Off lectionary sermon series on the body of Christ based upon Colossians 1:15-23a, 1 Corinthians 12:27-28, &
F-1.0301
Good morning. Today starts
a three part sermon series on being the Church Alive. You may or may not have noticed that for this
sermon series, we’re going to be off the lectionary path. And what you’re also about to find out is
that I’m going to be weaving in pieces from the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s
constitution. But the hope is that all
of this, the sermon, our worship time, and the weavings of the Holy Spirit,
bring us to a place of looking with fresh eyes and renewed hope at how we can
be the body of Christ and the church alive in the world.
So, today is just the beginning.
We’re going to focus on Christ as the head of the church. But come back the next 2 weeks and we’ll be
considering our various callings within the body and how we can be open to and
participate in what God is calling us to right now… or if we’re already open to
it, how we might make it even better.
Well, I said I’d be drawing from the constitution and I am. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the time to
read some of this book but you should.
Sadly, what most Presbyterians know of this book is how to spew an
alphabet soup of rules that work for or against an idea. But there is some truly beautiful and amazing
theology in here. Given the history of
this document, it makes it even more impressive just how clearly the love of
Christ flows through its pages.
So, hold our scripture readings from Colossians
and 1 Corinthians together in your mind and let’s see what the foundations
section has to say about how to understand it.
Section F-1.0301 “The Church Is the Body of Christ”:
The Church is the body of
Christ. Christ gives to the Church all the gifts necessary to be his body. The
Church strives to demonstrate these gifts in its life as a community in the
world (1 Cor. 12:27–28):
·
The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God
alone, even at the risk of losing its life.
·
The Church is to be a community of hope, rejoicing in the sure and
certain knowledge that, in Christ, God is making a new creation. This new creation
is a new beginning for human life and for all things. The Church lives in the
present on the strength of that promised new creation.
·
The Church is to be a community of love, where sin is forgiven,
reconciliation is accomplished, and the dividing walls of hostility are torn
down.
·
The Church is to be a community of witness, pointing beyond itself
through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Christ
Jesus its Lord.
This brief passage is really quite amazing. I couldn’t preach a better sermon or hold out
a better vision than that. It’s a whole
statement of faith… no really a statement of calling… no more like a statement
of having been called and truly heard the word of God.
So, tipping my hat to the years of history, tradition, and
faithfulness that goes into this (F-1.0301), I’d like
to use it as the outline for our thinking today. See, this statement reminds us of just how
deeply relational God and creation are.
God doesn’t stand in the distance like a puppet master and we are not
islands unto ourselves. The
church is a community of:
·
faith
- entrusting itself to God
·
hope
- rejoicing in the prospect that God is making a new creation
·
love
- forgiveness, reconciliation, restoration
·
witness
- pointing beyond itself to the transforming work of God
So let’s start with the first marker of the church. We are “a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of
losing its life.” That’s a pretty
powerful statement. Does it mean that
we’re called to go out and be martyrs for the faith? No, this statement is about the church as an
institution verses the church as the body of Christ. We, meaning all believers, are called to live
as the body of Christ, no matter where that leads us, even if it means losing
the institution we call the Presbyterian Church (USA) or it’s buildings or it’s
holdings.
We, the body of Christ, are not the stored up
treasures of an institution and we should not be bound by them either. So long as the organization of the PC(USA) is
a wonderful and beneficial thing, it can support us, help us join together our
resources in more useful ways, and be a true conduit for making Christ’s reign
known in the world. But the faithful
wisdom built in these pages (The Book of Order), is that we are to live as if
the institution doesn’t matter.
We do this because we are not only a community of
faith but we are “a community of hope, rejoicing in the sure and certain knowledge
that, in Christ, God is making a new creation.”
Our hope is not in our own ingenuity or cleverness. It is not in politicians or even religious
leaders. No, our hope is in the way God
works around and through us to transform life after life after life.
It is God who pours out gifts on us and then calls us
to organize as a body so that they will be used in even more amazing ways. We “strive to demonstrate these gifts” in the
way we are together and in our workings in the world. But it is because Christ is the only true
head of the church, calling, guiding, proclaiming, that we have seen and felt
the vision of something bigger when we join together in service.
Now, take a look here at the statement “The Church
lives in the present on the strength of that promised new creation.” This is a pretty power packed sentence. It does not say the church only lives in the
present because we know that it has been, is, and ever will be alive. Rather this is about how we can find our way
to stay living in the present. It is in
the strength that hope provides us. We
can keep our work focused here because we are emboldened by our hope in the way
Christ is timelessly working to make creation new.
And with experiences like that, we know that we are
also “a community of love, where sin is forgiven, reconciliation is
accomplished, and the dividing walls of hostility are torn down.” Our lives individually, as families, as
congregants, as coworkers, as sisters and brothers are bound in the quality of
love we share… a love that we learned from the first lover of creation, God.
When we are living as the true body of Christ, our
work is that of building up each other, healing wounds, soothing anxieties, and
even the big stuff of dismantling the walls that divide us from one another and
the rest of creation. The work of love
in community is beautiful but it is demanding.
Yet, when we are living the love of God together, moments and lives and
communities are forever made different… holy.
And that’s why we are “a community of witness,
pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s
transforming grace in Christ Jesus its Lord.”
Our time together is for the cultivation of and fellowship in the love
of God. But our calling is not to come
into the church walls and hang out. Our
lives together should be pointing to something bigger, to God, all along the
way. Our words and works should not be
pointing to us to say, “look what I’ve done.”
They point to God to say, “look at the never ending, always faith
inspiring works of God.”
See, the point of all of this is that we are living in
a body of faith, hope, and love… and a body with a calling to share those and
other gifts with the world. We are all
called to be nurtured by and serve in the body of Christ. We don’t have to worry about the future of it
or how it will sustain itself because Christ, as the head, is in charge of
that. But we are called to be the living
body of Christ.
The reformed tradition has a way of talking about that
called the Priesthood of Believers and Baptismal Calling. See, we are called to honor all works in the
body because they all serve as witness in different ways. All believers are ministers, just of different
callings. The words “lay leader” or “clergy”
and “teaching elder” or “ruling elder” are words of the institution for how it
orders itself. But our work transcends such
language, no matter our title or calling.
The person who unlocks the doors and scrubs the toilets is as
deeply honored in the body of Christ as the person who leads worship. Does that offend me? That I compared the work of a sexton with the
work of a pastor? No, and it shouldn’t
offend you either. Membership and
witness in the body of Christ is about commitment in covenant, not status. And ministry and ministering is about
service, not privilege. My ordination is
about my function, not my rank or prestige.
The things that should offend us are when we stand in the way of
that witness and become stumbling blocks to one another’s callings. The things we should feel anxious about are
when we stop loving and working together or become indifferent to the needs
around us. Our real work is to hear and
respond to the cries of those in need of the body of Christ. Our focus need not be on solving every
problem but it should be on the call of Christ in each one of us and living
that each and every day. Everything else
is in God’s hands. And thanks be to God
for that. Amen.
