Epworth United Methodist Church

Epworth United Methodist Church
Rev. David Weekley, Pastor
11-08-09
Mark 12: 28-34

The First Commandment

Watching the news last week was particularly distressing, especially coupled with the personal concerns many of us share this morning for ill or distressed friends and loved ones.

Following the devastating blow to marriage equality and equal rights for all persons that occurred in the Maine elections I received countless emails from all around the country of people sharing grief, rage, and disappointment.

Some of these emails even went so far as to threaten violent civil disobedience in the face of continuing discrimination and inequality.

Following the election news our nation was stunned and bewildered by the shooting rampage at Fort Hood by an Army psychiatrist that left at least thirteen people dead and scores wounded.

Because this man is also a Muslim, many people of this faith living in the United States now fear for their safety as well.

I thought of all these things as I read the gospel reading for today from the twelfth chapter of Mark and it occurred to me that when the world around us is in a doomsday frame of mind, the message that faith, hope and love abide with us as we strive to love God and neighbor in following Jesus is central not only to our survival, but for the survival of this broken and hurting world.

Last March, on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean not far from the North Pole, the Norwegian government opened a huge underground vault, more than 425-feet deep inside a frozen mountain in order to place shipments of seeds from all over the world it. It is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it can hold more than 4.5 million seed samples.

This seed collection is created in case humankind does something more tragically stupid than the things we have already done- like have a worldwide nuclear war, or cause massive climate change from our continued abuse of the planet.

It’s also a small hedge against natural disasters as well.

Known by many as “The Doomsday Vault” this immense chamber will also hold seeds for almost every variety of food crop known to humans, in case we lose our food supply and the ability to reproduce it.

The low temperatures caused by the natural permafrost and supplemented by a refrigeration system, can preserve these seeds and keep them viable for thousands of years, even if global warming raises the outside temperature.

This project grew out of a trust funded by the United Nations in 2004; as its contribution, Norway provided the location for the vault and paid $9.4 million for its construction.

The hope, of course, is that the seeds stored there are never needed, but it seems a smart move to be prepared in case it does.

All of this started me wondering about the Church, and especially our Epworth church as another type of doomsday vault, as a place where such things as faith, hope, and love are harbored [in the sense of providing people with a shelter or sanctuary] and well-tended; for what kind of life would we have on this earth if these values were lost?

Jesus actually hinted that faith-communities should have this role in the community and world in which they live.

It was on the day when Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying he was. After the disciples responded about what they had heard from others, Jesus asked who they thought he was.

After Peter spoke up, declaring Jesus as the Son of the living God, Jesus said that this confession of faith was the rock upon which God was going to build the Church.

Jesus then added that not even the gates of Hades, not even acts of extreme human stupidity would be able to prevail against it.

The expression, “the gates of Hades” was a symbolic way to talk about death, so Jesus is saying that not even death, which no human being can overcome, will be able to destroy the Church.

This is important for me, for us, to remember, because I have not seen a time in my lifetime when Christianity and the Church has been so under attack- even from former members.

In other words, the Church is a stronghold against the powers of darkness, stupidity, and catastrophe- a spiritual doomsday vault, if you will.

First-century Christians understood this point, because they did view the Church as the place where the great spiritual values such as love of God and neighbor do survive storm and calamity.

For example, one of the earliest symbols the early Christians employed to represent the Church was Noah’s ark; that vessel on which representatives of all living creatures found refuge during the catastrophe of the great flood. You can still find this symbolism today in some stained-glass windows, where either Noah’s ark itself or a dove bearing an olive branch in its beak is pictured.

So, in the face of events such as the continued discrimination of minority people such as the LGBT community experienced in last week’s election, and horrific human violence like the shooting spree at Fort Collins and the fear and rage such things engender- let’s consider what vital seeds the Church holds:

1. The Church is the place where faith is offered without embarrassment. There is a saying that ‘God has no grandchildren’, which is another way of saying that without the passing of the knowledge about Jesus Christ from parents to children, from elders to young people, from those convinced of their faith to those who have not yet been persuaded, Christianity itself would eventually die out completely or be greatly reduced in its ability to influence the world in any positive way. Individual spirituality is certainly a good thing, but it is seldom enough by itself to pass faith to the next generation. It requires congregations of convinced people of faith to do this in any kind of concentrated and effective way.

2. The Church is the place where hope is nourished without delusion. As the events and news of any week reveal, there are ample reasons to lose hope in life. In fact, it is pretty easy to preach about despair. There is generally plenty of evidence around us to encourage despair more than hope. But the Church understands that hope is never rooted in what happens in any present moment or generation. The hope the Church shelters is the hope of the gospel and Jesus’ teaching that the realm of God is still to come in its fullness, without denying that life is sometimes tragic. The hope the Church offers is an ultimate belief that when all else fails, when every other support gives way, our lives remain in God’s hands. God has given us the Church to support our hope, for if left out on its own, hope is vulnerable. It’s unrealistic to expect the Church to be the kind of community where everyone is always totally certain about hope, but it is a community where we have enough evidence from experience [our own, and the witness of others] to justify a decision for hope instead of despair.

3. The Church is a place where love is exercised without limits. Jesus taught us that the first commandment is to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We in the Church understand that Jesus was not talking about emotions, but about behavior. This is one of the reasons it is so distressing when it is so-called Christians who vote against equal rights for all persons, especially these days, people in the LGBT community. Jesus was talking about acting in ways that support the wholeness and the well-being of other people, all of whom are our neighbors. When we really grasp its meaning, we understand not one of us does this perfectly, but it is a core force of the gospel that will never leave us at peace when we exclude people, and ignore others’ needs. As people of faith, we understand loving our neighbor to mean more than merely behaving towards others in a generally ‘nice’ way; it means we should love others as God loves us. So when we ask ourselves if we have behaved in a loving way toward someone, we are comparing ourselves with the love of Christ. And, of course, in such a comparison, we always come up short, but ideally, it causes us to reach further and to understand that that love has no stopping point where we can say, ‘There, I’ve done my duty, and now I can forget that person/those people.’

Please do not think that this is a ‘Praise the Church’ sermon; it is not.

I am not suggesting that the Church or our Epworth church is a perfect repository of faith, hope, and love for bragging purposes, but rather, to remind us of what critical world-changing values we do hold, and what saving seeds these are, and how desperately the world needs them.

When the world and those around us are in a doomsday frame of mind, the message that faith, hope, and love abide does survive with us who follow Jesus Christ. And it is not just our own salvation that we are talking about; we are talking about the survival and the salvation of the world.

Prayer…