September 2, 2007 Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time Psalm 112 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 A Sacrifice of Praise Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. Hebrews 13:16 There are times when the Spirit of God whispers to me in the still small voice of the heart. Last week was not one of those times. Last week the Holy Spirit hit me like a lightening bolt. It felt like the proverbial ton of bricks falling on my head; the Word of God came through clear and strong as I was talking with a friend who lives out of town. He doesn t know Sarasota much at all. He asked quite innocently, Are there other Presbyterian Churches in town? Yes, I said, there are 9 others to be exact -- good, strong churches of our brand of Christianity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) in our immediate area and First Presbyterian had a hand in beginning 8 of them. My friend was bamboozled. Eight churches? You ve started 8 churches -- in this small town? Well not me personally, most of this happened before I was born. Yes, eight, and I can name them for you. These are in geographic order going North to South they are: Peace, Lakewood Ranch Christ, Longboat Key Whitfield Northminster Siesta Key Chapel Bee Ridge Pine Shores Covenant
2 I wish that I could say that we helped to found the Church of the Palms but we didn t. Back then we were a part of two separate denominations, which reunited in 1983. Last week was not obviously the first time I d thought of this. I ve known about your spectacular history of church planting for a long time. Mission work has characterized this congregation since its birth 101 years ago. I ve known that, and I ve bragged shamelessly about it. But it didn t really hit me until last week. We have 8 children! No wonder we are so tired -- and blessed. Some of you were there. Bob and Oneeta Getman along with their young daughter Joy (now Prible) were part of the start up of Northminster Presbyterian Church. Azalea Oberg and the Bistham family went to Pine Shores. Janet Barr and her family went to Whitfield and stayed 40 years. Al McFayden and his father and David Kennedy, Caroline s father also went to Whitfield. These folks did the same thing that the Stikeleathers, the Crenetis, the Freuhs, the Brockmans and others are doing out in Lakewood Ranch and Ray and Pat Woody have done at Christ, Longboat Key. For more than 100 years we ve been a church on the move branching out, reaching out. Since my little epiphany last week, I ve spent some serious time wondering what if things had been different? What if the members of this congregation had not been willing to share what they had, to make that sacrifice of praise to the Lord to start new churches? What if our ancestors and we decided to keep everything and everybody here to build up our resources, human and otherwise? What would it be like? For one thing it would be crowded (which might be nice this time of year!). Pat Huck and I added up the current membership of all those churches I just named, including ours. The total comes to 3,252. Those are just the numbers of members they have now. Tens of thousands of faithful people have worshiped and served here over the past 100 years here in this congregation and in the churches we ve helped to found. It s not been easy. Some of you heard Tom Stikeleather, a member of our congregation and a church planter out in Lakewood Ranch, speak a few weeks ago about some of the obstacles our group is facing out east including the prohibitively high cost of the land. Peace Presbyterian, our youngest daughter congregation, needs to purchase that land. And God will make a way. God always makes a way. This morning s reading from Hebrews looks back to a period of great missionary activity and enormous risk. The writer of Hebrews reminds the believers to: Remember those who are in prison And those who are being tortured
3 He or she is talking about people they all knew. In the early days of the church believers were regularly jailed, tortured and killed for their faith. Terrors strained many marriages. At the very least those who publicly confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior could expect ridicule, loss of jobs and status. I m certain you know that in some parts of the world that kind of persecution is still going on today. In the face of such stress church communities naturally become self-protective. Strangers are suspect. It is important to be careful. The writer wants believers to take good care of each other. This might seem obvious, but it s not. Isn t it always most difficult to love those who are closest to us? Let mutual love continue might also be rendered Let your love for the brothers and sisters abide. The important word here is meno -- which means continue, remain or abide. It s the same word that Jesus used when he told his disciples: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish. i Abide in the love of those closest to you it is the foundation, the basis of all other love. You know the word for it, this love of brothers and sisters it s philadelphia. The city takes its name from this Greek word. What s so interesting to me is the contrast the writer sets up here in these two verses, first calling us to philadelphia the love of sisters and brothers, and then to philoxenia, Do you know the word xenophobia? It means fear of strangers. Well this is philoxenia love for strangers or the outsiders. So the