Philippians 1:5
Hebrews 2:14 1 Corinthians 1:9 2 Corinthians 8:23
The five year old beavers must surely outnumber all other groups in the Boy Scout Organization, even outnumber all other groups taken together. The beavers are the little fellows who tell us they belong to their beaver colony. They wear the brown hats edged in blue with a beaver tail hanging down the back.
I am sobered every time I hear the beavers reaffirm their promise and motto. Their promise is, “I promise to love God and help take care of the world”. Imagine: only five years old, and already taking care of the world. Their motto is simple: “Sharing, sharing, sharing.” Here is something every beaver can do: share, share in the life of the colony, share with others, share out the knowledge and skill gained in the colony, just share, always sharing, sharing, sharing.
Sharing is a most important biblical notion as well. There is a group of New Testament words that has to do with sharing. The noun-form is usually translated “fellow” (e.g., fellowship, fellow-worker, fellow-prisoner, etc.); the verb-form is usually translated by “share” (e.g., to share in something, have a share in something, give a share in something, etc.) The person who does all of this we could speak of, in fractured English, as a “sharer-in-er”
Today, on “Presbyterians Sharing” Sunday, we are going to look at this word group that we might be nourished, like the five year old beavers in their colony, for our life and work in the household and family of God.
I: — The book of Hebrews reminds us that we “share flesh and blood”. We are all creatures, not deities; we are earth-beings of flesh, not gods of pure spirit. We share a finite human nature; we share fragility, vulnerability to fragmentation. In the words of the psalmist, we are frail creatures of dust. We are mortal.
Be sure to underline the last word, “mortal”. We are fellow-mortals. We are all subject to death. Death, however is not a bizarre twist, a sudden reversal that appears out of nowhere at the end of life. Death is not the jarring conclusion of a life that has unfolded death-free. On the contrary, what we call “death” is simply the final work of the power of death, which power has been at work in everyone’s life at all times.
Because the power of death is operative in the world at all times and in our individual lives as well, there is always a brokenness about us; there is always something fractured about us, somewhere. And since fractures hurt, all of us are always hurting somewhere.
Not everyone admits this. Some people boast of “having it all together”. Many others know they don’t “have it all together”, and therefore try extra hard to seem to “have it all together”.
You must have noticed that everyone else’s job seems easy. (And of course the better a job is done, the easier the job seems to an outsider.) Everyone else’s life seems easy (at least easier than ours); everyone else seems to be so much more free of complications and contradictions and anguish. We are left lamenting or fuming, “Why don’t I have it all together?”
Either we own that we “share flesh and blood” or we deny it. If we deny it unconsciously then we are unconsciously driven in such a way that sooner or later we collapse. If we deny it consciously then we consciously drive ourselves to “get it all together” or appear to, with the result that we render ourselves compulsive or artificial.
Why don’t we avoid all this and own one truth about us: we share flesh and blood? We are ordinary folk, as ordinary as everyone else. However distinguished we may be in terms of social standing, intellectual ability, or vocational achievement; however distinguished we may be, we never transcend our sharing in flesh and blood. We are finite, fragile creatures, already fractured here and there, already in a measure of pain, already riddled by the power of death on its way to a conquest that no one can deny in any case. We are ordinary folk in a world of ordinary folk. Why don’t we simply admit this?
In a Christmas sermon several years ago I spoke of the Incarnation as an affirmation of ordinariness, a God-ordained ordinariness that we should be pleased to own for ourselves: after all, what’s good enough for our Lord should be good enough for us. At the door of the church following the sermon a woman looked at me with disdain and disappointment in equal measure as she remarked, “Shepherd, I never thought I’d see the day when you defended mediocrity.”
I hadn’t defended mediocrity; I never shall, for mediocrity is sin. Ordinariness, however, is entirely different. To own our ordinariness is to admit without dissembling that we all share flesh and blood. There is no one who “has it made”, no one who knows no brokenness, no one who isn’t in pain, no one in whom death isn’t operative right now. All of us are suffering more than we are letting on.
II: — Yet as Christians we share ever so much more than flesh and blood. In the second place we share in the life of our risen Lord. Paul exclaims, “God has called us into fellowship with his Son”. To say we are called into fellowship with Jesus Christ is to say we are the beneficiaries of his victory now and shall be eternally. Our sharing in the victorious life of our Lord is the warrant, the only genuine reason, for everything we do in church life.
