Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·June 5, 2005

Prayer of the Day

O Loving God, in the midst of your presence, we gather with loving hearts and open minds.  Allow this time to be a time fully dedicated to praising your name, with hope for the future of your great works in our lives.  Now we enter into this time knowing we are gathered in your name.  Let our voices be loud and our hearts be full of unfailing love for you.  Amen.

Scripture
I Samuel 22:1-5

David left Gathand escaped to the cave of Adullam.  When his brothers and his father’s household heard about it, they went down to him there.  All those who were in distress or discontented gathered around him, and he became their leader.  About four hundred men were with him.

From there David went to Mizpah in Moaband said to the king of Moab, “Would you let my father and mother come and stay with you until I learn what God will do for me?”  So he left them with the king of Moab, and they stayed with him as long as David was in the stronghold.

But the prophet Gad said to David, “Do not stay in the stronghold.  Go into the land of Judah.”  So David left and went to the forest of Hereth.

Message
Bill Dunning, Guest Preacher

[Bill was our former youth minister, who is now attending Lexington Theological Seminary working toward his master of divinity degree.  He also serves a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation in Kentucky as pastor.]

It’s such a pleasure to be back to see all of you.  I hate “good-byes,” and I hate being away from family, but it just makes it so much more special when you get to come back and visit with everyone.  I’d just love to sit down with you all and hear what went on with your year.  I’ll tell you what went on with my year.  That sounds great to me.  Let’s just forget the sermon.  That’s fine.  Well, I guess I should continue, but it is a blessing to be back with you after a year separated by space and time while we have been in Kentucky.  Without your words of encouragement and prayers, we would not have made it.  But here we are with a year of new experiences under our belts.  What an experience it has been!

We moved to Kentucky not knowing very many at all, not knowing what to expect, and often wondering what I had gotten my family into.  The problem was that in being part of a new community, it meant we were somewhat outsiders trying to push our way into the crowd in this new environment we had thrust ourselves into.

As we begin to focus on our Scripture for today, we must look at what lies beneath this situation we read about.  We all know David as the young man whom God gave strength and courage to become a pivotal rock on which the foundation of our Church stands.  But do you happen to know what occurred before the prestige of royalty in becoming a king came into David’s life?  David ran into a lot of trouble before he saw the time of good in his life, and it was powered by jealousy and hatred from King Saul.  Saul, seeing the strength that David had, on top of God’s favor, saw nothing but trouble for his kingdom and power.  Besides all of this, David came from nothing but a low-class family, being of humble birth and low social position.  He was a nothing when measured by his society’s standards, and that’s how Saul treated David in every public setting.  David was an outcast, and Saul did everything in his power to try to keep it that way.  He even attempted several times to do away with David’s life.  David was an outsider all because he was a threat to the powers that be, all because Saul saw the possibility of an eventual God-created and God –centered, peaceful, community in what David possessed.

Many of you might know by now that tomorrow morning I begin an eleven-day journey to the country of Bosnia.  I’m very excited and thrilled about the possibilities this trip can bring, not only to me but also to our community of faith.   In preparation for our trip, nine other seminary students and I were asked to read what has been printed concerning the country and the conflict that occurred during the 1990s.

Talk about being an outcast!  If you are unaware, Bosnia was a country known for the acceptance of diversity.  They loved everyone there. 

I’m sure many of you know Dervisa Salihovic, a member of our first Bosnian refugee family that Broadway Christian Church sponsored in 2000.  I was able to talk with her about Bosnia yesterday.  She said that during the time before the war, they liked everybody.  Everyone was their brother and sister as long as they were good persons, no matter their nationality.  But in 1992, Serbia decided to change all that.  Instead of diversity, they wanted Bosnia for their own, and they wanted all to be of Serbian nationality within the country.  Ethnic cleansing thus began to eliminate all Moslems from the country.

From her profound book The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War, Slavenka Drakulic included a letter she wrote to her daughter as she reflected on their experience together during the war.  I’d like to read a little bit of that letter to you this morning.

One afternoon, Tuesday, July 2, I remember with the clarity that memory reserves only for traumatic experiences.  We were talking on the telephone, and in the middle of our conversation, you started screaming, “Mama, they’re shooting next door.”

I could hear the shots in a garden next to ours.  I could visualize the garden and its high wall covered with roses and bunches of grapes hanging on the vine, the way the sun shown through its leaves at that particular moment of the late afternoon.  And I could see you standing there by the window overlooking it, lost and pale, trembling.

You dropped the receiver, and then I heard your voice – half cry, half whimper – as you were no longer a human being, but a wounded dog.  I can hear it now.  Every sound that entered the receiver on that day – the distant sound of radio news in the background, the tram that passed by the house – and the silence, the sudden silence that followed it.

Then your boyfriend, Andreas, frightened, yet soft voiced tried to calm you down.  “Hush.  It’s nothing.  It’s nothing,” he said.  But it was too late, because that was the moment when the war began for both of us, and we realized it.

I still think about the sound that you uttered that afternoon.  I couldn’t recognize it as my child’s voice, but it wasn’t a voice, not even a scream of utter fear.  It was the sound of someone falling apart.  I didn’t recognize you, because I was losing you.  I sat at the end of the telephone line, my whole body weak, lifeless, collapsed.  I don’t think I ever experienced such hopelessness.

I read this letter to you, and I tell you these things to put you there, in the middle of war, of destruction, of terror.  It was a war begun to wipe away Moslems from the country.  They were forced into exile.  They were outcasts pushed out of their lives.  They were not touched by compassion but were terrorized by hatred.

