Sermon - On Purpose: Belong As You Are

I invite you to hear now this reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians chapter 3 beginning at verse 25.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

Paul writes, but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian.

You are all God's children through faith in Christ Jesus.

All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female.

For you are all one in Christ Jesus.

This is the word of God for us, the people of God.

Let us pray.

Lord, we ask that you would open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit that as we ponder these your scriptures, you would inspire us, challenge us, lead us further into your kingdom, we pray.

Amen.

So I first attended a United Methodist church when I was in seminary.

I'd grown up Episcopalian, but when I was at Duke, I was dating this guy, and he invited me to come with him to a United Methodist church that he really loved.

And I was smitten with him.

So I was like, sure, I'll go with you.

Now this church was in downtown Durham.

It had been planted as an intentionally biracial congregation, co-planted by a black pastor and a white pastor.

By the time Kevin and I attended, it had become intentionally multiracial, with a Hispanic pastor as part of the pastoral team.

This service was unlike any I had participated in.

We sang traditional hymns from the hymnals.

We sang black spirituals.

We read scripture in English and in Spanish.

There was communion every Sunday, and there were sung responses that were always in Spanish.

And the people in that church were so full of love and joy and welcome it was contagious.

By the end of that first Sunday in worship, I knew that this was a community to which I could belong.

Not because there were many who were like me, short white girls, but there were also black women with beautiful church hats, and there were Hispanic families with children that sang and danced so joyfully, and there were professors, and there were people with special needs, and people off the streets, and everyone in between.

I knew that I could belong at that church because there wasn't any type of mold one had to fit into to belong.

One could just be, and that was enough.

Today we are beginning a sermon series about our new purpose statement for our church.

You can see it on the front of your bulletin, and let me tell you how we arrived at this purpose statement.

In January, as a church, we launched a study team.

And the purpose of the study team is to begin discerning what to do with the back buildings on our campus.

And that's still in process.

But the beginning of that was to revisit our mission, our purpose.

We have that in several years.

And so the question was: who are we being called to be now in North Raleigh, in this season, in this time in our world?

How are we uniquely being called to fulfill the Great Commission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world?

And so the study team prayed and discerned and discussed, and they came up with this.

Kent to church council, church council discussed and affirmed it, and here we are today, unveiling it to you.

It answers the question: who are we?

What are we about as a church?

What is our unique purpose now?

And so our purpose is to be a place, a church, where people can belong as they are, become like Jesus, and be love for God's world.

And so for the next three weeks, we're gonna focus on each element of this purpose statement, beginning today with belong as you are.

Belonging is a fundamental human need.

We were created by God to have real, authentic, loving relationships with other humans.

We need to be known and loved as we are.

And yet, belonging can be difficult to find.

There are lots of reasons why this is the case, and I cannot properly discuss them all in a 20-minute sermon, but I do want to name that I believe the divisiveness of our world contributes to this difficulty of belonging.

Because we fear that if we say the wrong thing or think differently from those around us, we're gonna be ostracized or rejected.

And so instead of finding true belonging, we try to fit in.

Fitting in is not belonging.

Fitting in is when you alter yourself in order to be like those around you.

Whereas belonging is being known and love for who you are without condition.

I felt a belonging at that United Methodist Church and seminary because nobody was requiring me to fit in.

There wasn't a mold to fit into.

Everyone was so different, which meant everyone could be themselves.

And it was so freeing that nobody expected me to be anything other than myself.

That church is what started the process of me becoming a United Methodist, to being a pastor in the United Methodist Church.

I'm standing here today in part because of a church that valued belonging over conformity.

Now I know that many of you are here today because North Raleigh United Methodist Church has been that place for you.

You stepped into this church and you found that sense of belonging that you have never felt anywhere else.

I have heard iterations of this story over and over from so many of you.

Nobody has expected you to be anybody other than yourself here.

This is a church community that does not require everyone to be the same, does not require everyone to fit in to belong.

And if we're honest, we know that this is not always the case in churches or in the groups that we are a part of.

Much of the time, we have to fit in before we feel like we belong.

In churches, this often means that we have to believe the right things.

