Bare Necessities: Celebrating Our Congregation's Inclusive Witness in An Exclusive World

Scripture   Galatians 1:1-12

 

OUR STATEMENT of WELCOME: Bethesda Presbyterian Church is a diverse congregation welcoming all persons to serve Christ as full and active participants in our faith community, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identification, or any other personal attribute.

 

Many of us know the song. I first heard it when I saw the film “The Jungle Book” at age six – at a theater, as part of a birthday party for a friend:

  Look for the bare necessities
  The simple bare necessities
  Forget about your worries and your strife
  I mean the bare necessities
  Old Mother Nature's recipes
  That bring the bare necessities of life

Nothing strips our spiritual lives to the bare necessities of faith, hope, and love quicker than death and dying.

The Apostle Paul died a dramatic death on the road to Damascus. His zealotry for his Jewish faith – protecting his version of the faith from the Jewish sectarian outburst known as Christianity – was stripped away by the voice of the One who appeared directly to him, proclaiming three simple sentences accompanying a light so bright it blinded him for three days: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? … I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”

Light. More light. More light that strips away all our prejudices, all our proprieties, all our conditions, all our codicils, all our respectability, all our legislative riders, all of our life’s regulations. More light that penetrates to our very shameful core: “Why do you persecute me? I am Jesus. Follow me.”

Naturally, then, Paul grows the angriest when that bracing, searing, penetrating beam that exposed all his justifications and rationalizations is not seen by others, or at least not appreciated. When conditions – not expectations, mind you, but conditions – are placed upon following Jesus: what we intentionally frame as church membership, with new members stepping forward this coming week. For Paul knew from hard personal experience that applying conditions to faith community participation can only lead to one thing: more persecutions, like the ones he had once carried out.

And so Paul lets the church in Corinth have it when the wealthy separate themselves from the poor at the earliest Communion tables: where whole meals in the name of Christ were actually served, where all were welcomed at these tables, “to each according to their need” as scripture puts it. Paul writes the Corinthians, “What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” Keeping the focus always on providing in and through the church the bare necessities of life – spiritual and physically – vitally mattered to the Apostle Paul.

And so also, with all the zeal of the convert, our apostle lets the church in Galatia have it in the scripture Scott just read for us. This is Paul’s only letter that forgoes the customary prayer of thanksgiving that follows the opening greeting. That is the case, because Paul is addressing a church community here suddenly deciding whether non-Jews – the Gentiles he has reached out to – must now take on Jewish practices in order to become Christians. The Gentiles Paul has been reaching with the Good News are now being told they must be circumcised (if male, of course) and eat certain foods and observe many other rituals.

All these conditions – in 1 Corinthians, in Galatians – makes Paul furious! For Paul harbors a heretical notion: that direct trust in God and in one another – the bare necessities to be spiritually alive – relativizes even the most precious parts of a religion’s authorities and practices. That Christ is a doorway through which anyone can enter at any time – not because belief is a new “work” and Christianity a new “law.” And that any barrier placed at the entry of that doorway of all-inclusive love and grace is, as he puts it in today’s reading, “accursed.” That one’s status and condition need not be altered to be invited into God’s loving heart: the body of Christ.
 

The bare necessities of faithful living:  (1) Conditions? There are none. (2) Expectations to practice such unconditional acceptance? You bet!

 

Sunday-in and Sunday-out, in our bulletin, we find Our Statement of Welcome. That statement conveys the bare necessities of our congregation: the unconditional love of our discipleship.

What gave rise to Our Statement of Welcome that our Session approved in June 2010? The conditions many other congregations – and at the time our Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination as an official whole – were verbally or nonverbally placing on full participation based on sexual orientation … and, in some cases, gender identification.

Regardless of the official national policy at that time, we did not want to send that message. We stood with the apostle Paul’s conviction that he experienced and shared through the Holy Spirit: that Christ’s love knows no strangers, and it is expected from this no-strangers community of ours that love would be conveyed in turn to all we meet.

And so, with this Statement of Welcome, we opened the doors – and we need to say this every now and again, and what a better time to say it than on this, the first Sunday of Pride Month – that all persons regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification are both welcomed here and expected to be full participants here should they choose to align themselves with Christ’s body here! A great and timely and shining “More Light” example of our general Statement of Welcome conveying the bare necessities of our discipleship: Unconditional Love, Unconditionally Expected – and therefore, Unconditionally Practiced.