CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (USA)

June 24, 2007

Rev. Ed. Thomas

SERMON TITLE: “When Lives Touch, a Difference is Made”

Acts 2: 41 – 47

Gracious Lord and God and Holy Spirit: Come quickly and instill within our minds an awareness of your Word for us today. May we sense and feel the power of Your presence to illumine us and bless us. In the Name of Christ our Lord, Amen.

The title of the message today is “When lives touch, a difference is made”. You could very well call the sermon, “The power of Christian fellowship”. I want to talk first about a person that some of you may have heard of. His name is Leo Buscaglia who is a Professor of Education in Southern California. Many of you may have heard of his tapes and lectures and read some of his books but what I want to tell you this morning happened before any of that. It happened when he went into the classroom for the first time as an Assistant Professor of Education. He was anxious, not knowing how the class would respond and at last he looked for a friendly face in whom he might deliver his sermon. Now that’s not uncommon. I tell you that almost any young man or woman coming out of seminary is so nervous when they stand in the pulpit that they look out desperately trying to see some friendly face to whom they may deliver the sermon. You may not realize the power that you have. You have the power to really salvage a lot of sermons by your smiles and your interest. And you have perhaps saved a lot of ministers who entered the pulpit very nervous.

As Leo began to lecture, he began to stammer and, heaven forbid, he lost his place in his notes and if any of you have ever spoken before a large group, you know the terrible feeling it is to feel that no one hears what you are saying. As he looked out and tried to find a friendly face, he almost (and he saw them just talking to one another and writing to each other, none of them were paying any attention) he almost ended his lecture real early and considered ‘I wonder if I’m in the right profession?’ Just as he considered that, he looked up and he looked at a girl who was on the fifth row and she smiled at him. So he began to look at her and the next words he spoke she said ‘Oh, yes’ and wrote down something in her notes and so he directed the rest of his lecture to that girl. Pretty soon, almost everybody in the class started listening and taking notes. The young lady in the fifth row literally pulled him through.

Now, as I said, you have often pulled other young ministers through too, and we feed on that. You know, the Baptist preachers look forward to someone saying “Praise the Lord!” Now if Marian Allen would say that to me, either she would choke or I would choke, one of us, because I know it would take a lot of courage for me to keep going if someone said “Praise the Lord, Brother, keep going”. But you do that in your own quiet way. So it was! After his lecture he looked in his attendance roll because everybody had a seat and he wanted to know who this young lady was. He found out that her name was Lannie. As he graded her papers he found out that she had a sense of humor and he thought ‘she must be a well-adjusted young lady!’ He noticed that she also made good grades on her tests. So he decided that it would be good if he got to know each one of his students and so he invited them to make an appointment with him so that he might meet them. But he was particularly interested in Lannie because he wanted to tell this young lady what she had literally done for him in his first lecture. But days passed and weeks passed and Lannie wasn’t there. So he went to the students who had sat around her. They hadn’t missed her and they didn’t even know her name. So he went to the Dean of Women and he said, “I need to ask you about a missing lady. He told her the name, Lannie, “and she hasn’t been here”. The Dean of Women said, “Oh Leo, you didn’t know?” Leo replied “Know what?” “Leo, maybe you had better sit down! You know at the west end of Los Angeles there are the Palisades where there’s a sure drop into the Pacific? Some picnickers saw her drive up, get out of her car and go to the edge of the cliff and jump in the Pacific Ocean. Leo, Lannie is dead!” He was hurt, he was shocked, and then he became angry with himself and the kids in the classroom and he went to the president of Southern California and he said, “What in the world are we doing? We are dispensing information and knowledge but we don’t even know our kids. Lannie literally pulled me through my lecture. And I didn’t get to know her and the kids didn’t get to know her”.

But you know, it’s not the classroom where we don’t know people very well, it’s in the family as well. Sometimes spouses don’t know each other as well as they should. They don’t listen to one another. That’s why a lot of marriages are hurting. Sometimes we, as parents, don’t listen to our children very well. If I had to do it over again, I would probably spend less nights at church and more time with my sons and daughters and listen to them; listen to their hurts, their joys and their dreams. Some people move into apartment complexes for the deliberate reason to not have to know their neighbors. If you were to ask a lot of people in apartments ‘who lives next door to you?’ or ‘who lives across the hall from you?’, they probably wouldn’t know. You may know your neighbors in the houses around you by name but do you really know them? You sit in pews in church and you probably know each other’s names but do you really know their hurts and needs?

