See what love the Father has given us,
that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.
This is, I believe, one
of the most important sentences in the whole Bible. It expresses the simple good news that
whatever else we are, we are children of God, and not by our own making, but by
God’s own choosing.
It is what we will say
in a bit to the little gentleman being baptized this morning: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism
and marked as Christ’s own forever.” We
do not say these words as if we were wishful thinking, and there is no asterisk
at the end of them leading to fine print on the bottom of the page that says
something like, “unless you do something bad or wrong, especially x, y and z.” No, we say these words because we believe
them to be true, and they will be just as true every single day of this child’s
life, as it is every single day of all of our lives.
All Saints Day is not only
about the great heroes of the faith who did extraordinary things for God. It is about us in our ordinary lives trying
to live into what we already are: loved
by the One who made us.
There is no hierarchy
for God’s love. This child we baptize
this morning is loved and will be loved by God as much as the greatest of those
we call saints.
I am here this Sunday at
Denise’s invitation to start a conversation about St. Peter’s future. But there is actually a conversation we need
to have first, and it has everything to do with what I just said about us as
individual Christians, equally loved by God.
My experience is that
churches—especially small churches such as St. Peter’s, are in love with their
past and fearful of their future, and they simply don’t know what to think
about the present. Love for your past is
great so long as you remember that you cannot return there. Anxiety about the future is also a fairly
natural thing, but what is needful first and foremost is to be certain about
who you are right now.
And who you are right
now is above all things loved. There is
nothing wrong with who you are, even if you want to be more. We are obsessed in our culture with
largeness: bigger is always better. And we have soaked that up in the church, so
that the model we think about when we think about church is large. We all should want to be mega-churches.
Bull. Small churches are, in fact, the norm, and
there is much that is good and even holy about them. The Bible has no preference for the size of
churches, if anything small churches are the expectation. The mega-church is only in heaven, the vision
of which we had in our first reading this morning, the great multitude that no
one can count.
Of course you want to
grow, but one of the biggest secrets about church growth is that if a community
such as this one does not value itself as it is, or if it believes or is led to
believe that it is inadequate as it is, growth will never happen. Your first task to enable a future is to love
yourself in the present.
Because that—love—is all
that is necessary for any church of any size to be all it can be. Any future you have must grow out of the love
you have for one another now. That means
that the first step in a conversation about the future is a conversation about
why you value this community now.
And that is the
conversation we are going to have after Service. I want to hear stories about why you value
this place, what gift have you been given here, or been inspired to give by
here.
We will talk about the
future also, but first I want to make sure you are relaxed about who you
are. The trouble with traveling the road
of anxiety is that it leads to nowhere and nothing but more anxiety. If you believe the truth that you are a child
of God and, together, children of God, and saints, we, come what may, there is
always a future in that.
I’ll leave you with a
quote from Deuteronomy (7:7-8), which parallels the quote from First John with
which I began, and has something to say about size in the eyes of God.
It was not because you were more
numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose
you—for you were the fewest of all peoples.
It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to
your ancestors.
1 comment:
If only small churches, with small congregations were honored and respected in the present climate. Too much attention is paid to numerical growth, and independent financial stability, IMO.
Post a Comment