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Creekside
Church
Sermon of May
2, 2010
"The
Holy Cities: Goshen and Elkhart"
Revelation
21:1-14
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Pastor Janet Shaver
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A
husband and wife (let's call them "John" and "Denise")
were driving home from a dinner party. One word let to another until
they became caught up in a bitter argument. Finally, John shouted
to Denise, who was driving, "Stop the car. I'm getting out!"
Whereupon, Denise stopped the car, and John opened the door, got out,
and began to walk. He quickly realized, however, that they had been
driving along the edge of a scary neighborhood noted for drug deals
and crimes of violence. He looked around and thought he saw ominous-looking
shadows everywhere. Panic-stricken, he called out to Denise who had
just begun to pull away, "Stop the car and let me in!" When
he got back in, he said, "Take me to a better neighborhood."
"That broke up both of us -- and the argument too," John
said later.
Our scripture passage today tells us of city life much different
than any city that we are familiar with. A city where everything
is made new - that there will be no more tears and weeping but a
place of rest and respite. A place where we live in mercy and grace
and all people live in harmony. Revelation 21 describes this Holy
City as a place of beauty. God is calling us now to redeem the city.
Take this city and begin to redeem it in the place where
God sits in the neighborhood. That is what the passage says today.
God is in the neighborhood. God is in our city neighborhoods ready
for us to continue the work He began when Jesus Christ came.
Cities are important. They are important enough to Paul that he
spent his entire ministry in the cities. He moved from city to city
helping the church be the place where people would understand who
God is in their lives. Paul spent His ministry in the city bringing
the Good News of Christ to the people.
The World Expo 2010 opened this weekend in Shanghai. The theme
for this year’s expo is Better City - Better Life
Why Better
City – Better Life? According to their website, the reason
for the city focus is that, “In 1800, only two percent of
the global population lived in cities, but by 1950, the figure had
risen to 29 percent, and by 2000, almost half the world population
had moved into cities.
Despite all its glories,
there is no denying that the city today has many challenges because
of high-density living patterns, faces a series of challenges, such
as spatial conflicts, cultural collisions, resource shortages and
environment degeneration” But as much as we know the problems
of the city, we see what happens within these problems.
As the church we see
the fallout from those challenges - high crime rate, social diseases
like alcoholism, drug addiction, family abuse and high drop out
rates in the schools. The fallout brings a sense of hopelessness
and broken-heartedness to all involved. Family structure suffers
and many end up homeless or in prison. It becomes a life or death
situation for some.
So what is the US idea
at the World Expo. The United States pavilion is a branding for
the future. The pavilion is built around four themes: sustainability,
teamwork, health and the Chinese community in America.
But what about the church,
if Creekside were to have a pavilion in a Better City - Better Life,
how would we present the way our city should look? What does a Holy
City look like to us?
Maslow is a humanistic
psychologist who believed that humans have the capabilities to reach
the highest form of self-actualization and in that reach there are
levels that had to come first before they could reach a place where
they know that they are doing what they were born to do.
Before any of our emotional
needs are met, Maslow says that there are two needs that go first.
They are safety and our physiological well being.
Maslow says; “When
the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied,
the next class of needs are for love, affection and belongingness.
Maslow states that this
is where people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation.
This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the
sense of belonging.
Maslow is right on his
needs development. God creates in each one of us the basic needs
for love, acceptance and belonging. This is the ministry that Jesus
began over 2,000 years ago and they are the needs that we as humans
still long for.
So with this thought
in mind, how would we look in the Creekside Pavilion at the World
Expo 2010. If our church right here in Elkhart and Goshen was to
be a model of those needs, what would we look like? How would we
present a Better City - Better Life as Jesus might present them?
So if these are our basic
needs right after safety and our physical needs like housing and
food, they are pretty important.
Let’s take a look
at them.
What does love look like
to us? How do we present that as the way to a Better City- Better
Life Expo.
Lucy stands with her
arms folded and a resolute expression on her face, while Charlie
Brown pleads with her. "Lucy," he says, "you must
be more loving. The world needs love. Make this world a better place,
Lucy, by loving someone else." At that Lucy whirls around angrily
and Charlie goes flipping over backwards. "Look, you blockhead,"
Lucy screams. "The world I love. It's people I can't stand!"
We are hard to love.
We want our way and no one else’s. We can be rude, and abrupt
and pouty. We have hundreds of actions that would keep us from being
loved.
Note, dear friends, that
most of all, first and foremost, that which God desires of us is
that we love one another. We may tithe. We may teach. We may sing
or serve or sacrifice. We may visit on behalf of our congregation,
preach the Gospel, clean the kitchen, sew the quilts, sponsor the
youth, mow the grass. And all of these things are of vital importance
to a congregation. They are wonderful and important to our life
together. But if we do not do them out of love for God, if we do
not love one another, we miss what God desires most of us. 1
Dr. William Willimon
tells about a friend who spent much of his life in an orphanage.
His mother took him there as a little boy. She let him out of the
car under a big cedar tree and told him she would return that afternoon.
She never did return. Willimon’s friend is now middle aged.
