to increase it. We want our lives to count. We want to think that we have made a difference. We want our legacy to change planet earth.

And that’s what the early church did. The early church sacrificed because of vision. You heard it read in one of the today’s readings: “From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to any as he had need.” (Acts 4:34-35)

Why would they do that? If they owned lands, I imagine it was because they were people of substance. They probably saw their properties as an investment in their children’s and their own future. But now they were fired by a vision God had given to the church. It was a vision to reach out to the poor with practical caring, to be fishers-of-men in a church that was committed to demonstrating the Gospel, not simply preaching it.

All of a sudden, people who owned lands or houses thought to themselves, “God has a purpose for my homes and properties that I had never completely understood before. I had thought it was for me and for the generations to come from me, but now I see that God has given me this to sacrifice for the vision He has given to the church.” And so they sold their properties. They didn’t feel that they’d done anything particularly noble, or that they had made some painful sacrifice and were now grieving the loss of what they had sacrificed. They did it with joy, because vision gives us something beyond ourselves to live for. We become willing to lay down our lives, to make sacrifices, because the vision transcends us. It owns us, we don’t own the vision.

This isn’t only true in the sphere of the church. The same principle works at every level. You remember the vision John F. Kennedy cast: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” He didn’t just say, in a vague way, “Let’s conquer space!” It was a very specific vision: “In this decade we’ve got to put someone on the moon, and we’ve got to bring them back.” That’s a tall order. Let me tell you that his vision fired NASA, it excited them. It gave them something far beyond themselves that they wanted to accomplish—all because the President had cast a vision. Charles Garfield wrote of the NASA engineers and scientists at that time: “I’ve never seen a group of people work with such absolute focus and fervor as these people, who saw it as their own personal mission to send astronauts to the moon. They worked incredibly long hours, under intense pressure, and they loved it. They had something that added meaning and value to their lives. And they gave two hundred percent to make it come true.”

That’s the gift that vision gives us: it adds meaning and value to our lives. It transcends us. It calls us higher into something greater.

Third: Vision shapes our personal growth and development.

Matthew 16: 18-19 “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. I will give you the keys to the kingdom. Whatever you bind on earth, Peter, will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” I can imagine—though scripture doesn’t tell us, it’s pure speculation on my part—that Peter’s jaw dropped open. I can imagine him saying: “Not me, Lord. Surely not me. I see myself as being loyal, though there are limits on that; sometimes I fail. But basically I’m the kind of guy you can count on, not so much a leader, but a strong supporter.” There’s a big difference between leaders and strong supporters, trust me. But Jesus, who calls us all by name, knew him better: “No, I’m making you a leader. On this rock I’m going to build my church. I see something in you that you haven’t seen, and I’m casting vision to call that forth.  Your faith foundation is the rock on which I’m going to build the church that will save the world. Even the very gates of hell won’t be able to prevail against what you’re going to unleash, Peter.”

That changed his life. He still screwed up royally, despite Jesus’ words. Frankly, we can have great visions, yet still fail at certain points. That’s ok. God doesn’t disqualify us from inheriting the vision if we fail. Look at Abraham, our father in the faith. God gave him an incredible vision. When he wasn’t seeing God fulfilling it, he made some really serious mistakes, trying to make it happen through the flesh, you might say. He wasn’t sure whether God could do it, so he thought, “Maybe I need to take this thing into my hands!” That led to some costly mistakes. Yet as you heard in the Old Testament reading today, God took him outside, and he said “Look up.” (He was complaining about the fact that God had given him a vision and God didn’t seem able to fulfill it.) “Look up at the skies: can you count them?” “No, Lord.” “You’re standing on the sand, can you count the grains of sand?” “No Lord, of course not.” And the Lord said: “So shall your descendants be.” And then it says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Finally he got it, finally he brought his faith to bear on this impossible vision, and God fulfilled it for him.

God gives great visions to the most improbable people. If he could use someone like Abraham, if he could use someone like Peter to be the rock foundation for the Church, he can use you and he can use me! I don’t care what you know about yourself: it’s what he sees in us that matters. Don’t limit your life by what you see in you. You don’t see enough. You see through the filter of your experience, through your failures (we are always much more aware of those than we are of other parts of how God has made us.) He sees the heart. He calls us forth. He gives vision, and causes us to rise up into something that transcends where we thought we could ever have gone. That shaped Peter’s life. We see him there, preaching a sermon on the day of Pentecost and bringing three thousand into the Kingdom. We see him healing the lame man at the Beautiful Gate, and now five thousand new people come into the Kingdom.

We see the man Peter rising up, refusing to regard his failures as the end of his life, but laying hold of Jesus and saying: “God do something new in me. I’ve failed again. But that’s not your last word. Call me to become the man who’s going to make your dream come true.”

We have a vision at Church of the Apostles. The staff, vestry and others have spent two years working on it. I’m here now to tell you about it—not to explain it, but to preach it to you. Our vision—our calling—is “To make visible the power of God’s love so that all will know Christ.”

The reason why we worded it this way is that the light’s already there. All we need to do is to make it visible. We didn’t want a statement which would imply that we need to make anything happen. He’s done it all for us. We just need to let it shine. And what we are to make visible is the power of God’s love. Listen again to the words of Jesus: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they place it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and praise your father in heaven.” God is calling us, church, to remove the bowls!

In your life, and in the life of this church, we’re going to let that light blaze out.

Let me give a final word on how we will do it. There’s a magnificent story in the book of Judges. Gideon is trying to engage scores of thousands of a tough enemy, and he selects about 30,000 soldiers. God tells him he has too many, and finally God gets him down to three hundred. Then God gave him the strategy. At night, these three hundred men in three different companies were to stand on the hillsides surrounding the valley where the Midianite hoards were amassed. They were to hold in one hand a burning torch, and in the other hand a jar. The jars were to be carefully placed over the torches—not to put them out (oxygen still needed to flow through)—but so that the Midianites, in the dark of night, wouldn’t be able to see what was surrounding them.

Now Joshua blew a single trumpet blast. At that precise moment all three companies smashed the jars together. The only way they could have done that was by banging them into their neighbor’s jar. Imagine the sound of that: three hundred pottery jars shattering the quiet of the night. That sound was carried in the still night air all the way down into the valley, startling all the Midianites out of their sleep. As they looked up to see where the sound was coming from, they saw hundreds of lights around them. In their panic, they fled, without a blow being struck. The enemy was routed!

The Lord Jesus is saying, “When your light shines, the enemy is going to flee. People are going to come into my kingdom. And you are the ones who’ve got to make it happen.”

What jars do we have to break, so that we can make visible the power of God’s love so all will come to know Christ? What in our lives is trapping the light? What in our church is trapping the light? Over the next few weeks, we will talk about how we are going to do that. We’re going to talk about what God has given us so we can break the jars. He doesn’t want our light to be something hidden, something that may be there but not piercing the darkness, not achieving anything. We are not to be content thinking, “Ours is a wonderful little light, and it’s working for me. I like it the way it is.” He says, “No, the light in you is not just to work for you, it’s to work for them.”

I want to pray now, for you, for me and for our church, that God will take what he’s given to us, and ignite our hearts so that our light will bring light to those who are walking in darkness.