First, I want to say a word of thanks to the altar guild for this beautiful vestment on our communion table, and I want to tell you, those flowers up on our cross are real. Isn’t that incredible? The wonderful care that they take is just incredible. And, by the way, I will be in trouble with Virginia if I don’t tell you that those flowers are in memory of the 100^th birthday of her husband Earl. So we have much to grace our life with today.

I’m reading a book right now on the history of the world around the year 1000; specifically the northern hemisphere. Can any of you guess how much of Europe was Christianized around the year 1000? Less than half of it. Does that surprise you? We always think of Europe as being the place where Christianity moved and that Europe had been Christian forever. 1000 years ago there were Vikings moving across all of Europe, mostly pillaging and stealing other people’s stuff and causing havoc. But as they were slowly converted, they kind of took on Christianity. Then they used the same methods of evangelism that they used in their raping and pillaging. Meaning that you either became a Christian or they cut your head off. So it was rapid conversion to Christianity in Europe during that period. One would question today their methods and I don’t think I know anyone that using that tool of evangelism in our world anywhere.

Part of what I want to do today is reflect upon the Christian world, as we know it in the year 2003. To see it in some of its most vibrant places and in its great diversity. And hopefully, come back to our text to see what it is that Jesus may be saying to all of us today.

I have a friend in Zimbabwe who teaches in a high school there.  She teaches sciences and math most of the day. Then towards the end of the day, she teaches seminary courses on a high school level to local people. What they have found in Zimbabwe is that if they train local preachers and let them go out and do the preaching and evangelizing, they do a much better job because they understand the culture and the people. Now I bring up Zimbabwe because it is one of those places in the world today that is in great turmoil. The hopes and the dreams of the Zimbabwean people has been crushed by the very man who gave them that hope several decades ago as they reached independence. He is a brutal dictator, who has seen thousands of people and, in the last few years, the breadbasket of Africa, a total economy, destroyed. And, in an interesting twist, has moved to a reverse racism, pitting those Europeans who are in the country and in some ways putting them in dire situations. A doctor who cared for me when I was in high school was murdered there this last spring. This man had dedicated his retirement years to helping build a local economy. Now I tell you about Zimbabwe, in part, for you to understand that not all Christians in the world today live with the same degree of comfort that you and I live and are free to express our faith. My friend once told me that there are many people who will travel as many as twelve or fifteen miles walking on foot to gather for worship every Sunday morning. And not in some elaborate building, but perhaps under bushes or under a brush arbor, in order that they might be able to express their faith, even under the dangers in which they live. Now I know sometimes a few of you get nervous if we go five minutes over and Frank starts signaling me to shut up. Do you realize that when our brothers and sisters gather in Zimbabwe, that they go on for five or six hours at a time.  I mean after all, you’re not going to walk all that way to be done in sixty minutes, right? So, if I go over a minute or two today just forgive me.

I was thinking of the contrast of that simple but vibrant place that is under such turmoil to some other places in the world where there are Christians. My niece back in West Virginia had the good fortune a few years ago to go to the Good Will games in Russia, of all places.  She was a weight lifter. Now being the good little American that she was there were a lot of things about that culture that she could not understand and that she struggled with. It was good for her to kind of see that contrast and struggle with it. But when she went to what was St. Petersburg, and walked into that Cathedral that was built centuries ago, and saw it in it’s magnificence and heard the divine liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, she was overwhelmed with the sense of God’s presence in that far off strange world that she had entered. One of the things in the last decade that has given us promise is that a place where communism had tried its best to destroy the Christian faith, or by controlling the state to some how propagandize it has again found renewal. I have a good friend who died this spring that was born in Lithuania and came to this country when she was twelve years old. She tells a story of her mother, who during World War II, and all the aftermath of that, was the strength of her family. Many of you may not know it, but there was a strong Methodist presence in Lithuania from the beginning of the last century till about 1940 when the communists did all they could to wipe out that faith from that region. And there too in Lithuania is a renewal of Christian faith and the Methodist Church is a part of that. My friend tells a story of a family that had to learn four different languages that they might survive that crucial period after World War II. They found themselves in East Germany and had to find a way to sneak over to West Germany that they might be able to have some hope of living without the terror that disrupted their normal life in Lithuania. I watched as my friend gently cared for her mother, who in the last years of her life had a stroke and couldn’t speak. I often saw in her a determination to care for a woman whose strong Christian faith had endured much in life. To begin on one side of the world and end her life on another. And she was grateful to God for all that God had given her. A very different experience of living the Christian faith that you and I have today.