One day Willimon was to meet his friend for lunch and Willimon was
late. When he arrived, only about fifteen minutes late, he found
his friend in a state of high agitation, pacing about, perspiring
heavily, visibly upset. It seemed an overreaction to fifteen minutes
of tardiness.
Later, this friend said
to Willimon, “I just can’t help it. I know why I get
so bent out of shape when a friend is late. My mother kept me waiting
under that tree at the orphanage all afternoon. And she never, ever
returned. I just can’t stand for someone I love to be late.”
We are not asking why
people do the things they do but try to love them out of it.
We don’t know why
but we do know love. We don’t know where people have been
or what they have experienced in their lives. People need love from
us because they maybe some that have never been loved. People are
what they have lived and people who live without love do not know
how to love. We receive love freely from God and in that we freely
give love.
To create a Holy City,
a Better City - Better Life, it is important to know that everyone
has a past and sometimes that past does not include love. They never
received it, they can’t give it because they don’t know
what love looks like.
Maslow also says acceptance
is another one of our basic needs.
Some years ago when actress
Sally Field won her second Oscar in the span of only a few years,
she famously gushed in her acceptance speech, "You like me!
You really like me!" She has never been nominated again.
People need acceptance.
A man came up to the
preacher and said, “That was a damn good sermon, preacher.”
The preacher said, “Sir, we don’t really talk like that
here.” The man said, “That was such a damn good sermon
pastor that I put $1,000 in the offering plate.” To which
the pastor replied, “Sir, you are a damned generous man.”
Sometimes it is difficult
to accept those whose differences are like sandpaper but to accept
them here in our church is saying “We are all growing and
we want you to grow with us.” We accept them saying “All
of us fall short of the glory.” “None of us are right
without Christ.’ Accepting people despite where they come
from and how they look. Acceptance is unconditional. Like the bumper
sticker says, “Forgiven not perfect”
The opposite of acceptance
is judgment. When we are not accepting someone, that means that
we are judging them. Judging leads to fear, fear leads to anger
and now we have conflict. Now we see why the cities are in so much
turmoil.
Have you noticed that
the world is angry? What is “road rage?” It is conflict
on the road. It is anger unleashed on the road. Everyone wants to
be loved and accepted. To not be loved and accepted is to be rejected
and judged. That makes us angry.
Acceptance means recognizing
and understanding and appreciating others their differences. Someone
should take the first step. It is always the church.
In our pavilion we would
show acceptance by allowing each person who we encounter to be themselves.
We would offer each person we encounter an unconditional acceptance.
We would accept them by caring for them and nurturing them to a
place where they would know this is where they belong.
We long for a place to
belong. We long for a place to belong. This isn’t more evident
than when we see the popularity of clubs and the new places where
people congregate. In fact, there is a theme song made popular from
a half hour comedy made in the 80's.
YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvRGh2NEjSU&feature=related
People want to be where
everybody knows their name. In Nappanee, there is Main Street Coffee.
There is never a time that you go by there that thee are not groups
of people relaxing on sofas and working on their laptops.
WE need to be in community.
We need to belong. That is what God intended. That is how God set
up with the Hebrew people. They were to be in community with God
and themselves. That is the model God calls the world into today.
Not just Christians but the world. That is why Christ dies so that
the world would be reconciled with God - not just a select group
but all of us.
In The Good, Great Place,
Ray Oldenburg says that locations that promote a casual, public
life: cafés, bookstores, pubs, the bygone soda foundation,
etc. are called “third places.” He means that these
are environments that provide gatherings that bring happiness and
a sense of belonging. They are called third places because they
take third place right after home and work.
Starbucks was so impressed
with the “third place” idea that it made it a corporate
mission to become a third place for us all. After home and work,
each local store wants to be the place where we hang out with each
other.
The Starbucks understand
our need to belong to be in community outside of our work and home.
Oldenburg suggests that as Christians we should get out of the church
to meet these people in those third places. That pastors should
have their offices in these places so that we might be better in
touch with the people who need what the church offers.
But I want to say that
in our pavilion, I want the church to be the place that is considered
the third place for all people who need to be in place where every
body knows their name and we are always glad they came. That we
can create that same atmosphere here in the church. That people
can come anytime to congregate and just hangout and shot the breeze.
That members know that we all have the same hangups and same problems.
That we are one community.
Some of the places deemed
third places, the YMCA, local diners and neighborhood bars just
like we heard from Cheers.
Closing:
A man thought back to his days working in Dorothy Day’s Catholic
Worker soup kitchen. Some of you may know the Dorothy Day Story.
Dorothy Day was a great Roman Catholic activist early in 20th century
who devoted her life to working among the poor. Coles says that
one afternoon several of the workers at the kitchen were forced
to struggle with a “wino” a “Bowery bum”
an angry cursing truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair
a full scraggly beard a huge scar on his right cheek a mouth with
virtually no teeth and bloodshot eyes. What did Dorothy Day have
to say about this man? Evidently she was thinking of the great passage
in Hebrews about entertaining angels unaware, for she said, “For
all we know, he might be God . . . so (let’s) treat him as
an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful
one we can imagine.”
This is God’s idea
of a Better City – Better Life.
To build a Better City
- Better Life our Expo pavilion must demonstrate our understanding
of these basic needs - the same basic needs Jesus ministered to
2,000 years ago.
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