In the World, Not of the World, For the World

Preparation notes for an extemporaneous sermon given on May 20, the seventh Sunday of Eastertide, at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH.


Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 
Psalm 1 
1 John 5:9-13
 John 17:6-19


The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

Last week I tried to answer the question why come to church.  I want to continue to answer that question this week.  
Perhaps we could put it the way many people do:  “Church.  what’s the point?”
When Jesus knew that he wouldn’t be with the disciples much longer, he taught them about how they should live when he is gone.  He gave them the picture of the vine and told them that they must abide by faith in God’s grace and only through abiding would they be able to produce the fruit that they were made to produce.

The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

Now when we ask the question.  Or make the accusation: “Church.  what’s the point?”  We assume that we’re all agreed on what we mean by the word church.  
But since the word church can mean a few different things it’s a word that notoriously leads to miscommunication.

We call this the Valley church and by that we mean a building.  For many “the church” means the Roman Catholic hierarchy.  We say we’re going to church on Sunday and by that we mean an event that takes places at 10 AM and involves reading the Bible, singing, prayer, and preaching.  But the word church as it’s used in the New Testament almost always means one thing: an assembly of people.  The Greek word ekklesia meant a gathering of people who have been called out for some political or religious or social event.  And all throughout the New Testament it is this word that is being translated into our English word “church.”  
Church is a gathering of people.  Not just meaning the gathering of people every Sunday for service and Bible Study, Fridays in the summer for potlucks, and Wednesdays once a month for Council.  
It’s deeper than that.  The church is a community that has been called out for a purpose.  And that purpose is to manifest the way of life of the kingdom of God.  This is the vine image.  As the followers of Jesus abide in the vine, they are able to bear fruit.  And that fruit is for the sake of those who are not on the vine.  So the church, the people who have by faith and baptism become part of a different way of living, a different way of looking at things, the church exists for the sake of showing a different way of being in the world.
 
The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

So when Jesus says “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” what does he mean by “world.”
“World” used here and many places in this gospel means those who reject the message, the revelation of God in Christ.  The revelation is that God loves the world, that Christ came not to give a message of condemnation, but of salvation.  But the kingdom of God, the inbreaking of God’s new spiritual activity is a threat to the status quo and the light when shed on injustice makes the unjust violent in its resistance.  The world is the world insofar as it resists Christ’s revelation of God’s new way.
By baptism we’re a consecrated people.  
Jesus prays in today’s gospel reading, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”  To sanctify is to set something apart.  It is to consecrate it for a higher purpose.  We are called out to be different than the world, to be separate.  We are called to a live a different way than the way of life which excuses injustice and oppression if it is profitable.  We are called to the light, to love -- to wholeness and not destruction.
So often this call to be different, to be set apart, to be holy, has been understood individualistically and selfishly.  Hence the phrase “holier than thou.”
But Jesus prays for his disciples that they would be sanctified in the truth.  And we learn from reading John’s gospel that Jesus is the truth.  In fact when Jesus prays “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth,”  he is speaking about himself.  In John’s gospel we read that in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God and that that word became flesh and dwelt among us.  To be sanctified in the truth, then, is to be sanctified in Christ.  So what does that mean?  
It means to be set apart to be little Christs in the world, to be corporately Christ, the revelation of the glory of God, in the world.  Just as a Christ was set apart on earth for a mission to display the glory of God’s love, the disciples are being set apart for a mission to demonstrate that love by their life together in community.
We may like to do our own thing, to have our own spiritual path which is completely private.  We may like to keep to ourselves or to our own safe haven of like-mindeds.  But that’s not church.  To be church, to be the ones called out by Christ, is to be in the world.  This means in the community, involved with other people, participating in the events, relating to the people that we encounter in the marketplace, in the everyday world.  It is a call to be in the world, to be in the midst unjust systems, of broken relationships, of oppressive corporations.  It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick.  The community of faith are not called to separatism and seclusion, but to be incarnate in the everyday, to work within the normal in order to testify to extraordinary, the new in Christ.

