Day 167 - Have You Got The Spirit?

A Sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN May 26, 2013

texts: Deut.6:4-9,12, Acts2:29-42

This is Trinity Sunday, the day we acknowledge the three-fold nature of God. I’m not going to talk about the Trinity because Peter gets to the core of it for all of Jerusalem in this passage from Acts.

This is Shavuot, one of the more important Jewish religious celebrations, and the first Pentecost is here. It is late morning and the Holy Spirit has just descended on the entire congregation of believers, about 120 mostly Galileans.

And now we have this rowdy bunch of Galileans with tongues of fire dancing around their heads creating quite a stir and drawing a crowd.

Jews from countries all over the Mediterranean are here for this Jewish holy day. They are confused and puzzled because every one understood what the believers were saying as if they were speaking in their own native tongue. Some listeners were amazed and perplexed by the spirituality of the words, but you remember the proud urban folks in Jerusalem looked down their noses at Galileans as uneducated country people. The cynics in the crowd said this is just drunken rambling of a bunch of good old boys from Sand Mountain.

Peter did not take this comment very well. He stood up and in a loud voice that everyone could understand began preaching, “These people are not drunk! I ask you didn’t the prophet Joel say, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.’  Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” No one here is drunk, they are filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Peter was preaching to more than just these outsiders - the cynical Jerusalem Jews. He was preaching also to the 120 Jewish believers who perhaps harbor doubt about Jesus now that He has gone.

Peter very carefully and methodically explained to them exactly what has happened in the last fifty days. (2:22-24, my words) “All of you who are Israelites listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God. God did deeds of power, wonders, and signs through Jesus while he was with you and you know it yourselves, you saw them. What you (the "Jerusalem Jews") do not know is that God also knew and planned from the beginning to hand Jesus over to you so you could crucify and kill him using the hands of Gentiles who are outside the Law (so you could try to avoid guilt).  But God raised Jesus up from death because it is impossible to hold God in the power of death. I command you to let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that the One God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Messiah.”

Peter’s has just said that Jesus with this gift of the Holy Spirit is the one Lord, not God. (v36) These are fighting words that ought to challenge this crowd as heresy. His claim is particularly pointed on this particular holiday because a devout, penitent Jew has the Shema on the tip of the tongue. The Shema is Moses’ declaration of God’s covenant with Israel delivered with the Law to Israel. The Shema reveals the nature of God, his steadfast love, and his commands. (Deut 6:4-9,12)

“Hear O Israel, The Lord is One. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Teach your children well that they remember them; talk about them everywhere you go and when you lie down and when you rise. Tie them to your hand as a sign of my promise, write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates lest you forget that I AM the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

The Shema is the deepest connection of Israel to the steadfast Love of God. This is the distilled essence of the covenant of Judaism because it confesses the true nature of the One God with the command Jesus said is his greatest: (1) You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. The Shema concludes, “Let these words of the Law guide your life.” Even the cynics among the penitent Jews know this.

Peter didn’t finished preaching until he told them that these deeds of Easter were done as part of God’s eternal plan foretold by David. They crucified the prophet who is the Son of God, the one who God had made as Lord and Messiah. He is telling the Jews of Jerusalem that they have crucified their God about whom they proclaimed with greatest honor and respect, “Hear O Israel, The Lord is One.”

They ought to be as outraged by Peter’s proclamation as the chief priest, Caiaphas was by Jesus’ answer when he asked Jesus if he was the Son of God… “You say I am.”

If you imagine yourself a Jew in Jerusalem hearing this outrageous allegation of guilt of sin against God, guilt caused not by willing desire but by God, why is your reaction not to shout “Crucify him!” like they shouted when the Jesus acknowledged the truth of the allegation of Caiaphas?

But something has gone wrong. We don’t hear “Crucify him!” What happened? 

What has happened is that many of those Jews in Jerusalem were cut to the heart by Peter’s words because they came to understand fully the magnitude of the tragedy of their actions.  God used them for his own purpose, blinding them to the sin of their action so that when their eyes and ears were opened to understanding the gravity of their sin against God, it heaped despair upon them like a massive millstone around their neck. As a doctor would say, their pain was exquisite. All is lost. They have committed the worst imaginable act that a penitent Jew can do.  Is there any more heretical action than to do violence against God? They have no recourse, no place to hide. There is no exit from this deed. They are cornered by their guilt and can only repent by asking Peter “What must we do to be saved?”

