What do Anabaptists Value? Does it Matter? (Part 2 of 4)

Two thousand years ago, Jesus said, "I will build my church." And I come here this evening in full confidence that He has been doing that, and He is doing that in the church here and the churches that you represent. Last evening after the service, some of us were talking and the question was raised, "Why if I was raised on a farm, why am I not still farming?" And I guess there's a variety of ways you could answer a question like that. You could talk about the call of God on your life and so on. But my response in the moment was it's because I was a lousy farmer and they wanted to know some details.

And so I told them this. I said that one of the jobs that my brothers would trust me with was disking. You can't mess disking up too much. That's just out there tearing up the field. So I got to do a lot of disking. But even that, I said, I'd be out and I'd be headed across the field, halfway across a big field, and kind of lost in the things I was thinking about and the ideas and the projects I was working on. And the CB radio would come to life and it would be one of my brothers and they'd say something like this, "Steven, you may want to put the disk down."

In our first session last evening, we described a worldview, our worldview, anyone's worldview as being something like a tree that is formed through the beliefs and values, what we consider to be true, what we consider to be lovely, and the nutrients that shape our set of beliefs and values. In the second session, we said that we're facing a tsunami and that this tsunami is the worldview of this age, the beliefs and values of this age, what this age considers to be lovely and true, and that it's a powerful shaping force that is working to insert its idea of what is true and good and beautiful into our thinking.

And we talked about how that only in a counter community of considerable strength do we find the power of God to resist this tsunami. And that one of the primary ways that God is resourcing us for the resistance to the spirit of the age is the community of believers. But only, only if we're huddling with them, listening to each other rather than tuning our ear to the dominant narratives, the dominant ideas that surround us.

And so from that then, we ended with these two ideas that Anabaptism is, it has been, and continues to be a counter community of considerable strength, first of all, for withstanding the current tsunami of moral defilement. And we could call this a defensive strength. It's a way God is enabling us to withstand the forces that we face. But it's not merely defensive strength. It's also offensive strength. That Anabaptism is a counter community of considerable strength for mobilizing a reverse tsunami of Christ followers that fill the earth with the glory of God. This was certainly true historically of Anabaptism. It is still true, I believe, to a degree. And I think God would like for it to be even more so as we move into the next years.

So now in this session, well, I should say in the last five sessions of these eight, I want to offer five dishes, you might say, that are at the heart of an Anabaptist worldview, five emphases that help us to understand the kinds of things that Anabaptist people have cared about over the last 500 years.

But before they can be served, we need to set the table just a little bit more and then we'll dive into the five dishes. And in this session, two more things for setting the table. I want to talk about relating paired ideas and then also spend a little bit of time talking about why I care and telling something of my story.

So this first one, relating paired ideas. What do I have in mind? What am I thinking of? Well, paired ideas are ideas that go together. And there's a lot of ideas that if you talk about one, it's almost like you have to talk about another in order to be complete, to be thorough, to get it right. So for example, if someone is talking about the sovereignty of God, it won't be long before someone says, "Yes, God is sovereign." But we need to also remember that man has been given some freedom here.

And so the sovereignty of God and the freedom of man are two ideas that we need to, oh, how do they fit? How do we relate them? That's what I mean by relating paired ideas. We want to talk about that challenge. And there's hundreds of these as we go through life. There's just many ideas that, oh, how about this one?

Someone might talk about doing good and how important it is to do good. But someone else, yes, that is right. We are called to do good works. But, oh, we shouldn't just do good. We ought to let God make us good. We need to be good, not just do good. Well, those are paired ideas, doing good and being good.

James 2:17, "Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead." So faith and works, how do they fit together? How do you relate them?

Now, when I talk about paired ideas, I'm not talking about contradictory ideas. So good and evil are not paired ideas.

Okay? There's one that we should embrace, the other one we should not. But when I'm talking about paired ideas, I'm talking about two things that are both good. And the question is, how do we relate them?