The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

Jesus says here, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”  The disciples by being called out to a new a way of life, leaving their nets and starting down the road with this rogue Rabbi, are becoming separate from the world.  Many have understood this “not of the world” in different ways.  This is the idea behind monasticism -- to live a separate and contained existence in a cloister.  That is not what is being said here.  Many of us literalists will hear “not of the world” and think immediately of alien life forms and UFOs.  Neither monks nor ALFs are the picture here.  And this is because “the world” is not some actual building or actual group of people.  “The world” is the people who reject the light of God’s love.  And because “the world” is those who reject Christ, all of us are the world.  The line between church and world is drawn down the middle of all of our hearts.  We are all those who have heard the call of Christ to live differently according to the law of love grounded in faith in God’s forgiveness and love for us.  Yet if we’re honest, we are not always loving and giving people.  We are not always those who have faith.  We are not always “abiding in the vine.”  The line between church and world is drawn down the middle of our hearts.  With one breath we praise God and with another we curse our neighbor whom God loves.  Salt and fresh water pour forth from the same stream with us.  We do not become part of the church because we have attained a place of spiritual arrival, we come because we know that there is something beyond the determined, what is -- there is a freedom, a what ought to be --there is possibility for love and for grace and for change in our own lives in the way of Christ which we receive by faith.
We have the line of church and world drawn down the center of our hearts, but by baptism that line has been drawn.  Before faith and baptism our hearts did not know that there was another way to live, another way to be, a new kind of thinking and feeling, freed from the tyranny of self and sin and meaninglessness and death.  Now we have participation in the way of Christ through faith and we live in the world but have started to learn what it means to live “not of the world.”  
Because we have world in each of our hearts we are saved from the possibility of exalting ourselves over others.  We are not trying to say that we have arrived, only that there is a better way, a better road and that we’ve discovered this.  Come and see.
To be “not of the world” is to inevitably question the practices and ideas of the world around us.  Where there is injustice, where there is fear-mongering, where there is guilt-tripping, where there is violence, we see by contrast with the light, the power of darkness and its grip on human minds and hearts.
Where there is exploitation, we grieve because we have come to follow the one who sought not to be served but to serve but we also know that the roots for exploitation, the selfishness that is its seed remains a part of our own psyche that is only slowly being healed by God’s love.
The church is in the world but not of the world, it must be in order for the world to see a different way of being.

The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

To be sanctified in the truth is to be made holy, to be set apart for the purpose of living a life of a distinct nature according to the call of God.  This call to be set apart is not for the sake of our own enjoyment or personal fulfillment (that may be at times an experience but the persecuted church in all times and places can remind us that it is not necessarily the case).  This call to be set apart in a particular and peculiar way of living is not for our own sake but for the sake of God and our neighbors.  The church exists as a gathering of people who demonstrate a different way of life than the ways of life around them.  
Jesus does not pray that God take the disciples out of the world.  If the disciples are taken out of the world, then the world has no way of coming to know Jesus’ way.  They may wish that Jesus prayed the opposite -- the earliest readers of John’s gospel would be Christians who lived under threat of persecution.
Jesus does not pray that God take the disciples out of the world because though they do not belong to the world, they have a mission to the world.  As Christ demonstrated the kingdom of God through his teaching and care for the poor, the marginalized, the demon-possessed, the sick, the gathering, the church, the ones called out from the world are to demonstrate the kingdom of God, embody the kingdom of God in their time, in their place in the care for each other and in their care for the poor, the marginalized and the sick.  The church is set apart to manifest the glory of the love of God to a world that needs to know and experience that love.  And that love needs to be embodied in the way of life of the members of the Christian community.  They will follow the example of Christ and put one another’s needs above their own.  And this basin and towel servanthood education will not only help them show the same kind of self-giving love to the stranger and the enemy, but will create a new kind of community with a new kind of way of relating to one another that is as attractive as it is hospitable.
Gandhi is famous for saying “be the change you want to see in the world.”
This is the call of Christ to the church.  Be the change that God has for the world.  And this has to be lived out in community because love cannot be understood if there is not a community in which to show that love and to learn how to love unselfishly.  So the church is called to be a community that manifests a way of relating, a power dynamic that is a response to God’s radical grace and forgiveness toward us.  This new way of life, lived out in community becomes a living witness to grace that others will experience when they encounter the community of believers.
And this has ramifications beyond the personal.  The church can testify to an economics, a politics, a sociality that is not grounded on power and violence and greed, but on love and faith and grace.  And that is the kingdom of God -- a new community, a new possibility for humanity made known by the grace of God and carried on generation after generation by the actions of those who have come to believe Christ’s revelation of God’s radical love.

The Church is in the world, not of the world, for the world

The mission is carried on by the disciples.
Two extremes are to be so in the world that we are indistinguishable in our lifestyles and to be so apart from the world that we live only for ourselves and maintaining our own “holy” identity and image.
We are not called out of the world for the sake of leaving the world, we are called out of the world in order to offer a different way of being.
We are carrying forward the misson of Christ to manifest the love of God, to be light in darkness.  This is why we come together to pray for one another and with one another, this is why we listen to one another’s needs and offer to help one another and share one another’s burdens.  This is why we raise money to be a blessing to those in need.  This is why we come together for Sunday services and other times.  Because we have been set apart to a new and different way of life than what is offered in our consumerist, partisan society.
In a world of division and fear of the other, we are called to trust God and love the neighbor and even the enemy.  Not because we will feel good about ourselves for doing it or because people will admire us, but because that’s what Christ came for.  That’s the purpose of God with us, Emmanuel.  Christ is Savior because Christ rescues us from the ways of life we construct as humans who are bent on self-preservation, self-advancement, self-gratification.  Christ is Savior because Christ offers us a way to die to ourselves and rise to a new life where all is for God and we can love and not fear our neighbor.

“Church.  what’s the point?”

This is the kingdom of God.  This is God’s coup d’etat, in Karl Barth’s words.  This is how grace is manifested, in a new community founded on God’s love.  And all of the powers of darkness tremble at a church which has learned to witness to this radical new way.