Embracing diversity

This act of Worship at Home has been prepared by Gary Long.
​Today we will be thinking about: being open to the varieties of divine revelation and religious experience,  greeting diversity with hospitality and not fear,  being willing to expand our faith through encounters with otherness. 

Prayer
We come to worship our wonderful God, through Christ Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Abba – Father, Amma – Mother,

• We come to find your forgiveness and your love.
• We come to share our joy and our faith.
• ​​We come together to experience your power in our lives.

Fill our worship with the power and love of your Spirit infilling our lives and over-spilling in exuberant joy. Send the gifts of your Spirit today so that we may build each other up to better grow your Community of Love within this congregation and in this place.
In the name of our Lord, Jesus the Christ
Amen.

StF 99 All creatures of our God and King.

​Prayer: Praise   StF 838 Responsive reading   [Psalm 148] 
1 Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights above.
2 Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his heavenly hosts.
3 Praise him, sun and moon;  praise him, all you shining stars.
4 Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies.

5 Let them praise the name of the Lord,  for at his command they were created,
6 and he established them for ever and ever – he issued a decree that will never pass away.
7 Praise the Lord from the earth,  you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
8 lightning and hail, snow and clouds,  stormy winds that do his bidding,
9 you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars,
10 wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds,
11 kings of the earth and all nations,  you princes and all rulers on earth,
12 young men and women, old men and children.

13 Let them praise the name of the Lord,
    for his name alone is exalted;
    his splendour is above the earth and the heavens.
14 And he has raised up for his people a horn,
    the praise of all his faithful servants,
    of Israel, the people close to his heart.

Praise the Lord.

Lords Prayer 
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.

Save us from the time of trial
and deliver us from evil
For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours
now and forever.
Amen.

StF 103 God is love: let heaven adore him.

Prayer:  Confession - transformation
Gracious God, 
We know how different our lives ought to be when we have come to know Jesus.
We want to say sorry to you, because we know that often, these differences are not seen in our lives.

Because of our hope in Jesus, we know we can be very bold.
Lord, forgive us when we are timid about showing that we belong to Jesus.

We know that your plan is for us all to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.
Lord, forgive us when we do not want to change.
 
We know that because we are working for God, we should keep doing what you ask and not give up.
Lord, forgive us when we do not stick to the tasks that you give us. 

Thank you that because of your love shown to us in Jesus,
we can be forgiven and have a new start.
We are forgiven, loved and free.

Help us to put our confidence in you rather than in our own strength,
so that we may love as you love us, and grow more like Jesus.

Amen.

Introduction to theme & readings:  Theme:  Embracing diversity
God loves diversity.
Today we will be thinking about: being open to the varieties of divine revelation and religious experience,  greeting diversity with hospitality and not fear,  being willing to expand our faith through encounters with otherness. 
The church should embrace diversity, whether ethnically, racially, theologically, or sexually. Embrace does not always mean acceptance of all behaviours and opinions, but it means openness to the other’s experience.
There are two readings and two talks.  The 1st reading is from John's gospel.  We are at the Last Supper.  Judas has just left to go and betray Jesus.

Reading 1: John 13:31-35

Talk 1
If you knew you were about to die, what would you tell the people you love? What cherished hope or dream would you share? What last, urgent piece of advice would you offer?
In our Gospel reading this week, we hear Jesus’s answer to this difficult question.  
Judas has left the Last Supper in order to carry out his betrayal, the crucifixion fast approaching, and Jesus knows that his disciples are about to face the greatest devastation of their lives.   So he gets right to the point.  No parables, no stories, no pithy sayings.   Just one commandment.  One simple, straightforward commandment, summarizing Jesus’s deepest desire for his followers: 
“Love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Let's just reflect on what Jesus doesn’t say.   When death comes knocking, and he has only a few hours left to communicate the heart of his message to his disciples, he doesn’t say, “Believe the right things.”   He doesn’t say, “Maintain personal and doctrinal purity.”   He doesn’t say, “Worship like this or attend a church like that.”   He doesn’t even say, “Read your Bible,” or “Pray every day,” or “Preach the Gospel to every living creature.”  
He says, “Love one another.”   That’s it.  “Love one another.”  
And so often we’ve made a mess of this commandment over the last two thousand years.   New Testament scholar D.A Carson said: “This new command is simple enough for a toddler to memorize and appreciate, and yet it is profound enough that the most mature believers are repeatedly embarrassed at how poorly they comprehend it and put it into practice.”

