First Baptist Church (New Hampshire Ave), Washington, DC May 31, 1998
Can you believe that it won't be long until we cross over into the third millennium, a full two thousand years after the birth of Christ? Can you believe that we are still here to see it? Why, it seems like it was only yesterday that we started the second millennium, doesn't it? You remember it, don't you? Or am I just a bit older than most of you?
Well, no, none of us were around at the start of the second millennium, but some of its memories and its mistakes linger with us. And today, as I have been asked to speak on the theme, “Creating a Loving Community for the New Millennium", I am thinking about both the blessings and the blunders of our own time. I am thinking about all we have done, both good and bad. And I am hoping that we will learn from that, so that we will not repeat the ways of the past. Someone has said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. And so a part of what I will do with you today is to lift up the sad saga of the second millennium, hoping that the Spirit of God might be our teacher and take us to a right path.
And yet, if I am to find clues for what the third millennium could be, should be, where do I go? To what source shall I turn? I certainly have to do better than just reading the history books. Abraham Lincoln told us more than a century ago that the dogmas of the past were inadequate for the stormy present. And so I know there has to be something better than merely reading the record of the second millennium to give us a clue about the third one.
And there is. There is. It is the record of the first millennium and its beginning. It is the record of the earliest days of the Christian church. It's called the Book of Acts. In the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, I submit to you, there are some very important clues that will help us toward our task of, "creating a loving community in the new millennium." It's especially appropriate that we work in this book today, because, as you may know, today is Pentecost Sunday in the Christian year, and Pentecost Sunday marks the time when the Holy Spirit first fell on the believers and created the church. Pentecost Sunday, today, is a great time to celebrate a missionary society; it is a greater time to think about the future; and it is the best of all times to be reading the Book of Acts.
And so I want to organize my remarks today around four great questions that the Book of Acts raises for us. I want to spend just a few brief moments with four powerful issues that were lifted up at the first millennium, that were messed up in the second millennium, but, if we get these right, will help us do what you have asked for in the third millennium, "creating a loving community."
Let me first give you the four great questions, and then we will unpack each one.
Four questions toward a loving community:
· Who are we?
· Who gets in?
· Who leads?
· And where do we go?
That all sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? We ought to be able to answer these. Who are we, who gets in, who leads, who is in charge, and where do we go. But, I tell you, we've made a whole lot of mistakes trying to deal with those. I pray God through His word and His Spirit will guide us beyond those mistakes.
First off, who are we? Who are we? What is our identity? Do we know ourselves? Are we clear about us? Before we can do anything about anybody else, we have to know something very important about us. Who are we? Let's go right to the first Day of Pentecost:
Acts 2:41-47
The place to begin to create a loving community is to know that we are ourselves a beloved community. If you want to love somebody, you have to receive love. You cannot give away what you do not have. The place to begin to create a loving community is to understand that we, the church, are already a beloved community. Martin Luther King liked to use that phrase, and he was right on target. We are, because of Christ, beloved. God loves us and wraps his embrace around us, and if we know that, feel that, experience that, we can start to share it.
These earliest Christians did something radical in response to Christ. So radical that hardly anybody since has been willing to do it. They came together, they held all their goods in common, each one got what he needed, not what he wanted. What a radical idea! Just to share with each other out of love. Rev. Tucker, I remember your telling a story once about getting caught up here in the church office on a Sunday evening, and somebody came in and tried to steal the church's offerings. Well, hey, in the early church they gave it away anyway! And look at what it did for them: "day by day .. they ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people."
Sounds to me as though their love was contagious. Sounds to me as though they had found out that if you know God loves you, and so you can love each other, then that's where you can begin to love the world.
