From Passion to Compassion: Our Communion with God's World (Passionate 1 of 2)

October 2, 2011 – World Communion Sunday
Bethesda Presbyterian Church

Scriptures    Isaiah 58:5-9    Matthew 28:16-20

“From Passion to Compassion:
Our Communion with God’s World”

The Three Ps of Our Church’s Identity
“Passionate: Our Worship” (Part 1 of 2)

As a congregation, we have waded into three streams that seem to convey well our identity as a church to the world around us. These streams are: Personal, Passionate, Progressive.

Three streams. How did we wade into these streams, to begin with?

Two years ago, our Session then (our church board) studied a celebrated book called Christianity for the Rest of Us: Transforming the Neighborhood Church by Diana Butler Bass. I have since urged new Session members to read that book, as well. In that book, Bass identifies eleven “Signposts for (Church) Renewal”.

Our goal from studying Christianity for the Rest of Us: To identify and intentionally make plain to the congregation and to our community three or four of those signposts for renewal already writ large here. We would then paint and plant those signs to say to all who come here and would come here the following: While we’re an all-inclusive church who welcomes all and turns away none, here’s what identifies us in terms of our particular spiritual gifts. Here’s what makes us uniquely Bethesda Presbyterian Church.

And so the Session chose these four already-present Signposts: Hospitality … Worship … Diversity … Discernment.

Four spiritual gifts already among us that would soon form and shape into three streams. Three streams, of our congregational identity. Utilizing the fourth signpost – discernment – framed to the world we seek to reach our hospitality as Personal … our worship as Passionate … and our diversity as Progressive. Personal – Passionate – Progressive. Words writ large across the face of our bulletin each Sunday as well as the top of our website home page – made plain, as the prophet Habakkuk writes today, that a runner might read them.

Such is the backdrop of our current six-Sunday series: Personal, Passionate, Progressive. Two Sundays on each.

The last two Sundays, we focused on the Personal: naming and supporting and enhancing and challenging ourselves to cultivate our biblical gift of Hospitality.

Two weeks ago, we discovered how we encounter new spiritual birth among ourselves simply by practicing Hospitality – as Abraham and Sarah did to three strangers by the oaks of Mamre – even and sometimes especially when we do not expect, or even pray for, such a new birth to take place, such as Del Ray. How just by being hospitable – i.e., by practicing the gift of receiving the new among us – God makes all things new to us. How discovering, like old Sarah of old, when her child expected was announced: Oh, yes: We can laugh!

And last Sunday, we discovered how God’s hospitality is made known to all of us as a template for ours. How that hospitality was made startlingly clear and radically fresh by a father who runs to welcome his prodigal home. Not walks … Not wanders … Not saunters … not sashays … but runs, to welcome us back into the very bosom of life’s grace. For those who happen among us – even, among our own – from the dirty linoleum floors of their lives: Might we do the same?

Might we be as passionate as God about demonstrating our hospitality? Which leads us to this moment we’ve all been waiting for, dear Presbyterians – Presbyterian, if not by membership, or even by heritage, then certainly by association. We who often self-identify, tongue leaning to cheek but not firmly planted there, as decent-and-in-order, and as God’s frozen chosen. Today we encounter that second P: Passionate.

(Long pause.)

Feel the passion?

We feel it in worship among these robed wonders – more on this next Sunday. I feel it at times from this very pulpit.

And then there’s the passion of commemorating Jesus’ Passion: Communion. When I see your faces – the vulnerable traces of our lives. Laid bare, before the grace of God’s love.

And when we all come to at least glimpse, around this very table, a sense of God’s Communion among us. And on this – the World Communion Sunday – we come to glimpse our Communion with God’s world. With all creatures … great, and small. Will all fauna – and flora, besides.

Communion with the world that reminds us of – nay, confronts us with – our Great Commission. Where Matthew’s Jesus says to us, very intentionally in the original Greek text: “I – With You – Am.” The holy name revealed at the burning bush – “I Am Who I Am” – now being interposed – impregnated, if you will – by the two most powerful words of eternal Communion there could ever be: “With You”. We are now surrounded! God’s presence is now the holy’s middle name!

“I – With You – Am,” the resurrected Jesus has said. Adding –for eternal emphasis” – the words “always – even unto and into the valley of the shadow: the end of the age.”

Go out into the world, Jesus cries to his disciples here. God’s “With You” presence has been stamped now behind your eyeballs and engraved on your frontlets. Go out! If that’s not the gospel of World Communion – then, what is?

What is?

Going out into the world – to proclaim that God’s Presence surrounds us all – and at all times. That’s Passionate.

And that – really – is what our worship in this safe place, this sanctuary, is all about. Not just to enjoy worship while we are here. But also and especially to live in awe of God’s “I-With You-Am” presence out there.

Which is the true meaning – the true purpose – of Worship, according to the prophet Isaiah. The one who writes – and we can substitute the word worship for fast here:

Is such the fast that I choose:
a day to humble oneself? …

(Or) is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rearguard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

This, my friends, is what it means o be Passionate: To be worshipful of our God in a way that God’s presence – the “I-With You-Am” – is reflected to the world entire through our ministries of justice and mercy. Including our very Presbyterian calling to carry that justice and mercy beyond our congregational ministries and into the civic arena. Unless, as the social satirist Stephen Colbert puts it, one of two things would happen: “Either we … pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we … acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”

God’s Communion – God’s passionate presence in the world – is our Communion shared with God. Not just for God, or even from God. But Communion with God. The “I-With You-Am.” Our compassionate and justice-seeking presence alongside our Creator.

So let us now be passionately worshipful around this table of a God who requires not our sacrifices here, but our justice and our mercy.

Here. And especially out there.