Protecting Our Parents

Philippians 4:1,4-6
Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

This morning’s sermon begins with two disclaimers. The first one is this: I’m not talking about you or anyone you know. If you happen to think that the shoe fits you or fits someone else you know, maybe God is talking to you, because I’m not talking about you or anyone you know. The second disclaimer is this: I don’t deal in guilt. I grew up Lutheran, so I know all about guilt. But because I grew up Lutheran, I also know all about grace. The biblical gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of grace, not guilt. The heart of the gospel is a message of the reclamation and reformation of lives embodied in the God who welcomes prodigals home and in the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. My responsibility as one of the shepherds of this flock is to cultivate behaviors and attitudes and perspectives that shape our lives in the direction of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m talking about, not you or anyone you know, and I don’t deal in guilt. Those are the two disclaimers.

Now to the point. “Protecting our Children” is very important around here. But protecting our parents is important also. As most of us are aware, years ago, First Baptist Greenville put in place a program and a practice that requires anyone who volunteers to work with children or youth to have been a part of our congregation for 6 months, to provide references that we actually do contact, to agree to our running a State Law Enforcement Division check on them, to have a personal interview with a staff member, and to go through a training session on reducing the risk of the sexual abuse of children. Staff and volunteers alike sometimes get frustrated with all the hoops and the paperwork we go through around here; but we are committed to making every reasonable effort to protect our children and youth, and to making First Baptist Greenville a safe, healthy and happy place for them and for their parents.

That’s not everyone’s experience in church. Last week, Associated Baptist Press reported that in the last two years among the more than 900 churches that have purchased a new background-checking service from Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, more than 600 felony convictions—not misdemeanors and traffic violations, now, 600 felony convictions—were uncovered among church staff and volunteers at those 900 churches.

Last month, Diana Garland, the dean of the Baylor University School of Social Work, revealed the results of a study of clergy sexual misconduct with adults that indicated that “In any given congregation with 400 adult members, seven women on average have been victims of clergy sexual misconduct since they turned 18.” What those number mean is that if this congregation were average, there would be dozens of women in this church who have experienced clergy sexual misconduct as adults. That’s a stunning number, but the issue comes as no surprise to the clergy on our staff.

We have a pastoral staff covenant that was instituted by my predecessor Hardy Clemons more than twenty years ago. In it, our pastoral staff members commit to God and to each other these two things, among other items:
• “We will give special attention to nurturing our marital, family and/or other primary relationships because we recognize the stress and the vulnerabilities our ministries place on us and our relationships,” and
• “We will maintain the highest ethical standards in all relationships. If we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to sexually inappropriate behavior or if we are approached inappropriately by someone, we will discuss the matter with the senior minister or another one of our colleagues in highest confidentiality.”

Those two items in our pastoral staff covenant indicate that as a pastoral team, we are as committed to protecting our adults as we are to protecting our children. And it’s probably time that our congregation as a whole paid more attention to our shared responsibility to protect our parents as well as our children. If each member here is a minister, as we say, then maybe we all should look at these two elements of our pastoral staff covenant: giving “special attention to nurturing our marital, family, and/or other primary relationships” and seeking out support and accountability if we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to inappropriate behavior or if we are approached inappropriately by someone.

I know there are folks who would just as soon we not talk about such things in church or anywhere else for that matter, but there is an epidemic in our culture, and individuals and families in our congregation are not immune to it. So on this morning, on the Sunday after we observed “Children’s Sabbath,” I’m raising the issue of protecting our parents as well as our children.

The idea actually came from one of our parents. (O.K., maybe right now I am talking about you or someone you know.) Last month, Bev had a conversation with a parent who spoke positively and gratefully about the Sunday School session our youth ministry sponsored recently on Internet safety. The teacher of that session was a police officer whose undercover beat is the Internet where he poses in various virtual venues as a 13-year-old girl. His job is to lure sexual predators on children away from their computer screens out into the light of day and put them behind bars. But what the mom said to Bev pulled me up short. She said, in effect, I’m glad we’re committed to protecting our children from online predators, but who is watching the people who are preying on our children’s parents?

She said that her husband keeps up with friends and work colleagues on Facebook. She is his “friend,” and that means she can read the online conversations that he has with other “friends.” She told Bev that she was astonished to see how forward, flirty, and inappropriate some women were in their online conversations with her husband. Her husband is mature enough and committed enough to fend off their advances, but not all husbands and wives are that mature and committed. How do we protect our parents from temptation and predation in cyberspace or any other space?

