The Community of God

Matthew 28:16-20

Trinity Sunday

June 15, 2014

What do you think of

when you hear the word community?

The word community is one of those words that can

have a couple of meanings

The differences are subtle, but they’re different.

When we hear community,

we might think of neighborhoods or cities,

people in schools, or even churches.

They use the word a lot in the news I’ve noticed.

The dictionary says that community is

a group of people living in the same area,

or having the same interests or identity.

But it’s more than that, it’s it?

Just because something is called a community

doesn’t mean that it’s a Community. With a capital C.

Community with a capital C brings along

images of more than just people who live

on the same street or share an interest.

It brings images of people who support,

and of love one another.

It talks of shared respect,

being mutually accountable to one another

helping each other.

Having love for each other that then spills out and

includes others.

There is a lot of talk about community these days.

Mostly , I think, because we feel that it’s slipping away

It’s something that some of us remember from the past,

or seen it in the movies, or read about it

or heard about it from others,

but over time, Community with a capital C has become scarce.

We don’t easily form Communities here in the US

we don’t rely on it, we don’t seem to need it.

So for most people, it doesn’t exist.

Lots of things have taken away our Communities

There’s technology which is giving us wider spread communities

but without human contact or responsibility.

We’re more self sufficient and so we don’t need it–

when we’re richer, we don’t have to rely on others,

And I think we’re more afraid of people

so we don’t want to let people into our lives.

In some ways it’s easier not to be part of a Community

of any kind. To just be responsible for yourself and your business.

It’s just simpler to be alone with family, a few friends.

Some say that religious institutions like ours

are the last reliable place

to potentially find Community in our culture.

Not that all churches form a Community with a capital C.

But churches and other religious institutions are the last

group who even have the potential for real Community.

As a culture, Americans have been shying away

from being part of a Community with a capital C.

But at the same time, we long for it.

People talk about it, we dream about it.

There are countless articles written about it.

“Community” is the marketing buzzword

when talking about those who are thirty five and younger.

We might not have it, we might not know how to make it,

but we want it, we are drawn to it.

I think that is, because we are created –

the earth, the sea and stars, plants, animals

and humans -- we are all created by a God

who in God’s self is a community.

Today, we are celebrating Trinity Sunday.

A Sunday when some pastors and Sunday School teachers

have tried to explain a doctrine that is basically unexplainable.

Where we talk about how we worship one God

but three different beings.

I will not be doing that for you today.

The Holy Trinity
Sankt Lambrecht, 1430

But I will tell you the significance of the Trinity.

It tells us that the nature of God is Community – with a capital C.

Three separate individuals -- not just one, not just a couple,

but three - that together make up one.

Individual parts, but one body.

To be part of a Community -

to be in relationships that stretch beyond family and

selected friends - is in our DNA, it’s part of us.

The world would love us to be separate,

to not trust or rely on anyone else.

And sometimes it seems like the world is winning.

But Community is part of God,

and therefore Community is part of us.

In the Gospel reading for today,

we hear Jesus’ last words in Matthew.

It’s Easter morning and Jesus has told the women

to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.

The disciples find him on a mountain and he gives them

these instructions, “make disciples of all nations.”

Simply put, make a community for yourselves

out of the whole world, make a Community.

Now some have taken this command

that to mean that we should convert every person

to our culture and our religion by force if necessary.

And sometimes its hard to look at it any other way.

But that’s how humanity has taken it in the wrong direction.

What I hear Jesus saying to us is

Gather people that are different than you,

the same as you, people that you don’t know.

Meet them and talk to them gather around

the worship of Jesus. Learn to love one another

and care for one another. Form a Community.

Individual parts, but one body. 

Father Son and Holy Spirit

Creator, redeemer and sustainer

God eternal, God in flesh, God in inspiration.

God in us, God for us, God through us.

However you want to say it,

We love and worship a God that works in relationship.

An equal relationship, sharing the pain, the glory

the sorrow and the joy equally.

The work of any one rests on the other two.

Any one would be less without the other.

God in the Trinity.

And the Community in the Trinity,

that is the Community we imitate.

That is what churches are:

Not hothouses to grow theologians in,

not a place to send your kids and grand kids to

so that they can learn morals.

But a place where we all go to learn how to live together.

A place of Community, imitating the God that we worship.

And Jesus said where two or three are gathered in my name --

Where there is an effort to form this love,

this Community with a capital C –

we know that God will be there among us.

God's Vision

Acts 2:1-12

June 5, 2014

Pentecost

Pentecost.

The first day of the church as we know it.

Now we might think that it was a festive occasion.

But really, the disciples must have been terrified.

Wind, flames, speaking and understanding different languages.

And when we come to church, we basically know how it will go.

We know there will be prayers and songs,

we know the pastor will get up and say something,

Some of us even know the liturgy by heart.

But this was the first time for the disciples.

They had no hymnal to refer to

they had no instructions book

No mission statement or constitution.

no years of tradition.

This was the first time for the disciples.

Now these disciples had been with Jesus,

heard him talk, spent time with him,

eaten with him, had their feet washed by him.