We keep the organ tuned. Because we are aesthetically sophisticated and an out-of-tune organ would grate on our musical sensitivities? We keep our organ tuned for one reason: an off-key musical instrument impedes us in our praising God for giving himself to us in his Son. God has called us into fellowship with his Son. We have responded to God’s call, and we want to move closer to that Son who is our elder brother. We want no impediment to our praise of God week-by-week. This alone is why we keep the organ tuned and pay the hydro bills.
As long as we own our shared fellowship with Jesus Christ as the foundation of our congregation; as long as this is the core, the focus, the goal, the glue of our life together; as long as this is the motivation and the dynamic of our life together, we can cheerfully welcome all sorts of diversities and differences in congregational and denominational life.
We modern Christians assume that while there is much diversity in congregational life today (not to mention the proliferation of denominations throughout Christendom), things were simpler in the earliest days of the church when individuals and congregations and groups of congregations were carbon copies of each other.
Not so. Individuals like Paul and Peter were not carbon copies of each other. On one occasion at least Paul said of Peter, “He’s dead wrong and I told him so to his face.” The congregation in Philippi and the congregation in Corinth were not carbon copies of each other; they differed enormously.
In the earliest days of the church there were three major groupings of Christians: Palestinian Jewish Christians, Greek Jewish Christians, Greek Gentile Christians.
The Palestinian Jewish Christians lived in Jerusalem and surroundings. Certainly they acknowledged Jesus to be Saviour and Lord (else they wouldn’t have been Christians at all). At the same time they continued to observe Torah in all its details. They even took their lamb or dove to the temple at Passover and placed their hand on it in identification with it as the temple priest sacrificed it. They felt that any Gentile who became a Christian ought to be circumcised and observe Torah. After all, since Jesus was a Jew, shouldn’t all his followers be or become Jews as a condition of becoming a Christian? James was a Palestinian Jewish Christian.
Greek Jewish Christians were Christians of Jewish parentage who lived outside Palestine in the wider world. They lived in Rome , Philippi, Ephesus , even North Africa . Christians though they were, they were also determined to remain Jews — at the same time as they never felt that Gentiles had to become Jews in order to become Christians. They tended to be more affluent, more exposed to the wider world than their Jewish Christian cousins in Palestine . They tended to be merchants and traders and artisans rather than peasants and fisherfolk like the Jewish Christians in Palestine . Paul was a Greek Jewish Christian.
Greek Gentile Christians (people like you and me) were just that: Gentiles with no Jewish background at all, folk who lived anywhere except in Palestine . They didn’t know a yarmulke from a yo-yo. But they knew enough to know that they weren’t going to be circumcised and didn’t want to observe every last jot and tittle of Torah. Why shouldn’t a Gentile Christian eat bacon? Why not ham and eggs and milk and lobster, all at the same meal and all off the same plate? Gentile Christians, however, seemed to have enormous difficulty staying on the rails morally. They had to be reminded constantly that while they didn’t have to observe every last item in the Torah they were committed to obeying Jesus Christ. Eating lobster didn’t excuse them from the Ten Commandments. The fact that their wine didn’t have to be kosher never meant that they could drink any quantity of wine at all. Titus was a Greek Gentile Christian.
What is the point of this lengthy history lesson? All three groups, however different, knew they had been called into fellowship with Jesus Christ. All three shared equally in the life of the risen Son of God.
Yes, there were enormous differences among them. Nonetheless, when the poorest of them, the Palestinian Jewish Christians in Jerusalem , were faced with famine, the others, better-off financially, made enormous financial sacrifice to help the poorest.
A worldly-wise, affluent Gentile Christian living in the capital of the Empire ( Rome ) was as much removed in every respect from a Palestinian Jewish Christian as we today are removed ethnically, educationally, culturally from black Seventh Day Adventist Christians living in sub-Sahara Africa . Still, at the end of the day we all know that we share two huge commonalities: a vulnerability to suffering, and the invitation to live in the company of Jesus Christ.
III: — Yet we share even more. Paul thanks the Christians in Philippi for their “partnership in the gospel”. He looks upon the congregation as a symphony orchestra. He never thinks of himself as the star soloist, everyone else in the congregation merely a spectator. Everyone has a part. In some sense the apostles are the first violins of the orchestra; still, no orchestra consists of first violins only. Music is made only as everyone shares in the effort of music-making. An orchestra that doesn’t have piccolos and bassoons and triangles doesn’t make the music it is meant to. To the extent that it doesn’t it is both ineffective and unattractive. There is certainly a place, necessarily a place, for piccolos and bassoons and triangles. The apostle thanks the Christians in Philippi for their “partnership in the gospel”.
