How Big is Your House? Chris Hutton Joint Service Between The First Mennonite Church and Vineland United Mennonite Church January 24, 2016 It s great to be here this morning. If you haven t met me yet, my name is Chris Hutton and as Louise mentioned, I am the pastor over at The First Mennonite Church, and please let me say on behalf of The First Mennonite Church that we are excited to be here this morning and to do church family with all of you this morning. As many of you know the connection and history between The First Mennonite and Vineland UM is a long history and a rich history. Many of us are not just church family, we re also blood relatives of one another. One of the early challenges I ve faced in coming to the Niagara Region is finding out how all of you are related. Who s related to who. Who used to be a Koop and now is a Funk. How many different Neufelds are there? One person s last name is Dyck, but they re not related to this other person named Dyck, but that person named Dyck changed their last name to Nigh and the Nighs were pastors over at this church 20-30 years ago. I feel like I need a big family tree chart in my office, like something out of the CSI shows just to keep track of it all. Well, as I m trying to figure out your families, let help you get to know me a little bit this morning, here is a picture of my family. That s my son, Xander, up in the top left flashing some sort of Michael Jackson dance move. The two girls with a cookie on their eye are my wife, Michele on the left, and one of my three sisters, Sabrina, on the right. The gentleman on the middle left trying to retrieve something from a pair of stockings is my father, John. But if you think that s odd, that s me over to the right, also trying to retrieve something from a pair of stockings. At the bottom is a picture of my father, and I don t know if you can see her, but directly behind him is my oldest sister, Skye. This doesn t give you a complete picture, but I actually have three sisters in total, and they are all blondes and redheads. I am literally the dark sheep in the family. The only one with darker hair. That s my family. Diverse and different. Not only with different appearances but also with different opinions on many things. Having fun together. Enjoying one another s company. Enjoying love and what we mean to one another. And now today, our two church families of The First Mennonite and Vineland United Mennonite are hanging out together to celebrate World Fellowship Sunday. We are here to sing and worship God together, to enjoy one another s company and to celebrate what God has done through our two families over the course of our history.
One of the things that we have done together is to sponsor a family to come from the war-torn region of Syria to Canada. And if you haven t seen any pictures of this yet or if you were unable to join us for our Deacons of Jazz fundraiser event on the 16 th of January, here are some pictures of the Dardar family who we have sponsored. This is a bunch of us at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto ready to greet the Dardars who arrived in Canada on January 6 th. We picked them up the very next day. What do you mean you can t see their names? Have we lost our family? Initially there was a little confusion as we checked in at a desk set up for refugees to find our family, but Phew, here they are. That s the chair of our Refugee Committee, Randy Pauls, signing the documentation to show that we picked up the Dardars and were about to take them to their new home. We are ready, and here they come, Thank you, Thank you, thank you, the Dardars were just so overwhelmed when they first met us. After all they had been through, and then the whirlwind of activity in them coming to Canada, the father of the family pictured here, named Bashar, just sort of blurted out a bunch of thank yous that included a moment where he shared, You don t know what this means to us. At one point, we were running past bodies and people who had been injured as we tried to get out of Syria. He was so shaken up that this story just sort of came out of him. I like this picture best, One Happy Reunion. I love the caption and the idea that this is about two families reuniting back into one family. And then lastly here we see one thankful family. So let me introduce the family to you here, that s Bashar, the father of the family in the centre. On the far left hand side is Bashar s wife, Wafaa. Over on the far right-hand side is Bashar s mother, Afifa. Bashar is holding their daughter, Hazar, she s age 2. And then on either side of him are their sons, that s Hisham on the left, and Nizar on the right. Bashar used to work in some sort of interior design work and construction. Wafaa is a very generous host if you ever visit with them. She is always ready with snacks and coffee or tea. Afifa is a little uncertain about some of the rural terrain around the Lincoln area, but she is slowly adjusting to life in Canada. Nizar and Hisham love the lego and various toys that they ve received in coming to Canada, and they are so helpful around the house. Hazar loves to play games and is right in that two-yearold stage of finding new and creative ways to get into trouble. 3 weeks ago, the Dardar family were living in a storage shed in and around the refugee camps in Lebanon. No electricity and no running water. And think about
that for a minute. Try to imagine your own family or your own situation, try to imagine yourself living in a cold storage shed with none of the amenities that we take for granted living here in Canada. Now, they live in a 3-bedroom apartment. They have warm clothing. They have food to eat. There s no one extorting them or pressuring them into paying something so that they can get what they need to survive (something that unfortunately often takes place in refugee camps). They don t have to step outside and worry that a bomb will hit their home, or that soldiers will roll into town and possibly cause trouble. This family now has a fresh new start in our country. And you have been a part of that. Your gift as a church combined with ours will give this family a fresh new start. Our family as both The First Mennonite Church and as Vineland United Mennonite Church together have brought this family here. And this is why that one slide says a happy reunion. Now we are all family together. We are in the business of family reunions. We are in the business of peacemaking and bringing people back into the family that God created all of us for. Paul puts it beautifully in 2 Corinthians. He calls us agents of God s ministry of reconciliation. Just as God reconciled us to himself through His Son, Jesus, now we too are called to heal, restore, and reconcile relationships with one another and with God. Jesus says that we are like a light on a hill that lives out the reality of the family of God for others to see. But what does that family look like? In the Old Testament and in the history of Israel, the family unit is the basic building block of life as a community and as a society. The Old Testament has tons of stories about families. Amazing stories of families reconciling and accomplishing things together. Not-so-good stories of highly dysfunctional families. Much of the tradition and law that we read about in the Old Testament section of the Bible revolves around family concerns. Honor your father and your mother. Make this kind of burnt offering at the right time after your child is born. Don t have certain sorts of relationships with particular family members. Jesus comes along and re-defines what it means to be family. He blows open the doors on what it means to be family. Now, your family is not just the people who you were born into a family relationship with. Now, your family includes people who you follow Jesus with. The people who gather around and want to learn more about Jesus.