The reality continues to haunt us even today.  Just this week a new video was released showing six of the 8,000 Moslem men and boys being killed in a massacre, forced into being outcasts, stripped of their dignity and pride.

With focus once again on today’s Scripture, we see a great future beginning, and it all starts with supporters.  During a time of hiding from terror, David begins to gain supporters, but not ones we might see as being a success in an army.  Through our Scripture, we see the army forming behind David.  It is an army made up of nothing but people like him – outcasts.  As our Scripture told us this morning, everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented all gathered around David.

If we take a fast glance, we see what we think is a recipe for disaster and failure for this army.  However, what is not present to the naked eye is something that goes much deeper than that.  David is fighting with his army for a future he knows is better for the people.  The situation is a mirror image to that of our Messiah who fought a battle against exclusion with an army of people he attracted who were outcasts of their own time, as was Jesus, as we all know.

David shows us how to fight, not with the human kingdom in mind – a kingdom based on self-greed and self-interest.  No.  David and his army fight the battle looking toward God’s kingdom.  Their mission is clear through David’s leadership.  An example of his mission:  We are all equal.  We belong to the same kingdom of the one who loves us, guides us, protects us. 

If only it could be this simple today.  But just as we see what took place back then, and what we see taking place now, many have their own agendas who work toward their own human kingdom.  Now we know how that looks.  But David gives a clear example of what a foundation of faith on which we should stand that our future only lies in God’s hands, and what God will do for him, not what he can do on his own.

With the example of David’s army, what kind of army is the Church today?  Many churches have clearly-stated mission statements on which they base their ministry.  Then they expand from those mission statements just as we do here at Broadway.  So, I’d like to verbally remind us of our mission statement this morning.  “Our mission is to enable persons to encounter the living God as disclosed through Jesus Christ, to serve and celebrate God in an ever-changing society.”

Now when it comes time to put this mission statement into action in the real world, how do we live by it in our own lives?  Do we?  Do we think of it?  Do we have it memorized?  How easy is it for us to step out of our comfort zone to include the excluded into our community of faith?

Mike Yaconelli was a remarkable speaker and writer concerning the youth ministry.  In his book A Childlike Faith, he wrote about a young woman from the church he served in a small rural community.  Now, she was unlike anybody else there, living all of her life with a mental disability, and this disability prevented her from reading, or moving, or speaking as quickly as the average person is able to do.  Jill was very excited to be included in worship and so desperately wanted to read Scripture.  As she began to read the Scripture one Sunday morning at a much slower and slurred pace than everyone was use to, Mike could hear the groans and feel the uneasiness everyone else in the congregation had towards this one who was not like the others.  She was an outcast.

What a terrible thing, but how easy it is to want to keep things in our community the way it is without messing up the “nowadays.”  Are we a church that is to be comfortable where we are?  No!  We are encouraged, though, by Jesus’ example to move out of our comfort zone to mess things up a little bit.

During our adventure in the next two weeks, three Bosnian men who work for Church World Services will lead our group.  They live in Bosnia.  They experience Bosnia, and they work to help rebuild it.  These men will show us how our church is including others through their service to rebuild a country that was stricken with hate and enormous tragedy.  We will experience what will happen when we step out of our comfort zone, allowing God to be the one in control.  That’s big.

So… what are we doing, as individuals, or as a church, to reach out beyond our comfort, to touch another of God’s children as our brothers and sisters?

I don’t know if it is still used or not, but I remember the United States Army used to attempt to recruit new soldiers by using the slogan, “Be all that you can be in the Army.”  It had a little musical jingle that I can’t or won’t attempt to sing this morning. 

This is such a welcoming family, a family of faith, that I miss so much.  I miss seeing every one of your faces every day.  I have seen numerous visitors walk through those doors into this church to find a warm and friendly church.  Eventually they join this church, because they feel like it’s home.

Now, it goes beyond those doors, my friends.  Does your faith?  Does your mission in life go beyond those doors as a part of this church? 

I have seen bits and pieces of the new television series “Lost.”  I’m sure some of you are familiar with it.  It’s about a group of people who have survived a plane crash.  They find themselves stranded in an Amazon forest of sorts, full of secrets and mysteries beyond their knowledge or imagination.  Now this group consists of very different people with very different backgrounds, problems, and life stories.  The object is for all of them to work together to survive and find a way off the island together.  The problems lies in that they have individual motives, forgetting about the group, thinking only of themselves.  Together things work, but when their personal histories and selfishness cloud this judgment, things get worse, and they remain divided and stranded.

Now, we don’t want to leave others out of the church.  Do we?  With David and Jesus in full view, we, too, can work together, putting aside our selfish ways and include all into our family of faith.  So, will you be all that you can be with the mission statement guiding you through, not just in church, but also beyond? 

Our denomination is going through some major changes.  We’re getting ready, hopefully, to elect our first female general minister and president.  Ideas are changing.  Things are eminent, but we will not go anywhere as a church, as a denomination, if we do not learn to accept and open our arms to others, not just here but in other places in our lives so that the church – our family of faith – can be all that it can be with our help.

I would like for us to end this morning, this time together, by reading our mission statement together.  It is found on the front of your worship bulletin.  I think it would be great for us to read it together this morning.

“Our mission is to enable persons to encounter the living God as disclosed through Jesus Christ, to serve and celebrate God in an every-changing society.”

Amen.

Benediction

Dedicate us to your mission, O God.  Give us the courage to stand up for your purposes.  When our silence says, “I don’t know,” help us to say, “It is so!”  Place us boldly at your side.  Amen.