Bible Talks - Family Church (9:45am)
Series: Christian Calling · Talk No. 5
Called to Fellowship
Sunday, 07 August 2005
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One of things we hardly ever do in church any more is recite the Athanasian Creed. There are several reasons for this. The most obvious is it’s fairly long and repetitious. Also it’s written in old fashioned language and it tends to be strongly dogmatic. It starts off: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity” Back in the olden days when we still used the BCP, if you stuck to the rules you were supposed to use that creed about 13 times a year. More common experience was that we might use it once a year on Trinity Sunday as it remains one of the great Trinitarian statements of the Christian faith.
Broughton Knox in his little book “the Everlasting God” states, “The doctrine of the Trinity is the glory of the Christian religion. It tells that ultimate reality is personal relationship.” And goes on to say that relationship, as the Athanasian creed reminds us, is bound up in the very nature of God and as Christians we are called to be in relationship with God as our Father, Jesus our brother, and with each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.
When we become Christians through faith in Jesus Christ we are incorporated into the fellowship of all believers. We most often express this when we recite the Apostle’s Creed and say, “I believe in the holy catholic church; the communion of saints.” These are not separate statements. The holy catholic or universal church is the communion or fellowship of saints or believers.
When Jesus and the first Christians used the word we translate as church, that is the Greek word ekklesia to describe the people of God they reflecting the biblical understanding of being God’s people, called out and gathered together, assembled around their God.
After the Lord rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt he gathered them together at Mt Sinai. There heaven came down to earth showing its glory and giving its blessing on the newly constituted people of God.
Throughout much of the OLD TESTAMENT the Israelites look back on the gathering at Mt Sinai as the assembly that defined who they were as a nation and the people of God. Later when Solomon built the temple on Mt Zion in Jerusalem and God showed his presence there with his people. The focus shifts to Zion as the place where people gather together to meet fellowship with God.
Of course this was the intended significance but as the people increasingly neglected the terms of the covenant their prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Isaiah start pointing not to the earthly temple and Zion as symbols of God dwelling with his people but to the heavenly gathering, the spiritual Zion, and instead of the Israelite nation gathering, there would be the gathering of those who truly belonged to the Lord. Those who had god’s Spirit living in them and had his Law written on their hearts. The later Old Testament prophets talked about the Lord gathering his people from all the nations around himself at the heavenly Zion.
This vision of the assembly of God’s people at Zion was at the heart of the prophetic visions of the end of the Age. God would fulfill his promise to Abraham to bless the nation through the assembly of the people of God.
When Jesus came he cancelled any idea of there being special significance in the earthly Zion in Jerusalem or the earthly temple and transferred to himself the end times hopes of the people of God gathering together. A purified remnant of God's people would gather together around God's presence just as the prophets had foretold. But the gathering point was not, would not be a mountain, a city, a temple. The gathering point would be Jesus himself.
The temple, the priesthood, the kingship no longer serve as Israel’s focal point. The focal point of the new Israel, that is those who are constituted as God's new chosen people through faith in Jesus Christ, is Jesus.
During his earthly ministry Jesus began drawing together the new people of God. In the description of the feeding of the 5,000 in John’s gospel there are symbolic elements relating to the gathering of the Israelites at Mt Sinai. During his ministry we see the Jews of his day becoming more and more alienated from Jesus and we even see Jesus ministering to the Gentiles, the roman Centurion, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the people of the Decapolis across the Jordan. A person could only enter into this new expression of God’s chosen people through identification with Jesus.
A highly significant aspect of this is Simon Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah or Christ at Caesarea Philippi. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Then Jesus in a play of words on Simon’s nickname says, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” That is the confession of Jesus as the Messiah is the rock on which Jesus will call his people together. Jesus would build around himself his new people of God.
The early Christians saw their own gatherings in the light of this rich Old Testament background. They knew that their meetings were not merely a human association of like minded people, but they were the gathering together to himself of God’s own people, and they readily used symbols and words of Israel’s great assemblies to explain their own dignity and calling.
For example in 1 Peter 2:4-10 where Peter says:
“4As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—5you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For in Scripture it says:
“See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.”
7Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
“The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone, “
8and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.”
They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.
9But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
Peter uses phrases from Exodus, Isaiah and Hosea, all originally referring to the Israelites, God's Old Testament chosen people, to describe Christians, God's new chosen people.
Whenever we gather together as Christians we are not just a group of people who happen to be Christians gathering together for mutual support and encouragement. We are the people of God coming together, gathering around God. Remember Jesus saying, “Whenever two or three people gather in my name, there I am in the midst of them” It only takes two or three people gathered in Christ’s name for that gathering to be part of the church, the ekklesia, the gathering of God's people.
So our fellowship meetings, be they church meetings on Sundays, growth groups during the week, prayer meetings, One80, a family gathered for prayers, parents and their children reading Bible stories before bed. There is the church, there is the people gathered before God.
As we read the New Testament letters we see that Paul and the other authors regarded any meeting of Christians meeting for Christian purposes were already part of that great heavenly assembly at the end of the age. Jesus has ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father and is gathering his people around him.
Paul wasn’t talking about us being part of some sort of universal invisible church or even our local gatherings being part of the universal church. When we gather together around Christ we ARE the universal church. Our meeting together in Christ as inconsequential as it may seem to us, as poorly organized as it may happen to be, as irrelevant as the sermon may be, as contrary to our own tastes the music and even how much certain other people may get on our works – in spite of all the things that be wrong or go wrong --- we are the universal church.
We are God’s people, God’s family, God’s personal possession, the body, the vine, the vineyard, so the question arises “if all this grand sounding stuff is true, how then should we live?” Let me just make a few points
1. Unity in diversity -- We are all different . We have different backgrounds, ethnic, racial, educational, economic, social, experiential, age sex, and giftedness yet we are one in Christ.
2. Service and responsibility -- We are serve one another as I said a couple of weeks ago. We are mutually responsible for each other’s welfare. Our discipling and spiritual growth are a mutual responsibility.
3. Freedom and authority – We are bound together not by a set of rules, or a written constitution, but by the mutual relationship we have with Christ. We are to look after the weaker brother as Paul speaks about it in Romans and other places. We are to avoid causing others to stumble. We are to promote love and respect and honour.
I sometimes think that we forget just what we’re on about. We forget that we are the gathered people of God. We forget that when we meet together Jesus is here with us. It is the realization of these things that lifts our gatherings out of the mundane and ordinary into the heavenly and extraordinary.
Let us pray.
