As we continue to experience The Word of the Lord together, let us pray. God of all generations, speak to us now in ways that we would hear so that we might continue to grow into what you have in mind for us, community. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught, but if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, thou who art our rock and our redeemer, Amen.

Hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Romans. Listen for God’s Word for you today. Message Romans 15.4-13. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

This second week of advent is about hope. As if you couldn’t figure that out. It’s on the outside of your bulletin, and it is at the beginning and end of today’s passage. I’ve only known a couple of people who thought that hope was not a good thing, and they were quite miserable souls. Certainly, as an idea, we like hope. As they say, we fer it, not agin it. But what does hope mean, in what do we hope, and for what do we hope? That’s a lot of hope questions, and they can all be answered with the same answer, but the answer is more complicated than just “God.” I may have mentioned this before, but if I have, it bears repeating. There is an age old story about a minister who gave a children’s sermon and started with “What does this remind you of, quack…” Point…to just answer God or Jesus to everything does not explain everything. In what is our hope, and for what do we hope? The answer Jesus, while in some measure correct, would only get partial credit, because that answer needs explanation.

When we look at this section in Romans, Paul begins and ends it with hope. But in the middle, there is something else, something that defines our hope, and makes it a little more tangible. Paul writes of insiders and outsiders, of welcome, of singing, and of the choir. In other words, Paul writes of community, where the lines are drawn for who is in, and what that means. The context for this section is the debate about who could be included in first century Christianity; was this just for Jewish people, or also the gentile? Who was in and who was out, that was a dispute in which Paul constantly found himself. It boiled down to what was necessary to be in with the other children of God. What rules did you have to follow? What did you have to do? What requirements did you have to meet? That was the debate of 1^st Century Christianity. And look again at the first verse in our section, verse 4. “Even if it was written in Scripture long ago, you can be sure it’s written for us.” True then, and true now. The problem then was that the people who went to temple wanted to place all these rules onto the newcomers, make the newcomers fit into their rules and ways of thinking. And to this Paul writes a big “N” “O”. The community of God’s family is not a pyramid scheme, where you work your way to the top. All people in it are equal, and all people in it are to learn from all other people in it. Which is to say, the person who has just come to Christianity, and/or the church, has something to teach the person who has been a Christian and/or churchgoer for 50 years. And when this is enabled, then a true realization of community and God’s family is taking place, and we experience the kingdom of heaven now. That is where the hope lies. The hope lies in the fact that we can experience God, community, by our willingness to be a family. When families get a new member, they celebrate. And don’t think for one second that good families do nothing but teach the new one what it means to be family. A new in-law can teach new things, as well as learn, and make the family a better and more full experience. Now this one is from the past 2 months experience, as well as the past 4 years, a child will do the same. I have learned as much from my daughters as I have taught them. New folks are not people we have to make be just like us, they are folks that help us experience the vast richness of what it means to be a child of God.

This sermon is titled “What does it take to be in the choir?” It is so in part because of the imagery used in the passage from verses 5 and 6, and again in 9, “May our dependably steady and warmly personal God develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all. Then we’ll be a choir – not our voices only, but our very lives singing in harmony in a stunning anthem to the God and Father of our Master Jesus!” I want to tell you about a couple of my choir experiences. The first is from a Sesame Street video we have…point…when all join in, the sound is more glorious, not because it is perfect, but because all are joining in. The second is a personal story, of when I was in choir at seminary. (two choirs…the other members were talented…offered solo…Jackie Robinson…saw him the next day…he told me that the choir wasn’t as strong or as full without me there…even if this is your first time here ever, you have heard me sing in the C.T.W. and you know two things, I don’t get by on my looks, and I won’t ever get paid to sing. I might get paid sometime to stop singing, but that is different. And he told me that the choir wasn’t the same, wasn’t as full or as strong without me.) point…That is what it means to be in the choir, to know that the choir is stronger with you than without, and it takes the choir to know that too. To those of you who are here for the first time, or close to it, we need you to hear that we need you here for us. We need you to teach us the wonderful things that God is doing with you. We should have no illusions that God only speaks to us, or when God speaks to other people uses the exact same words. We need you to help us grow spiritually. To those of you who have been regularly in these seats for x amount of years now, we can’t be, as Paul puts it, “The choir,” unless we accept people for who and where they are. Welcoming is not a synonym for weeding out those who are different from us, and rejoicing when we find folks who quote, “fit in here.” If Paul puts it as being “The Choir,” he also puts it as being quote, “The Church.” We can’t be the church that God calls us to be unless we accept newcomers as equal part in the family. Understand this, newcomers will have new ideas. They will want a new tradition to start, or one to be altered. And we need to not only accept it, we need to revel in it. It will help us become the church God wants us to be. This is nothing new in the church, Paul dealt with it. And Paul is begging for inclusion of newcomers without their having to stack up to our qualifications throughout all of his letters, including Romans.

One of the things we are all going to need to do, all of us, newcomers, and old friends, is to let go of the notion that we can find or create the “perfect” church. The Anthem this morning, with the combined choirs, includes a note above where the kids or youth are to sing. The note is from a place on the web where it suggests how the anthem should sound. The note says that if you can’t get kids to do it, or if you would prefer the anthem to sound more professional, you should use a few sopranos or a soloist. Does anybody here actually think that it would have been any more moving, that it could have been any more moving than to have the kids sing “Some see a child, but we see the Great Shepher. Some hear a baby’s cry, but we hear our Maker. We know we stand in the presence of the great I AM.”? It was a holy moment when the kids sang those words. We could have gone more professional, but at what cost. In trying to make it perfect, we could have lost sight of the fact that it was already perfect, because everyone joined in. The perfect church that you are looking for, or that you are trying to create, doesn’t exist on this side. But if you open your eyes, you just may find that you can see holy moments because everyone is involved.

Let us grow in our welcoming, constantly striving to increase in that strength, cause it is a strength here, so that the instant anyone comes into contact with this community, they immediately feel like they are a vital part of the family, an important member of the choir. By doing so, our hope will be realized, as we mature into and as, the family of God, the kingdom of heaven, here on earth. And until the day we are with God in the kingdom in full, may we be so lucky as to experience more and more of heaven here on earth. Amen.