The Church's Advertising Slogan: Love one another

Advertising slogans capture the imagination.  A good advertising slogan stays in your mind, it is catchy.  But more important, the slogan must somehow capture some essence about the product or communicate some idea about the product.  So when you think of say a car, you think...safety, Volvo, or Ford, 'Everything we do is driven by you'.  Or you think beer, Carlsberg, 'probably the best lager in the world' and now, ‘that calls for a Carlsberg’.

In many ways, the passage from John 13 is the advertising slogan for Christians: All people will know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another.  The love we have and demonstrate for each other as Christians is a giant billboard which the world around us reads and observes. Today we are particularly interested in that aspect of love demonstrated in the way Christians serve, the way Christians become as a church, the serving community which grows out the self-giving love of Christ.

This morning I want us to think about two ways we fulfil the words of Jesus in John 13 by become a serving community.

First of all our love and service to one another is a proclamation of Christ’s self-giving love.

The Christian teaching is that in Christ we have seen God's love in action and we have heard God's message of love proclaimed.  As Christians we focus our understanding of who God is on Jesus Christ, on his life and ministry.  In essence, we see in Christ an unconditional love, a self-sacrificing love that reaches out to all people regardless of race, religion, gender, social status or even their belief in God. 

Jesus came and sought out sinners, sought out those whom God was calling.  Jesus gave and gave, ministering healing and wholeness of life to all who would receive.  God even insured that Christ's death became a demonstration of God's love and forgiveness towards all, and the resurrection became the ultimate statement of God reaching out in love to all who would believe in his message.

Who is the God we proclaim?  God is love.  Through faith in Christ we have received and have been rooted in God's love.  Through faith in Christ we have experienced forgiveness, acceptance, healing, grace, mercy, and compassion. Through worship and sacrament we are reminded continually of God's love in Christ. Through our regular meeting together in worship and at Holy Communion we continue to experience God's self-giving love for us in the gifts of Christ's body and blood.

So out of our experience and understanding of God's love, we love and serve each other: as Jesus said, 'love one another, just as I have loved you'.  Our love and service for each other is a testimony, a revelation, even an advertisement of what we have experienced in God and know God to be.

When we love and serve each other in visible and tangible ways, we are demonstrating to a watching world, that we know something of the love of God in our hearts and souls.  Our experience of God's love motivates us to act it out, to advertise it, to reveal it.  By working at demonstrating our understanding and experience of God's love, we are proclaiming who God is to a world that still seeks God and does not know him. 

Secondly, our love and service toward each other also proclaims what kind of church or community we are.

 In a sense by acting out the love of God as a serving church or community we recommend ourselves or advertise ourselves to the community at large.

One of the gifts we as Christians offer to society is a sense of community, a sense of commitment to one another.  In Central and South America, the institutional church was failing to offer anything relevant to society.  Xtians there formed what are called base communities, groups of xtians dedicated to studying scripture and acting out the liberating truth they have experienced in Christ.  Through their community life they confronted the oppressive political and economic and religious structures of their society.  By developing a true sense of community, they proclaimed the authentic and life changing love of God.

In our own worship life, when we exchange the peace, we are demonstrating in a visible and tangible way our unity, harmony and LOVE for each other.  When we have disagreements about the life of our church we meet together in a loving and civilised manner and talk out our differences and try to come to an agreement (those who go off in anger and bitterness, who undermine the church by slanderous and negative talk are not demonstrating the love of God which they have so freely received).  When one of us is in need, members of the congregation reach out and care for us in tangible and practical ways, as well as praying for each other.

Christians are not meant to go it alone.  But individual, private Christianity is the mark of our times.  One of the failures of the traditional church is that it can lose its identity as a community.  One of the reasons for the success of the alternative church found in house church groups is that they often offer a genuine caring community.  In the USA presently there are a score of mega-churches, churches of over 1000 people, some even 5000 people or more.  This caters to the autonomy and individuality of American society, because you can attend a worship service with thousands of individuals and feel inspired by the numbers and the professional worship service, but you have no personal obligation to those people.  One can sneak in and out.

We have to guard against this.  For some people, the quiet service where they can sit alone and not be involved is enough.  People still like churches where they can 'get lost in the crowd'.  But if that is the only expression of one's faith, it can be an incomplete faith.

There are people who come regularly to church and who have been changed because they have experienced acceptance and encouragement.  They have experienced the love of God by the way others have loved and cared for them.  This is the true church in action.

If our local churches wish to continue to be a healing community, a caring Christian community, it must guard against being an institutional, individualised, impersonal church.  Each of us will have to allow the Holy Spirit, God's living presence in each one of us, to help us reach out to others, to help us allow ourselves to become involved in the life of others in this church.

Certainly one of the key ways we can do that is through small group meetings where there is space and time to get to know one another, to listen to one another and to minister to one another.  We can also make an effort to get to know people in church.  I know it is hard, but why not introduce yourself to someone you do not know during the coffee time after a service or in the queue as you go out so that in the future you can at least say hello.  That contact or introduction may lead to something more.  Building a Christian community in this church means each one of us will have to work at reaching out to others.

Jesus took off his garment, tied a towel and began to wash the disciples’ feet.  It was an act of humble service by their master.  It is an example for all of us to imitate in service to others.  The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.  Christ has ministered to us meeting our deepest personal and spiritual needs.

By acting out our understanding and experience of the love of God as a serving community, we proclaim to the world an alternative way of being together.  By being a caring and serving community we are offering to the people of our community a safe place, a place where one does not have to suffer alone, a place where wholeness and healing can occur.

