One Body

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1 Corinthians 12:14-31

King David wrote in Psalm 139:8, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  Do you ever take a moment and consider the human body and how it works and its relationship to the mind and the self and to others?  God really has done something fearful and wonderful.  

Consider what all goes into playing a banjo?  You have to understand music in such a way as to have a feel for it.  It helps if you can hear; though it is amazing that Beethoven composed all of his beautiful music when he was all but stone deaf…and not just hear but know what it’s supposed to sound like.  To play the banjo it is necessary to have hands and fingers and a neural network with the brain to form chords, finger notes, and pound out rhythm.  But you also have to know what to do with the silence between the notes.  I’m a right-handed banjoist.  Yet, if I lost my right hand, I could still banjo but I would need a special prosthetic made to hold a pick so that I could either strum like a riverboat banjoist or pick individual notes and play Irish fiddle tunes. 

On the other hand (pun intended), as a right-handed banjoist my left hand is probably the weakest, uncoordinated part of my body.  Yet when it comes to playing music, the skill I’ve developed in my left hand could not and cannot be done with any other part of the body.  I could lose the thumb and even a finger or two on the left hand and still manage to play music.  But if I lost my left hand, this otherwise clumsy and awkward and weak part of the body, it would be an adjustment but not like losing my right hand.  But, I could not play banjo anymore, or guitar or fiddle.  That would be devastating to who I am as a person and have profound effect on my relationships.  My music affects more people than just me.

Paul uses this body image here in Corinthians to describe the Gathering. He notes that God has made, established the human body just as he chose to and he made it so that it consists of many parts and those parts need each other. A hand cannot be a hand without a brain and having hands is a good bonus to a brain. If a part of the body is lost no matter how insignificant it might be, even just a pinkie toe, the impact on the rest of the body and the human person and the community of that person is…profound.  There would be something hugely lost to myself and to those around me if I couldn’t play music anymore.

Well, so it is in the Gathering.  We are the body of Christ and individually we are members of his body.  Paul wants us to think of our fellowship in the Gathering as a body, like a human body, that God has fashioned and is still fashioning our life as a congregation in such a way that we each are an indispensable member of this whole body.  Even if we were to lose what would seem to be an insignificant part or person, the effect it has on the whole body is dramatic, even traumatic.  No part no person is insignificant. 

So, the main point of the day, we are the body of Christ and each of us are individual members of hisbody gifted by the Holy Spirit with abilities for specific functions of Jesus’ own ministry to his gathering and to the world and therefore, we are each indispensable in his body and his ministry. So, here in this passage Paul brings out three threats to that unity: individualism, isolationism, and elevationism.

Individualism is when we say, “I am a hand, but I don’t really need this body.”  In real life that sounds like, “I come to the gathering here because the minister is God’s gift to preaching (riiiiight), but I really don’t feel like I have much in common with the people here and those I’ve talked to, I don’t agree with them all that much on stuff.  I’m not so much into the things that this gathering offers for me to do.  I like to do what I like to do.  I’m a hand.  I don’t need them all for my Christian walk.”  Individualism is sitting in the pew and avoiding fellowshipping and serving with others.  It’s the risk-free way to go.  It keeps you in control all the while preventing you from the mandate to love and share in ministry together.  People don’t get to know you and you don’t get to know them.

Isolationism is when we look at our brothers and sisters in Christ and say, “You’re a hand.  We’ve never had hands before and we have functioned quite well without them at doing the things we do.  You’ll have to find some other way to fit in.”  Paul blatantly says, “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you.’  And, the head cannot say to the foot, ‘I don’t need you.’” The Christian faith is about human beings relating to each other NOW as a signpost and foretaste of the way life will be when Jesus returns and God makes all things new.  We relate to one another in a way governed by the one commandment Jesus gave his disciples – that we love one another as he has loved us.  Love is a community effort.  There is nothing worse a gathering can say to a person than “We don’t need you.”  Truth is, the Lord sends every person and every person is uniquely gifted for the ministry that Jesus is doing in and through a particular gathering. 

Lastly, elevationism says, “I am an important and powerful person outside the church and therefore, I should be important and powerful inside the church.  So, face it. I’m better and more important than anyone else here.  And…if I’m going to give the big bucks because I can, I’m going to say how they’re used.”  Others might say, “I’ve done everything there is to do around here.  I’m here all the time.  I am this congregation.  Therefore, you people will do what I want you to do or I will make life miserable for this gathering.”  