They had seen him arrested and killed,

and raised from the dead.

And for 40 days since the resurrection,

Jesus had been roaming around with them

visiting them and encouraging them.

But still, even in their last moment with Jesus on earth

they didn’t seem like they

completely understood the arrangement.

Right before he ascends they say to Jesus:

“Lord, is this the time when YOU

will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

What great things will YOU be doing now, Jesus?

How will YOU wow us in these last days?”

No, no, no, Jesus tells them, you’ve got it wrong.

MY job is done.

“YOU will receive power now

The Holy Spirit will come upon YOU.
YOU will be my witnesses in Jerusalem

and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”
YOU will be the ones to carry on my church,

YOU will finish the work that I’ve begun.

This is YOUR job now.

And just to make sure that they understood

that it was THEIR work now,

Jesus ascended up, into the clouds

and left them. Alone.

How could Jesus do that?

How could Jesus leave the church in the hands

of these people with no instructions or guide book,

with no leadership seminar, no seminary class?

And these 11 people ?! -

- Their assumed leader was, Peter, the same one who

had denied Jesus in fear.

- James and John the ones who were jockeying

for position arguing over which one was the greatest.

- There was Thomas who wouldn’t believe that Christ had risen.

- Jesus left the church in the hands of the same ones who didn’t believe that Jesus could feed the people in the field,

- The ones who tried to push the children away from Jesus.

- The ones who accused Mary after she anointed Jesus.

On that day, God gave Jesus ministry to people like that.

To people like us.

People who are egotistical, insecure, cynical, tired,

burnt out, who tried to hard and didn’t try hard enough

God gave the church to regular people like us

and for better or worse,

they made something that we are still part of today.

It would be impressive enough if you just noticed the

length of time that it’s lasted.
But we are still reading scripture, praying, being moved and inspired by the same stories. We are still surprised, lit on fire, motivated to baptize and make disciples

help strangers and to work for justice in our communities.

Still after all this time.

Maybe one of those disciples

had us in mind that day.

Maybe in one of those dreams that that the Holy Spirit inspired

that day of Pentecost, maybe one of them thought:

I want a group of people that follows Jesus

to be in a city like Columbus, OH 2000 years from now,

to welcome everyone and have school

and a ministry in Swahili and a food pantry.

That dream would seem impossible then.

But here we are.

That’s how dreams are.

On that day, God declares,

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams

So what dreams are we dreaming?

What visions are we envisioning.

What can we see the church being and doing and becoming?

I will ask you to share that in our meeting after worship.

For right now, just pray for God to

fill us with the spirit, to give us

visions and dreams and to tell you what God wants from us.

God still expects great things out of us.

God has chosen this church, in this time and place

God has chosen us to get that job done that Jesus started.

This is not just Jesus’s work any more.

This is our work.

And we can have confidence in the Spirit

that has brought us to this place.

Look around you today.

This is the church that Jesus imagined and is still imagining.

This is the church that the Spirit is still working on.

This is God’s vision.

Jesus Last Request

John 17:1-11

June 1, 2014

Boy, Jesus has been pretty chatty

here these last few weeks.

They call this portion of John the Farewell Discourse, it runs

Chapters 14 through 17. That’s a lot to say.

The other three gospels kind of portray

Jesus as a guy who doesn’t say enough.

And what he does say,

he says in stories and parables that are relatively easy to follow.

Not easy to understand, but at least easy to follow.

But in John, Jesus just seems to talk philosophically.

It’s almost like I have to diagram the sentence to see

what the subject and verb is.

Even here in this week’s gospel, Jesus is closing out his

farewell discourse with a prayer.

Prayers are usually simple, and this one is in the end,

but there’s a whole preamble in this prayer that’s a little confusing

Jesus says to God,

“I glorified you on earth by doing what you wanted me to

I made your name known

They know everything that has been given me is from you

I’m asking this for them, not for me, but on their behalf

all mine are yours, and yours are mine.”

That’s confusing.

but the actual content of the prayer is fairly simple.

Jesus just says:

“God, protect my followers,

so that they can be as close to one another as I am to you.”

 Jesus was praying for his followers, For the church.

For us in other words.

That we could be as close to each other as God is to Jesus.

That is Jesus’s whole prayer, that is where God’s glory is found.

It takes a lot for John to get there,

but it’s beautiful to think that that is Jesus last prayer.

Now, does your mind ever wander off

while someone is talking?

Like when pastors are preaching.

My mind does.

Especially if someone is talking a lot about things that I don’t quite get,

it’s hard to focus on what they say.

I hear the voice, but I don’t comprehend.

Like the adults’ voices in Charlie Brown cartoons.

I have to think that’s what was happening with the disciples.

Jesus was talking for a long time and

Maybe they just drifted off

and started thinking about different things while Jesus was talking.

So maybe no one was listening.

When Jesus prayed for this.

“Help my followers to be as close to each other as I am to you.”

I have to think that the disciples weren’t

paying attention when Jesus spoke

because they seem to forget his prayer almost instantly.