You’ll be relieved to hear, I’m sure, that I have sworn off ten-point sermons after last week’s effort. So, I’m suggesting this morning that protecting our parents begins with three points.

First, paying attention to our marital, family and/or primary relationships. Paying attention is hard work. Admittedly, paying attention is harder for some of us than it is for others, but it’s hard work for all of us. A very wise grandmother I know was talking with her teenaged granddaughter whose parents had divorced. It was an ugly divorce, and things haven’t gotten any prettier since. “I want you to know,” the grandmother said, “that there was a time when your father loved your mother very, very much. He loved her, I want you to know that. A honeymoons is a lot of fun,” the grandmother said, “but marriage is hard work.”

I was reminded of that the other week at Wednesday-night supper in the Fellowship Hall when the conversation turned to what it’s like to try to sustain a relationship for decades. Bev said of a friend of ours, “She’s been married as long as I have. After 33 years of marriage, you understand it isn’t always pretty. It’s not a feeling you have; it’s a commitment you make.” Commitment carries you where on any given day feelings can’t take you, and commitment requires paying attention to the marital and family and/or primary relationships you have instead of dallying in relationships outside of them.

A honeymoon is fun, but a marriage is hard work. Having a baby is exciting, but rearing and nurturing children to adulthood—and sometimes beyond—is hard work. In the course of the hard work that relationships are, all of us experience stress and vulnerabilities that can leave us susceptible to inattention or to attention to the wrong people. Pay attention to the right people, not the wrong ones. Pay attention.

After attention comes accountability. Our pastoral staff covenant expresses it this way: if we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to inappropriate behavior or are approached inappropriately by someone, we will make ourselves accountable in highest confidence to one of our colleagues. I’ve told this embarrassing story before, but it’s a story of accountability, so I’m going to tell it again.

Many years ago, in my former life in the university, after the word broke that yet another tall- steeple Baptist preacher had blown himself out of the pulpit by his sexual misconduct, a friend of mine came in my office and asked, “What is wrong with these guys? I’ve met a lot of attractive women in my life,” he said, “but I’ve never met one I thought was worth throwing it all away for.” I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that we went from that comment to making a list of what it would take in a woman for us to throw it all away for her. Attractive, smart, funny, rich. As the list grew, it should have become clear to us that if any woman had all of them, she sure wouldn’t be interested in either one of us. But then we did something that neither one of us expected. We both agreed that if either one of us ever thought we had found the woman worth throwing it all away for, before we acted on that thought, we would call the other one in for a consultation. And we agreed that throwing it all away would require a unanimous vote of the two of us. Embarrassing that we would think like that, huh?

A couple years later I confessed that story as sin to one of my best professional friends who has spent decades working with clergy who have thrown it all away. When I told him I was embarrassed by that little episode, he said, “Don’t be. What the two of you did is to make yourselves accountable to each other. That’s the mistake everybody who goes over the waterfall makes. They come to believe they are accountable to no one, and that’s when they mess up.”

In a community of believers, each member a minister, we are accountable to God and to one another. If you feel yourself becoming vulnerable or being approached inappropriately, seek out someone you can trust in highest confidence to whom you make yourself accountable.

Attention, accountability, and now direction. It’s the direction of our energy and our attention. In a wonderful benediction to the people of God in Philippi, the apostle Paul points us in the direction of “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

The misdirection of our energy and our attention is one of our greatest human failings. Except in the rarest cases, in our relationships we know what is right, what is honorable, what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing, what is commendable, excellent and worthy of praise. Our most frequent problem is not that we do not know but that we do not direct our energy and our attention to those things. Think about these things, Paul says, and you will discover the presence of the God of peace in your relationships.

Fred Craddock tells a story about riding to a denominational meeting with a leader in the congregation he was pastoring, a successful and well respected businessman in the community. The man’s wife and teenage daughter were riding along because they were going to shop in the city while the two men attended the conference. Craddock says that he was astonished at what he heard as they rode. The husband and father was assaulted with a constant barrage of criticism and ridicule. He was a human punching bag for barbs and slings and arrows from his wife and his daughter. At the beginning, Craddock said, he was in shock. And then he became embarrassed first for the man, and then for his wife and his daughter, and then for himself even. And then, as the barrage continued, he became angry. And then he was just sad to see what kind of family life this successful and respected man had, successful and respected everywhere else except in his own family.

