Although I haven’t yet posted anything here about it, Christin and I recently returned from a J-Term trip to Tanzania. This morning, Christin shared pictures and stories from our trip in worship at Lena UMC and I preached. Our text was Ephesians 4:1-6.
We picked this passage from Ephesians to read today because it’s the reading the pastor in the church in Usa River, Tanzania, preached on our last Sunday there.
For me, one of the greatest blessings of traveling to Tanzania was the joy of visiting the growing, vibrant church there. Sometimes I catch myself buying into this lie that the church is dying. I spent all of this last week in a week-long class about church finance, learning about financial stewardship and how tax law relates to churches and pastors.
Doesn’t that sound fun? I learned all sorts of stuff about budgets and offerings, and about giving, and there were a few times I caught myself thinking pessimistically about money and the church, almost thinking that the best we could hope for was to keep the doors open, to cut down the budget enough so churches wouldn’t need to close.
I don’t know if any of you read blogs or columns about the need for the church to reach young people in order to keep numbers up or anything like that, but I sometimes get caught up in this gloomy thinking that maybe the church’s best times are behind it.
But it’s simply not true. Around the world, Christianity is growing. The church is growing. 100 years ago, there were 9 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, there are 516 million. There are more Lutherans in Tanzania alone than there are in the entire United States. There’s only a few Methodist congregations there, but the United Methodist Church is planting congregations.
We did not visit a dying church. We visited a church that’s rapidly growing, building new buildings and starting new congregations. We met many brothers and sisters in Christ who are absolutely confident God is at work in their midst. And they’re confident God is also at work in our midst in America, and they promised to pray for us and our congregations. I hope we can continue to pray for them too.
One of the places we saw their enthusiasm was at that ordination service. Granted, it was a lot warmer there than it is here, but I’m still amazed there were hundreds of people willing to stand outside the church to hear the message, and to celebrate with this new pastor.
I’m looking forward to my own ordination hopefully in a couple of months. I expect mine to be shorter than four hours and I think I’ll pass on the roasted goats, but it will be a similar ritual, so I’ve been thinking about what it means to be ordained. Being ordained is a recognition of a call to be a pastor, a public leader in the church, but it’s really just a human ceremony to recognize a particular call.
One of the things I saw in Tanzania was a lot of different people living out their faith in the church, not just pastors. Really, each one of us has a call from God that comes through baptism. I’ve had people say that I’m “going into ministry” and I hate that term. Being a pastor is not “going into ministry.” We’re all called by God to be already doing ministry. If you’re baptized, you’re called to be a minister. Reaching out to your neighbors, ushering, helping with communion, listening to your coworkers at your job, that’s ministry.
In this reading, Paul writes that we are all called to one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Pastor Brian is called as the pastor to be the leader, the shepherd, but he’s not called to do all the work of ministry. If you’re a follower of Christ, your job is to do ministry, to live out your faith by serving others, at church, yes, but also at work and at home.
In this letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes, I beg you to live a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. I think living a life worthy of what we’ve been called to would be to actually live out our faith all the time. Everything we do should be ministry.
So, are you doing that?
No, you’re not, and it has nothing to do with whether you’re a pastor or not. I don’t think it’s possible to live a life worthy of our calling. That’d be being perfect, and we can’t do that.
But God makes us worthy. Jesus died for you, and because of that, you are made worthy and valued by God. We can do our best to live as God calls us, but it’s only by God’s work that we do any good. We can’t do it on our own.
Knowing we can’t ever be completely worthy of our calling and knowing we’ll fail, Paul gives us some hints of what living a Christian life looks like. Be humble, living with all humility and gentleness, with patience, making every effort to maintain peace and unity though the Holy Spirit.
It’s that unity I want you to especially think about today. Unity is a hard goal. There is much that separates us. You might have noticed Iowa was in the news earlier this week. The presidential caucuses make some of our divisions clear, as people put their political differences on display. Our country is divided by parties, and by race, and by money, and by so many things.
As Christians, we’re supposed to be the body of Christ, but we seem just as divided as anyone else. I have faithful Christian friends seeking to follow Jesus, seeking to live a life worthy of their Christian calling, in both parties, supporting many different candidates, worshipping God in different ways in different denominations.
Our unity as Christians doesn’t come from us. The unity of the Spirit Paul writes about relies on Christ, not on the details of how we worship, where we are, or even whether we get along with each other. Our unity comes from the Gospel message of God’s incredible love for us in Jesus Christ, not in the external signs of the different ways we live out our faith. The church is one body around the world, whether in Lena, Illinois, or in Dodoma, Tanzania. Jesus and his followers are present and active in every nation on earth.
This unity often isn’t tangible or visible, but one of the ways we do see glimpses of it is in worship. When we shared the peace a little bit ago, that symbolized our unity as God’s people. And it’s visible in communion. Christians all over the world celebrate this meal together. We might have slightly different understandings of what’s going on when we take communion, and some of us do it every week, some once a month, some once a year, but we all hold on to the promise of Jesus to meet us here in the sharing of the bread and the cup.
The meal symbolizes our unity, imperfect as it is, as a community here, around the world, and even across time. As we get ready to share Christ’s body together, I invite you to join me in singing hymn 620, One Bread, One Body, and to remember our sisters and brothers in Christ around the world with whom we are united.