In Matthew 6:25, we read Jesus' words, "Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things." Jesus is giving us a reality, these things, the physical realities of life. Okay? That's the one idea.

Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.

There's the kingdom of God. There's these things. How are we to relate them? Now, I'm giving this just as one more example of the opportunity we have to think about how you relate paired ideas. It's not that I want to do an exposition on this particular passage necessarily.

I want us to think about our models for putting together two ideas that belong together. You see, we do this a lot. In fact, we've developed a whole vocabulary of how we relate paired ideas. You'll recognize some of these. I want to give you five models that I suspect at least three of these, well, probably four you'll have heard, maybe all five you'll have heard. But it's models for how we relate paired ideas. The first one is the balance model.

Have you heard about that? Oh, we need to be balanced. And you see, the idea there is that you have idea A on one side and you have idea B on the other. And you get enough of A and you get enough of B so that it, I guess, points to zero. It's balanced.

And we use that language a lot. Oh, if you're going to be wise, you need to be balanced. I remember as a student at Columbia Bible College, the president was giving a dress to the group and he was talking about an issue that was rather controversial. And he kept talking about, well, he didn't actually use the word balance, but it was similar. And at the end of his presentation, the moderator opened it up and said, "Does anyone have a word of response?" And I remember an older student, I think he was probably in his 40s or 50s from India, he just stood up and he said, "I want everyone to know that balance is of the devil."

Well, that got a response out of everyone. But I don't think he quite understood what the preacher was saying. What he heard with balance was compromise. And that's not what we mean here. But it does show maybe something of a bit of the difficulty with this model. And some people have observed in the balance model, you get five pounds of one thing and five pounds of another. But boy, it just equals zero at the end of the day. And there's not a whole lot of energy in this particular model. So others have come up with models that have more energy in them. And this one maybe does. This is the boat or model.

And this one says, yeah, you have to use your imagination on my drawing there. That's a boat with two oars. Okay? And the one oar is oar A and the other oar is oar B. And it just says that if you want to go down the stream, you're going to have to use both oars, both ideas. You pull on faith and works. And otherwise, you're going to go in circles and get dizzy and never get anywhere.

So the boat or model. But again, while that one might have a little more energy in it than the balance model, some still want more energy. They say, "Oh, no, truth, truth has, it's not just balanced and blah.

There's tension there." So they suggest a tension model. Now, that's maybe not a word that we hear a lot, but I have heard preachers say things like, "We need to keep these two truths in the center of biblical tension." Okay? And this particular drawing comes from a physics class. If you've ever had physics, one of the things you might do is have a force table here with a pin in the middle and there's a ring. And you can put strings tied to that ring, but you have to put weights on the end so that that ring is centered on the pin. And when you get the forces right, then that's what happens.

In the tension model, A is pulling with all of its weight and B is pulling with all of its weight. And that's the idea here, that if it's God and things, you pull with all of your might on worshiping God. And you also pull with all of your might on embracing the gift of God and the things that he gives us. And you just keep those two intentions. You pull with faith on one side and works on the other. And you just, oh, there's tension here. But you don't let go because then you'd move into heresy or something. But you keep the two together.

So the tension model. How should we relate paired ideas? Well, the last two are kind of different but still relate. This one is the knife edge model. And it says that truth is found at the sharp edge of a knife. Oh, it's right there. And it's easy. It's easy to get off. And so there's error A and error B in this particular model.

And what we need to do is find the truth that's right there on that some kind of a razor edge between the two errors. Well, maybe this one is the one that's most commonly used or referred to. I often hear people saying, "Oh, you got to, you want to stay in the middle of the road. You want to, there's a ditch on this side and there's a ditch on this side." And truth is found in the middle of the road.

And here we have error A and error B. This is really the same as this one, just it's a more generous view of truth than the knife edge model.

