Starting with Middle C: Community: With Whom Will I Be
September 23, 2018
Rev. Eric Huffman
I Corinthians 12:12-26
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.If all were a single member, where would the body be?As it is, there are many members, yet one body.The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect;whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. 1 Corinthians 12:12-26
Good morning! Welcome to St. Luke’s United Methodist Church. Thank you for being here. My name is Eric and I am not the one who usually does this. Our senior pastor Dr. Pace is actually preaching now at The Story, Houston building behind this building so if you came to hear Dr. Pace’s sermon there’s still time to get up, go out, like no one is going to judge you! We decided to do a little pulpit swap today. I’ve been on staff as an associate pastor for four and a half years now – a little over four years. It’s hard to believe it’s been four plus years since I moved my family here from Kansas City. It’s a work on this vision that was being dreamed up here at St. Luke’s. A vision of Dr. Pace and a few other key leaders that have really been thinking and dreaming about how this church can share the love of Jesus with more of Houston. And three and a half years ago, the end of February 2015 The Story Houston was born, and we have just been having the time of our lives working hard and growing by the grace of God.
Last Sunday we announced that The Story will be expanding in 2019 and this will be our base and our HQ but in 2019 we’re planning a second campus in the Timbergrove community here in Houston. We’re just continuing to spread the word about all that God has done in our hearts and really want the whole city to know that God loves them in Jesus. So, we’re really excited about what’s ahead.
I don’t know about you, but I wake up grateful and just feel like the luckiest man on earth a lot of the time. I wake up grateful every day. Grateful for so many things, not the least of which is to be a part of this family at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church. That’s what we are – a family. It’s in our tagline. We say, “St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, a family in Christ putting faith to work in love.” That’s who we are, a family.
But family is a funny thing, isn’t it? I can’t think of anything else in the world that simultaneously we so completely crave while we also constantly criticize it. So, we all want more than anything else to be a part of a family and then when we have a family we just throw it under the bus at any given chance. We crave and yet criticize family.
The 19th century Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said that “family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” But the 20th century American philosopher George Burns said, “there’s nothing better in life than having a large, loving, caring, close knit family – in another city.” We’re torn about how we really feel about family.
Leah was a young woman in her 20s in Kansas City and she was a lead barista at the coffee bar up the street from my office, so I often went to see her. And she’s delightful, just bright and a smile on her face all the time. She treated every customer the same and it didn’t matter if you were upwardly mobile or you were obviously homeless. It didn’t matter to Leah. She’d talk to you, about her tattoos which she had from head to toe. She’d talk to you about her dogs, two pit bull looking dogs that she named Spike and Lee that she rescued from a local shelter just days before they were to be put down. Every time I went into that Starbucks I would invite her to go to my church. And every time she would politely say, “I’ll try,” but then she’d never come. Till one Sunday she did.
She came in and then the next Sunday she came again. And the Sunday after that she came again. And soon enough within a few months she was making the decision to join that church and become a member.
We did a strange thing whenever you became a member of that church. We made you get up in front of the whole community and give your testimony. We don’t do that anymore because we want you to join the church, so we don’t make you do it anymore. We used to, and she stood up in front of that church and she told a bunch of people that she was just starting to get to know her story. About how when she was just a baby her dad walked out on them. She barely knew him, and during her whole childhood and adolescence she felt this void. This anxiety, uncertainty that she couldn’t put a finger on, but she knew it was there. She tried her whole young life to fill that hole in her heart with all kinds of things. With alcohol and drugs – to try and numb the pain, with tattoos and dogs and men and whatever she could find, to try and satisfy this hunger in her heart but nothing really worked. Until she found that church.
I’ll never forget her standing in front of this community of people who were from all different walks of life, old and young, different colors and backgrounds. She said, “For me church is a family that works. Church is a family, but a family that works.”
It’s interesting to me that anyone like Leah with a story like hers would ever crave a family at all. But the hole in her heart was family-sized. Even though all the associations in her mind to family were negative, all the associations were abandonment, pain, loneliness, emptiness. Yet her heart still craved family.
Her story may be more dramatic than most of ours today, but I think we’re all the same. We all deeply crave family, even though families are made up of sinful people that are bound to break each other’s hearts from time to time. Families are bound to let each other down yet we still crave family, maybe more than anything else in life. All of us across every culture and creed, in every time, want a family.
