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Holy Name Day
January 1, 2006
Delivered by Reverend Sandra Stayner
Exodus 34:1-8
Romans 1:1-7
Luke 2:15-21
Coming Together, Growing Closer, Reaching Further in Christ's Name.
As the year 2006 opens its doors with all its potentiality perhaps the most obvious thing for me to do would be to ask you about your New Year's resolutions. But I don't want us to begin the year by thinking of our individual needs and desires. Instead I want us to think about who we are and what we hope to achieve this year as a community of faith gathered around the Word of God. During this past year we have been developing some very exciting programs for our children and for ourselves, programs that we hope will allow each one of us to deepen our walk with Christ. The self-selected group that came together to guide our thinking about how best to establish these programs has been meeting weekly on your behalf to try and understand the complexity of our life. As a result of their conversations the title of this sermon emerged as something that will guide us as we bring our hopes and desires for our corporate life to fruition. Let me repeat it for you so that you can take it in. Coming together, Growing closer, Reaching further in Christ's Name. That's what we're about as a community of faith.
Coming Together
The consistent witness of Christians throughout the ages is that the gathering of Christians on the first day of the week, the day of resurrection is something that is absolutely essential to our Christian faith. Early Christians were sent to the lions for attending worship in a friend's home. Under communist regimes in Russia and China being identified as a Christian could mean immediate exclusion from jobs or schooling and even imprisonment, but in spite of the danger Christians continued to meet secretly to participate in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. These Christians understood the act of corporate worship through Word and Sacrament as absolutely essential to their very being, an understanding that I think has been largely lost to those of us in the Western world. For us church is not essential to our being it is instead just one competing activity among many. We will come if it suits our purposes, if not we will stay away perhaps to the detriment of our souls.
The community of faith is a place of encounter with the living God. Perhaps you know the scripture, "where two or three are gathered in my name I will be in the midst of them." I remember walking into a church one time where a group of people were celebrating Eucharist together. When I entered I could immediately sense their love and caring for one another. I thought to myself "wow it's as if Christ himself is present. I want to be loved that much." It was only later that I realized that St. Paul's actually teaches that Christ really is present wherever 2 or 3 gather in his name. When we come together to worship we become the tangible expression of Christ's love for the world. His love is made real in our relationships with one another. I can't tell you how many times visitors to this church said to me on their way out, "this is such a warm, caring community!" Christ's love is palpable in our midst. But we need each and every member of the body if we are to express the fullness of Christ in the gathered assembly because we each have a unique role to play. When we fully understand who we have become in Christ, coming to church is no longer about my personal likes or dislikes, whether I feel like getting up on a cold Sunday morning or staying in bed and reading the scriptures on my own. We choose to participate in the gathering of the faithful not simply for ourselves but for the sake of people we don't even know, who would come to this place seeking an encounter with God. "For you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that you may declare the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy." (I Peter 2:9-11) At the time of our baptism we become a vital part of Christ's body on earth, the church. We become a part of a new people called into being by Christ himself and charged with Christ's mission to bring the world to God. Coming Together is an essential part of our Christian calling.
Growing Closer is one of the ways we are formed as Christians. In his epistle St. John says, "If you cannot love your brother or sister whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see?" When we become part of the community of faith we are drawn into the reality of Christ's love for us and we learn to love as we are loved. As we knock up against people from different backgrounds or cultures we are forced to ask questions about pre-conceived notions we have held. We are offered opportunities to grow in love that we could never receive by choosing to live in a self-created bubble, surrounded by people we like. As we struggle to realize what it means to belong to a community of persons whose only reason for being together is to be faithful to Christ's word, the barriers that separate and divide the human race are broken down, our capacity for relationship with others is changed and we are made new. As we learn together, cry and laugh together, constantly allowing new people to be drawn into our midst we gradually become more fully the person God has created us to be. Irenaeus, one of the church fathers once said that the glory of God is a human being fully human, fully alive. Our fellow members in Christ are able to carry us when we simply cannot go another step alone. They give us energy when we are burnt out. They "are the reservoir of life that fills up all our weaknesses." (Listen with the Heart by Joan Chittister, p.66) By sticking with us through the ups and downs of our lives, they help us learn what it really means to be fully human and fully alive.
But the life we receive is never simply for us and for our families alone. Corporate worship is not centered upon itself. We cannot simply participate because of what we get from it personally. We break bread in remembrance that Christ's body was broken. We pour the wine to remember his life poured out for us, and from that we learn a new meaning for our lives as we take up Christ's mission for the world. This experience of Christian community causes us to reach beyond our natural boundaries, to embrace the concerns of those alongside us kneeling at the altar rail, enables us to embrace others who are simply not like ourselves, people we may not come into contact with socially if we were not brothers and sisters in Christ.
Reaching Further expresses the movement that flows quite naturally from the realization of how deeply Christ has loved us. "We love because he first loved us." Says the apostle John. This gathering of Holy love is not only for those who come. From the experience of intimacy with Christ and with one another at the altar we are immediately sent out to do Christ's work in the world, fulfilling our baptismal identity, as we bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, as we set at liberty those who are oppressed, and proclaim the year of Jubilee for all. (Isaiah 61:1-2) Christ's mission becomes our mission. As a community we must continually wrestle with new ways to actively work for justice and peace in our homes and in our communities and in the larger world. As the Eucharist draws to a close each Sunday we join together and pray:
Eternal God, heavenly Father, you have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. Send us out now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord, Amen.
Coming Together, Growing Closer, Reaching Further. The challenge for us this coming year is to understand how to structure our life as a community in a way that will allow every member of this community to live into a deeper relationship with one another and with Christ, by coming together as Christ's body, growing closer to one another and to God and allowing ourselves be sent out to reach beyond boundaries that separate and alienate, to bring a broken world to Christ until every person and every institution has been drawn into the arms of his loving embrace.
In his name we pray
Amen
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