SCRIPTURE: 1 John 5:9-13
TEXT: THEME: The community of Christ testifies to life in God’s son. INTRODUCTION Working our way through the letter of 1 John, gives assurance to an anxious congregation that is wondering if they are believing the right thing. Christ’s return is happening a lot slower than assumed and it brings questions about everything else about Jesus. The Author of 1 John begins by setting the acts of God through Jesus in the context of Fellowship. This draws us back to Creation, the Garden, God journeying with Abraham and Sara and their family, all the way through the Exodus, wandering through the wilderness, the 10 commandments, a series of Judges, Prophets, and Kingdoms until the incarnation with Jesus. Through it all God has not stopped loving us. God’s fellowship with us is not contingent upon our Good behavior. In fact the mission of Jesus is based upon love, his unflinching insistence towards the alleviation of human suffering. We are assured that we are profoundly loved by God, adopted into God’s family and commanded to love each other as Ohana. The ultimate expression of fellowship. Today’s passage takes the love of God one step further in the formations of a loving community that lives out life, as in God’s son. SCRIPTURE We receive both testimonies; human and Divine. Human from our experiences, answered prayer, feelings of God’s acceptance of us, instances of healing, guidance in troubled times, words of wisdom, being in the community of the church, knowing God’s grace is abundant, having friends, being able to reconcile relationships with practices of forgiveness. We have the testimony of the Divine in the incarnation of God in Jesus. His life, teaching, ministry among us, healing, deliverance, casting out of evil spirits, standing up to religiosity, inclusion of the marginalized and crossing of boundaries of hate and prejudice establishing a foundation for the Kingdom of God that includes all people. The appearances, the visions, the empty tomb, the guidance, the testimonies of Jesus begin to blur the divine with human testimonies, where both are limited by our human understanding and left to our interpretation of them. The testimonies become embedded in our hearts as we try to live them. And this is the testimony, God is Creator, the giver of Eternal Life. Life is in his Son. Jesus is the example of how we are to live in relationship with God and how we are to live with each other. Jesus’ example is one of caring, healing, acceptance, fellowship, forgiveness, reconciliation, restoring people as part of the community. Sharing what we have with others. Taking care of the poor with the resources we have. Building better communities of justice, sharing, love and respect. APPLICATION How do we live exhibiting the life of the Son of God among us? We live as if we are planning a Baby Luau and not a funeral. Although I have to admit, with each funeral I do, I am getting closer to the worship I would like to have at my funeral. If all we do is plan for our death, then we could be missing out on all of the living that there is still left to do. We worried about suffering, being in a coma, whether people are going to visit or that we don’t want the way we look to be the last memory they have of us. If we are living our lives as if we are planning a baby luau, we look back at all of last year’s accomplishments with marvel and set our course for living into what we are going to do with the time we have in the future. What is going to be new? What are we going to complete? What are we going to create? We are not worried about what happens if we don’t finish what we set out to begin, if it is important, others will bring it to its completion. Let’s have fun being the church! Our future is not predetermined. We can hope, dream the possibilities, transition, evolve, move in a different direction, dance, have respect for each other, thankfulness of our past, with appreciation of our traditions, culture, practices, identity, our history, our struggles, our failures, our successes. We can entertain possibilities and plan to take 1st steps. Try and see what works as we live our lives found in the life of the Son. I have to admit that WUC is a great church. Our message is to be loving and we are different from other churches because we are willing to let our theology evolve as God continues to speak and reveal new things to us. We are loving the Bible. We maybe Small in size but we think big. It is time for us to let our neighbors know what we have been up to. We want to physically meet our neighbors in a 500 foot radius around the Mission Ground to tell them what we are planning with the 84 Affordable rental units we have planned for the mission ground. This summer, we want to hear their concerns about what we plan to do. This will be an opportunity to answer their questions and invite them to a community gathering we will host later in the summer. As we listen we can consider new things and let them know how our faith in God has led us to use this property as a gift to our neighbors. This is a perspective I’ve gained a couple weeks ago when our planner met with the County Department on Housing at One Main Plaza. I parked at the church and walked over. After our meeting we walked down to 62 Marckt for lunch. On our way back we stopped for a coffee and made our way up Main Street to the Mission Ground. As we did, I began to imagine the renters of our 84 rental units walking around Wailuku town for breakfast, coffee, lunch, dinner, and shopping in the neighborhood stores. I wondered what kind of stores and amenities they may need within walking distance of the Mission Ground. If they worked in this area they would be able to walk home after work, a distance shorter than most parking lots in down town Honolulu. I imagined the kind of business that would be inspired to begin because of these neighbors, this could revitalize Wailuku town with a different kind of clientele. Can you imagine the impact our vision may have on our community because we decided to love our neighbor? It would be a demonstration of God’s transformational love. But that’s not all, when this is done, I wonder what else God would have for us to explore? Infant toddler care? Farmers Market? The Greater Wailuku Parish? We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of possibilities. CONCLUSION Our anxiety makes us worry about our salvation as fear immobilizes us. When we reset our focus upon God, we can begin to see what God has already been doing with appreciation. This is the foundational ground work to follow God into the future, it could be something good for our whole community. We don’t have to get it right at the beginning, but be willing to move and refine our vision of what god is doing for fellowship, for loving our neighbor, for contributing to the betterment of our community. This sounds like living a Biblical Narrative.