So, the question is “Why?” Why do we want this thing that so often lets people down? Are we gluttons for punishment? Are we just products of this mechanistic system of evolution that left us tribal by nature? Or is there something more going on to our deep desire and longing for family?
The Christian response to that question has to do with our understanding of God. We believe that every person who ever lived, everywhere and in all times deeply craves family because we’re all created in the image of a God who is family. By his very nature he is family within himself.
Now we’re monotheistic as Christians, I hope that doesn’t come as a big surprise to any of you because we believe in one God. But throughout out holy book, throughout the Bible, this God is described often in plural terms. One God - three persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A family in and of himself. As early as Genesis 1, God refers to himself mysteriously in the third person. God says in Genesis 1:26 - 27 “Let us make human kind in our image.” And so, he created them in the image of God, male and female he created them. This is our understanding of God. We are created in the image of a God who is family and therefore we crave family ourselves by our very nature.
Later in the New Testament Jesus takes that principle and runs with it, especially in the prayer that he prays from John 15 to John 17. Really long drawn out prayer Jesus prays for his followers. And in John 17 he prays specifically for the unity of his followers. Because – and you want to listen to this part because it steps on some toes of some Christians who are so prone to divisions and separations and splits. Jesus prays for the unity of his followers because that is the way the whole world will know that God truly sent Jesus. That Jesus was the Son of God and that God truly loves all the people outside of these walls. The way that they out there will know that our God is legitimate, and that Jesus is truly God and God is in love with them is if they look at us and see us loving each other. The only way perhaps some of them will ever know is if they look in a place like this and see a family that works.
A family of people that even though we come at this from different places, even though we may disagree on different things, such as a style of worship or which service we go to or which campus we’re on, or what color the carpet should be. Or if we disagree on the fact that every single room on this campus is some shade of beige and I don’t know why. But it’s fine, we’re a family. We get along because we love each other. We love each other so completely.
This is who we are called to be. Paul kind of ups the ante in this passage we heard Jennifer read today in 1 Corinthians 12. Paul uses an illustration for the kind of family we should be. He says, “In fact we are one body” which is an interesting analogy. We are one body made up of many parts. And I think it’s tempting for us to look at this body like maybe the world would. Like there are some parts of the body that are more important than others and there are some parts of the body that are more prominent, more beautiful, more presentable. So those parts of the body are the ones that should be cultivated and paid attention to while the other parts of the body we should sort of put off to the side.
If we look at the Body of Christ in this way do you know what we become as a church? We become the Christian equivalent of the guy at your gym who only works his arms and his chest because he thinks that’s what girls like. So, he’s all yoked up up here. But when he wears shorts - it’s like walking on a pogo stick or toothpicks. He keeps skipping leg day but the upper body is more important.
Every part of the body matters the same. Every single member of the body regardless of how involved you are, how long you’ve been here, how many committees you serve on, how much money you give. You are no more worthy or valuable to this community than the one who just joined last week. Or the one who’s joining this week. Or the one who can only come a few times a year for whatever reason. Or the one who’s down on their luck and can’t give as much money. We are all one in Christ.
Paul kind of shows his sense of humor. We always think Paul is serious until we read his passages in church very seriously like he’s all business all the time. I think Paul had a sense of humor. Especially in this passage. I won’t spell it out for you because it’s slightly inappropriate what he says but if you were listening you caught it. It’s in 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul says, “There are even parts of this body that are so unpresentable and unpleasant at times that we treat them like the parts of the body where the sun don’t shine.” And it’s true. There are parts of every church, somebody acting up. And Paul’s point isn’t that we’re ashamed of those people, his point is that the people you’d think are less presentable or less worthy, are in fact even more worthy we present them more proudly. Because this is the body of Christ is put together. You don’t get what you pay for here. For one we’re equal because Jesus says we are.
There’s this story I came across last week and it continues to blow my mind. I’m not quite sure it fits into this sermon, but I wanted to process it with you today like a therapist or something.
