Community Church Sermons
September 4, 2005
Romans 13:8-14
One of my most prized possessions is a picture of the Last Supper painted by Polish artist Bohdan Piasecki. At first glance, you might mistake this painting for DaVinci’s famous rendering of the last meal Jesus shared with the disciples, but closer examination reveals a very important difference.
In Piasecki’s painting of the Last Supper, there are women and children along with Jesus and the disciples!
Some say Piasecki’s painting is more accurate than DaVinci’s. I agree. The Passover meal, which is what the Last Supper was, is a family event. It includes fathers AND mothers, brothers AND sisters, sons AND daughters. It even welcomes strangers just passing through town! The idea that the Last Supper was for “boys only” is just not right.
It is a family meal!
And, of course, when Christians gather around the Lord’s Table in worship services today, everyone is welcome. Around this supper table, God gathers His family – male and female, young and old, single and married, black, white, yellow, red.
Think about it for a minute! At the very center of our
faith is a liturgy that reminds us that we are a family – the family of God.
And today, I just want to say to you, “Welcome to the family!”
When I was in Seminary, one of our professors liked to provoke us with the question, “Can you be a Christian all by yourself?” And we brash young Seminarians, knowing everything about everything already, boldly answered that OF COURSE you can be a Christian by yourself. Many of us had come to Christ in very personal and private ways. We knew for a fact that faith in Christ was something held in the heart and did not depend on others. Yes, you CAN be a Christian all by yourself, we replied.
And then our professor asked us what the Great Commandment was. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And then he asked what Jesus’ new commandment was, the mandate handed out at the Last Supper, and we answered, “Love one another as I have loved you.”
And then he asked us, “Which of these can you do by yourself?”
And we knew he had us! You can BELIEVE Christian things all by yourself, but you cannot LIVE the Christian Faith alone.
Love one another. Forgive one another. Encourage one another. Bear each other’s burdens. Forbear one another. Pray for each other. Be patient with each other…
The Bible is full of “one another’s”!
The Christian Faith is built on the premise that God created human beings to live in COMMUNITY. We are a family – the daughters and sons of the living God – sisters and brothers all! And God has a reason for placing us in a family. All you have to do is look over to the Gulf Coast today to see why.
You know, we Americans love to think of ourselves as rugged individualists who don’t need anyone else. Many of us live under the false impression that we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and that we can do anything we want if we just put our minds to it. And that illusion becomes our reality…until something like Hurricane Katrina hits.
And then, in an instant of time, everything is gone – your home, your job, your freedom, your security, your fresh water, your food…maybe even your loved ones. The insulin your diabetes requires becomes useless because you have no electricity to run a refrigerator to keep it cool. The oxygen you need to help you get through your Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease runs out and you are left to breathe only the 90-degree heat and humidity. There is no private place to go to the bathroom, no shade to hide from the sun, no way to get out of an attic with floodwater up to your neck and the bodies of the dead floating nearby.
In the twinkling of an eye, you are unable to care for yourself.
Only if others come to your aid will you get through.
This is one of the reasons God created us to live as a family - we NEED each other to get through the hard times of life. And life is much more fragile than we think. Everything can change in a heartbeat – with a doctor’s diagnosis, a thoughtless decision, a terrorist attack, a careless mistake, a natural disaster, a tiny little blood clot.
And something else that has hit me hard in the aftermath of the tragedy of Katrina. Isn’t it frightening to realize that a mere few hours is all that separates us from living ordered lives of civility and living in total anarchy where the law of the wilderness is the only law that counts? Gangs roam freely about, looting, raping, killing, even shooting at rescue workers. And all that right here in America, of all places!
That’s another reason God created us to live as a family – to protect each other from the forces of evil.
It was no mere coincidence that Jesus gathered the men and women and children who followed him around a table to share the Passover meal. They were about to experience a great tragedy of their own. That very night, Jesus would be betrayed and the next day killed on a cross. How could they possibly go on?
Only by becoming a family – taking care of each other, protecting each other from evil, loving each other, praying with each other, supporting each other, encouraging each other.
And so Jesus invited them to a family supper, and told them to take care of each other. “Love one another as I have loved you.” And that is what it means to be a church. A church is a living expression of the family of God.
Our Scripture text from Romans tells us to have no debt, but the continuing debt to love one another. Every religious law you can think of – from the 10 commandments of Judaism, to the 5 pillars of Islam, to the 12 principles of Buddhism, to all the things you learned in Kindergarten – are summed up and fulfilled in the one rule to love your neighbor as yourself.
We are called to community – to take our place in the family of God.
And in this family, each of us has responsibilities.
