When Tanya and I had the opportunity to travel
to London last year we greatly enjoyed the ability to travel the subway system,
or the tube as they called it. The tube
was a great way to travel quickly around the city. What we especially enjoyed was the recorded voice that
played constantly when passengers entered or exited the train cars. The voice was recorded in different
versions of the English accent but always said the same three words – mind the gap. One of the recent James Bond movies has a chase scene in a
tube station and I enjoyed hearing that voice in the background – mind the gap. I got so used to hearing that phrase – mind the gap – that I even bought a T-shirt with the expression.
Mind the gap
is a reference to the space between the door of the train and the edge of
the train platform. The gap could
be as wide as several inches and it was possible, if one was not careful, to
allow your foot to slip into that gap and if it did, the results would be
incredibly disastrous.
This morning, as we continue our series of
messages built upon the theme of Building,
we come to a message titled Building
Bridges. It is obvious that we
live in a time of great division in our society, and the vastness of that
divide became glaringly obvious during last year’s election campaign. We are a society where the gaps have
grown so wide and so vast that we are coming to a point where it seems that we
can neither talk to one another nor understand one another across those divides.
That gap was one of the reasons why, some
months ago, I invited Linda Allewalt to write a series of columns with me in
the Sentinel-News about belief and
unbelief. Linda and I have been
acquainted for a number of years, and she is well known for her non-belief
views that she has made known through the Sentinel. The columns were published last summer
and if you are a reader of my column you probably saw them in the paper. I don’t know if they started many
conversations, especially between believers and unbelievers, but I continue to
hear from people about them, some of whom are not at all people of faith, so
perhaps they accomplished a little bit of their purpose. I hope they helped to
bring about a conversation across the very wide gap between belief and
unbelief. This morning I say that
we must mind the gaps that have grown
between us and we must work to build bridges across the divides that have come
between us and threaten to tear us further asunder.
Our Scripture text this morning is comprised to two passages. The first one
printed in the bulletin this morning is from John 15:9-17, which is part of the
long section John shares about the Last Supper. The second passage comes from Acts 15:6-11. I am going to read these in reverse order
from which they are printed, and read them separately.
Hear the words from Acts 15:6-11. Follow along as I read –
Acts
15:6-11
6 The apostles and elders met to consider
this question.
7 After much discussion, Peter got up and
addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among
you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and
believe.
8 God, who knows the heart, showed that he
accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us.
9 He did not discriminate between us and
them, for he purified their hearts by faith.
10 Now then, why do you try to test God by
putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have
been able to bear?
11 No! We believe it is through the grace
of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
1. Bridges Take Us to Where We Wouldn’t Naturally Go.
Back in the 80s, when I was living in Anderson
County, I was a member of one of the local civic clubs. We met at lunchtime on Thursdays and
were typical of most groups in that we all had our preferred places of
seating. One week, after
installing a new president of the club, we came into the room to find a new
arrangement. The new president of
the club had decided we should sit in different places and so had placed our
nametags in a manner that placed us by people we didn’t know as well and seated
us near people we wouldn’t ordinarily sit beside. It seemed like a good idea to me, but some of the clubs
members were surprisingly angry.
They did not want their seating arrangements disturbed! We are, as the old adage reminds us, birds of a feather who flock together. This is the way we are as human beings;
we associate with those who look like us, think like us, believe like us, and
talk like us. Associating with
those who are like us makes us comfortable.
I have longed believed
that much of what affects church life, health, and growth is more sociological rather than theological. Churches are full of people, and it is the natural
inclination of people to gravitate to those who are both like-minded and like us, but
as people who follow Jesus we must resist the temptation to affiliate only with
those who we know, only those who look like us, only those who talk like us, only
those who think like us, and only those who believe like us.
This passage from the book of Acts is part of a
longer one that tells us about what is known as the Council of Jerusalem, which
was convened because of all the Gentiles coming into the early church, which
was at that time mostly Jewish.
Many members of the early church struggled to understand these new
people who were flooding into the church.
They talked different, acted different, thought differently; they were
different in so many ways that large numbers of the early church were not
interested in welcoming them. There were the, two
groups in the early church – those who embraced the new people who were
different and those who said those new people must conform to those already in
the church before they would be accepted.
It was an incredibly important moment in the life of the church, and the
decision made would have tremendously important ramifications for the future of
the church. Thankfully, the
prevailing argument was the one that welcomed the Gentiles into the church
without placing upon them unreasonable burdens or expectations.
