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"Salem.....Where a Warm Welcome Awaits You"
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LOVE IN ACTION (The following sermon was preached by Pastor Barbara Melosh on May 7th, 2006.)
oday is the fourth Sunday of Easter—the middle of this season. Easter is a whole week of Sundays, seven Sundays for celebrating the new life of resurrection. This year, our second reading for each of the seven Sundays comes from this small and often overlooked piece of the New Testament. Like the book of Acts, which we’re hearing in our first reading during Easter, it’s about the life of the early Christian church. 1 John is addressed to a community of people trying to figure out what Jesus’ death and resurrection meant for their own life together. And it’s about our life together today--the new life of ordinary people transformed by the grace of God. John writes, “…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” This counsel from 1 John captures in a sentence the message of that whole book. Might be seen as the mission statement of the Christian church, and one that is a lot more direct, challenging, and compelling than most of the mission statements that have been thought up since. Grounded in the ministry of Jesus himself, who commanded us to love one another not in some abstract and impersonal way, but through service that is immediate, practical, and physical—to wash one another’s feet. It is a counsel of sacrificial love—“We know love by this, that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” It is a challenge, laid down in a question—“How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother and sister in need and yet refuses to help?” The word for “love” in this passage is agapeo--a word with rich shades of meaning. It refers to self-giving love, a love that finds joy and fulfillment in the care and flourishing of someone else. It’s a word that also means “to welcome” and “to offer hospitality.” It’s an inspiring passage, but an intimidating one too, at least to me. It makes claims on us. It sets out a very high ideal—one that we know we’re going to fall short of, more often than not. I recently went to a conference where the speaker, a woman named Marva Dawn, told us a story about trying to find a church in Wisconsin. She started out looking for a Lutheran church, but, she told us, she ended up going to another church because, she explained, “The Lutherans in Wisconsin don’t have cars.” And then she paused for a beat, while her confused listeners tried to imagine the punch line—had we missed something? She went on to explain that she had called four Lutheran churches near her apartment, one after the other, and told them all in turn that she wanted to come to their church, but she couldn’t drive—she is legally blind. Could someone come and pick her up? No one replied from any of the four Lutheran churches. So, she said wryly, she could only conclude that Lutherans in Wisconsin didn’t have cars. Because if they did— they wouldn’t refuse to help a sister in need, would they? Well, I don’t know anything more than what the speaker knows about those four churches—that she asked them for help and didn’t get it. But I think it’s a pretty safe bet that those Lutherans help one another out in their churches and neighborhoods and workplaces. Like people here at Salem, they probably visit their fellow members and friends in the hospital, and bring casseroles to new mothers, celebrate together at potlucks and cry together at funerals. Maybe they even have something on their bulletins like what we have on ours—“A warm welcome awaits you here.” We don’t know exactly what did happen with those four churches who didn’t respond. But we do know that, for whatever reason, those Wisconsin Lutherans weren’t able to look past the walls of their own churches to welcome the stranger. Sometimes that happens because we are afraid of each other. Marva did something that is pretty unusual in our experience, isn’t it—she asked strangers for help, as a fellow Christian making a claim on other Christians. She believes what we say here every week-- that we are here to love and serve one another. And so when she needed help she asked for it. This woman is dangerous--who knows what she would want next? Sometimes we can’t look past the walls because we’re forgetting what it means to be church. We’re happy to have people come here, but we’re not willing to go out and invite them. But we’re not just church on Sunday morning—we’re sent to be church to our neighborhood. And if we’re going to be church to the neighborhood, we can’t just wait for people to come to us. We’ve got to go to them. That’s what we’re inviting everyone here to do in our new outreach, “Neighbor to Neighbor.” It’s not an evangelism program, designed to bring people in the door. It’s a social ministry of welcome to our neighbors. When we say “social ministry,” often we think about ministry to people who are in economic need. We are active in that kind of social ministry here at Salem and we are becoming more active in partnership with SoBER, our neighborhood association serving South Baltimore with food pantry and other ways of helping people in desperate economic need. Most of our new neighbors here in South Baltimore aren’t in economic need. But they do need the rest and renewal of Sabbath. They need community, connection, friendship, and welcome—a place to call “home”. And we need them, because they’re our neighbors and we’re called to love and serve them. To do that, first we’ve got to know who they are. We’re asking everybody here to participate by adopting a block or two blocks, paying attention to who’s moving in. Then I and the outreach committee and anyone else who wants to join us will knock on those doors and welcome them to the neighborhood. Yes, it’s the sort of thing that used to happen more informally than this—in the neighborhood many of you knew, where everyone knew one another and people sat on the front stoops and kids all went to the same schools and played together on the sidewalks. But times have changed. And we need to change with them, because one thing hasn’t changed—Salem is God’s church, called to be church to this neighborhood Our outreach committee has another great idea about how to help our new neighbors feel welcome and to get to know something about this community. We’re asking you to participate as we produce an “Insiders’ Guide to the Neighborhood.” Our young people in confirmation will get us started with this part of the ministry. They’ll be coming around to you to ask you about your favorite places in the neighborhood. Please welcome them and share your memories and experiences. Sometimes when something like this is proposed, I’ve heard people ask, “How will this help Salem?” My answer is, “It will help us become who we are meant to be—the people of God, loving and serving our neighbors.” We heard it in 1 John--“…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” That’s the mission statement of new life—new life for us and for our neighbors.
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