Testing.

One, two, three.

Dearly beloved.

We are gathered here.

But we are not gathered loud enough as presiding over. Seated. Let us pray. Made the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable. And thy sight or God who art our strength and our redeemer. Amen. Acts two, verse 42, they devoted.

Themselves to the Apostles teaching and.

Fellowship to the breaking of bread and the.

Prayers. With the growing realization.

In the world of a need for a world sense of community.

We have also a growing realization that modern life.

In the Western world is.

Impoverished by this loss of.

Community.

With this loss is common knowledge that.

Our modern.

Life is increasingly impersonal and empty.

And it is to this. I address the sermon of the morning what we mean by community.

Birds flock together. Animals huddle in herds. Insect swarm. Even microscopic life.

Is known to colonize. And man is no exception.

We find ourselves involved in all kinds of communities.

In the living of life in the modern world. If we were to start.

With other parts of the world, I.

Think the illustrations would serve this sermon well for the contrast, of course, would be far greater than it is in the United States.

But I shall stick to life in the Southwest and in a town like Tucson.

Hoping that we will get the point and that we will benefit.

Shared interests, shared laws, a shared place. Shared conditions go toward making community. People must live together, must share some part of their life together, or we have no community.

Now in a city like Tucson, which is a community in itself, we have many kinds of communities and it would be impossible to list them all. There are probably too many of them. There are various members of our.

Church huddled together with others in an artistic community, in the business or Chamber of commerce type of.

Community. There is a a.

Particular need for talent or or financial attainment to qualify for some of these. There are fraternal orders, social order, civic organizations.

And the like. There is the.

Community of learning. We call it the university.

I think that in a city like ours, this kind of breaking up into communities is very necessary.

Certainly the timid, the shy, the newcomer would be lost if he were to be absorbed solely in the large community. There are tasks to be accomplished which could not be accomplished by everyone working together. There must be a break up into smaller parts.

I think some of our members belong to so many communities. Their lives are fragmented and they sometimes wish that they could escape to someplace where men did not huddle together. The way we are apt to do.

But in the midst of all of this.

There is a community which I would.

Like to typify in the sermon as the community of the Holy Universal Church of Jesus Christ.

Now, this may not be acceptable to many who worry within sound of My voice, to call it.

The community among the communities. But nevertheless, it is my firm conviction that those who have known what the Christian faith is all about and have shared in its experience cannot help but share in this conviction that this is the community which gives reason for all others and gives interpretation.

For the understanding of the others. Robert McAfee Brown says.

In a world where people feel so lost and alone that they are eagerly.

And sometimes pathetically desiring community, it makes sense.

Once more to talk about the.

Christian community. It does not.

Mean that the church is a community in the same sense that communists go.

On. INS and cocktail parties are signs of community.

But at least it means that talk of our community is not irrelevant.

And the existence of a particular community. The church may be more significant than we realize. That's what makes it so important that I clarify this this morning. Let's ask the question what makes it the community?

The nature and purpose of the church is amidst all of these involvements that we have with our fellow man on this horizontal kind of a relationship is that we look for the living God, who is the author of community, that in the very act of creation he put us in community.

And that he is known and understood through community. Now, many of our various groupings serve more exalted ends than others. But the church is the one, though it looks a great deal like some of the others that make sense out of the others. If you lead through your Bible intelligently at all.

You will realize that the old covenant, the old arrangement or relationship with the living God was within this kind of context. When God speaks with a man like Abraham. It is not just with him as an individual, but with him and his seed after him. And through him, all the families.

Of the Earth shall be blessed. Man's understanding of the one.

True and only living God.

Is seen in this context. I would like to quote from Cole, who has written a very splendid book recently.

These Jews were elected.

To be a light to light in the Gentiles. They listened, They responded, They rejected. They rebuilt. Though God had intended that their common life should be so contagious that.

All nations should be drawn to the covenant relation with their Creator.

And Lord.

