Our Mission in the Community
This week it was discovered that there are at least 10,000 more galaxies than we thought there were before. That’s like 10,000 worlds. That’s a lot of matter out there in space. I don’t know about you but I find it completely impossible to relate to that concept. Our world seems quite huge enough, thank you very much, for me to get me brain around.
But is there some way that this abstract, other-worldly information relates to you and me? I believe there is, and I want to share it with you this afternoon. It relates, believe it or not to our
mission in our community.
First the big picture, the biggest picture of all actually and the reason that we’re here. The biggest
picture of all is that God created the universe so that He would have a people with whom to dwell. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit existed in perfect and complete unity and love before time or matter was created.
God, whose very identity is relationship, wanted to share the love, the completeness and the joy that He had in Himself in the Holy Trinity. 1 John says that “God is love”. In order to share this love He needed to create beings that were in some ways like himself, with a personality and a will to choose to love.
So all matter, including every star and all those freshly-discovered galaxies out there were created so that God would have a people. The sheer number of galaxies and planets tells us at the very least that our God is extravagantly and limitlessly creative. And God chose to have a people who would start out their existence on this planet the planet we call home.
What is Our Big Purpose?
To put it in a nut shell our mission as a church, and the mission of the church universal, is to be part of the enfolding of humanity into the love of God in Christ, and to live that love right here, right now with all that we have and all that we are.
There are two parts to this: A Commandment and a Commission.
The Commandment - Live lives of love right here, right now. Jesus said: “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. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments”.
Jesus said that this principal of love and this practice of loving matters more than all other
commandments, all other guidelines, all other high and noble themes. Everything else found in the Old Testament hangs on, is related to and lesser than this first principal.
The Law of Moses or Torah, which has really been extremely important and still is for many, many people as the groundwork of living life. It contains the 10 Commandments which are really the basis that Western culture was built upon.
It contains the revelation of how we were created, how we rebelled, and, in the story that started with Abraham, how we were to be reclaimed and redeemed by God in Christ.
There is something more important than all that, and it is one little four-letter word. Love. This is
not to say we don’t need the Bible - of course we do because God transforms us through his Word and we are told to read and reflect and meditate and keep God’s Word very near to our hearts.
Loving God and loving people is what happens when we apply and live out God’s Word. Faith and hope are extremely important things, but in the end love is what will remain eternally.
Again, we need to keep the big picture, the end goal in mind: Enfolding Humanity in God’s love. When we do that we understand why Jesus said that loving God and loving others is so hugely important.
Jesus said that loving God and loving people was more important than the Prophets. The prophets were the revealers of God’s will and mind and heart. They wrote of profound mysteries, they had deep insights into the character of God and the character of humankind.
They predicted the coming of Christ. They suffered for the truth they spoke...most of them were killed by the people their message was designed for. There is something more important than all that. One word that is a world of understanding, a font of joy, and the binding first principle of life: Love.
So it’s clear that our mission in the community is rooted and grounded in love. It has to be.
Humans will always have mixed motives - we unfortunately can’t get away from that because of
our natures, but, perhaps because of that fact, we must always determine to do what we do out of love. Love is a verb, it is an action word. It is not sentiment or warm gushy feelings.
Love is a decision. It is a policy that we live by and that directs our actions and reactions. There are feelings associated with love, but love is a decision. Love is not automatic, just like spiritual growth is not automatic.
Jesus said what matters the most is that we love God - without restraint, without any limits. All our hearts. All our soul. All our mind. That pleases God. That honours God. That brings a smile to his face. And that is our first mission, to live that love, right here and right now.
Rick Warren, in a book that some of us are using in a group study, says something about spiritual growth that I think relates directly to love.
“It takes intentional commitment. You must want to (love), decide to (love), make an effort to (love) and persist in (loving)”. This is love that involves the will, the mind and the heart.
The best way to do that is to get involved - get more involved than you are - in people’s lives.
If we want to grow as loving people to maturity in Christ, we must start thinking maturely, which, again, Warren says, means focussing on others and not ourselves. We think of others more.
The Contemporary English Version of the Bible says this: “We should think of their good and try to help them by doing what pleases them. Even Christ did not try to please Himself”.
And if we want to be a part of what God is doing in this community - what God does is love and redeem people in communities - we must individually and together as a church family make the decision to love; to be a people characterized and identified by love. That is the vital groundwork of our mission in the community.
Love enacted in our little daily decisions pleases God and prepares the way for others to become
part of God’s people.
