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August 21, 2011 Tenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Ever since I was a little shaver, I have been part of a Christian community. And I recall being lifted up my whole life by people whom I barely knew. Everywhere I lived, Wisconsin, New York, Iowa, North Dakota, Oregon, I have always found myself in Christian community. When I went to seminary, my home congregation held Jeranna and I up both in prayer and financially. Individuals would send us cards of encouragement weekly. When I got to Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, IA, it was a community like no other I had ever lived. I studied with Christians from all over the globe. We began every class day with worship. The thing we all held in common was our baptism and our faith in Jesus Christ. Today we welcome a fellow believer in Jesus Christ to join our fellowship for a year. Youngshim Mason will be our intern. Youngshim grew up in South Korea. And many of you might be wondering, how did she get here? I encourage you to ask her. Listen to her preach. Let her teach you. I have been thinking a lot about Christian community this week, thanks to our second lesson in Romans. Christian community is certain things and isn’t certain things. I am afraid many of us have an image or ideal of what Christian community should look and act like, and when that image isn’t upheld, we get disappointed, or turned off by the church. Back in the 1940’s a famous Lutheran Pastor named Deitrich Bonheoffer gave us some helpful language about Christian community. Prior to being executed in the concentration camp at Flossenburg, Germany, for plotting to kill Adolf Hitler, Deitrich wrote several books about living out our theology in community. He helps us make the shift from theology to ethics… living our faith in daily life. One
of the most influential books I have ever read is, “Life Together: A
Discussion of Christian Fellowship”.
Bonhoeffer wrote this book while running an illegal seminary for
the Confessing Church in Finkenwalde, Germany where he lived amonst 25
vicars (or interns) in emergency built houses.
Bonhoeffer saw Christian fellowship as a gift. He writes, “It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s word and Sacrament.” Did you catch that? It is a gift to be here today. Being stuck in prison himself, Bonhoeffer knew that the physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.” Bonhoeffer,
strongly believed that the only thing that holds the Christian community
together is Jesus Christ and not our wish dreams of how the church should
be. He writes:
“That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for
something more. One who wants
more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood.
He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has
not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into
Christian brotherhood. Just at
this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very
start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its
root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea
of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout
heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood.
In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being clear
right from the beginning, first the Christian brotherhood is not an ideal,
but a divine reality. Second,
that Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a psychic reality.” Fellowship in Christ is not some perfect venture where everyone always does the right thing. But if you see Jesus at the center of every relationship, and we have a healthy understanding of sin (i.e. the log in our own eye), then you can see that our community is formed solely around the grace of God in Jesus Christ. As a result you can see others with more grace. In our second lesson, the Apostle Paul makes the shift from theology to ethics. He starts out by saying first of all, the Christian life is grounded in the mercies of God. Everything we do after we say I believe is the Christian life. In other words, it’s hard to have grace and forgiveness for others until we know God’s grace and forgiveness for ourselves. Second, living the Christian life takes sacrifice of our bodies. There was a story once of the huns… a warrior like people. They wanted to join the fellowship of Christ and decided to get baptized. An interesting practice took place. The Huns got baptized with one arm out of the water. This was the arm they used to kill people with. They didn’t want that part baptized so they could go on sinning. And notice Paul compares us to animal sacrifices on an altar… where the whole animal is given. There is one difference. The animals are dead. We are to be a living Sacrifice. We are no good to anybody if we are the walking dead. The sacrifice must be living or in the Greek logical or reasonable. Presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice means it must reasonable… within our own ability to give. Third, Christians are not to live like everyone else in the world. We are not to conform. But our minds must be renewed. We must be reprogrammed so we can discern God’s will. We discern God’s will only by reading or hearing the scriptures or receiving the sacrament. The Bible tells us that God loves the world as it is. God desires abundant life for everyone. God desires justice for the poor and weak. God shows us how to forgive. Fourth, Christians who have renewed minds don’t think too highly of themselves… nor should they judge how well others are doing at living out the faith. We realize with a renewed mind we are all in the same boat. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. As Christians, we must always see Jesus standing between us and the other. We must meet the other as he or she already is in Jesus eyes. Jesus died for this person long before you ever met them. In order to live in community as Christians, Paul concludes that we are to see ourselves as a “body.” The body is an amazing thing. Every part is woven intricately together… each diverse organ relying on the other to keep us alive. Paul says, you are one body. In that body there are many members and not all members have the same function. This tells me that every person in the body of Christ is of extreme value. There is nothing expendable. With renewed minds, we are to see the importance and necessity of others… we are to see the value of our own gifts.… A simple example, if you want to lose weight, how should you go about it? You should eat fewer calories, exercise, and weigh yourself to see if you are making any progress. You don’t all of a sudden say, “I want to lose 10 pounds… I think I will cut off my arm today.” Finally, Paul says, in this body, we all have gifts that differ according to the grace given us. The word Gift in Greek is charism. The root word for gift is grace. Our gifts are graciously given by God for use in the church. If God gives them, we aren’t to doubt them. The good news is we are a fellowship centered in Christ. We don’t always get it right, but Christ does for us. It is a gift that we can even gather together with other Christians, even with those from other parts of the world. Let
us live in community with one another, caring for each other, building one
another up, and always putting Christ between us and the other.
If we do this God’s grace will abound.
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