Becoming the People of God Part One: Creation

Becoming the People of God 1: Creation

October 16, 2011

1 Thessalonians 1:1-9

J.W. McNeill

Today and the next four Sundays we will be examining five contrasting statements. One each week. Trying to understand how these pairs of statements differ will help us be clearer about the nature of God, who God has created us to become, and what difference that is to make in our lives. These will be simply provocative sketches, not full answers. I hope that you will give further thought to the topics we will consider and I invite you to ask questions and probe further as the weeks go on.

           

Why this is important: I am aware that there are those of you who particularly appreciate sermons that are more theological and philosophical. I also know that there are those of you who sometimes feel that some of these theological sermons are difficult to understand. You might even feel like they go over your head. But think of it this way. If you are an infielder on a baseball team and the ball is hit toward you and it’s going over your head, your job is not to watch it sail into the outfield. Your job is to reach up and try to catch it. You might not catch every one, but if you try, you are likely to catch some. So I invite you to reach up this morning instead of giving up. We’re all supposed to be working at this here.

The danger is this: if we do not make an effort to understand what we believe, our minds, our thoughts, our beliefs will be shaped for us by the loudest voices that surround us. It is clearly true that the loudest voices around us are not coming to us with messages of the love of Jesus Christ.

If we do not intentionally try to understand who God is and how God is calling us, we will either head off in a direction away from God – or simply wander around in a fog of confusion being drawn this way and that by whatever calls loudest to us on any particular day. The people of God are NOT to wander around in a fog. We don’t have to. We can exercise our minds and understand. Theology is simply faith seeking understanding.

One of the reasons that nearly every week we say together an affirmation of faith is to help keep ourselves clearer and by repetition to ingrain some basic truths about God and about ourselves so that we have some confidence that we are keeping the story straight.

Creeds/Affirmations of Faith do not attempt to try to give us a complete set of teachings. Instead they lay out some basic propositions which form a set of beliefs that have wide agreement. One of the interesting things about creeds in the history of the Christian tradition is that they tend to be written against particular false beliefs that the church wants to take special care to guard against.

One of the ways to understand more deeply what a creed is trying to say is to examine what it was written to guard against.

If you have been coming to Fairport UMC for some time, you know that we usually use the Affirmation of Faith which was written for the United Church of Canada in the mid 1960s. We began using it more regularly after a very intentional group process some years ago that revealed that it spoke to many of us at a deep level.

Over the next few weeks we will be looking at it more closely and see how it contrasts with an alternative set of beliefs that have come to be known as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).  Some of you might remember that I referred to this set of beliefs in a message last spring.

To review: MTD had five precepts:

• A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.

• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

• The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.

• God is not involved in my life except when I need God to solve a problem.

• Good people go to heaven when they die.

We will take each of these in turn, starting with the first one this morning.

Just a note on where these come from. A couple of sociologists of religion did a nationwide study of the faith of adolescents. After thousands of surveys and 250 in depth interviews, the researchers were able to piece together that the youth they interviewed had a fairly consistent theology that stretched across Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and other faith traditions. They also determined that they got this theology from their churches and their parents. The problem for the Church is that this theology is decidedly NOT Christian.

This will become clearer as we contrast it with our affirmation of faith.

One more thing and then we will get into the meat of this. Our Scripture texts for this series will be the assigned Sunday readings from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. Scholars believe that this letter is the earliest piece of writing in what we now know as the New Testament. Each week’s theme will be tied to our reading from this letter of St. Paul. Lispers beware.

St. Paul writes to the congregation in Thessalonika and opens with a very robust expression of gratitude and appreciation of them. He writes:  you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Notice this: they became imitators of the Lord (Jesus) in joy despite persecution. How were they able to do that? How were they able to become people of God with enthusiasm and joy despite the threat of persecution? Because they were clear about who they were to be and what they were to do and they intentionally set about doing despite the fact that it would have been easy to be something else. It was not convenient. It was not easy. It was not what was going on in the culture around them, but it was who they had been called to be. They set their minds and hearts on becoming the people of God and so became the bearers of a message of hope in a world that needed hope. Messengers of peace in a world of violence, messengers of justice in a world of oppression.

Now we might not face persecution, but we are called to have that same kind of clarity and dedication to live with joy and enthusiasm the life to which Christ has called us. To imitate Christ – to be as Christ to one another and the world.

On what basis can we do that? The answer is that at least one element is clarity about who we are.

Who are we imitating?  Who do we want to be? What do we want to be when we grow up? A clear intentionality is needed.

First Premise of MTD

• A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.

True in some sense. One can imagine a statement that is less true. For example:

           

I don’t want to be hard on atheists, but this MTD statement carries us a long way from atheism. Compared to this statement of atheism, MTD sounds reasonable.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism does acknowledge a God who created and orders and got things going. But “watches over?” That indicates an element of distance. According to MTD, God is not too involved in life on earth. (This is the Deism part.) Not too big a role for God.

But it also has an implication from our side of things:  God does not need to have too big a role in our lives. Safe and respectful distance. “OK God, if you don’t get too close to me, I won’t get too close to you. Deal?”  Background God. Stepped back. Maybe once was involved. Creation, Biblical days, long ago. But not much now. We’ve taken over. Technology.

So now let’s contrast this with what our affirmation of faith says:

We believe in God – WE believe this. Others may not. [More on this later. Do we have to coerce or force of manipulate others to believe this?? NO!]

This statement of affirmation orients us to the world, orients our lives, gives us a particular reference point to how we approach the world. It’s all a miracle. It’s all a wonder of God. The psalmist says it so well as we read a couple of Sundays ago here: The heavens are telling the glory of God.

And notice: Not a God. But the God – the God of whom the Bible speaks. The God who Of Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Miriam and Moses. The God who calls forth a people to be a sign and a witness to that God’s steadfast love and mercy. A testimony to that God’s commitment to lifting up the oppressed. Not a God. The God.

Our affirmation goes on to say that God HAS created and IS Creating – all existence depends in each moment on God. God is continually bringing the universe into existence. There is simply no existence apart from God. God’s being undergirds ALL being. All of creation can be thought of as being suspended from God’s being. If God were to let go, all would be nothing.

Our affirmation goes on to say that this creator God has come in Jesus – Not at a distance, but come to us as one of us. Mystery how this happened – simply means there is no physics explanation for it that we are aware of – but we affirm that is what happened. We cannot view God as apart from us. God has had a part of us.

And that God who has come among us, gotten close to us, is the Word made flesh: became an articulate message among us to reveal not just God’s love for us, but also the way we are to live with each other so that God’s way might become real – the Kingdom (kindom) God’s way for us to take root and grow – as it did among the Christians of Thessalonika.

That is, in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, God’s purpose was to

reconcile and make new: Transformation of us and our relationships.

Not to judge and condemn us, but to renew us into a different way of life based on justice, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

And this way of life preserves us, as Paul says, from wrath: that is, from violence, condemnation, and death. Imitating Jesus – the Message, Sign, Word of God made flesh forms us into God’s people.

           

God is not at a distance. God is continually, always and everywhere creating and refreshing not only the world around us, but us. Refreshed to be God’s people, student followers of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Imagine that!

More next week. Stay tuned!