If you are listening carefully you may see the fulfillment of the prophesies of Jesus. Everything is coming to pass like the falling of rows of dominos. Do you remember Jesus quoting the commission to Isaiah by God? (Is 6:9-12): 

 “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ I will make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate;  until the LORD sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

All the people of Jerusalem have to do to understand their cities are in waste and the Promised Land is desolate is feel the chafing under the heel of Roman power, observe all the Jews coming from other lands, and  look around their city and temple and see the Roman soldiers everywhere.

If Peter is preaching the Good News to them, it is not very comforting. He says, “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. God has blinded you and made you kill Jesus, the Messiah, Emanuel (God is with us).” How can the despair go deeper?

Friends, we are seeing God and the Holy Spirit at work here. The Holy Spirit brought these Jerusalem Jews to Peter. The Holy Spirit inspired these 120 believers to speak. The Holy Spirit allowed everyone to understand their testimony. The Holy Spirit inspired Peter to proclaim the Good News, Peter the man who was afraid of persecution and denied Jesus three times, one of the fellows who ran off and left Jesus to die alone on the Cross. Can there be any doubt the Holy Spirit is at work here?

Isaiah’s prophecy comes true. The Holy Spirit opened the eyes of the Jews of Jerusalem to the depths of their despair. They have crucified their God.

But the depth of this tragedy does run divinely deeper. Even Jesus is cut to the heart by their actions because he understands and knows the deed of their hands was ordained. Do you remember his words spoken on the cross before he died, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they do.” Divine compassion arising from human despair.

Peter understands. Peter answered the question “what must we do to be saved?” with “Repent, acknowledge your sins that they may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” Christ has bound together forgiveness and repentance - compassion and despair, fulfilling his prophetic promise. Forgiveness comes from only asking the question, “What must we do to be saved?” The Lord said through Isaiah (42:16) “I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, I will guide them by paths they have not known.  I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not forsake them.” There is a home.

These words, “…the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him” ring like the Shema but do not. The promise of the Shema is to Israel; that if it obeys the Law God will protect you. The threat is, if you do not obey it and God will punish you. The promise of the Holy Spirit is to everyone: repent by acknowledging your guilt and receive forgiveness.  There is no threat.

Luke makes it clear that none of this understanding, repentance and forgiveness is an act of choice or free will. This was all God’s plan from the beginning.  Peter may proclaim the Good News but the power of the Holy Spirit guided him. The Holy Spirit operated on those who listened. It awakened understanding. Paul says faith comes to us from hearing the preaching of the Word of Jesus. It came so powerfully to the people of Jerusalem that they could only ask, “What must we do to be saved?”

At the end of the day, 3,000 more people heard and understood with the Holy Spirit’s help and joined the congregation of believers. Luke says they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers, growing in faith to carry on proclaiming of the good News.

I ask you, who are the ministers of the congregation of believers?... Each person in the congregation of faithful believers is its minister. The Holy Spirit dwells in them and empowers us. Only one question remains. The Lord used the Holy Spirit to cause Peter and Luke to send this question to us from across the ages. I hope it is a rhetorical question for all of us, that is, I hope the answer is self-evident and answers itself: “Have you got the Spirit?  AMEN.

Day 160 - Birthday Dreams

Romans 8:12-25 and Acts 2:1-21,33 

Dreams – Unique Human Character.

If there is one thing almost all of us do, it is dream.  Some times people criticize us for it, “he is just a dreamer,” and some times praise us for it, “What would we have done if Thomas Edison hadn’t dreamed of lighting a room with electricity rather than natural gas or candles?”  If there is a unique characteristic of humanity, it is probably dreaming.  Our dreams set us apart from all God’s other creatures.

If you ever watched a pet dog sleeping on the floor or ground with their legs and feet twitching as if they were running you might object to my claim. I watched my old dog chase squirrels most of my childhood and one day he got it just right and finally caught a squirrel in the open between two trees. When I watched his twitching legs I imagined he was dreaming about that squirrel he once caught, chasing a memory.