The people who are here with you today in church, these are your brothers and sisters as well now. Jesus says in Mark 3: 33-35 Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Then he looked at those around him and said, Look, these are my mother and brothers. Anyone who does God s will is my brother and sister and mother. The family of God is now a worldwide family. It s not just restricted to one nationality, one language, or one culture. In the passage that we read from Isaiah, the prophet predicts a day when the Lord will say, my blessings are for Gentiles too [or people outside of the Jewish family] when they commit themselves to the Lord. Do not let them think that I consider them second-class citizens. Later on, he will say, I will bring them all to my holy mountain of Jerusalem and will fill them with joy in my house of prayer. I will accept their burnt offerings and sacrifices, because my Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations. For the Sovereign Lord, who brings back the outcasts of Israel, says: I will bring others too, beside my people Israel. The apostle Paul will later say to the churches in Galatia, you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female you are one in Christ Jesus. Now, I should say something and I should recognize that as we talk about family, not all of us have had a great experience of family. Some of us have experienced deep pain and deep suffering in our families. This is a reality. As much as we have had relatives who showed us great and deep love. We have also had family members who have shown us great pain and great hurt. And while we re at it this morning, let s be even more honest, some of us have not had a great experience of family in church. Some of us have been hurt by people who were supposed to be our church family. And I am sorry if that is you this morning. I too have experienced this in my own family, and I ve experienced it in church family before too. So as I talk about what it means to be the family of God, what does God intend that family to look like? What are the markers of love that we are called to express as opposed to the things that we can do to hurt? How can we redeem love in the families we are born into, in our church families, and in our family as a world together? Gal. 6: 1-10 advises us to share each other s troubles and problems Whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone, especially to our Christian brothers and sisters. 1 Peter 3: 8-9 says that we should be of one mind, full of sympathy towards one another, loving one another with tender hearts and humble minds
In the first of his letters, the apostle John will say we ought to give up our lives for one another, if each of us has enough to live well, we should help out a brother or a sister in need. Jesus himself will say that we are to serve one another. The one image that he uses is foot-washing. Jesus washes the feet of his followers to model how each of us is not to lord over one another, but to serve one another. And most of all, we are called to extend the exact same grace and forgiveness that God extended to us when he gave his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Sharing our troubles and problems. Doing good to everyone. Expressing sympathy to one another. Loving each other with tender hearts and humble minds. Sacrificing for one another. Helping each other out. Serving one another. Being radically gracious and forgiving with one another. These are the markers of the family of God. Who do you need to serve better? Who do you need to do good to? What do you need to drop so that you can look after your family? In what relationship do you need to be a tender heart and a humble mind? Who do you need to extend grace and forgiveness towards? Who is God calling you to make peace with and bring back into family? In the passage that we read from John, Jesus says that in his Father s house, there are many rooms. What does the apostle Paul say is the house of God, or the Temple of God? It s us! We are the place where God resides now. Not in a Temple or in a building, but in us as a people, as his kids. So how big is your house? How big is your heart? There s a lot of people who need those rooms. If you ve been following in the news, with the latest Syrian refugees coming to Canada, many of them are backlogged to find homes. They re staying in hotels, some for weeks at a time, because there s no place yet for them to go to and make a home. Is there something more we can do for them? You know, back when we initially planned on bringing the Dardars to Canada, we conservatively thought we might be able to put together $40,000 to this. Since then, the generosity and the compassion for people to Syrian refugees has raised more than that. And it s as if God was saying to us, guys, my house is bigger than that. Let me show you what we can really do. And so now we find ourselves asking the question, what does God need from us next?
Because there are a lot of people, like the Dardars, who are in need, who are suffering, who are lonely, and who need a family to welcome them home.