The Joy of Including
(Ephesians
3:1-12)
10:30 am, Sun, Jan 5, 2014;
Windsor UBC; J G White
As we come out
of the stories of Christmas, I notice that these are tales that include
strangers. Joseph and Mary are strangers in Bethlehem, and don’t even find a
sensible play to stay. Shepherds from
the countryside are angelically urged to visit the holy family in their
makeshift B&B. A year or two on,
strange travellers from the east come to find and worship and offer gifts.
This Child, this
Jesus, grows to be a man who teaches about life and God, who touches people
with healing, who trains disciples to follow the pattern, and who faces His
death in such a way that all humankind can benefit. All
humankind.
Jesus was
Jewish, after all, not of any other faith, and was the awaited Jewish
Messiah. Yet it became clear that this
spiritual role extended far beyond Judaism.
Jesus is the Saviour of the world, not just the chosen people. God so loved the world.
This is the
emphasis of Epiphany, January 6, a day to celebrate the story of the Magi, and
then have a season to celebrate the showing
of the Saviour to everyone. So we read from Ephesians 3 today. The preacher here speaks of the mystery of
Christ that is being shared, in former
generations it was not made known to humankind, but it has now been revealed to
his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become
fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ
Jesus through the gospel.
The Jewish
Messiah is not just for the Jewish people: Jesus is good news for everyone on the planet. So we are in the joyful role of including everyone in the life of Jesus, the Gospel,
the Kingdom. We have the great pleasure of including people.
But, is it a joy?
For the Lord to
use us to reach out to others, we must be transformed by the renewing of our
minds. For our minds are not always set
to include people. Most of us live in a
world of insiders and outsiders; people who belong and “come-from-aways”; us and them.
An acquaintance
from the other end of the Valley posted an article from the Coast on Facebook a few weeks ago, called, “Saying Farewell to
Nova Scotia for a Reason.” My “Facebook friend” moved here from Ontario less
than a decade ago and is now set to leave and go back. She prefaced the article with her own
comment…
Nova Scotia can't keep young people---no
surprise---but just as many of us over 50 are coming and then leaving again for
reasons far more basic; the inability to get genuinely accepted by anyone
except other "ex pats" a problem particularly acute in smaller
communities. Something I have never before encountered before moving here: that
no matter what---I will always be an outsider. I hear the same story even from
Nova Scotians living here, who come from a different area of the province:
which strikes me as clan thinking at its most basic level. So I go back from
whence I came.....
We Nova Scotians
can be known for being very friendly to visitors, tourists. But when it comes to someone moving in next
door, we are less than welcoming.
This challenge
of our own, especially rural, culture is one that I am sure Jesus would have us
face. The challenge to be welcoming, be
including, be less “us and them.” If
people from West Hants, say, share
this petty attitude about strangers,
doesn’t the Spirit of the living God call us, in churches, to grow into a
better attitude than the average person?
Is this not possible? As one
church website put it, we can be a people
committed to the ancient Christian virtue of hospitality, or the love of strangers. (www.knoxmet.org/about.html)
This is a love available to us, in Christ, and much needed.
It is the joy of
welcoming strangers that Paul, or whoever wrote Ephesians, had. Grace
was given me to bring the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ,
and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in
God… As you peruse these long
sentences in Ephesians 3, note the exuberance, the enthusiasm, the joy! The joy of sharing what was once for one
religious sect. Now, everyone is
welcome.
Is everyone
welcome in our lives? Not that we each
have to be a gregarious extrovert, an in-your-face welcoming committee of
one. (One of the most helpful books I
read last year was Adam McHugh’s Introverts
in the Church: Finding our Place in an Extroverted Culture. I’m sure some of this will leak out in sermons
yet to come.) We each have a calling, whatever our personality and giftedness,
to be part of the team that finds joy in including people. Including them in the fellowship of those
seeking redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ.
The mystery of
the Gospel that Ephesians 3 speaks of is that the Jesus events, and Jesus
Himself, are available and intended for everyone. Let this be the root of our attitudes, and
our joys.
I’ve been
thinking this past week: there likely is a bit of a ladder of joys when it
comes to interacting with “outsiders.”
Here’s my first, rough draft of “stages of joy” when we approach
strangers…
The joy of
belonging (when others don’t).
The joy of
knowing what’s going on.
The joy of
thinking oneself right.
The joy of
knowing more than someone else.
The joy of
correcting someone. (These are not good joys!)
The joy of being
nosy about others.
The joy of being
curious about someone, genuinely interested.
The joy of
seeing curiosity in someone else.
The joy of
seeing change in someone.
The joy of learning
from someone.
The joy of
seeing someone start to belong.
The joy of
seeing blessings for someone else.
The joy of
seeing the church be better by including others.
The joy of
seeing faith grow in someone.
The joy of
seeing a person take his or her own
faith journey.
The joy of
seeing someone go father, do better than you.
It can be worth
praying through our attitudes, and the sources of our joys. The Lord longs to develop our joy.
The author of
Ephesians claims, “Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift
of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power.” By the grace of the God who died for us, we
too can be graciously gifted to include “strangers.” Then, we will welcome the bright, intelligent
stranger who moves into the neighbourhood from Ontario. Then, we will be warm toward the totally
irreligious acquaintance we run into each week.
Then we will have joy in getting to know people like… Kevin.
At his baptism, Kevin introduced himself to his new church
family as an “ex-drug addict, schizophrenic, and — most of all — a child of God.”
Here is his story, told last year in Mosaic
magazine. [Home Church, by Giselle Randall]
“There I was,
living in the street. Homeless,
friendless, drugs and alcohol my only companions,” Kevin said as he shared his
testimony before being baptized. “Let me tell you — winter is very, very cold in
those conditions.” Some people helped him find a room in an apartment. “I lay
on the bed, over the blankets, too afraid of what I might find under them. I
started to have convulsions… but when the ambulance came, I refused their
help.”
Feeling like he was about to die, Kevin suddenly felt
God’s hand on him. He remembered the words of an ex-girlfriend: “Don’t wait to
lose everything before stopping all this.” With the last of his energy, he
reached out for help and went back to a detox centre.
After rehab, Kevin began attending Église Voix de
l’Evangile, a small church in Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec. “He’d go away
and we wouldn’t see him for a while, then he’d come back and we’d receive him
and just show him love,” says the pastor, Michel Martel. “Slowly but surely, by
being patient with him, just being with him at times, he’s starting to really
understand what it means to be a Christian.”
Kevin was one of five people baptized on Sunday,
August 4, 2013 at Église Voix de l’Evangile, a church plant that started as a small
group in Pastor Michel Martel’s home in 2009. Today the church meets in a
coffee house downtown and has grown from 12 to 40 people on average. It is one
of about five evangelical churches in Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, a city of
100,000. Only one percent of Quebec’s population identify as evangelical
Christian.
Of this gospel I have become a servant. (Eph 3:7)
Of this gospel
you have become a servant.
Let us
serve.
By the grace of God, let
us find joy in including others.
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