Just as God has fearfully and wonderfully made it so that the loss of any part of the human body profoundly affects not only the person losing it but also those close to them, so God has made the church so that the weaker members are elevated and all are equal in care for one another.  The gathering is the only human community where rich and poor, powerful and powerless, successful and failing, black and white, red and yellow and brown, rural and city, Brit and Scot, Yank and Arab…whatever the boundary line of status we draw…are a family…the family of God.  As a family we all gather around the same table, drink the same Holy Spirit, eat the same body of Christ, and share in the same ministry of Jesus Christ.  In the church, those who seem of little importance or status out there in the world become elevated and honoured just the same as the worldly honourable.  It’s because we share the Holy Spirit and the same ministry of Jesus.  We love because he loves us and so we build one another up in love.  

Friends, we are the body of Christ…THE BODY OF CHRIST.  Each one of us individually are members of his LIVING BODY…eyes, ears, hands, feet, heart, mind, follicle, finger…and this is by God’s doing and design and not our own.  We are in effect a New Humanity – human beings indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God so that in our life together in the love we share we look and function like Jesus the Christ who gave himself up for us to free us and heal us of the spiritual disease of sin.  Jesus has gifted us each to be a particular and vital part of the Body of Christ as it exists in this backwater community of Southern Ontario.  Through all the gatherings of this community the kingdom of God is breaking into this fallen world and WE are an integral part of what God is doing here.  

We, the gathering, are fearfully and wonderfully made by God to be a New Humanity, the Body of Christ, humanity filled with the Holy Spirit so that we reflect God’s glory and love.  So, and praise be to God, let us love and serve one another in all humility in this world that is hopelessly dead in individualism, isolationism, and elevationism.  Amen.

The Lord's Delight

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Isaiah 62:1-5

Have you ever noticed how people get around babies?  They have a very distinctive almost universal effect.  We want to look at them, make baby-talk noises, hold them, protect them.  They make us smile especially if they smile.  There are certain feel-good chemicals that our bodies release when we see and interact with a baby.  Then there’s the thing of what happens when a baby starts laughing.  A laughing baby is more apt to get a room full, maybe up to a stadium full of people laughing than the best comedian ever.  If you could get the leaders of warring nations together in the same room with a couple of laughing babies, I think world peace could quite possibly result.  If I had to sum up the effect that baby watching has, it would be delight, especially when the baby is happy or laughing.  They just have that effect on us.  They fill us with a joyful sort of pleasure.

Well, it’s easy to talk about delight as a response to babies because it’s all so innocent.  The word that we translate as delight here in this passage is a bit more complicated, a bit more adult we might even say Isaiah says to the Israelites, “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.”  The LORD delights in you. Israel goes from a people being abandoned, unwanted, wholly undesirable to being a delight to God.  Then the prophet brings out the bride and bridegroom…marriage imagery.  

If you look at the other places in the Old Testament where this word turns up you may ask if maybe we’re talking about lust.  It’s always men who feel this delight, usually when they are looking at a woman they would like for a wife.  It sounds a bit like delight here means the joyful and I will say innocent pleasure a man feels when he finds himself in the company of a woman that he is smitten with.  That’s the way the word is mostly used in the Old Testament.  There’s an instance of a father, King Saul, delighting in David and wanting him to marry his daughter Michal.   It wasn’t that Saul himself was attracted to David but rather that Saul thought David had the right qualities of character that would make him a good husband to Saul’s daughter. The word can also be used for things we very much enjoy doing like me and playing music especially in retirement communities.  But for the most part it’s the joyful but innocent pleasure of a man finding himself in the company of a woman with whom he is well suited.

The second most common way the word is used in the Old Testament is for when God finds delight in someone.  God feels delight in a person or in his people when they delight in walking in his ways.  It gives God delight to bless those who have been faithful, to answer the prayers of those who have called upon him.  

In this passage here, it is God who is delighted.  The imagery is that it is God who is finding himself smitten with his people, God who is feeling that joyful but innocent pleasure with respect to his people; his people, whom the prophet is quick to mention that they were not long ago labelled Forsaken and Desolate.  That’s about as close as you get to calling someone unlovable.  Why the change?

