Sermon prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

8:30 & 11:00 Morning Promise services – 5-5-02

by Gregory S. Kaurin, associate pastor

 

texts: Ephesians 2:10, 12-22, & Leviticus 19:33-34 (also Luke 15:20-32)

 

Sermon:

My Fellow Aliens

 

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This morning, we focus on Messiah Lutheran Church’s 5^th Mark of Discipleship: Invitation.  We are called to be inviting others to know Christ’s love.  You can get a sense of this by looking at the first full phrase in our Mission Statement: “In response to God’s love we are called to lead all to Christ…”  That’s a big challenge for our whole congregation and the Christian Church.  And striving for it means each of us doing our part where we are and with the gifts.  You and I are each called to invite others to know Christ’s love.

Of the Marks, this might be the one that makes us the most nervous, because it really pushes us out of our comfort zone.  Several weeks ago, I mentioned a study that found that over 80% of new people in church come because someone invites them.  That same study found that, of those already in churches, only 25% feel comfortable inviting.  So over 80% are coming because they’re invited, but only 25% feel prepared enough to do the inviting!

I want to change all that.  I want us to change that number.  I want you to leave today feeling more motivated, more comfortable and more able to invite people—not just into church buildings—but also into the love that you experience from God, the love he showed all of us through Jesus Christ.  To do that, we will try to answer to three basic questions about Christian invitation.  Question #1: Why?  Why should we be inviting others?  #2: What?  Into what are we inviting them?  #3 How?  How can we invite them?  Where do we start?  What might we say?  As we discuss each these questions, we’ll focus on three passages from the 2^nd chapter of Ephesians.

So let’s begin answering this first question of “Why?” by reading together this passage from Ephesians 2: 10 & 12 on the screen. 

 

 

Paul is sometimes a bit hard to understand.  As we go through these passages, remember that he is talking to Gentiles and explaining to them how it is that they are a part of the promises handed down through the Jews, through the Old Testament.  “Because of Jesus Christ,” he’s telling them, “Israel has become the light to all the nations.”  Because of Jesus, the whole world is open to God’s salvation.

But first look at that 10^th verse.  We’ve touched on this before: God didn’t put each of us on this earth for the soul and only purpose of saving us.  He made us in order to live in a loving relationship with him and with his creation. 

There’s a reason why—when you got baptized, or when you first became Christians—that God didn’t just say, “Okay, you’re saved!” and immediately zap you up into heaven.  That’s not the end of your story.  It’s as Paul said in that passage, “We are God’s works of art, created in Christ for the good works, which he designated, planned, to be our way of life.”  We aren’t here just to be saved, but also to live in, respond to, and spread that salvation as our way of life!

God made you like a beautiful living work of art, loved you as his child, and he calls you to tell others that that is how he feels about them, too.  Just as someone once told you, we need to tell others.  We invite others into Christ’s love because God has called us to make invitation a part of our way of life.

 

We should also be inviting others out of a sense of humility.  Let’s be honest: when it comes to the grace of God, we are all on alien territory here!  If God and his throne suddenly appeared… just imagine that the ceiling above us is ripped off.  We look up, and there’s the Almighty Father looking down at us.  It’s like he’s looking directly at you—your inner thoughts, knowing everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve left undone, everything you’ve ever thought.  You look up and you know that he knows…everything.  He should be shaking his head.  He should be glaring at you, at all of us.  Instead, because of the face of Jesus, we know that he is smiling, loving, forgiving, and accepting. 

This is alien soil for all of us.  To keep it to ourselves—whether because we don’t want to spoil it by inviting in the “wrong” kinds of people, or because we’re too self-conscious, or shy—we’re acting like we naturally belong.  Worse, we’re missing the true feast and celebration by the simple fact that we’re not sharing it.  This feast and celebration must be open and inviting, or it ceases to exist.

In this lesson from Ephesians, Paul was talking to the Gentiles, explaining how they and the entire world had come to be invited into God’s feast.  I think this relates to Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.  In that parable, a whole lot of people think that the wayward son, who came back to his father’s house, is the main subject of the story.  His character definitely showed the huge forgiveness and mercy of God.  But I think that the real subject in that parable was the older brother.  That is to whom Jesus was talking when he told the story, to all the “older brothers” gathered around him.

