It was May of 1373 and a woman lay dying in an English city. The priest had been called in to perform the last rites for her. She looked like one more victim of the sickness and plague that were killing people all over Europe. Her mother brought a crucifix – a cross with the figure of Jesus crucified on it – and put it before her eyes so that it would be the last thing she saw before her mother closed her eyes in death.
That’s when it all began for the woman. She began to have a vision, an extraordinary vision. In this vision she saw in a deep and graphic way the sufferings that Jesus endured, but through it she also saw the love, felt the love that God had offered the world through that cross. She began to see how, beyond all things, it was God’s love and mercy that motivated all that God did.
In one moment of the vision she was looking at her hand. There, in the palm of her hand was something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, round as a ball. “What,” she thought to herself, “can this be?”
The answer came, “It is everything which is made.” She was holding the universe in the palm of her hand.
She was amazed that it could survive. She thought it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing. But again she heard a voice that said, “It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”
The woman saw three properties in the small thing that was the universe in her hand. “The first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, and the third is that God preserves it…God is the Creator and the Lover and the Protector.” It was clear to the woman then what she needed to do. “Until I am substantially united to him, I can never have love or rest or happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”[i]
Julian of Norwich recovered from her illness and lived at least forty more years. But she never forgot the series of visions she received as she looked at the cross. In fact, the whole rest of her life was devoted to trying to meditate on them and to share them with others. She gave the rest of her life to loving God.
As we began this new year, the Vision and Design Team of our church took on the task of looking at our mission statement. You know a mission statement is a succinct expression of what it is that an organization exists to do. The Island Creamery on Chincoteague exists to make fantastic ice cream. That’s their mission. They’ve added fudge and coffee to their offerings. They’ve got free Wi-Fi. They could get distracted by adding other stuff to what they do. But if they forget that they exist to make Marsh Mud and Pony Tracks ice cream – they will be in trouble.
So what is it that Franktown Church exists to do? There is a lot of stuff that goes on here. A lot of great stuff. But what are the things that are so essential that if we didn’t do them, we couldn’t be Franktown United Methodist Church? The Vision and Design Team went back and looked at our mission statement and we liked what was there. It said some great things about who we are. What it said was: “The mission of Franktown UMC is to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus Christ as the Holy Spirit empowers and guides us. We are called to pray, worship, study, witness, serve and love, as we reach out to the Eastern Shore community and beyond.”
The essentials were there and there are lots of great verbs in there – pray, worship, study, serve. But we wanted it to roll off our tongues so that people would remember it easily. We wanted to get down to the absolute essentials. And we found that we were using words that Jesus used.
Do you remember the story of when a lawyer came to question Jesus? He said to Jesus, “Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus knew he was being tested and that he was dealing with a lawyer so he said, “What does the law say? How do you read it?”
The lawyer summed up the whole of the law like this, "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole strength and your whole mind and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus was pleased with what the lawyer said. In fact Jesus used the same summary of the law and the prophets when he was teaching his disciples.
What is the key word in all of that? Love. When asked what it is that God asks from us – what it is that we as a body of Christians are called to do – the short answer is love. That’s what pulled Julian back into life and drove her for the rest of her life – she got in touch with the deepest desire of her heart – to love God with all that she had.
So right up front in our new mission statement we put that the mission of Franktown UMC is to love and glorify God. Glorify – make great. Add whatever glory we can with the small gifts that we have to the name of God. It is our first and great command. So we love and glorify God in our worship. We come here on Sunday mornings, not first because we want to have our needs met. That happens. In many and joyous ways that often happens, but it is not the reason we are here. We come first because we want to give up some love to God. We want to raise the roof for God. We come because it is the deep desire of our souls to be united to this God who created us and who loves us and who protects us. This God for whom the whole of the created world is just a small round thing, has loved us and wants nothing more of us than to love in return.
So now it’s your turn. It’s your turn to respond and help to grow this vision. If the first thing we are here to do is to love and glorify God, what ought we to do? What can we do in worship to love God? I was in a Toby Mac concert with the youth on Thursday night. My hearing is just coming back. It was an amazing amount of energy. Toby Mac was bouncing all over the stage jumping on his fellow singers. But he was praising God. Maybe Peter and I need to be doing that.
But not just in worship – in what other ways can we be loving and glorifying God? How can we do that in our life together? In our life in the world? How can we make God more than a brand name we stick onto ourselves like a fish on our cars and more like the source and object of our love?
