Sermon preached by Fr. Tom
at St. Thomas Episcopal – Plymouth
January 26, 2014
Third Sunday of Epiphany
Isaiah 9:1-4
Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Matthew 4:12-23
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be an acceptable offering in your sight, Oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”
Suppose you were to draw a picture of the Christian Church. I would like you to think of how you might depict it. This is a tough one.
I’ll describe a picture I read about this last week. There is a circle with radii coming from a center labeled “Christ.” Each radius was labeled with a name of a different denomination. The man who drew the picture explained: “The nearer to the center, Christ, the nearer to each other.”
Christ has to be the center of our faith. I hope that in all the pictures you drew in your heads, Christ is at the center. A hymn we sing tells us that “In Christ there is no East or West, In him no South or North. Galatians 3:28 tells us “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.“ We are all one as we are one in the Lord – or should be anyway.
St Paul ‘s first letter to the Corinthians is a letter written to a church that is not “one in the Lord.” It is a divided church. It is reported to Paul by Chloe’s people that people are quarreling. When Paul writes to the Corinthians he could be addressing to the letter to so many communities today which are divided. Suppose Paul wrote a letter to the Church in Plymouth today. What would he say? What are the core issues for Christianity in Plymouth? Where are our growth edges? Where is it that we need a little work?
Talk to enough people about the Church, and you will hear people tell you they are disillusioned. There is infighting and back-biting. People get overly concerned with the financial bottom line rather than ministry. People get distracted by politics and the need for power. Unfortunately the Church is made up of people with all their faults and shortcomings and we don’t check our sinful nature when we enter the church door.
We are not called to be divided. We are called to be the Body of Christ and function in cooperation with each other. Hold that thought, and I will come back.
One of the interesting things about traveling in a clergy collar is that people will sit down by you in the airport, and they are like the ancient mariner. They have this tale of woe they have to tell you. It is the albatross around their neck.
Last summer I was flying back from a conference in California. I had a delay in San Francisco, and I had a pair of women come sit down. One of them asked if I was a priest, and I told her that I was an Episcopal priest. She told me she was from Oregon, and she had some insight into why churches were closing there.
I told her I would like to know myself, and would be interested in what she knew. She told me it was because they were preaching the Prosperity Gospel. In other words, they are preaching that if you are right with God, you will prosper financially and socially. She said that when the economy went sour in Oregon, people were not getting what the church was promising and so they quit going. I asked the woman if she went to church, and she said “no.” She had been watching things though, and she saw how it all worked.
Now I would claim that the Prosperity Gospel preachers were not preaching the Gospel. They were preaching a gospel people wanted to hear. If people quit going to church because they were not prosperous enough, maybe they were not too well grounded in the faith anyway. I encouraged the woman to try to find a church to attend since the economy seemed to have thinned the herd, and the ones left might be the good ones. The woman’s friend offered her some chocolate so she would quit talking, and the conversation was over.
The church has survived a lot of boom and bust cycles over the years. It is remarkable really that we are still around after 2000 years when faith communities today are not that different from the one at Corinth. It is a testimony to the fact that Christ really is at the center of the true Church that we have thrived. We are human beings after all and prone to sin. If it were a human institution, we would have gone up in flames or fizzled out long ago.
We are all too human, but we have been baptized into the Body of Christ. A testimony to that baptism and its power is the work day we held here at St. Thomas yesterday. We will get some notes out soon for those of you who could not be there, but I will give you the short version. We prayed, we worked, we ate together, and then we worked some more. We talked about challenges and strengths of this congregation. I saw a bunch of people working together for the future of this parish, and I was very encouraged. In the words of St. Paul from today’s Epistle, we were “united in the same mind and the same purpose.”
I am not saying were all saying and thinking the same thing. I am saying we were unified by our common goals and it was productive. Paul would be pleased.
We are called to be one with Christ and with each other. Think of the picture I described earlier. As we grow closer to our Lord, we grow closer to each other. Working together like this is a testimony to our faith.
So what about the larger Church? What is our testimony? The testimony of the Prosperity Gospel churches in Oregon is one of failures – a lesson that did not deliver and got replaced with something else.
This failure and others like it – that is why it is all the more important to stay focused on Jesus. We have to read the Bible and live out our baptismal vows to seek and serve Christ in all persons. We need to be like the Christians in Acts 2:42 who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” We have to remember that we are saved by grace and not our righteousness.
I am grateful and encouraged by the work this congregation did yesterday. God’s power is working through us as a community. We have different opinions. We come from different places. We are one in Christ.
Here are my takeaways today:
• Think about that picture I described earlier with Christ at the center. Imagine each of us as one of those radii.
• As we grow in the faith and get closer to Jesus, we will get closer to each other. That is my vision for this congregation. .
I have said these words in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.