Some of you will not marry. Statistically, this is becoming more and more the case. The age at which people are entering into their first marriage is steadily rising (now near 30) along with the high divorce rate and lowering marriage rate mean that in 2007 for the first time since millions of men left widows during WWII, single adults have become the majority, 51.5 percent of the adult population.  Particularly, many of you women will not marry.  It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. As I said last week, throughout university and graduate school (the time people are most likely to select a mate), roughly 57% of the people you will meet will be women. Even if you were to go to a large church with many singles, close to 60% of North American churchgoers are women - a gap that widens among twenty-somethings. What that means in your generation is that many of your female friends will settle for a man who either falls below your standard of education and ambition, or they will fall in love with ambitious unbelievers because they couldn’t find a good man in the church. Interestingly, in Mainland China, the situation is reversed, for the one-child policy along with selective birth control has created “bachelor bomb” in which unmarried men between 20 and 44 already outnumber their single female counterparts 2 to 1.  So ladies – there are good men in the world, they are just all in China.  So, some of you will not marry.  Dads and moms, some of your kids will not marry.  Christians, some of your friends will not marry. Church, some of our own and some of our visitors will not marry. 

If you were to visit the study of American President Thomas Jefferson in the newly constructed White House during the early years of his presidency at the beginning of the 19^th century, you might be pleased to see a well-worn, and obviously poured over Bible prominently displayed on his desk. However, if you were to be so bold as to open Jefferson’s Bible, you might be shocked at what you found between the covers.  During those years, Jefferson had engaged himself in a project to re-craft the Bible in his own image. He took a razor to its pages, rearranging the Gospel narratives, removing entire sections, and even re-writing some passages to give the “correct” reading.  Jefferson did this because he believed that the ethical and philosophical teachings of Jesus had been obscured by the supernatural and, he thought, superstitious stories about Jesus.  He sought to remove any reference to miracles, to the deity of Christ, to resurrection power, to the Holy Spirit – and be left with the pure ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously, followers of Jesus have always taken issue with Jefferson’s approach, for once we set ourselves up as the final authority as to what or what isn’t proper to God, we come out with a God that looks very much like ourselves and a Bible that no longer challenges us beyond ourselves.

 

My point in telling this story is not to deride those who edit out the power and deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. My point in telling this story is to ask whether we in the modern church unwittingly do the same thing.  Jefferson edited out the supernatural to leave the ethics – do we do the opposite? Have we taken our razors out and left behind a virtue-less faith? We glory in our correct doctrines, but do our hearts and our hands lag behind?

Because Jesus didn’t stop there. Let me ask you something: now understanding the diversity of people and backgrounds of those who followed Jesus, wouldn’t it be something spectacular if from out of this rag-tag bunch of hermits, tax collectors and zealots a consistent approach to seeking the welfare of the city emerged?  If you threw Jesus into a group of people who couldn’t agree about anything, and they came out of their experience with Jesus with such a one-minded approach to seeking the welfare of the city that within a few hundred years they had infiltrated every city of the Empire.  Historian Rodney Stark has directly connected the growth of Christianity with the care and concerned they showed one another and to the city.  Stark cites the non-Christian Emperor Julian who attributed the growth of the Christian movement to their approach to seeking the welfare of the city:  “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans [Christians] observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence … The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”

When I was in university a group of us would go down to High Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio and talk about Jesus with the people down there. To get a little context, High Street is a little like the Byward Market are here, close to the university, center of town, lots of bars, lots of people on the street.  So we’d talk about Jesus and sometimes people would be interested about learning more, and sometimes they’d want to check out a Christian Church – the only problem was that we couldn’t find a good church in the area to send them to. We looked and looked, then found one, just over the bridge – walking distance to the place where we shared with people.  I checked out there doctrinal statement online – looked good, so Jean and I and a couple of friends went to visit them.  We sat through their service that Sunday morning.  It was easy to notice that they were very traditional and everyone had very grey hair, but that’s fine – would they be welcoming of the students and street people we’d send them?  We talked to the pastor after the service, and I am not sure if I have ever been as disappointed with a Christian in my life as I was when he told me that it would probably be better if we didn’t send those type of people to his church.  Keep in mind that theirs was the only gospel preaching church for miles around the inner city core.  This was his answer: “We don’t think we’d be a good fit for them. Even though we’re located right downtown, we think of ourselves as more of a country church that just happens to be located in the middle of the city.”  I was a bit upset.  Ok, very upset.  How can a church be so disconnected of the community around it to the point that they would say, please don’t send people to us?