In conclusion, as a community of love and service towards each other, we proclaim or advertise who God is, a God of love. As we care and serve each other, we proclaim to an often lonely and needy world, that we are a loving community.  Jesus created the advertisement campaign for the church.  He said that the primary way we advertise who God is and what kind of church we are is by the way we love one another.

The Crucible of Easter

When I was at university in the USA, I worked as a night porter in a mortuary.  It was a great job.  It was dead quiet at night and I could get on with my studies.  I only had to answer the telephone and open up in case a body needed to be delivered after hours.  Well, it was strange sitting there in that little office with dead bodies in the next room.  Every little noise made me look up and wonder if somehow someone was not really dead.  I do not know where we get the idea that dead people might come back to life and start moving around.

          This Easter you and I face the reality of the risen Christ.  He who once was dead is now alive.  Death has failed.  Jesus is vindicated.  The Saviour lives. What are we to do?  How are we to respond?  If it is true that he is no longer dead, no longer in the tomb, then we are faced with a crucible of faith. When you encounter the glory of the risen Christ, how will you respond?

          First, let's reflect on this Easter story from Jesus' perspective.  The whole drama from Palm Sunday with the triumphal entry to the Last Supper, to the Garden of Gethsemane, to the arrest, trial, mockery, crucifixion, and death is a tale of unbelievable tragedy in which in the end a reversal of incredible proportions occurs, the resurrection.

          We see Jesus in this tragedy coming to terms with his fate, his impending death.  His life and ministry faced a gruesome end and he sensed it all.  In the Garden he faces for  the last time the hard choice of accepting his death.  At the beginning in the desert, there is the story of Satan tempting Jesus to take a short-cut to glory and fame without trotting the path of servitude.  Now, in Gethsemane, Jesus wrestles with a hard choice, whether to accept his Father's will.  He faces it and accepts the way of death. 'Not my will, but your will be done', Jesus prays.  He embarks on the way of the cross, trusting, believing, hoping.  This crucible of obedience becomes for him the means to triumph, vindication and exaltation. 

          As a result of making this hard decision, as a result of facing this crucible, his life and ministry is transformed through the cross and empty tomb to become a universal and cosmic ministry which extends to all, those dead and alive, those present and those in ages to come.  Out of Jesus' death comes the gift of resurrection life to all who believe. 

          But what about you and me?  Today, we celebrate the resurrection, the triumph of God's love and God's power.  In proclaiming this resurrection in our liturgical words and actions, we are faced with a crucible as well.  We are faced with the choice of the resurrection life, with the unbelievable truth that God has confronted all our sin and failure, confronted our rebellion and selfishness, confronted all our fears and enemies, even death, and triumphed.  Each Easter, we come face to face with the one who was dead, but now is alive. We come face to face with the glorious risen Christ.  We face the choice of responding in faith, acknowledging Christ as Lord or choosing to go our own way as if he is still in the tomb.  When you encounter the glory of the risen Christ, how will you respond?

          For many people, they stumble on the details.  Did Jesus literally rise from the dead?  Now I do not want to get side tracked about whether you have to believe in a literal rising of Jesus from the dead, or as the once Bishop of Durham said, a conjuring trick with bones.  However, such an understanding is not beyond the realm of God's power.  Whatever we think happened, we cannot sit in this service and carry on as if nothing happened.  And if something happened, then there is a hard choice for each of us in all this.

          Paul puts it another way, 'If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Christ from the dead, you will be saved'.  The Easter story is God's story.  It is a story of unconditional love, of God's love for us.  It is a story of God reaching out to us and demonstrating the power of a life of faith transcending even death.  The grave could not hold Jesus, the grave transfigured him, propelled his life of service to new heights.  The resurrection infused Jesus' life and ministry with power which broke open the tomb and unleashed spiritual power that still transforms people and circumstances today.

          When you encounter the glory of the risen Christ, how will you respond?  Our response becomes the hard decision for us, the crucible we face.  To believe in the resurrection means entering into a life of faith; it means identifying with God's action on our behalf; it means choosing God's way.

          For many that is exactly the problem, they want to keep control.  The life of a middle-class western European is quite comfortable, thank you very much.  All this talk of the resurrection is slightly beyond, a touch too mysterious, too spiritual.  The death and resurrection becomes a stumbling block.  People are willing to say, I believe in God, and I am willing to serve my neighbour...but let's not get carried away with all this supernatural, over the top, fanatical religion stuff.

          But that is exactly the point.  The resurrection is a demonstration of God going over the top, of God pulling out all the stops, of God reaching out to you and me and saying the life I offer is stronger than death. The life of faith is a life which transcends the mundane existence of the purely human perspective.  The resurrection presents to you and me in the strongest way possible the choice between the life of faith or the life lived my own way.  When confronted with the risen Christ, you cannot ignore it or pretend it did not happen.

          After all the services of holy week and all the services today, I am faced today with the awesome, unbelievable Easter story that Jesus is alive, that Jesus is risen.  If I say yes, he is risen indeed, if I believe and affirm the Easter reality, I know what it means.  It means, that in some sense my life is not my own.  It means I believe God has reached into my rather self-contained life and broken down the fences in which I have made myself comfortable.  It means I have opened myself to God’s power to transform my life and offer to me a new life.

          And how will you respond when faced with the risen Christ in all his glory?  Will you say, yes to the resurrection life?  Will you open your self to the new life that is in Christ?  Will you say with faith in your heart and soul, Alleluia, Christ is risen.