Calvary United Methodist Church August 7, 2016 A CYCLE OF SACRAMENTS: THE TABLE OF GRACE Rev. Dr. S. Ronald Parks Children s Sermon: John 21:4-11 We are thankful to be together in this community of peace and joy. We welcome the youngest members of our community of faith to the front of the worship space that we may celebrate the gift of God s Good News. Good morning, everybody! (Morning.) Aw, that was less than enthusiastic. That s okay. Hey, at the Oak Park Dog Pound this week, big celebration, big goings on. One of the neighbor dogs had a birthday. It was not Molly. It was not it was Flint, actually. Flint is one year old today.
Duke is 16 weeks old today. And Fender, I don t know how old he is. He s just big, alright? So all the dogs got together, they all had a good time. And one of the things I noticed when they were all together is it s really easy to separate them and to divide them and I was trying to think how many ways could I think of to group these four dogs differently. Based on what can we make like little groups out of them. Ok, let s start with age, since we are talking about birthdays. For example, all the dogs except one are young, meaning that they are still puppies. Mollie, however, is 12 1/2 years old. There is no puppy left in her.
Interestingly enough, you can also group them by gender, which means are they boys or girls. Three of the dogs in the neighborhood are boy dogs or males. Mollie is a female or a girl dog. You could group by them breeds, in other words, what kind of dog are they? Three of the group are Yellow Labradors. One of them is a Standard Poodle. You can group them by size, for example.
Duke, because he is only 16 weeks old, is a little dog. But all the other dogs, they are big dogs. In fact Fender is a light weight compared to Mollie and Flint. You can group them by coat. For example, three of the four dogs are shedding dogs, which means they lose their hair, much like I did years ago. And one dog is a non-shedding dog, which means, and it s Fender, which means he has hair like your hair, which means it has to be cut like at a doggy barber. It doesn t fall out, it has to be cut and trimmed. Let s talk about the rather ouchy issue of going to the potty. Three of the four dogs are housebroken, which means they don t go to the potty in the house.
One of them almost housebroken, right? Family: where do they live and who do they live with? Interestingly enough, Mollie and Duke are brother and sister; they live with the same parents in the same house. The other two dogs are only dogs like only children. There is only one dog in each of those houses. Now, you notice the differences are often very easy to see. It is no difficulty whatsoever to pick out which dog is which, just like if you look around this room every person here is different and everybody has their own name and no two people look alike. Differences are easy to see. And when we separate things and put them into groups, we do something really interesting. Because separating things based on differences, that practice has a very particular name.
It s called segregation. Now, a little while ago I talked about This is the church, and this is the steeple, and open the door and see all the people. When you keep your hands apart, that s called segregation, right? And it s the easiest thing in the world to do, because we are really good at seeing things that are different in other people. We are really good at segregation. It s quick and it s easy, but here s the thing: it s not really what God is interested in. And there is a story in the New Testament which sort of lifts this up in a way which is kind of neat and cool and talks about differences. It is from John 21: Just after daybreak, the disciples went fishing. Jesus called to them from the shore, Did you catch anything? They all yelled back, No. So he said to them, Cast the net on the right hand side of the boat. They did as he told them. And the net was almost miraculously was quickly filled. In fact, they couldn t lift the weight of the net into the boat. So, they all jumped out of the boat, fortunately they were only about in water this deep, and they were able to drag the full net to the beach. And when they examined everything that was in the net, they counted Evie was at the early service, so anyone else want to take a guess? How many fish do you think they caught? Remember it was so big they couldn t lift the net. Go ahead. (40.) Forty. It s a good number. Anybody else want to take a shot? Go ahead. (24.) Interesting. What they actually caught was 153 different fish. That was every known kind. There was an ancient historian named Jerome who was a Roman and Jerome wrote all kinds of facts in the history books that he wrote and at the time when he wrote his books it was thought that there were 153 different kinds of fish in the ocean. So that 153 number, that s not a coincidence, right? They were amazed because the net, as filled as it was and as heavy as it was, the net held every single one of those 153 fish.
Now in that little story are God s three big lessons on something called integration. Separation is this, integration is this. This is the church, this is the steeple, open the door and see all the people, all the people brought together. That s called integration. First lesson: We must be ready to do and listening to whatever Jesus may tell us. And sometimes when God or Jesus speaks to us, it s not in words like I m saying right now. Sometimes it s a feeling that we have, or a thought that we have, that reminds us of what God and Jesus are all about. And the disciples, because he told them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, they did exactly as he told them. That s called obedience. Second thing: we must be, as brothers and sisters in Christ, fishing for every kind of fish. 153 types of fish in the ancient world, a billion types of people in the modern world, right? And we should be fishing for every single one. Every known kind of person is the person that we want to share the love of God with. Because the net, think of the church as a big net, the net is big enough to hold all of us. For example, if there were 800 people in worship this morning, we d figure out a place to put every single one of them, even if it was on the lap of the people sitting here right now, wouldn t we? That would be okay, wouldn t it? Yeah. They were all amazed because the net was big enough to hold every one.
