“Awakening Community”
By Rev. Dayle Barrett
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Reading: Luke 14:15-24
Today, if you watch the news, they're very quick to tell you about the economic things that happened from the pandemic: how inflation changed, how property prices changed…. But often we ignore the social impact of the pandemic, how for a few years, we were forced to live so far apart from each other that now we have to learn all over again how to be community. It's not that communities died, it's that they kind of fell asleep. And maybe what we need today is a nudge, a jolt, something to wake us up again, so that we can be the people that God has called us to be. And so that's my plan today - to talk about awakening community.
We are far more distant from each other than we have ever been before. I'm sure you all know people, if you're not doing it yourself, who work from home, who order most of their food to home, Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes. A bunch of you’ve got that on speed dial, right? Then, even when you do go out to the grocery store, it feels like every time there are fewer cashiers and more of those self checkout kiosks… I just wanted to talk to somebody.
I went back to London for a few weeks at the end of August, and we haven't quite got that far here yet in Canada, but in London, England, a lot of McDonald's don't even have somebody to take your order anymore. It's just a row of screen kiosks for you to decide what you want to eat. It seems you could easily go a week or two and not really interact with anyone at all. And it does something to us. It changes the way we are. It changes the way we interact.
Some of us might notice that when we are around people, we find it more difficult to connect to them because we've forgotten how to do it. The same gazes that used to make us feel comfortable and welcome might even make us feel a little bit frightened, and so we become anxious and trepidatious of these communications with other people. But it didn't just stop out there in the world, did it? It also changed the way that we do church. At the height of the pandemic, the United Church of Canada was closing one church every week. Many churches didn't survive the pandemic because people couldn't gather together to do what the church does, and worship as one. The churches that did survive were only able to do so because they thought ahead. They thought of new ways to be community. People like Elaine put music performances for our choir online. People like Mark put on online Alpha courses, so people could still gather together and talk about their relationship with God, and their faith.
And things like that got us through to the other side, but that doesn’t mean we're the same as we once were. You might have proved me wrong today, but many weeks, we have three times as many people watching our service on livestream as we do sitting in the pews in person. The community is still there, but they're not still here. Now, don't get me wrong, I thank God for livestream. There are many people who have been valuable members of our congregation for years who wouldn't be able to stay connected if they couldn't watch us online. This week, I had the privilege of meeting some of them, as Joanne put on a lovely homecoming communion, and people who aren't usually here on a Sunday - some for health reasons, some for mobility reasons - gathered here to eat at the Lord's table together. They all told me how much they love watching our weekly services, how much they love being able to stay connected to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church.
But that's not all of them, is it? There are lots of people who stopped coming on a Sunday and watch online because they got stuck in a habit from a couple of years ago. After a long time of not being able to gather as they used to, we found other things to do on a Sunday. We realized how comfortable our couch was after a busy week at work or doing other things, and realized, hey, I can, I can just watch it right? I can do this church thing all by myself. I don't need to be there.
If the evangelical movement taught us anything, it might be that we need a personal relationship with God. We need to know God for ourselves, not just as something we do on a Sunday, but we need to know who God is in our own lives. But sometimes we can take that to an extreme and begin to believe that the community itself is more trouble than it's worth. I bet you've all heard someone say this: “I don't need to go to church to be a Christian. In fact, you don't need to be a Christian to go to church.” I heard a preacher once put it this way. He said, “You can sit in a garage every single day of the week. It doesn't make you a car.” And he's right. How often you go to church doesn't make you a Christian. But I think that preacher also missed something, because if you never take your car to the garage, it won't be a very good car for very long, will it? In other words, yes. You can be a Christian without going to church. You can be in church without being a Christian. But, maybe Jesus' message wasn't just about a personal label.
If you look at the Gospels, read all four of them front to back - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - you'll find that Jesus never talked about being a Christian. He never mentioned the word Christian, once. That doesn't mean Christianity is not important. The word Christian was given to the followers of Paul and Barnabas who were spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, those who believed in the resurrection. But what Jesus promised to give wasn't Christians. Jesus promised to build a church. When Peter recognized him as the Christ, he said that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him but his father, which is in heaven. And then he said, “Upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
Now, when we hear the word “church” some of us think of beautiful buildings like this, or some of us think of great institutions like the United Church of Canada or the Anglican Church, or the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church. There are many others. I can't name them all. But when Jesus said, “Upon this rock, I will build my church,” he wasn't talking about either of those things. The word “church” in the Bible comes from a Greek word “ecclesia” and it means assembly. What Jesus was promising to build was a group of people gathered together around their faith. And so, I wonder if there's a sense in which, if we're not gathering, we're not being church at all.
