Our Mission as a Church, Part 2

In the last post, we looked at the first part of one of our collects (a prayer that gathers our thoughts and intentions). I’m going to print it again here for your easy reference:

Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Keep Us in Your Love

In Part 1, we looked at how God keeps (protects) us in his steadfast faith. But we also ask him to keep us not only in that faith, but in that love. When we ask God to allow the Scripture to mess with us, it’s because he wants to shape us in a very specific direction. The Bible puts it this way: “To be conformed to the image of his Son.”

In other words, what should be happening to us is that as we’re yielding to the Scripture, wrestling with it, thinking about its implications, God is using it to change us. And the way he is changing us is that he’s making each of us more like Jesus. If that’s not happening to me, again, then I’m not wrestling with the Scripture in a serious way. Because to make a commitment to Christ is, in fact, to make a commitment to personal change.

If you’re saying, “I want to follow Jesus, but I want to live my life the way I am right now, thank you very much,” then you’re actually lying to yourself, because God is not interested in that. When we become a part of the church, we make a commitment to follow Jesus. That means he calls the shots, and I make the time to listen, to figure out what he is saying. And that becomes the direction of my life.

And what happens is that my commitment is continually changing me in a way that looks more and more like the love Jesus embodies and expresses. It’s continuing to stretch my heart in places I wouldn’t naturally be stretched, because it’s calling me to care about not just people who are in my family or who look like me. In fact, my commitment to Jesus expands my vision, because as it says in John 3:16, “God so loved …” Who? “The world.”

What does that mean? It means God cares just as much about somebody who’s completely different from me as he does somebody who looks just like me. God cares just as much for my political opponents as he does for me. God cares just as much for the people that I’m glad to have in my neighborhood as he does for the people I hope don’t move into my neighborhood. Are you there?

And see that God is trying to push us, because we by our very nature are clear boundary keepers when it comes to our own affections. There are people we love, there are people we like, there are people we are nice to whom we don’t like, and then there are people we hope we don’t run into. And we can probably name people in each of those categories, right?

But God comes in and says, “Guess what? Those sorts of categories don’t mean a lot to me. I want to work in you in a way that causes you to learn how to love in a way that’s bigger than your boundaries.”

Because that’s what the love of God looks like. It’s always breaking through the walls that we create, and often for good reason, to cause us to invite, love, and care for, and even perhaps be connected to people who are just not like us at all.

All of this takes place only through his grace, meaning (as we say in another prayer), “I will, with God’s help,” meaning “because I need God’s help to do this.” And that moves us into the next part of the prayer, which we’ll discuss in Part 3.

How does your life show evidence that God is keeping you “in his love”? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on June 17, 2018, at Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Winter Haven, Florida.) 

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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