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The title of today's sermon should intrigue
you—'Conquering the Divide.’ The Holy Spirit had that title just pop into my
heart when I started reading through both Saint Paul's letter this morning to
the Ephesians and thinking of Jesus in today's Gospel. “For He is our peace…”
Paul says this to a once alienated people, strangers to the covenant, the
Promise, the Gentiles. What a wonderful thought still for us now: “He is our
peace.” Christ Jesus is our peace.
I wonder if we really think about
the words: The Peace of Christ, when we share that sign every Sunday? In the
ancient Church, the church of Byzantium, they would greet one another with a
kiss on each cheek. Or a bear hug however you want to interpret it today.... we
share the sign of peace as an acknowledgement of God's Providence through
Christ whose Grace has overflowed to give us peace in our hearts, that first
church.
I love Sundays that talk about God as
the Good Shepherd. This is just another one of them with another facet to the diamond
that is brightly shining in our lives, Christ. This week is talking about
compassion. Compassion is a lovely word and even a greater spiritual way of
sharing when we are opening our hearts enough to share God's love to our
neighbor. The fundraiser I had for my birthday raised almost $200 out of $500
towards making bricks out of recycled plastic to create homes for the homeless.
I don't really know how many bricks
they will be able to make with what was donated, but I can only hope that other
people around the world are donating to help the project come to fruition. I
thought about those bricks stacking one upon each other as a gift of love, and
a handshake in some senses, of peace. Each brick going down, each layer of
connecting material was bringing, building these people hope. We live in a very
complex world that makes it difficult to be hopeful and encouraged about much
of anything, especially when we are divided between the secular and the
religious as they say. The Great Divide in our hearts is beyond words and
actions but more has to do with purpose and mission.
The Great Divide in the world today
is even stronger than those boxes of what we have compartmentalized, polarized
people within. It goes beyond the contempt of the “Scarlet Letter” and becomes
condemnation. This judgmentalism is truly hard for one to break free
from. These are those moments when we refuse to find rest. When we refuse
to allow one another to have peace. It is a self-righteous evil that divides us
and takes us as those sheep with a false Shepherd. There are plenty of false
shepherds in the world. It doesn't necessarily have to be a person, but it
could be a mindset. The ruler of this world grows his power by leading us
with empty promises, vainglory and ill-gotten gain.
Perhaps we could think of all of
today's texts as speaking to another side of our daily spiritual warfare battle
of staying faithful sheep underneath our Sovereign, healing Shepherd Jesus against
the evils of the wilderness of the world dividing us through judgement,
condemnation and empty promises. The Prophet Jeremiah gives us a profound
start to ponder upon: “… the days are surely coming… a righteous branch… He
shall reign as king and we shall call Him the Lord is our righteousness.
Basically, today's lessons really
are speaking to that first church and that is the heart. Just like those bricks
of recycled plastic to help in bringing compassion to the homeless, the bricks
of the heart are built by our lives’ journey with Christ as the Cornerstone.
This spiritual temple to God is always going to need healing. We need healing
for the many times we walk through valleys to find our way out to climb up
mountains, bring down mountains. We need to have God, our Good and Gracious
Shepherd in guidance, in covenant with us, as His children.
I think that's the key right there. We
are always in need. We are always seeking some kind of healing and we are
always challenged with finding, living into real peace. In today’s Gospel, we
have this frenzied scene of the disciples coming back from their commission
from Jesus to go out and heal and do many other things of the Gospel and we see
the people, the crowds basically huddled around Jesus and following Him
wherever He goes. It's important to note that yes, we've heard of Mark being
our “news reporter, just the facts ma'am” Gospel, but this particular set of
stories or connected stories that we have this morning really make clear the
eyewitness of Peter which is one of the primary sources of the three synoptic
Gospels. That's hard for us to fathom, when we get into the story that Mark
paints for us of Jesus out and about being the Shepherd, being this fount of
compassion… that these accounts are all coming from the eyewitness of Peter.
As we would come to find out in many
other Gospel stories, Peter sometimes was a rock, and sometimes he was a
chicken heart and other times, he was truly just being human. All the disciples
that followed around Jesus and that we hear about were truly ordinary men and
women. They were like blue collar workers today. They were shaped by and lived
hard lives. Jesus helped them to change and transform them all into being,
becoming truly the priesthood of all believers. The word Apostle is used
for the first time here. The subtle
difference between the word disciple and the word apostle is that apostle
literally means to be sent. Think of the
Blues Brothers here: “We are on a mission from God!” They were definitely sent on a mission, we
see that even more clearly through the elaborate journey of the Book of Acts.
It was really nice after this last
Sunday to have fun with many of my birthday present gift cards that I received.
One of them was to Barnes and Nobles, where I bought this gigantic addition of
the Gnostic Gospels. The Gnostic Gospels and related wisdom writings were
disputed works that were either lost or excluded for various reasons out of the
canon that we have as the Bible today. What I think was interesting though in
just reading through a few of the very rich stories and poetry in this book was
that these were coming from people who were divided from one another and
divided on aspects of understanding God.
It was really intriguing to read the
commentary and the actual ‘Gospel of Thomas’. As we know the story of Thomas,
the notorious “doubter” of Jesus’ Resurrection and the missionary to India; he
was not included in the Canon of the Bible because of different perspectives of
how he saw Jesus. I think this is a rather profound little section that begins
his gospel, he says: "if your leaders tell you, "look, the kingdom is
in heaven," then the birds of heaven will proceed you. If they say to you,
"it's in the sea," then the fish will proceed you. But the kingdom is
inside you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be
known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But
if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are
poverty."
