Tag: Virtual Community

CALLED TO WORSHIP & FELLOWSHIP

As believers and followers of Jesus Christ, our Christian faith is not meant to be lived in isolation. The Bible clearly emphasizes the importance of believers gathering in regular communal worship and actively participating in a local church fellowship. And as Lutherans, we confess that God has called us to live out our faith in community, gathering regularly for grace-filled worship and fellowship. Rooted in the Holy Scriptures and guided by the Lutheran Confessions, this call reflects God’s gracious design for his people to receive his good gifts, grow in faith, serve one another, and witness to Christ within our fallen and sinful world, united as the Body of Christ.

The Scriptures make clear that gathering together for worship is a divine command for believers. In Hebrews 10:24-25, we receive firm exhortation for this purpose, where it states the following: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day [of the Lord’s return] drawing near.” This passage emphasizes the necessity of regular assembly, where believers receive God’s Word and Sacrament, and where they give one another mutual encouragement in faith, especially in view of Christ’s imminent Second Advent to come.

The Lutheran Confessions affirm this biblical mandate. The Augsburg Confession (Article VII) defines the Church as “the congregation of saints in which the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments are rightly administered.” Regular communal worship is the context where these powerful means of God’s grace (i.e., Christ’s Word and Sacrament) are faithfully delivered, sustaining and strengthening us in true faith and hope. In addition, we as Lutherans believe that the Lord himself is at work in our assemblies of worship forgiving sins, creating faith, and renewing his people through his gifts. And as we gather together in praise and prayer, we participate in a foretaste of the heavenly worship described in Revelation 5:9-14.

No Christian is meant to function alone. Our faith is not solitary but lived out in the context of a local church fellowship. We are baptized into the community of Jesus Christ where we depend on one another and serve with our God-given gifts. The Small Catechism teaches that the Holy Spirit “calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth.” And this calling, gathering, enlightening, and sanctifying happens concretely in the local congregation, where believers hear the biblical Word of God proclaimed (both law and gospel). Moreover, the local church is also the place of mutual care and accountability. For Galatians 6:1-2 calls us to “bear one another’s burdens,” which requires active involvement in a fellowship where relationships foster love and support.

Faithful participation in a local church yields profound spiritual benefits. First, it anchors us in God’s grace. Second, it strengthens us to live out our various vocations of family, work, citizenship, and so on. Third, the local church is God’s primary instrument for mission. Jesus’ Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is a corporate call, fulfilled as believers work together to evangelize, support missions, and amplifying our impact for God’s Kingdom. By being faithful members of our own congregation, Mount Olive Lutheran Church, we contribute to this work of the Kingdom.

Despite the clear biblical mandate, too many Christians at this present time neglect communal worship, citing their busyness or personal preferences, or their disillusionment with imperfect human organizations. Yet, Scripture warns against this in Hebrews 10:25, as isolation seriously weakens our faith and hinders our growth in Christ. While no congregation or organization of the Church of Jesus Christ is perfect, God nevertheless calls us to commit to a local congregational assembly and “to bear with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:2).

In our digital age, some may argue that online services or private devotions are sufficient. But while these digital and private alternatives can help supplement our faith, they cannot replace the embodied, relational nature of the Living Church of Christ gathered in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The biblical vision of divine worship involves physical presence, shared sacraments, and personal ministry — elements that virtual platforms cannot duplicate.

God commands his people to gather regularly for worship and to be faithful members of a congregational fellowship, because it is his design for our spiritual flourishing. As Lutherans we rejoice in this command and calling to prioritize corporate worship, engage actively in our congregation (including participation in one of our two small group Bible studies), and use our gifts to serve one another. So let us heed the call of Scripture: Do not neglect meeting together. And in this, we honor God, encourage one another, and prepare for the great “Day” when we will worship him forever in perfect fellowship and eternal joy.

Happy Summertime! Pastor Tim

THE REALLY REAL STRAWBERRY OF GOD

(I was asked by a parishioner on Pentecost Sunday several weeks ago for a printed copy of my sermon for that morning, so I’ve decided to also use this sermon as the basis for my July/August article.)

Have you ever eaten any kind of wild berry? If you have, then you might have noticed a difference in flavor from the garden-variety that’s been selectively bred vs. the wild-variety of the natural world. And there’s even some taste differences between berries that have been farmed conventionally (with chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers) vs. berries that have been farmed more organically.

My favorite kind of berry is the strawberry for sure, and the kind of strawberry we’re all most familiar with is the conventionally farmed garden-variety strawberry that’s the descendant of the wild strawberry. And of course, the garden-variety strawberry that we’re most accustomed to is a mass produced strawberry breed that has been designed and grown to be consistently the biggest, most beautiful and juiciest strawberry possible. These strawberries are still technically real strawberries, but they’re selectively grown using only the best GMO seeds. So the supermarket strawberries that we’re used to eating are essentially the very pinnacle of what a strawberry could be.