But, oh, you know, what mistakes we've made at this point! How we have failed to love one another! How throughout the centuries Christians have turned on one another and put one another to the sword, all of it in the name of God! Northern Ireland, where Protestant and Catholic do battle, in the name of Christ. I don't know about you, but I was brought up in an environment that was so Baptist we sort of thought the Methodists were a little off, and the Catholics, well, there's no hope for them. You know, the kind of place where Baptists are so narrow it takes twenty of them to make a dozen?! And the thing is, many of us grew up with a religion that was all legalism, all thou shalt nots, all negative. I understand the need for rules, but, you know, I grew up and I found it that the gospel is the good news. The good news. And the good news is that God loves me. If God loves me then I can love you. If we are the beloved community, then we can make love happen for others.
The place to begin creating a loving community is to know that we are loved. Who are we? We are the beloved community.
I
Second question: who gets in? If we are going to talk about community, who gets in? Who qualifies? How do you pay your dues, how do you join, what standards do you have to meet? Who gets in to this community?
And the answer is, only those who cannot meet the standards! The answer is, you can't qualify! You can't be good enough, smart enough, strong enough, or rich enough to enter. That's how you get in! By not being qualified to get in!
Acts 3:1-8
The lame man at the Temple: you know, the Law said that imperfect people were not welcome in the Temple courts. Just as you had to present a perfect dove or a perfect lamb to make your sacrifice, you were also supposed to be physically complete, whole. And so that lame man was handicapped not only because he could not walk, but also because he could not be admitted to the temple courts. God's house disdained him; he was incomplete.
But, great God, Peter and John, what did they do? They reached out to him and gave him the greatest of gifts. They gave him acceptance. They healed his handicap, but better than that, they healed his heart. They accepted him and they made him presentable. That's what Christ always does. He makes the wounded whole. He sets the captive free. And that's what we'd better be about, too, if we are going to create the loving community.
The Christian church has a lot to answer for at this point. Too many times, too many churches, have set up barriers. Standards for people to meet. Social standards, educational standards, behavior standards. I like to say that the trouble with most of us is we think everybody ought to look like us, sound like us, think like us, and smell like us. And they don't. They won't. We have to go beyond these "our kind of people" clubs. Years ago on the island of Hawaii there was a leper colony, and serving that leper colony was a Catholic priest named Father Damien. Nobody else would go there, but he did. He tended their sores, he prepared their food, he buried them when they died. He lived among them, but he always felt apart from them. There was a certain distance he felt. He would begin his sermons with the telling phrase, "You lepers." But one day Father Damien looked down at his hands, and there he saw the telltale signs of the dreaded disease. From that day Father Damien no longer preached, "You lepers", but "We lepers". He felt closer to them because he shared their suffering.
If we are to create a loving community in the new millennium, who gets in? Anybody who acknowledges his need. Anybody who is incomplete, empty, and needy. If you've got it together, and have no needs, go home, for there isn't room for you in a third millennium community. But if you can see that your righteousness is as filthy rags, then come on in. There's a place for you.
III
The third question: who leads? Who stands before the people and moves them forward? What kind of person will it take to lead us into a loving community? Will it be the sort of leader we've always looked to? A man (usually it is a man), typically with white skin, generally with a university education, preferably from one of the Ivy League universities? Who will lead us into a loving community, what kind of person? A dictator, who always knows what others ought to do and is quick to tell them? A dynamic, exciting person, who leads by the sheer force of his personality? Who will lead the way into the loving community?
Acts 15 (summarize):25-28
Who leads into the new community? Look at the model of leadership in this passage. Leaders who are themselves willing to be led ("we have decided to choose representatives and send them to you"). Leaders whose lives are marked by sacrifice ("they risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ"). And leaders who are willing to listen to the Holy Spirit ("it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"). I am very sure that in the third millennium no loving community will come out of leaders who are not teachable, leaders who are caught up in the trappings of power, leaders who stubbornly press forward their own agenda. Who leads into the new community? Servant leaders. Giving leaders. Consensus-building leaders.