I want to share a story told by a minister of his Session. He noticed at this particular Session meeting that there was one Elder who seemed to be negative about everything. Every vote that came up, he was against it; He knew that something was going on. At the end of the session meeting he said, “I wonder if there are any prayer requests?” and he looked directly at that Elder and he said, “Bill, do you have a prayer concern?” And Bill looked down and he said, “Well, tomorrow morning I have to go to South Jersey. Remember you performed the wedding of my daughter?” The minister said, “O yes, about 2 years ago.” Bill replied, “Yeah, well they have a one year old child now. Tomorrow morning I have to go to South Jersey to bail my 28 year old son-in-law out of jail with $5,000. He’s been trafficking in drugs and it breaks my heart”. The minister said, “All of a session the Session got real and they prayed for Bill and as soon as they finished praying for Bill there was another Elder who spoke up, “I haven’t told you but I have been diagnosed with cancer” and they prayed again for that Elder. Then one of the most sophisticated of the Elders said, “I haven’t told any of you but six weeks ago I lost my job and I’ve been riding the train every day for six weeks so that no one would know that I had lost my job.” And they prayed for him. Then they began to discuss what they were doing as the Session. We talk about the parking lot, the leaks in the roof, the curriculum, but we don’t really know each other very well. And the church is about knowing and caring!

I know when I first came here as your interim when Julian was on sabbatical you had started something or Julian had started something in the session that I thought was very meaningful: there was a time for worship, a time for prayer, and a time for fellowship and that’s important!

That brings me to the first point based upon our scripture this morning and that is, Jesus Christ was the foundation of their fellowship. Koinonea was something that the Holy Spirit created in the church based upon Jesus Christ. Now all of us probably take fellowship for granted. We have fellowship suppers, fellowship dinners, and this and that and the other, not really understanding the power of that fellowship. Two illustrations I want to share with you that have really helped me to understand it.

When I went off to college at 16 years old or 17 years I guess, I wanted to visit some fraternities and I thought that this was a good idea for me because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters so I talked to my dad. He had gone to the University of Georgia and he had a bad idea about fraternities. He said, “No, no, you don’t want to go into one of them”, and I said, “Yes, I do.” So I joined one and it meant a lot to me. I thought when I graduated that I would want to keep up with my brothers. Today I only know where 2 of my fraternity brothers are and I’m not close to either one. By contrast, a year after I graduated I went to Washington D. C, and joined a church and became very involved in the young adult fellowship. That’s where I met my wife sitting in your midst this morning. We have long been gone from there and yet every Christmas we send a Christmas card to at least 20 of those former young adults and we are often calling them or talking to them. What’s the difference? The difference is the fellowship in my fraternity was not based upon Jesus Christ. The fellowship in the Young Adult group was based upon Jesus Christ and it’s glue. If you don’t have it you miss it.

Now the second illustration, I have to apologize to my son because he’s also here this morning and this happens to be a story that something happened to him. When he was 12 years old I had taken a group to Israel in the Middle East and there was another 12 year old who was his roommate. They had each bought a hat in the old city and his roommate’s hat dropped out the window. Instead of waiting until the next morning and going to the next floor and getting it off the ledge they decided they would go out that night and crawl down the hill and retrieve the cap. But my son lost his footing and fell about 20 feet to solid rock below. He was taken to one hospital and they found out that it was more severe than they thought so they rushed him to Odessa which is the major hospital in Israel. The doctors told us that his injury is such that he could not travel, meaning that one of us had to stay behind. Well, the next day our group would cross back into Jordan and obviously it would not be well for my wife to have to cross back into another country, a Muslim country, and being a female of course, so I said that I would stay. The second day that I was there it hit me! I was terribly lonely! I had taken the fellowship of our 26 people for granted. Every morning on the bus we read some scripture and we had prayer and we had fellowship. All of a sudden I was alone. I had moved from one hotel to another one that I knew about. It was across from the old city hall and it was a Palestinian hotel. But behind that hotel there was a garden tomb and I knew there were Christians in that garden tomb. So I asked, “Is there any church service there tonight that you know of?” “Oh, yes, there’s a Nazarene church right down the street and they’ll have a Wednesday night service”. Well, I had never been in a Nazarene church. I didn’t know whether they handled snakes or what they did but I was so desperate that I went. To my surprise the speaker that night was a Roman Catholic priest and I discovered that there were Baptists and Methodists. I never met any Nazarenes. I guess that some were there but I never met any. And in the service they asked if anyone had a prayer request. I raised my hand, “Yes, my son is in Odessa” and they said, “we’ll pray” and so they prayed. After the service two young women came up to me from Scotland and they were nurses in the Odessa hospital. They said, “We will go see your son and by the way, there is a Presbyterian doctor in Odessa as well”. Well, I had never met any of those people before but immediately I felt a kinship with those total strangers. I felt a bond. What was that bond? It was the Koinonea, established by the Holy Spirit, where Christians meet together. We dare not take that for granted for Jesus Christ is a foundation of the fellowship we enjoy in this church and in every church. And a total stranger can come in and sense a kinship a kinship.