The older brother had been with his father all this time: working, responsible, and decent.  When the younger brother—wasteful, irresponsible, and messed-up—came home, the elder brother was tempted to exclude himself from the feast and celebration.  “If you’re going to just let him back into our house…after all I’ve done for you, I won’t be a part of this!”

You see, the older brother had forgotten something.  Through all his work and decent living, he had forgotten that it wasn’t his work and responsibility that earned him a place in his father’s house.  It was his father; his place in the house had always been given by the constant grace and love of his father, long before any of his labor and good living.  In a sense, he was still just a welcome guest in his father’s house…just like his younger wayward brother.  Until he, like his father, was willing to welcome his younger brother, he would miss the most important gift that his father offered: free, unearned, and undeserved love and acceptance.

Those who want to exclude others, and those who simply avoid inviting others to God’s Table, end up excluding themselves by their attitudes or their unwillingness to share.  You and I don’t naturally belong to God’s Table.  We don’t earn our place through time or efforts.  We are invited, each and every time.  We are invited, and can invite others to join us, because we are all equally alien in the Land of God’s Grace.  Once we realize that we are fellow-aliens, that is what makes us into fellow-residents, brothers and sisters, yoked together by God’s grace and invitation.

So, why do we invite?  Because God has made it our way of life, and because we know that we are all in this together.  We need each other.

 

Question #2: What?  Into what are you inviting them?  Let’s read this next passage.

 

 

I would summarize the point that St. Paul made to us Gentiles like this: your forgiveness and salvation is grace.  A gift.  And, because the Almighty God gave it, it is huge and eternally powerful.  Nothing in creation can take it from you, not even angels or powers or demons, not even the devil himself can force your salvation from you.

So, if your salvation and eternal life is that secure, then one of the biggest residual gifts that God has given to you is: Peace.  What are people looking for?  Peace.  Christ said it to his disciples, again and again, “Peace.  Peace is my parting gift to you.  Peace I leave with you.  My own peace, such as the world cannot give, I give to you.”

If your salvation is secure, if your eternal life is promised and given to you by God, if nothing can take it from you, if this is real to you, then of what do you have to be afraid?  Nothing!  Peace!  What a great and motivating gift!

“But, gee, pastor, if I share my faith, some people might thing I’m a little weird!  Someone might be offended if I leave my Bible on top of my desk, or if I suggest that they try a couple churches, or maybe even come to mine!”  I would answer, “Excuse me, but, so what?  It really isn’t such a big deal to have a few people look at you strangely when you’ve already got peace, salvation, and the most important things that you can have!”

And really, that’s what you have to offer them.  Even when you’re not explicitly inviting them to church—your faith gives you a self-confidence and compassion that rubs off and attracts them.  They want what you have.

Into what are you inviting them?  Into lives full of peace and patience.  And humor: not in the joking, stand-up comedian way.  Christians have a humor that realizes that we are all a bit goofy as we stand in this alien grace of God—you and everyone you meet.  We are all forgivable, loveable, savable, fallible, odd and funny. 

 

So, you have been given these gifts of a new way of life, full of forgiveness, peace, patience, humor and humility, but we need to remember something about God’s gifts.  It isn’t as simple as: God has given you a gift and now it’s yours.  God gives gifts in order to give to others.  God’s gifts to you are actually his gifts to others.

If you have the gift of a singing voice, God didn’t just give it to you so that you could entertain yourself in the shower.  He gave it to you so that you could sing to others, and to help us all lift our souls and voices to God.

The same with forgiveness and peace.  God gives forgiveness to us—not just for us to revel and roll around in it ourselves—but, so that we can give it to others.  We are called and sent with these gifts to help the rest of the world to drop some of its hostility, to start looking at each other with more forgiving and welcoming eyes, to work together on things that are both explicitly or not explicitly Christian goals, but goals that express human, and thus Godly love, forgiveness or justice.

