When Heaven Came to Us Colossians 2:6-12, 16-3:4

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1 When Heaven Came to Us Colossians 2:6-12, 16-3:4 I don t like religion. Religion and its inherent regulations and rules often give the church of Jesus Christ a bad name. I was talking with a mother of a teen age girl once. The girl attended church with great regularity. She was in the youth group and active in the church. She helped with the little children during vacation Bible school; a good girl a Christian. But the mother was terribly upset. This young Christian had developed more than her mind a bit earlier than most and she wore particularly short skirts and she wore them to church. It s just not right to dress like that in church! the mother told me. It s a disgrace. She said to, You need to tell her to dress in an appropriate way. What s a preacher going to say? The facts are really pretty clear. The young girl, turning woman, was dressing in a way a bit more fitting for someone hanging out on a street corner practicing the world s second oldest profession than a youth liturgist. But the other fact was that she was practicing her faith and living it in discernable ways. For her trusting in Jesus was a way of life, an important way of life; being a Christian mattered. I grew up in a time when little boys going to church on Sunday morning always wore a coat and tie and little girls always wore dresses and often times white glove. I loved that time I really liked to put on my Sunday best and strut down to Westminster Presbyterian Church. But those times are not these times and they will never be again. And for us to put up some sort of barrier to attendance based on what you wear to church is antithetical to evangelism. Let me say it in plain English it does not matter what you wear to church - well within reason. But I had dilemma on my hands an upset Mom and a dedicated Christian girl. I sided with the girl. At the end of the day, I do not intend to run people out of the church because of rules that no longer apply. I would rather have that young girl practicing her faith in a church community than for her to walk away because we put up rules and barriers. Hear me carefully; appropriate attire is appreciated but not an absolute. Paul proofread. Dick Powell

2 was facing similar circumstance. The religious elite were putting regulations on the practicing Christians and the regulations were incongruous with the propagation of the good news of the Gospel. Paul knew that burdensome unnecessary regulations would kill the church. After all, hadn t Israel been crushed by adhering to the letter while ignoring the intent of the Law? Love justice, do mercy, walk humbly with your God. That s what the Lord God wanted, not perfectly performed sacrifices with priest adorned with splendid vestments. God wanted heaven on earth. Jesus said as much when he taught us to pray the Lord s Prayer. It s right there thy kingdom come, thy will be don on earth as it is in heaven. This was not a pie in the sky bye and bye wish this is what Jesus wanted for earth to be just like heaven. And he knew it could be so, because it has been so. The Lord God walk with us in the Garden. Sadly, the fact is we do a better job of making the earth look more like hell than heaven. This past week a man was sentenced to life in prison for holding and selling a 14 year old girl as a sex slave he is not singular. On this cold night to come over 4,000 people will have no place to lay their head in San Antonio. Tomorrow more people will hear the bad news we are reorganizing and your position is being eliminated, when just the week before the CEO has said, Our people are our most important asset. A lie is a lie. Sin is rampant and we don t have time to worry about dress codes and other regulations in the church. Jesus said, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He was serious and he knew the truth it is possible and we are called to bring in the kingdom. Jesus left, the Holy Spirit came we have work to do. In her wonderful and compelling book, Take This Bread, Sara Miles wrote about her unlikely conversion to Christianity: One early, cloudy morning when she was forty-six, she walked into a church; St. Gregory s Episcopal in San Francisco, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans except that up until that moment she d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was her first communion. It changed everything. proofread. Dick Powell

