Calvary United Methodist Church March 13, 2016 DeThink Church Rev. Dr. S. Ronald Parks Children s Sermon: Luke 10:1-12 It is a joy for the church to gather in this time and place. We welcome the children to the front of this worship space to celebrate all of God s good gifts. I know it seems like a long, long time ago, but on Christmas we started a particular mission project and I wanted to kind of just remind us what that project was. On Christmas Eve we read a book called The Invisible Thread and the point of The Invisible Thread was to remind us how love connects us to one another. So we talked about the invisible threat of God s love that runs from The manger of Bethlehem all the way through Harrisburg to A place called Jinotega, Nicaragua.
And we talked about our desire to be in ministry to a group of kids at the Children of Destiny Orphanage down in Jinotega. These are about 45 kids who are in grades 6 through 12. What we wanted to do was to share God s love with them by Building some additional housing for the kids. And, as we talked about Christmas Eve and I ve talked about since, there are really two ways that we can make that happen, two things that we are currently doing. The first is represented by this little bank right here. This is called a love collection, because when you get money together you are collecting for others. So, since Christmas Eve people have been taking these little banks home and the hope is that people will bring them back on Easter Sunday and that once all the money is counted we ll have about $5000 to add to the $20,000 that the mission committee has already set aside in order to go to Jinotega, Nicaragua and build those housing units.
So, on Easter we are going to have these baskets up front and people are going to get to bring their little houses back. That s the love collection. But there is also a love connection that we ve been talking about. We are going to actually send a team of people from our congregation there in August of this year. We need 16 volunteers age 16 and up. So far 13 of the 16 slots are filled, which means we still have room for a couple of more people. Now, the really great thing is that the first meeting for that trip is today at 12:15 down in room 121, so if you have any interest or if you are thinking you might want to go, there is still time. Somebody asked me not too long ago whose idea it is to go to a distant place To build rooms at an orphanage for Kids that we don t know. After all, there are always people around us that are in need and we know that that s true. The reason that we have a food pantry here is for exactly that reason. We know some of our neighbors are in need. But why would we go to a distant place to build housing for kids we don t know?
Well, it s really God s idea. And this is how that idea was kind of communicated to us and to the world. It is from Luke in the 10 th chapter: Jesus picked 70 apostles. Do you know what an apostle is? We ll talk about that in just a minute. He sent them in pairs. You know what a pair is, don t you? Like you are wearing a pair of shoes? How many are in a pair? Two, right? Right foot, left foot, two. He sent them in pairs, in groups of two. 70 divided by 2 is (35) Listen to you guys showing off out there! He sent them in pairs everywhere that he wanted to go. Everywhere! Have you ever been everywhere? That s a lot of places, right? And he gave them these instructions: Travel light. Take only the bare essentials. In other words, that s a carry-on bag. Move fast. Don t get distracted. Be careful. Because you re like a lamb in a wolf pack. Stay with anyone who opens their door to you. There were no hotels around in Jesus day. And be gracious guests. Don t wear out your welcome. Heal anyone who is sick. Tell them God is right here in front of them! That s a pretty bold statement. Because when they listen to you, They re listening to me. Wow! That s a really interesting idea that when we talk in God s name about God s love, it s actually as though people were listening to God. So, let s kind of back up and break this down a bit. Jesus sent 70 apostles in pairs. An apostle is a very special kind of person.
It s a messenger. It s taken from a really old word, apostolos, and it means a messenger who is sent to deliver the news. So you and I are apostles when we take the message of God s love to other people. Where did he send 70 apostles? He sent them all over the place. Everywhere he wanted to go. Now, why did Jesus send apostles instead of going there himself? Because he is only one person and all the rest of us, we have the same responsibilities that he did. Why did he send the 70 apostles everywhere? It s pretty simple. He sent them to teach God s word. We all know the Bible as God s word, but God s word is also the word of love and there are many words that can convey that. He sent them to show people how to live God s way; how to treat each other, how to love together in community. He sent them to share God s gifts, to give to others the blessings that God had entrusted to each of them.
