Sermon Cloud

 LIVING AT THE CROSSROADS

            I think I have mentioned before, if not in a sermon, then in conversations with some of you, how the Irish Celts evangelized.  The fourth century Roman Catholic Church model presupposed an organized town or village with a parish church as its center, within a political unit – like a county with villages and roads in between them – that could double as a bishop’s diocese.   But in Ireland of the day there were no such official political units and most of the roads were just cow trails, so the priests ordained by St. Patrick adopted a model of monastic communities built in locations accessible to the traffic of the time, near settlements, on hilltops, on islands near sea lanes and especially at the occasional crossroads. 

            These monastic communities were not just populated by priests, they also had teachers, craftsmen, artists, weavers, farmers, families and children all living under the leadership of a lay abbot or lay abbess.  Some such communities contained as many as a thousand people; and a few others may have been as large as three thousand people.

            A typical day was divided into three periods of worship, study and work – if you wanted peace and quiet, you had to go outside the walls.  They worshipped twice a day, learned the scriptures together and encouraged one another in prayer.

            The community compound was surrounded by a circular outer wall, not used to keep people out, but that signaled entry into an area of “alternative living” where violence was legally and absolutely excluded, wild beasts were tamed and nature was regulated – very different from what lay outside that wall.  Across the enclosure a visitor would see a caretaker’s home, a few chapels, a cemetery, a library, workshops, farmlands, family homes and a guesthouse.  The guest house was clearly the best building, constructed on the choicest site, but nevertheless separated from the monastic community. 

            The idea behind this type of evangelistic living is that the visitor would have an opportunity to see the living out of ordinary Christian life in a community where faith affected the way people supported one another and worked out their salvation together.

            Someone from the community would be assigned to the guest to befriend and support them during their stay, while the guests participated in the common life of the community and gained experience through observation and participation.  The goal of such a ministry of hospitality was to treat the guest with the highest priority of the people of the community, and in time and within that fellowship, the guests discovered that they had become Believers, and were then invited to commit to the community.

            It’s very different from what most churches do, isn’t it?  It is Christianity more “caught than taught.”[1] 

            For the past few weeks we have been following Jesus’ blueprint for life as a disciple, and it looks a lot like the Celtic way of being church.  He first described himself as the “Model Shepherd” and directed us to listen to his voice and follow where he leads.  Then he called himself the “Real Vine,” and encouraged us to get close to him and to stay close to him as our source, allowing ourselves to be pruned according to the will of God, in order to bear good fruit.  Now we’re continuing in the theme of abiding in Christ and bearing fruit, but Jesus is going farther into what that kind of life looks like, and he uses the relationship between God the Father and himself as the example for living that we should follow.

            The example of that relationship is one of abiding and obeying.  Jesus abides in his Father and his Father abides in him.  Jesus listened for his Father’s voice and said that the words that he spoke were the words of his Father.[2]  Jesus said that all of his actions were done in obedience to his Father’s commands.  God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit of God live in a community we call the Trinity – and here Jesus is telling us that we are now part of that community, and to live in the same kind of relationship.

            The command to “love one another” is directed to the community of saints – all of us – and is a narrower focus than the command to love our enemies[3] or our neighbors.[4]  As Jesus oriented his attention and activities to the will and word of his Father, we are to understand that Jesus is just as attentive and active toward us as he is toward his Father.  And now that we are “friends of God” reciprocity means that we are to respond back to Jesus with similar attention and activity as we care for one another, and invite others into the circle of the community. 

            Throughout our lives we choose certain people to be our friends, and Jesus has done the same, choosing us as his friends.  Remember how Abraham was called a friend of God”?[5]  Well, Jesus says that the community of saints at the crossroads of  7^th and Roosevelt are all friends of God and his word to us is that obedience looks like love. 

            This kind of love isn’t a feeling, and isn’t just a thought, it is the active, obedient response to treat one another with the same intimate, costly love that Jesus and his Father enjoy, the same kind of love that Jesus gave to us when he called us his friends. 