They arrived for the conference early, so when the women headed off to shop the men went to a nearby café for a cup of coffee. They sat in silence for a while, and then the husband and father spoke. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he said to Craddock. And then he asked, “What do you say to a man who has everything he wants in the world except the thing he wants the most?” What do you say to a woman who has everything in the world she wants except the thing she wants the most? What do you say?

I’m going to offer two responses under the heading of "direction." First, I would say, Get your entire family into counseling with an expert family therapist. You guys need professional help. And if they won’t go with you, then you go alone. Don’t try to do this on your own. You need a family therapist.

Second, I would say, I grieve for you. It shouldn’t be that way. But don’t make the mistake of obsessing over the one thing you want most that you don’t have. Happiness is to be found not in having the one thing you want most but in wanting what you do have. Direct your energy and your attention to what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent and worthy of praise in your life. “Think about these things,” the apostle Paul says. So often, we make ourselves miserable in our obsession over what we don’t instead of appreciating and enjoying and being grateful for what we do have.

In whatever condition or state we find our lives or our relationships, it is a spiritual discipline of the highest order to direct our energy and attention to what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent and worthy for praise. And when we exercise that spiritual discipline, we discover just as Paul tells us that the God of peace is with us after all, that the peace of God which passes all understanding keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

A starting place in protecting our parents is that we all covenant together that whatever the condition of our lives and our relationships may be, we will engage in attention, accountability, and direction. May it be so. Amen.


Photo by Dustin Diaz under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Children’s Sabbath: When Were You Hungry?

Mark 8:1-8
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost 2010

Last night about 8:30, I received an email from someone in this congregation who is so dedicated a soul that this morning’s sermon was already on his mind. The email informed me that there is a tradition among some folks in this place that “a perfect Sunday morning would be that the Gamecocks won Saturday, Clemson lost, and the Sunday sermon was short.” Truly, I say unto you, two out of three ain’t bad. It is no more likely that the Sunday sermon would be short than that the University of South Carolina could beat the #1 team in the country in football.

So in honor of an utter unlikelihood that borders on impossibility, I’m going to preach a ten-point sermon on a miracle this morning. Not three points but ten points, and here they are. One through ten. Nutrition. Attention. Affection. Compassion. Responsibility. Commitment. Thanksgiving. Breaking up what you have. Giving it away. More than enough. Got it? Good. Then may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. Don’t you wish? Don’t you just wish?

When were you hungry? When have you experienced a grinding, gnawing need for sustenance that is hunger? Nearly twenty years ago, our own Schaeffer Kendrick challenged this congregation by saying, “No child in Greenville County should ever go to bed hungry.” The Schaeffer Kendrick Challenge was this: every person who comes here on Sunday morning should bring one canned good or other staple, or place one dollar in a special offering that should be taken up in every adult Sunday School class. That’s why those large plastic bins are located at various places around our facility. It’s why this basket sits in the “Come Unto Me Window.” It’s why last Sunday morning in the Hope Sunday School Class I put a dollar in the envelope that was passed around before the lesson started. No child in Greenville County should ever go to bed hungry.

But they do, and here’s how we know. The most recent numbers that the School District of Greenville County has made available to the general public show that out of the almost 69,000 students in public schools in this county, more than 28,000 or 41% qualified for USDA free lunch assistance. In her children’s sermon, Laura illustrated the statistics for children living below the poverty line in the U.S. as a whole. In Greenville County, based on qualifications for free lunch assistance, the percentage of children who are hungry is not 1 in 5 or 2 in 10 but 2 in 5 and 4 in 10.

One of our own members is the principal of an elementary school in which 90% of the children qualify for free and reduced lunch. Do you hear that? Three miles from here one of our members principals a school in which 90% of the children are at risk for inadequate nutrition on a daily basis. They don’t show up in National Geographic; you don’t see them on CNN or FOX News; you won’t find relief agencies running heart-rending advertisements to adopt one of them by sending a monthly check. But children all around us right here in “River City” with our beautiful Liberty Bridge and Falls Park and downtown eateries bustling in the evenings are going to bed hungry and going to school without adequate nutrition. Point #1: Nutrition. Children are hungry for nutrition.