The Second Part of Our Mission:
The Commission - Jesus said: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt 28). Jesus wants us to play an active part of the enfolding of
humanity into the love of God in Christ. That means you and that means me, involved, but that does NOT mean you and me on our own. It means us together.
How do we know that this is not to be a solitary thing we do?
Some hints: “Whenever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the
midst of them” (Matt 18:20 KJV), and
“You are a chosen people. You are a kingdom of priests, God’s holy nation, his very own possession. This is so you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness and into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people; now you are the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9-10a). We are meant to be together, to do life together, to work together for God’s common purpose of touching lives and redeeming people and communities.
How do we play a part in the enfolding of the community into the love of God? That’s were it gets really, really exciting and interesting. This is where we can learn to soar in life. We do this by offering our selves to Christ and to his body.
We offer our creativity. All of the gifts of the Spirit are for the common good. When we function at our best, we all bring our gifts, our perspectives, our histories (good and bad), and, most importantly, our love to the table.
Do you want to know my dream for our church? That we would come together during the week just to hang out together, to do projects together, to pray together, to study the Bible together. That we would choose each other as friends because we sense God’s call to belong to this family of believers.
That we would love one another right here and right now. And that we would struggle together to more perfectly love God as a community. I see children playing a very large part in this. And actually, for those of us who are here week in and week out, we do experience some of this, whether we’re aware of it or not.
Next door in the Common Room there is a beautiful garden. O.K. It’s just a big room, but for much of the week it is a big playroom with young people running around and playing and bringing huge smiles to the faces of nearly every adult that walks by. It reminds me of a garden.
Use to be that the Common Room was mostly unused except for Sundays when we were in there and for the occasional special event. It was a little depressing and strange, I found, that such a big space seemed to connect so little with our community.
Now that the kids are there, it is full of life...and love. The adults who take care of the children
are full of love for the kids. It’s in their eyes.
That’s just one example of ways to do life together, of finding meaningful ways to be together and make vital connections.
And there are others among us who choose to be with each other during the weeks at Bible studies and the Agape Supper and Thursday night meals. The mission staff that are here day in and day out choose to be because they want to be part of a community serving God together.
Whenever we get together, whatever we do, we are forming a community. And then Sundays...my dream for our times of worship together is that we would not have ‘services’ in the normal sense. Instead we would pool our creative abilities and together encounter the living God as we meet together as the living body of Christ.
Can you imagine what it would be like to come here every Sunday and have the clear sense of meeting with God together? That we would find creative ways to make space for the Holy Spirit to move among us, so that when we leave here to leave here it would be with a profound, weekly sense that you and I have encountered the living God.
What would that do for you? Would you be encouraged to be part of the enfolding of our community into the love of God. Would that make you want to reach out, to introduce people to Jesus. Actually I heard a far better way of understanding what it means to share the gospel this week. It actually ties the whole message together.
When we think of enfolding the community into the love of God, when we think of evangelism which is another word for the same thing, we do better not to think in terms of introducing people to Jesus. Does that sound heretical? Then listen up: we should “love them” to Jesus. And that is precisely what our mission is as a church.
We can grow to be so comfortable and so practised at loving God and each other that we simply care for new folks that we meet and open our arms to the community. And of course, loving God and loving people for Christians means to not be shy about the One who has called us, the One who loves with an everlasting love, the one who has come literally in Jesus to show us the way to God.
It would be silly to not tell people why we’re here, to not tell them why we’re a people, why we do stuff together. It is all about Jesus Christ, of course, and we would share that quite naturally according to the gifts we each have.
The universe is a big place. Too big to imagine for us. It is also too small to contain the love of
God. The love that he has for me, the love that he has for you, the love that he has for the communities of the world, the love that he has for our local community.
God has given us a commandment to live lives of loving God and loving people. God has given us a commission to enfold people into his body that all might experience the transforming and redeeming work of Jesus Christ.
Will you join me in seeking to live obediently to this commandment? Will you join me in this mission, this great commission to be part of the enfolding of as many people as possible into the love of God?
Let’s pray.
God, you have made us a people. And you have given us a vision. And Jesus Christ, you lived the life of love that is the perfect example of what you mean when you say to love God and love people.
Teach us to follow you, Lord Jesus. Teach us to think much, much bigger than about just ourselves. Teach us to pour out lives into you, and to pour our lives, as you did, Jesus, into our community. In your perfect and holy name we pray. Amen.
