The body of Christ: breaking down the walls, 10.6.13

Ephesians 2:11-22
¹¹So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” —a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— ¹²remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ¹³But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

¹⁴For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. ¹⁵He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.

¹⁷So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; ¹⁸for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; ²²in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

1 Corinthians 10:15-17, 11:17-34

¹⁵I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. ¹⁶The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? ¹⁷Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

11¹⁷Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. ¹⁸For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. ¹⁹Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine.

²⁰When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. ²¹For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. ²²What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

²³For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, ²⁴and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” ²⁶For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

²⁷Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. ³⁰For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. ³¹But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. ³²But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. ³³So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. ³⁴If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation. About the other things I will give instructions when I come.

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            Paul’s words can come across as harsh, and I think and hope that my sermon is going to be challenging. To set the stage for that I want to remind you that when I’m preaching to you, I’m also preaching to myself. We all have room to grow together. Another thing to remember about Paul with the Corinthian church and about me with you is that I love you. Challenge is meant to help us all grow.

This sermon series is about the church. The Bible uses different images for the church because it’s a community that’s not quite like anything else. Susan preached about how the church is a family two weeks ago. Last week I preached about the church as an ambulance base or a mission station where we get what we need for our calling in the world.

This week we’re talking about how the church is the body of Christ. That means that as different as we are, everyone around the world who belongs to Christ is part of one body. We are united and connected to people we will never meet. And together we are not just a community, not just an organization, but the living, breathing body of Jesus Christ. That is amazing and mysterious. It means the church is much greater than any one of us, and it means we owe more to our fellow members than we might think because we are one, holy body together.

            Raise your hand if you’ve been a part of the church, this church or another church, for as long as you can remember.

Now, raise your hand if being part of a church is pretty new to you. Great.

            In the first century, when Jesus walked the earth and the church first began Jews and gentiles were about as far apart as they could be. The passage from Ephesians that Donna read talks about how the gentiles who became Christian once felt. Before they came to faith in Christ they were separated from God. The way people connected to God was through the rules and rituals that defined the Jewish community, and they were not part of that community.

            Then Jesus came, lived, died and rose again, and everything changed. The wall between Jews and gentiles was torn down. The Old Testament rules and rituals no longer defined who was in and who was out of God’s community. Now Christ’s call and Christ’s cross define the community of faith. It doesn’t matter where we come from, it only matters that Christ called and we answered. All people who follow Christ are one.

That means we have no business looking down on other Christians. The divisions that used to matter are overcome in Christ. Christ died to reconcile the division between Jews and gentiles. He took two very different communities and made one community in his body, putting the hostility that divided them from each other to death on the cross. That means when we are hostile towards other Christians, we’re going against the cross of Christ, and frankly, that’s not something I want to do.

           

            Of course, the early church’s division between gentile and Jewish Christians isn’t really an issue now, so for this passage to speak to us we have to think about other divisions that the church faces today. Maybe the best comparison is old and new members. As we saw a minute ago, some of us are new to being members of the church and others have been part of the church their whole lives.

            Our experiences and differences shape us, and the different perspectives that come with being a life long church member or a brand new Christian make this church stronger. At the same time, those differences do not define us, and none of us has any right to look down on anyone else. Jesus Christ himself welcomes everyone here today. Jesus’ welcome and grace is the only ground any of us has to stand on, not our background, not our parents, not our pledge or our tenure or our volunteer hours. Whether know it or not, without Jesus we are lost. We are found now because of his love, whether we accepted that love 40 years ago or just this minute. We are all one and no one is better than anyone else.

            It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative; if you’re black, white, Latino or Asian, if you know the Bible well or are just reading it for the first time, if your faith is rock solid or you have lots of doubts and questions. It doesn’t matter if you have a PhD or a fourth grade education. It doesn’t matter if you’re Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic or agnostic. Christ has broken down every dividing wall that threatens to separate us and he is the one who makes us the church. We are one in his body with all our differences and all our unique personalities.

            In our passage from Corinthians Paul focuses on class divisions, which continue to challenge churches, including ours, today. Of course, class isn’t just about dollars and cents. Class is about culture and expectations and experience. The social and economic group we grow up in shapes how we see the world in ways we can’t even see. Unless we have some experience that moves us out of the class in which we grew up, we don’t even know how limited our perspective is, because however we grow up seeing the world is normal to us.