Jesus didn't talk about Christians, but what he talked about all the time was the kingdom of God. And how did Jesus describe this kingdom? In the passage we just heard, it's a great feast to which everybody is invited. First, those who might expect an invitation, those who are, for some reason, close to the Master. But for some reason, those people had all sorts of excuses not to come to the banquet. We talked about this in Bible study. They conspired, the Bible says, to make excuses of why they wouldn't come. Listen to what some of them were: I bought a piece of land, and I need to go see it. It sounds a bit benign, doesn't it? But who buys a piece of land without seeing it first? The second guy might be even more ridiculous. I've bought five yoke of oxen, and I need to try them. Now, most of us have probably never had oxen, but think about it this way, who would buy a car without test driving it first? The last one might be the worst one. I have just married, and so I can't come to the banquet. As if you can't bring your wife with you to this fancy dinner. These are the lamest excuses that we've ever heard, and yet, these are the reasons that people gave not to come to this great feast.
At Bible study, somebody told me that he could identify in his life times where he might have been the person who was rejecting the invitation to sit at God's table, and he made me think about the reasons that they gave. Yes, the excuses were horrible, but it doesn't mean they didn't have real reasons. You see, sometimes people don't want to be part of a community of faith because they've been hurt by the community of faith. Maybe some decisions were made that they didn't agree with, that rubbed them the wrong way. Maybe people didn't welcome them the way that they wanted to be welcomed. Maybe they were made to feel like second class believers in the church.
It made me think, what if these people had reasons that they didn't come to the feast? Maybe they didn't think the Master would have very good food, maybe the servants were kind of mean and they didn't like the servant that was inviting them to the feast. The fact is lots of people have their reasons why they don't want to become part of the church. Many people have reasons why they end up leaving the church. But the Master then says this: “Go and get the poor and the lame and the maimed and the blind and ask them to come.” Those categories are important, because if you were somebody who studied the law and had a very literal interpretation of the scripture you were reading. Those four people were people who were not allowed to go to the temple. They were excluded from the community of faith for one reason or another, the poor might not be able to pay the dues necessary; the maimed, the blind, the lame, may have been excluded just for who they were, and their lack of ability. So, in this passage, the Master extending the invitation to these communities is an image for us.
What I'd like us to ask ourselves is why we have been invited. Maybe because you were baptized at birth, maybe because you grew up in a Christian family, maybe because you're part of a social group that made it easier for you to be in the church. If you are the invited, who are the poor and the lame and the blind today? Who are the people who, for some reason or another, feel like they're not welcome in the community of faith? Who are the people who feel like they have less access to our God than we do? Because the challenge we hear in this passage is to go to those people and ask them to come.
Many worry today about the demise of mainline Protestantism. You hear a lot of doom and gloom that the church is dying, and we're never going to see another revival. We're never going to see us at our former glory. But when the Master sent the servants out, he said, “Go to the roads and the lanes.” I like the King James Version. It says, “Go to the highways and hedges.” It's poetic, right? “Go to the highways and the hedges and compel them to come that my house may be filled.”
Here's a challenging idea for you. The same Spirit that descended upon the apostles at Pentecost. It's the same Spirit that animates the church today, and we have been in far worse straits than we are now. You've got to remember that this church started with twelve crazy men who tried to convince everybody else that their best friend had just risen from the dead. For the next 200 years, these people, and people who believed them, risked their lives - were beheaded, crucified, killed in gruesome ways, burnt at stakes for this belief, and we think God can't fill this place?... He will fill it, but He might not fill it with the people you're expecting.
