Yes, that's right. I accidentally said, at least on paper: Sermon - so easy a caveman could do it.
I'm an real dunce sometimes, and it doesn't do much to increase my market value if I say "oh sure, my job is so simple a caveman could do it."
This whole thing was obviously a riff on the 'popular' geico ads, and if you don't remember them, here's a quick video hit to remind you of them.
I still hold these up as the possible gold standard for television advertising, for a few reasons:
1 - they were the first tv commercials that I could remember that generated their own tv show. It was terrible, but it was there.
2 - The characters in the commercials had sufficient presence to pull off ads based on a very simple premise.
3 - People who were being advertised to actually went out of their way to watch these ads. They got quiet when these things came on, shushing the room up in a way normally expected for the show that's running, not the ad. People would go and find them on youtube (which I obviously just did).
It's really not everyday that ads come on that people will make an effort to see. Usually, it's quite the opposite, where people will very much go out of their way to avoid seeing ads. They'll flick through channels, they'll fast forward, they'll leave the room to make a snack, whatever. But it's a rare ad that makes people want to see it.
Now, fast forward mentally to evangelism, if you will. And that's a hard job. It's possibly the hardest job in the whole church, really. Or, I suppose, it's the job that the fewest people actually want to do. If you go back through the Bible, you can find all sorts of folks who were willing to be part of all sorts of jobs in the church - pastors, trustees, fellowship, teachers, workers with the gifts of administration, all that. But very few who want to be evangelists. Very very few.
A large part of that comes from what we feel about evangelism and how it is to be done. In a way, evangelism is marketing for the church, and for God. And most of us are hopelessly stuck in the past. That is, we have an idea about how to get people thinking and talking about God, and most of us know that we're horribly unsuited for that task. If you were in church on Sunday, you will recall that I talked a lot about ads the way they used to be. Here is a classic example of an ad from David Ogilvy, whose work I referenced extensively on Sunday.
As a church member said who looked at this on Sunday morning: "you've got to be joking! Who's going to read all this?"
Yes indeedy doo. This is a big ol' block of text. It's full of facts, no doubt, but who on earth has the time to get their head around this? Ultimately, it's very much like the old question of 'if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?' A falling tree obviously makes sound, but if nobody hears it, what was the purpose of that sound?
It's the same with evangelism. What we expect to happen is nothing short of miraculous, but the wrong kind of miraculous. What we expect to happen is to be able to give unto someone a Bible, and expect them to instantly convert to Christianity. We expect them to have a Bible, open it up, and read through the whole thing, believe it, and come to our church. And heck, if you look at that Ogilvy ad above, you'll notice that even the layout is the same as a Bible. Picture, headline, columns, all that. Looks just like a Bible. And what Ogilvy said about that ad is quite telling for us as Christians who seek to do evangelism.
"Factual advertising like this outsells flatulent puffery.
The more you tell, the more you sell. Notice the
very long headline - and 719 words of copy. All facts."
Sounds good in theory, but what the heck are we advertising in the church? Are we advertising a Rolls Royce or car insurance? No we are not. We're talking about a guy who had a day job, and that day job is important to remember here.
Jesus Christ is a carpenter.
Would you, if you had a carpenter who did genius work for you, recommend him to a friend by giving that friend a 2,507 page description of that carpenter's work? No, you sure wouldn't.
Even if it was true.
Even if you believe that the carpenter had done all of that.
Even if you knew all about it, almost from memory.
Ask yourself how you recommend a carpenter to someone. Or a plumber, or an electrician, or whatever. These guys, their bread and butter is earned not through big advertising firms like that of mr. Ogilvy, but through word of mouth. They earn business based on the results that they give to their clients. If you're on the computer reading this, then you've probably looked at an email, or a facebook message, or whatever, where someone has said 'hey, my whole house stinks like sewer water. Does anyone know a good plumber? Someone I can trust?" The overall success of these trades is linked to the work they do.
If you're going to recommend Jesus Christ to someone, and I honestly believe that you should, then you need to be able to do a couple of things. Firstly, you have to be able and willing to talk, unlike all the Old Testament prophets. Remember them? The ones that I talked about on Sunday, the ones who didn't want to be bothered with speaking about God and His word for mankind? The rogues' gallery includes Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jonah, and honestly everyone else whom God approached to get this done. They all said, pretty much "there must be someone else. Lord, send someone else."
But God said no. He said that these people were selected by him for a very good reason. And a large part of that reason was that God fixes broken down kitchens. Because of carpentry. And there's the second thing you need to be able to do. To be able to talk about what this carpenter has done for you. It honestly does you no good to be able to talk about what the carpenter has done in someone else's kitchen. It does you no good to be able to talk about a carpenter who you assume does great work. If you're going to be recommending someone, it's going to have to be someone who has done good work for you. Some sort of before and after.
So here we go.
Jesus, the carpenter, Jesus the savior, has done great work for me. I'm not perfect, and the house, the temple, that he's working on, it isn't perfect either. It's like an older house, in that it'll never really be 'done.' But with each successive job, it gets a little better. I eat too much, and I'm too short with my family. I tire of people far too quickly, and I'm a little bit lazy if I don't get a prodding every now and then.
That's the before picture. The after picture is far different. I believe in a God who understands the human condition. I believe in a God who has been like us, and so understands my failings. I believe in a God who had a job to do and didn't necessarily want to do it. And I believe in the work of Jesus Christ being redemptive at its core. He makes all things new. There is no such thing as too late.
That doesn't mean I'm perfect. Far from it. But it does mean that I know my faults. I have no excuses for them. They're not my parents' fault or my wife's fault or the fault of my children. They're my faults. And knowing them, I turn them over to my carpenter. I give him my busted up kitchen, my leaking foundation, and my rattling windows. And I say to him 'make these things new. Because that's what you do.'
I'm a work in progress folks, but I believe that Jesus, the carpenter, fixes what I did wrong. All the problems with my house, he fixes those up. It's what he does. He takes my weakness, and turns it into strength. Because he's the one who promised to do it, who can do it, and whose work I have seen in my life.
Looking for a carpenter? There's one I can recommend.
PJ.
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