Making Christ Central Part 1

The first church building that was ever built was in 323 A.D. Actually, there were around seven, eight, or nine of them built between 323 and 327. They were all built…they were paid for out of the coffers of the Roman Empire. They were sponsored mainly by Constantine’s mother, Helena. Later, the Catholics made her Saint Helena. They were all built as memorials over supposedly sacred places. Until that time, Christians had never conceived of meeting in a building, a special building. They had always met in homes. The only known Christian gathering place ever discovered and excavated in archaeology is in a town called Douro Europa, in what today would be called Syria. It’s nothing, and you’re familiar with this because I know you do what we do; it’s nothing in the World but a house. They kicked out the wall between the two bedrooms, and that was the earliest and only known building ever set aside for Christians. It was built probably around 250A.D. And it was nothing but a house. You’ve done that, haven’t you? Kicked out a wall so you could hold 40 or 50 people.

I shared with two of the brothers last night that there’s been an awful lot of work being done by the French, and none of it’s gotten into the English language. It’s called church archaeology. It has nothing to do with the archaeology of the Holy Lands, but of the early Gentile churches. There have been a lot of documents and letters uncovered; in fact, 25,000 have been located and identified as Christian. Some of the most interesting things that archaeologists have discovered are that nobody had a religious vocabulary during the first three centuries of our faith. Christians writing one another did not start off the way we do with, “Oh, our dear brother in Christ, praise God for this, that, and the other.” The only way they could find out they were Christians was if there was some reference to the Lord or to other brothers and sisters. They had no religious vocabulary for the first 300 years.

They also never took the names of biblical characters as we do. We think we got that from the Jews because they did, but we Gentiles did not get the idea of naming our kids Bible names from the Jews. We picked it up because the heathen named their children after heathen gods, and after Constantine began building memorial buildings and naming them after saints, because he had built hundreds from the coffers of the Roman Empire’s treasury. He had built hundreds of temples to pagan gods when they began building church buildings. And as they had named temples after heathen gods, they named the church buildings after Bible characters. It was only after that Gentiles, heathens, Christians, us uncircumcised, that we began to name our children Bible names. Rather, the Christians of the 2nd and 3rd century, from all archaeological evidence, all of them dropped their last names and went only by their first names, because their last name was a giveaway as to which part of the sociological strata they lived in, and they did not want to know who was a slave or who was a wealthy man. They all called one another by their first names and dropped their last names.

Now, I can go on and on and on, and I’m trying to do this just as fast and succinctly as I can, so let me come back to some of our practices. Have you ever wondered where we got…I bet you have never wondered this…where did we get the Sunday morning sermon? You thought that was because people in the first century preached. I’ll bet you think that. A sermon is an unscriptural sermon, non–New Testament, totally heathen practice. Yeah, I’m going for it. And its warp and woof in us, and we can’t get rid of it; I don’t think we ever will. There was something called rhetoric that goes back to about 400 B.C., and the Greeks were into rhetoric, like today we’re into television. Rhetoric was both a form of entertainment as well as a thing greatly depended on by the government to make its decisions. When the Greeks came together in their different towns and even in their national governments, they had orators who would stand up and debate. These men were brilliant. You’ve never heard, I’ve never heard, things like what they could do. Brilliant men who had spent their whole lives learning to do nothing but speak with some of the most brilliant ideas conceivable. They would literally turn the day with their oratory, and Aristotle came along and set down rules for oration.

I did not know this when I was in the seminary, and I will speak to you…brothers…for a moment. Everything that I learned about homiletics, message, and sermon preparation came first from Aristotle, and I quote, and you will recognize, every great statement of rhetoric will have a clear introduction, a clear conclusion, and three to four major points. All that Aristotle left out was a deathbed story and a poem. There was no such thing as a sermon in the Christian faith until about 400A.D. A great heathen orator was converted and brought sermons into the Christian faith. The Greeks had made a science out of this. When the Romans conquered them, they were so into rhetoric that they would actually gather in an amphitheater… they were conquered people…and someone would come before them and say, “Now we’re going to pretend that the Spartans are upon us, and what are we going to do about it?” And four or five men would come in and orate. Then, boy, at the end, the whole amphitheater would go wild as to which one they felt had won, as to what should be done about the invading Spartans.

The Romans picked this up, and they were great orators. But perhaps one of the greatest was a gentleman whose name is known as John Chrysostom, which means, when translated, “John the man with the golden mouth.” And John, the man with the golden mouth, brought out of his pagan life abilities as an orator; he brought in and became a Christian; he brought that in with him, and he created and gave to us this damnable, stinking, non-Christian thing called the Sunday morning sermon, and it has wrecked as much havoc upon the Christian faith as anything possibly could. I’ve read his stuff. Man, it’s unreal. It’s just like what you might hear on any given Sunday morning. Beautiful rhetoric, taken to its ultimate ends. Down with sermons. I didn’t even get one amen over that one. Amen.