In no other area has the church sinned more profoundly. I tell you, we have a lot to answer for in the church. And ministers and pastors above all. So many of us act as if we were God's gift to the world, and that if you don't hear us, you are dead wrong, because we're God's man, we're God's anointed, we deserve our fine cars and our anniversary offerings and our $800 suits. I tell you, there has to be a special place in hell for leaders who have turned all the attention on themselves and not on the Kingdom, who have arrogantly tried to take everything for themselves and feed the people with the crumbs from the table. I have to say I am so pleased to have had an association with Rev. Tucker over these last few years and to have watched him give of his time, his energy, even his own money -- I doubt you want me to say this, but it's done now -- I have seen him give, even at the cost of his health, to foster our Church Association for Community Services, so that the least of these might find hope. Sacrificial leadership. That's who is going to lead us into a loving community in the new millennium.
IV
And finally, last but by no means least, if we are going to get serious at all about creating a loving community worthy of this new age, this third millennium, we must ask, "Where do we go?" Where do we go? What is the destination toward which we are working?
Acts 16:6-10
Where do we go? Into places different from what we are used to. Into arenas unlike the ones where we are comfortable. Look at what happened with Paul and Silas and Timothy. They were traveling up and down the towns of Asia Minor, happy as clams, preaching and teaching and having great fellowship with their old friends. But the Holy Spirit prompted them not to stay in Asia any longer. They tried to go down to Bithynia, up toward the Black Sea; they had other friends there, other churches where the fried chicken would be out and the deviled eggs ready. Nice, sweet fellowship! But the Spirit did not allow them! Every time they tried to keep it comfortable, the Spirit said no.
Until one night Paul had a vision. In that vision a man of Macedonia, a European, saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." And so they went, convinced that God had called them to cross over the boundaries from Asia and Africa, the birthplaces of the faith, and to speak to Europe as well.
I believe that if you and I are called to create a loving community in this new millennium, we will have to leap over some human barriers that have held us back for a long, long time.
We will have to leap over the nationalistic barrier. We will have to get past the notion that God loves America, all others are trash. We'll have to see all peoples, of all nationalities, not as strange or challenging, but as enriching. Where do we go? We go to people of other cultures and we draw insight from them.
We will have to leap over the political barriers. We will have to get past the notion that God is invested in a partisan political agenda. We'll have to confess that the Christian Right is neither Christian nor Right. And on the other side of the ledger, I'll have to give up on something in my heritage, because I can show you a biography written of my great-grandmother, in which the author wrote, "Mrs. Moorman, being from western Kentucky, is of course a Baptist and a Democrat." Where do we go? We go past political labels and partisan privilege and we stand for Christ, above party.
And most of all, Oh, I hope so, where do we go? We will have to go right on past our outworn, dated, artificial, and wholly useless notions of race. It bothers me that too much of the church of Jesus Christ, in this millennium, has divided itself up on the basis of race, and prefers to keep it that way. There has to be something better than white churches and black churches and Hispanic churches and Asian churches. I don't know, maybe our Korean brothers have pointed the way for us. Do you know that the largest Baptist church in the state of Maryland is a Korean church? It's the Global Mission church, out in Aspen Hill in Montgomery County. More people are members of that church than of any other Baptist congregation in Maryland. But did you know that although most of the people are Korean, and much of their worship is done in the Korean language, they now have a service in English, and it attracts lots of folks who are not Korean at all! Maybe that points the way. We know that for a time we have to deal with racial realities, but, oh, I hear the man of Macedonia pleading, "Come over and help us." And it doesn't matter if he is European or Asian or African or the man from Mars. All that matters is that we go and we help.
Where do we go? Across the barriers. Where the Spirit says go.
Where do we go? Someone has said that the key to the Book of Acts is its very last word; the last word in the Book of Acts is "unhindered". If you want to go where God is going, then know that it will be unhindered, without barriers, to every race and tribe and nation.
"0 Zion, haste, they mission high fulfilling, To tell to all the world that God is Light; that he who made all nations is not willing One soul should perish, lost in shades 0 night. Proclaim to every people, tongue, and nation That God, in whom they live and move, is love. Tell how he stooped to save His lost creation, and died on earth that we might live above. Publish glad tidings, tiding of peace, tidings of Jesus, redemption and release."