So, we jump around the world a little and we see that there are Christians that live their faith with the same sense of fervor that we do, but sometimes with a greater sense of dedication because often it’s not so easy to live the Christian life in other places of the world. Today, as we remember our bonds with the rest of the Christian world, the irony is that Europe, which at one time was the cradle of the Christian faith and sending missionaries out all over the world, finds the Christian faith in decline. Where there is a cultural religion that resembles little the true Christianity, which was so fervent and strong there for so long. Then we have a continent like Africa, which at one time we would have seen as a heathen land, where Christianity is growing the most rapid of any place in the world. And they are preparing to send missionaries to guess where? To Europe and to the United States. One of the wonderful things is that in many places the Africans have given up trying to sing our European hymns. And they have taken their culture and their own musical style and have placed words of scripture and faith in that context. This morning as we worship in our good American way, most of our African brothers and sisters are singing hymns to the beat of African drums. And believe it or not, some of the most wonderful music that has been sung in the Northern Hemisphere is a product of our brothers and sisters in Africa. Who knows, we may be singing some of those songs here. You never know. We live in a world in which the Christian faith still struggles to define itself against a changing world. And we gather here on this Sunday to remember that as we hear God’s word read and proclaimed, as we offer our prayers to God and as we come to this table and we remember the living presence of Christ with us, that we do not do it alone. That we do it with our brothers and sisters around the world as they find themselves in diverse circumstances, and yet try to remain, as we try to remain, faithful to the gospel.

Now, I’ve got to hit somewhere on Luke’s gospel. I’ll admit to you that that text is not one of those things that is written to help bolster our self-image. I will tell you that as I read it as the son of a coal miner I wasn’t quite happy with what Jesus said. He upsets me all the time. “So your slave works all day and comes in”, Jesus said. Do you set him at your table and feed him because he has worked hard? Well, my union father said “of course you do”.  There are union regulations that say you can only work eight hours a day. But Jesus says that in this order of life that you naturally expect that He will provide your meal and that you will take care of business. That comes hard against the ears of a more egalitarian age in which we live. But if we look at what Jesus is trying to say to us, we are reminded that at the very pit of the Christian faith it is not what God can do for us, but what we are called to do in God’s name. If there is a major flaw in Christianity in this country, from liberal to conservative, it is that often what it reflects upon is how God and the Christian faith can serve us. And we often forget what Jesus has said to us.  It is how we can serve God that ultimately will give us the integrity of the faith that we need. As I look at all the church growth literature, I have yet to see one piece of that literature that has said to us, that what we need to do is teach people to sacrifice what they are that they might become what God has intended them to be. That’s not a good advertising campaign. Can you see that? And yet we hear Jesus, in the gospel of Luke, reminds us that we need to do that which God has called us to. What do we share with our brothers and our sisters around the world to profess the Christian faith as we do? We share the kingdom of God that was revealed through Jesus. We share with them a need to give to God our first and greatest alliance above all else. God’s kingdom may become the primary focus of our lives.  No other allegiance comes close to the challenge that that kingdom brings us. We seek to know in this world that God’s justice, God’s mercy, and God’s grace are lived in tangible ways in our lives and in the lives of our brothers and sisters around the world; To know that we are still called to convert a harsh and secular world that swirls all around us; To a kingdom of God that would denounce all other things that are worshiped whether it is materialism or secularism or even our own self-centeredness. The challenge of the gospel is before God’s children and our generation. As we come to this table today, and we come seeking to do what God has told us that we ought to do, because that is our proper place. And knowing as we give up our life, Jesus has told us that in fact, we will gain it. Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.