Westworth United Church

Westworth United Church                                                   August 1, 2010.

Rev. J. Clark Saunders                                                          Colossians 3:1-11

Both/And … Either/Or

          It seemed to be the fashion a decade or two ago.  United Church congregations around the country were creating mission statements.  Other institutions – hospitals and educational institutions, for instance – had been doing it.  And it seemed like a good thing for churches to do:  to try to sum up in a few words what we believed our congregation was here to do.  The congregation I served in Edmonton in the 1990s went through a process that produced a mission statement, and we did refer to that statement in much of what we did as a church.

            A couple of observations occur to me as I think back on that kind of exercise.  The first is that, although mission statements are supposed to be brief and succinct – 25 words or less, you might say – church boards and congregations found it very hard not to get wordy.  When Westworth produced what they called a Statement of Purpose back in the 1970s it took the writers not 25 but 95 words to say what we were about – and even then they had to add a footnote for further clarification.  I think the church I served in Edmonton took almost as long to say what they needed to say.  Now, Harrow’s mission statement manages to state their mission in 74 words.  And the prize for boiling it all down to a manageable length – which is really what a mission statement is supposed to do – goes to St. Andrew’s River Heights which comes in at a respectable 29 words.  (Now perhaps you’re getting an idea of just how much research goes into a sermon.)

            So keeping it short is a challenge.  But my other observation is that, while a congregation might like its mission statement to sound distinct and different from all the others, it is hard to avoid a certain similarity from one congregational mission statement to another.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, we find certain words repeating themselves in statement after statement:  words like “caring” and “sharing”, “justice” and “community”.  These are words that we may think are typical of Christian values in any age.  But I think it could be argued that they are characteristic of Christian values in much of North America in our particular time.  And one word that is distinctive of our age — a word that is found in many mission statements created by United Church congregations over the past twenty years or so – is the word “inclusive”.

            I suppose it may be in response to a sense of exclusiveness, in reaction to experiences of being judged or rejected, that inclusiveness has become such a prevailing value among Christians – or at least among Christians in our United churches.  There are denominations that exclude people who don’t follow their doctrines to the letter.  There are churches that reject people who are divorced or people who are gay.  Most of us like to think that we’re not like that.  We like to think that we have open minds and open hearts. And whether it’s true or not, we don’t like to project an image of being closed or exclusive.  We want the world to know – or at least to believe – that our congregations do not reject people.  We want to include everybody.

            And, of course, we can find verses in scripture that support the value of inclusiveness.  One that comes to mind is found in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians where he declares, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  Today we heard something similar in the Letter to the Colossians – a letter that has traditionally been credited to Paul although many scholars suspect it was written by someone else.  The passage we heard ended with the words, “… there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”

            Well, these are pretty inclusive statements, aren’t they?  They make the point that in Christ, divisions and distinctions and barriers that include some and exclude others are done away with.  And statements like these are ones that we hear gladly.  They speak sympathetically to the spirit of our times and of our culture.  By holding up examples of contrasting pairs – Greek and Jew, slave and free – the writer of Colossians assures us that not just one but both of these pairs will be included.  He assures us that no one will be left out, no one will be left behind, that all are welcome, that walls that divide are broken down.  And our writer’s words certainly support all those mission statements that uphold the value of inclusiveness.

            But in that verse from Colossians, the words I quoted tell only part of the story.  In fact, that verse comes at the end of a passage in which the writer holds up contrasting pairs of things in which his message is not one of both/and but one of either/or.  His chapter begins not by emphasizing how both sexes or both slave and free are included in Christ, but by saying that we have choices to make between two things, and each choice is not of equal value.

            He calls on his readers, for example, to set their minds not on things that are on earth but on things above.   He contrasts the life they used to live – a life that has died — with the new life they are called to live in Christ.  He distinguishes between the old self – and provides a long list of habits and practices they used to engage in – with the new self that is being renewed constantly. 

            In all of this it is quite clear that, though all classifications of people may be included, all ways of life are not equally good or acceptable.  Life isn’t just about both/and; it isn’t just about everyone being included – both male and female, both gay and straight, both Jew and Gentile, both black and white.  Some things in life are about either/or.  There are places in life where we have choices to make, places where one thing is better than another.

            And the burden of the message here is that as Christians we should aspire to the better things.  Now the word “aspire” is one of those s-p-i-r words, words like inspire and expire and conspire – words that are related to the word “spirit”.  To aspire to something is to have a spirit that aims at something higher, something better.  And the two-sided message that Christ has for us is, first, that we are accepted as we are, and second, that we are challenged to reach for something better.

            Back in my student days I volunteered at a youth drop-in centre, a place where disaffected youth could come and hang out, free of judgment, free of rejection.  It was important for them to know that this was a place where all were welcome, a place where they were invited to come as they were.  But I sometimes reflected that while we offered acceptance, we had little to say to them about how they lives could be better, richer, more fulfilled.  We were good at the both/and part of the message, the message of inclusiveness, but no so good at the either/or part of the message, the part that helped people make better choices.

            Thanks to the grace of God we are all included in Jesus’ message of love.  But in our daily walk as Christians we are constantly faced with decisions that challenge us to aspire to better things. 

            I remember hearing someone say that what he valued in his spouse was that she helped him to be a better person than he would have been without her.  Well, I guess that’s what Jesus offers us:  not just a sense of being included and accepted, but the challenge and the help we need as we try to become better people.