The second thing that I found from that scripture is that they shared together. They share together in their homes. We have become a nation of individuals. We don’t borrow sugar any more. When was the last time that someone came to your house and borrowed a cup of sugar? When have you had to ask your neighbor to drive you to the doctor? When this country was built, when they moved out into the west, how did they build their houses? They were simple one-room log cabin houses but no one person could build it. The neighbors came together and they helped each other build their houses. And they depended upon one another. It’s important that we learn how to share and do it again.

The third important lesson from the scripture, and I want to share this with you. They intentionally reached out to one another. They intentionally reached out to one another. I know that I’ve told you before the story about China. In 1966, a very fundamental right-wing youth group within China took over the Communist party. They were atheists to the core. The first thing they did was to close all the Muslim temples, the Jewish temples, the temples of Buddha and all the churches. They locked the doors. They burned their Bibles and Korans. They burned the hymnbooks. They kicked out the missionaries. They imprisoned a lot of the pastors. In this world, in our country, where we had been such a strong influence in establishing Christianity in China we did not know what to expect, whether it would even survive. Ten years later the Chinese decided a different policy. They opened the churches again and to our surprise the church was not dead but was very much alive! Let’s say you have a congregation of 100. Let’s say Mobile city closed this church and burned your Bibles and imprisoned your pastor. And 10 years later what would you think might have happened to this congregation? Well if the same thing that happened in China, you would have grown to 1,000 members from 100 and including all of those who died during that period of time. You couldn’t even fit into this sanctuary and that’s what happened in China. They couldn’t even fit into the old church buildings. They still are worshipping in house churches!

I think that’s a lesson for us because in the 1950’s we built huge massive buildings. I remember Tom Walker pleaded with the minister across the street ‘Don’t move away’ but they built the church out on the end of Dauphin Street. I don’t know if you know this or not but a lot of us preachers call it “Fort Jesus”. Did you ever hear that term for the Dauphin Way Baptist Church? It was because it resembled to us a fort. But the truth is that many great big church buildings, including this one, may seem like a fort because, you see, instead of going out with our Christian faith, we lock it in. And, not only that, but we spend a major portion of our finances to maintain buildings.

What happened within those house churches? They talked to their neighbors. The neighbors saw something in their lives that was different and they wanted that, so many people converted to Christianity. They didn’t have buildings and they didn’t have Bibles to speak of!

My wife and I were in Sheon China several years ago. We went to one of the churches. It was not a house church. It was in the church but there were more people outside of the building listening to speakers than there was in the packed church. Churches are people who were put together by the Holy Spirit.

One last story. This is the true story of an automobile accident in which a family was seriously injured, father, mother and children. The father crawled out of the car and saw that one of his children, a daughter, had been thrown out of the car. There were lacerations all over her face and shortly, then, a car stopped and a man got out and he said, “I’m a doctor. Maybe I can help”. The father was overjoyed. The doctor took his handkerchief and began to bind up some of the wounds and to wipe the blood off of her face and he turned to the father and said, “Could I borrow your handkerchief?” And the father said, “Sure”. So the doctor went out on the road and he started waving his handkerchief and the father said, “Wait, wait, what are you doing? You’re supposed to heal my daughter, you’re a doctor!” The doctor said, “Easy, man, easy. I need help”. He kept waving his handkerchief and the father became furious. He said, “But you are a doctor!” He said, “Gentle, man, I am a doctor but I don’t have all my instruments. I need instruments”. The analogy of this story I am telling you is this: A lot of times we have a serious situation which requires God, “God, you’re all powerful, why don’t you heal me? Why don’t you do this?” But you see, God would say to us, “Yes, I have the power to do that but I need you. You are my hands and feet. Through you my word is spoken. I can do far more if you help me!” The church, you and I, are the hands and feet of God! We’re the instruments of God!

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit - AMEN