Lay Servant Training Opening Worship – April 20, 2013

Good morning!  I am going to start today with the story of the graphic that I am proudly displaying on my Springville United Methodist Church T-Shirt.  A story that has Easter People written all over it!

Have you ever had an idea just pop into your head?  An idea that came from some place you did not know existed?  This is where the One Another cross came from, and where it goes no one knows.

I attended a church service where the pastor cited the large number of occasions in the New Testament where the words “one another” were preceded or followed by a command or request.  Searching an online bible database, I found 41 such instances.   They started with Jesus’ words in the Gospel According to John, Chapter 13, Verses 14 (^“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”), 34 (“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”), and 35 (“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”). “One another” also shows up in Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1^st Thessalonians, Hebrews, James, 1^st Peter, 1^st & 2^nd John.  It was in seeing the breadth of the commands where the idea of the cross was born.

And then my business background kicked in…how could any Christian NOT like this cross?  I thought, “I will copyright it and sell it on anything I can print it on.  Better still, I will license it to someone and collect royalties for the rest of my life.”  And I started down this path, sending inquiries to companies that I thought would be interested in some original Christian artwork…even though I am hardly an artist!  Alas, no responses came.

It was about this time that I had a long talk with God.  Did He not send the cross to me in order to help provide for my children?  If so, I reasoned, the offers should have been flooding my email.  Since that did not happen, what was His intent?  And then the classic series of consequences started.  Our Emmaus group wanted to raise money for worthy causes.  “What do you guys think about using this image?,” I asked the group.  Their approval was enthusiastically “YES!” and the project was started.

Pastor Ron Fike and I were discussing where this project could go, and we talked about getting $1 from each item sold through other churches for our local mission fund.  And then God and Julius had another chat, and the $1 charge no longer felt right.  The words were His, and I am pretty sure that the image is His; that I was simply the facilitator here on Earth.  So the charge went away…

And since then we have about 40 items floating around the village of Springville.  And the cross has made its way to Flint and New Orleans on the front of Siena Heights University Campus Ministry’s Winter Break T-Shirts.  And it is now in Marquette, MI and Los Angeles as gifts for my girlfriend’s family.  And it has been translated into Spanish with help from Nick Kaplan of Siena Heights and Rey Mondragon of Ypsilanti First United Methodist Church.  And the Spanish version is probably on its way onto t-shirts in Iowa, courtesy of Katie Waggoner’s sister Sara, who plans to use it to raise money for her mission trips to Guatemala, and to take shirts down with her.

So where is the Easter People connection?  In his recent Easter message to the United Methodist Church in Indiana, Bishop Michael Coyner gave some guidelines for Easter People.  First, Easter People know that the church is the Body of Christ, and not the buildings that we worship in.  How many stories are there of church buildings being wiped out by natural disasters, yet the congregation pulls together and continues to function until another building is secured?  Each one of us here today, the teachers and the students and the clergy, is a living, breathing part of the Body of Christ.  We not only understand that “church” is a living thing, we have a demonstrated commitment to further the Word of God.

We Easter People offer our best out of a sense of gratitude to God.  Sure, we will all take the tax deduction for our financial donations, but we all know that it is the non-financial donations that make God’s church the force that it is today.  Every time we step up to lead a small group, to preach a message, to add our voices to a choir, to lead a charitable effort, and so on, we share the love that He put in each one of us out of a sense of owing Him something for all of the good we have been given.  And without the efforts of our Lay Servants, our churches would be dark and uninteresting save for an hour or two each Sunday morning.  It is our best that makes our churches vital and alive with the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ death on the cross and His rising are the things that fuel our faith, not the points that we collect for helping out or for writing our weekly check.  We understand that we were all redeemed on that first Easter!  We know that we are awash in His grace!  We know that He will not take any of this away from us even though we are all sinners!  We know that Jesus’ final act as a human being was the ultimate act of love, a love so profound that it can never be completely understood.  We understand that the Holy Spirit moves us to do the things that bring glory to God, the things that we could never figure out to have done on our own, including designing and giving away a cross graphic!

In wrapping up this morning, I would like to read from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Chapter 3, verses 12-14: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

And we Easter People place all of our trust in the Trinity.  We know that by believing in Him, and by sharing the love in our heart in same manner that Jesus shared His love, we have been granted access to all of the goodness that God created here on Earth and beyond.  There are no other conditions for His love of us.  As Chris Tomlin says in his song “Indescribable,” “He can see the depth of our hearts, and He loves us anyway.”

But we Easter People need to remember to be vulnerable enough to continue to share the compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness and love that we have in our hearts.  We need to share love when there is no promise of a return.  We need to share love when all seems hopeless.  We need to share love when bombs rip through our world.  For when we are vulnerable and courageous enough to share love when all seems hopeless, that, my friends, is the moment when hope is fueled, and God shows just how powerful and loving  He is.  He showers all of us in goodness.  He fills all of our hearts with joy.  And all of that, and more, makes us smile as He shows us just how much WE are capable of doing in His name.  We know that we cannot do any of this without Him.  And He needs more Easter People to make more good things happen here on Earth.  Amen!