So all of these models have been useful. I hear them used to help us try to think about how we relate things correctly. But I'm going to suggest that in our passage, Jesus actually gives us a different model than any of these five. You see, all five of these, and while they're helpful and useful to one degree or another, they all suffer from something.

And that is, it seems as if they seem, it seems like they make both ideas equal.

Now, we've already said paired ideas are both good. But is it possible that when we have paired ideas, that they're not just equal and you need five pounds of this one and five pounds of that one, or you just pull on both with equal amounts of passion and energy? Is it possible that one actually is more fundamental than the other? Both are good, but one is more basic, one is more fundamental. And clearly, in this passage, Jesus is pointing to a model that says that. So let me offer another approach. And I'm going to just call this the first and second things model. And it's pretty simple. It's really two circles. The middle one is a dashed circle.

And that's intentional. And then here's where we'll put the first thing.

And by first thing, we mean one of the two paired ideas that needs to anchor the other. It has priority or emphasis in some way. It's more fundamental in some ways. And then the second thing

is the paired idea that needs to be kept with the first. If we're going to think correctly about reality, if we're going to live correctly, it's vital that we don't disconnect the two. Now, I use a dashed line to indicate two things. One, that the first and second thing are not the same thing. The sovereignty of God is not the same thing as freedom of man. Faith is not the same thing as works.

Doing good is not the same thing as being good. God is not the same thing as things. Okay? So we use a line to say these are not the same thing. We use the dashed line to indicate that the two realities need to be kept together if we're going to be living and thinking correctly about reality.

So that's the model, first things and second things. Now, clearly in this passage from Jesus, he's saying God is the first thing. And we're not going to, no one is going to disagree with that. But he's also saying the things, being physical, being embodied, being creatures that eat and work and so on is good. It's a part of God's economy. And we are to receive it as a gift from him.

But God is first, the things are second. Now, with that model then, let's just turn to some of those other paired ideas for a moment and see if this works. Would you agree that if we're talking about the freedom of man and the sovereignty of God, that those are not equal ideas, but one is more primary than the other?

Yeah. Which one's primary? Sovereignty of God. That's first. See, we don't balance those ideas. They're the first thing. We identify the first, but we also don't become so enthusiastic about the first thing that we divorce it from the second.

Freedom of man is also true. What about faith and works? Are they balanced ideas or is one more fundamental?

What about doing good and being good?

Being good, first thing.

And from being good comes doing good. Okay? And I would suggest that I don't, there's likely paired ideas that are to be balanced, that are equal. But I found that a lot of these, that it's really helpful to understand which of those is first, which is second. Now, we're not quite done with this. I want us to think about if this is the model for proper relating many paired ideas, then let's think together about ways that we mispair them, that we inappropriately relate paired ideas.

So I'm going to give three. The first looks like this.

And we'll call that reversal.

Reversal is when first things or second things are made first. Reversal. So let's just try to think about what that may look like in God and things. So if God is to be first and the things are to be received as a gift from him, what is reversal? Reversal makes the thing central, makes God second. I'm going to suggest that's the prosperity gospel.

It says that God is the best way for you to have a prosperous life, to have all the money you want and all the food you want. God is the means to the real end, which is financial prosperity. That would be reversal.

There's a second way that we relate inappropriately paired ideas. And let's see, which one did I put next for us? Okay.

That one could look like this. It's one circle and there's first things and there's second things. In this case, we have not distinguished them. I'm going to call that confusion.

Confusion is when we make first things and second things and basically say they're the same thing.

You say, does that really ever happen? Well, let's try, let's stay with our passage. What about God and things? If we make them the same thing, is that ever something we do? Well, I'm going to suggest that in some ways, this seems to be the issue that Jesus was pushing back against in the first century with where the dominant perspective was that a person who was rich, if they were rich, that meant they knew God.

If you were financially prosperous, therefore you were blessed by God. I think that's a form of equating. That's a form of confusing the two things. It's a way of misaligning paired ideas. The third way we can wrongly pair ideas, maybe we're going to have to have kind of a series here.