And for attention. One morning two years ago, I jumped into the car, backed out of the driveway, and as was my habit, I fired up my cell phone to check my work voicemail. The fifth-grader in the passenger seat beside me asked, “Dad, why are you always on the phone?” “There are a lot of people I need to be in touch with,” I answered impatiently, as I tried to listen over the sound of his voice and my own. His next question was softer, more hesitant: “Am I one of those people? Am I somebody you need to be in touch with?” Click.

Don’t think for a minute that children living below the poverty line are the only children who are hungry. We see it all the time around here. Children in affluent families don’t miss many meals, but children in affluent families can be starving for attention. Their parents are so caught up in their work or their home or their recreation or their community service or maybe even their church service that their children are left hungry for attention. By the way, it’s a small thing, but I don’t listen to voice mail on the way to school anymore, because there is someone right there in the car with me that I need to be in touch with. Point #2: Attention.

And affection. Several years ago, Bev and I fostered a child who was so abysmally starved for affection that he didn’t even know to ask for it or receive it. When he would hurt himself, for instance, by inadvertently hitting his head on the corner of the countertop as he ran through the kitchen, he would turn and walk away from the outstretched arms ready to comfort him into another room where he would cry alone until he had cried it out, and then he would return. His case was extreme, of course, but it stands for the hunger for affection that is experienced daily by more children than you would ever imagine. Their faces don’t show up milk cartons. Their descriptions don’t appear on Amber Alerts. But they are all around us and even among us, folks.

Affection is a fundamental physiological need as well as an emotional need. Insufficient affection results in a “failure to thrive” in children and adults alike that has physiological as well as psychological consequences. If you are among those people who happen to think that when Jesus says “Love one another,” that it’s a bunch of touchy-feely religious sugar-water hocus-pocus, then you don’t know your science. You haven’t study the development of the human brain, the importance of the human limbic system, and you haven’t studied primate social behavior, just for starters. Point #3: Affection.

In our family we have a tradition called the “goof hug.” The term was coined by our oldest son when he was very young, before he could pronounce “group hug.” Bev or I would call for a “group hug,” and his eyes would light up and he would say excitedly, “Goof hug!” “Goof hug!” Over the years our goof hugs have gone from three of us to four to five and now six. And it’s goofy alright. It can happen in the kitchen or the den or the living room or the driveway whenever or wherever anyone in the family calls for it: Goof hug! It’s silly, I know, but it’s also a parable. The people of God must always be the people of the goof hug, because there are always children and adults alike in our world and in our community and in our congregation who are “failing to thrive” because they are starving for affection. Nutrition, attention, affection.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus was surrounded by hungry people: “there was a great crowd,” we are told in Mark 8:1, “without anything to eat.” Jesus’ first response is my point #4: Compassion. “I have compassion for the crowd,” Jesus said, “because they have nothing to eat.” “Compassion” means “co-suffering.” It is the capacity to feel someone else’s hurt. Compassion is the essentially human response—and the Bible teaches that it is an essentially divine response as well—to another person’s suffering. Compassion.

But Jesus goes a step beyond compassion in verse 3. When Jesus says, “If I send them away hungry to their homes,” he is taking personal responsibility for their condition. If Jesus is our example, then it is not nearly enough to “feel someone’s pain,” as they say. It is also necessary to acknowledge our responsibility in relation to them when they are suffering. Compassion. Responsibility (#5).

Having had compassion and acknowledged responsibility, Jesus then commits the resources he has available to alleviate the suffering that he sees. Of course it’s not enough: seven loaves and a few small fish are not sufficient to satisfy the hunger of 4,000 people. But if you never make the commitment to allocate the resources that you do have to accomplish what you can accomplish, your expression of compassion is worthless, and your sense of responsibility is hypocrisy. Commitment (#6) of resources.

Jesus’ next step may be the biggest difference between Jesus in this story and us in our stories. In verse 6, Jesus offers up thanks (#7) to God for what he does have instead of whining about what he doesn’t have. That might be the miracle in the story: that the person with compassion who feels responsible for those who are suffering and is willing to commitment all he or she has gives thanks instead of whining when they only come up with only seven loaves and a few fish. But you see, if every group of 13 fishes around, so to speak, and comes up with seven and few, thousands can be fed. Remember that as you leave this morning where children stand at the door with baskets to receive an offering for seed money to launch an initiative in 2011 to feed hungry children in Greenville County. If everyone comes up even with just seven and a few, thousands can be fed.

