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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