11-10-08 Next Steps – The Power of Belonging

 

Have any of you been to a bar lately? Not a sports bar, but a pub, a bar, or a tavern? If not, you should go. Really . . . I’m completely serious. I grew up goign to the bar when I was a kid and I continue to frequent one often. Do you know what a bar that is really hard to find anywhere else? “Beer” Ha! Ok, besides beer. The onething that a bar has that most other places dont have is community. I make it a habit of mine to watch socail and cultureal trends. Cheers was one of the longest running TV shows ever. Cheers was so popular because people want a place where “Everybody knows your name.” A the core of the human heart, people want to know and be known. People want to love and be loved. These are basic needs of the human soul. This is who God created us.  

The church is called to be bar community times 10, but the churh often times gets confused with the vision of who God calls us to be and the stark reality of where we really are  In the church, there’s always this tension with how God created things to be, and the way things really are, and sometimes people who are a part of the church judge others, when Jesus himself never did. God never intended the church to a place of judgement, but rather the greatest community.

 

We are in the series these days called “Next Steps.” We are looking at how there’s always a next step of growth and development possible for followers of Jesus. Today’s next step is Community I’d like to start this message by reading from the Gospel of Luke. So this is Luke, Chapter 6 starting with Verse 12:

 

One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles…

And then Luke gives all their names. Then in Verse 17:

He (Jesus) went down with them (His disciples) and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by evil spirits were cured and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all. (Luke 6: 12-19)

 

In Jesus’ day we see a very important pattern where He moves from solitude or quiet time spent in prayer with God, and then in the morning He appoints twelve to be His followers. He forms community – a group to be with – a group to hang out with – he creates a place for all to know and be know, a place for all to love and be loved. Jesus creates this group where people could bond and learn who God was and who they were in him. Then after He forms a little community, they go down into a level place to do ministry.

 

In the morning He goes to be alone with God, to be filled up with God’s love and favor and freedom. And then in the morning He assembles a community. He is going to do life together with His people, and then after that moves into ministry-

 

Solitude: love God. Project these 3 – with each one sliding in – thanks!

Community: love people.

Ministry: serve the world.

 

An obvious question, when it comes to Jesus is: What did He need these guys for? Did those twelve disciples add a lot of value to Jesus’ teaching or ministry?

 

The answer is this: Jesus’ disciples didn’t get what He was trying to teach about. They argued all the time. Their number one debate was who’s the greatest, which is counter to His spirit. Two of them asked if they could sit at His right hand when they got to Heaven. The other ten got ticked off when they heard about that. That started another fight. They tried to keep children away from Jesus when Jesus wanted to see them. When Jesus said it was time to stay awake and pray in the garden, they all went to sleep. When Jesus said it was time to go to sleep in a boat, they all woke Him up to get Him to pray. They promised to be with Jesus in His greatest trial and then when that trial came, they all ran away.

 

In Luke 9 they went through a Samaritan town, which they didn’t feel was sufficiently welcoming and they asked Jesus:

Should we call fire down from heaven to kill all these Samaritans? (Luke 9:54)

Jesus said no.

We saw a man who was casting out demons in your name, but it wasn’t one of us so we stopped him. Didn’t we do good? (Mark 9:38-40)

Jesus said no.

 

Thomas was a doubter, Judas was a thief, Levi was a tax collector. Peter cut off a guy’s ear. Where did Jesus get these guys? “Disciples are us?” What did He need these guys for? Obvious question when you look at this move here. Solitude-that makes sense. To be alone with the Father, but then why these twelve?

 

And the answer is because Jesus wanted them to learn about how to live in real community as God created us to. The reason why he picked very different people, from really different backgrounds and really different understanding about life was because he wanted to teach them that they could live in community and still be very different people. The one phrase that I feel defines Jesus’ ministry is this:

Love . . . rightly understood.

 

Somebody asked Jesus one time,

All the Bible, all those Commandments – all the Old Testament – that’s all they had in Jesus day. What’s it all about?

Jesus said, it boils down to two ideas. If you get these two you get the whole Old Testament. He said the first one is to:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. Love God. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, want and seek good for each person. (Matthew 22: 37-39)

 

 

If you are unclear about what the Bible is about, if you are a little unclear, if you are not sure what it means? Jesus says: Understand them in light of these two Commandments: Love God with all that you are, and love people the way you love yourself. That’s it. People make it a lot more complicated than that, but that’s it.

