Do Church – There’s Unity in the Church even in our Diversity

1. Good morning, all. We have another first today in that George is going to be doing his first Sunday translation. It’s good to be in the house of the Lord and to sense the Spirit of God. Today the sermon is going to be a little different.
2. Turn to Philippians 3: 20-21. Basically, it says that we are citizens of heaven. We have people in the room today who are actual refugees. George is translating today because Leto is in Cyprus. She’s one of our oldest refugees, since she had to flee her home in 1974, and over the years we have had many come through and they may understand something better than the rest of us. That is to understand what it means to be a refugee in a strange place. But we’re celebrating our diversity today, as in our series we don’t just go to church, we are the Church. An important issue is that a church is not based on a diversity but it is based on a unity.
3. Paul preached this from the rocky hill in the center of Athens in Acts 17: 26, from one man God made every human being. Looking around the room today, we can see different colours and different shapes, but in our diversity we all come from one place. There’s a unity about the human race, that is not recognized in the world, but should be recognized in the Church. The phrase, “Mankind”, in the book of Genesis right from chapter one God made mankind – it’s the word “Adam” and it became the name of the first man. His name represents all of us, so God wanted us to recognize that we are a unified entity, but He immediately starts a diversity. God made all “Mankind” “Male and Female” He made them, so the first diversity starts there. God then tells mankind to inhabit the earth, and so other kinds of diversity began.
4. People who worked with plants vs people who worked with animals. People who lived on farms vs people who lived in cities. All this diversity was given so that man could fill the earth. Later we hit problems with that when we come to the tower of Babel. People refused to disperse, living in one place with one language. So, God looking at that says that we have to change that situation. If they live like this, they’ll be able to do what they want, but they won’t be able to do what God wants, and so He scatters their language and people had to move out and away from that place. Many people see this as a curse. I see this as God’s blessing, because it caused people to go back to doing what God had commanded them to do first. Now, going down through time, we see people living all over the earth, developing different tones of skin and all the differences we see now. God sees this and now He wants to take it to the next step.
5. In Genesis Chapters 10 and 11, God chooses one man, Abram to be a blessing to the world and He makes the promise that all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. This would not take away the diversity that had grown, but there would be something that begins to bring people back together again – the blessing of bringing people together again. It tells us the potential of fulfilling the will of God. We come to the church age and Paul stands on Mars Hill in Athens and preaches to them that out of one man, God made all men and he affirms the diversity of people. He came out of a church that grew out of Judaism, where many people tried to make people Jews before they could become Christians, because they wanted everybody to be the same under the promise of Abraham. Paul recognized that, that is not the plan of God. In Galatians he wrote that there aren’t these divisions in reality – there’s no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, not because those divisions don’t exist, but because as Christians those things become unimportant.
6. We come to the day of Pentecost, where Peter gives a sermon repeating something from the prophet Joel – on the day when the fulness of the Spirit of God happens, God will pour out His Spirit on all people, so that all will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions and Peter says, this day is that day. On that day people are in Jerusalem but they’ve come from all over the place and from what we can tell there were about 15 language groups and, on that day, all that diversity is brought back under God. Not that they didn’t remain different in the natural, but in Christ, they became a unified mankind again. The first man, Adam, ended up dividing, the second man Jesus, ends up re-uniting.
7. This is the experience of the Church. Paul tells the Corinthians that the Body is one unit, made up of many parts, which all have their own purpose, which is one in Christ. Paul experiences the beauty of the diversity, Corinth being a multicultural place, and where Paul had begun his journey from Antioch in Syria, where people had ended up from all over the empire and coming to faith in Jesus there, where they are first called Christians – little Christs.
8. Think of the pictures of the day of Pentecost, here are just a few. We have Barnabas, a wealthy Jew from Cyprus, Simeon also called Niger, who was probably a black African who had become a believer, Lucius of Cyrene north Africa, Saul from the coast of what is now Turkey who became a very devout Jewish believer. People from all over coming into unity in Christ. The bible tells us that Christ tears down the walls of hostility. What I like about this church is that we have never had a year where we haven’t had people worshipping from nations which are in conflict – Kurds and Iraqis, Iranians and Iraqis, Sri Lankans from the Singhalese and the Tamils, in fact for a time we were the only church in the world where those two groupings were worshipping together. For all of our existence we’ve had people who were in conflict in the room. To my knowledge it has never affected our worship, because there is something which pulls us together more than our personal identity.
9. We are citizens of heaven, on a journey, this not being our home, we are all refugees on a path to go somewhere else. There’s still a lot of American in me, there’s a lot of my culture in me, and God is not asking me to change that, except for the parts that don’t reflect Him. Even if we come from anywhere on earth, though we are not called to give up that diversity, we are called to recognize that those things that unite us are more important. When we come together, we put preferences aside, and we find our commonalities. We could say that in this room there are diversities of worship styles. We’ve had people from very reserved cultures, we have diversities of theologies, we certainly have differences of skin colour, language, we like to eat different foods and even though we may like different foods, we usually go back to our own preferences. We can find a lot of things that make us different. I’ve noticed that it’s easier to grow churches with homogenous cultures, and that’s not a bad thing, but the vision of this church is that of the book of Revelation, before we get to heaven, that we can come into one place on Sundays, every tribe, every tongue worshipping here. It doesn’t make us better than any other church but it good to be able to put away our differences and enjoy the culture of Christian unity. We have a special obligation to be able to accept people in a way that is not natural. The number one element of our culture is the love that transforms us, that because I have put on Christ, I cannot despise someone else, not the ones I prefer, not the ones I don’t prefer, that whoever comes to faith in Jesus, stands together with me, brother to brother, I’d say sister to sister, but we are all sons of God. There’s nothing that pushes us away from each other, even when we experience the things that could, the Kingdom of God is not divided by culture. We’re all one and we’re all different and it’s ok that we’re different. That’s the expression we want to share today.
10. One spirit, one faith, one baptism, one body – we are the Body of Christ.