Winona Conference Part 2 – You’re Made for Two Realms

And so, we never question why we do what we do as Christians. So, you’re going to get it right now. Here it goes. Church buildings never existed until Constantine, 323 A.D. Constantine commissioned around nine great, big, memorable buildings to be built over places that were sacred. His mind was thinking like a pagan. Pagans built temples—pagan temples—over places where supposedly some god had appeared. And each temple was always named after a god. So, he built these great memorable shrines and named every one of them not after a pagan god, but after a New Testament name. And so, we have St. Peter’s Cathedral and so forth. Church buildings never existed before that. Before that, Christians met in homes, and Christians met in parks, and the church building had no idea of ever being to replace Ecclesia. Today, church is a building, not a people. The choir did not come from the Old Testament temple choir. The choir did not get introduced into Christian faith until after the coming of the building, when Constantine emptied the coffers of the temples throughout the Roman Empire, turned them over to Christians to have a great building campaign all over the Roman Empire, at which time they accepted and took into those buildings the choirs of the pagan temples. And they took the music of that particular day, and instead of letting it just be a fad that passed on, they solidified it and institutionalized it for the next 1700 years. And so, you have the pagan chant still going on in the building.

In 500 A.D., a man by the name of Gregory the Great sat down and worked out a Sunday morning mass to be done at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock early in the morning. That’s when people got up. He figured that thing out, put it into a ritual, and it has never moved since then. And the Roman Catholics performed that thing every Sunday morning without variance, and it has gone on for 1700 years. You talk about boring…Isn’t that ridiculous for Roman Catholics to repeat the same old service over and over and over and never change and have no variety? Isn’t that ridiculous? Say amen. That is ridiculous.

You fell for that, buddy. John Calvin sat down in 1540 and worked out an order of worship for his church in the city of Geneva. It was adopted by Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, everybody, and for almost 500 years, we have repeated it without variance. That is even more stupid. And yet it’s considered sacrosanct.

A guy by the name of Suger, in the year about 1200, in the city of Saint Denis, France, invented the stained-glass window. It was about that same time that the steeple was put on the building. Well, what else? Are there any of them you’d like to know? Maybe I can help you out here, and then I’ll cover some others. Huh? Oh, real simple. Those buildings that Constantine built did not have any windows, or they were very small. And so, when the meeting started, two things happened. After those churches got a little older and the buildings got older and they got damp, they stank. So, whoever was in charge would get a couple of candles and go in there and light them, and you’d have some kid go through there with incense to get the stink out. It was totally innocent. And somebody decided they would do it this way. And they put little robes on the little kids and turned them into gold things, and they’d go through with this. And that’s where it came from, brother.

And you know that great big old thing you have over the altar? That started out being a bookmarker. You know what I’m talking about? You don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s a big cloth. It started out being a bookmarker. (Audience – What about the 11:00 worship service?) Well, we’ll get to that in a minute. Now, I’ll tell you where the sermon came from. The sermon is not scriptural. I’m sorry, saints, but it is not scriptural. It did not exist in the first-century church. Preaching there was organic, temporal, and so forth. All right, now, this guy John Chrysostom was probably the outstanding orator not only of his day, but with the possible exception of Diogenes, the greatest Greek Roman orator of all time. Came from the Greek side of the Roman Empire, and he got converted to Christ. And he started the tradition of delivering an oratory. It was not the first-century urgency—almost the gushing out—of the early Christians. This was in the order of Greco-Roman oratory. And there was a science that had developed. You cannot understand, in my day and years, we cannot understand how important the orator was to the Greeks and the Romans. They were the movie stars of their day. Those amphitheaters were made not only for Greek tragedy and plays to be put on, but for orators to perform—literally. A whole city would gather to hear some great orator deliver an oration. They’d go crazy. They were the pets of society. They were the movie stars.