These are actually some profound
thoughts. Who leads us? Who do we allow to lead us? There's a lot of false
shepherding out there that tries to divide us and get us to believe one way or another
and point to different directions of what they think are the answers. Thomas's
next verses say a profound truth about the heart: the kingdom of God is inside
you and it is outside you. What I think he means to say there is that the
potential kingdom of God is to be realized through our voices, hands and feet
in the world, especially when we are led by the true Shepherd. He says: “When you
know yourselves then you will be known, and you will understand that you are
children of the living Father.” The moment we faithfully embrace our role as
children of Grace and promise, God can truly lead us. What we do through our
ministry in serving others will be a reflection of this.
This last segment you hear of this
third stanza, since Thomas's Gospel is divided in Poetic stanzas, ends by
saying: "But if you do not know yourselves, then you will dwell in poverty
and you are poverty." Being grounded in the heart with the Gospel of
Christ is being affirmed by His love, His healing love, as that Cornerstone.
There are many things of this world that try to knock us off our foundation of
faith in Christ, yet alone help us to feel divided and alienated from one
another because we choose to be disciples of Christ in a hostile, secular
world.
Just like we have a political divide
today teetering on the edge of Civil War... the Gentiles were hardly accepted
by the Jews. It was beyond infringements upon Mosaic law being that they were
uncircumcised, as we hear from in Paul's letter, but they grew up in a
world without a covenantal God, a Shepherding God. They had no idea what being chosen really
means. For years perhaps, centuries, the Gentiles were treated with
hostility and made outcasts. We hear some of that bias in regard to the stories
about the Samaritans. This now powerhouse letter Paul from prison writes to the
Ephesians, bridges and begins to close that hostile divide with a conquering
peace that brings down that dividing wall between them. He says to them: “For
through Him, both of us have access and one Spirit to the Father… so then you
are no longer strangers or aliens but you are citizens with the Saints and
members of the household of God.”
Do we hear these welcoming words
today being the church in the world, to one another? Do we offer not only an
extravagant welcome that is Jesus’ to give through us and compassion to others?
Or do we make everything conditional and divided by bias and other things that
corrupt our hearts to follow. That Foundation of Christ within us is the
Cornerstone upon that foundation… but have we been building the right things
within our spirit to allow our hearts to truly love our neighbors? The divide we
have between one another these days is very real and very ugly in parts even
with people that we may think are our friends or colleagues. Many of the people
that donated to that fundraiser for the plastic bricks were from one “political
side.” The other side was too busy pointing fingers, filing complaints and protesting
other ugly things merely to tearing down our worldly leaders.
Restorative justice is compassion. Money
has become an evil root that has just made it nearly impossible to
achieve. The making of and building from these bricks is one of the many
examples of the fruit of genuine restorative justice. Right under our very
noses there are many opportunities for us. There are many opportunities for us
to be led by our beautiful example in Jesus to be a fount of compassion to
others… Instead however, many choose to be divided by politics, secular worldly
gain and selfish indifference. This particular telling of the feeding of the
5000 through Mark's Gospel, as I said earlier, is not only having us see
through Peter’s eyes, but we're also seeing Jesus in action feeding others in
more ways than one. The disciples were complaining and concerned about the
money as well as the amount basically exhibited they’re still growing and
challenged in their faith in Jesus, that God will provide.
I love the image of the twelve
baskets and the twelve disciples. We know for the Jewish culture, the number twelve
is not only a missional number, but it is a very powerful numeric symbol of
them being gathered and chosen by God. The twelve tribes of Israel are united
by God, and the notion of Covenant, is still a message here, but in addition to
that, the bread being gathered into these twelve baskets says something
profound about the spirit. These broken pieces made whole and multiplied. These
broken pieces are our challenged selves as disciples being made whole through
the love of God, the healing compassion of Christ. Once that is realized deeply
in our spirit, in our hearts we are empowered to go forth and make disciples of
all nations, all peoples. Isn't that a wonderful thought? Now mind you, I don't
think the Gospel writer Mark was too concerned with those insights, more than
just bringing that picture together of how we are gathered together through the
ministry of the Gospel and are inspired to scatter with God's Word.
We may never in our lifetime,
realize genuine peace. We may never know a complete peace that has no
divisiveness woven into it. But why can't we try? Why can’t we try to be a
real, united people of peace? Each one of us has many gifts to share, many ways
of being active compassion in the world through our voices, hands and feet… Why
aren't we truly embracing that? If we sit back and let the world pass by and
let the discord grow, we will never see even a glimpse of that peace that being
children of Grace and Promise we are called to realize.
Let us pray,
Gracious and Loving Lord Jesus,
We thank You for Your providence, Your
healing compassion in our lives,
You make us whole with Your living
and restorative Word.
You help us to see beyond ourselves
to see that all people need to be united, a part of Your Holy Family.
Help our hearts to grow that foundation
with great spiritual bricks of all good things
In Your Most Holy Name, we lift
these things to Your shepherding heart
AMEN
July
22nd, 2018; Ninth Sunday after Pentecost; Year B; Proper 11; SOLA
Lectionary
Sermon
by: Reverend Nicole A.M. Collins
Psalm
23; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-44, (RCL--53-56)
This sermon was delivered at First Congregational Church at 10am:
https://youtu.be/XnC5cM1nBhw
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