Maybe God will awaken this community and fill it with the people who you think don't belong here. Who, for one reason or another, have always been on the outside of the church community looking in: the poor and the lame and the blind and the maimed. Those in the hedges and the highways came, not because they knew the Master, nor because they got along with the servants. They came because they knew they never deserved to be in the same building as the Master. They came because they were grateful. And boy, could we ever fill a church with grateful people.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining Reverend Jason and Joanne at Holy Blossom temple to hear lectures from an esteemed biblical scholar, Rabbi Shai Held. He had many amazing things to say, but this one really stuck with me. He taught that, in the book of Leviticus, when we read about the sacrifices, there's one that stands out. If you were in the nation of Israel and you were bringing your sacrifices before God, all your sacrifices had to be consumed in three days, except for one: the sacrifice of thanksgiving. When the sacrifice of thanksgiving was offered to God, you had to consume the whole thing in one night. Now you might think, how is anybody supposed to eat that much food in one night? And that's what made him think… Obviously, the sacrifice of thanksgiving was meant to be shared with friends and neighbours and family members and people from the community. To consume a sacrifice like that, you would have to share the gift that you were thanking God for.
Here's the principle: The grace of God that we don't deserve compels us to gratitude. But, because there's nothing that we can do to pay God back, we express our gratitude in generosity. The way we thank God for his forgiveness, grace, love, kindness, and for the goodness of the earth and the wealth of creation is by giving what we have to other people - by building community. And when we look at Thanksgiving like that, it makes us realize who we're supposed to be when it comes to this feast.
In the Bible study we were talking about, some of us identified with the first people who were invited. At a time in our lives, we may have rejected God for one reason or another and refused to be part of the community of faith. Some of us might have identified with the poor, the lame, the blind, and the maimed; those on the hedges and the highways who felt like they weren't supposed to be able to access the community, but were now welcome and felt grateful. But I wonder if the purpose of this story is to teach us how to be the servants. Maybe the way that we express our gratitude to God isn't just by coming to the feast, but it's by inviting others to come with us… and that's not easy today, is it? After all, we're modern Christians. Faith is private. It's something you do by yourself. It's your relationship with God and, you know, you might go to church on Sunday, but really, you don't need to talk about your faith with anybody on Monday. But let me ask you this question: Does your gratitude for God's grace compel you to share it? Has God done enough for you that it's worth telling somebody else about? Have you experienced the kind of compassion in community that you want others who are lonely to also know? Because if that's true, you have no reason to be silent about what God has done in your life.
Here's the thing about issuing invitations. The story makes it clear, some people will say no, but the likelihood is, in 2024 no one's going to burn you at the stake for asking. You won't be beheaded or hung upside down on a cross. Somebody might just decide to say no. But people are so lonely today - so devoid of human interaction. It's been such a long time since, for some people, anyone called them to ask them how they're doing, that if you sit next to that lonely person you see sitting on a park bench and just ask their name, make small talk, and take a phone number… you might change someone's life. And then you can invite them. You can say, I know a place where there are many more like me who want to know you and who want you to feel the love of the same God who loves us. And this is how, my friends, we awaken this community. Not just by coming to the feast, but by going out to the edges, going out beyond the boundaries of what we think the church should look like, and compelling them to come that God's house may be filled.
I said I wouldn't, but now I'm going into minute message mode. For those of you who are going to be with us tomorrow, I need us to remember that there is a difference between inviting community and awakening a community of faith, and this is the difference. We can have all the great events in the world for people to come to. We do lots of great events. If you look at the calendar for this month, it's going to drive you nuts. There is lots going on at this church that we should be very thankful for. But the way we move from bringing people into the building to bringing them to the cross is to have people like you who are willing to be servants. And what does that mean? It means that when you come for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, I do not want you sitting with your friends. I know that's going to be hard, but I do not want to walk in tomorrow morning and see what looks like a middle school disco with, you know, the girls on one side and the boys on the other. I don't want to see Timothy Eaton people at one table and everybody else on other tables. I want you to come tomorrow and find someone whose name you don't know, and introduce yourself. Go and hear a story that you've never heard, and share yours, because I know people who attend our church now who are only here because everyone in their lives who was happy seemed to have some kind of faith, and they wanted to know what that was like. I know people who attend our church now who thought that Christianity was nonsense until they felt the kindness and the love of you people in this community.
So, what do we do? We act as servants of God, and we offer the same thing that Jesus offered to us. We say God is throwing on a huge feast. It's called the kingdom of God, and I want you to come eat of His body that it was broken for you. I want you to come and drink of His blood that was shed for you. I want you to come and taste and see that the Lord is good, because blessed are those who trust in Him. If you really want to say thank you, become a servant, and let's awaken community together that this house may be filled. Thanks be to God. Amen.