When it comes to the church, we enter into the new Israel, which corresponds with the old Israel, again, a community. And unlike the old covenant.

He goes on to say.

Men and women, we're not born into it. Bound by blood to garden one another. They were born again of the spirit entering the community of faith individually by.

Acts of decision. But they were not isolated individuals any more than.

Were the members of the old Israel. They were members of one of another living in the Assembly of God, the Fellowship of Love. And they were included within the church because God had called.

Them through Christ.

Or the church is not a human.

Organization instituted by men for their.

Mutual association.

And benefit.

It is a divine.

Organization.

Created by God's act, constituted by His call and supported by His.

Spirit, which dwells within it. Minister has a superhuman task in the 20th century to talk about this in American Protestantism.

Because we have been coerced as well as blessed by the so-called great evangelistic campaigns of the past. When a moody and a Sankey swept across the nation and said, All you need to do is accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and life is all right. The two boys have added to this Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in that the concept of the church is almost an afterthought. Certainly it was true of Billy Sunday. Now there is a bit of card shuffling after the decision is made as to which group you're going to join up with. But this is almost an aftermath and all the intentions of the evangelist may be pure. The man on the street thinks, well.

The concept of community is a bit well, it's nice, but it's just not necessary. When we become members of the community, we are in touch with a dimension which gives a different tone and flavor to everything we do. While the church doesn't have the comparatively easy job that some of these other communities set out to do, they don't set out to do too much, and consequently their.

Goals are far more realizable. But when the Church of Jesus Christ seeks to be faithful to Her, Lord, to God, the Creator, to be sensitive to the Spirit of God at work within our common shared life, the community of God. This is a task of a very high order indeed.

All right. The story about a drunk. And I don't usually tell stories about drunks in the pulpit, but once in a while, they're very, I think, illustrative in the best sense of the word. This inebriated gentleman was walking down the street and it was he was really under the weather and he came up against a tree and he nearly wrecked his brain. It was a near concussion. And he looked at it again. And of course, because of his condition, he saw two trees. And so he tried to go in the middle of these two trees and had it again.

And he did this repeatedly. And finally he said lost, lost in an impenetrable forest. You and I are going to have community whether we want it or not. We really have to have it to be human. And the reason for this great amount of community organizations is that man will belong to something somewhere, or else he's completely lost.

Now we we're talking about the church as being.

The community, among all other communities, which establishes our relationship with the living God and shows us how to go about the relationship we have with our fellow.

Man. I have the feeling that many of us belong to a lot of communities, and after a while we are not sure what.

It's all about. And the church is just one of them wasting sight of all the others. This is, I think, the average Americans understanding of this whole problem.

Now the church is in the world and it exists for the.

Sake of the world.

Get this straight.

You cannot help but be born into the family of God. Hits. You are in touch with those of like mine who have found God in Christ. Whether you have actually taken the steps to identify with the local congregation or not, you're in the church. And if you say, Well, let the organized nice church be darned or damned, depending on just how realistic you are, you still have to contend with what the church is trying to contend with. How do we keep man alive, his relationship with God? And how amidst this welter of relationships.

He can begin to make some sense. The world needs.

To hear this. The world needs to know this. And the church is placed in the midst of the world for the sake of the world. And there to reaction.

Primarily, there are two kinds of churches. There are.

Those who retreat from.

The world. You know the kind God has saved us in Christ. And we are now going to huddle over here together until all of the world has disintegrated.

Then God will lift us up out of the world and all be well with our souls.

I don't know whether any of you.

Would typify this congregation in that in that way. There may be some who feel we are that.

We are that kind.

Trying to escape the problem, the pain, the difficulties of being a part of the world in which God has placed this.

We say our prayers in isolation. The world isn't.

At all aware of what we're doing with our liturgy, you know, liturgy in this church. We are trying to celebrate how God has come to us, how God has redeemed us, and how God would put us to work in the common life. This is what we do by prayer, by song, by by sermon, by everything we share on a Sunday morning.

