Romans 5:1-5; 8:16-25; Colossians 1:24-29
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossian Christians:1:24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, 25 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, 26 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. 27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28 Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. 29 For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.
The Apostle Paul says that, in his house arrest in Rome, he is “filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of…the church.” Now, Paul does not mean that there was any insufficiency in Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Not at all. All he means is that the church needs to embody Christ’s self-giving love in new ways in every time and place, so that people can see the reality of it afresh. The world needs to see Christ embodied in believers, embodied in acts of compassion, for Christ embodied in us is our hope of glory, our hope that God can and will restore us as his children. Paul lives and works for this goal, enduring suffering with hopefulness, so that he may present those under his spiritual influence as mature in Christ. In all times and places, the church needs to live with integrity, with self-giving love, and with contagious, solidly grounded, hopefulness.
Here at First Christian Church of Berryville, we say that our mission is to build a community of hope through Jesus Christ. What is hope? Hope is more than wishful thinking.
When I was eight years old, I had five long-term desires for my life: (1) that I was going to be a famous major league baseball pitcher, (2) that I was going to be for the milkweed plant the kind of chemurgist that George Washington Carver was for the peanut, (3) that I was going to be an ornithologist/artist of the stature of Roger Tory Peterson, (4) that I was going to be the kind of President of the United States who ends up on Mt. Rushmore, and (5) that I was going to be a preacher with influence as broad as Billy Graham’s. I was not going to have to choose among these options. I was going to do them all, either simultaneously or by turns. I need not tell you that those desires were not solid hope, but were merely groundless, wishful thinking. When I had begun to mature as a Christian, not one of those daydreams remained as my deepest desire…although I occasionally still indulge them—Walter Mitty fashion--as fantasies that pop up from the depths of my mind. My most entertaining fantasy is becoming the first rookie pitching star who is simultaneously drawing social security. Of course, I would have to learn to play baseball first, a small obstacle to overcome. The point is that wishful fantasies are not what I mean by hope.
Hope is the well-founded, confident expectation that something really good that is not yet apparent will emerge to fulfill our best and deepest desires. When I say that this hope is not yet apparent, I mean that we hold this hope even as we go through human vulnerability and suffering, even as we groan in agony over the fact that we still fall short of the glory of God, even as we are all too aware that we are not yet what were created to be, even as the purpose for which God created us is not yet fully actualized. Still we confidently expect that better things are coming, preferably already in this life, but if not in this life, then at least in the next.
For Christians, the confident expectation is not groundless, the confident expectation is not grandiose like my childhood fantasies, and the confident expectation is not in ourselves. Rather, our hope is rooted and grounded in what has been revealed through Jesus Christ regarding God’s reigning wisdom, holiness, love, and power…and our hope is rooted in our actual experience of well-balanced, daily Christian living. Our confident expectation emerges from spiritual growth through Bible study, prayer, worship, fellowship, and the rest of The 9 Ways.
Our Christian hope flowers when we live our lives as immersed in Christ and when he is being formed in us more and more each day. Our Christian hope is in the experienced fact that Christ is gradually equipping us to do his work of building hope in others. The hope of Christ moving through us touches the lives of many other people in many ways.
I want to say that hope is a matter of social justice. There is nothing more oppressive than a lack of hope, nothing more liberating than adding solid hope to someone’s life.
I want to talk about the many ways that hope is flowering through the ministries of First Christian Church.
Let’s start with the Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry. When a family is at the end of its rope, f-o-o-d spells hope. This congregation has labored long and given generously to support Loaves and Fishes. The number of families who have been sustained in their hope is beyond calculation, but it is highly significant. Even if you are one of the volunteers or donors, let’s all join in applauding those around us this morning who have joined energy and resources to make possible this outpouring of hope. Recently, our volunteer energies have been stretched pretty thin. There is no shame in letting other congregations help fill our gaps. But keep this in mind: the other congregations that have historically supported Loaves and Fishes are also experiencing the stretching of their volunteer energies, some more severely than we are. We need some folks praying and thinking about creative ways to expand the human resources and food resources of Loaves and Fishes. If we want to go farther in building hope for the families being helped by Loaves and Fishes, we need to be thinking about how we can help them with a hand up as well as a hand out. Can we help them with job skills? Can we help them find home-based ways to supplement their income? Can we help them with gardening, cooking, and food preservation skills? Can we help them with financial planning? Can we help them with family relational skills? Can we help them establish a stronger spiritual foundation for their lives? Can we stimulate conversations within and beyond this congregation on what comes next for Loaves and Fishes? Can we deepen our prayer on such matters? I am not trying to pile more burdens on the already over-burdened volunteers. I am trying to stimulate visions that will bring more people, more energy, and more resources into the battle for hope. We need to be talking to our friends within and especially beyond this congregation about all the possibilities. There are lots of people out there, some of them Christians who are not affiliated with a church, who want to make a tangible difference for the better. If they see and hear that First Christian Church is about making a tangible difference, about building a community of hope through Jesus Christ, they may join their energy and resources with ours. They may even supply new creative vision and new leadership. We have to show by our conversations and by our actions that we care. This is a matter of social justice.