What are we inviting people to experience?  We are inviting them to experience Christ’s love in the forms of forgiveness, peace, patience, humor and humility, and in beauty, art and music.  We are inviting them into a new way of life and a new way of experiencing creation.

 

Finally, how?  How do we begin inviting them to experience Christ’s love?  Let’s read this last passage.

 

 

Concentrate on those last couple verses.  Paul used present-tense verbs.  Instead of saying we grew or were built up, he wrote, “Every structure grows into a holy temple and you, too, are being built up.”  Life in the Spirit is not just a state of being; it is a process.  The Marks of Discipleship we’ve been talking about these past weeks—like this Mark of Invitation—these are all processes.

I recently heard a pastor put it in a way that is simple to understand.  It isn’t a matter of trying to do these things; it’s about practicing.  We’re not called to try to be inviting; we are called to practice invitation.  Saying that we’re going to try to do something lets us off the hook.  If I just try to do something and slip up, then I can give up and say, “Well, I tried!”

No, we are called to “practice,” and practicing includes the glitches and falls and imperfections.  Forgiveness means we aren’t judged by the success of what we do, so we are free to practice.  We will make mistakes, and practice some more.

Here’s a piano.  How many of you could walk up here, sit down and improvise a masterpiece right now?  Raise your hands.  How many of you could get up, walk out that door and start running a marathon, 26 miles, nonstop?  How about if you tried really hard?  What does it take to do things like that?  Practice, lots of practice.

These Marks are not things we try to make a part of our life.  They are things we are always practicing, at all our various skills and levels.  So, my first answer as to how you start inviting is to patiently and with self-forgiveness start practicing, at your level, and then begin stretching yourself slowly into new levels.

 

Inviting, like Pastor Steve suggested last week, is not clobbering people over the head with your Bible or your beliefs.  Inviting others is much more simple and loving than that!

You don’t have to be ready to debate or prove your faith.  You don’t have to have a bunch of memorized scriptures under your belt—ready to whip them all out and throw into peoples’ faces.  I don’t think that’s what people want or need from you.  But you can be ready to share why your relationship with God is important to you, or what Jesus means to you, or why you go to church.  That is what witnessing really is—it’s sharing your relationship with God out to others.

Being inviting is also checking yourself for a couple things.  Do you come across negatively?  Do you take time to listen, patiently, as if the other person matters to you (and thus to God)?  Practice these things: let go of negativity and pick up your listening.  Christians who are inviting are ones who listen, and ask questions, and share and then listen some more.

Can you invite quietly, through being nice?  Of course!  I think it’s a whole lot better to come across as a generous, thoughtful and listening person than a holier-than-thou super-Christian.  But, at the very same time, don’t be afraid to mention things you heard in last Sunday’s worship service or Bible study.  Don’t be afraid to mention your religious beliefs in normal conversation.  Don’t be shy about having a good relationship with God.

And when the opportunity comes up, invite people!  People are looking for something that you have, and they are a whole lot more open to invitations than we realize.  Or, you might invite them to an activity, like a youth event, or a 2^nd Sunday at Seven Concert, or the spring play.  Get them into the building where you worship.  Put one of our “Visitor Folders” or Mission cards into their hands and ask them what they think, or to consider dropping in.

And on Sunday, it’s so important in large churches to work on being small.  It’s easy to come here for worship and immediately run up to people we know, all our friends.  It’s fine—of course—that we want to catch up with them.  But that leaves our visitors out.  I challenge all of you to set aside a half-minute or two each Sunday: go up to someone you haven’t met before.  Maybe you don’t recognize them, or they may be long-time members—either way, take just a moment each week to look for and introduce yourself to someone new!

 

Worst of all worlds, when you invite someone, they might just turn you down.  …oh my.  It’s okay, let them turn you down, and with a silent prayer let the Spirit work on them from a different angle or from someone else.  Just stay polite, forgiving, and welcoming.  The door will remain open to them, and you and God have all the peace and eternity to work with and wait for them.

You’ve got peace and eternal patience.  And you are only practicing, after all.  You are one alien walking beside another.  You just happen to know the way home…through Jesus Christ.  Amen.

 

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