Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ 3^rd Sunday after Epiphany

461 Orange Ave., CA 94022 January 27, 2008

CALLED TO FOLLOW

1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23

The gospel begins with a beautiful, poetic vision Matthew quotes from Isaiah, Chapter 9:

Land of Zebulun (Nazareth), land of Naphtali (Capernaum),

on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,

Galilee of the Gentiles –

the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,

and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death

light has dawned.

This is the language of a great prophet who speaks to the universal yearning of all people, Jew and Gentile, to be drawn into the light of eternal truth and beauty and salvation. The word salvation has its roots in the concept of healing, salving the wounds, and drawing together the broken pieces of the world, of our lives, even our bodies into a whole – complete, healed, and happy, at peace with ourselves. Isn’t this what we all yearn for? For when we are broken the light is extinguished, but when we are whole the light shines forth.

Matthew adopts this image to introduce Jesus’ active ministry. From this exalted prophetic platform Jesus enters as an agent of healing (salvation) in a broken world. We know the gospel is going to take us further into the brokenness right up to the cross, and the epistle indicates it doesn’t appear to get any better with the growth of the church in the early years. Brokenness is our condition and healing is our calling.

In our epistle we hear the nagging, breaking voice of dissension in the Corinthian church that has been working overtime to put the light out. This passage is a good description of a large part of Christian history right up to our own volatile and divisive situation. The light came into the world, as John says, and we have been devising clever ways ever since to snuff it out. It is a miracle we are still here.

In our Epistle reading we hear the exasperated voice of Paul speaking to the Corinthians. I think we should feel some empathy with the Corinthians. They were a diverse, cosmopolitan mix of cultures, races, and religions – a seaport town on the isthmus linking the Peleoponnese to mainland Greece. It was simpler and safer to transport goods across the isthmus to waiting ships then to sail around the peninsula. Therefore, Corinth was a hub of commerce, rich and filled with every whim and wind of doctrine, big temples and every vice under the sun. Sounds like the way San Francisco and the Bay area is described in Kansas.

Paul worked with Prisca and Aquila, and husband and wife ministry team, for eighteen months founding the church there in the spring of 50 to late summer 51. Apparently, after he left, the Corinthians began dividing themselves into cliques, identifying with whomever they looked upon as their inspiration. Some held to the evangelical activism of Paul, while others leaned towards the more traditional Peter. There were charismatics and gnostics who claimed direct inspiration from the Christ-Spirit, while others found solace in the articulate, intelligent arguments of the African theologian from Alexandria, Apollos.

The Corinthians remind me of the church in America, today. We are divided into our theological encampments, stockpiled with our beliefs and traditions, defending ourselves against the pollution of bad theology. Some of us are traditionalists, and some of us are evangelical activists, and some of us are charismatics, and some of us desire an intelligent, logical faith that makes sense. There are conservative-fundamentalists and liberal-fundamentalist, agnostics and practical atheists, who all claim to be in the Christian tradition.

John Hagee, for example, anybody ever heard of him? I have heard of him, but I have spent no more than 10 minutes in my life thinking about him. There are many people who have, however. John Hagee is the pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. He is a proponent of Christian Zionism, a movement that focuses on the “end times” scenarios that involve “ingathering” all the world’s Jews in Israel against the backdrop of major international war. You may not have heard of him but he is enormously influential, claiming that 99 million households tune in to his weekly radio and television broadcasts.

Recently a British academic, writing a book on Christian Zionism, was incredulous that John Hagee is not on the radar screens of most mainline clergy because he view’s Hagee’s apocalyptic script as a major export from the U.S. to the rest of the world. Furthermore, he says it is what many Europeans now regard as American Christianity (Journal for Preachers, Lent 2008, p.54), and he has the statistics to back him up. In the 2002 Time/CNN poll it was reported that 59% of Americans say that they believe the events of Revelation are going to come true, that nearly one-quarter of Americans believed that the Bible predicted the September 11 attacks, and that 36% of those polled who support Israel “say they do so because they believe in biblical prophecies that Jews must control Israel before Christ will come again.” World War III is almost something to look forward to from their world view.

Are you beginning to quake in the pews? I am. No wonder I want to hunker down behind my “progressive walls,” and cry out, “Hey! We’re different.” There are a lot of people out there who believe this doomsday stuff and they affect public policy. John Hagee has consulted with Presidents, presidential candidates, and members of congress. Senator Joseph Lieberman, described him as an Ish Elokim, a man of God, invoking the same phrase the Torah uses for Moses.

We are a church broken in pieces. And it is not just the church out there, it is the church in here, as well. We may think we are all unified here at Foothills, but there are some of us who are traditionalists, who don’t want things to change, who grit there teeth when new ideas are proposed. “We’ve been just fine the way it is, why change it?” There are others who are “evangelical activists” who feel the moral imperative to do what is “right” – and so should you. There are the Spirit-born among us who want to be touched by the soft feather of God’s grace in the quiet of contemplation and are disturbed by hostility and discord. And there are the intellectuals here who yearn for the well-articulated argument, the clarifying, logic satisfying motion to end all debate. This is who we are, not unlike the church at Corinth.

Let’s think about this for a moment, this diversity of approach, as we prepare for our Annual Meeting. We are going to vote on a recommendation this evening to change our mission/vision statement that will articulate a policy we already practice. It reads:

"We are an Open and Affirming congregation, which means we provide a spiritual home that welcomes each individual as a beloved child of God.  We affirm the humanity of all people, welcoming, into the full life and ministry of the church, people of every ability, age, ethnicity, culture, economic status, gender, sexual orientation and religious belief."

We have discussed this idea of declaring ourselves an open and affirming church for years. We have looked at it from all four quadrants of thought. Over ten years of discussion has gone into this statement, and I believe we have reached consensus in this church. Consensus is not the same as total agreement. Consensus is a range of assent from “enough already” to “I can live with it” to “it’s about time.” This statement may not be perfect but it is a further articulation of the phrase we have come to know and love: Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.

There is another famous phrase from our past that works here: In essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity, and in all things charity.

Our consensus is built around our history of being a church that reinterprets its tradition in a new historical situation while holding firm to the essential, eternal truth, that God is. And further, that God is love, love that is not affection, but commitment to the spiritual well-being of all people. We are unified in the essential declaration: God is unconditional love. This love is made known in the person and ministry of Jesus, born in the land of Zebulun and who began to teach in the land of Naphtali. We are called to follow in his way, empowered by the gift of the Spirit. This is the essential truth in which we have unity.

How we do this in the church and in the world is where we get into trouble, because we are often snuffing out the light of others rather than reflecting God’s light. Like it or not, there will always be politics. How do we survive, I don’t know? The existence of the church must be evidence of the miracles of God.

This evening, no matter how the vote turns out, let us be unified in the essentials, proud of our diversity of opinions, and charitable to all.

Last week we heard Jesus say “Come and see.” This week we hear him say, “Follow me.” Just think about who Jesus asks to follow him. Jesus chooses this rag-tag group of disciples, fishermen, accountants, Pharisees, educated and illiterate, poor and rich alike - and if you read the whole story - men and women who are the model for our discipleship today. They didn’t all agree with each other. They didn’t all agree with Jesus. They weren’t all self-sacrificing, at least one was a scoundrel and another was a coward. Still, through their witness and our practice the miracle of the church happens whenever our wills spill into the will of God – and we come and see that the kin-dom of God is at hand.