But our special dreams set us apart. We do more than dream about the past. We dream while we are wide awake. We see an injustice or some other thing we don’t care for and dream about what the world might be like if those things were not in it.  We may even feel anguish or frustration because so much of what we see is out of whack with our idea of how things ought to be. My mother used to say that kind of stuff made her want to chew nails. The technical word for that frustration is cognitive dissonance - the conflict between what is and what we think ought to be. It powers the dreams of changing the world to make it a little closer to God-like.

Unfortunately that conflict between what is and what ought to be can be the problem with dreams. We run the risk of becoming Don Quixote, the crazy old Spaniard who jousted with windmills.

The Problem with Dreams – Their Tragic Nature

The tragedy of dreams is that usually it takes us a long time to gain the wisdom to put things in perspective and see the really important dreams. We may spend scores of years focused on something until one day we finally realize our priorities are skewed and time wasted. We may feel our age hanging over us, thinking now we know what to do but have very little time to do it. Sometimes we may feel all we have left are dreams of hope that our youth guided by the Holy Spirit find the vision with enough time to do something about it.

I can relate to Solomon’s woe in Ecclesiastes. : In 12:1-7, old Solomon looks over the wreckage of his life and wonders where wisdom got him. He lamented,

Eccl. 12:1   “Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”;  2 before ... the day when ... the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and … before the silver cord is snapped, … the golden bowl is broken,…the pitcher is broken at the fountain,… the wheel broken at the cistern,  and the dust returns to the earth as it was, - - - and --- (our) breath returns to God who gave it.

Solomon’s forlorn words of despair and resignation make Ecclesiastes a hard book to read. He struggled for the wisdom to see beyond the veil of death but near the end of his days all he could say was, “the poor and the rich, the proud and the humble, the profligate and the righteous, those who toil day-in and day-out and the slacker, they all have the same reward” – death. Everything about his youthful dreams told him that the righteous must find a just reward, but his lifetime of experience showed him over and over the conflict that the rich and the poor enter the same ground together. He concluded in a very Jewish view that everything but God was futility and vanity. (Sadducees vs Pharisees)

Paul’s Dream 

Paul understood Solomon’s lament and Christ’s answer. Solomon’s world was the old world that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection fractured forever. The Christ Event cracked in the fabric of reality and the Kingdom of God is emerging from it. Paul said we are trapped between the dying old world and the emerging new Kingdom of God that is already here but not fully. That happens upon Christ’s return in the consummation of the New Jerusalem.

The power of the Christ Event fractured and mortally wounded the old world. This event is so momentous that Paul could only describe it in terms of the pain of childbirth. He said, “The whole world is groaning in labor pains and the whole world of the children of God are awaiting the fulfillment of our dream.” Paul knew the crucifixion and resurrection changed everything about God’s relation to the world and this Holy Spirit reveals our new dream.

Paul said (Rom 8:16,23), “When we cry, “Abba! Father!” (the very cry is) ¹⁶…that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, even while we groan awaiting the fulfillment of our dream: our adoption and the redemption of our bodies.. Paul is describing the birthing of the Church.

Joel’s Dream (in Acts)

When the Holy Spirit descended upon Peter and the assembled congregation of all believers in the world, about 120 persons, Luke says tongues of fire danced on heads and everyone understood what the others said in their own language. Can you imagine what it was like?  Have you ever felt that Spirit, it is as real today as then. Peter was so moved he could only resort to my favorite powerful words of the prophet Joel to describe the revelation of the Holy Spirit working on them.

            ‘God declares In the last days (it will be, God declares),

            that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

                        and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

            and your young men shall see visions,

                        and your old men shall dream dreams.

18       Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

                        in those days I will pour out my Spirit;

                                    and they shall prophesy.

19       And I will show portents in the heaven above

                        and signs on the earth below,

                                    blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

20       The sun shall be turned to darkness

                        and the moon to blood,

                                    before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

21       Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Peter makes it clear that the gift of the Holy Spirit from Jesus guides all who make that last call on the name of the Lord for the dream of new life. Pentecost points the church towards its future – the New Jerusalem. It is the day the Spirit blew that Good News into the world through the Church– the promise of a home with God.

Pentecost – The Day The Dream Begins

If Paul felt the image of childbirth best describes the nature of the Christ Event as the emergence of the Kingdom of God and announcement of its future fulfillment, we ought to ask what was born on the Day of Pentecost?