We'll begin with this and this. And here's the first thing. Here's the second thing. Now, notice what we've done here is we've pulled the two apart.

And then that maybe comes over here to where it looks like this. And

then that comes to something that maybe looks like this.

And I'm going to call this separation and divorce.

In our enthusiasm for first things, we can begin to minimize second things inappropriately and say, oh, all you need is the first thing. Okay? And then with time, the second things become almost a barrier to the first things. And with time, you begin to make the second things evil.

So perhaps that would be a picture of sometimes in our enthusiasm for Christ and for the kingdom of God, we can begin to develop these ideas that, oh, if I can just get to know God well enough, I won't care about the physical things of life. They won't matter. They won't be significant.

And maybe we will wind up on the trying to get as far away from the physical world as we can rather than the kind of embrace that God calls us to that says, as we seek first his kingdom and he gives us our daily bread, we receive it with joy. We receive it with thanksgiving. We receive it as a good gift from our Father.

Now again, I give that as an illustration of relating first and second things and some of the problems that we have. But that's not the point here. The reason that I've spent some time on this thinking about relating paired ideas is because as we move into the emphases of Anabaptist, we're going to find that sometimes what we emphasize, it's the same thing that other Christian groups maybe emphasize, but we reverse the first and second things from what is normally done.

It's not always that we're rejecting something and others embracing. It's just that we give a different kind of emphasis. So we're going to need this first and second things model to help us understand what it is that we care about. So hopefully that will become increasingly clear as we move forward. So our task then, our task as followers of Jesus, as people who care about thinking correctly, living in alignment with Jesus, our task is first of all to keep first things first.

And of course, the only way we can do that is to rely on his ability, both to teach us what's first things and to give us the power to actually live those first things. I really think that's one of the reasons that we're called to fast.

Fast from food, for example. Food is one of these things. We're called to fast because that's a second thing. We fast from it not in order to wean ourselves off that we'll never need food again in our life. But we fast so that we can keep first things first and then actually receive this as a gift from God rather than it becoming a central reality for us. So fasting is not, again, to get rid of food, but it is to learn to receive it as gift.

Keep first things first. Our second job is to keep second things. And that in some ways is just as difficult as the first. Because once we've identified what is first, our enthusiasm for that can cause us to minimize or deny the second thing.

And so we embrace both first and second things with passion, heart, soul, mind strength. And I include this quote from Lewis who said, and that's where I got the actual language for this model, put first things first. We get second things thrown in, put second things first, and we lose both first and second things.

Now, the second part of this session, I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about why I care about this subject. See, I don't remember ever questioning the truth of Christianity until I was around 19 years old. I was a volunteer at Choice Books of Northern Virginia.

And one of the things that a number of us fellows like to do in the evenings was to go over to the Mormon visitors, yeah, their visitor center. And we found that if you sat through their presentation and showed any interest, they would give an elder to you to talk. And so we did a lot of research on what Mormons believed. And then we'd go there and ask for an elder. And then we'd sit there and discuss.

And apparently they got rather used to us coming. And so on this one evening, they said, okay, this evening we're not going to have your group with one of us. We're going to split you up. And we're going to give an elder to each one of you to have our discussion.

And I drew an elderly Mormon lady as my discussion partner. And she was very enthusiastic. And so we were going after, I was asking her questions and saying, yeah, but what about this and this and so on. And somewhere along the line, she says, okay, Steven, I want to give you something.

I want to give you a copy of the Book of Mormon. Well, you have to understand, I love books. And I was building my library at the time. And any free book that had some kind of historic, cultural, theological merit, I wanted to add it to my library. And I thought, even though I didn't agree with the Book of Mormon, I'd still like to have a copy and so on.

But she said, now, before I give it to you, you have to make a promise. And so the promise is that as you read, you will pray and ask God to give you a burning in your bosom to confirm that this book is true.