            People who grow up in the middle or upper middle class probably have parents who put a high value on education. Those parents probably succeeded in school and a big part of their parenting was helping their kids succeed in school too. Throughout their life they saw a connection between education and success. In middle class culture there’s often a strong sense that people control their own destiny and that they are responsible for what they do and what happens to them.

            For people who grow up in a family struggling to make ends meet the world looks very different. Often, they grow up without knowing many people who have succeeded in school. That means parents don’t emphasize school because they haven’t seen any benefit from education in their own lives. Sometimes they believe that education is the school’s job, and the parent’s job is surviving, not helping with school work. Since people who have struggled to survive have had a lot of things go against them, it often feels like success is more a matter of luck or fate than education or choice. The world feels threatening and totally beyond their control.

            Obviously, there are plenty of people who straddle those two worlds and I’m oversimplifying things to make a point. The point is that where we come from impacts how we see the world in ways we don’t even recognize. For example, for an upper middle class person it makes sense to take out student loans because they believe education is a good investment that will allow them to succeed and pay back the loan. For people who grew up struggling to survive, the risk of that loan feels too threatening to make sense and the benefit seems uncertain at best.

For working class families it’s often obvious for adult children to stay with their parents because that makes it easier to survive together. For many upper middle class people the expectation is that when children grow up, they move away from home. For each group those decisions can seem obvious, while for the other they seem strange.

            In some ways rich people and poor people live in different worlds. Society separates us from each other, and we don’t often even have the chance to see the world through different eyes because we spend most of our time with people like us. And like most social organizations, the church is often divided along the same lines. There are black churches and white churches, country churches, suburban churches and city churches, wealthy churches and poor churches.

            Paul reminds us that that is not how it should be. In Jesus Christ all human divisions are conquered. The divisions that matter so much to people don’t matter at all to God. The church is the body of Christ, so however different we might look or seem, we are one in Christ. That means when we allow human divisions to divide us in the church we are tearing Christ’s body apart. When we look down on people because they don’t act how we think they should act, we are spitting on Christ’s body. When we resent someone because they see the world differently we are rejecting part of Jesus. We are one body, and when don’t act like it we turn away from our Lord.

            It’s easy to talk about unity and equality, but it’s hard to live it. We say we believe that people are equal and that everyone is welcome, but we don’t always truly believe it in our secret hearts and we don’t experience it in our lives. We won’t know how deep our differences go until we start overcoming them in real life behavior. It will be harder than we think, but we can do it because we are already one in Christ.

            Paul’s argument is theological; he’s talking about what the ritual of the Lord’s Supper means in a spiritual sense, but he’s also talking about the practical nuts and bolts of sharing a community table with people who are different. In Paul’s time the Lord’s supper was both a religious ritual and an actual community meal, think sacrament and potluck rolled into one.

The rich people in the church could start the meal whenever they wanted, and they didn’t have to worry about having enough to eat and drink. The poor members of the Corinthian church couldn’t get to the gathering until their boss let them go, and by the time they got there, there wasn’t anything for them to eat.

            Paul says that we aren’t really eating the Lord’s Supper unless we’re eating it together as equals. It is the responsibility of members of the community with more resources to look out for those with less. It’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has enough, that everyone can share at Christ’s table. The church is Christ’s body and the communion meal is Christ’s body. If we allow our differences to divide us we tear Christ’s body apart. When we do that, this amazing meal that is a sign of Christ’s love and death and salvation will condemn us instead of bless us.

            The church is one of the few places where we have the chance to build genuine community with love, honesty and real sharing among people who are very different. Our community is more diverse now economically, politically, and religiously than it was 5 years ago. That’s going to be challenging sometimes. There are times when we are not going to understand each other, times we get frustrated because some one else just doesn’t see things the same way we do.

But difference is an invitation to a conversation. It’s an opportunity to see the world from another perspective. For this to work, for us to really be the community we are called in Christ to be we need to be willing to question ourselves. Paul tells us to judge ourselves, to examine ourselves to see if our mind is in sync with God’s truth. I guarantee if we really start learning about each others experiences we will learn some uncomfortable things about ourselves, but real growth is often uncomfortable.

