(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for The Glue That Holds Us Together, originally shared on March 8, 2021. It was the ninety-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
There is so much that is pulling us apart in
our country. The Church is no different, except that we are. What is the glue
that holds us together when everything seems to be flying apart? Today we will
find out.
The coronavirus vaccines are rolling out and
building momentum as more and more people are being declared eligible. I spoke
with Dean George Pindua, Assistant to the Bishop of the Morogoro Diocese of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania last week. He said that they were still
experiencing hospitalizations and deaths, and people were being encouraged to
do all the things we are being encouraged to do to lower the curve and the
economy on track, much like where we are here.
I read an article a week or so ago on why
poorer countries are doing better than richer countries in terms of
hospitalizations and deaths during this pandemic. The first reason is our
excellent health care. The irony is that we in the richer countries live longer,
into our elderhood, and the virus affects and kills older people at a higher
rate than younger people. The second reason is that we tend to concentrate
older people in retirement homes and convalescent centers. Those are not
options in poorer countries, either by desire or by necessity, so when an older
person in the richer countries gets the virus, they often live in a community
filled with a vulnerable population through which the virus spreads easily.
We are divided from one another in many
ways, and one of them is by age.
What holds us together when there are so
many things that drive us apart?
What holds the Christian Church together
when we seem to be losing the glue that binds us together?
What holds us together when there is no
obvious source of major persecution of Christians? What holds us together when
the traditional glue is disintegrating, when there are no cultural ties, no
common nationality, no common language, no regional identity, no common place
of national origin.
Some groups, especially newer immigrants are
still bound by many, if not, most of those today. But even those who are new to
America are challenged with keeping next generation bound together in a cohesive
community including in their local Christian communities when language and
culture are in decline.
The next generation often wants to be
American in its contemporary state. In America there is opportunity for a
better life, where the rich get richer and the poor get, well, richer. It also
involves a desire to speak the new language, adopt the values of our youth culture,
be individualistic, success oriented, driven by celebrities, materialistic, secular,
and filled with the affirmation of whatever you personally think makes you
happy. Everything that the old world was not, or was but now is on steroids.
It’s been said that the third generation
tries to remember what the second generation tries to forget. Often, they can
only try.
My grandparents on both sides were second
generation immigrants. Their parents had settled in Wisconsin where the weather
was similar to that in Norway and fertile land was cheap. My grandmother told
me that she remembers when they chopped up the old cherrywood furniture and
used it for firewood because nobody wanted the old wooden stuff. They wanted
the modern plastic kind. She remembered when they switched to English, but she
thought that, even though her mother spoke Norwegian, that she always prayed in
Norwegian because she didn’t think God understood the new language as well as
he knew Norwegian.
That is a very common immigrant experience.
More recent immigrant communities are
experiencing the same things.
What do we do when those common bonds no
long tie?
In the Christian Church, we get serious
about our identity and where we belong, and why.
Peter writes, in his first letter, the
second chapter, starting at the 9th verse:
*1 Peter 2:9-11
This is the work of the Holy Spirit. The
cultural package is what Martin Luther described with a Greek word, adiaphora:
important but not necessary.
The Holy Spirit is the Gorilla Glue that
holds us together because it does not depend upon us. It’s not like the
cultural ties that can be lost because even when we lose it, we still have it.
We have it not because we are steadfast in our faith but because God is
steadfast in God’s unearned love. The Holy Spirit because it is God at work for
good in the world, the third person of the one true living God. if we lost it. The
Holy Spirit is always at work even though we don’t deserve it. That’s the
point.
We need a savior, and we have one in Jesus
Christ, who was fully human and fully God, the second person of the Trinity,
the one true living God. We are sinners, yet God makes us God’s saints through
the gift of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. That is God’s grace in action.
We saw it most clearly when Jesus died on the cross.
We speak of unconditional love too easily, I
think. The unconditional love with which God loves us is not that of an
indulgent grandparent, or that of one who is shy about judgement. God accepts
us as we are, but God never leaves us as we are. God transforms us.
Faith means that we have been given a living
relationship with the one true living God. That means we are changed. We are a
new creation; we are born again. Faith is transformational. Always.
The streams of living water that the Bible
uses as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit pushes and transforms us and the whole Christian
Church.
In 16th Century reformer Martin
Luther’s “Small Catechism”, that he wrote for instruction in the basics of the
Christian faith (you can buy print copies online, but I’ll put a link to a free
digital copy in the comments/more info section below), in the part describing
the Third Article of the Apostle’s Creed, the part that deals with the Holy
Spirit, he writes;
I believe that by my own understanding or
strength
I cannot believe
in Jesus Christ my Lord
or come to him,
but instead the
Holy Spirit
has called me
through the gospel,
enlightened me
with his Gifts, made me holy,
and kept me in the
true faith,
just as he calls,
gather, enlightens, and makes holy
the whole
Christian church on earth
and keeps it with Jesus
Christ
in the one common,
true faith.
Daily in this
Christian church
The Holy Spirit
abundantly forgives all sins –
mine and those of
all believers.
On the last day
the Holy Spirit will raise me
And all the dead
And will give to
me and all believers in Christ
eternal life.
This is most certainly
true.
This is an expression of the Holy Spirit.
This is the glue that holds us together.
Why have most churches lost their unity and
their power?
What have we lost? Our confidence? Our mojo?
Our groove? We haven’t lost the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is still at work
among us, but at least our awareness of it. We lost our sense of identity because
we have looked away from God’s transformational power, the glue that holds us
together, because we have looked to ourselves and to our place in the world
instead. We don’t hear the music of God because we’re tuned into the wrong
channel. We have moved away. We have burned the cherrywood because we wanted
the modern plastic.
Today is International Women’s d
Day, and I’d like
to close with a story about just two of the women with whom Jesus had regular
interactions, Mary and Martha, in the gospel of Luke, the 10th
chapter, starting at the 38th verse:
What is the better part now, the ongoing
presence of God in the world? It is the Holy Spirit.
We still have many distractions, but there is
“need of only one thing”.
The glue that holds is together is that God
will never leave us. Let us open our hearts, our true selves, to the presence
of the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water, and live and act in the Holy
Spirit for the sake all the people in God’s world and for those in the world
but not of the world in God’s Church, by the Holy Spirit’s transforming power.
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