Global

Pentecost 17A, 10/5/14
Philippians 3:4b-14
Global Church Sunday

Lord, help us to treat you and your messengers with respect and love. Make us the cornerstone of your church and help us to bear fruit in your name. Amen.

Christians in every hemisphere, continent, and time zone today are gathering together for worship. This is World Communion Sunday. It is a day to honor the things we share with other Christian denominations – Scripture, Baptism, and Communion. Today we are also experiencing music from churches around the world.

This day isn’t about denying the cultural and theological differences among us, but about recognizing that there is at least one thing that ties us all together as Christians: our faith in Jesus Christ. The namesake of our religion is the only reason that any of our congregations and denominations exist in the first place.

So Global Church Sunday, as we celebrate it in this congregation, is a day to remind ourselves that the church is not about us. It is about Jesus. It is so much bigger than our building and our members.

Church    is about faithfully living as disciples of Jesus.

And people can do this – people have been doing this – in countries and cultures around the world for the past two thousand years.

Today we take a moment to recognize God’s presence and activity in places outside our own doors.

Sometimes when we get too familiar with something, it can start to seem old or boring. Getting outside of our comfort zone can bring us excitement and inspire new ideas to bring back to our everyday lives.    Welcoming people from other cultures is one way to help us see our world in new ways.

Many of you met Eva, who was with us for about a week in July. Eva is a social work student from Slovakia. She was spending time in our town as part of a global exchange program through the ELCA.

The Sunday that Eva worshipped with us, she helped me serve Communion. This was something she had never experienced before – only the pastor serves Communion in her home church. The idea that anyone who receives Communion is eligible to serve    was totally foreign to her.

It’s something we take for granted – and truly, something we appreciate, when many of you step up as volunteers to help serve – so hearing about Eva’s experience of serving Communion in our congregation was moving.

Being among us, in a culture outside of her own comfort zone, Eva was able to experience God in a new way.

We have at least as much to learn as Eva does.

Have you ever been to worship with people who spoke a language that you did not know?

A colleague of mine tells a story of his year volunteering with the church in Africa. He was invited to prayer meetings once a week, and he went because he was expected to go, but he wasn’t really sure what his role was supposed to be. He didn’t understand what people were saying, and didn’t see how he could participate in these gatherings. Eventually, he started to let his mind wander while he was at these meetings every week.

After several months, he had a better grasp on the language, so one night he actually paid attention to the words that were being prayed.

He was shocked to discover that once a week, from the time he arrived, the community had been gathering to pray for him, and his ministry among them.

Just because you don’t understand the words that are being said, doesn’t mean that God isn’t acting through them on your behalf.

Have any of you ever prayed with a congregation or in a building that is older than our country – or older even than our denomination?

The oldest Christian communities in the world are in Palestine, and the oldest remains of Christian church buildings in the world are in Syria and Jordan. These ancient churches weren’t planted by some European missionary in the age of colonialism, these communities were started by Jesus’ original disciples.

They were around even before the New Testament was compiled or the Nicene Creed written.

But you don’t have to travel to the Middle East to find ancient Christian churches.

I once visited the York Minster in northern England. It’s the largest cathedral in Britain, and boasts the biggest medieval stained glass window in the world. Construction on this cathedral started    about 200 years before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation.

Imagine the wealth of knowledge    and the depth of tradition    held by these communities in Jordan, Syria, and Palestine.    Think of what we can learn by studying the artwork and the stained glass of ancient cathedrals. What kinds of things might we learn from these places and communities about spirituality and discipleship?

I could go on all morning. There is so much to learn by stepping out of our comfort zone. God can speak to us through the traditions and cultures and even the languages of other people.

If you are ever presented the opportunity of going on an international mission trip, I hope you take it. Your faith will be deepened by what you experience among God’s people somewhere else in the world.

But I don't have the money to send each of you to a church in some other country for worship this morning, so we’re attempting to bring some of those traditions to you.

That’s why we’ve got songs from all over the world in worship today, some old and some new. That’s why we dedicated an entire service to doing things that are a little bit different from what we do on a normal Sunday here in our community.

When I was studying at Luther Seminary, I heard a comment from a student who was about to graduate – who was about to be ordained – about how he believed it wasn’t important, at all, to learn about traditions of Christians around the world. He was just going to be called to serve a small parish in the rural Midwest, full of people of Scandinavian descent, he said. None of that multicultural stuff mattered to him or to them.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

What matters    is Christ.

And none of us has a monopoly on understanding Christ, or knowing when and where God shows up.

That is why connecting with the global church is important.

Everything that we can use to identify ourselves – our family name, our parents, our children, our professional achievements, our reputation in the community, our ethnic heritage and our nationality – none of these matter at all.

Compared with knowing Christ, none of these other things, none of these measures of our identity in the world, carry any kind of importance.

Rural Midwestern Scandinavian Lutheran – none of those adjectives have meaning when compared with the name Christian.

“Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Paul summarizes the essence of Christian identity in today’s passage from his letter to the church in Philippi.

“For Christ’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

and be found in him. Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul had enviable social status in the Jewish community in the first century.

He was the guy that everyone wanted to be.

But none of it mattered.

As a Christian, Paul knew that those earthly measures weren’t going to gain him salvation.

All that matters, at the end of the day, is growing in faith,    growing closer to God.

A few years ago, there was a popular series of t-shirts and key chains and stickers and whatnot. They said things like “Football is Life. The rest is just details.”

Do you remember that fad? Maybe you still own one of those shirts… ?

Well anyway, that’s actually a pretty accurate description of Christianity.

         Jesus is Life. The rest is just details.

We can learn from Paul, and from Christians around the world, about many ways of practicing our faith. What’s most important is that we prioritize Christ above any other identity that we think is important. Jesus is bigger than our local congregation, bigger than Norwegian American Lutherans, bigger than the ELCA, bigger than we could ever understand.

Other cultures might have deeper ways of praying, more meaningful ways of worshipping, bolder ways of living as a disciple. Christians around the world can teach us about following Jesus and can help us grow in faith.

Contrary to what that seminary student said, Global Church Sunday matters, because Christ matters.

         Christians can only grow in faith when that faith is practiced in community.

And Christians can grow more deeply in faith when those communities are connected to one another, bridging the barriers of distance and language and denominational affiliation.

In Christ, may we all be one.

Amen.