And he sent them to do God s work. Whenever you do anything to help somebody, you re doing God s work. And he sent them to do God s will, because God has called us together and brought us together into being in order that we may share His love with others. In other words, he sent them to be him, which is a kind of interesting thing In every time and place! You know, that s exactly the definition of the church: The people of God bringing Christ to everybody in every time and place. It was all God s idea. It wasn t our idea and this place, this congregation, this isn t our idea either. It s really God s idea that we ve taken seriously and we have created this place and are in fellowship with each other because of it. And here s the one simple sentence that s all you need to know about what it means to be sitting here this morning: For God so loved the world who is in the world? Is it a couple of people? A lot of people? Every-people! God so loved the world that he gave Us his Son so that all who follow him can
Be sent out to be him and to bring live to all people. It s pretty simple stuff. We go in God s name to be Christ to others. Now, I thought it might be kind of fun to sort of work through that because we have to do this everywhere. It s not just here that we are the church; we re the church everywhere. So, here s what we are going to do. It s kind of a little experiment, but you probably will have some fun. In six big garbage bags in the front of each section of the church are these balls. So, what I want you to do is kind of go down there and grab some of them and hand them to the closest person that you can find. Just grab one and hand one to everybody that you can find, until you run out. Go fast! Go quick! Hand them away! Give them to everybody out that way. Now, the operative word here was hand. Hand them! Just give them to anybody, anywhere. Now, everybody stand up. There is always this confusion in the church about what is mission and what is ministry. This is ministry: I want you to hand those balls to everyone around you, in other words, you hand it off, they hand it off and when you ve had one in your hands, sit down. This is called ministry: when we care for each other and hand the love of Christ to each other. Go! As soon as you ve held the ball, you can sit down. Are we good? Ok. Now, here s the interesting thing what are you guys doing standing have a seat, you re good. Now, the really cool thing about ministry here in this place is you didn t know everybody that you could have handed that ball to, do you? (No.) You don t even know their name (Oh, yes, I did! I did!) You don t know everybody s name. (I just handed it to one person.) So, that s part of what it means to be in ministry to each other, is sometimes we don t even know who it is that
we re praying for, that we re shaking hands with, that we re giving a hug to, but that s okay, because the ministry works even when we don t have all the information in our heads. That s what ministry looks like. But there is another piece to this. On that ball is that For God so loved the world thing, which means that it s not enough or us just to be in ministry with each other here in this place or in this congregation. What this means is that we re in ministry, except we call it mission when it goes out past this congregation. So, here s the cool thing about mission: when you let it go, you never know where it is going to end up. So, everybody who s got one of those balls, turn it loose. Throw them. Hit them! Do something and don t let them stop! Keep them going! Ok! Hold on! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Thank you! Alright, now, think about this in terms of mission. You guys put those coins in those banks and you brought them back and we know where that money is going to go. And we hope that the kids who live in the houses that we build will understand why they now have a new place in which to live. It s not because we re fun or kind of generous, it s because God loves us so much that we can t stand to hold it in. We have to share it with everybody, everywhere. Now, you guys each get to take one of those globes home. If you want to, you can leave them here until the end of worship and then come up and get them. Or you can just take one now. Thanks for sharing in our time this morning, for when we share the love of Christ, we are the church.
Message: Ephesians 4:1-6, 25 (Video) For more than ten years the Rethink Church campaign has been part of United Methodist communications effort to share what it means to be a part of this particular fellowship started by John Wesley more than 200 years ago, in which he called out the people of God to be something more than expected that they could be. So, when we think about what United Methodists think about church, we have to actually look at what it means to be the church, not just what it means to be this particular church and what it is that we do together here, but what at the basis of our shared community, what it really means to be the church. And to do that, you have to go back to Paul. Paul is the founder of Christendom. Not Christianity. Jesus is the founder of Christianity. But Paul is the one who begins to take the words that Jesus spoke and turn them so that we understand Jesus to be something more than just another teacher. Paul helped us understand the words about Jesus in addition to the words of Jesus. And because of that, he s not only the founder of Christendom, because of his activities, because of his travels around the Mediterranean, he s actually the architect of the church. Paul doesn t rethink church, Paul invented the church. He wasn t the only one that was gathering together with like-minded people of faith. That was happening with the disciples in Jerusalem. But Paul, when he thought about God s call to him and God s claim upon him, realized that there were those who needed to hear the good news. And so he travelled and he took the idea of church to places where it met with sympathetic ears. And because of that, he invented what he called Ekklesia. Ekklesia is a Greek term.
