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Christ Wants the World to Know About His Church

          Let’s say you have a friend who wants to know more about your church. Here at Grace, we have ways to help you. It simply depends on who your friend is. If your friend is the coffee type, you and your friend can simply make your way around the corner to Grace Place Coffee. There you’ll find our baristas working hard, not only on making good coffee, but more importantly on making the city know what we do here at Grace. If your friend is the tech savvy type, you could have her navigate her way over to www.gracedowntown.org. There you’ll find all sorts of information: all our bible class schedules are listed, and you can download last week’s sermon, there are photos of our buildings and the people that use them. All of those facts are descriptions of what we do as a church.  I know that the folks involved have been very eager and have put a lot of work into getting the look just right and getting all the information in the right place. And it’s really quite beautiful. Why do we go to all this trouble? We want the whole world to know about our church.

          If your friend is a bookish person, you could have him navigate his way through your bible into John 17, to the gospel we heard this morning.  There you’ll find a section of scripture which we call Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer.” Jesus puts together a beautiful description of his Church. On the night before he dies, Jesus gathers with his disciples and he gives us a lot of information as he describes what his Church is and what his Church does. Why does he go to all this trouble? Because he’s eager, just like we are. Today, as we look as we look at what Jesus has to say, we discover that Christ Wants the Whole World to Know about his Church. And the description he gives is absolutely beautiful. It’s a“Church he has unified” and aChurch he has “glorified.”

          I wonder if Jesus’ description of his Church matches the image you have in your mind. We know that the word “Church” means so many different things. If you were waiting for a flight and you asked several of people waiting with you at the gate to tell you what came to mind when you said the word “Church” you would probably get a whole bunch of answers. You might get some people who said “it’s a building.” And if you asked them to describe it, they might say, “it’s got a steeple and stained glass.” But if you tried matching their description to Jesus’ description, you might run into a problem. If you asked “Is your Church glorious?” The person might respond “well, it looks pretty nice, but it’s not quite glorious.”

          On the other hand, you might get some people to say the “church” that I belong to is the group of people that I see on Sundays at at 8, 9:30, or 11 And if you asked them for description you might get them as “friendly” or “conservative” or “casual”. Yet again, matching that “church” with the one Jesus describes might not work. If you ask “is your church unified?” You may hear, “Not as much as we’d like.”

          And if you were to ask a third person what he or she thought of “the Church” you might get a few of them to identify with whole group of people around the world who consider themselves religious—people who believe in God and tend to attend worship on Sundays. The kind of church we mean when we say “Church and State” And the description of that Church might make you a bit uncomfortable. They might say “that church is conservative, or strict, or hypocritical… or even foolish.”  And if you tried to match that description to Jesus description, you might be laughed at if you called that church “united” or “glorious”.

          You’ll have to admit that at first glance, the world-wide population of people who call on the name of the Lord is a group that hardly looks unified or glorious. You might have heard that the largest Lutheran Church body is in the process of losing whole congregations. Doesn’t look very unified, does it? The Church doesn’t look very glorious either: The largest church body in the world has been rocked by allegations of sex abuse and scandal.  And it gets worse away from the headlines. You know the topics that are better left unmentioned when the relatives come over: Uncle Bob’s church believes something different than Aunt Mary’s church. And you know the people around your water cooler who have baggage with ‘the church’ and who have told you that they don’t want to hear about what you do on Sunday mornings. Is this the church that Christ wants to tell the world about? This religious sub-culture full of bad press, bad blood, and bad tastes in people’s mouths? Not at all.

          “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

          Let’s be clear. The church that Jesus wants the world to know about is a Church which makes no headlines. A Church that has no denominations. A church that is not made out of bricks and mortar. It is all people on earth who believe in Christ, and as such, it’s a church which can only be seen through the eyes of faith. This is the Church, that Jesus wants the world to know about. A church that is unified.

          The true Church has only one teacher, Christ. The true Church is united by has only one truth, the Word of God, given to the disciples and handed down to us in the bible. And the true Church is united in one task, sharing the message of Christ to more and more so that the Church continues to grow. And the same facts that bind the true church together bind us together here at Grace. One Teacher, Christ, one Teaching the Word of God, and One Task of sharing Christ in our communities and our home. But there is one more fact that binds us together. We all desperately depend on our savior.