Once you have given thanks, you have to break it up (#8) to give it away (#9). You can’t keep what you have intact and do any good with it. You have to break it up. And you can’t keep it to yourself to do any good with it. You have to give it away. Whether we are talking about nutrition or attention or affection, it has to be distributed—spread around—by breaking it up and giving it away. When we follow Jesus in compassion, responsibility, commitment, thanksgiving, breaking it up, and giving it away, we discover that we actually have more than enough (#10) to go around. Let’s make it so.

Nutrition, Attention, Affection, Compassion, Responsibility, Commitment, Thanksgiving, Breaking it up, Giving it away, More than Enough. Let’s make it so.


Photo of the mosaic floor of the Church of the Multiplication in Tagbha on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee by Steven Conger by license of Creative Commons.


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

World Communion: A God’s-Eye View

2 Timothy 1:1-14
World Communion Sunday 2010

If you are a parent or a grandparent of more than one child, then you have probably marveled at one time or another at how two children reared in the same household could be so different from each other. If you have at least one brother or sister, sooner or later you have wondered at the differences between them and you.

There was Jacob the homebody, soft and quiet and close to his mother; and there was his brother Esau the hunter, rough and ruddy and close to his father. There was Rachel, graceful and beautiful, and her sister Leah of the lovely eyes. There was Joseph the dreamer and his rash-acting brothers who sold him into Egypt. There was Mary the devoted student and Martha the diligent hostess. The differences between brothers and sisters reared in the same household can be so great that sometimes a person’s closest “kindred spirit” is not found among one’s own siblings but among children reared in another household. Think David and Jonathan, Mary and Elizabeth, Jesus and John the Beloved. Kindred spirits. Soul mates from different families.

For all our marveling and wondering, we can account for most of those differences—and the similarities, too. Except in the case of identical twins, no two children of the same parents have exactly the same genetic make-up. The differences begin in our DNA. Beginning even in utero, no two children experience exactly the same environmental influences. For the simplest of examples, a first child born into a nuclear family experiences a very different interpersonal environment than a second child experiences in that family. For the second child, there are not two but three faces and voices and bodies interacting with them. And a third child grows up in an entirely different interpersonal environment than either the first or the second. There are not three but four, and they’re all different. The differences in their genes and the differences in their experiences even within the same household result in distinct personalities, disparate identities, different strengths and weaknesses, dissimilar tastes.

On this World Communion Sunday on which brothers and sisters in “the household of God,” as the church is called in Ephesians 2:19 and 1 Timothy 3:15 and 1 Peter 4:17, share in the bread and the cup of remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ, we would do well to reflect—even if only briefly—on the nature of our kinship, our sisterhood and brotherhood in the household of God.

I’m suggesting we take a “God’s-eye view” on the matter. Now, you and I both know that there is no one any more presumptuous than the person who proposes to see things as God sees things. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” says God (Isaiah 55:8-9). We all know that there is no one more preposterous than a person who purports to see as God sees. “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been God’s counselor?” God’s judgments are “unsearchable” and God’s ways are “inscrutable,” says the apostle Paul (Romans 11:33-34). No one sees as God sees. We all recognize that it is intellectually and psychologically and spiritually impossible for a finite being to comprehend an infinite point of view.

And yet, Scripture is every bit as insistent that there are times and places and persons who are called on to “write the vision” they have seen, to “make it plain” (Habakkuk 2:2; compare Revelation 1:11). From time to time, God says to a mere mortal, “What do you see?” (Jeremiah 1:11,13; 24:3; Amos 7:8; 8:2; Zechariah 4:2; 5:2; compare Acts 11:5-9). By suggesting that we take “a God’s-eye view” on World Communion Sunday, I recognize that I can be called “presumptuous” and “preposterous” but there is a vision of “the household of God” that World Communion Sunday represents and that vision should be written and made plain. And here it is: If in God’s household, God had wanted an “only child” of a church, God could have and would have made it so. If in God’s household, God had wanted an “only child” of a church, God could have and would have made it so.