When we don’t understand someone we should ask them about their perspective, and listen to each other without judgment or defensiveness. We need to open our hearts to each other and really treat each other as beloved brothers and sisters. That’s the way God sees us, that’s who God calls us to be not only when we are in this space but, most importantly, when we leave this building. We are one because we are Christ’s body together. As we let that spiritual vision shape our real life together we will have uncomfortable moments and holy transformation. As we share life with each other, we’ll discover what it really means to be the body of Christ.

So taste and see, the Lord is good. Happy are all who are called to God’s table. Thanks be to God.

Everyone is welcome: making the belief a reality, 7.14.13

Acts 15:1-21

Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’ ²And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders. ³So they were sent on their way by the church, and as they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, they reported the conversion of the Gentiles, and brought great joy to all the believers. ⁴When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. ⁵But some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, ‘It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.’

6 The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter. ⁷After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, ‘My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. ⁸And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; ⁹and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. ¹⁰Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? ¹¹On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.’

12 The whole assembly kept silence, and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. ¹³After they finished speaking, James replied, ‘My brothers, listen to me. ¹⁴Simeon has related how God first looked favourably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. ¹⁵This agrees with the words of the prophets, as it is written,
¹⁶ “After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, ¹⁷ so that all other peoples may seek the Lord—even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things ¹⁸known from long ago.”

¹⁹Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, ²⁰but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood. ²¹For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues.’

Galatians 2:11-16

¹¹But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; ¹²for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. ¹³And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

¹⁴But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” ¹⁵We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; ¹⁶yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.

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            The early church was an amazingly dynamic community. New people were coming to faith all the time and becoming a part of a community where sharing and love were a way of life. At the same time, there were disagreements, and the church was still learning what it was. We read a few weeks ago about how the Holy Spirit led Peter to Cornelius and his family to preach the good news about Jesus.

            As soon as the believers in Jerusalem heard about Peter eating with gentiles, they started to criticize him. But when he told the story of God’s Spirit clearly leading the way and of how God gave the Spirit to those gentiles before Peter had even finished speaking, they could see that God was reaching out to gentiles as well, and they praised God.

            That didn’t end the discussion, though. While the church leaders accepted that gentiles could come to faith in Jesus, some people believed that gentile believers had to be circumcised and follow the Law of Moses.

            That seems strange now since neither one of those things has been part of our experience as Christians. But at this point in the church’s life, Christianity was still a movement within Judaism. The church had its own leaders, but they hadn’t left the synagogue or temple. They were still Jewish, even though most Jewish leaders thought they were heretics.

            The Old Testament was the only Bible these Christians had, and when the Old Testament talks about circumcision, it is clear and non-negotiable. Israel is ordered to circumcise their sons on the eighth day after birth as a mark of their covenant with God; those who weren’t circumcised, were excluded from that covenant. Circumcision and law were the signs of the relationship with God. Without being circumcised and following the law, one was not part of the Jewish community of faith, so it makes sense that these Jewish disciples of Jesus insisted on new believers following the rules of Judaism, their community of faith.

            But Peter, Paul and Barnabas had seen that God was doing something new. It wasn’t just about bringing a few gentiles into Judaism; in Jesus God was making a new way for people to be in covenant with God. This new covenant was based only on God’s grace through Jesus Christ. These evangelists who had worked with gentile believers knew that God was calling them to follow Christ, not to follow the law of Moses.

            The church is wrestling with what it means to be part of the faith community. In this conference, the church decides that membership in the church is going to be based only on following Jesus and following a few ideas from the Law. It sounds like strange and silly detail, but the short list of rules James mentions: no sexual immorality, no animals that have been sacrificed to idols or strangled, and no blood, keeps enough of the tradition of Judaism so as not to offend, while not restricting the gentile believers unreasonably.

Even after the council, the question of how gentiles will be included in the community isn’t entirely settled. There continued to be people who taught that circumcision was required. The whole Letter to the Galatians is Paul’s response to this faction within the church.

In our case we’re just reading a small section of that letter. In that passage we see a different side of Peter than we do in the passage from Acts. In Acts Peter advocates for fully including gentiles without making them follow the Law or be circumcised. We know he risked the disapproval of his friends when he stayed with Cornelius. He wants everyone to have a place in the church.

But then Paul talks about rebuking Peter because when Peter visited the church in Antioch he started out sharing the table with gentile believers, but then pulled away from that fellowship when he felt pressure from other leaders. How do we put those two pictures together?