          Let me tell you what I mean. When you sit on an airliner with 200 to 300 people, you are very closely connected with the people that are flying with you. You are united, even if you’re flying Continental. You all have the same destination, you all have the same pilot. But there is that curtain that separates first class from coach. And there is nothing wrong with that curtain. And the first class passengers have perks that the coach passengers don’t. And a lot of those first class passengers worked hard for those perks. There is nothing wrong with flying first class. But those first class passengers would be foolish to think that they are better off than the coach passengers if there is a problem on the plane. Because if the landing gear goes, you can’t fix it with hot towels and Denver Omelets. And when the oxygen masks drop down the air they breathe in the first class cabin, is exactly the same as the air they breathe in coach.

          We can well admit that the congregation and the synod to which we belong have some first-class blessings. And as we look at other churches, we could identify the ways in which we are not unified. We could take all sorts of opportunities to see how other churches don’t follow Christ as their only teacher. We could talk about how other churches give dangerously little attention to the Word. And we do not condone or support congregations which act so dangerously! Still, we would be foolish if we thought we were better then them. We dare not forget that in those churches there are people who take Christ and his word seriously, and that they depend on him as desperately as we do.  

          And we do! Consider these words for a moment. “I pray that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”When you hear Jesus say that he wants us to be united to his Father, it signals a problem, especially when you hear the fact that his Father is a Righteous Father. That’s the sound of a big clunk coming from the landing gear. Suddenly we become aware of a problem. “I supposed to be united to a God who is Righteous, a God who is Perfect? A God who expects that I be perfect as well? I’m none of those things!”  We are all confronted by the desperate danger that we all face, the fact that no person can ever get it right. We’re unified alright, but we’re unified in a way that God never wanted us to be—one common sin infects us all. And as long as congregations like this are full of people like us, there is no way we will ever be as unified and as glorious as we are supposed to be. We can build beautiful buildings, we can sing beautiful songs, and they might look glorious, and our sound glorious, but without Jesus, we would still be desperate.

          Until Jesus says what he does:  “I have given them the glory that you gave me.”The glory that I had, I handed over. Everything that they needed, everything that they didn’t have, I gave. It’s such a short statement.  But it means so much! And we could spend a long time talking about how Christ actually did that. 

          We just celebrated the Ascension, a day when Jesus completed his work here on earth. And if we looked at all steps of that life spent working on earth, we would see a Savior who went from cradle to cross without sinning so that you could be perfect and glorious in God’s sight. We would walk to a tomb where we would find no body for this reason. Sin has been paid. Death has been defeated. And there we would get a glimpse of the glory that he gives us: the kind of perfection that gives life eternal.

          We could spend that time reading through John’s gospel. We could go all the way back to the first chapter where it says “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

          Why did Christ go to all this trouble? Why go through the pain and the difficulty? Why suffer the humiliation and the shame? Why take all of the glory that he had as he sat on his beautiful throne in heaven and hand it over to people like us? “So that they may be one as we are one:I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”  He wants you to know that his Father’s righteousness is something that we do not need be afraid of. Instead, it is something in which we share, because the perfect, flawless glory of Christ covers over the sin that shamed us, it repairs the unity that was broken.He wanted you to know that you to know that you are unified with him and glorified with him.

          When we consider what he has done for his Church, we are left to consider question, so what does it mean for the Church? First of all, the gift of God’s love and righteousness means that we look forward to something glorious. God’s people wait for the reward and the rest that has is coming to them. We look forward to standing beside our savior in heaven and seeing the Church as he sees it. Unified and glorified forever.

          It also means that there is a kind of glory that we experience right now. Forgiveness is a fact which brings us joy long before we get to heaven. When you hear that Jesus, God’s own Son, wants you “to be with him where he is”, you can almost feel the warm comfort of reconciliation. And when you realize that you get to look into the eyes of Father whose love has been made known to you, you can’t help but bask in the stunning brightness of Christ’s righteousness. 

          And it means one more thing. When Christ tells us about his Church, it changes the way we think about our church. When we talk about life here at Grace, there is so much for us to talk about! We can tell them about the bricks and the mortar. We can tell them about friendly faces, and the coffee shop and the music and the bible classes. You can tell them about the word and the truth. But when we realize that there is a group of people here who have been given the righteousness of Christ, it changes the whole game when you start telling the world about the Church to which you belong: when your friends get all sorts of wrong ideas about church, tell them about my church. “Tell the whole world about grace - aboutmy grace,” Jesus says. Tell them about sins forgiven and perfection won. Tell them that you know about the Love of God. The love that binds you together with me into one beautiful, unified and glorified, holy Christian Church. Amen.

Preached at Grace Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI (www.gracedowntown.org) on May 16, 2010

Services

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Mondays 6:30 pm

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church | 1209 North Broadway Milwaukee, WI 53202 | (414) 271-3006

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