Meaning we have to agree with the church's theology or the pastor's sermons before we can really belong to that community.

In non-church groups, this means we have to behave the right way.

We have to drive the right car, wear the right clothes, vote for the right candidate, and so on and so on and so on.

Only then can we truly belong.

But that's not belonging.

That is fitting in.

And that's why belonging is part of our purpose statement.

It's what sets us apart.

And we put belonging first in our purpose statement because we strive to be a church where people can belong before they even believe.

Where people can belong with differing viewpoints, differing backgrounds, differing cultures, differing theologies.

Belong as you are is the first part of our purpose statement because God calls us to value belonging over conformity.

Belonging over conformity was a primary emphasis in Paul's letter to the Galatians.

To understand the power of Paul's words in Galatians, we must remember that Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.

It started among the Jewish apostles and spread, thanks to Paul, to Gentiles, to non-Jewish converts.

And in those early days, Gentiles were a great source of conflict.

Because for thousands of years, the Jewish people were known as people of the covenant.

God had given them the law through Moses, and if they wanted to be in a covenantal relationship with God and each other, they must maintain these holy laws like circumcision and dietary codes and ritual purity.

But then Jesus sent Paul to preach the gospel not just to Jewish folks, but to Gentiles.

And soon Paul was bringing scores of Gentiles into the church, which had primarily been full of Jewish people who were faithfully upholding Jewish laws.

And so you can see how conflict erupted.

Some Jewish Christian leaders insisted that the Gentile converts needed to follow the Jewish laws if they wanted to claim the Jewish Messiah, and you can see their logic.

Don't the Gentiles need to live like Jewish Christians if they want to belong to God's family?

Doesn't proper belief and practice, aka conformity, come before belonging?

But Paul preached an entirely different message.

He traveled around the Gentile world proclaiming that Jesus was the fulfillment of the covenant, meaning the promises God made to God's people were realized in Jesus.

The requirements of the law were satisfied by Jesus.

So Paul insisted a new day had dawned for God and God's people, which is why he said in verse 26, you are all God's children through faith in Jesus Christ.

What he meant is that all of us, Jew and Gentile alike, are adopted into the covenant relationship with God as God's children, not because we keep any laws, but because we have faith.

We belong to God's family, not because we fit a mold and do the right things, but simply because Jesus invited us in.

This claim was revolutionary.

It was earth-shattering because for thousands of years Paul and his ancestors had defined their belonging in God's family by their faithfulness to the covenant and its laws.

And Paul was now saying that Jesus, as the fulfillment of these covenantal promises, has welcomed us into a new kind of belonging.

One that Jesus extends by grace and we accept by faith.

And this belonging fundamentally changes us.

Christ now lives in us through the Holy Spirit, so our identity becomes intrinsically connected to Christ.

In verse 27, Paul writes, All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.

In our baptisms, we are given a new identity.

We put on Christ like a team uniform.

And all other Christians are also wearing this uniform.

And so we see how I belong to Christ and you belong to Christ and you belong to Christ, which means we all belong to Christ together.

And our differences are cast in a new light.

What we hold in common, this covenant of faith and the Holy Spirit alive in us is more important than whatever divides us.

And there was a lot that divided the Galatian church.

Beyond this fight over how to include Gentiles into this Jewish-Christian movement, it was a rigidly hierarchical world.

Men held power over women, free people held power over slaves, Roman citizens had more privileges than those who were denied citizenship.

The wealthy had power over the poor.

You get the picture.

If everyone followed these rules, if everyone fit into their place, everyone would respect their limits and the world would go on.

But then Paul said in verse 28, there is neither Jew nor Greek.

Now imagine these words being read in a cultural climate that had no concept of egalitarian freedom.

And imagine how some reacted when the church began acting like this is true, which is what the church did.

Slaves, like Paul's dear friend Onesimus, were freed because their owners' faith compelled it.

Women ran Christian churches from their homes.

The wealthy and the poor gathered for common meals and they ate as equals.

This kind of counter-cultural community of radical belonging had the power to change the world.

And that's what it did.

It spread like wildfire across the ancient world.

And we are inheritors of this boundary-breaking movement of radical belonging.

We are carrying on this legacy.

Now I know some of you might be thinking, Laura, do you have the right church?

Because we're not very radical.

But before you get afraid of that word, let me assure you that not every church with radical belonging looks like the multicultural church of my seminary days.

It doesn't always look radical from the outside looking in.

Sometimes it looks like my home church, the one I grew up in.

The one that is a lot like this church, only much smaller.

At St.

Paul's by the Sea, there were the usual ministries like choir and Bible study and youth group and so on.

Nothing that made it really differ from the rest of the churches around us.

Only there was something different about it.

There was this wide open welcome, this openness, a willingness to fold someone into the community, not because they fit in, but simply because they showed up.

I first learned about belonging through my experience as a child of this church.

In fact, I think you can tell a lot about a church's commitment to belonging by how they welcome the children.

You need to know that I was not always a well-behaved church kid.

The problem was my best friend was the pastor's daughter.

And you know about those pastors' kids, right?

So one day, one Sunday, we were probably five or six, she convinced me that we should sneak out of Sunday school and go steal cookies from the kitchen that were reserved for the fellowship time after the service.

So we found the perfect opening, we snuck out of class, we snuck down the hall as best we could, as best as five-year-olds can, right?

And we got to the kitchen and she knew exactly where they were stored, as pastors' kids do.

And so we started grabbing cookies, I put some in my pockets, I had them in my hand, and that's when we were caught red-handed.

And the man, of course, who caught us was the one who intimidated me the most out of all the people who helped with the fellowship time.

And now, this moment could have gone a lot of ways.

We could have been severely punished for breaking all sorts of rules.

We could have been publicly embarrassed or chastised or made to feel like we didn't belong in the church because we were cookie thieves who were playing hookie from Sunday school, for goodness sake.

But instead, this man gently reminded us that the cookies were meant for after church, and then he quietly walked us back to class and he never said another word to us about it.

He never treated us differently.

He even let us keep our cookies.

We weren't kicked out of the church, we weren't publicly humiliated for our thieving ways.

We were given grace.

It's the same grace the church gave me years later when I sang my first and only solo at the Christmas performance.

It was terrible, guys.

I mean terrible.

And I was so embarrassed, but you know what?

Nobody said a negative word about it.

In fact, they were so proud that I got up there and tried my best.

No one kicked me out of the kids' choir.

No one made me feel like I didn't belong because I couldn't sing.

And so it was that I grew up knowing without a question that I belonged in that church and by extension with God, not because of anything I did that was right or good or holy, simply because I was, because I showed up, and that was enough.

There are plenty of churches and organizations out there that require conformity before belonging.

There are plenty of churches out there that live as if in the kingdom of God there is still Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, as if we must first get the rules right before we can really be part of God's family.

But that is not the church that Paul wanted for Galatia, and it's not the church we're called to be.

Everyone can belong here at North Raleigh United Methodist Church because everyone is welcome in God's kingdom.

Rich or poor, male or female from any country, speaking any language, voting for any political party in God's kingdom, there are no prerequisites to belonging.

There is no test to pass, there are no cover fees to get in.

The ticket to entry into Christ's kingdom is simply Christ's invitation, which Christ has already offered far and wide, even to us.

And so as we live into this belong as you are purpose statement, we must remember that offering a sacred space of belonging is not something that just happens.

It has to be cultivated.

It takes work, it's something we must cherish and protect.

And it's not a task just for the pastors and the staff.

It takes all of us.

You contribute to a culture of belonging by how you welcome and genuinely care for anybody who shows up.

You contribute to a culture of belonging by not requiring people to agree, by honoring a minority perspective, by seeing people primarily as God's beloved children, not as Jew or Greek, slave or free male or female.

You contribute to this culture of belonging by having gentle, open hearts to the kids who pill for cookies, to the newcomer who hasn't been to church in decades, to the skeptic who asks all the hard questions and is not satisfied with simple answers.

All of us contribute to this culture of belonging by showing up together, week in and week out, with an abundance of love and grace, with the goal of communicating Christ's wide open welcome to any who seek Him.

We at North Raleigh know that all can belong as they are because we have found belonging as we are.

And may we extend that to the world around us.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.