At this
point, I think it is important to add a further thought. I have a friend who once described our
church to me in this way – Dave, your
church is a niche church in our community. He went on to say that he was not intending the word niche to be insulting or judgmental in
any way. His use of the word was to
indicate that he saw our church as being different from most churches in the
community, primarily in the fact that we are not governed by a creed and we are
more open and accepting than many other congregations. I think this is true, and it is in
great part due to the fact that we are a Disciples church. Disciples churches, historically, are
very hesitant to tell people what they must believe. Disciples churches, historically, have understood that, in
too many instances, people enshrine their personal opinions as God’s eternal
truth and then require that people follow their opinions as though they are God’s
eternal truth. It is dangerous
when we equate our opinions with God’s truth; they are certainly not one and
the same. In Disciples churches we
acknowledge Peter’s confession of faith – you
are the Christ, the son of the living God (Matthew 16:16) – as the one
creed around which we unite. From
there, we respect the right and the responsibility of each person to come to
their own conclusions about what the Bible means. This is not for everyone, obviously. Sometimes people, inquiring about our
church, will ask me, what does your
church believe? Well, I respond, it depends on who you ask.
Well, they continue, are you conservative, moderate, or liberal,
to which I answer, yes. We are a very diverse collection of
people, some of whom are conservative, while others are moderate or
liberal. In a recent phone call, I
was asked, what are your church’s
doctrinal positions; I looked on your web site and couldn’t find any listed. I told the caller that we don’t have
doctrinal positions. Explaining
that we don’t have creeds and that we encourage people to interpret the Bible
for themselves, I could tell that we were not what the caller was seeking in a
church. I could tell that the
caller believed we should have statements about doctrines and even political
matters. If that is what someone
is looking for in a church, they will not find it here. In fact, I find it troubling that
churches are increasingly reflecting the birds
of a feather flocking together dynamic found in our society. It is possible now to find your own
particular slice of the church pie that almost perfectly suits your individual
taste. You can find liturgical
churches, traditional churches, contemporary churches, biker churches, and
cowboy churches; you can find traditional and modern architecture, storefronts
or home churches; you can find churches that adhere to particular political
ideologies; and churches of any other descriptive term that you so desire. But shouldn’t the church be reflective
of the diversity of God’s wonderful and beautiful creation? It is distressing, I believe, that we
have arrived at the point of such little diversity and variety within
individual congregations.
To return to the analogy of a bridge this
morning, we know that for most of history a river has created a natural
divide. Rivers have almost always become
the borders to mark the territory of different – and sometimes warring –
groups. We see the people on the
other side of the border as being somehow different from us. Most of you know that I play in a band.
All the other members of our band,
as well as our sound person and our merchandise person, live in Indiana. As the only Kentuckian in the band, I get
to drive to Indiana every week for rehearsal. For the two-and-a-half years that
I have been a member of the band I have enjoyed the gift of dealing with the
bridge construction traffic in downtown Louisville. But I like to think positively, so I remind the band that I
would be greatly impoverished if I didn’t get to drive across the river and
visit to Indiana each week. If I
didn’t come to Indiana, I tell them, I would not realize how fortunate I am to
live in Kentucky!
Obviously, bridges take a great deal of time,
effort, and expense. The same is
true of the bridges we are called to build within humanity. It’s tough work to build bridges
between people. It is work that
often progresses slowly, if it progresses at all. And, building bridges to others can be costly, because some
people will not stay with us when we build bridges to groups or individuals of
whom they do not approve. But we
must resist the temptation to remain in our bubbles, living in safe subcultures
where we are no required to interact with those who are different and with
those who make us uncomfortable.
The second passage I will
read this morning is from John 15:9-17. Follow along as I read –
9 “As
the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
10 If you keep my commands, you will remain
in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
11 I have told you this so that my joy may
be in you and that your joy may be complete.
12 My command is this: Love each other as I
have loved you. 13 Greater
love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
14 You are my friends if you do what I
command.
15 I no longer call you servants, because a
servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you
friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
16 You did not choose me, but I chose you
and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and
so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.
17 This is my command: Love each other.
2. God Has Called
Us to Build Bridges out of Love.
I was changing a sign in front of a church
years ago, and I don’t remember the exact message I was putting on the sign but
it was something about love. A guy
walked by on the sidewalk as I was about finished and remarked, Love.