Now because the flavor of the strawberry is so delicious, people have also devised ways to distill its flavor down to be even more concentrated than the flavor of the strawberry itself. And wanting to make it even more powerful, we’ve taken that distilled juice to make delicious strawberry candy, with a heavy dose of sugar and a little sodium added to it. Then, because real strawberry juice and pure cane sugar are too expensive, the large scale candy maker has decided to use artificial strawberry flavor along with high fructose corn syrup, and they’ve even bumped up the sodium a little bit more.

Then the soft drink company comes along, and says they’re going to make a soda pop out of the popular mass produced strawberry candy. And then the gas station minimart people come along and say they’re going to make a slurpee that’s flavored like the soda, that was flavored like the mass produced candy, that was flavored like the original candy, that was distilled from the genetically modified strawberry, that was based upon the wild strawberry of the real natural world. So by the time we go from the wild strawberry through all the various iterations down to the slurpee, we have something that tastes vaguely strawberry-ish, but isn’t anything like a real strawberry.

Consequently, if someone buys that slurpee and they start drinking it as they’re walking along the road, and they see off the road some funny little red things that kind of look like the picture of the red berries on the plastic cup of their slurpee, then they just might pick one of those berries and take a bite. And they would realize that it sort of tastes a little bit like their slurpee, but it’s not nearly as flavorful. So they decide to stick with their slurpee.

Brothers and sisters, we live in a time of hyper-reality, where things are supposedly now more real than real — more strawberry than a real strawberry, so to speak. There are the hyper-realities of virtual reality and virtual community, for instance, but all this unreality of our present era is no accident. In fact, sociologists say that our society has moved out of the modern era into what they call the post-modern era.

In the modern era, society accepted the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality. However, in our new postmodern era, there’s only your truth and my truth — there’s only subjective reality. So in this present upside-down era, there is no such thing as an objective reality that is universally true. It’s like Pontius Pilate cynically stating to Jesus, “What is truth?” (see John 18:37-38). Just like the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, today’s postmodern mindset assumes there is no such thing as “the truth.” It assumes there is only power, and whichever narrative can muster the most muscle to support it is the winner. But what do the Holy Scriptures declare about this?

Several of our Bible readings on Pentecost Sunday 2021 declared that there is such a thing as universal truth. In our Gospel Reading from John 15:26-27 and 16:4b-15, our Lord Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit of God twice as the “Spirit of Truth.” And in our Epistle Reading from Second Corinthians 3:17–4:9, the Apostle Paul refers to the plain truth of the gospel. So for Christians, there is indeed such a thing as objective reality and universal truth, and God is the source of all truth (both natural truth and spiritual truth). Whether revealed by the natural world through science and reason, or revealed by the supernatural world through faith and spirit, God is the source and foundation of all of it.

But we’re now being told these days that the distinctions between mother, father and child are unjust power categories from a bygone era. We’re being told that a mother is now a “birthing parent,” and that a child must give their permission for a diaper change. Give me a break! And some educators now want us to believe that 2+2=4 is a “subjective cultural construct,” and not objectively true. Well, just try rocketing astronauts to Mars without 2+2=4. Good luck with that!

While there’s some usefulness to the various critical deconstructions of absolutely everything these days, I’m convinced that the radical cynicism, criticism and deconstruction which characterize our present postmodern era are ultimately a dead end road. It’s essentially what our passage from Second Corinthians 3 and 4 would call “the god of this age” — what we might call the god of this era — and it’s a god that continues to try to blind hearts and minds to the grace and truth of Almighty God.

However, the “Spirit of Truth” will guide us through it all. Like Dante in Dante’s Inferno, we must pass through the fires of this present age before we come to the glorious return to the harmonious natural reality of Eden that God promises us through Jesus Christ our Savior — the glorious return to the really real natural strawberry (so to speak) of God’s original blessing in the Garden.

The Apostle Paul says in our Second Corinthians reading, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” and our Lord Jesus says in our Gospel of John reading, this freedom-giving Spirit of the Lord is the “Spirit of Truth.” So it’s clear that these two aspects of God’s Spirit are inseparably linked together. Freedom and Truth… Truth and Freedom… You can’t have one without the other.

Therefore, if we stand firm upon our Judeo-Christian belief in objective reality and universal truth — unlike the false gospel of the postmodern god of this era — then we will be grounded in the really real and we will be truly free indeed.

Together in Christ, Pastor Tim