Past and Present Saints

Revelation 21:1-6a

I want to begin my sermon today by talking about the difference between the community that is gathered here and the global world in which we live. Then I want to get back into the text and talk about some folks who have struggled with that same issue in the past. And hopefully that will bring us up to the present in about 10 to 15 minutes.  We’ll see if I can do it.

It’s interesting to note that we often see and often refer to our country as a very religious place. The truth is, compared to other developed countries in the world, we have a much higher worship attendance.   People here believe that our faith has a much stronger impact on our communal life as a nation than many of the other developed countries. That is a fact.  But the other fact is that in spite our faith, we—Christians in particular—live as a people with a value system that often runs contrary the secular values of the world in which we live.  I’m not going to give you a test on the list of those values I’ll discuss today, but I want you to think a little bit about them as I go through the list on both sides.  And I want you to think about where you fit in on this list and where you do not fit in.  We live in a secular culture that emphasizes the individual’s wants and personal happiness over all else.  And by the way, our individualism is often supreme in all things.  We live in a culture whose values say that material things are what we put our lives’ work into.  The gaining of material things gives us a sense of prestige, a sense of who we are, and a sense of being comfortable with ourselves.  We put our highest premium on advertising and selling those material things, and those material things somehow tell us that they are going to give us worth.

We begin early with very little children and communicate to them that life is most importantly wrapped around our sense of gathering up material things.  We live in a secular culture that says that cynicism is at the heart of everything we do and think.  But what is cynicism?  Cynicism assumes that everyone around us is out to get us.  That is, after all, because everyone is that way.  The fact is that we go and get what we want the best way we can, even if our ethics are conflicted.  We tell ourselves that it is all right.  After all, the entire whole world revolves around a system in which we all cynically do what we want to do.

Now I want to contrast that for a moment with the values of the Christian church, which have been revealed through the New Testament and have been lived out through the centuries by people who have caught on to what it truly means to be Christian.  The Christian faith is not a faith of individuals.  It is a communal faith.  The Apostle Paul said that in the living body of Christ is found a gathered community.  The community is the brothers and the sisters, the gathered saints of any period of time, that let us know who and what the presence of God is in the world.  Gathering together is not something that we do for our own gain, but for the gain of God’s kingdom.  Jesus said that we must pick up our cross and follow him.  Jesus also said that if we are to gain our lives, then we must loose them.  The values of the Christian faith demand that somehow we see our own personal happiness as secondary to the kingdom of God, while we know that kingdom of God is in the world in which we live.  Seeking God’s will (and God is the authority outside of ourselves) and not our own will in what we will say and what we will do and what we will be is the proper response for a Christian.  The Christian community has always lived out of God’s grace and sees that grace present in the gift of others. For that reason, the Christian faith has no place for cynicism.  Because when we see the other, we see our brother, we see our sister, and we see a child of God who like us, may be in need of some redemption.  Those we see are still breathing, living souls created by God.  Now if we look at those two value systems that struggle and tug and pull, what I want to say to you is a personal confession.  I struggle day to day with those two different value systems in my own life.  And I preach this sermon not so much to make you feel guilty about where you might be, but I want you know that I want you over on the Christian value’s side.  The truth is, all of us are a mixture of those two worlds’ claim on us.  I want you to hold that tension in place a little bit because I want to go back to the book of Revelation.

What do we know about this book?  What we know is that it was written by the early Christian community who struggled widely against the secular values of its own day—a set of values not so different from the values of our secular world of the present.  The early Christian community lived in a world in which Roman life defined everything that was, and there were those who refused to worship the mighty empire of Rome.  What we know and understand is that during that early church experience, there were many people who gave up the Christian faith.  By the way, in some ways I will not judge them because they saw that if they were to continue trusting in that faith and in God, then they would either die or their families would die, and they just couldn’t take it.  But the interesting thing is that the church has remembered those crazy ones who remained faithful.  They remained faithful to the God whom they had come to know thought Jesus.  The church lifts these martyrs up before us, so that we might remember that in their faith we might catch a glimpse of where our faith might be.

Now it’s interesting in this past year that in Pakistan, the Presbyterian Church was blown to bits.  People died.  It’s hard for you and me to imagine this living in the tolerant country that we do, that people could actually die because of the faith they hold so dearly.  What seems crazy to me is why anyone in Pakistan would want to hold to the Christian faith when they know that only persecution would come to them.  In the Sudan two young men were killed on one of the streets of one of their cities, simply because they held onto the faith of Christianity, which was not popular.  What I want to say to you is that I hope that somehow those saints in the past and those saints who live in the present day inspire us.  These people have had to live out their faith with courage.  Some of the saints gave up their lives for the very values that the Christian faith holds dearly.  May these saints be a shining beacon to us.  My hope and prayer are that none of us will ever have to make choices of life and death that those saints in the past and that those saints in the present have had to make. But my hope and prayer are also that we might see in them something that may tell us about what is important in our own lives.  And that is that God is always first.  And God’s kingdom is always central to who we are and what we are about.  No matter what happens to the world that we live in, no matter how bad things may get in places all over the world, that God is still the God of all creation.  Jesus is still the redeemer, and God’s spirit will always dwell on this earth challenging us to come to God’s kingdom now and for generations to come.  

I got a call yesterday that Maria Louisa, the matriarch of our sister church in Caborca, died this week.  I don’t know if any of you who haven’t been to Caborca know her, but those of you that have been to Caborca, a city 90 miles south of the American border, know that there is this little Methodist church.  I won’t say the church’s name in Spanish, but its name translates to the Good Shepard.  Its members live a faith that is not always easy.  Their culture looks at Methodists and wonders what they are about and why they are Methodists.  When I met Maria Louisa for the first time a few weeks ago, what I saw was this regal, proud matriarch of a church.  This lady dressed nicer than any old lady that I’ve ever seen.  She had a great sense of dignity and pride in her faith that she not only lived, but that she was willing to share with all the new, young people that were a part of that congregation.  There are saints from the past and saints in the present who may push against the culture in which they live and live faithfully to the God whom we love and serve.  That reminds us even in the present day that God has taught us to be people of faith and people of courage.  There are saints sitting here in our congregation today—people whom God has called to live among us to teach us.  They give us hope and inspire us with their courage. The Apostle Paul tells us that there is a great cloud of witnesses at Heaven’s gates, and they are cheering us on and telling us to be of good courage in the day and age in which we live. Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer.