St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
Psalm 24, Matthew 5: 14-16, Bishop Elaine J. W. Stanovsky, October 4, 2008
10 Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. (Selah)
SUNG RESPONSE: There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday. A day when we look around the world and embrace the wideness of God’s mercy, and of the Christian family we are part of. We think of Christians struggling to preserve social structure in communities where war and AIDS have lowered life expectancy into the 30s. Where grandparents are raising grandchildren as a matter of course because the parents’ generation has been wiped out. Where villages and orphanages have taken on the task of parenting children who have no parents. God gives us these courageous ones as brothers and sisters.
We celebrate today Iraqi Christians, whose numbers have diminished from about a million before the first Gulf War to perhaps 800,000 today. Since the US occupation, attacks on Christians in Iraq have increased dramatically, leading many to leave the nation.
We celebrate the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska that traveled as a frontier movement east across the vast expanses of Russia, and crossed the narrow seas to Alaska before Statehood.
We celebrate United Methodists in the Philippines, where the church is growing and spreading to other parts of the world. We celebrate Samahan UMC in Surrey, British Columbia, an immigrant Filipino congregation started with the blessing of the United Church of Canada, the first United Methodist Church in Canada since the mainline protestant churches united in 1925
We celebrate the emergent church in China, where small underground Christian communities survived decades of persecution under the Maoist government, and now are flourishing despite restrictions on worship and evangelism.
We celebrate tenacious Christian disciples in declining communities in Montana and the Dakotas, in rural communities across America, who take on a personal commitment to keep the faith alive in their communities.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
We celebrate the Church of Jesus Christ, in its worldwide variety of expression. Ethiopian Orthodox celebrating with brocade and fringed umbrellas. Russian Orthodox serving communion wine in silver spoons. Pacific Islander Christians spreading tapa clothes pounded out of tree bark and painted in traditional designs. Celtic Christians walking a spiral to reach the Christ candle.
Jesus Christ has captured the hearts and the lives of people for many years. These have carried the gospel around the world. They preserve the gospel under conditions of hatred and persecution. They offer the gospel in circumstances of poverty and calamity. They teach the love of Jesus Christ to the young and the aged. They bless people in every circumstance of life, from birth to death, and to moments of joy and despair all along the way.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
We celebrate Christians who carry the gospel love of Jesus Christ into hospitals and battlefields, into prisons and half way houses, into work places and under freeway overpasses. We celebrate Christians who believe that enemies are the same as neighbors, and who seek out people wherever they live, to embrace and invite them into Christian community.
And as the Christian movement has grown and spread, Christian people have entered into relationship with people of every other faith tradition. Sometimes these encounters have been suspicious and even tragic. But sometimes people of different faith traditions have found in one another kindred spirits, and have joined hands in charity and love and creation and creator.
We are part of this movement. Our faith, though weak, is part of a worldwide movement. On this day, of all days, we celebrate the breadth and the strength of this movement, and hopefully we each gain a little courage for our part in God’s great plan to bring the whole creation into harmony and plenty.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
Today, I want to broaden the focus even a bit more on this World Communion Sunday. The Bible says that the Earth is the Lord’s. Not just all the peoples of the earth – but the EARTH is the Lord’s, the world and all who live in it.
What about the earth? Christians are re-learning our responsibility for loving the earth, as well as its people. We are learning to use the church china again instead of paper or Styrofoam plates and cups. We are learning to check to see if products are harvested by sustainable means. We are learning to check our own use of fossil fuels. In my new role as a bishop in the church, I am required to fly a good deal. And it bothers me. But I have begun to make adjustments to the way I fly. If I am coming to Montana from Denver, like this week, we scheduled a whole week of meetings and appointments and events, to make the most of cost to the ozone of my trip. And last week, when I had three days between a meeting in Atlanta and a meeting in Nashville, I just settled into a hotel and worked from there by phone and internet, rather than fly home to Denver between the meetings. I’ve even begun to be grateful that the planes are full, realizing that the fuller the planes, the fewer flights needed, the less fuel burned.
I do have a growing – or perhaps it is a renewing – sense of stewardship for the earth. I want to live in partnership with God’s good creation, not to deplete it, but to love it and care for it and tend it.
I want to honor every creature that we say was rescued from the flood in Noah’s Ark. I want to live in a way that makes it possible for all the creatures of the earth to thrive, and for the planet to be a haven of hope and a place of peace.
