Communion Service Sunday 5th October – led by Martyn Macphee
One of the pleasures of having Martyn lead our worship is the detailed intros to the hymns he’s chosen. And this week he managed to slip in a “plug” for undervalued Organists and Directors of Music – not in our church of course! And John remembered that the Old Testament Reading from Psalm 137 about sitting down by the rivers of Babylon had been a hit song by Boney M in the 70ies – though the song missed out the Psalm’s bit about being happy taking Babylon’s babies and smashing them against a rock.
We moved swiftly to Luke 17, about Faith and a Servant’s Duty and Martyn’s Address came at it via a story from Pastor Tony Campolo’s book “The Kingdom of God is a Party”. Tony Campolo had flown to Honolulu for a speaking engagement and had found himself wide awake and hungry at 3am in the morning. He’d found an all-night café, sat down and ordered a coffee from Gus the café owner and seen a whole gaggle of young ladies – ladies of the night – come in; coming off duty, as it were. And he heard one of the women say, ”Tomorrow is my 30th birthday”. And her friends had replied to her, “So what do you want, a party?” Gus had told Tony hat they came in pretty well every night at the same time so Tony had suggested throwing the girl – Rachel – a party and Gus had thought it was a good idea. The next night Tony had showed up with crepe paper and streamers, Gus had made a cake, and he’d invited many in the neighbourhood to come round. When Rachel had arrived, they’d all jumped up, and sung Happy Birthday Rachel. And Rachel had just stood at the door and wept. Tony had heard her say to one of her friends, “I’m 30, and that’s the first birthday party that t I’ve ever had”. Gus had asked Tony what he did for a living and when told he was the pastor of a church (a church that threw birthday parties for prostitutes at 3 o’clock in the morning) he’d said, “No, you aren’t. Because if you were, I would go to a church like that”.
Gus’s comment had been a compliment to Tony, but it was also an indictment of the church in the 21st century. Gus couldn’t fathom that any Christian church that he’d ever known about would reach out and care for a woman like Rachel. Churches were for righteous people, for the religious – for respectable people in our culture.
The church had never been intended by Jesus to be only for the righteous, the religious, and the proud. It had been created for people like us; people well acquainted with sin, with selfishness, with imperfections. Perhaps it was just that we thought that some people were a bit more imperfect than we were?
The Gospel lesson from Luke had told the story of two churches. The first one was all about faith and the following. Nothing wrong in that, but there had been criticism throughout the ages that church was always about itself, a kind of a private club, where we sung and prayed together, had fellowship together, and drank coffee together (a lot of that!). There was a sense of community for members of a congregation; a sense of belonging and caring which we valued deeply.
The critics could be right, for often church was all about us and not about others; and when Jesus had told the parable that we’d just heard, he’d described another kind of church, the kind where people worked at feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, and reaching out and touching the untouchables of the world. These churches did this not simply because they were compassionate, but because they believed it was expected of them as followers of Christ.
Jesus’ words were about the servant who didn’t just come in from the field and sit down for dinner, but put on an apron, and served the master. We were all of us worthless servants. And we were only doing what we ought to do. Not a comfortable image. We might not like to think of ourselves as worthless slaves, but we couldn’t ignore the obvious expectation of that parable. We were called to pack a lunchbox, put on a hard hat if necessary, and spend the time serving others.
Two churches and two agendas. One church had seen its mission to care and be cared for by the members of the congregation, the other had seen as its purpose reaching out to the world in need.
Martyn thought the church was called to do both and became unhealthy whenever its focus drifted to just one or the other. But it was too easy to forget the reaching out one.
In 1991, a Gallup poll survey found that the average person needed shelter and food, community, a sense of belonging (which could only be met when people were intimate in contact with one another on a regular basis – whilst nearly one-third of people In the Western world had been lonely for long periods in their lives), a sense of purpose (life was only meaningful when we had reason to get out of bed in the morning and do something), and finally, we needed to have faith – faith in something or someone larger than ourselves. And we needed practical help to grow in that faith.
Martyn thought the list was not simply one-dimensional, rather it was complex and multi-dimensional. Every Sunday morning, we had people entering the doors of our church with those needs on the front burner of their lives. And every Monday morning, we drove past countless homes and schools with people who weren’t in church on Sunday who had the very same needs that we had. If we only cared about ourselves, we stood indicted of being an exclusive club where membership had its privileges. However, if we only reached out to others, we discovered that the affection and accountability we shared as a congregation could quickly come undone.
In order to be healthy, we had to be both. Our church had a congregation that was older yet remained vibrant. It was not a time for us to circle the wagons and celebrate our accomplishments. There were people within our walls whose needs were great, and there were people beyond our walls who were dying to find out if Christians really “walked the walk”. So we, people of warm hearts and possibly of calloused hands, were not ever to give up being the church that Christ, that God, had called us to be.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 