Finding Faith ... in our uniqueness

EDITOR'S NOTE: In October 2017 I began a new venture as a synodically authorized minister at Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. The ride over the past 2.5 years has been an amazing journey of learning, growing and a deepening of my theological mind. This sermon took place on Aug. 5, 2018.

Yesterday, Shelley and I had the opportunity to attend a ceremony at Trinity Lutheran Church in Moorhead, where the area Yazidi community came together to mark four years since the international terrorist group ISIS tried to wipe that entire people off the face of the earth in northern Iraq.

We listened for an hour as a Yazidi woman who had been captured, enslaved and tortured for a year, but managed to eventually escape and make it to the United States, share her story with us. … On that nightmarish day, 40-some members of her family were taken, separated and sent on various unknown paths. … To this day, 18 of her family members are still missing.

This atrocity is to the extreme of where we humans fall away from God’s plan. … But it’s not just in genocide where we humans terribly fall short. … No, unfortunately, we are all complicit. ... None of us here may not be committing atrocities on an international scale, but our everyday, seemingly benign slights and taunts and omissions of others, loved ones or not, are no more excusable.

Everywhere we look these days, it seems that strife surrounds us. You can’t turn on the television, or pick up a newspaper or swipe through your social media without seeing the fighting, the tension… the general disharmony.

It ranges from the silly political fights we have … to the far greater crimes of war and genocide.

But, the Good News is that today’s second reading from Ephesians tells us there is another way.

Remember, as Paul writes to us, that we Christians are called to live a life “worthy of the calling to which you have been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

I think it’s important to repeat that list … humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

All good traits aren’t they? … Wonderful aspirations for us. … And I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. … But the importance of Paul’s message is not in the listing of those gifts, but actually comes in the next sentences ... “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all.”

And this my brothers and sisters in Christ is what separates us as Christians from just being nice people. … From just being moral people.

I have good friends, cherished friends, in my life -- as I’m sure many of you do -- who would not disagree in the least that humility, gentleness, patience and bearing one another in love are wonderful and caring traits, human characteristics that are very important to strive toward. … Moral imperatives that everyone should live by so that we can live in harmony on this one world that we have.

But that’s as far as they will go: They call these gifts moral imperatives. … You see, they would consider themselves human secularists but certainly not Christians. … They are people who believe there is a moral code that everyone should live by, but they would not consider themselves saved by Christ, and they maybe wouldn’t even agree that Christ, nor God exist.

But, alas, they don’t disagree with the notion that we have to be good to each other.

And this is where our identity as Christians separates us from others. … I don’t mean to imply that it makes us better, or that we should be haughty about it. … But Paul’s emphasis on why humility and gentleness and patience and bearing one another in love isn’t about us just getting along here on earth. … Paul's emphasis is on why those traits, those actions are important in the scheme of God’s plan.

And after exhorting us to practice those traits so that we may bring harmony to this world, Paul tells us why that is so very important.

Because for starters, there is only one God -- and please excuse me here, but I’m going to take these out of Paul’s order for my own purposes. … And there is only one Lord, and there is only one Spirit. … Furthermore, there is only one baptism, one faith and one body. … And what comes last? … There is “one God and Father of all and through all and in all.”

And therein lies God’s plan. … And it involves each and everyone of us. Because we are the body. The ONE living and breathing body of the church here on earth. … The ONE living and breathing body of Christ and thus the ONE living and breathing body of the faith. … ONE. … One body. One baptism. One Faith. One Lord. One Spirit. And one God and Father of all and through all and in all.

And THAT is why God delivers us the gifts of humility and gentleness and patience and bearing one another in love, so that we can make EVERY effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

You see, these gifts aren’t given to us just so that we be nice to each other. … These gifts aren’t just about keeping us out of arguments or to an extreme scale keeping us out of war … for preventing genocides. … These gifts are part of God’s very plan for his one people, for his one world, for his one faith. ... We are given these gifts, and each of us different gifts, as Paul points out, so that we keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace as God intended when he first set humans on this earth.

But I want to be careful here because far too often this message gets contorted. There are far too many who want to take this message of oneness and use it for their own purposes. … But Paul addresses that too in today’s reading.

He reminds us that even though God’s goal in giving us these individual and unique gifts to build his body of the church, we are but immature children in our faith, and so it is, that we fail all too often to live out God’s plan. ... Far too often we take this message of oneness and we as Christians act as though the purity and sanctity and the future of our church depends upon minimizing its people’s differences until we all look and talk and think and act alike. … And thus we think we are achieving God’s goal through our misguided division … versus understanding what his actual message is to us.

Nowhere in Paul’s letter does it say that each of us needs to conform to the same thoughts, or the same beliefs or the same norms.

As a matter of fact, it actually exhorts the opposite. … Paul reminds us that our unmatchable God made each of us in our own glorious uniqueness because he loves us -- all of us -- and thus it is our obligation … no, our duty … to use those individual gifts given to each of us to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

And yet Paul understands our nature better than we do sometimes. … He reminds us that in a lot ways, despite however old we are, we are still just children in God’s eyes. … He reminds us that despite what God’s intentions for us are, we are but immature in our faith, and it is certain that none of us can come to maturity in our faith without Christ. … Because it is in living like Christ we walk the path God has destined for each of us, and why he gave us our gifts after all.

And because we are immature children in our faith, Paul reminds us that we must mature if we are to ever achieve God’s plan of one body, one faith … oneness in him.

“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” … Instead, we must speak the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, him who is Christ.

And then our whole body -- the whole church, the whole body of Christ --- will be joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly and promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

And those body parts are us. … You and I. … For our body of the church to work properly, each of us must be doing our jobs. Each of us must take the gifts that God has bestowed upon us -- we apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers ... each of us has been called to a vocation in God -- and we are to use those gifts and those vocations to achieve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

But nowhere does God, nor Christ, nor Paul tell us we have to be the same. … That we have to think the same. That we have to act the same. That we have to be clones of one another.

There is room in God’s plan for dissent and differences and uniqueness. … And with God’s allowance for difference, comes great responsibility. … We are not to use our differences as a club. … We are not to use our differences to create disharmony, discord or indifference to those who are not like us. … We are not to use our gifts to insist we all be the same.

As Christians, we know this: Christ died for us. … And, as Paul writes, when Christ died and ascended on high, he made captivity a captive itself, and in doing so he gave his gifts to his people. … In dying Christ gave us his earthly gifts, and in addition, Christ died to fill that great, big, gaping hole that separates all of us in our uniqueness. … He gave us his life so that we would have the one and only eternal bond that we need to pull us all back together. … One body. … One church. … One Lord.

So, on this glorious Sunday, won’t you join me?

Won’t you please join me in helping to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace?”

Because, you see, it’s not our differences. ... It’s not our disparate beliefs, nor diverging politics, nor competing theologies that separate us that is important .... No, what is important … what is imperative … what is vital … is that we remember that our own uniqueness is supposed to be used to create the oneness in Christ that is part of God’s plan. One. … One body. One baptism. One Faith. One Lord. One Spirit. And one God and Father of all and through all and in all.

And he gives all of us the singular gifts we need to help each other achieve that right and just plan here on earth.

And that is the Good News this Sunday. … Amen.