Do you know what Pentecost means? It is the Greek word for the Hebrew word, Shavuot, the religious festival celebrating The Lord giving the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Jesus said he did not come to do away with the law but to fulfill it. The Holy Spirit descended to Peter and those 120 people fulfilling Jesus’ prophesy. They carried the Gospel onward and we are now 2.2 billion strong. Do you see it now? Pentecost has the same importance to the whole world as Shavuot has to the Hebrew.

Solomon lamented that birth always points to an end. Christ points to The New Beginning.  Do you remember our sermon on New Jerusalem in Revelation? On that final day the need for the Church ceases because God has redeemed everyone who desires and has come to live with us on Earth at home together. Pentecost is the day of birth of the real dream. A home with Emanuel – God is with us.

This dream is faith in the work of Christ in the Church started on that first Pentecost. I think I first glimpsed this when I was not yet 18 tears old but sadly only understood it today as I wrote this sermon. I had graduated from high school in May, 1965, and began Georgia Tech in June. One of my longtime buddies from high school started with me. We both ran track and played on our varsity soccer team and sat in most of the same classes. He was from Ozark AL, a sleepy south Alabama town of about 10,000. His Dad was the mayor and surprising at the time was chairman of the Advancement Committee on Civil Rights.

He drove down from Atlanta many weekends that summer to see his girlfriend in Dothan. Mid-summer I got a phone call with the bad news. On the way home, he went to sleep at the wheel, ran off the road and crashed in a fatal accident.

I made the drive down for the funeral. It was so bad they kept the coffin closed. It was especially hard on his parents and younger sisters. As we walked behind the casket to the cemetery for the committal we passed the AME Zion Church where the youth choir stood on the front steps of the church proudly singing the old spiritual “In That Great Getting’ up Morning.” It was so moving that I still recall it 48 years later. This spiritual captures the essence of our dream born on Pentecost. Here it is in an edited, abbreviated version:

I’m gonna tell you ‘bout the coming of judgment, fare thee well, fare thee well.

There is a better day a coming,

In that great getting’ up morning, fare thee well, fare thee well.

Oh preacher! Fold your bible for the last souls gathered,

fare thee well, fare thee well.

Yes, for the last souls gathered, fare thee well, fare thee well.

Blow your trumpet Gabriel, Blow your trumpet.

Lord, how loud shall I blow it?  

Blow it right calm and easy, do not alarm all my people

Tell them all to come to the judgment, fare thee well, fare thee well.

Then you see that fork of lightening,

Then you hear that rumblin’ thunder,

Then you see dem stars fallin’

Then you see the world on fire,

Then you see dem poor sinners rising,

See ‘en marching home for New heaven, fare thee well, fare thee well.

Fare well poor sinners,

In that great getting’ up morning, fare thee well, fare the well

That great getting’ up morning is the faith and hope of the Church. The dream in our hearts is that we have the fire in our belly, and our youth have the vision of faith understood on that first Day of Pentecost. Come Holy Spirit, come Heavenly Dove, fill our hearts with your tongues of fire as we the Church await the Lord’s great and glorious day, continually proclaiming the God’s grace in the Good News to the world that 21  “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

In that great getting’ up morning, fare well poor sinners, fare thee well, fare thee well.                                              AMEN.

Day 153 - In Spite of Ourselves

A sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN May 12, 2013  texts: Rev. 22:12-17;  John 17:20-26

We have followed the path of the disciples from Easter to the time of absence between Jesus’ Ascension and Pentecost. Last week we heard Jesus’ promise to send the helping Holy Spirit that is the essence of God to teach and remind us of Jesus’ words. Next Sunday we celebrate Pentecost (wear some red) when the HS descended to the disciples.  Today in this time of waiting, we recall the prayer Jesus voiced at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is called the Prayer of Consecration since Jesus calls for the blessing of God upon the new Church. It also is known the last Testament of Jesus, the disposition of his estate.

As I read the passage preparing the sermon and thinking about the Church, I was amazed at what we as a Church have fulfilled of that prayer, almost in spite of ourselves.