And I don't know if it was right in that moment or in the next hour or the next days, but my world went into a bit of a tailspin because I had used almost an identical appeal to a group of juveniles at the Juvenile Delinquent Center in Fairfax, Virginia, to call them to read the scriptures and come to faith in what they were reading and come to God through that. And here was this lady calling me to believe in a whole considerably different understanding of the world using a similar argument. And it wasn't that I began to doubt or find some kind of reason to embrace Mormonism. I just began to question whether either Christianity or Mormonism were true.

Now, that particular crisis for me was not deeply disruptive or enduring. I was surrounded by some people who were able to help me think through some of the questions I was having. But in addition to that, some of the books that I was reading, like Evidence It Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, articles from Keith Green's Last Days Ministries, books by George Verwer, Leonard Ravenhill, and a variety of others, were really influential in kind of getting me through that crisis rather quickly. But what it did was led to a much larger crisis for me. And you'll notice that the books and the titles and so on that I described, that, well, maybe you're not old enough to know some of those, but they're not Anabaptist books.

And I was listening to a lot of sermons on tape, not podcasts. This was back when you'd get sermons in the mail if you wanted them on a cassette tape and you'd listen to them. And I was getting them from a local Christian college. And I was finding them to be tremendously helpful. See, I was drinking deeply from Christian wells that were not Anabaptist, that were not Mennonite. And during this time, I became a student at Columbia Bible College.

Now, that's a school that bleeds missions, world missions as well. That's their one emphasis. Their other one is the Victorious Christian Life. Their motto is to know Him and to make Him known. And there I was thrown in with other believers, some whose devotion to God made me question, if not my own, some of the people around me, my own devotion.

And these other believers, none of them were Mennonites. And I began to wrestle with that question. Why am I a Mennonite? Is that a valid faith choice? It wasn't that I wanted to stop being a follower of Jesus, but in what tradition is best to do that?

Every day in chapel, we would have sermons by gifted communicators. They pulled in speakers from all over the world. And they would teach the Bible. They would tell these dramatic stories of faith. They were convincing and compelling. And none of them were Mennonites.

Every day in class, I heard learned, intelligent teachers who would convincingly and passionately describe a Christian worldview, a worldview that made sense to me from my own tradition. And none of them were Mennonites. And you can see how that would feed just a crisis for me. Why am I a Mennonite? And one day I walked into, it was my favorite instructor's office.

But I was fairly new to his class. And we had not talked. I was just observing him from a distance. And I was just thoroughly enjoying his teaching. And I wanted to ask him a question. I think it was about an assignment or something. I'm not sure.

And the course was world history. So I walk into his knocked on the door. He says, "Come in." I walk into the office. And before I could get my question out, he goes, "Brewbaker, you're a Mennonite, aren't you?"

I said, "Yes, sir." And then he asked this question that's just stuck with me all these years. He said, "So tell me, how does it feel to live in a country where your freedom was bought with my blood?"

And if I hadn't before, in that moment, I came face to face with the reality that my faith tradition was not exactly in the mainstream of Christian thinking.

And so again, I just exacerbated the, I might come back to that story a little bit later. There's more to it. But for now, these were some of the pressures. So I started asking in new ways, in more intense ways, what does it mean to be a Mennonite? I knew some ways we were different. I knew we didn't go to war.

I knew, thanks to my brothers and sisters, that we didn't pledge allegiance to the flag.

I knew that we dress differently in some ways. But are Mennonites just basically Baptists who don't fight and dress different?

I was benefiting significantly from Christians of other denominations. And I was impressed by them. I was impressed with the quality of their presentation. But some of them, I was able to observe their lives. And I was impressed with that.

And when I compared my own church, my own denomination, I found we just didn't always fare too well.

Sometimes when talking about this subject of Anabaptism with people, it's inevitable that someone will ask the question, "Well, okay. So there's clearly some good stuff here about Anabaptism, but we also know there's some problems. So how do we keep from throwing out the baby with the bathwater?" That's the question. You've probably heard that question. How do we keep from throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Now, the way I understand that question is like this, that the baby are the good things, the good things in the tradition.