Right in the beginning, Peter and Paul start fighting and

Writing letters about how wrong the other was.
Talking bad about each other in their churches.

Paul and John, who was also called Mark,

start off working together, but then they part ways and

Paul starts complaining about him to Barnabas.

Then Barnabas and Paul start fighting about things.

We don’t have a good beginning examples of Christian unity

and we don’t have a good history of it either.

Whenever you talk about Christian unity, it seems vaguely hypocritical.

It’s hard to pick out a time when Christians

were unified in the same spirit that Jesus wanted us to.

Even before the Reformation when we were

at least one church, the unity was kept with threats and violence.

For the entire time he was alive after breaking from the Catholic Church,

Luther was involved in heated debates with other reformers

about how the new church should live it’s life.

The Lutheran Church in America has spent the last 200 years

trying to get together and just when it looks like everything is working out for the ELCA, hundreds of churches leave over the issue of sexuality.

It doesn’t take an expert in religious studies

to see that Christians have trouble getting along.

All you have to do is post any opinion you might have on

a Christian page and see that most people don’t agree about anything .

And some Christians are willing to curse at you,

call you names, and even threaten

bodily harm to you when they do disagree.

There are thousands of churches created out of Christian disagreement.

There are wars created out of Christian disagreement.

Beheadings, death by fire,

all sorts of horrible stuff because we just can’t get along.

Even at the personal level,

in most churches you can

Just sing the wrong song, or change the drapes,

or misplace something in the kitchen

and you can start a small war.

We’re all better than that here, of course.

So maybe the church has been daydreaming

when Jesus was praying this last prayer:

“God help my followers to be as close to each other as I am to you.”

And you know, I have to say, there are some Christians,

I don’t want to be unified with.
That couple that wrote a book that said that the best way to raise

children is to beat them and withhold food if they disobey.

That turkey in Florida that burned the Koran.

The people from the Westboro Baptist Church who protest

at funerals because they don’t like gay people.

I really don’t want to be known as unified with

some of these loose screws out there.

So maybe I’ve been sleeping.

Maybe we’ve all been sleeping, drifting off,

balancing our checkbooks in our mind while Jesus has been talking.

Jesus who gave us everything, has just one last request.

That we be as close to each other as Jesus is to God.

And from the outside it looks like we’ve pretty much ignored it.

Today as well as hearing Jesus’s last prayer

we also hear about the Ascension.

The story about the time after Jesus’s resurrection

when he was taken away, right in front the disciples.

Right before he’s taken up, the disciples ask him one more time,

“So are you gonna restore the kingdom to Israel now?”

Which is just funny in itself and proves that they have been daydreaming

most of the time that Jesus was talking.

But then Jesus is taken up and you see them doing a very natural thing.
They follow Jesus up to the sky, where’d he go?

What do we do now. Come back to us and clear everything up.

And those two mystical figures in the white robes

give the first good and most ignored

advice to any church and any Christians.

“What are you looking up there for?

What are you standing there staring into heaven like that?”

Why are you looking for God and Jesus up there?

That’s not where you’re going to find Jesus.

Staring up into the great by and by trying

to discipher the all the right answers, all the right interpretations.

That’s not how you should be the church.

And hen we ignore that, we inevitably lose our way.

When we have our head in the clouds trying so hard to unite with God,

When we miss the people around us,

That has been the downfall of the church from the start.

We spend so much time trying

to link up with God up there.

That we forget that the way God

decided to show himself to us was down here.

As another human being.  Another person.

With flesh and blood and hands and feet and a mind and

difficult moods and strange opinions that are different from us.

The story of Ascension and Jesus prayer remind us that
We don’t find God’s glory by unifiying with that vague concept that

we understand as God and God’s will.

We find God’s glory by unifiying with one another.

Christians have usually done church

by looking up into the sky

and day dreaming about what God wants.

But Jesus has asked us to do church with our heads down.

Looking into one another’s eyes.

I could be as right as rain, have all the right answers –

I know I’ve got a better handle on theology than

The Westboro Baptist Church or Pat Robertson,

But if I can’t look them both in the eyes and see children of God,

then my theology and thoughts and concepts are just dry bones.

If we have all the right answers,

but can’t look into one another’s eyes

and see children of God, then what are we doing here?

Jesus’s one dying wish is that as a

Christian that I be compassionate instead of being right.

I don’t know that I’ve always made that choice.

I don’t know that Christianity has made that choice.

So has the church throughout all it’s years gotten it wrong?

Do we stubbornly refuse to do the one thing that Jesus prayed for?

Have we failed at being the church?

Maybe we’ve ignored the work that Jesus would have us do.

Or maybe the work is just very hard.

Maybe this one last prayer of Jesus

is the most difficult thing that we can do.

Maybe it’s just something that takes 2000 or more years to sort out.

Jesus last prayer:

that we could be as close to one another as Jesus is to God.

It’s a prayer in progress.

All we can do is promise that we’ll keep on trying.

and trust that the Spirit will always be here to help.