By “partnership in the gospel” Paul means that all Christians share in the proclamation of the gospel; all Christians share in the Christian mission. The gospel isn’t simply food for you and me to consume. It is also food for our children, for newcomers to our congregation, for people not yet in our congregation but on their way here and therefore known only to God, for people on the other side of the world who need feeding as much as we. All of us are partners in thrusting the gospel outwards; all of us are essential to the Christian mission.
Some people mistakenly think they aren’t. Some people think they are consumers only, not because they want to be consumers only, but because they feel they aren’t gifted like Mr. or Ms. So-and-so. To say this, however, is to say that because not all of us are first violins there is no place in the orchestra for piccolo or triangle. Not so.
As I reflected on our shared partnership in the gospel I thought of the congregation and the denomination in terms of a football team. There are players on a football team who look like what comes to mind when we hear “football player”. They are built like gorillas and eat who knows what for breakfast. They even have names like football players. When I was eight or ten years old and the Montreal Alouettes were winning Grey cups their fullback was Pat Abruzzi. Bruiser Abruzzi . Brute Abruzzi . Bonebreaker Abruzzi . He ran like a tank. A real football player.
And then on every football team there is a player who doesn’t meet the stereotype at all. He is 5’6” tall and weighs 145 pounds. He wears less padding than anyone else. At the end of a game played on the muddiest field his uniform is still white. He is the field-goal kicker. He kicks the ball through the uprights, over the crossbar, and scores three points for his team. Furthermore, he kicks a three-point field-goal only when his team can’t score a seven-point touchdown. Is he important? Whenever a football team wins the game with only seconds left on the clock, who wins it for the team? The field-goal kicker.
In church-life there are people who don’t speak well in public, can’t dazzle the congregation at announcement time, can’t draft the motion that gets the board past an impasse. Are they essential? Not everyone in the orchestra plays first violin. Yet without everyone who doesn’t play first violin there wouldn’t be an orchestra at all. Football teams will go to the ends of the earth to get that one fellow — the field-goal kicker — who looks like anything but a football player.
Remember: the person or the congregation who appears least able to supply what someone else needs is the person or congregation we can’t do without.
Paul thanks the believers in Philippi for their partnership in the gospel. He knows that we all share in the outward thrust of the gospel; we all share in the church’s mission.
IV: — We share one thing more. We are “fellow servants” of the congregation. Paul speaks of Titus as his “partner and fellow worker in the service” of the church in Corinth .
“Service”. It has to do with servanthood. “Service”. It reeks of inferiority. My grandmother used to tell me she was “in service” before she married. She worked as a resident servant in the home of her social superiors. She had to wait on them, wait for them.
“Service”. Even in our era it sounds demeaning. “Service personnel please use the back door.” Service personnel can’t even enter the building through the front door, just because they have dirt on their overalls, which dirt they acquired, of course, by doing the bidding of those who can use the front door.
But Jesus washed feet, didn’t he. More than that, he said that we ought not to think ourselves above him; we too must wash feet — and do it gladly, willingly, ungrudgingly. Paul named himself and Titus servants of the congregation in Corinth . He and Titus shared the footwashing detail.
Let’s change the metaphor. Let’s think of compost. Leaves, twigs, grass-cuttings, kitchen scraps, even bovine manure (you know what the popular expression is); all of this finds its way into the compost heap. In a few months something valuable is going to appear at the bottom of the heap. At least something valuable will appear if one more thing is present: warmth. Compost piles need warmth. If the pile chills, the process shuts down.
What we have to contribute to church life and community life both here and anywhere at all in the world may not appear much. All of us are busy, all of us are tired, all of us have 101 commitments. Therefore it appears that we have little to offer Christ’s people here and elsewhere except a few scraps and scrapings and even a bit of bovine manure. We should offer it anyway. As we do, and as we surround it all with our warmth, humus appears sooner than we think.
“Humus”. It sounds like “humility”. “Humus” also happens to be the Latin word for earth. Our humility, our shared servanthood, reinforces our earthliness, our ordinariness.
And so we come full circle. All of us in this congregation share a fragility on account of our mortality. All of us also share the risen life of him who has conquered death. We share a partnership in the proclamation of the gospel and the church’s mission. And we share the humble of servanthood of him who washed feet — as well as hands and hearts — and without whose washing we wouldn’t be a congregation at all.
“Sharing, sharing, sharing”. The five year old beavers have much to tell us. In as much as we are always sharing it will become plain that we do love God. In loving God, and in sharing, sharing, sharing, we shall even help take care of the world.
Victor Shepherd
September 2006