Let’s think about families, youth, and children. It is not just here in Berryville, but all across our culture, that families, youth, and children are in crisis. Like many earlier times in history—for instance, the 1790’s or the 1920’s—we are proving that life without a spiritual and moral foundation does not work. Our education systems reflect the lostness of our whole culture. I am not attacking our schools—they have a tough, perhaps impossible task in trying to compensate for the broken homes from which their students come. And since, in our pluralistic culture, they are unable to speak with moral and spiritual authority, they are trying to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. But it is apparent that there are many children and youth for whom our education systems are not working. How do we pour some hope for something better into the lives around us? I do not have statistics, but I believe it probable that First Christian Church is attracting far more unchurched youth to our mid-week youth program than any other long-established congregation in this community. It comes as a bit of a shock to some of us. Some of us—maybe most of us--prefer not to see the signs of brokenness so openly displayed among us. But take a look at Jesus. The perfect Son of God did not pull back from the messiness of life. He did not insist that those who came to him know how to do things with social propriety before they offered their hearts and their service to him. He was willing to take a lot of heat for that. Christ is still at work. I believe that he is at work in our youth ministry. And he is still taking heat. Let’s just be sure that the heat he is taking is not coming from us. Can we use more help? You bet. Do we need more critics? Probably not. We will not help by standing back and remembering through a golden glow how we did things in the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, or 1980’s, and then wondering why we are not still doing things that way. Even 1990 was a generation ago. What we did then had to be designed to work then, and, to be honest, our best efforts did not always work then. Youth ministry is messy and unpredictable in any generation. We are entering the second decade of the twenty-first century. What we do now has to be designed to work now. Let’s get about the task of building a community of hope that includes youth and children. This is a matter of social justice.
The Gulf oil spill which dominated the news for a time is receding from the lead story on the evening news and the front page of the local paper. It was and is and will remain a great tragedy, but it should call to our attention that the practices and policies of industrial agriculture have been killing the Gulf for decades now, sending topsoil and fertilizer down the Mississippi. Not only that, but those same policies and practices have been killing the soil of our farmlands, killing family farms themselves, killing the rural towns that once served those farm families, killing all of us as we eat the subsidized high fructose corn syrup and similar products that emerge from our agriculture industry, and depending heavily on petroleum at all stages of the process, petroleum that is itself costing us heavily at all levels of our lives. Diversified, sustainable agriculture and local food economies are the answer to many of the problems that face us. Our church community garden may not seem like much of an answer to such huge problems, but our garden is like a signpost calling our attention to the shape of the solution. I am convinced that our garden fits very closely with our biblical and Christian values. I am also convinced that it fits with our mission of building a community of hope. Perhaps we can welcome into our church people who are looking for such a sign of hope and who in turn can help us enlarge the impact we make in supporting increased opportunities for employment in our local economy. It is a matter of social justice.
Last week, I asserted that the modern Christian social justice movement emerged from the evangelical tradition and the holiness tradition. These three traditions compose the subtopics of our mission statement. The evangelical tradition is represented in “drawing people to Jesus.” The holiness tradition is represented in “becoming more like Jesus” and the social justice tradition is represented in “doing the work of Jesus.” Last week I bemoaned how the church has suffered for well over a century by the splitting apart of the social justice tradition from the evangelical and holiness traditions. Both sides of the split have suffered from that. I see hope that this is turning around, that the chasm is being bridged by the latest generation of young evangelicals who are less judgmental, less dogmatic, less narrowly focused on private morality, and more aware of the social justice concerns that are rooted in the Bible. I pray that this may be so. Whether it is so or not, there is nothing that keeps us right here and right now from taking a holistic approach to Christian spirituality. We will be spiritually healthier when we are living out a well-rounded Christian life represented by the six streams of living water, and the social justice tradition will both draw strength from and contribute strength to that healthy combination.
Let me conclude with an example of how the streams work together: My father was not an active church person through my growing up years on the farm. His excuse was that the church was filled with hypocrites, and that there were people outside the church as good as those in the church. He finally dropped his excuses and became actively involved when he saw two things: (1) he saw rural churches overcoming traditional antagonisms and cooperating to offer more effective ministry and to help slow the decline of rural communities, (2) he saw Heifer Project International taking practical self-help steps to make life better in impoverished countries. As a result of reconnecting with the church, my father began rapid spiritual growth that showed up in study, service, personal formation, and general life satisfaction. His seeing the social justice tradition in action gave him hope and spurred the rest of his spiritual growth.
It can happen again. It can happen right here and right now. Our efforts to carry tangible hope to people in despair can make a difference. Let us embrace our calling.
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