            We find this command hard, because our ways are so different from Christ’s ways.  Christ found something loveable in you and in me and said, “Now there is one to whom my heart is drawn, and out of whom I know that I can make something of permanent worth, and through whom I can do something that will not be temporary, but that will keep on doing good far down the centuries…In this one I see infinite possibilities if she will come to me and use what God and I can give.”[6]

            And so as God the Father gives to Jesus, Jesus gives to us; and as Jesus gives to us, we are to give to one another.

            There is an underground social practice that is popularly called “re-gifting.”  The thinking behind it is that if you receive a gift you like, you keep it, but if you receive something you don’t like, or already have, you carefully re-wrap it, store it away, and then give it to someone else when you need to give a gift of your own.  It has to be kept a secret, though, because the belief is that the person who gave you the gift would be hurt that you gave it away; and that the person who received the “re-gift” would feel awkward accepting a gift he or she knew had already been given.

            In some other cultures, though, a gift is only a gift if it continues to be given.  To keep a gift is considered selfish.  The Massim tribe lives on some South Sea Islands near the eastern tip of New Guinea.  The people of this island participate in something called the Kulu Exchange. There are ceremonial gifts of armshells worn by men and necklaces worn by women that are given from one person to the next, island to island.  People travel great distances just to deliver these gifts to someone on another island. The necklaces move clockwise around the circle of islands; and the armshells move counterclockwise.  It takes anywhere from two to 10 years for a gift to complete [its] journey.  The gift exchanges never stop.  If they did, they would lose their value and no longer be gifts.[7] 

            Our chosen-ness is a gift from God, not of our own doing, but only because it is the will of God to give us the gift of calling us his friends.  As Christ found something to love in us, we are to receive that love as the gift that it is, and pass the gift on to one another in ways that the world can see.  If we live that way, passing the gift from one to another, those who come to our church community will see and be attracted to our way of life.

            We are God’s people and everything we have is God’s, and everything God has is yours, too, because it is mine, and I will give it to you.  Radical, eh?  God gives it to me, and so what’s mine is God’s; and if what is mine is God’s, then it is also yours, because if I am obedient, it will pass through me to you.   My money, my support, my prayers and encouragement, my time and energy – all received by me from God, and all yours if I am God’s obedient conduit. 

            That’s one reason why there is such a strong emphasis on Christian behavior in the New Testament, because our behavior is to be in direct response to what we have received from God.  There is no room for aggression or violence among God’s people – no room for petty resentments, for gossip, name-calling, revenge, cyber-bullying or texting hateful phone messages.  There is no room for sexual immorality, drunkenness, fits of temper, hatred, jealousy, lying, cheating or stealing.[8]  If you feel convicted by this list, don’t blame me – this list is Paul’s in Galatians, except for hateful texting and cyber-bullying, which would have been on the list if Paul was writing today.

            The behavior that is the obedience of love is called “the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”[9]  How would life in your house change if you behaved toward your family members this way?  How many more friends would you have if you treated them like this?  How would our church change and how much would people want to seek God because of how we treated one another?

            It is a long way from how we are to how Jesus is.  Most of us will never learn to love in the kind of obedient way that caused missionaries like Hudson Taylor, Eric Liddell, David Livingstone and Jim Elliot to spend their lives loving people in China, Africa and Ecuador who didn’t know Jesus; or that caused Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Wycliffe to love their brothers and sisters enough to give their own lives so people could have the Word of God in their own languages; or even the kind of abiding love that allowed Ann McClamrock to care for her quadriplegic son for thirty-five years. 

            But we can treat each other better, more often, can’t we?