This final testament of Jesus goes directly to the heart of the question, what is the purpose of the Church (capital “C”)? This prayer connects God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Disciples, you and me to yield an answer about that, and how the “C”hurch relates to the “c”hurch.

Jesus clearly prays for blessing on his disciples and future believers, but Jesus talks as if we are already a Church of Christians in congregations who share and live in the body of God and Jesus. Verse 21: “… As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The issue is not whether we individually will be one in Christ. The issue is that we are all one in Christ. The issue is not whether as a Church we will be corporately one in Christ. The issue is the Church is one in God and Christ.

Yet each of us knows if we are one with God it is in spite of ourselves. We sorely lack in the department of “good examples.” Isn’t that the whole message of the Good News, we have an undeserved blessing of grace from God? A blessing that reminds us of the power of God to reconcile with humanity;  A blessing that constantly reminds that we are a Church formed from congregations formed of individuals who carry the burden of sin. It is a blessing that reminds us individually and as a congregation that we are always in need of repenting, again and again and again...

Our critics are quick to point this out. We should listen to them, not because they are always right but because they might be right, and are a clear mirror of our appearance. We need to be mindful that our external critics may expect us to adhere to a standard of the world that is not God’s standard.  BUT…

The world does have some reason to wonder about our integrity. Consider:

(1) In Acts, our earliest record of an organized system of congregations, unity often gave way to schism. Peter and Paul argued about whether you must be a Jew to be a Christian and what kind of food should be eaten. They argued over how much wealth congregants should share with the group and whether pastors should serve meals or just preach. They argued over mission territory.

(2) Paul’s letters describe his fights with other Christian evangelists who he feels are invading his turf. He tells of congregations fighting over where to sit, how to do communion, what is proper decorum in worship, backbiting, and so on.

(3) In one of the earliest formal controversies, faithful Christian believers argued over interpreting the nature of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in our reading from John. One side formed the idea of the Trinity and put it into words of a creed. The tragedy of these older religious controversies is the absence of a good historical record of the losing side. When you lost one of those arguments, you really lost. Losing tended to be fatal. Many earnest Christians who found themselves on the wrong side of the argument lost their life or were exiled in the name of the Trinity.

 (4) The universal Church split over how to do the evangelism in verse 21. People went to war over this question, “Do you have to join the Church to become a Christian (Catholic), or do you have to be a Christian to join the Church (Protestant)?”  Thousands of lives were lost in this war fought in the name of Christ because folks forgot verse 26 of Jesus’ prayer, “I made your name (God’s name) known to them, and I will make it known (to all), so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

(5) Immediately the Protestant church split over how to do baptism and age of qualification and other dogma. That battle costs thousands of lives in the name of Christ.

(6) Most Protestant Churches in the US split over sanctioning slavery and the power of government in local affairs in the time of the War Between The States. Hundreds of thousands died in the name of Jesus. As the hymn goes, “they died to make men free.”

(7) The German Church ceded obedience to the civil authority of Hitler. Millions of people died in ovens and on battlefields for Christ’s name.

I could go on with depressing examples. I could point to the bloodletting in our US Churches over ordination standards and national politics, but my point is not to defend any side of these issues to foment discord. To defend a side demands I condemn myself to ignoring Jesus’ prayer for unity and consecration.

My point is to look at the conflicted history of our Church through the lens of Jesus’ last Testament and ask what do we look like to the world and to ourselves, how did we accomplish what we have done, and can we do even better?

On the positive side, Christianity has grown from a small band of poorly organized frightened disciples and followers into the hundreds in the time of Acts and into thousands of Christian denominations today numbering about 2.2 billion people who profess Christian faith. On the negative side, many of us are still prone to worship a denomination rather than Christ and will not hesitate to fight over a specific denominational belief at the drop of a hat.

In spite of ourselves we have done some things right because we are a visible Church of 2.2 billion when we are not fighting with each other, and even more visible when we are. Are all those 2.2 billion Christian people? Only God knows who is in the invisible church. What I can say is that our record is something to be proud of, not of our own works in it, but of the work of the Holy Spirit and glory that Jesus asked for us. We should be proud and penitent that He is doing the saving work of the Church, not us.

We know the Church uses our arms and legs led by the Holy Spirit. The remarkable thing is that if each one of us is honest, we have to wonder how a flawed and broken people have done God’s work so well?