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SCRIPTURE: 1 John 5:1-6
TEXT: THEME: INTRODUCTION Churches all over are suffering; smaller attendance, the lack of the younger generation to partner in its future, no youth, with people no longer coming to church. A colleague sent me a Southern Baptist article of how there are more people ‘converting out’ of religion than converting into faith. We are living in an age of religious skepticism. Young people today question authority, they ask questions about why things are done this way, how are we able to put up with conflicting ideas of faith and believe with integrity what we believe. We have been able to live with inconsistencies, paradox, and contradictions handed down to our generation that they find unacceptable. I don’t blame them, in our day we couldn’t challenge authority as freely as they can today. While we were developing our faith we were told to believe and when we couldn’t, they said we don’t have enough faith. Faith isn’t enough for today, it must be exhibited in Integrity, genuineness and authenticity. So now it is up to us to deal with these inconsistencies, contradictions and paradoxes of faith and come up with better understandings. To our benefit, we have experience, education, years of faith and new scholars and discoveries that are aiding our inquiry. If all we do is defend what we believe, then we will find ourselves on one sides of a divide with those we wish were in the church on the other. But if we admit to the problems of what we believe and stop the practices that hurt others, then we can take their concerns seriously and begin to find answers to the mystery of faith that will satisfy both of us. SCRIPTURE Our newness in living comes from our belief in Jesus as the Christ. In a typical Johnnine fashion, there is a twist in this passage, making an argument for loving God, by loving the children of God. At first we may think the way to love God, is simply to obey the Commandment but that becomes legalistic, self-righteous, judgmental, cruel and arrogant. We have never been successful at doing something just because we were told to do so. But when we remember what the commandments were about; to love God and to love others, then we remember how God has loved us. We may be commanded to love, but love is responsive. Love is intrinsic as it has its own rewards and we don’t love just to get God’s approval but because we know what it means to be loved by God and we want others to know what it means to be loved too. Love becomes embedded in the way we do things, as part of how we think and as part of our being. Love is about relationships and loving all of the children of God. The author of 1 John is trying to motivate the members of this congregation to be loving even though they don’t feel like it. They live in a hostile environment of injustice, oppression, fear, scarcity and persecution. The language of conquest, victory, world domination gives them a feeling that their belief in Christ will lead towards a better future. But like the kind of Messiah Jesus is, the Kingdom of God, would be without a country or boundaries but could be in every person, every country and within every border in the world. Love can conquer all. Even in the middle of the Pacific in a town called Wailuku, in a Gothic sanctuary where faithful gather and connect on You Tube, for love to prevail. We think that to spread Christianity we need to colonize the world, have holy wars to eliminate the infidels and replace their beliefs with the gospel of love after we slaughtered their men, women and children. Along with their dominate culture, they brought capitalism that confused the gospel with greed that never fully included others as equals. Instead we treated our new brothers and sisters in Christ as ‘the help’, to keep the few in power, to control most of the wealth, under the guise of Christianity. This pattern is in play today, in businesses, in our Country and in the world. The one who comes by water and blood, turns our hearts to the birth waters of life in relationship with a Higher Power. By whatever name we may give, we need the help beyond what we can do for ourselves. We need guidance beyond what we can imagine for ourselves. We need a community to belong to, formed around God. By blood, an unflinching insistency towards the mission of alleviating human suffering is displayed in love that does not stop. All the way to defeating death with resurrection. And the out pouring of God’s Spirt in us, not that we are gods, but gifted beyond what we could do on our own, to participate in mission God is doing. God’s mission of alleviating human suffering. APPLICATION How do we love the Children of God? In that same article, it stated that in 2021, memberships in churches dropped below 50%. Two demographic groups; young people and unmarried were less likely to attend religious services and today’s young people spend more time on their own or alone. In a day of more communication technology, we spend an increased amount of time alone. There is a loss of connectivity and as the Surgery General has stated, loneliness and isolation are the new epidemic. In this regard the church can be a source of community. Maybe the commandment is to be less hypocritical, less judgmental, and to love more unflinchingly insistent in alleviating human suffering. We want society to change so they can come to church but we can’t make them change. What we can do is change ourselves, to do something differently, to engage our neighbors and connects with them. The Church can be a spiritual link to the divine, The church can be a historical narrative identity as the people of God. The church provides a set of rituals that give us a sense of stability and community such as the rite of baptism, communion, Christmas Eve Service, Easter Sun Rise, Mother’s and Father’s Day, even by working together to sell Soda at the County Fair. Making friends can be hard, so our weekly schedule, reunions our congregants. Together we find meaning in the world, provide a safe harbor and help each other make sense of what is going on in the world through the Bible. CONCLUSION Before the General Synod last Summer, the UCC sponsored a few pod cast on the church called Frontline. One speaker said, we are obsessed with the decline of the church. Things have changed and the church has lost its ability to relate to people under 40. Then he pointed to an odd ball church that was made up of former evangelicals, catholics, and divorced, in Colorado. They focus on the pain and trauma caused by conservative Evangelicals who launched extremely hash laws against the LGBTQ? community and the rights of a women to make decisions over their own bodies. They attracted ’30 Somethings’ around loving the Bible again. They moved beyond literal understandings of God’s word and found life, love, grace, acceptance, belonging and community in the Bible. God is about relationships. We are commanded to love, until we do it naturally. So love becomes a part of who we are and what we do, innate, embedded, intrinsic, genuine and authentic. |
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May 2024
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