Sunday, April 24, 2016

A Sermon:: Who Are We?


                                                                   Who Are We?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 24, 2016



Scripture: Acts 11:1-18



Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.



I’ve got to tell you something this morning. I’ve got to ask you some questions that have been weighing on me recently. They aren’t questions for me to answer, but I think they are questions for me to ask. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing as the First Congregational Church of Maltby? Those are questions of identity. They are also questions of mission. They are really important questions. Identity really matters. Mission really matters. They matter to each one of us as individuals, and they matter to us as a church.

Identity and mission have always mattered to the larger church. Identity and mission were the major issues in the very early life of the Christian movement. In its earliest decades the biggest issue facing the young Christian movement was one of identity and mission. It was the issue of whether the gospel of Jesus Christ was for the Jews only or for both the Jews and the Gentiles. The question with which Christians wrestled was: Who are we? Are we a movement of and for Jews only, or are we a movement of and for everyone?

In our reading from Acts this morning we see the founders of the faith wrestling with that question and answering it. The answer they gave was: The movement of Jesus Christ and the grace of God are for everyone, not just for us Jews. They adopted the identity of a universal movement. They adopted the mission of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ beyond Israel to the whole world. For that decision I give thanks to God, for if they hadn’t done that we never would have heard of Jesus of Nazareth. So it’s a good thing for us that our earliest ancestors in the Christian faith answered the identity question the way they did.

A church’s identity, or its mission, which is really a different way of talking about the same thing, is as important in today’s world as it was in the days of Saints Peter and Paul. A church’s identity has several layers. I’m thinking here of Christian churches, and the most foundational identity of any Christian church is that it’s Christian. There are a lot of different ways in which people understand what it means to be Christian, and some of them are more faithful to Jesus Christ than others; but an identity as some kind of Christian is the most basic identity of any Christian church.

OK, we’re Christian; but I have to tell you that there’s a lot more to the question of our identity and our mission than that. A church usually has, and always needs to have, a more specific, a more precise identity and mission than that. Look at our passage from Acts again. There was no issue about both Peter and the other leaders of the Jerusalem church being Christian. Their issue was what being Christian meant with regard to mission in their specific time and place. It was the specific issue of the scope of the Christian that shaped their discussions and their disagreements, not whether or not they were followers of Jesus Christ.

Whether the Gospel is also for Gentiles is, of course, not our question. For us that is a question that our tradition answered a very long time ago. Yet the way we see the ancient pioneers of our faith wrestling with that question in the New Testament can still be instructive for us. Their issue was one of the relationship of the Christian movement to the world in which they lived. As they wrestled with the question of how to relate to the dominant Gentile world in which they lived different people among them came to different conclusions. Some thought that they needed to wall themselves off from that world. Some thought they needed to protect their Jewish identity from any dilution or, as they saw it, contamination. If you want to follow Jesus, become Jewish first, they said. Of course, very few Gentiles, especially the men, had any interest in becoming Jewish; but that was their problem, these Christian Judaizers said. Our movement is Jewish, and we’re going to keep it Jewish at all costs.

Others answered the question differently. In the book of Acts, though not in the authentic letters of Paul, it is Peter who first answers the question of the Christians’ relationship to the Gentiles differently. Peter, and Paul either after him or before him depending on which texts you read, saw that God’s grace extends to everyone, not just to the Jews. These Christian universalizers saw a great mission field among the Gentiles. They saw that many Gentiles were longing for a new and powerful way to connect with the one true God that Christianity offered. They saw the Holy Spirit alive and working among Gentiles as well as among Jews and said all right then. God is for everyone. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone. Thanks be to God!

Our world is of course very different from the world of Peter, Paul, and the other earliest Christians. Yet there are some interesting similarities between our context and theirs. Especially in this part of our country, Christianity is becoming a minority way among an atheist or at least agnostic majority. Some Christians want us to circle the wagons the way the first century Christian Judaizers did. They want to retreat to what they see as a better Christian past, to cling to what was, and to pretend that what is will just go away. Well, here’s the truth. What is never goes away. It changes. It evolves, but it doesn’t go away.

Folks, I am convinced that the Holy Spirit is calling us out into our mostly non-Christian world the same was the Holy Spirit called Peter and his associates out into the mostly non-Christian world so very long ago. God called them to mission in parts of their world that were very foreign to them, and they accepted the challenge. God calls us into the world too. About that I have absolutely no doubt. God calls us to mission in the world. Let’s take that as a given.

It’s a given, but just as the precise nature of God’s call was an issue for Peter and Paul, so the precise nature of God’s call is an issue for us. God’s call to us is an issue of identity and mission. It comes to us not as answers but as questions. Who are we? Why should we continue to exist as a church? What does God want us to be doing right here and right now? Those are immense questions, and they are immensely important to us as seek to live together into the future.

How would you answer those questions? Here’s how I’ve heard you answering them in the relatively short time that I’ve been with you. You self-identify as “friendly.” You see yourselves, correctly I think, as a friendly congregation. For the most part you like each other and get along relatively well, certainly better than you have at other times in your recent past. You think of yourselves as friendly to visitors, and for the most part I think that you are. Beyond that, you identify as an autonomous congregation. Some of you strongly identify as Congregationalists, and for you that mostly means being an autonomous congregation that values individual freedom of conscience. You certainly are autonomous. Isolated even. And you seem to respect each person’s right to her or his own opinions, sometimes to an extreme that isn’t necessarily all that healthy for the church as a whole. I think some of you also self-identify as a congregation that does some good work in the world, primarily for and through the Maltby Food Bank.

All of that is very well and good, but I want to ask you: Is it enough? My answer to that question is no, it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for a couple of reasons. Your self-identity is mostly as a Congregationalist church. I’m a life-long Congregationalist too, but every expert out there today who has studied the matter will tell you that people just don’t care about denominational identity like they did fifty or sixty years ago. Denominational loyalty is mostly a think of the past. Identifying ourselves as Congregationalist before all else will not sustain this church into the future. That may not be news you want to hear, but it’s not my job to give you only news you want to hear. My job is to give you what I know to be the truth, and the truth is that no church today that identifies itself only by its denominational tradition will long survive.

If this church is to have a future it must have an identity beyond the one it already has. It must be committed to a mission in the world more than it is at the moment or has been in the past. It is my job first of all to put that truth before you. It is much less my job to answer the questions of identity and mission for you. Those answers are yours to discern. I have some ideas along those lines that I’m happy to share with you, but these questions are yours, not mine, to answer.

So I’ll just leave you with these questions: Who are we? More importantly, who is the Holy Spirit calling us to be? Why are we here? Why should we continue to exist? What difference do we make in the world? How is God calling us to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our time and place? Great questions to be sure, and the answers aren’t necessarily easy to find. I pray that we can work together in the time ahead to find them. Amen.

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