I have a great respect for Richard Niebuhr, a theologian/ethicist born in the Midwest. His family emigrated from Germany with the heritage of the German Evangelical Church. He was a pastor who taught at Yale and was president of Elmhurst College. He struggled with these flaws of the Church and its war with the world as he searched for an orthodox (conservative) belief that was true to the core of Christianity.*  As an ethical Christian he was concerned about making Christ-like decisions in life. Every decision of a Christian is an ethical choice to act or not.  He believed humbly that a Christian stands on the moral high ground only in the sense that such a person can look over the US Christian landscape as an inside participant and be an honest critic, not an outsider whose only intent may be to tear down the Church.

He observed that the Church has yet to stop a war, has yet to create a lasting peace, has yet to eliminate poverty and implement charity. He lamented that it teaches moral responsibility, self-discipline, and brotherly love, yet neither the ranks of the disadvantaged and the morally corrupt, or those with privilege subside, rather the progress of social disintegration continues. He lamented that often the church finds itself of the side of the crucifiers rather than the crucified. He concluded the Church faces a single question: ”What must it do to be saved?” He wrote these words in 1930.  Are they true today? I’ve heard a lot of people say the same things - our society is disintegrating and the Church has lost its way.

What is the church to do? Richard Niebuhr said the outside critic criticizes the Church for failing to achieve some standard of society or civilization, and for not being the savior of the World.  The outside critic and frankly some of us insiders seem forget the Church has always known it is not a savior but lives in the company of those who have found a Savior. Our vocation as insiders is to proclaim the Gospel in word and deed. (Share the secret.)

The Church is the congregation of all believers. We must embrace the reality of criticism. It reveals to us that we desire to live as part of the world even though we are supposed to live in the world but not be of it. Remember, the Church is not subject to the world’s judgment. It is subject to judgment by One who has his own standard measured against that final testament that we just read.

I am sorry I cannot sugar coat it. We are blind not to recognize that we are individually susceptible to the seduction of the world, and we bring it into the Church in all manner of ways like a bad cold.  The history of denominations begins nobly but always evolves into an effort to shape the denomination to match our cultural views. Henry VIII and the Church of England is a good example. The split of the Baptist and Presbyterian Church in the Civil War, and even now, is an example. In Alabama if you see a person ill and hungry on the street and feed them and let them stay with you at church until they are well, you risk imprisonment if the person is an illegal immigrant. The problem of the Church is not that a crisis in the world is besetting the Church and will defeat it. Our crisis is that we have let the world into our Church and embraced the world’s values, not God’s. They are not always the same.

It is God’s Church, it cannot be defeated without his will. Jesus will preserve and rule it until he returns. Our risk is we may not be part of that Church. RHN in 1930 said “The cracks in time, the disruption of the world are too deep to be of human origin and reveal the justice of a God who judges. God is not the amiable parent of soft faith, or the miracle worker of a radical Pentecostalism but the Creator, Judge, and Redeemer who is at work in time using his instruments,” you and me. These are the words we heard in Revelation, “See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work…Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.  Outside are the dogs and …everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” Our job as a Church is not to judge the outsiders, the dogs and liars, but to wash our own clothes after a good day’s Christian work living the Gospel until Jesus returns.

Richard Niebuhr said we are most likely to hear God’s promised guidance to do that work in prayerful contemplation of scripture, not in worship of the letter, but because we find in scripture the Holy Spirit who reminds us of what Jesus said and guides us to understand and live it. This is how we find the answer to the perpetual question to the church, “What must it do to be saved?”

The Gospel of John tells us that we need to consider that the prayer of Jesus was not to urge his disciples onward, but a call for the unity of the church with God, so that the world will see that the reconciling power of God in Christ is in the world but not of the world.

Now, let us remember that this prayer of Jesus was his last testament given after a meal as we partake today. It is a meal partaken not at a Presbyterian, Baptist or any other denomination’s table, but the Lord’s Table. This meal is open to every professing Christian from east and west, and north and south.  Come let us break the bread and share the cup together to honor Christ’s presence in us and with us. Amen.

* H. R. Niebuhr's comments come from "The Responsibility of the Church for Society," Westminster-JohnKnox: Louisville, 2008, pp3-46