Christ - A Place for All People

Preached on World Communion Sunday, October 1, 2017

Scripture reading: Revelation 5:1-14

Once there was a mother who had had a bad day and all seemed to be her children’s fault. They were going crazy.

Tall Timber Ranch
Above Leavenworth WA
September, 2017

It so happened that the mother’s birthday was coming up. Her kids suddenly thought of this, and they asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She felt inspired, and she said: “What I want for my birthday is three well behaved children.”

The littlest one burst out: “That’d be fun! Then there’d be six of us!”

The Book of Revelation is a series of prophetic pictures showing the birthday of a new heaven and a new earth. It also shows us the present world as we know it, and how it must end. Some of the pictures are scary. Other pictures show us God’s people and God’s kingdom. Those are happy pictures and they seem to tell us that “the more, the merrier” would be a lot of fun, and that this is actually God’s plan.

There’s a city so big that it would spread beyond the horizon of this planet. There are astronomical numbers of angels, and gatherings of people that no one can count. This doesn’t mean that the new creation will be crowded. It’s picture language telling us the great thing that God wants to do.

Some of the prophetic pictures in Revelation are hard to understand. Some are very simple. In the seventh chapter, there’s that crowd that no one can count. They’re dressed in white and carrying palm branches. That just means that everyone is dressed for a party. The palms are party favors for waving around. The harps stand for happy music, and harps are the nearest thing the ancient people had to electric guitars. The picture tells us that something worth celebrating has happened.

That crowd pictures all the people whom Jesus, the Lamb of God, has made his own, through his sacrifice on the cross. They come from everywhere, and from every time through the ages.

You see, I believe that the tribulation is what this world has been, ever since the first sin put a poison in human nature and spoiled everything. I would claim that Christians in North Korea and Pakistan are going through the tribulation now.

The crowd is every generation that has struggled with this world’s evils, and faced life’s challenges, and kept on track by trusting in the Lord, and staying faithful through it all. In all their hardships, they have found God to be their helper, their forgiver, their strength, their peace, their Lord and Savior.

There is a picture like that in the mind of God, because he always sees, and he is always aware, of all his people, in all times and places together. It’s a living and moving picture, and we are a part of that picture right now.

If you could see it for a moment, as God sees the picture of his people, you would eventually find your own face. And you would see the faces of people you love. And alongside of the familiar faces, you would see strange faces: some with almond eyes, some with long black braids twined with feathers, faces of every shade of brown and black, and every shade of pale.

Maybe some of the white robes would remind you of serapes, and others of saris. There would be golden turbans among the golden crowns. There would be no boundaries between the Desert Aire and the Mattawa parts of the crowd. There would be no boundaries between the American part of the crowd and all the others.

The truth is, most of the crowd might be from Latin America, and Asia, and Africa. You’ve probably helped send missionaries there, and they’ve sent missionaries here, bringing the love of Jesus back and forth.

These people will want to meet you and have fellowship and thanksgiving with you. Some of them may be praying for you right now, just as you pray for Christians in other lands.

It’s a picture of all of us celebrating what Jesus has done for us, and what he has given to us by becoming the Lamb of God. There’s that picture of Jesus as a lamb with seven horns, in the fifth chapter of Revelation, because he gave his life as a sacrifice to free us from our sins and from the burdens of our guilt, and to make us new through the miracle of his love.

The lamb was an animal for sacrifice in the old Jewish Temple. The bloody sacrifices of the Old Testament, were God’s way of telling the ancient people that the love of God, which bound him to them, in mercy and faithfulness, was a costly thing.

Sometimes, God’s people are tempted to brood over how costly it seems to be to love God, and to be true and faithful to the Lord. But the picture of the lamb tells us that loving us is a costly commitment for God.

God patiently nurtured, and lead, and forgave his people, in the Old Testament, and, finally, he came down from heaven in the flesh, as one of us. God came in Jesus, and lived a life of hard work, and sweat, and poverty, and risk, and he died a cruel and painful death, in order to carry out the costly love that he had always talked about. He gave his life to make us one with him, and one with each other, in love and peace.

The picture of the sealed-up scroll, that only he could open, is a word picture for the destiny of the world and of all human life. Sometimes we wonder where are we going, and is it all worthwhile? The scroll is the secret of the meaning of it all. The lamb being able to open the secret tells us that he is strong enough to take care of our future and guide our destiny, and guarantee that it will all be worth it.

It’s a part of understanding Revelation to see that completely different things are still pictures of the same thing. So, our protector, who is as fierce, and as full of fight, and as majestic as a lion, who would kill for us, is also the humble, gentle lamb who actually died for us instead. The strong hands, that hold the meaning of our life, are scarred with nails.