When I look at my own life, it’s not too hard to explain why I, and possibly you, fail to follow Jesus’s dying wish.  Love makes us vulnerable, and I’d rather not be vulnerable.   Love requires trust, and I’ve been let down so often. Love spills over margins and boundaries, and I feel safer inside my comfort zone.   Love takes time, effort, discipline, and transformation, and I am just so busy – or is it lazy?      
And yet Jesus didn’t say,  “This is my suggestion.”    He said, “This is my commandment.”   Meaning, it’s not a choice.  Not a matter of personal preference; it’s a matter of obedience to the one we call Lord.  
But what does Jesus mean by this command to love?   Does love obey decrees?  My guess is, most of us would say no.   Shaped as we are by Hollywood, or Jane Austen novels, or romantic poetry, we usually think of love as spontaneous and free-flowing.   We fall in love.  Love is blind, it happens at first sight, it breaks our hearts, and its course never runs smooth.  

Even if we put clichés aside, we know that authentic love can’t be manipulated, simulated, or rushed without suffering distortion.  Those of us who have kids understand full well that commanding them to love each other never works.  The most we can do is insist that they behave as if they love each other: “Share your toys.” “Say sorry.”  “Don’t hit.”  “Use kind words.”   But these actions — often performed with gritted teeth and rolling eyes — aren’t the same as what Jesus is talking about.  

Jesus doesn’t say, “Act as if you love.”   He doesn’t give his disciples (or us) the easy “out” of doing nice things with clenched hearts.  He says, “Love as I have loved you.”  As in, genuinely.  As in, the whole package.  Authentic feeling, deep engagement, generous action.  

So, is Jesus asking for the impossible?   Maybe he is.   G.K Chesterton once wrote that "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult and left untried."  
Imagine what would happen if we all took this commandment of Jesus’s seriously?  If we obeyed orders and cultivated “impossible” love?  I ask these questions fearfully, because I don’t know how to answer them - even for myself. 
I mean, I know fairly well how to do things.  I know how to help at the Foodbank.   Or bring dessert to the church pot luck.   Or donate to my favourite charities.  

But do I know how to love as Jesus loved?  To feel a depth of compassion that’s gut-punching?  To experience a hunger for justice so fierce and so urgent that I rearrange my life in order to pursue it?   To empathize until my heart breaks?  
Do I really want to? 
Most of the time I don’t face up to the challenge.  I want to be safe.  I want to choose the people I love based on my own affinities and preferences — not on Jesus’s all-inclusive commandment.   I want to keep my circle of concern small and manageable.   Even there love is hard work and challenging, even among people we love – just ask a couple who have been married for decades!

Charitable actions are relatively easy.  But cultivating my heart?  Preparing and pruning it to love?  Becoming vulnerable in authentic ways to the world’s pain?   Those things are hard.  Hard and costly.
And yet this was Jesus’s dying wish.  Which means that we have a God who first and foremost wants every one of his children to feel loved.  Not shamed. Not punished.  Not chastised.  Not judged. Not isolated.   But loved.
But that’s not all.  Jesus follows his commandment with an exhilarating and terrifying promise: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”   Love is the litmus test of Christian living.  Our love for each other is how the world will know who we are and whose we are.   Our love for each other is how the world will see, taste, touch, hear, and find Jesus.  It’s through our love that we will embody Jesus.

I can’t speak for you, but this makes me tremble. 

What Jesus seems to be saying is that if we fail to love one another, the world won’t know what it needs to know about God, and in the terrible absence of that knowing, it will believe falsehoods that break God’s heart.  That the whole Jesus thing is a sham.  That there really is no transformative power in the resurrection.   That God is a mean, angry, vindictive parent, determined only to shame and punish his children.   That the universe is a cold, meaningless place, not a place shot through with love.  
This is the power we wield in our decisions to love or not love.  The responsibility we shoulder, whether we want to or not. 
  
But here’s our saving grace: Jesus doesn’t leave us alone and unsupported.  We are not direction-less in the wilderness.  He gives us a road map, a clear and beautiful way forward: “As I have loved you.”   Follow my example, he says.  Do what I do. Love as I love.  Live as you have seen me live. 
Weep with those who weep.   Laugh with those who laugh.  Touch the untouchables.  Feed the hungry.   Welcome the child.   Release the captive.  Forgive the sinner.  Confront the oppressor.  Comfort the oppressed.  Wash each other’s feet.  Hold each other close.  Tell each other the truth.   Guide each other home.
In other words, Jesus’s commandment to us is not that we should wear ourselves out, trying to conjure love from our own easily depleted resources. 
​
Rather, it’s that we're invited to abide in the holy place where all love originates.   We can make our home in Jesus’s love — the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.   Our love is not our own; it is God’s, and God our source is without limit, without end.  There are no parched places God will not drench if we ask.  Our call is to mirror God’s love for us. 
“Love one another as I have loved you.”  For our own sakes.  And for the world’s.