NRSV translation here is not the greatest. Do not neglect to show hospitality is not nearly strong enough. Literally, the Greek means Do not forget to love the stranger for in so doing some have entertained angels. Everybody hearing this advice would remember the story of the angels who came to Abraham and Sarah by the oaks at Mamre. Looking for all the world like traveling salesmen, they instead sold the old couple on the Good News that they would have a son though they were old, and would become against all the odds the parents of a people who would bless the whole earth. ii Hebrews is packed with beautiful poetry and excellent advice, down to earth and practical: -- Stay free of the love of money. (And you thought that was just a modern problem.) -- Remember to pray for your leaders. (Thank you for that.) Then the lectionary skips down to the end of the paragraph, to the summary. All this is called a sacrifice of praise to God the fruit of the lips of those who confess Christ s name. In those early days of the Christian church it was precisely that kind of sacrificial sharing that made the difference. So if you want to know what will make the church grow listen carefully. This is it. Listen to Luke s famous lines from the second chapter of Acts:
4 Those who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to any who had need as they spent time together in the temple And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. iii This is how the Christian church grew in beginning against all the odds. That little band of believers very quickly became a force that even the very power of the Roman Empire could not contain! New Testament Scholar John Dominic Crossan suggests that this is why the first Christians impacted the world the way they did. It s all very well, he said, to share the bodily resurrection of Jesus but the Greco-Roman knew plenty of stories of gods and demi-gods who could do marvelous feats. The difference was that Jesus claimed that God s reign of justice and radical community was already breaking into this world. The early church showed that in its sharing. iv This is how those first Christians turned the world upside down. Janet Noble Richardson was the sister of our own Tom Noble and a fine Presbyterian pastor. She told me about a man named Joseph Ton who up until 1981 was the pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Oradea, Rumania when the Rumanian government shut it down in 1981. Many years before that Ton had fled his country to save his own life because so many Christians were being persecuted. Then one night 1972 he was in a Bible study group at Oxford. The passage that night was from the 10 th chapter of Matthew when Jesus tells his disciples: See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves. v Joseph understood that God was calling him to go back Romania. This time he didn t hide; he spoke boldly and as a result he was harassed and arrested. One day during an interrogation an officer threatened to kill him. Joseph was calm in his answer: "Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. Sir, you know my sermons are now on recordings spread all over the country. If you kill me, I will be sprinkling them with my blood. Whoever listens to them after that will say, I d better listen to that man. He believed in this Jesus enough to die for him. So, go on and kill me. The officer couldn t do that, so he let him go. Ton said:
5 "For years I was a Christian who was cautious because I wanted to survive. Now I could do whatever I wanted in Rumania. For years I wanted to save my life, and I was losing it. Now that I was willing to lose it, I was winning it." vi Funny how that works. You and I may never be called on to make that kind of a sacrifice for our faith, but we can be aware of and pray for those who are. And we can look for the opportunity to practice the kind of faith that the writer of Hebrews commends to us. Loving our brothers and sisters Welcoming strangers Visiting those who are in prison Advocating for ones who are tortured and abused Strengthening marriages Avoiding the love of money and being content with what we have Supporting and encouraging those who speak the word to us. All these add up to what the Hebrew writer calls a sacrifice of praise that is pleasing to God. Maybe you have offered more of a sacrifice than you think. You didn t have to start all those new churches. You could have kept everyone right here. You could have let them help you pay the bills and serve the poor and prepare the communion and teach the children. You didn t do that. You sent them out to do a new thing on Christ s behalf. You sent out because it was the faithful thing, because the Lord told you to: Go into all the world [to Lakewood Ranch and Siesta Key and Whitfield] to make disciples baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all that I have commanded of you. And it is a sacrifice of praise, pleasing to God. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dr. Susan F. DeWyngaert First Presbyterian Church Sarasota, Florida i John 15:7 ii Genesis 18:1-15 iii Acts 2:44-47 iv John Dominic Crossan, Excavating Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) 306-308 in a sermon Dining with Jesus by Pamela Byers preached at Old First Presbyterian Church, San Francisco,August 29, 2004 v Matthew 10:16 vi Joseph Ton by Janet Noble Richardson from a sermon preached at St. Timothy Presbyterian Church, Livonia, MI, August 30, 1998.