Well, if you remember your Israelite history, these people were people who had just returned to the land of Israel, to Judah, to Jerusalem from being in exile in Babylon.  They were at one time Forsaken and Desolate with respect to God.  About eighty years prior God had kicked them off the land he had given this people, his people, and taken away their sovereignty as a nation.  They had made themselves reprehensible to God.  Like an adulterous wife they were worshipping other gods.  The rich were abusing the poor.  People, even their kings, were sacrificing their children to these foreign gods believing it would make them powerful.  They were not a delight to God.  They were just imitating the other nations at their worst.  So, God sent the Babylonians to level Jerusalem and the Temple, and to carry the people away in exile to Babylon.

Over time, for most of the people, exile in Babylon wasn’t all that bad.  In fact, they grew quite comfortable.  They built nice homes and established successful businesses.  But there was a small remnant among them who understood why God had exiled them and they wholeheartedly returned to God.  They built synagogues to learn and worship in.  Most of the Old Testament as we know it was given a final edit and “officialized” in Babylon.  The argument can be made that the core practices of today’s Judaism dates back to these faithful Jews of the Babylonian Exile.  They strove to be faithful while in exile rather than comfortable.

After about seventy years, the prophets among them began to say God would soon be sending them home to rebuild.  Then, the Persians conquered the Babylonians and Cyrus, the Persian king decreed that the Jews could return to Judah, to Jerusalem to rebuild.  He also gave them the mandate to rebuild the Temple.  He even provided finances for it and also ordered that the Temple artifacts that the Babylonians had stolen be returned.  

These Jews who had remained faithful amongst the comforts of Babylon, well, God vindicated them. God recognized their righteousness, which was their continued faithfulness to him throughout exile.  This vindication took the form of saving them from exile and bringing them home to the Land of Israel to once again be a nation.  The desire that they had to stay faithful and endure gave God that joyful yet innocent pleasure we call delight.  The difficulties they faced for being faithful didn't break them.  Rather, it shaped them, solidified their identity as God’s people. These faithful faced hard times and persecution simply because they were living differently than the culture around them.  Remarkably, they didn’t use them as excuses to rationalize walking away from being faithful.  Moreover, they didn’t give into comfort mistaking material comfort as being God’s blessing.  They stayed faithful and endured and God took delight in them, this faithful remnant, and showed his delight by bringing them home.

You know, this faithful remnant reminds me of our four small gatherings (churches) and the thousands of other gatherings (churches) like us who patiently endure in North America today, who keep gathering around Jesus in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit to love and serve and support each other, to learn together, to worship together, to be emblems of hope together in our communities.  We continue to be as faithful as we can in the face of the constant threat of knowing that for a good many of these gatherings, “Hey, this year could just be our last.”  Even so, we don’t give up.  It is a rare child today who has had someone sing Jesus loves me to them.  The media rarely if ever has anything good to say about us, the faithful remnant.  Those larger false gatherings, they spew hate and condemnation while aligning themselves with political power seem to get all the attention to the extent that if the communities around had an assumption to make about us it is that we are just like what they see in the media.

But you know, growing small and growing old has taught us that the love of Christ is what matters - the unconditional, self-denying, non-judging, even sacrificial love that Jesus lived and pours into us with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Love is what matters.  Love is the lesson that our exile in this culture is teaching us who continue to be faithful when we could quite easily say “I’m done.”  But you know, I’m inclined to say to you, to us, what the prophet said in our reading: Our name is not Forsaken.  Nor is it Desolate.  Our name is “My Delight is in Her”.  We are “Bride of Christ”, and a beautiful one at that.  God is delighted in us.  God is delighted in you.  We have our warts and pimples so to speak.  If you have any doubt, consider the love that you share.  That is a gift from God, a blessing to the ones who give him delight.  Amen. 

 

Our New Reality

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Isaiah 43:1-7

This passage from Isaiah is a difficult one to preach because it’s very hard to say any better or explain any better what God himself is saying here.  So, I thought I would do something different today and read it over and over again and just let it sink in.  As I read it just listen and maybe a word or thought will grasp you.  If so, ponder it.  After I read, we’ll sit silently for a minute and then we’ll sing the chorus of The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

This passage is absolutely beautiful.  God says, “I created you.  I formed you.  Do not fear.  You are mine.  I am the LORD, your God, your Saviour.  I have redeemed you, yes you, at the expense of other people and peoples, indeed at the expense of dying myself.  You are precious and honoured in my eyes.  I love you.  Do not fear for I am with you.  You belong to me.  You are called by my name and I have created you to bear my Presence.”  Take this as a word from God, to you and to us as a congregation. “Do not fear. You are mine.  You are precious.  I love you. I am with you.”  Take this word.  It is yours.  It pertains to you.  It pertains to us.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

