This is the message delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of the First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on Sunday, May 5, 2024, on the occasion of the installation of new Elders and Deacons, drawing from Isaiah 42:5-9 and John 15:9-17.
Given the nature of today’s service, what with communion and the installation of Elders and Deacons, I am going to take this opportunity to do something that I am absolutely certain will completely shock each and every one of you.
That’s right; I’m going to speak briefly!
I know, I know, just the thought of me speaking briefly is completely crazy. It’s never been done! But, if you’ll bear with me, I think that the point we’re given in the scripture today is a simple one, and the kind of thing we don’t need to really belabor, especially on a busy day like today.
Of course, as a pastor I often feel a bit guilty when I deliver a lightweight homily. After all, in our modern, capitalist society Pastors aren’t just itinerant agents of the Almighty, we’re trained ministry professionals. Whether pastor or pulpit supply, we are paid for our service, and when we rise to the pulpit we feel the pressure of the Holy Spirit sure, but there’s also that quiet voice in the back of our heads telling us that we have to make absolutely sure to give the congregation their money’s worth.
It’s that sense of…obligation, as much as it is the sense of calling. And we get those two mixed up all the time, you know. We confuse contrast and call so very often in our lives, and usually to profoundly negative results. I’ve seen congregations try to hold pastors to the letter of contractual law in all kinds of ways: one congregation I know tried to use contractual obligations as a tool to force a leaving pastor to remain; another church I know, quite some time ago, actually tried to work a time-limit for sermons into a pastor’s contract!
Bet you wish you’d thought of that one before, eh?
Obligations are important to us, we see them as a kind of accountability; something that holds in place when our hearts, our minds, even our full selves want to do anything but the one thing we agreed to do in the first place. They are unyielding, contractual, firm, fixed and unchanging; the immutable laws of human interactions.
You owe me. I owe you. We owe this to each other.
Obligation are the shackles that bind us together as a community.
Kind of dark, when you think about it, isn’t it?
When we understand obligation in this way, it makes the beginning of a journey in church service - such as the one we begin today with our incoming Elders and Deacons - seem like the first steps on an exhausting hike up Mt. Everest. Like it or not, we are going to be bound to each other, and to this journey of service, until the either our term of service or our very bodies expire!
And when we look at what has become of many of our churches, when we see what we as church communities have been reduced to - stewards of ancient buildings, empty pews, and shrinking bank accounts - it really seems like a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad sort of obligation. Why would anyone in their right mind want to do something like this?
Many years ago, a friend of mine got married, and the pastor who performed their wedding opened his homily with the line “Today, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. Good luck!” In that moment, the mood in the room fell so hard you could almost hear it physically hit the ground, and I can tell that you all are probably having a very similar moment right now.
Why would the pastor talk like this on a day like today? Why would he say such horrible, depressing things about obligation to church service on this, of all days?
Well, unlike that very misguided pastor those many years ago, everything I said so far was not meant to fill you with the sober terror of all the ways things could, and probably will, go wrong, but to invite you to see that there is another, far better way that things can, and should, go!
In our scripture today, we are given this beautiful speech about love from Jesus, a speech which has been the source of a number of hallmark-card-worthy one-liners:
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Consider that all of these lines, wonderful as they are, are all showing the flow of love operating on one direction: Christ loves us, so we love others. The love flows from Christ, to us, and out into the world.
It doesn’t stay pooled up among us.
Let me say that again, because it is really important.
GOD’S LOVE DOES NOT, NOR WAS IT EVER INTENDED, TO REMAIN HERE WITH US..
In our American culture we have been inundated with the idea that followers of the Christian faith must protect ourselves from the world, that we must hide ourselves away from the temptations of the world, defend ourselves from contamination by the world, and always maintain a healthy distance lest that which is not of our own community of faith turn us int some twisted, secular, monstrosity which has bent itself fully and completely away from the service of Christ. But when we see Christ describe what the ideal Christian community looks like, this defensive formation plays no part of it! It always flows outward, and never inward.
Our obligation, in fact, isn’t to our church community at all.
Our obligation is to the world.
Consider the great work of the Lord our God, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it.
Consider the calling we have been given in righteousness, the love that we have been personally given not to collect, or to hoard, or to defend, but to share freely and openly with all who would receive it.
This is our obligation; not to serve the church within these walls, but to serve the Lord beyond them.
The Lord has given us as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the darkness in which they sit.
Christ chose in those days to step away from calling us servants, because he quite rightly pointed out that a servant does not know what the master is doing. Friends, we know what our master is doing; we know what God is doing, what God is working in this world.
God is working a ministry of impossible, creative love.
God is exploding in mercy as all those former things being to crumble and pass away.
God is declaring a new thing to spring forth, a new thing that all of you are stepping up to be a part of; not only our new Elders and Deacons, but each and every one of you who count yourselves among the number of First Reformed. All of you are a part of the work of Christ in this place, because God’s love does not flow just through the few leaders, ordained and elected to serve, but through each and every one of us who stand here ready to receive the love of Christ Jesus, and to pass it on to a world that so desperately needs it.
You did not choose Christ, but Christ chose you, appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the fruit of love grown and nurtured through the Holy Spirit in the name of Christ Jesus - that is something that endures.
Today, we all get to have our share in growing that fruit, a fruit that we aren’t going to box up, or jam into some moldy back corner of the fridge. The fruit that we grow today is meant to be shared beyond these walls, given freely and without condition to the widow and the orphan, the refugee, the homeless, the hungry, and the lost.
After years of hard work my friends, you could be forgiven for thinking that today marks the beginning of a new term of obligation; an obligation of boring, meticulous effort, paying that which we owe to our community in time served minding the store, and seeing that the lights stay on, the building doesn’t fall down, and that those within stay as safe and stable as possible.
But the ministry to which we are called - Elders, Deacons, Pastors and Congregants alike - is inside out. It isn’t about what we owe to our church, what we owe to each other, it’s about what we owe to this world; a world full of suffering, hurting, desperate people who just need someone to step forward, laying down their life in love just as Christ laid down his life in love for us.
We aren’t obligated to do that my friends. We get to do that!
We are the friends of Christ Jesus, abiding in his love just as the love of our Creator abides in him.
So behold. A new things is being declared today; springing forth even as the former things pass away.
Let’s go chase after it together, shall we?