Spend a few minutes writing in the first section of the third panel of your bulletin. Draw what it looks like if that feels better. We’re going to ask you to turn these so that we can start developing some visions for the short- and long-term. What can Franktown Church be doing to love and glorify God?
So what is the second part of that Great Commandment that Jesus gives us and that the lawyer recites? To love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And Jesus goes on to tell a story to help us know who our neighbors are. The story of the Good Samaritan is a classic and the outlines of it are very familiar to people who have hung around church for awhile:
A man goes down a dangerous road and gets beaten up and left for dead by robbers. Two Jewish religious authorities pass the man by while a foreigner stops to bind his wounds and to get him to a place to recover. Jewish people hearing this story would have been very surprised to hear that the compassionate one was a Samaritan.
At the end of the story Jesus asks the lawyer, “So how was a neighbor to the man that was beaten up?” The lawyer is forced to admit that it was the Samaritan.
Our neighbors are sometimes hard to love and we can convince ourselves that they’re really not deserving of that love. But Jesus keeps calling us out of our comfort zones to meet that neighbor and to be that neighbor by loving and serving them.
In her new book Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, Sara Miles talks about one of her rules for her church, which is to embrace the wrong people. Hey, it’s what Jesus did. As the priest in her Episcopal Church told her, if you’re going to follow Jesus, sometimes you have to sit in the smoking section.
Miles tells the story of Debbie Little Wyman who started a street church on Boston Commons that inspired a network of outdoor churches – churches that had no buildings. They simply existed to meet and serve people. Wyman, Miles says, “was a small, pale woman, with a great laugh and rimless glasses that made her look like a cross between a nun and a mad scientist.” She began by taking sandwiches to the park. “’It was the oddest thing,’ she said. ‘I had an itch that wouldn’t go away. I just had to get closer to people on the street, to see what Jesus meant.’”
So she packed up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bought two cups of coffee from a local coffee shop and went to the park, looking for someone who looked homeless. That was her whole plan for starting a church. As Miles tells it, she “spotted a man and went over and sat down. She was full of doubt. ‘I had no idea what to say. I handed him one of the cups of coffee. He took it and he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you doing today?’
“’Wham,’ she said, ‘Five minutes in, and I guess I saw who was taking care of whom.’[ii]
Following Jesus means letting that love of God spill over into loving others and receiving love from them. So the second part of our mission statement is the second part of the Great Commandment: to love and serve our neighbors. Your turn again – how can Franktown live this out? Listen to your heart and see if there is one thing that you feel God is calling us to.
So what is it that churches produce? It feels strange to talk that way because in one sense – we are not a business manufacturing goods, but Jesus did tell his disciples that they should make something. They should make more disciples.
We do that through witness – telling others the news about what this Jesus thing has meant to us. But we are Methodists so we also emphasize that experiencing God’s grace and accepting salvation through Christ is only the beginning. We then continue to grow in holiness – deepening our relationship with God and with each other through the practices of study, prayer, fellowship, confession, and Bible reading.
Each of us has a journey to take with God. We are all unfinished products moving on to perfection. So there are things for us to do as we grow. What are the things that we should be doing to help make disciples – followers of Jesus? The youth on Friday night during the lock-in decided that one thing they would try to do is to sit together during worship to let all of us know that they are taking their identity as disciples seriously and to welcome more youth in. What more should we do?
Luke 10:25-37
Just then a certain lawyer put him to the test.
--Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
--What does the law say? How do you read it?
--You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole strength and your whole mind and your neighbor as yourself.
--You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.
But he wanted to justify himself, so he said to Jesus,
--So who is my neighbor?
--A certain man was going down from
But a Samaritan who was traveling came upon him and he was moved with compassion when he saw him. Coming to him, he bound up his wounds, poured oil and wine on them, and placed him on his own beast of burden. He brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave to the innkeeper and said, 'Care for him and if you spend any more in addition, when I return I will repay you.'
Which of these three seems to you to have been the neighbor to the one who fell into the hands of robbers?
--The one doing mercy to him.
--Go and do likewise.
[i] Julian of Norwich, A 40 Day Journey with Julian of Norwich, Lisa E. Dahill, ed., [Augsburg: Minneapolis, 2008]
[ii] Sara Miles, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, [Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2010], e-book location 726.
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