 

And nobody had ever seen anybody love the way Jesus loved. Jesus was the most loving man they had ever seen. And in the end He died for love.

Just before He died, He gathered them together and He said:

A new command I give to you… (John 13: 34-35)

It’s real important whenever a Rabbi would say this.

Love one another…

Of course, this wasn’t new at all. This is the oldest. What’s new about it is the Jesus factor.

Love one another, as I have loved you…

With a love that is so deep it’s kind of scary, that just never ever stops no matter what. It takes the right form consistently.

…As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13: 34-35)

 

Jesus said to those twelve, “I want you to be the most loving group in the world.”

And this is His word to us. This is to us right here at New Community. You don’t have to be the smartest, richest, prettiest people-just the most loving. Jesus says, “I’m betting the farm on this. Everybody will know that you are Mine, that you’ve got My stamp, you’ve got My signature. You are My disciples, My students, My children, if they look at you and say,

“This is the most loving group I know, then you will be unstoppable.”

 

 

Jesus seems to carry a big sign throughout his ministry. It says, EVERYBODY’S WELCOME! Do people see this sign when they look at me? Do people see this sign when they look at this church? In the Jesus community, Everybody’s welcome.

 

The thing that scandalized Jesus in the eyes of people, especially religious leaders was how He would welcome, love, accept, embrace, include anybody who came up to Him. It didn’t matter-prostitutes, Samaritans, tax collectors, gentiles, lepers, sinners, Romans, Centurions who were regarded as oppressors-they could all come to Him. So the religious leaders, when they looked at Jesus, said this about Him:

This man welcomes sinners and eats with them. (Luke 15:2)

 

That was not intended as a compliment. No Rabbi did that, but Jesus did that! Jesus walked around and it was like He had this giant sign on His neck:

Everybody’s welcome.

 

Jesus’ disciples, His followers, didn’t really get it. They were often kind of scandalized or put off or confused by this themselves, but then after He died and the Holy Spirit came on them, the strangest thing happened to this new community. It became a place that had never existed before-where everybody in the world was just welcome, and not just welcomed, but loved

 

There had never been a place that had even had the idea of being something like this. There were countries, there were armies, there were guilds, there were families, there were tribes, there were cultures, and there were cults where people could go and worship gods and try to get good fortune. There had never been even a community that had the idea of being the kind of place where anybody who wanted to, could come in.

 

The world always has people who are on the margins (display a piece of paper with margins), for whom folks don’t have much space or use, and that’s what would happen. In the ancient world they didn’t have much use for slaves (write in the margins). Slaves could be abused. They could be bought and sold. They could be punished however a master wanted to. They could be killed if they grew too old or sick or useless. Nobody had much use for slaves. 

 

Then there’s this group, this community, which remembered that their leader one day knelt down, took a basin of water and washed their feet as slaves do. He said: Now you do this. He said,

 

 

In this community people who are like slaves, people who just serve, they are the greatest of all- like a community of slaves. They remembered this and they said to slaves:  Come! You are welcome here.

 

In about 140 AD, Aristides wrote this about Christians:

Any slaves they may have among them, they persuade to become Christians because of their love toward them… (Nobody loves slaves except Jesus people.) They become brothers without discrimination.

There’s never been a community like this before. Why would you love slaves?

 

Wrote “Poor” in the margins of paper.

 

The ancient world had little use for the poor, but Jesus said things like:

Blessed are you who are poor. (Luke 6:21)

 

When I went to Chiapas Mexico in my second year of seminary, we were required to stay a day and a night with people from the church in that region. The people were very poor. A couple of friends shared their experience with me.

 

These friends were assigned to spend the night and the next day with a single parent mother whose husband had recently left her when he found out that she was pregnant with their third child.

 

When it came on to supper time, the woman, in broken Spanish, asked my two friends if they liked Pizza. They thought they understood her and they nodded their heads “yes”. She ordered the pizza and a bit later a car pulled up with their pizza. The woman was trying to pay the driver, so she handed the personal pan pizza to my friend, Drew. He looked down at the pizza and thought to himself, “Cool” a personal pan pizza for each of us.” He remembers thinking to himself that they had struck it rich, since they had mostly eaten rice and beans since they had arrived and they were told that they would be served whatever the family normal ate.