It’s about something the Chinese government is up to now. You know it’s a kind of Communistic, totalitarian regime. This is not sci-fi, this is not a conspiracy theory, this is really happening. It’s a system of social credit the Chinese government is instituting. It’s already in the beta phase and it will be officially rolled out about 2020. What they’ve done is to install between 200 and 300 million closed circuit TV cameras with facial recognition technology. They’ve forced certain citizens to have it and an app on their phone that allows them to be tracked.
The point is that the government wants to track every single citizen everywhere they go and look at every purchase they make. They look at every person they hang out with, they look at everything they do and give them a social credit rating based on their behavior. And this is something you can track in real time. If you’re a Chinese citizen, you’re at the grocery store, you have your Smartphone with you. You load up your cart with let’s say cleaning supplies, and you buy a lot of cleaning supplies. The government will know as you check out and use your credit card. The government will know that you must be a clean person, and they like that you’re a clean person and so you’re a good citizen and your social credit rating in real time will go up a few ticks on your phone. On the other hand, if you buy beer and you buy more beer than one person should buy, you check out, you pay for that beer, the government will know that you might have a problem. The government doesn’t like that and that may mean you’re not a productive citizen and your social credit rating will go down a few points.
The higher your social credit rating is the better your life will become, because you’ll be allowed to live in certain neighborhoods with a higher social credit rating. You’ll probably be welcome to date certain people who are more desirable if you have a certain social credit rating. You’ll get certain jobs. You’ll be able to travel more to more places if your social credit rating is higher. If you’re a parent and you and your spouse have children in school, the better your social credit rating is combined, the better your schools your kids can go to.
It’s a pretty insidious system, social credit. I had two thoughts when I read that story. My first thought was “God bless America!” We have our problems but there’s something to be said for freedom of speech and a reasonable right to privacy. Amen! Hallelujah! God bless America!
But the second thought I had was this sense of conviction. Like is that really that foreign to us? A system of social credit? Isn’t this the way the world works? Isn’t this what we do to each other? The government doesn’t do it necessarily – yet. But isn’t this the way the world works on the day to day? Don’t we judge each other and assign value to each other based on the decisions a person makes? Based on how responsibly they live their lives or steward the money that they’re given, or what they can give to us in return? Don’t we make judgments based on these factors?
Of course, we do. That’s how the world out there works. If someone’s down on their luck or they make some bad decisions, there’s mistakes in their past that just set them up for cycle of poverty or shame or whatever. We in the world go along with that and we want to be around people with a higher social credit score.
But like a father figure, Paul, knowing that that’s how the world works writes to these first century Christians in Corinth as if to say “That’s not the way we do it here. Not in this house, not under my roof.” You can sense Paul is talking to this congregation like a father would talk to his family. That’s not the way we operate here. This is not a system of tenure here. Whether you’ve been here all your life and you don’t miss a single Sunday for sixty or seventy years. Or whether you just joined last week or for whatever reason you can’t be here. Like our sisters and brothers who are shut-ins in nursing homes. No matter how many times you darken these doors in any given year you are worth just as much as any one else around you right now. Your attendance doesn’t affect your worth.
The same with service to the community. We love when people serve on committees but it’s not like serving on committees gets you an extra room on your mansion in heaven or gets you any extra attention or privileges here at the church. People who serve willingly on those communities are happy just to serve their church.
The same goes for money. People who give more money than others, they don’t buy a certain VIP section of the church. They don’t get to sit in certain seats like it doesn’t really change anything about how they belong to the community. The same is true for someone who’s out of a job or unable to give in some way. It doesn’t affect your status as a member and part of this body. So, you can have your name on one of these beautiful buildings on this campus or you can have everything you own in the backpack you have right now, and you matter equally in this community.
And it’s not because we at St. Luke’s in leadership are just a bunch of sweethearts. It’s not because we get it. It’s not because we’re any nicer than anyone else. Paul tells us why. Paul says, “It is because of Jesus. It is because we have all been made to drink of the same spirit. No matter what we have to give. No matter how worthy or dignified our life decisions may look in retrospect. We all receive the same portion of the same spirit because of the grace of God.”
And the way that he phrases it – “made to drink of the same Spirit” – clearly means he’s talking about baptism here. I love when we have baptisms on Sunday mornings because it is such a sacred and holy thing. Set apart from the ordinary of life. And I hope whenever this happens up here you dial in. I hope you don’t check out and just go through the motions and mumble through the words on a page. Because what’s happening here when especially a child is baptized it’s the holiest moment of your week. I promise, because there are some sacred vows being exchanged up here. Do you think these two parents can raise this child on their own the way that this child should be raised? Of course, not – no parents can. Trust me – you’ll find out what I mean.