Does the world know this? There is a sense in which the church retreats so far that we can't find her anymore. I think that most politicians today just shrug at the church as being a well-meaning outfit, but pretty much out of touch of how the world really functions. And in many ways, I can't blame them for taking this stance. Then there are the churches.

The congregations which belong to the one Church of Jesus Christ. Regardless of their particular addition, we saw identify themselves with the world. Then what they practically do is sprinkle holy water on everything that's going on. Right now.

It happens like this. If you're a Colombian, I don't want to pick on the Kiwanis alone. I honor them by saying they're a rather good civic club. But you invite.

A clergyman, usually to give God the nod.

Before the operation gets underway. So God gets the nod, The clergyman sits down, he gets a second rate meal for the all his major.

Tasks, which he.

Has agreed to participate in. I'm going to catch it from quiet this morning.

I know it's no different than any of the others. And on we go. Everything that's done in that very intelligent meeting or stupid meeting, they have all.

Kinds in Civic Club.

Has now been sanctified by.

The representative of.

The church. We we actually get this kind of feeling from this kind of church that the church is so afraid of misrepresenting God to the community that they'll do almost anything. Well, you want me to do anything, man? I'll do anything you want. By the way.

This sermon isn't exactly the way the manuscript is. So you can pick up the manuscript and check the two after the sermon.

This is a very sad state of affairs that we become so engrossed in trying to represent the heart to the world that we don't do it at all.

We distort the fact. And it is not just the responsibility of the professional pulpit here to do this job.

That which is most effective in the common life of man is what comes out. The atmosphere that comes from a group of people who are the community of God who and who want to help from God, regardless of their sin. Stand firm for what God requires of man and the love of God, which would redeem that. You and I may sanctify the status quo and think that all is well on the note of judgment be to the 20th century.

This is one of our problems, but it's also one of our joys. The book of Ephesians is summarized by the scholar Dr. Berkeley in this way, and I think this summary is very helpful to us.

The theme of Ephesians could be summarized in these words as we see it, this world is a warring disunity.

There is a war between nation and nation, between faith and faith, between Gentile and Jew. And within a man's own being.

It is the aim of God to reconcile and to gather all men and all things into one and Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God's instrument.

In the reconciliation of all the warring and the divided things and persons into a new unity by his life and by his death. Jesus Christ brought to men the means toward that unity.

By the means, toward that unity. Have we brought.

We Wait a minute.

But the means toward that unity have to be brought out throughout the world to all men. And our task is the task of the church. In the church, there is one body.

Christ is the piece of man. He has gathered together Gentile and Jew within the church.

The middle wall of partition has been broken down and reconciled into one body within the church.

That is to say, to put it briefly, Jesus Christ is God's instrument of reconciliation and the Church is Jesus Christ's body in its unity meant to be the permanent. I think I've skipped it again. My eyes are getting dim the first time I've had to do this. The church is Jesus Christ's agent of reconciliation.

The church is meant within.

Itself to be one body and its unity, and it is meant to be the big letter of that unity among men. And whenever the church takes off in any one of these directions, retreat. Or ID, we have no reason to exist anymore. We have a witness to God in the preaching of the word in the sacraments. We share in the service we render. I'm not at all sure that the Word of God is very clearly spoken in the 20th century. I'm not at all sure that men are listening because we don't seem to believe what we're saying.

When we gather about the Holy Communion. We break bread together. We drink the cup and then we join hands saying in Christ, we are one and God has given us Christ in order to bring all men to himself. And we are responsible to God for the world, not to the world for God. And it is high time that every single one of us, every mother's child, within sound of my voice, be aware that within the kind of communities in which you move, men are listening for this word. Men are hoping for some evidence of this solidarity found in Christ, men with desire to see the kind.

Of servant that is from God himself. In a book called Outside the Camp by Charles West. He says Christian man cannot underrate the powers of this world, but neither can we forget that, in fact, Christ has already conquered them.