And they had a science. They had a way of using the human voice. Diogenes, you know, with his pebbles in the mouth, until he could speak perfectly clear with a whole mouth full of pebbles. John the Golden Mouth was converted to Christ and began delivering these orations. And he was so loved…I tell you, success sells… This began to be adopted by the other Christian orators of his day. We’re talking about a period just after Constantine. You can read his messages that he delivered, filled with flowery talk. You can’t tell them from a Roman oration. You can’t tell a modern-day sermon from an oration of the Romans except that the topic is different. We use the same gesture and what has been called the same stained-glass voice.

“Oh, brethren, we have met today to consider oh, oh, oh, a faithful thing. Oh, I call your attention today to the great, the great, to the grace of humility. Oh, brothers, oh, the church lost her humility.” I’ll come back to that in a minute. The sermon is not scriptural. And the Christian community can live months without one. Amen? Amen. The Christian community—the community of the believer—ought to be able to shut down meetings and never know the difference, for at least a period of time, because it is not your meetings that make you that community. I want you to understand that I am saying to you that the community continues outside of gatherings—even without gatherings—she continues. And I’m talking about the church.

Almost all of you have probably heard my story by now about Martin Luther and his beer-drinking habits. Surely you have heard this story, but I’ll go ahead and tell the two who haven’t heard it. Martin Luther took out the place where they had the Eucharist, and he took a pulpit off of one of the pillars and stuck it up there. Pulpit came from an announcement area in the Greek pagan temples called an ambo. Constantine brought those ambos in and stuck them on pillars in the building. Luther ripped one of them off the pillar, brought it, and put it to the front, and so the pulpit was born.

Luther loved to preach, and he was in the tradition of the Greek Roman orator. Do you understand that in the universities of that day, rhetoric was taught as one of the five major subjects of learning? That all people who were educated studied rhetoric, and all men who were going into the clergy had to become masters of it? And we’re talking about John Chrysostom, Diogenes. We’re talking about a Greek-Roman pagan practice. And he took the scripture, and he preached. He didn’t like to get up early in the morning. He was a good beer-drinking German who loved to drink beer on Saturday nights and talk. So, he kept moving the 5 a.m. mass up to 6 a.m., 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m. He stayed up later, talked longer, and drank more beer. Finally, he moved it to the last hour he could and still call it morning mass. And that is how we got the 11 a.m. church service.

Now, I want you to stop and look at this. We’ve got a building that doesn’t belong to our faith. We’ve got a choir that does not belong to our faith. We have got a pulpit that does not belong to our faith. We’ve got sermons that do not belong to our faith. Sunday schools were brought into this country by Dwight L. Moody around 1860; we’ve got Sunday schools that are not inherent to our faith.

Now let me go after the two really biggie—the really biggie-biggie. But before I do, I want to throw in one more little bitty one. I want to explain to you how an orator would come out in one of those amphitheaters or one of the great city auditoriums. He would come out, and here would be all these Greeks—or maybe it would be Romans—gathered to hear this movie star. And I just want you to know, as a preacher, I’m going to tell you something that we don’t tell. Every preacher is a born actor. Let me tell you something: there is not a Hollywood movie star living but what he’d give his eye teeth to be able to walk out on a stage with a thousand paying customers and deliver a one-hour, uh, what do you call it? Soliloquy. A one-hour soliloquy. That would be the ultimate achievement of any actor. Very few are ever so honored. Well, preachers get to do it twice every Sunday.

The orators would come out and stand up on a little box, and then they would take a robe in front of the people, and they would tie the robe on like this, and then they would deliver their oration. But here’s the fascinating thing: they would take a scroll as their text, and they would say, “This evening, I am reading from Homer’s Iliad, Chapter 27, verse 13. He would read it, fold it up.” When we took the New Testament and broke it into chapters and verses, it was not for your convenience. It was in the tradition of—and for the convenience of the orator. Now put that in your plumbing, buddy. Now, isn’t this incredible? Does this not get to be absolutely awesome? What does this say to you? That you’ve been had. Alright. Praise the Lord. You know, I wish I could get every Christian in the world and tell them these things. And I think we’d get past a lot of this gimmick stuff that is for you so much. As I said, we just need a little honesty. We’re just dying from a lack of honesty here.