That’s what it’s all about. We just have to keep reminding people of it. We do. We must speak of love often, reminding one another that it
is the central focus of our faith.
The problem we most often confront, in regards
to love, is that we are conditioned by the surrounding culture to view most
everything as being transactional; that is, most everything is based on conditions,
primarily the condition of you do
something for me and I will do something for you. If you are kind to me, I will be kind to you. If you are helpful to me, I will be
helpful to you. If you love me, I
will love you. If you want to see
easy proof of this, you can prove it when you are driving. Let someone into traffic, and most
often they will also let someone into traffic. But if you pull up close to the car in front of you, keeping
someone from cutting into traffic because they tried to bypass everyone else,
they probably won’t let anyone into traffic either. That’s transactional behavior, which is not the way love
works. Love is not a transactional
event, and that is why it is so difficult. Love continues when someone is not kind to us, when someone
is not helpful to us, and when someone does not love us.
In this passage from John’s gospel, Jesus is
very clear about his great command – love
one another. Notice that two
times Jesus uses the word if. In verse 10 he says if you keep my commands, you will remain in my
love. In verse 14 he says you are my friends if you do what I command.
Clearly, Jesus is not making a suggestion; he is issuing a command.
In verse 16 Jesus also spoke about the fruit
that we would bear. He
commissioned us to go and bear fruit – good fruit – but in too many cases it is
a bitter fruit that has been sown by humanity, and it is a bitter harvest that
we are reaping. Have you picked up
a newspaper this weekend? Turned
on the news? How much evidence of
good fruit is printed in the paper or reported on the news? Not much, sadly. Time and again we see one act of
violence bump a previous act of violence from the front page. In recent days we heard much in the
news about the shooting at the Ft. Lauderdale airport; this morning that
headline has been replaced by the headline of someone using a truck in
Jerusalem as a weapon of violence and death. We are reaping a harvest of bitter fruit because humanity
has sown the seeds of hatred and division.
It is easy to believe, considering all that
happens in our world, that it is impossible to bridge the gaps that exist
between us. Perhaps we have grown
too skeptical, and too cynical.
There is no shortage of talk about building bridges and bringing people
together in our society, but not always a lot of evidence of it. We hear the talk after every election
cycle, and then we quickly find it is the same old, same old, and we become
skeptical about whether bridges can really be constructed.
But God
has called us to build bridges of love.
Which means, that person of a different political party, driving us
crazy with their pronouncements?
God loves them, so we must love them. That person of another race that makes us
uncomfortable? God loves them, so
we must love them. That person of
another perspective that we simply can’t understand? God loves them, so we must love them. That person whose religious perspective
is different from us and we think they must surely be a heretic? God loves them, so we must love them. And we must be willing to build that
bridge, as difficult as it might be to do so.
There is a great parable about two brothers who shared adjoining
farms. For over 40 years they worked side-by-side, sharing equipment and
helping each other out whenever needed. Then one day a rift developed. It began
with a small misunderstanding and it grew into a major difference, and finally
it exploded into an exchange of bitter words followed by months of angry
silence.
One day the eldest brother was out in his fields when a truck pulled
up. Out jumped a man who approached, carrying a carpenter’s toolbox. I’m looking for a few days work, he
said. Perhaps you would have a few small
jobs I could do for you? Well, yes I do, said the farmer. See
that creek down there? It’s the
border between my brother’s farm and mine. We don’t get along any more. In fact, I would prefer to not even see his farm. I want you to take that timber over
there by the barn and build me a new fence, a real tall one, so I don’t have to
look over at my brother and his farm.
I’ll leave you to the work.
I will be gone until later this evening and will check on your progress
when I return.
The carpenter was glad to have the work, so set about working. The farmer drove into town and when he
returned at sunset he was shocked to see what the carpenter had done. The carpenter was just finishing the
project, but it was not a fence.
In its place, he had built a bridge, and walking across it was the
farmer’s younger brother. Calling
out to his older brother he said, after
all that’s been done and said I can’t believe you’d still reach out to me. I’m so glad you did. It’s time to put things behind us and
start again. The two brothers
met at the middle of the bridge and embraced. Turning to the carpenter the older brother asked that he
stay on for a few days, but the carpenter replied, I’d love to stay, but I have more bridges to build.
Do you need to build a bridge today? Of course you do, because all of us have a bridge to
build. The real question is, will
we build that bridge?
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