It s literally and by definition, it s formed by two words or a word and a prefix: ek and then the word kaleo. It literally means to be called out. When we call somebody out on something, what we re doing is we re exposing them. We are bringing them to the public eye. I m calling you out on what you said or what you did. And this has the same emphasis: to be called out of privacy into the public domain and therefore it s a gathering, it s a public assembly of those who have been invited or called out or summoned. In Paul s day, the ekklesia which took place mostly in Greek territories was an assembly of people who were called out for a period of time, like a meeting, by their desire for wisdom. So they would meet in public theaters around cities and towns and they would gather there at an appointed time to discuss what they thought of as the major issues or the most important things in their society in their day: politics and religion. These are the things that currently you re not supposed to discuss in public. But there was this fellowship, this gathering of people, who were seeking truth and wisdom and so they brought all of the issues into a public forum and they beat them around until everybody was tired and wanted to go home. For Paul, that sparked an image. The ekklesia was for him the gathering of those called out by God. So that word becomes our word for church to Paul. And in fact if you look at the Greek New Testament, the references, the times that the word church is used, it s ekklesia. Those who are called by God And invited by Christ, and you know what Paul s invitation looked like: lightning bolt, hit the ground, blind. That s some invitation. God wasn t taking no for an answer.
So we are called by God and invited by Christ and we are summoned together for service. That s church. That s ekklesia. Wesley, from the moment that he was old enough to understand what his father was doing when he stood in front of a congregation to preach, Wesley from that moment forward began to struggle with the idea of what exactly it meant to be ekklesia, what it meant to be called by God and invited by Christ and summoned to serve. More than anybody perhaps in our tradition, Wesley time and time and time again turned to the concept of rethinking the church. In fact, it was so much a part of his own faith identity, that while he was at Oxford, he formed a group of people who would, in effect, daily rethink church. They were called The Holy Club at Oxford because people thought it was kind of odd and strange that you d get a bunch of people together to be that thoughtful about the church. Wesley was so thoughtful about the church, he composed twenty two questions that were intended for everybody in his little group to ask themselves on a daily basis. You could ask yourself at the beginning of the day or you could ask yourself at the end of the day, but the purpose was to re-think church yet again every single day. And what are some of the questions that Wesley put before his colleagues? Well, I won t share all of them with you but some of them are pretty illuminating. Number 2: Am I honest in all my acts and words, or do I exaggerate? I know no one ever thought of that.
Number 5: Am I a slave to dress or friends or work or my habits? Number 8: Do I give the Bible time to speak to me every day? Number 10: When did I last speak to someone else about my faith? Number 11: Do I pray about the money I spend? And, by the way, this prayer is not Gee, I hope if I spend this money, Oh God, you ll give me some more. That s not the prayer Wesley was talking about. Number 12: Do I get to bed on time and get up on time? Daylight savings time notwithstanding. Number 20: Is there anyone whom I fear, dislike, criticize or hold resentment toward? And the corollary question that goes with it: If so, what am I doing about it?
But the question that seemed to stick with Wesley in a way which the rest of them might have had some import, but this was foundational: Number 22: Is Christ real to me? As they spent day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year, the Holy Club at Oxford began to be labeled with a slang, a slur: Look at those Method-ists over there, the people who think that by doing certain things in certain ways, by rethinking church with a real sense of criticism and examination. If they do that, they think somehow they are going to draw closer to God. And people mocked them. There s one guy in this picture, however, that really, his face speaks to me about church. Look at that face. Ahhh I ve seen that face here. Not today, but I ve seen that face. That s the face of religion. That s the face of my relationship with God being all abstract and intellectual. That s the face of intellectual fatigue. That s the face of Gee, I m really tired of asking myself these questions on a regular basis. Of course I m not perfect. Of course I exaggerate. Of course there are days in which I don t have time to let the Bible speak to me. Of course there are times when Christ is just a word or a name or an insult or a profanity. And Wesley had that face too, right up until May 24 of 1738. I mentioned the Aldersgate experience that Wesley had, his conversion experience, about a month ago, but let me share with you again what he wrote in his journal, because it is so instructive: In the evening, I went unwillingly to a society you know that face? That s Wesley s face on May 24 I went unwillingly to a society on Aldersgate Street where Luther s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans was being read.