Brothers and sisters who preached in the first century preached out of urgency and emergency, and there was no ritual to it. You didn’t know when you might get one, when you might not. Amen. Why are you clapping? Why don’t you repent? We need a completely different understanding of the Christian faith because what we have was not what it was. Now then, if that doesn’t slow down your kitty car, here’s another one. Everybody knows that we have pastors. Pastors have absolutely no scriptural place. I’ll give you $1,000 if you can find a pastor in the New Testament. He ain’t there. I know that obscure verse in Ephesians. I read that too. I read that once. I read Ephesians once.

Now just a minute. The practice of modern-day pastoral practice…find me a man in the New Testament who goes around visiting the sick. Find me a man who shakes hands and pats old ladies’ hands. Find me a man who gets up in a pulpit and preaches every Sunday like clockwork…a sermon. Find me a man who prays over a football game on Saturday nights, just before they go out and half-kill one another. Find me a man in a suit and tie. There is reason and tradition. Now you can name the time and place when we started wearing suits and ties. Find me a funeral in the New Testament. The Romans had funerals, and they brought in philosophers and orators like John Chrysostom to bring an oration over the dead. John Chrysostom and two or three other contemporaries of his introduced the funeral to the Christian faith and brought the first sermon orations ever delivered in the history of our faith, sometime between 400 and 450 A.D. I’ve read one of them. Would you like to hear it?

This is a pagan one. “Oh, friends and comrades, oh, we are gathered today here on this sad yet glorious occasion to bid farewell to our friend. And oh, though we weep, oh, though we mourn for his passing, yet I tell you that somewhere he’s looking down upon us today and saying, ‘Weep not, weep not, for I am in a far better place.” Excuse me, I’m an old East Texas boy who grew up with horses, cows, and chickens, and that is a bunch of bull. We’ve got no business with that kind of stuff in the fellowship of the believers. But that wasn’t my point. My point was, where does the modern-day practice of the pastor come from? And I have spent more time trying to find out where pastors came from than on any other search I’ve made. I know one thing for sure: they didn’t come out of the New Testament. One day, I got some writings, some original writings of the Anabaptists. It was just recently published about that thick. The thing cost a fortune. I found it, and I was stunned.

Here’s the story. We’re back to about 1525-1530. We’re right in the middle of the Reformation, and we’re in the days of Martin Luther. It seems as though it was the practice in that particular day…I know you’ve heard of the seven sacraments, have you not? Well, there were also seven pastoral duties of a priest, and that’s where the word pastoral came in. Now, I can never remember all seven of them. Let me see what I can do. The priests were to visit the sick, marry the young, bury the dead, and bring blessings upon civic events. Some, a few, mostly those who could read and write…not many could…to teach or write. I can usually remember six. I don’t know what the others… oh, did I say, “bury the dead”? Yeah, I did. What were those other two? I don’t know, but you’re so familiar with them. Martin Luther— oh, I’m sorry, baptized, of course, and baptized the babies. That was another. Now, that was considered not only a sacrament, but one of their duties, one of the things, the perfunctory things they did. I don’t remember the seventh one. No, it’s not, and you would think it is, but it was not a pastoral duty. I don’t know what it was, but anyhow, Luther had all of these ex-priests on his hands, and they would come to Wittenberg for training under him. He’d send them out to these empty cathedrals and huge church buildings to go back as Protestant priests, and he changed the pastoral functions a little bit and told them to do this a little differently than the other. They all went back to these church buildings, where, because of Frederick the Wise, who was more or less the governor of that area and was protecting Luther from the Roman Catholic armies and from being burned at the stake, all of these men went out back out…oh, changed, changed the church. Dispensing of the sacraments, you know, when people come by, and y’all don’t do that here, do you? That’s not what this is here, and those of you who are Catholics, you know.

Well, instead of that, he told them to go back, rip all that out, which they literally did, and instead put in a platform and preach and make it the Word of God. Those became the seven pastoral duties of the Protestant priest, and from that grew up that lone single man who buries the dead, marries the so-and-sos, does this and that, and always speaks in a stained-glass voice. “Oh, brothers, I’m so happy to be with you here today. Oh, what a joy it is. Oh, how wonderful.” Why can’t we speak English just like everybody else does? There’s no scriptural basis for all of these things. If you can find a funeral in the New Testament where some brother preached over it… You can’t find an ordained man going out visiting the sick, or any of the other things we get stuck with. That office, as is practiced today, ought not to exist.

Well, let me see. Oh, the pulpit. Would you like to know where the pulpit came from? That is a cute one. Luther would come in at 11 a.m. with all these books and stuff, and he wanted to preach, and they had this big box full of wafers and bread. He’d stick his Bible up on that, and he would speak to them. Later, on the pillars that held up the buildings, they had these pulpits. You walk up a spiral staircase as part of the Sunday ritual, go up there, and announce. They had announcements in the Roman Catholic Church, just like we do. They went up there, and they ripped those things down and brought one of them and put it up here in front, and that’s where we got our pulpit. And oh, brothers, those great men who stand behind the sacred desk and proclaim the Word of God.