And that the bathwater are the things, maybe in our history, the pieces that are not good, the things that have happened, or maybe some of the emphasis that have been a problem. That's the bathwater. So the baby is the good parts. The bathwater is the bad parts.

And I've found over the years that not everybody likes the question because some will say something like this, "Well, there's baby here, but there's no bathwater. So how do you ask the question? It's all baby.

This is as good as it gets. So let's not talk about bathwater." Others don't like the question because they say, "It's all bathwater. There's no baby left." So what do you mean not throwing out the baby with the bathwater? Just throw it all out.

And then there's others that don't like the question because it's, "Ooh, that's too dangerous. We just need to keep both. It's too risky trying to sort through this. And we may not miss what's baby and what's bathwater. So we wouldn't want to accidentally throw out the baby.

So let's just keep both."

Well, during these years, my early 20s, I became a self-described expert on the bathwater of our church, Mennonites.

I'd get together with my friends. And we would make lists. We'd write down the things that were wrong. And there are things that are wrong.

Things that were on our list included things like how a conservative lifestyle is sometimes accepted as a substitute for genuine love and devotion for God.

We talked about how our willingness to divide over seemingly insignificant differences. We talked about our disregard and disinterest for the broader world sometimes while we put a lot of emphasis and energy into maintaining a certain appearance. We talked about how that, oh, it seemed like in some cases, non-resistance just becomes passivity.

It's just a way to protect our cushy lifestyles.

We talked about how it feels like sometimes we make a big deal out of what felt to us like insignificant things while the world is going to hell.

We talked about how a strong sense of community inside just seldom seems to translate into including others that aren't born into this. We would talk about the cases of sexual and physical abuse among us.

And so I became an expert in the bathwater.

Somewhere along the line in this, there were two significant events for me. The one was a lunch that I had with a non-Mennonite professor.

And I had respected some of what I had read from him and so on. And I decided, "I'm just going to put it out there. I'm going to just lay out my dilemma, my dissatisfaction with the tradition that had formed me." And he listened to me. And somewhere along the line, he said this, "One of the most significant indicators of God's will for your life, Stephen, is where you are." He says, "The parents you have, the family that you were given, the church you were born into." He says, "Find out why God placed you there before you leave it."

The other event that was significant during this time, my pastor came to me and said, "Stephen, would you be willing to write an essay on why you are a Mennonite?" Well, I don't think he quite understood all the struggles that I was having necessarily. But maybe he did.

But both of those events pushed me to start looking for the baby and start asking, "Is there a baby here or not?" I could name the bathwater, but I couldn't really name the baby.

And one of the essays that I came across during this time of starting to look for the baby was that by Harold Bender, The Anabaptist Vision. And I've included the three primary quotes where it summarizes his arguments. He says, "First and fundamental in The Anabaptist Vision was the conception of the essence of Christianity as discipleship.

It was a concept which meant the transformation of the entire way of life of the individual believer and of society so that it should be fashioned after the teachings and example of Christ."

And I found this description of what is at the core of an Anabaptist perspective to be very compelling. I said, "Oh, if this is at the heart of what it means to be an Anabaptist, then I can get excited about this, that Christianity is about following Jesus."

As a second major element in The Anabaptist Vision, a new concept of the church was created by the central principle of newness of life and applied Christianity. Voluntary church membership based upon true conversion involving a commitment to holy living and discipleship was the absolutely essential heart of this concept. Well, of course, the church should be made of people who are following Jesus.

And third, the third great element in The Anabaptist Vision was the ethic of love and non-resistance as applied to all human relationships. The brethren understood this to mean complete abandonment of all warfare, strife, and violence, and of the taking of human life.