About a quarter before nine, while the reader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ I felt my, not head, not thoughts, not intellect, not theology, not philosophy, not my academia, I felt my heart strangely, strangely as in I don t think I ve ever felt this before, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ; Christ alone for my salvation. An assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. Wesley knew all that before. Intellectually, it was all right there. He knew it. He taught it. He tried to live it. But all he had was a religion in the abstract and in that moment it became a faith based in a relationship. That s why we say, as Wesley says, we have a new understanding of what the world is: The world is his parish and the world is our parish. And we didn t make that up. That s God s design. From Ephesians 4, Paul shares these words: You have been called out of life to a new life; a live of humility, a life of patience. Help each other in love. Preserve the unity that brings peace. There is one body and one Spirit. We are called to one hope. We confess one Lord and one faith. We are bound by one baptism; bound to each other and to God the Father of all. He reigns above us. He s working through us. He s alive n us. Put away all pretense and pride. We are part of one another. We are one. We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord you know that song.
But the message is so often lost because we are the ekklesia, the gathering of those who are called by God, And invited by Christ, And summoned for service. So we ve got to rethink not only who we are as people in the church, but what this place is, what it means, what it should be. The religion of our heads needs to be translated into the relationships of our lives, the ones that go this way and the ones that go this way and that happens if we are willing to dethink church. So it s not about rules and regulations and propriety and percentages and budgets and all the other things that we get caught up in, all the other things that tend to irritate us. Oh, did you hear Parks in that last anthem? He was flat several times. Yeah, I heard it. Is this what you come for though? You know what I heard someone say earlier? The last hymn that you are going to sing is called Forward Through the Ages. It also has the same tune as Onward Christian Soldiers. Somebody complained, Why don t we ever sing Onward Christian Soldiers?
Why does he keep replacing those words? Folks, it s in the hymnal. I didn t write the text. Can we stop thinking about the stuff that divides, that separates, that critiques, that diminishes us together as who we are? Don t think about it. Just be the church! We are called to a new identity where that kind of critical stuff that we hold each other up to and are extraordinarily quick to point out the imperfections in other people, that s not you anymore. The you that critiques and judges and is insecure and fearful and sometimes feeling unloved, that s not you. You are gone! That person is out of here. In Christ we are a new creature. If anyone is in Christ, the old is gone and everything is new! I am made new in the image of Christ. I didn t say I m made perfect, but I m made new, and because of that I ve got to be a different person than I was when I walked in here. That was the whole point of the Holy Club, to get me to think about the person that I have been and the person that Christ has called me to be. And once I do that, we re called out into a new family. It s called a church. And I know we toss this word around with a lot of liberty family, yeah! I ve heard some things said to family members in here that I ve been embarrassed to repeat you are sitting in my seat. We don t need your help today. I ve been here since this church was formed. Family? Ok. Maybe it s a vision, but it is our destiny. A crowd was sitting around Jesus. They said to him, Hey! Your mother, your brothers, your sisters, they are here They re asking for you. And Jesus replied, much to the consternation of everybody sitting there and his blood relatives outside the door, Why is my family? Looking at those gathered, all of you, looking at those gathered, he said,
Here, here is my mother. Here are my sisters. Here are my brothers, because whoever does the will of God is my family. Can you get your head around that? Does that even make sense? We are a new family through our faith in Christ, which means that we can t choose each other. That s the cool thing about family, right? You re stuck with them. You didn t get to pick them and you can t disown them. They are always your family. Yeah! How about that? You don t get to decide who becomes a member of this congregation and I don t have any standards. That s how I got in. It s all about the relationship: mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son. Can you treat each other? Can you consider each other like that? Can we be the family of Christ? It s not our call. It s God s commandment in Christ. And we are called out of this family gathering which happens on Sunday mornings, we are called out of this family reunion into a new community. It s not the community that is new, it s the way that we look at it. It s Wesley s The world is my parish. The world is where I do ministry. The world, not just here, it s out there too. Jesus was asked by a person who desired to justify himself, after Jesus said Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself, somebody said, Whoa, whoa. Exactly who is my neighbor? And Jesus never answered that question. What he did is tell a story that involved three individuals, two of whom walked past a guy who was victimized on the side of the road and left for dead. The priest and the scholar went on by. The Samaritan, one of the most disgusting and reviled groups of people to the Hebrews at that time was the one who helped. And Jesus question back to the person who asked him Who is my neighbor? was this: Which one of those three guys was the neighbor to the victim by the side of the road? He never said who we are to regard as neighbors, he was trying to make the point You re the neighbor! You re the neighbor to whoever it is that is in need. There is no boundary around that, there is no proximity thing, there is not ethnic thing, there is not traditional thing.