No parents can and so they’re coming here humbly to seek not only God’s love but to seek the love of a community. Not just for them but for their child whom they love more than life itself. They ask a pastor to baptize a child and raise him up high so you all will know that this child isn’t just their son. They need you to call this child your son. They need you to teach him, pray for him, lead him, hold him accountable. They can’t do it alone. And we as congregation every time a child is baptized, we say these sacred oaths. We say, “We will proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We will surround this little one with a community of love and forgiveness. We will pray for him that he may become a true disciple who walks in the way that leads to life eternal.” This is seriously heavenly stuff here.
It doesn’t matter what the child brings to the table. Who brings less to the table than an infant? That’s what makes it so special. Infants have nothing to give. And yet we give them the same gift that we were given, and that every single member here was once that baby on the receiving end of such sacred promises. What a holy and different thing this is, this family, this body.
I have another example of what I mean. A couple of weeks ago it was my birthday. The older I get the less happy I get about birthdays. And this particular birthday I spent in florescent lighting at meetings, I had meetings one after another. And if you know me then you know that’s my own personal hell. That’s what I hate the most so I’m sitting in meetings all day. I get out of the very last meeting on my birthday and I check my phone to see what all I’ve missed and catch up on my messages.
What you’re about to hear was what was waiting for me. “Eric Huffman, this is Bill Denham calling to wish my young friend a very happy birthday. Hope you’re going to be able to have some celebration tonight or at least this weekend. Just wanted to send you my best wishes and I’m very proud of you for not answering the phone. I hope you take it off the hook for the day anyway. Anyhow, just hope you and Geo have a great celebration. Bye.”
My favorite thing about that voicemail is that Bill Denham told me to take my phone off the hook. Which I haven’t done since 1989. I don’t even know how to do that.
How many of you have gotten one of those calls from Bill Denham? Raise your hand. Almost every hand in the room went up. If your hand didn’t go up it means we just don’t have your information, so fill out one of those cards. But this is not to shame you because I can’t raise my hand on this question either, but how many of you have called Bill Denham to wish him a happy birthday on his birthday? Much fewer hands. Eagle Scouts. Most of us have not.
It doesn’t matter what you give. It doesn’t matter what you contribute. Everyone here regardless of what you have to give, everyone here gets the same call. Incidentally, someone told me between services earlier that tomorrow is the birthday of one Rev. Bill Denham. Therefore - 713-402-5156. Or look in your bulletins. Let’s blow his phone up tomorrow. Let’s make him want to take it off the hook.
Listen, it doesn’t matter what you have to give, or what your net worth is or how many times in a year you attend. What matters is what Jesus says about you. Jesus says, “You belong here.” Even if this is your first time here in a long long time. Even if for whatever reason you can’t get here like our nursing home brothers and sisters who watch the TV broadcast from their room at the nursing home. It doesn’t matter how often you darken these doors or how much money you put in the offering plate. What matters is what Jesus says, and what Jesus says is that you are his. And Jesus says you belong, just as much as anyone else.
See, that’s how grace works. That’s what makes this whole thing special. Grace is not a system of social credit. Grace is not a system of karma. Grace is not getting what you pay for. Grace is a room full of sinners claimed by Christ in sprite of our sin and set free to love and belong as equal members of one body. So, whatever it is you bring to the table, how ever much or little you have to offer to this community just know that we love you. We value you as much as anyone else. In fact, we need you. We need you here to become the family that works. The body that God created us to be.
Pray with me: Lord Jesus, thank you for your grace and love that looks past all our sin, and loves us through our trials and claims us as your own. Lord, teach us as your church to love each other the way you first loved us, to follow through on our baptismal vows to each and every child and adult that’s been baptized in this room, Lord. And to love each other through our differences in such a complete way that when the world sees us loving one another there will be no doubt in their minds that Jesus is who he said he is. And that this God of ours truly is love. And he doesn’t just love those who are inside these four walls, but he loves all those outside those walls as well and he always has. We pray for the conviction and courage to be one body in Christ Jesus. Amen.