Following Jesus, the centrality of the church made up of genuine followers. And then this idea that what God is about is making you and I into lovers, even of enemies. That began to flesh out a vision of Christianity. I said, "Well, yes.

That's biblical. And it's something I'd like to give myself to."

You see, I began to realize that the battle in my heart and mine was actually a battle between our weaknesses as a people on the one hand and the strengths of the Christians that I was encountering.

Another way of saying this is that I was comparing our bathwater with their baby. And the baby is going to always win.

I sometimes say that it was education or my schooling that made a Mennonite out of me. And I don't know that that's totally true. But let me try to help you understand what I mean. You see, there was something about the schooling that I did that gave me a different set of eyes, a different way of looking at my family, my church, and the tradition that formed me.

It gave me a way of thinking about them that I didn't have before. Let me illustrate. In eighth grade, I had the opportunity to tour the Savannah River site. Now, that is a large government facility that was dedicated to the production of tritium for the making of a hydrogen bomb. You say, "Why was a Mennonite boy touring a place like that?" Well, I was really into science fairs. And I had a number of projects that I worked on. And I would submit these for judging. And one of the awards that I received was a two-day tour of the Savannah River site. Now, please understand that since fourth grade, I had come to this awareness that I was not going to be a farmer.

What I wanted to be was a scientist, a chemist, a physicist, maybe an engineer. In my mind, farming was kind of down here somewhere. Science, oh, that was great. And so I just couldn't be more excited than to spend two days with the head mechanical engineer at SRS.

And so Dad drove me over. I met this engineer. His name was Regan Voight. And Dad left me there. So it was just Mr. Voight and myself for two days. And he took me all the way. It was an extremely large facility, five nuclear reactors there. We would drive, I think in some cases, 45 minutes from one destination or another. It's the size of a county. It's a very large facility. Well, I shouldn't say facility, a very large tract of land with a whole lot of buildings spread out across the thing. And we'd go into this lab and that lab. And then he took me to their document repository that had just stacks and stacks of papers, research papers that they were doing.

He said, "Stephen, just look through them. Anyone that you want, you can take." And I was collecting this massive stuff. I was just, "Oh, it was wonderful."

The second day, we're sitting there eating lunch together. I apparently had run out of questions. And he had finished the spiel that he needed to give. And so he looks across the table. And he says, "So Stephen, tell me about your family. What does your father do?"

And I said, "Oh, he's a farmer."

And Regan Voight's response, I think, changed my life. He says, "Really? He's a farmer?" I said, "Yes, sir." "Oh, Stephen, do you know what I would be if I could be anything that I wanted to be? If I could do anything I wanted to do? Do you know what it would be?" By this time, I kind of thought I knew maybe what he was going to say. He said, "I wouldn't be a mechanical engineer. I'd be a farmer."

Now, do you see how that can kind of start changing your perspective, give you a different set of eyes to look at dear old Dad?

But he wasn't done. He said, "Oh, I'd love to be a farmer, but I'm not nearly smart enough."

That'll change a young boy's perspective too. "I'm not nearly smart enough." He said, "Oh, to be a farmer, you have to be a chemist. And you have to be an entomologist. And you have to be a metallurgist." And a whole bunch of other issues that I had no idea what he was talking about. But he was saying, "I can't live long enough to learn everything I need to know to farm well. So I just have to be a mechanical engineer."

And that's why I say that it was experiences like that and some of the schooling that I had that gave me a whole different way of looking not only at my family but our faith tradition. See, I took courses there at Columbia in biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, they called it.

It gave me a way to test our understanding of First Corinthians 11 as well as other teachings. And I found that what I had been given has good, solid, intellectually valid support from the scriptures.

But in my case, it took an evangelical Bible school to help me see that.

And that was repeated in other courses.