The picture of the crowd that cannot be counted tells us that the work Jesus has done for us is something that should be for everybody. Everyone should be a part of it. The love of Jesus is meant to bring happiness to people of every group, or race, or language, or age. In Jesus, it all becomes holy and the source of joy. We all belong to everyone and there are no foreigners in Christ.

No one culture, or nation, or group can grasp the whole meaning of being a Christian. The people who become Christians in every culture will be experts on different parts of the gospel, and the Christian life, and we’ll all learn from each other about the unique glory of God that we have learned to see, wherever we come from.

School teachers among the Hopi people have had trouble finding out how much their students know, because the Hopi people have traditionally believed that it’s a bad thing to act like you know something that the person next to you doesn’t know. So, if you don’t think your friend can’t answer a question from the teacher, then you can’t answer it either. Isn’t it great to know that there are Christians in the world, as there are among the Hopi, who are really good at protecting others from looking and feeling dumb or inferior.

There was a student, in my seminary, from the Cameroon, in West Africa. His voice always sounded like he was on the verge of singing and laughing at the same time. Often, as he talked, he would spread his arms wide, as if he were trying to hug the world. He came from a culture that knew how to rejoice with their whole heart. I am much too reserved for my own good. I have something to learn from them.

I have heard that, at least in the past, a good host in Japan was honor bound to be generous. If you were a guest of good, traditional, Japanese hosts, and you admired something of theirs, they knew that they should give it to you. So, those Christians would be good at understanding what to do when God expresses his love for them. They knew that they had to give themselves completely to God. And they knew they had to give themselves completely to anyone in need.

Our American culture teaches us the value of good sportsmanship; about cooperating, and getting along, even with those who are in competition with us, and with those who don’t agree with us. We let the referees decide and we live by that. This good sportsmanship, in our culture, lets us be happy when we win, but not make those who lose feel like losers. We shake hands at the end of the game.

A lot of the world has no idea how to do this, and doesn’t want to know. So, they’re torn apart by centuries of envy, and bitterness, and the lust for vengeance. American Christians have something we can share with other Christians that can make the world better, if we only learn from our own traditions and share them with others.

Our world is becoming a smaller place all the time. The nations are getting mixed together. Every culture is full of fear and fury, because their identity is getting watered down and destroyed.

If we Christians can hold onto our faith, while the world around us is changing, then we will always have a strong and healthy sense of who we are and what we have to give.

When we study God’s picture of his people, we realize that God’s intended destiny for the world applies to those of us right here in this room. We all belong in the same picture. It’s how we glorify God and what he has done for us, in Jesus.

Once, there was a Japanese-American minister serving a Japanese church in Texas. He formed a friendship with one of the older elders in the congregation. He admired this man and thought he was so “young in heart and spirit”. One day, during a visit, the minister confessed to the elder: “I feel as if you were my father.” “Oh, that’s bad. That’s awfully bad. That’s very bad indeed.” “Why is it so bad?” “Because I want you to feel as if I were your brother.” (In “A Stone Cried Out” by Shigeo Shimada)

The glory of God’s family should be that it has the spiritual ability to take anyone from anywhere, and make them belong as brothers and sisters.

In our scripture reading, Jesus has made all of his people into priests, and that is a high calling that goes with the brother and sister mentality. The ancient meaning of serving as a priest was to be a “mediator”, or a “go-between”, between God and your fellow human beings.

In ancient Rome, there were certain priests who had the title of “Bridge-Maker”. We are called to be bridge-makers between people and God, to help others over a road, or across a gap they seem unable to cross by themselves. We open a bridge for them, through their barriers of doubt, anger, fear, discouragement, or misunderstanding that keep them away from God.

As priests, we try to be bridge-makers between some people and other people to keep things fair, and decent, and right, and generous, and loving. We help people learn how to live and work together.

It’s hard and costly to be a bridge-maker, or a priest, and we can only do it as a partner of Jesus, who is the real bridge-maker. Jesus is the only true priest who shares his job with us. His cross is the bridge of forgiveness and peace, that creates our peace with God, and peace with others, and peace with ourselves.

If we let ourselves be bridge-makers, and if we make the church itself into a bridge for all people, then we are plugging into our Lord’s work. It’s his meaning for our life. It’s our destiny. It’s what makes life worthwhile.

World Communion Sunday teaches us to picture the church as God does: a place for everyone, a family for everyone. Every human being on earth, everyone you know, every person you see or hear about is part of Jesus’ destiny for you. What you’ve got in Christ is for them.