A Community Of…

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.

A Daily Walk

A Daily Walk <-- Audio file of sermon based upon Revelation 1: 9-19

Good morning. I am glad to see so many of you here safe and sound from the weather this week. And let us continue to hold in prayer and help those who are still limited by ice, snow, and cold.

When I was last here, we had 3 straight weeks of sermons from biblical texts that are “apocalyptic” in nature. I use that word as a literary form, not it’s translation which simply means “revelation.” We looked at a text from Matthew, one from Revelation, and one from Daniel. We left Daniel by asking the question “what is faith?” and I invited us to mull that one over for a couple of weeks.

What is our faith individually and collectively? What does it mean? What difference does it make? Now, we’ve circled back around to the book of Revelation for one final apocalyptic text in this sermon series. And I hope we’re going to flesh out some of that question of faith. Well, let’s jump in and find out.

You see, until now we’ve looked in very intellectual terms at these texts. We’ve deconstructing where we’ve gotten overly emotional or interlaced them with other stories of our culture. But as we’ve said before, these apocalyptic texts are to “jar” us out of our everyday thinking. So, applying an intellectual lens to them is not the only tool we have. We are still faithful when we look in more emotional terms too. Many of these writings are truly for the purpose of creating an emotional response that impresses upon us a feeling or ideal that can’t be taken lightly. Nevertheless, that does not mean the stories have to be taken literally either. Herein lies the conflict that’s often hard to balance. And herein is our connection to faith.

As the book of Revelation opens, we are immediately told this book is to signify truths about God. As Oxford University professor of biblical studies Christopher C Rowland put it, this book “calls us to move through the letter to the spirit, not to become so bogged down in the minutiae of symbolic detail that we fail to experience these words as an organ for further imaginative insight into the ways of God and the world.” You see, we’re called to look at these texts not as a code to be cracked but as a story that reveals something, something that might be difficult for us to see or believe otherwise.

Jesus taught using parables or stories that could be applied to the way people lived. The book of Revelation tells a story using jarring images to weave together the truth of God’s ongoing relationship to the world, a relationship where justice and love triumph over institutional and individual sin. So applying one of Jesus’ parables to our lives might be as simple as saying “the good Samaritan helped someone he didn’t know because it was the right thing to do and so should I.” But applying the story told in Revelation is not as simple as applying it to a literal situation because it’s breaking across time, the Alpha and the Omega. It’s a “big picture” point of view where we can apply the truth to our faith but not exactly to the circumstances. Nonetheless, what parables and apocalyptic stories have in common is that they are both rich in meaning and keep telling us more and more if we keep looking into them.

But let’s get back to what the text says. The narrator is having a vision of Christ who is preparing him to write down what is to be revealed. From what John has already seen, we get the foreshadowing that he’s in for a wild and bumpy ride. But from the very beginning, John was asked for something he could do… to be a witness.

To be a witness and write down exactly what he sees, nothing more, nothing less may seem simple. But how often do we really live our lives that way? We anticipate, try to make sense, categorize information, and so on. It’s in our nature. Even now, I bet many of you are trying to figure out where I’m going with this. And ultimately, it’s John’s nature too because he did more than witness throughout this book. He interacted, asked questions, and did want to make sense of it. But all he was asked to do was witness.

So, I want to set forth witness as an essential part of faith. What we believe, how we define our theology, and all the different ways we’ve made intellectual sense of our faith are not really what’s fundamental. What’s fundamental is simply witnessing God.

Just as we saw last time we looked at Revelation, this book will go on to tell of a God of real power, creativity, and love that is beyond time. It weaves together the work of overthrowing the injustice in the world and beyond and offers assurance that God’s work will come to completion. It also shows how the restoring of creation as an ongoing work right now that’s hard to see from the inside out. But here we are, even today, on the inside looking at God’s work all around us. Can we see it? Do we stop to see it? Or are we too busy trying to make sense of it rather than witnessing it?


When we look at this text the next thing Jesus asked John to do was share what he witnessed. Now we may be tempted to look past just how deep this is. What we see is a book written by a man almost 2000 years ago that we don’t know, have no connection to, and quite frankly have a hard time understanding. But at that time, Jesus was asking him to write this letter to 7 churches. The Christian churches at this point were small and people knew people. They were in relationship with each other. This was not Jesus asking John to publish a book for folks unknown to him. This would be more like me asking you to write a letter to an elder in this church who has made a difference in your life. You know them, if not personally, you still know a good deal about them.

So the second thing I want to hold out about faith is that it’s relational. Faithfulness is in how we connect with others and share what we’ve witnessed. Sharing our experience of God is not only foundational to faith but foundational to the cultivation of a deeper faith. It is by seeing how God has been present to other people that we see God more fully in our own lives and vice versa.

A few weeks ago when putting the question of “what is faith?” out there, I quoted Hebrews 11 saying, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” I said that faith is that quiet utterance within us that tells us something more is going on here than what we can understand. Faith is that most foundational piece that calls to us and beyond us. It is not definable and it’s more emotional than intellectual. It is purely spiritual.

I raise this because I believe this is God’s message to us today, for our daily walk in life. The church as an institution has gotten very good at intellectual arguments about belief. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money trying to out argue one another’s beliefs while missing that God is present with each of us. And our society spends a great deal of time trying to see who can out talk the next person. Politicians, news commentators, and corporate leaders want to secure their power by making sure we believe they are sharing an absolute truth. And meanwhile, congregations, communities, and individuals hurt and long for something of real substance that speaks to their very core… a faith full of “assurance of things hoped for.”

I’m not saying that we should not use our gifts of intellect. On the contrary, it is a gift and we should apply it with gratitude. But as a gift, we should honor God, the giver, by rooting it first in faith.

So, what do I mean by this? I mean that our primary concern should be with making sure God is glorified in what we believe, say, and do. As we do make statements of belief, we should ask if it makes our experience of faith richer. When we are in a public forum, we should seek to make our engagements spring from our faith. As Sara Little, professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary said, “when belief is equated with religion or supersedes faith, when it becomes a control mechanism or a test for salvation, it is a prison rather than a home.” So we need to make sure our beliefs are not only supportive of our faith but of other’s faith too, lest we be creating a prison of limitations rather than a home of flourishing.

You see, just like Jesus did not want John bogged down in the symbolic details of his vision so he would not miss God, we too must not get bogged down in the minutiae of trying to outthink our faith or we might reduce our own faith and the faith of others. In similar fashion, last week the president of Louisville Seminary said last week that, “A good theologian walks past the establishment and into the fresh air of faith.” I would argue that it isn’t just a good theologian that doesn’t get caught up in establishment and doctrine. I think it is a good Christian whose daily walk is in the fresh air of faith.


Sisters and brothers, faith is our most core gift from God. It ties us to God and to one another. It gives us the vision to see and understand. Just as John had this vision and sought to know more of what it meant, so do we seek to make greater sense of the world and God. But we need to keep faith as our foremost concern, a faith full of witness and sharing of God’s presence and love. When we are concerned more with seeing and sharing in our experience of God than we are with convincing others we are right, the words of belief will flow naturally and with truth. Our words of comfort to one another will ring true. And our experience as children of God will be forever enriched and transformed. Let us take a daily walk in the fresh air of faith.

Thanks be to God. Amen.