And with time, I began to realize that there is a lot of baby here. Let me give you one other story. So this is after we're married now. And we live in a mobile home community with a whole bunch of other students. And the men would gather in the evenings while we'd be watching our children play or something. We'd stand around and talk. And one time, we were there. And so I'm the one Mennonite student and a whole bunch of other evangelical students. And they get to talking about church leadership. And they talk about how, "Oh, man, the leadership in their church, it's dismal. It's a bad deal." And they were describing how what they do is when they need a new leader, they take applications.

And people will apply from all over. And they bring them in the best applications. They'll bring them in. And they'll let them preach. And they'll think, "Oh, well, that person can preach pretty good." And they're with them a day or two, maybe have an interview. And they think, "Oh, we think we can live with him." And they said they hire him. And six months into this, they say, "Oh, no. What in the world? We made a mistake." And anyway, they just said that leadership's a problem. And I'm quiet. I'm not saying anything. And finally, one of them said, "Okay, Stephen, you guys, you Mennonites, y'all do things a bit different than the rest of us.

So how do y'all do the leadership thing?" And so I just launched in and described that, "No, we don't take applications. We look from among us for leadership." And I talked about the process. And yes, I talked about the lot. Sometimes we don't know who it should be. So we'll use the lot to determine this. And these guys, they're getting bug-eyed.

But I can see they're kind of enjoying this. And finally, one of them says, "You know, I'm thinking about this. And I'm convinced that if we followed it at our church, if we did what Stephen's church does, it would solve all of our leadership problems."

Now, you were supposed to laugh there because we know better. But do you see how a conversation like that can start giving you a different way of looking at maybe we don't have everything so wrong as we thought I thought we did?

I'm reminded of the story of the two young fish that were out for a morning swim. And an older fish coming the other direction nods to them and maybe says, "Good morning." And then as he's passing by, he says, "So, how's the water?" And the two other young fish, they swim on for a few moments. And then the one turns to the other. And he says, "What's water?"

They were so close to it, they couldn't see it. They didn't even know that it existed. And see, for me, the question was, what is Anabaptism? I was so close, I couldn't even see the air I was breathing.

It was easy to see the good in other versions of Christianity. But the good in my own faith tradition was often invisible. And I suspect that most of us are a bit like that fish. The grace that God surrounds us with can often be transparent.

And so we must deliberately become grace detectors, sniffing out, if you will, looking for the grace that God has blessed us with. No, I'm not saying we live in denial of the wrongs or create some false imaginary world, but actively looking for and naming and saying thank you for God's grace in our lives.

It's so easy to completely miss the air that surrounds us and sustains our life. In my enthusiasm for becoming an expert in the bathwater, I couldn't even name the baby and describe the baby. And that's our task this weekend, to identify the grace that is present in this faith tradition called Anabaptism, to look at this question, what does it mean to be a Mennonite? What is the value here in this faith tradition? And before I go on, I want to recognize the deep connection here between our individual experiences and how we think about these questions.

I've talked with many people over the years, some who have been deeply hurt by Anabaptist leaders, fathers, mothers, churches, or people in our setting. I've heard stories of emotional and spiritual, physical, sexual abuse. And it is hard when this is your story to see any good in Anabaptism.

I don't want to ignore that. The failures, the sin among us should be acknowledged along with the grace.

So this weekend, our intention is to look at this faith tradition called Anabaptism. And we're looking at this for two purposes: to recognize or to be grateful for, to take responsibility for the grace that God is pouring into our lives through this heritage, but also to take responsibility for our failures.

And we do have, we could maybe say, a depressing amount of failures in our story as well. I intend to unpack something of our emphases by using this acronym, blessed. Why that? Well, because these five words fit that, but also because the Sermon on the Mount is one of the most formative passages of scripture for Anabaptists. And the Beatitudes, a component of that. And of course, a repeated feature of the Beatitudes is blessed. And so for each one of the consonants, the B, the L, the two S's, and the D, I plan to offer one Anabaptist emphasis or dish, we could say. And then for each of those emphases, I want to talk about practices.

I give a story, a biblical text, and a picture to help anchor each of these.