From the earliest decades of the church’s existence, there were distinct personalities, disparate identities, different strengths and weaknesses, and dissimilar tastes in the various congregations of the New Testament. In Jerusalem, there was a very Jewish church that was law-abiding as well as gospel-proclaiming. In Corinth, there was a predominantly Gentile congregation that was a free-spirited, overly enthusiastic. And there was a church in Galatia in Asia Minor torn between the two, pulled by unnamed teachers in the direction of the law and scolded by Paul to go with the Spirit. There was a church in Antioch that was cosmopolitan, and missionary-sending. If the New Testament is to be trusted and believed, then in the household of God that is the church there have always been multiple siblings with distinct personalities, disparate identities, different strengths and weaknesses, and dissimilar tastes, owing to their different DNA, their different environmental influences, and maybe even their divergent callings as the people of God in their time and in their place.

This morning’s New Testament lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday was written to a third-generation Christian whose grandmother Lois and mother Eunice were believers. The counsel given to Timothy speaks wisdom to a particular individual in a particular household of God, the household of Lois and Eunice. But is also speaks wisdom to the sibling bodies that are churches and communions.

We sometimes call churches or communions by the untheological and unbiblical word “denomination.” That word was not coined until the fourteenth century, and it wasn’t used to refer to religious groups until the eighteenth century. The communion of the saints that is called the church is nearly 2,000 years old, but the word that dominates our understanding of the distinctives and differences among communions is fewer than 200 years old.

We are not denominations; we are sibling bodies, brothers and sisters in Christ, each of us “called with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to God’s own purpose and grace,” in the words of 2 Timothy 1:9. Each sibling body is called to espouse the “sincere faith” (1:5) that is in its DNA and in its upbringing. Each sibling body is reminded “rekindle the gift of God that is within” it (1:6). Each sibling body is encouraged to “Hold to the standard of sound teaching” that it has heard “in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1:13) and to “Guard the good treasure entrusted” to it, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in” it (1:14). There are many different communions in God’s household “called with a holy calling . . . according to God’s own purpose and grace.”

Remember that in the gospel of Luke, one of Jesus’ disciples reported seeing “‘someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Do not stop him; for whoever is not against you is for you’” (Luke 9:49-50). Just because someone doesn’t “follow with us,” it does not mean they are not following Jesus. Just because we don’t “follow with them,” it does not mean that we are not following Jesus.

In the gospel of John, in the passage in which Jesus states his claim to be the “good shepherd” of the biblical tradition, he says to those who are listening in his presence, “I know my own and my own know me. . . . I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice” (John 10:14,16). Jesus goes on to say, “There will be one flock, one shepherd” (10:17), but that is a “kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” prediction, not a temporal description. The temporal description is that there are other sheep not of this fold who also listen to the voice of Christ, who also belong to Christ.

It goes without saying that there are sibling rivalries in the household of God. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that sibling rivalries reflect ontological realities. Sibling rivalries are a reflection of human sinfulness, not of “God’s own purpose and grace.” There were, after all, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers, Mary and Martha.

And it goes without saying that sometimes we find our closest kindred spirits not among our own siblings but among sisters and brothers from other families. There were, after all, David and Jonathan, Mary and Elizabeth, Jesus and John the Beloved.

If in God’s household, had God wanted an “only child” of a church, God could have and would have made it so. “According to God’s own purpose and grace,” there are many churches with distinct personalities, disparate identities, different strengths and weaknesses, and dissimilar tastes, yet “called with a holy calling” to espouse a “sincere faith,” to “rekindle the gift of God that is within” it (1:6), to “Hold to the standard of sound teaching” that it has heard “in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1:13) and to “Guard the good treasure entrusted” to it, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in” it (1:14).

On World Communion Sunday, we celebrate the diversity of God’s household of many communions that are at the same time in a God’s-eye view, one holy communion of brothers and sisters in Christ.

Photo of computer-generated DNA by Geoff Hutchison, licensed by Creative Commons.

Photo of Saint Anna Orthodox Church, Rosedale, CA, by Joshua Trevino, licensed by Creative Commons.

Photo of Avondale Patillo United Methodist Church, Decatur, GA, by apmethodist, licensed by Creative Commons.

Photo of Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Assembly, by christianchurch, licensed by Creative Commons.

Photo of English Martyrs Roman Catholic Church, by DannyMcL, licensed by Creative Commons.

Photo of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, Asheville, NC, by Bill Rhodes, licensed by Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.