Here’s the message of the morning. Take this home with you. You are a citizen of heaven. And as a citizen of heaven, you have power to save the world. By your Christian baptism – or if you have not been baptized, but you participate in the church, then by your participation in the family of faith – you are a citizen of the Kingdom – or the Kin-dom – of God. And this citizenship comes with some rights and responsibilities. Just as a citizen in the city of Helena is expected to live in a way that preserves the common good, protects the security of your neighbors, and preserves the peace. So, a citizen of the City of God, the Kin-dom of God, is expected to live for in a way that preserves the common good, protects the security of all your neighbors and preserves the peace. This is a big assignment. Because, while the City of Helena is pretty easy to define. You know where it starts and where it stops, and who is in it. The City of God is vast, includes everyone, and encompasses the whole of creation. When we sing “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” that’s the city of God.
It’s easy to feel lost in the City of God. To feel insignificant in the whole sweep of creation, in the presence of the power and might of God. But this is not how God thinks of you, of me, of any of us, of all of us together. God thinks of us as significant players in the destiny of the world.
Matthew 5:14-16
14 "You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. |
You. Your life. Your faith. Your sharing. Your witness. They are the light of God’s grace in the world. Your life matters. How you think of yourself. How you treat your body. How you treat others. How you treat the earth. Whether you recycle. Whether you pray each morning. Whether you vote – and you MUST VOTE. You must do what you can to influence the governance and the future of our nation and the world through these elections. Whether you come to church on a Sunday. If you visit your mother. If you forgive your brother. Whether you use plastic grocery bags or re-usable grocery bags. How you regard people whose lives you don’t approve of. Whether you visit people in prison. Whether you share you toys, or lash out in anger.
All that stuff. All that stuff we do every day, each decision, each action, each word, it matters. I don’t tell you this to heap guilt upon you for all the many little failures we each experience every day in living the way we should. I tell you so that we will all straighten our backs, take ourselves as seriously as God takes us, and renew our commitment to living lives worthy of the love and possibility God has poured into us. Your life matters. God has entrusted the people in our life, the neighbors around us, the living creatures around us, and the very health of the planet earth to our care. And it matters how we treat it all.
Live with care and intention. Reflect on your life. Pray for strength and guidance to live well. And when you fail, as you will, as we all do, daily, ask God to forgive you, receive God’s forgiveness, and go at it again.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.
I want to close with a story of a disciple. Her name is Mujinga Kainda. She lives in Southern Congo. I met her in 2004 at the General Conference of our church in Pittsburgh.
The Pacific Northwest Conference has a tradition of hosting a dinner one night during the two-week conference to honor our bishop, former bishops and bishops elected from among us. Since we were in partnership with the Southern Congo Annual Conference, we decided to also host the bishop of Southern Congo, Bishop Ktembo and his delegation. I sat at a table with Mujinga Kainda. She speaks French, we spoke English. With minimal language skills we carried on a conversation. She said she was an Evangelist. I asked what her evangelistic work was. She said that she travels to several villages, even though she has her own children at home. She travels on a bicycle. I asked what she does when she comes to a village. She paused. Then she said that in one village she met a woman with two children, whose husband had died. She had no way to support her family, so she became friends with a married man who helped her support her family. When she became pregnant by him, he turned away from her. There she was: she had two children, was pregnant and had no means of support. She was also having difficult with the pregnancy. Mujinga told us that she put the woman on the bicycle and carried her the clinic, many miles away. She taught the woman to do some hand sewing that she could sell in the market to support her family. And she told her that God loves her and never leaves her alone.
Now, that’s evangelism.
And then she said to us, “She could use a sewing machine.”
So, before we left Pittsburgh, our delegation had collected enough money or Mujinga to buy this woman a sewing machine. And then, some months later, I received this dress, a gift from the woman, sewed on her new machine. It is a sign for me of the church that has left the building.
Mujinga was a disciple of Jesus Christ. In her work, she met a person with needs, and she brought what she had, what she could to relieve the woman’s suffering. But she also invited the woman into relationship – into a relationship that had the power to lift her out of poverty, out of desperation, out of abusive relationship, into self-sufficiency and hope. And she invited me into relationship with a woman I would never have known about if it weren’t for her. Together we became church, we followed Jesus into ministry and the world was changed.
I love being church with you, and with Mujinga, and the woman with the sewing machine, and with all our brothers and sisters around the world, working, day by day to live as citizens in God’s Kin-dom. To love and tend and heal one another and the world.
God guide us on this way.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. 