Separating things based on differences is called Segregation. It may be easy, but it s not God s way. And it doesn t matter whether you re a dog, Or a fish, Or a human being. Look at all those different kinds of faces up there, all the different colors, the shapes of eyes, the shape of the nose, the shape of a face. Every single person is different. Putting us all together despite our differences, as we have mentioned,
Is integration, bringing all the people of God together that all the people of God may celebrate God s presence. And when that happens here in this place, we re called a congregation because the people of God have come together. God s design is diversity. God made every single one of us different for a reason so that we would all know how special we are. And God s work, the work that we have accepted together as a congregation, is that we are going to share the love of Christ not just with the people that look like us or sound like us or comes from the same place that we do, we are going to share it with everybody. Because God s hope is that every single one of us will know what it means to be loved. Because love makes everything possible. We have communion today which is in that cup and that loaf right there and I thought it might be kind of an interesting thing to give you a little reminder of the promises that we make to each other to care for and love each other.
So this is a covenant cup. It s got a rainbow on it which is a symbol of diversity, a symbol of all the different kinds of people there are and you can put something in it and drink from it, which reminds us of the cup that we will all share in communion. So you are welcome to take one of those and celebrate all that God has given to us and how different we are, how special we are and how we are all together here this morning. Thanks for sharing in our time. Message: (Video) I know you don t speak Hindi. I know you probably know nothing about the Lead India movement that began ten years ago in that country to try to unite diverse ethnic factions together into a body of citizens who could work together. But what s the message you just saw there, not knowing the language, not knowing the circumstance, what did you see? That was not a rhetorical question. People working together, right? What you saw is an act of communion. Communion. What communities do. What they share. The things that make them one. What you saw is a shared vision, a simple thing. A tree in the road, we have to move it so people can get on with their day. When one person sees it and acts, it plants the seed in the minds of others to act together in order to accomplish something. It s a shared vision. It s a small one, but it s a shared vision.
It also says that everybody, if they take just a little bit of time, they can work for the good for all. It s a selfless thing and because it s a selfless thing, it s also a sacrificial thing. You give up some of your time, you give up your nice clean dry clothes in order to step out of the bus, step out of the cab, step out from underneath the awning, to lend your strength, your hands, your back to a common goal. And it s a sacrifice, but it s for the good of all because it s a social victory that happens. When the tree is lifted and pushed out of the way, everybody gets to go on with their day. Everybody has the obstacle cleared from their path. This is an act of communion. Do you get the message? It s a pretty easy message. It transcends cultures and language. It transcends everything that we know. And that s why it is important as we come together on a Sunday morning to celebrate this act of communion we understand how powerful and how potentially and radically changing this might be not only for us, but for others. This act of communion, this cup and these loaves of bread represent a shared vision. It promotes the idea that we are all together in the Body of Christ, different, unique, priceless and somehow we give that up in order to come together to stand and to sit and to kneel and to bow at one table of grace, to celebrate one God, who loves all of us exactly the same. Why? Because He has made us in his image and God has granted to us this communion that we call the church.
And because of that, we preach and proclaim selfless values, selfless ideas that we set before not only ourselves, but before others, about things like forgiveness and grace and mercy and justice and judgement and what it means to be a disciple of our Lord. These are all things that invite us to spend ourselves, to give ourselves away and that, my friends, that s the sacrifice that we are invited to make. In the gift of love, the highest virtue that we know in our faith is the virtue of loving others, loving God with all your heart and soul, mind and strength. Love who as you love yourself? Love whoever is there, whoever your neighbor is. Remember the Good Samaritan from last week? He didn t know the stranger that he helped. All he knew is that that, in that moment, that person was a neighbor and when those things happen, when we sacrifice and give away a part of ourselves for someone else, it s a social victory. It changes the world. It changes who we are, but more importantly, it proclaims something selfless, something sacrificial, something that God has called us to become. We do not just have the message. We are the message. And when we share of this break and this cup, we confirm the communion of which we are apart, the community that God has invited us into. We confirm what Christ has done for us and we don t just do it in remembrance of him, we do it because of him. We do it through him. We do it reminded of what was in his heart when on the last night of his life, he took a loaf of bread and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples and said: Take and eat. This is my body, my life, my presence among you. It is given for you. It is broken by hatred and indifference, it is suffering, but it is salvation. Take and eat and celebrate this gift. And then after supper, he lifted the cup before them, a cup that they would all share from, in community. And he said: This is the cup of the new covenant shed for you and for many for what? For the forgiveness of sins, for the grace that pulls us back together no matter how big the chasms of indifference and misunderstanding may be between us. Do this in remembrance of Christ, but do that rejoicing that that gift to us is now our gift to the world.
You are invited to share in this sacrament because the table of grace in the United Methodist Church is an open table. All those who love Christ are welcome to come forward at the direction of the ushers. We invite you to step toward the center of the sanctuary and come forward as you are directed. We will commune the center sections first and then we will move to the side sections. There are hymns on the wall that will help us to sing together in a prayerful way and the altar rails are here if you desire to remain for a moment of prayer. God has blessed us and brought us together in community. Let us rejoice in the gift that makes us one. COMMUNION As the Body of Faith, we sing in our lifetimes the Servant Song. Let me hold the Christ light for you in the darkness of your fears. Thanks be to God for the light He has granted to us, for the community of faith in which we gather this day and for the opportunity to say Thank you to the One who has given us everything. Let us present our tithes and offerings. Benediction: We have shared in an act of communion, but there are more acts of communion before us. We go forth to promote a shared vision, a vision called the Kingdom which Christ has inaugurated. We go forth to proclaim what it means to spend one s self, to be selfless in our lives together.
To sacrifice what God has granted to us, our time, our talents, our treasures. To change the world; to make a social statement of victory in the name of Christ. We are the message and we will not be silent. Amen.