Which one was the neighbor and the answer is: the one who showed mercy. And what did he say? Go and do the same. That s it. Go and do the same. Go and be the neighbor. We are new apostles to the human community. The human community is as broken and suffering as it always has been, but what s new is the world is now our parish. You got that? Everybody! And we are called out to new responsibilities because of the fact that we are new in Christ. We have a new personal identity, that we have a new congregational identity. We are a family of faith and when you look out those windows or walk out those doors you are walking out into your parish. We are called out to new responsibilities. How can you know God s love without sharing it with others? You know that it s relational. If you ve got it, you ve got to share it. If you don t love the people you see right here in front of you How can you love a God you can t see?
Loving God means caring for all people, No exceptions. We bear the new response-ability and God has given us the commission called ministry. In December s newsletter, Kristi and I wrote an article together about how important it is for us all to take some responsibility around here. How much information never gets to those of us who are being asked and employed to coordinate our shared ministry? How many times people talk to or make a phone call to or are in touch with one another and they notice a need; they notice somebody hasn t been here for a couple of weeks. They know that there is something going on in the life of somebody else, but they don t feel it is their responsibility to share. Hey! That s not our choice! I understand if you don t want a prayer concern shared because it is private and you don t want other people knowing your business. I totally get that. But when someone says: Hey, you know, I haven t seen so-and-so in about four weeks. Do you know if there s a problem? No, because if I did, we d be on it. We bear this responsibility to one another as a family of faith. We have, in this community, all the responsibility that we can manage if we let us decide and we are failing! We are failing each other. Are you praying for those people on that list in the middle of that bulletin? Do you even take it home? Can you name three people on it? Why not? Whose responsibility is this, to be the church? Are we just going to sit and rethink church day after day after day, week after week after week? I get to stand up here and Pastor Jeff, we get to tell you what it means to be, at least what we understand it to be followers of Christ. And then somehow we re supposed to make it all happen? No! We re in this together, you and me, new creatures in a family of faith, brothers and sisters, parent and child, Disciples of Christ. We are called to a new identity, personally.
But we are also called into a new family. If you have lost family members lately, you begin to appreciate how fragile, how frail, how fleeting is the privilege of being a brother and sister to these people. Don t take it lightly. This group will never be together again. Never. So when you choose to walk out of here and you choose not to shake the hand of someone who at some point in time may have slighted you, you might as well have told them that they are dead to you. Is that a church? Is that what we are? Is that this family of faith? No. We are called out to a new community. It s out there, but we are the ones who are new. And we are called out to a ministry of new responsibilities. It is my prayer and my hope that as you and I walk this journey of faith together, as the gathering called out by God And invited by Christ and summoned into service,
that we will not only think about what it means to be the church, that we will stop thinking about it long enough to actually do it. What a radical concept that would be. Let us present our tithes and offerings. Benediction: Thanks be to God for the gift of this congregation in which we are invited to rethink what it means to be here, what it means to be a Disciple of Christ and to be a church. But more than that, thanks be to God for the opportunity to stop thinking about it and just be the church, just be Christ to one another. Thank God for the change to do church. Now, get out there and do it! Amen