            I have a particular connection to this passage.  Sometime not long after my first wife and I split up, I was talking with my friend Dwight who taught me to play the banjo.  While we were talking, he got his Bible out and opened it to this passage (really all of chapter 43) and said that many years back the Episcopal priest there in town who was a close friend of his felt led to share it with him to comfort him.  Dwight then said “I give it to you now.  It can be your word.”  He read it.  Later in the chapter it says "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland” (43:18, 19).  There in the midst of having lost everything (emotional and otherwise), Dwight gave me this word, these verses.  It hit me deep.  Instead of lost, devastated, and ashamed I truly began to feel that I belonged to God and that God does love me and was working in me and my life on my behalf bringing about something new.  He was taking all that loss, shame, and hurt and making something new from it, forming me anew.  For had created me, formed me, as he has you, to bear his presence before others.  For probably the first time in my life I found myself able to let the past go and not dwell on it or try to get it back.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

The depth of ambiguity and anxiety that follows things like death and divorce can really become disillusioning.  You don’t know who you are anymore or what to do.  The occasional solitude that used to bring rest becomes relentless. You’re alone all the time and it can be very hard to be alone.  I think in life that it is too easy to forget that we belong to God and how much he loves us.  We forget who God is.  We think everything’s on our shoulders and God is only interested in evaluating our performance.  These verses say the complete opposite.  I give you this word.  Let it be your own.  You belong to God.  You are precious.  God loves you.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

We belong to God, who is the loving communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he does not leave us to ourselves and he is not silent.  He is with us.  He speaks.  We have no reason to fear.  We are called by his name and he created us to bear his Presence.  That’s your, my, our constantly new reality.  As that is the case, God is working in and with us as a congregation and as individuals to bear his glory.  The Hebrew word for glory is kabod and its basic meaning is weightiness, felt weightiness, his felt Presence.  God has created and formed us to be those who bear the weightiness of his Presence and to bear it in such a way that the weight of God’s love comes to bear on us and on others.  That means God in his wisdom has chosen to make us the visible, tangible proof of his reality and ways.  Take this word to heart.  Whenever you doubt who you are and what God is doing in your life and even if you lose sight of God and his love for you.  Turn to Isaiah 43 and read it over and over again.  It is your new reality.

 “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  Amen.

 

Like a Good Mystery?

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Ephesians 3:1-12

There’s just something about a good mystery novel.  They play into our pride, I guess.  We like to think we can solve the mystery before the author ties everything together in the end and thus, outsmart her.  A really good mystery writer will play you to the very end making you think you’ve got it all figured out only to kibosh your arrogance time and again until at the very last she finally reveals who did it.  Mysteries, we love to try to figure them out, but we cannot escape the fact that we are at the mercy of the writer for the final who dun it.  

Since we love mysteries so much, it goes without saying that no one likes a spoiler.  That’s somebody who tells you how the mystery ends before you get to it.  Well, Paul here in Ephesians is a spoiler. His main concern with the letter is to be the spoiler of God’s great mystery novel, the mystery of what God is up to in history.  In fact, Paul is such a good spoiler he is able to say that God is the one who has actually spoiled his own plot - through Jesus Christ God has manifested the Truth that is hidden behind the world we live in…behind history, behind space and time.  Jesus and what God is doing in, through, and as him is God’s revelation of how history comes to its completion and what it will be like.  Amazingly, with the plot spoiled we keep reading the book.

So, what’s being spoiled, what’s now being revealed, as Paul says, is God’s will, the manifold wisdom of God, indeed the mystery of Christ.  Paul says it is being specifically revealed to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms by means of the reality of the church’s existence in this earthly realm.  
This means, and this is huge, that Christian Fellowship, Christian Community…us…we’re the spoil.  To us and through us God is spoiling his own mystery by the living grace that he is making evident in us and the church in all times and places by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit in us who compels us to live according to the New Creation that God has wrought in Jesus Christ and will bring to light in the end.  

That’s pretty deep.  Our Christian community reveals where history is going.  The fellowship that forms as we live according to the Holy Spirit’s compelling us to love God, love each other, and love our neighbour the way God loves us – unconditionally, unselfishly, and sacrificially – is God’s revealing where history is going.  The Christian fellowship that we share is the plot spoiler of God’s great mystery of history and of his Creation.

