August 17, 2015

He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” Mark 4:26-29

“All that we Christians are called upon to do, all we can do, is to be an open watercourse for the divine love. We do not create any part of it; it would be an arrogant illusion to think we did. We must not blockade it; if we did, we would be the adversaries of G*d, not His children. We are simply to reflect it, back to Him and out to His world. Our calling is to give it free flow. That means we are never generous. We never give any gifts. We are merely to be the channel for the good gifts which come in a steady stream from G*d.” Franklin Clark Fry (1900 – 1968) “The Source and the Flow”, a 1967 Stewardship article. “For All The Saints”, volume II, (p. 354)

I am doing a funeral service today for a woman whose life was difficult, her relationships were often tragic, and she ended her life by suicide. She served in the Army during “Desert Storm”, she was a collector of antiques, she hiked the Appalachian trail, she was a generous person, and her husband shared with me that she believed that a person did not need to go to church to be a Christian.

As a pastor I understand what people mean when they say there is no need to attend church to be a Christian. I understand the mental exercise someone is going through to try to make sense of a statement that is full of contradictions. To say we can be a Christian without attending church is like saying “I can love the symphony without ever attending a concert”, or “I can join a fraternity without ever going through the ritual of becoming a member”, or “I can be a member of the Army without ever going through boot camp”. How can one claim to be “in a group” without ever attending any of the meetings.

But, many people believe that if they are loving, if they use G*d’s name once in a while in a sentence, if they read their bibles occasionally, if they are generous to others, and if they believe in Jesus “in their hearts”, then they are a Christian. And I cannot say anything bad about any of those endeavors. But you see, it is in our involvement in the church that we understand what true love is all about, why misusing G*d’s name is more than just swearing, why reading the bible and studying the bible are really different, and what generosity really means. G*d does call us to be generous, just as he was prodigal, and generous to us through the blessings we have received in creation, and in the life and death of Jesus. But being generous does not mean that we give some of what WE have. You see, WE never had the right to call the stuff we have “ours”. It was never ours. G*d has generously lent us all we have, hoping that we will be good Stewards of the blessings G*d has heaped upon us.

Pastor Dave