StF 242 A new commandment 

Reading 2: Acts 11:1-18

Talk 2
How wide do you cast your net of love?  More significantly how wide should you be casting your net of love?
Our passage in Acts answers that question for Peter in one specific situation – but one with implications all the way down to us here today. 
    • Is salvation restricted to a small group or are the gates of salvation wide open?  Do we, in practice, experience our faith as limited to those like us.? Do we prefer our brand of spirituality, our type of church, our culture, ethnicity?  Do we assume that our traditions, - what we hold dear spiritually - are the fullest expressions of divine wisdom and handiwork? 
    • In fact, God is generous in revelation and salvation, and loves everyone. Our ways are not God’s ways. There is a “wideness in God’s mercy” that far exceeds our own.
In the reading from Acts, Peter is defending breaking down barriers between Jews and Gentiles. 
    • The Gentiles were considered by some early Christians as inferior and unworthy of the early church’s message and mercy.  In telling of his encounter with Cornelius, Peter proclaims that all are chosen, not just one nationality or way of worship and lifestyle.  This statement is not arbitrary but the result of divine inspiration.  God has given Cornelius and his family a full portion of the Holy Spirit and Peter affirmed these former “outsiders” as full-fledged members of the emerging Christian movement. 
    • Acceptance is not grounded in homogeneity or uniformity of ethnicity or religiosity but in divine blessing.  In accepting Cornelius as fully part of the Christian way, the emerging faith is acknowledging that diversity is a gift of God and that God will be revealed in a variety of ways, according to culture, ethnicity, and personal experience. 
    • God’s love embraces everyone, and if God’s love embraces everyone, then every person is first-class in the church and in the world.
Story:
A man took his new gun dog on a trial hunt. He shot a duck and it fell into the lake. The dog ran across the water, picked up the duck and ran back with it to his master. 
The man couldn’t believe his eyes. He shot another duck and again it fell into the lake and, again, the dog scampered across the water and brought it back to him. 

When he got home, the man asked his neighbour to go hunting with him the next day, but he didn’t tell his neighbour anything about the dog’s ability to walk on water. As on the previous day, he shot a duck and it fell into the lake. The dog ran across the water and got it. 

His neighbour didn’t say a word. Several more ducks were shot that day and each time the dog raced across the water to retrieve them and each time the neighbour said nothing. 

Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, the dog owner asked his neighbour, "Have you noticed anything different about my dog?" "Of course," replied the neighbour, "But I wasn’t mentioning it out of politeness. Your dog doesn’t know how to swim. And if it can’t swim, it’s no good as a gun dog."

How often do we reject people or think them inferior to us because they look different, or they act differently or they think differently from us? How often do we think that only people who believe exactly what we believe are acceptable to God?
Every sermon needs a “so what”:
    • The “so what” here is that God loves diversity 
    • We should be open to varieties of divine revelation and religious experience, and greet diversity with hospitality and not fear.  Be willing to expand our faith through encounters with otherness. 
    • The church should embrace diversity, whether ethnically, racially, theologically, or sexually. 
    • Embrace does not always mean acceptance of all behaviours and opinions, but it means openness to the other’s experience.
No one and nothing is unclean. 
    • No place is without divine revelation, if we believe God to be omnipresent and omni-active – present and active everywhere. 
    • Earlier we read Psalm 148, in which the Psalmist proclaims a world of praise. In its own way, everything praises God – the breaching whale and the nesting osprey, the grasshopper lingering on a backyard flower, the Muslim bowing in prayer, the faithful Catholic praying her rosary, the scholar poring over texts, the young child at play. 
    • All things, at their deepest, praise God by their very being. 

Today’s readings invite us welcome all, embrace the diversity that God has created. 
    • They invite us to action, practical expressions of love. 
    • We live in a world where no one is truly a stranger. We are all children of God’s energy of love, and bound together as companions on our fragile planet. 
    • Each moment can be saving, for as we save one soul, help one person, we contribute to God’s world-saving quest.
Amen.

StF 615 Let love be real .

Prayers for others
Loving God,
We rejoice in your love, we rejoice in your promise of a new heaven and a new earth. While we await that we pray for our world.
We pray for our country as we still try to work out the effects of Brexit and continue to learn to live with COVID. We also pray for those countries yet to have many people vaccinated. Help us to share so that the world maybe safe.
We pray for a world full of war and hatred where there are many tears- may you bring your love. Help us to love even our enemies and to serve you.
Merciful God we pray for your church that we may show your love for one another and to your world. In Jesus name. Amen

StF 409 Let us build a house.

Prayer of Offering, Dedication & Thanks 
Loving God, Father & Mother of all that is. 
Thank you for the many good gifts you grant us, especially your love shown in Jesus.
Thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit to guide and strengthen us day by day.
Thank you that we are called to be your children - to grow more like you every day.
We bring our offerings to you and ask that you bless them.
We bring our gifts and talents to you and ask that you bless them.
We bring our lives to you and ask that you bless them.
Amen.

Blessing
May the God who raised Jesus from the dead fill you with new life,
May the love of Jesus fill every moment of your existence, 
May the Holy Spirit breath her power into every fibre of your being.
Amen.