First of all, a responsibility to be welcoming.
The first little church I served fancied themselves as a friendly, welcoming church. And they were – to each other! If you had been a member of that church for the past two hundred and fifty years, and your parents had been members before that, you were IN! When the church gathered on Sunday mornings, the members would warmly greet each other and check on how things were going. How is your Aunt Mabel doing after her surgery? How’s that new little grandbaby of yours? I’ll be praying for you when you have your surgery next week. They truly cared for each other.
But they didn’t quite know how to respond to newcomers. Do YOU know?
Well, by remembering what it’s like to BE a newcomer!
One of the hardest things in life is to be the stranger in the midst of a group of people who are already friends. You feel self-conscious, as if you’re intruding, like you don’t belong. And one of the most painful human experiences in all of life is the experience of feeling like you don’t belong.
Our Christian Faith carries within it a strong mandate to welcome strangers. So important is it to God that the Torah requires strangers to be invited into the Passover meal. The New Testament tells us to be sure to be welcoming of others because sometimes we entertain angels without knowing it!
So one of the first responsibilities you must take upon yourself as part of our church family is the personal duty to be welcoming. Now this doesn’t only apply to visitors. It also includes children. How can I make children feel welcome here? And it includes people with disabilities and handicaps. How can we make people who are wheelchair bound feel as though they belong? How do we welcome those who come to church struggling with doubt?
One of the jobs every member of the family has is to help people gain a sense of BELONGING. That’s how Jesus helped people. First, he WELCOMED them. And in the safety of that relationship, they became free to grow.
A second responsibility in our church family is to learn about each other.
One of our members was telling me about a friend of theirs who died recently. She had a tough life. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother abandoned the family, leaving her to take care of the other children. Life was always a struggle. Her brother died of AIDS. Finally, she came down with cancer and died herself.
This member also told me that, at one time, she came to church here. I got to wondering, “All the while she sat among us, did anyone know about the pain of her life?” For that matter, what do any of us know about the person sitting just in front of us? Or the person sitting in the choir? Or even a pastor?
Jesus took great pains to know his disciples. He knew their names, their family members, their fears, their hopes, their illnesses, their doubts. A family cannot be a family without the members taking an interest in each other. Only by knowing what our lives are about can we provide love that makes a difference.
To welcome…to know…and to share our experiences of God.
Just last night, I received an email from a church member, telling me about a friend who has been hit with two very difficult illnesses in her family. This member said that she’d been talking with another friend, and they thought it might be helpful to many of us if we had a discussion group on the topic of “Why bad things happen to good people.” What she was suggesting is important – it is that we members of this family can help each other discover where God is in the midst of life’s struggles.
God is the gift we have to share with one another!
I’m glad I’m part of an intrepid foursome of golfers who get out and tear up the golf course most Monday mornings. And I do mean “tear up.” I’m glad to be a part of all sorts of groups with whom I can share the many joys of life.
But you and I need more than social interaction.
We need spiritual nurture. We need to be able to talk with each other about God, and how God makes a difference in our lives.
There is a wonderful article in the most recent edition of The Christian Century. It is about a major landmark study of the religious beliefs of teenagers. What the study uncovered about what young people believe can be summed up this way: (1) a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth; (2) God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; (3) the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself; (4) God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem; and (5) good people go to heaven when they die.
What troubles me about these attitudes is how they place God way “out there” – beyond our world and our lives. And the focus of faith – as revealed in the study – is ME – ME – ME. There is no love of neighbor here, no call to self-sacrifice, no commitment to social justice.
Making ME happy is what it’s all about!
What would the world be like if everyone built their lives on such beliefs?
I dare say that’s the kind of faith that grows when people of true faith do not openly share about their own experiences of God. We allow the values of our kids to be shaped by the culture, and we deprive them of a living relationship with a God who makes a difference in peoples’ lives as well as in the world.
And it’s not just kids who need to know this God. It’s ALL of us! Right here in this church family, there are people who know first hand how God helped them through the loss of a loved one – the experience of cancer – the fact of their own death. Right here there are people who God has shown how to forgive and to mend broken relationships. Right here there are people who have stood tall with God in the face of racism and other forms of oppression and have witnessed God’s power to set people free. Right here there are people who found acceptance with God when they were not accepted by anyone else.
And we need to tell the story of God and God’s amazing redemptive love! We need to tell the family story!
Can our church become such a family? Well, in many ways, we already are. But – like all families - we need to grow and become more mature in our love for one another and our faithfulness to God.
And that depends on you. And me.
I want to invite you to be loved and to be loving in this family of God! As we prepare to come to the supper table, welcome to the family!