So, what is this mystery that God has kept hidden from the beginning?  According to Paul back in Ephesians chapter 1 verse 10, it has been God’s plan all along to gather up all things in heaven and earth in Christ (Eph. 1:10); to bring all things together, to bring all things to their created fulfillment under the Lordship of God the Son, Jesus Christ.  Simply put, it has been God’s purpose all along to unite his creation, all things in heaven and earth and indeed heaven and earth themselves in God’s own self with his Son as the head and the Holy Spirit as the uniting bond.  It was God the Father’s plan all along for God the Son to become human and in him by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit all things would share in God, in the loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit.  Indeed, as the prophet Isaiah said, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea (11:9).”   

That is the “what” of the mystery, now comes the “how”. Through the Incarnation and Resurrection of God the Son as Jesus Christ God infused himself to creation and healed it.  Now, God is applying this infusion and healing to each of us and all creation by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on us and in us each.  The Holy Spirit’s presence in us creates a bond, an organic union between us and God and us and us.  The Holy Spirit’s presence in us and his work upon and among us is what we call redemption. 

Redemption or “to redeem” in NT Greek is slave trade language.  It’s the word for buying slaves back from slavery and setting them free.  What that means for us is that we who once were slaves to sin and death now have been set free to live in the New Creation, in the plot spoiler where heaven and earth are one, where all things are united to God in Christ, and where God is making himself known to all things.  Jesus Christ/God the Son, by his birth, life, death, and resurrection, has set us free to enter the end times New Creation now, indeed, to enter unimpeded into God’s presence and this freedom is really applied to us by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit in and among us enabling us to love as God has loved us.

As proof of the mystery Paul presents here in verse six that the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus”.  This was a huge deal for Paul.  You see, Paul was a devout Jew who believed that only the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, had access to God and this was at the Jerusalem Temple.  The Temple in Jerusalem was the only place in their beliefs where heaven and earth coincided and God could be approached.  For Paul to see with his own eyes that Gentiles were receiving the Holy Spirit, the presence of God who was supposed to be only at the Jerusalem Temple, the same Holy Spirit that he had received in his own personal encounter with Jesus resurrected on the road to Damascus, for Paul to see the Gentiles included by God himself into the people of God by the presence of God’s very self meant that the end time New Creation that God had promised through prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had begun.  It began when God raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead.  

For Paul, the supreme plot spoiler appears to have been that Jew and Gentile are now brought together indeed bonded together under the one Lord Jesus Christ through union with him in the Holy Spirit and more so that the fellowship in this new humanity is the place on earth where God actually now dwells.  It is the New Temple of God, the New Jerusalem.  The early Christians called this bit of New Creation in the midst of old humanity the Gathering.  That’s a better translation of the Greek word and less historically/politically loaded than the word Church.  In the Gathering those who had once been enemies were now worshipping and praying together and enjoying a communion in fellowship, a love that surpassed anything known before in history.  God has made the fellowship of the Gathering, instead of the Jerusalem Temple, to be the place on earth where his Holy Spirit will publicly dwell.

This is the ending to the mystery of history, our history, well, I bet you never saw coming.  In each of you and in us together heaven and earth are united and we are in the presence of God because God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth decided from the very beginning to unite his creation to himself by sending God the Son to become human and that union is being extended to us and all the creation by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit until the end when he makes all things to be New Creation.  The proof that this is the Truth is each of us.  Once we were strangers who probably never would have met or become friends.  But since God has called us each to the fellowship of this gathering we have become family in Christ, beloved children of the Father and brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus sharing the “DNA” of the Holy Spirit.  

So, when you look at the news and all the war, and all the troubles and concerns and fears and brokenness and hurt and violence and you wonder where this world is going.  Well, have a look at your Christian fellowship and the love we have here.  That’s where it’s going.  In the midst of all this world’s sick, twisted, hurting brokenness there is Christian fellowship of which this congregation is a part.  The Christian love that is evident among you is the proof that there is reason to hope, that God does care and is involved and will heal his creation.  So, go forth and be plot spoilers.  On the foundation of the hope embodied here go forth faithfully and live as New Creation in the midst of the old.  You are God’s evidence that there is reason to hope.  Amen.