| Sermon for Sunday, October 9, 2005 PRAYERS PRESENCE GIFTS AND SERVICEbyRev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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Scripture: Matthew 6:31-33
I was listening last week to a sermon from Adam Hamilton who is the senior minister at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. He was talking about some of the themes in the series of The Lord Of The Rings stories. He reminds us that J R R Tolkien was a committed Christian and that the journey of Frodo Baggins with his friends has Christian motifs. Frodo’s mission is to destroy the ring and he needs help from a fellowship of other folks to do that, so he winds up gathering other persons around himself who sometimes do not get along with each other. They are a collection of elves, hobbits, and humans who even though they have differences and are different, have a common mission and need each other to get that mission and that journey accomplished. Adam said, this is what the church of Jesus Christ is like, this group of hobbits and humans and elves and dwarves who are different from each other but need each other in the journey we are on together. Sometimes we do not like each other or get along perfectly but we really need each other because we can’t get by just on our own. And when people join a church we are joining this kind of imperfect, journeying community. That is the kind of community our confirmation students have already become part of in their study the last nine months of the Christian life and are formally identifying with today. The group that they have become may be a group that will last for a long time. I had the privilege of having lunch with one of our college students last Sunday and hearing about how this congregation has been and still is am important place of belonging and community for him. Jon Wilterdink is a junior at CSU and is sensing a call to the ordained ministry. He grew up here at St Andrew, went through confirmation here, was very active in youth group and on mission trips and in youth choir and youth musicals. The fellowship of this church has been an important influence in his life all these years. That fellowship has continued even into his college career as he and several other CSU students who grew up in this church and were confirmed here still get together every month in Ft Collins for lunch and fellowship together and to support each other in their studies and in their faith! They are still a fellowship and a community. Today we celebrate 38 young people who are joining the fellowship of the church. They are uniting with this community of faith named after Andrew and they are also doing something else really important: -- they are taking a stand. By appearing here in front of you and making some promises about faith in God and following Christ, they are taking a public stand. They are identifying themselves with the life and example and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They are basing their lives now on his compassion, kindness, courage; on his spirit of welcome for every person, on his hospitality for the newcomer and the outsider. They are saying by being up here and being baptized or confirmed that they want to live like Christ and be like Christ. It is important for every person to take a stand like this, to say who we are putting at the center of our lives or who we are serving. Bob Dylan says in an old song that everybody serves somebody and serving God is the way to the fullest kind of life possible as we heard in Matthew’s gospel reading. Taking a public stand is really important. That is what a wedding ceremony does. It lets two people who are in love make a public statement about their love and their covenant. The wedding ceremony does not create the love or the covenant. It lets people announce it and say that they are proud that they are a couple and they want the world to know it. Joining the church and affirming Christ as the center of life does that also, and that public statement of faith is important. Rick Warren says in his book on the purpose driven life, “The difference between being a church attender and a church member is commitment. Attenders are spectators from the sidelines. Members get involved in the ministry. Attenders want the benefits of the church without sharing the responsibility.” In almost every one of our new member information classes we hear people say that to us. People tell us they have been attending for a while and they are deciding to join the church because they want not only to receive what the church has to offer, they also want to support it and make it possible for others as well. It is OK to be just attenders for a while. It is OK to be just consumers and recipients of ministry for a while. All of us begin that way – as recipients and attenders of church and we need to stay that way for a while. But there will be also a time for us when we do what these young people are doing – to say that we want to move beyond being spectators and admirers of Christ to becoming disciples. Being a disciple means that we affirm Christ as the central teacher of our lives and that we promise to uphold Christ’s work with our PRAYERS, PRESENCE, GIFTS, AND SERVICE. All of us will reaffirm that promise in a moment. We promise to pray for the church – for each other, because that is what the church is, each other, the fellowship. We promise to be present for worship, for study, for group activities. We hope that every Sunday you are not out of town or ill that you will be present in church. We promise to give and to serve, to devote a sacrificial amount of our time and our finances to Christ’s work. We take those promises seriously here at St Andrew. We are a high commitment church and members are people who are doing all those things. We discourage people from joining if you are not ready to fulfill those promises. That is why our participation level is so high and why we just won a national award for excellence in ministry that we will tell you about later on. Our youth are promising to be engaged and involved, as they have been so far, and that involvement is one of the characteristics of this church. We do not want people when they join the church to think that they are finished in their Christian growth. We do not want people to be like the five-year-old boy who went to sleep at night and during the night his mother heard a loud thud from his room. She went to his room and found him on the floor, having fallen out of bed. She tucked him back in and asked why he thought he had fallen out of bed. He said he guessed he fell asleep too close to where he got in. We do not want any of these kids to fall asleep in their faith to close to where they are getting in this morning so we will expect all of the rest of us to be teachers and encouragers and mentors and guides in their journey of faith so they and we will be faithful to the Lordship of Christ and will faithfully and sacrificially support the work of Christ with our PRAYERS, PRESENCE, GIFTS, AND SERVICE! May God help each of us and each of these young people as we fulfill those important promises! Amen. |