It seems like Peter believed in including gentiles in the church in principle, but wasn’t a hundred percent committed to deep community with them. He knew that they were equal in God’s sight, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to think of them as brothers and sisters. He wasn’t sure he wanted to get close to them. After all, they came from a different background; they had different traditions and food and habits. And Peter didn’t want to endanger his friendship with the Jewish Christians at the center of the church in Jerusalem.

In a way, Peter is acting out separate but equal. It’s fine to have gentiles in the church, but he isn’t interested in being their best friend. Paul says that’s not enough. In Christ, we are all one body. It doesn’t matter where we come from, how much money we make, what we like or don’t like. Our standing in the community doesn’t have anything to do with what we do for a living or how much we give or what kind of clothes we wear. It doesn’t matter what faith we followed before we came to Christ. All that matters is Christ. Christ’s grace is the only thing that saves us and it is the only thing that brings us into the community of faith.

That’s still a challenge in our congregation and in others. Church is part of our social life, but it’s also more than that. When we come to church we naturally have people we feel closest to, people who are close friends. And many of us have been in this congregation for years, so those church friendships have been part of our lives for decades.

That’s great. Part of the fun of coming to church is the joy of seeing people we already know and care about. It’s awesome when people we know from church become friends we see outside of church too. Some people we click with almost automatically, often because we have interests and experiences in common, and it’s fun to share those things together.

But the church is called to becoming the body of Christ. That means breaking down barriers. It means actively seeking out people we don’t know in the community and getting to know them. Not just getting to know their name, but listening to their story, sharing their experiences. It means getting outside our comfort zone every week to make new friends.

It’s hard because relationships can be awkward. Even simple things like knowing someone’s name. If you’ve seen someone in worship a few times and maybe you introduced yourself three weeks ago, you feel like you should remember their name, but you just don’t. So that feels embarrassing and it makes it hard to get to know someone better.

That might be the hardest thing about coming to a new church as a visitor or member too. If you’ve been coming to Laurelton for 5 years you already know everyone’s name who has been here a while so all you have to do when a new person appears is learn their name. That new member has to learn everyone’s name, and that’s hard to do. It can be hard for long term members to get to know new people too, partly because we already have people we want to visit with. That can be a beautiful thing, but it can also keep our community from integrating new people.

The challenge for the church is to be a community where deep relationships flourish, where we can share our true selves with one another and trust each other with personal things. At the same time we are called to be an open community where people are welcomed right in and made to feel at home regardless of where they come from or what struggles they face. Those two things don’t go together very often. Usually our relationships are either open, accessible and superficial or closed, exclusive and deep.

How do we do both at the same time? It starts with practice. It starts with looking for chances to get to know new people and really listening to each other. There are some conversations we need to have in private with particular people we trust, but in general I’d like us to actively work on including people as much as possible in our conversations and in our lives.

So today at coffee hour I encourage you to seek out someone you don’t know well. Even if you know the other person’s name and think they know yours, start by introducing yourselves so there’s no awkwardness if someone has forgotten. Listen to each other’s stories; get to know each other’s interests; find out what brought them to this church, what they like, what they don’t like.

We’re a small church. That comes with some challenges, for sure. Probably it would be easier to pay the bills if we were larger, for instance. But the cool thing about being small is that we have a great chance to get to know each other pretty well. Make it your goal to know everyone’s name by the end of August. If there’s someone in worship whose name you don’t know, find them after worship and introduce yourself.

I’d love it if we had enough new people visit during the summer to make it a challenge to learn everyone’s name. One thing we do every week in supper and scripture is start with introductions. Some weeks it feels silly because everyone there is a regular who already knows everyone, but the practice never hurts. So we’re going to try that today. We’re going to start with Alan and just go around the room. You can stand up or not, but say your name loudly and slowly. And pause after the person next to you so people have a second to absorb. As you listen, try to pay close attention. We’re not going to have a quiz, but community is better when we really know each other, and learning names is a start.

Paul writes a little later in Galatians: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” That’s a deep sense of unity, a vision of barriers broken down.

We say and believe those words. We believe that everyone is welcome in the church, but for that to really mean something, for the grace of community to really transform our lives and our community, that welcome has to take shape in everyday, practical relationships. We have to welcome new people in conversation, to share our lives with each other in ever deeper ways. It starts with a simple introduction and an open ear, and leads in slow, mysterious ways to God’s kingdom.

Thanks be to God.