Easter +1

We are among the early disciples. It is the week after Easter, and we have seen Jesus a few times already. We wonder among ourselves where he goes when he leaves us. He never seems to spend the night. He’ll stay for supper every now and then, but soon after he disappears, sometimes literally. Then we are left to our own wonderment and questioning. We talk about this new kingdom he describes, and we are sure that he will bring it about any day.
Fast forward to today. None of us have seen the physical presence of Jesus in our lifetime. He hasn’t dropped by, at least not physically, in almost 2,000 years. We still wait for the kingdom. In the meantime, that group of people who had all things in common seem to have forgotten that.
On the surface, we are churches and not the Church that Jesus commanded us to be. We split over baptism, we split over social justice issues, we split along racial, national, ethnic, and language lines, we split over the interpretation of Scripture. I wonder, what would those first disciples think of us. We they find a True Church left and exult over those who had remained pure? If so, who would it be? You? Me? Someone else entirely? Would those disciples find only splinters of a True Church, pieces of what was once a whole, shining and beautiful for one brief shining moment before we took Church and turned it into religion.
In this country, we are less persecuted from external forces than we are by one another. We make brief attempts to unite, but something always pulls us back apart. We are the modern Tower of Babel, talking past one another and never hearing Truth from brothers and sisters in Christ simply because they are “they” and not “us”.

At the same time, I must say that some of those differences and divisions are necessary. There does, indeed, come a point where God calls us to stand for something. The Church must recognize that in its call to the world to come to salvation in Jesus Christ there is also a call to leave the thinking, acting, talking, living, and even dying ways of this world behind. We can no longer be so inclusive of everything that we do not stand apart on anything. The Scripture is clear that that should be a difference between believers and non-believers. However, within the life of the Church we are to claw and cling to every bit of connection and union that we possible can. Where we must create distance, we must do it with gentleness, tenderness, and love. And where we can find points of agreement, we must cling to those with all our might in order that the Kingdom of God might even be revealed on earth through us and the people of this earth might see us with the same eyes as they saw the very first Christians.

Pastor Craig