2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 or 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 or Psalm 16; Galatians 5:1, 13-25 (Used: Galatians 5:13-18, 22-25); Luke 9:51-62 ~ Annual Meeting.
Stories and History
“...the fruit of the Spirit is this: love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Galatians 5:22.
Would you do me a favor? Just for a moment, would you close your eyes and try to place yourself among the disciples of Jesus on the day after Pentecost?
Now, what you need to remember as you try, is this: none of the Gospels have been written. No one knows who Paul is. None of the Epistles have been written. The term Christian has not been invented or even heard.
So, just close your eyes and try to put yourself there, the day after Pentecost, with the disciples of Jesus. (Pause.) Now, my bet is you can’t really do that. That’s because we know their future and it is impossible for us to remove that knowledge from our sensibilities. You just can’t do it. We know what’s going to happen.
The disciples, on the other hand, don’t know a thing about their future. They do not know what would happen. Did they worry about the future? Yep. Still, they moved toward the future.
What is, perhaps, even more difficult for us to understand is the writings called the New Testament are not a history of what happened and were not meant to be a history. The New Testament is not a set of facts, akin to the data we find in history. The New Testament is about the feelings and the responses to their story— the story about what happened to them.
The writers are not addressing the facts of what happened, but what it felt like. So, when Paul writes, he is interested in what it feels like to be a follower of Christ.
(Quote): “...the fruit of the Spirit is this: love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Slight pause.) And here is how the disciples were able to live through those uncertain times (quote): “...those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their ego with its passions and desires.” (Pause.)
Well, we are, today, in many ways in the same place as the disciples of Jesus the day after Pentecost. We do not know what our future will bring.
But in telling us how the disciples lived through those times with an unknown future and what it felt like, Paul is giving us some important guideposts for our times, today. (Quote): “...since we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” (Slight pause.)
We do not know a thing about what will happen in our future. Do we worry about the future? Yep. But we need to move toward the future.
So the challenge for the church today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is clear: can we, you and I, the church, live our lives not knowing the future and submitting our ego to the work of the Spirit, trusting the Spirit? Trusting the Spirit— that, my friends, is a definition of church. Amen.
United Church of Christ, First Congregational, Norwich, New York
06/27/2010
ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Benediction. This, then, is an précis of what the pastor said before the blessing: “This church was incorporated in 1814. A building went up on approximately the space occupied by this nave, this worship space in 1819. In February 1858 that structure burned to the ground. The brick church, this space in which we now worship, was dedicated in June of 1862. In 1860 this church calls the Rev. Samuel Scoville, son in law of Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and, literally, the most famous man in America at that time to be the pastor. Being the denomination who started the Civil War, as we Congregationalists are since we were key in the movement to abolish slavery in American, Sam says we will build the town Meeting House. So, in 1874 the building was expanded to its present size and the nave expanded to seat 1,300. In 1958 the size of the worship space in which we now stand moved back to its original design and renovated in 1984. It actually says in one write up that the worship space was reduced because the town did not need a meeting house any longer. All that is history. It is factual data. It says nothing about how we feel about being a community of faith. Telling our story as a church does not mean listing factual data. It means saying something about how we feel.” [1]
[1] Note: the meditation was brief because the Annual Organizational Meeting of the Church was held within the context of the service of worship.
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