We see the city organized against.

God, but we know that there is no part of it where God is not already doing the work for which he sent his son. Reconciliation and new life.

There is not and never can be a world like that. In 1984. You remember oil wells, but.

Not even in the labor camps of Siberia or the communes in China.

Totalitarian systems can never be as thorough.

As they pretend to be. Always that common humanity, which is a sign of God's grace, breaks through their plans.

There is always some way in which the Christian can serve his neighbor.

Some practical step by which he can create a bit of justice, love or peace immediately around him. And when he does so, he is pointing to the real power which lies beyond the total system or its dictator, and forces them despite themselves to modify their inhumanity and their total plans. This is the daily business of a Christian, even when, as in the Western world, the tyrants are not political leaders, but machines and organizations. He looks for.

The place where the issues between God and the powers.

Is joined in the practice of daily life. And there he bears his witness. Are you equipped to do this as a Christian? And do you get this from your relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ?

The community within the community.

My final illustration, I would try to take an individual and speak about this individual as though he were you or myself.

We were going to ask of this man which of the many communities to which he.

Belongs is the community which gives him life and strength.

And will place him at the country club?

This seems to be the less partizan of any of the groups I can pick. Or is it? I I'm not sure. But let's say that this man is an elk and he's a mason, is a Rotarian, is a member of the Chamber of Commerce. He is a family man. Oh, he's a lot of things. But within the context of the country club, he comes up against another human being. And by the way, if you say, well, this is not about me. I don't belong to.

The country club. You belong to some group that qualifies. In this illustration, the Bentley Club has its own little ways of operating its own little unwritten rules. And if the man doesn't dress right or he misbehaves in some little way, at that point, this man is suspect. I'm just trying to bring out the petty.

I'm not knocking any country club, please, any of the board of directors simulator. But I'll explain to you again.

This is a human situation. You see this man? His neckties. He doesn't have one on or he has one on when you're not supposed to have one on.

You know the problem.

But is this man in need? And you are introduced to this man and suddenly you realize there is some opportunity to reach out to him in Holy fellowship, which has in it some of the honesty of God Almighty. Are you restricted?

From touching this life according to what God would teach us in the community because of the communities.

Haven't there been times in your life in mind when we were honestly before God capable of being God's agent of love and reconciliation and understanding, and because the rules of that particular community would borrow from it. We conform. And in the very conforming stripe, at the heart of the sense of community, which God may have intended, even for the country club.

You and I stand in a very amazing and difficult spot as Christians. And you and I are called upon in all kinds of circumstances and situations to belong to Christ before we belong to anything.

And when we.

Belong to Christ, our belonging to these other things will make us the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

And we do not go out with any special holy concept of how much better we are than they, but rather the herd is reached. The fellowship is real. The deepest hungers of man may be found only when we are to do what God has kept holy for us in the community of the church.

And whenever a man.

Ceases to be this.

Kind of man because he finds his strength in these other groupings. God and his church. Our vilify. Is this part of your life? I think it is for you. And I will leave this place to make the decisions at this point of intersection of all this welter of communities coming together.

And here we are trying to choose which one we shall share in and we cannot share intelligently in any.

Except that we know that this community that God has given us in the church can make us whole because it is Christ's body. They devoted themselves to the Apostles teaching and fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayer. Is this the way you share in the church? If so, God may be able to trust you to work for Him, as you must in the communities to which we are called. Let us break. Oh, Lord. Our lives are broken and fragmented and confused. Because our awareness of like creation and redemption and sustenance is so often lost to us in this modern life grant that this part of the great church. They keep in focus that which is most important and help us in humility to go out to work within the world, knowing that we may be agents of thy love and compassion and justice. Help us as thy people. Before we would somehow do the jobs which thou has designed for each of us in these varying ways and in these several places for these ways and places also belong to the in Christ's name, we pray. Any man. Let us bring now our tithes and offerings that this word of God in Christ may reach out across the world.