 

But then something happened that challenged his understanding. The driver, after being paid, drove away, and my friends Drew and Adam looked around and realized that there was only one personal pan pizza. They walked to the house where there host set 4 plates and put a quarter of the personal pan pizza on each plate and then she took a mango and quartered it and put one quarter of the mango on each of the four plates. Then she prayed and encouraged her guests to eat.

 

My friends realized then that there was no more food, and that this single parent mother who was pregnant was not going to each anything. She has spit all that she had between her two children and her two guests, taking none for herself and her unborn child.

 

Jesus says, Blessed are the poor. The poor are on the margins of society, but because they have so little, they have no other choice but to trust in God, because they know they cannot trust in their own provision, because they have tried and failed.

 

Early Christians were known to fast for days, so that they could give the food that they would have eaten to those who were without any food.

 

Wrote “Sick”, “Diseased”, and “Dying” in the margins.

 

The ancient world had no room for the sick, diseased or dying. It’s hard for us to get a grip on this because we live in such a different world, but imagine a world with no medicine, no sanitation, no hygiene, soap did not exist, unbelievably crowded and filthy conditions in urban settings. When a disease would come, it would wipe people out. In 165 AD and then again in about 250 AD there were plagues that came to the Roman Empire and wiped out at least a quarter or more of the population of a city. Now this is the world. You can imagine what it would be like in our country if 75 million people were to be destroyed by a single plague.

One historian writes:

At the first onset of the disease of the plague they, (That is the general population.) pushed the sufferers away and they fled from their dearest, (Spouse from spouse, parent from child.) throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt.

 

That’s the world. But there was this odd little community of people who had remembered their leader would let lepers come up to Him and touch Him and He’d be so tender with them when nobody else would touch a leper. And He walked around looking for people who were blind or crippled to love them and to heal them and they came seeking for Him. They said, He did that so we’ve got to do that…

 

And they went to the roads and they picked up the sick and took them into their homes and they would bathe and clothe them and feed them and bury them, and sometimes die with them. Again, lots of divisions, lots of problems-can’t romanticize the early church-but they actually became this place that tried to do what Jesus said.

 

A strange thing happened. Contrary to what everybody thought would happen, the church didn’t get wiped out by the plagues and the illness. The Christians actually survived the plagues at higher rates than the pagans did, because part of what was going on is-even without medicines-care, food, touch, praying and love is actually healing. Actually isolation, which looked like the strategy of survival, is deadlier than community.

 

 

When you have fellowship, when you enter into love, you get healed and this is literally and physically.

 

There was an Alameda County study that tracked the lives of 7,000 people over nine years. Researches found that the most isolated people were three times more likely to die than people with strong relational connections.

 

They found, moreover, that people who had bad health habits like smoking, poor eating habits, no exercise, alcohol use, and so on, people with bad health habits but had strong social ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits-jogging and exercised-but were isolated.

 

In other words, it is better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone.

 

There was another study published in the Journal of American Medical Association. They infected 276 volunteers with the virus that produces the common cold. This study found that people with strong emotional connections did four times better fighting off illness than those who were isolated.

 

People who were connected were less susceptible to colds, they shed less virus and they produced significantly less mucus than relationally-isolated subjects. I am not making this up. They produced less mucus. It is literally true. Unfriendly people are snottier than friendly people.

 

This is the power of love and community. It’s in our bodies. It’s in our souls. It is needed by our world and once there was a day when there was a group of people who loved God so deeply, and loved each other so irrationally, and served the world so passionately that a kind of miracle happened. A guy by the name of Paul put it like this:

 

For now, in this new community, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

 

All these things that have separated and divided people for so long for everyone is just one in Christ Jesus. And it was happening. Those weren’t just nice words. There have never been in the history of the human race a community that had even had an idea like that, that all the divisions and hostilities and enmities that separated people, made them go to war, made them not like each other could be torn down and people could look at each other-slaves and free, rich and poor, male and female, barbarian and Roman-and just say,

You are my brother. You are my sister. What I have is yours.

And it was irresistible. It’s a matter of history.

Question:

 

Do you think God can still do that? Do you think it could happen today? Just to get personal for a moment, would people who know me, who know you, say:

 

By the look on my face, by my body language, by my tone of voice, by the way I listen, there is this big sign Everybody welcome.

And if not, would you like to ask Jesus to help you with that sign? He will.