3 Writing in the first person she said, Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all, but actual food indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people. And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I'd experienced. I started a food pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where I'd first received the body of Christ. I organized new pantries all over my city to provide hundreds and hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week. Without committees or meetings or even an official telephone number, I recruited scores of volunteers and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. My new vocation didn't turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays, folding my hands in the pews and declaring myself 'saved.' Nor did my volunteer church work mean talking kindly to poor folks and handing them the occasional sandwich from a sanctified distance. I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects, sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, take the firing pin out of a battered woman's.357 Magnum, then stick the gun in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car. I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends, and the prejudices and traditions of my new-found church. I learned about the great American scandal of the politics of food, the economy of hunger, and the rules of money. I met thieves, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters and bishops, all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I thought of as my 'community' in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary. Sara Miles story is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert: a bluestate, secular intellectual;, a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism. She is not the person her reporter colleagues ever expected to see exchanging blessings with street-corner evangelists. She s hardly the person George Bush had in mind to be running a 'faith-based charity.' Her own family never imagined that she d wind up preaching the Word of God and serving communion to a hymn-singing flock. proofread. Dick Powell

4 But as well as an intimate memoir of personal conversion at a moment when religion worldwide is rife with fundamentalism and exclusionary ideological crusades, she stumbled into a radically inclusive faith centered on sacraments and action. What she found wasn't about angels, or going to church, or trying to be 'good' in a pious, idealized way. It wasn't about arguing a doctrine the Virgin birth, predestination, the sinfulness of homosexuality and divorce or pledging blind allegiance to a denomination. She was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. She found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine poured out freely, shared by all. She discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the poor, the despised and the outcasts are honored. And so she became a Christian, claiming a faith that many of her fellow believers want to exclude her from; following a God which her unbelieving friends see as archaic superstition. At a time when Christianity in America is popularly represented by ecstatic teen crusaders in suburban megachurches, slick preachers proclaiming the 'gospel' of prosperity, and shrewd political organizers who rail against (well everything), it's crucial to understand what faith actually means in the lives of people very different from one another. Why would any thinking person become a Christian? How can anyone reconcile the hateful politics of much contemporary Christianity with Jesus' imperative to love? What are the deepest ideas of this contested religion, and what do they mean in real life? Sara Miles writes passionately and lives intentionally the life that Christ called her to live. She did not choose it, Christ chose her for it; and in so doing changed one life that is transforming the world around her. Christ compels us to love not just those who live and dress and know the right words to say in the pews, but to love everyone. Christ calls for us to tear down the barriers that separate us from the kingdom of God; the ones we erect with regulations. I use to sing a song in Sunday school, Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white they are all precious in his sight, Jesus love the children of the world. The question before us is, do we? Do we truly love children and people different from us? In the movie, Gandhi, there is a particularly poignant scene toward the end. The Hindus and Muslims are killing each other, again. Gandhi is fasting in an attempt to bring an end to the violence. A Hindu man approaches and confesses to Gandhi that they, meaning the Muslims, had killed his son. So he killed some Muslim boys; what is he to do? proofread. Dick Powell

5 Gandhi says to him find a little boy about the same age as that little boy. Find one whose parents are dead and raise that little boy; but the little boy must be a Muslim. Read the news just listen in the name of God, people are killing each other. In the name of God, hate is spewing out on the internet with a velocity here to fore unknown. Yet ours is a faith based on the person of Jesus. Ours is an active faith, a world changing faith. Jesus was born and grew up to bear a message of reconciling love. Jesus reconciling love is a love of action this love has feet and hands; feet and hands that are attached to your bodies sitting in pews like these. Your feet and hands are the tools of God s demonstrative love; the love that feeds, welcomes, heals, shelters and loves the unlovable for they are all precious in his sight. Our denomination has a long tradition of reaching out and lifting up those who are in need. The long-standing work we do with racial-ethnic educational institutions is demonstrative of the love that Jesus spoke about. When we take the time and provide the resources to break the yoke of poverty by educating a child, we are doing kingdom work. The stuff Jesus preached about. This Christmas we will spend a lot of money on a lot of stuff most of which is elective not required. I am not against that. It s not in and of itself a bad thing, so don t feel bad about it. But take a moment and pick up that Joy Gift envelope in your pew and be generous in your giving your generosity will accomplish kingdom work with those who are precious in his sight. Amen. proofread. Dick Powell