            I like to read the newspaper and I miss them – the internet is a poor substitute for the thrill of mining newsprint for a good story.  As newspapers continue to decline in number and content, I find myself reading mostly the obituaries and police scanner, and letting my imagination provide the stories from the few personal facts those types of stories contain

            I suppose because so many people were in town for Pioneer Days was why, on May 11, the usually short police list in the Herald was three columns long.  Buried in the midst of the entries for driving without a license, DUIs and loud music complaints was this entry from Thursday, May 7, 2009 – just ten days ago:  “5:05 a.m.  Unattended death, Highway 54.”  Not in the obituaries – obituaries are for people who die in beds and hospitals, people who have names.  People who die “unattended deaths” on the roadside don’t get obituaries, they get log entries.

            No one had sat at a bedside waiting for a last breath, no one pulled the bed covers up, no hands were held, no prayers were whispered.  No time was marked.  I suppose there is a mother or father or brother or sister somewhere who would want to know their prodigal isn’t wandering anymore.  This person never found his or her way to any monastery at any crossroads.  There was no community to take this wanderer in and love him to death. 

            We have all been chosen by God, Paul says in Ephesians, to do good works that God has prepared in advance for us to do.  I wonder how many different saints were chosen and called by God to approach this lonely wanderer and invite him into the community of God as he went along the road of his life?  I wonder if there was a “last saint” chosen to go out to 54 and meet this person before he laid down to die, but who didn’t answer God’s call because the Holy Spirit couldn’t make himself heard.  “I am the Good Shepherd,” said Jesus, “and my sheep know my voice…”[10]

            When I worked in the hospital in downtown Dallas, we used to have a lot of anonymous people throughout the year who died in the ER – transients, people brought in from bar fights, automobile accidents – that sort of thing.  The chaplains maintained the morgue and the death records, and it was our job to try to help the police identify the John and Jane Does. 

            I remember one man who stayed refrigerated in the morgue for five months while we looked for his family.  You’ll think I’m lying, but when we went through his things, we found his military DD-214 papers that listed his name as “John Frost,” so of course, we called him “Jack.”

            One of our Episcopalian chaplains decided that a man who had risked his life for his us as a serviceman shouldn’t be buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.  So she got the hospital lawyers to help her go to court and get herself named as the executor of Jack’s estate, which amounted to his dead body and his military burial allowance.  She became the “owner” of his body - which when you die, becomes “property,” like any other thing with your name on it that you possess when you die.

            She processed his paperwork and got the burial allowance, made a deal with a funeral home and then planned his funeral.  Jack had a full-blown funeral with standing room only in the hospital chapel and there was a similar crowd at his graveside.   

            There wasn’t much difference between the person on Highway 54 and Jack Frost, except that there was somebody there to meet Jack at the crossroads where he died, and took him into the community of saints, even if all that meant by then was caring for his body and his dignity after he was dead.   

            Those two people – Jack Frost and the person on Highway 54 – testify from their graves that the love of God, flowing through the people who are friends of God, is “love with a personal mission.  It is one thing to say that we care – it is another to experience the sights, sounds and smells of a shelter, and to listen to a homeless person’s story of despair…Yet we are promised that God's love is perfected in and among us when we dare to be present to another's pain and experience in it the pain that is often in our own life.”  We draw our strength from the knowledge that we are chosen and appointed by God to go and bear fruit: the fruit of peace, forgiveness and mercy, and to bring fullness of life to those oppressed and in despair.[11] 

            Better to be obedient while people are still alive to see us, eh?

©2009 Deborah Hollifield

[1] George G. Hunter, III, The Celtic Way of Evangelism, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000) pp. 26-54

[2] John 14:10, 24

[3] Matt. 5:44

[4] Mark 12:31

[5] Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23

[6] Arthur John Gossip, The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, (1952) , p. 724.

[7] Sermon by Rev. David Miles, quoting Lewis Hyde, The Gift.

[8] Galatians 5:19

[9] Galatians 5:22-23

[10] John 10:27

[11] Rev. Paul H. Christenson, “God Pause” from Luther Seminary 5/15/2009