"Set Apart for a Task"

I Peter 2:9-10

Several years ago, as Deborah MacPhail spoke to a small gathering of us in the Fellowship Hall of the Beverly Presbyterian Church in Beverly, WV, I experienced the stories of her time in Eastern Europe as a Volunteer in Mission as both grace and judgment.

I sensed God's grace in her willingness to sell all her belongings, and by faith, travel thousands of miles to spend two years in a foreign country for the sake of the Gospel. I sensed God's grace in her stories about Slovak Christians who are willing to follow Jesus when doing so is often highly inconvenient and sometimes risky. I sensed God's grace in hearing how churches in Eastern Europe are packed full for two services every Sunday. I sensed God's grace in knowing that Presbyterian Church (USA) mission dollars - our mission dollars - help make it possible for the Deborah MacPhails of our church to go unto all the world as witnesses for Jesus Christ.

With that sense of grace there also came a sense of judgment. I knew - and still know - that I am way too attached to my middle-class lifestyle to do what Deborah did. I’m painfully aware, that on most Sundays, the majority of our mainline American Protestant church sanctuaries are more empty than full. I’m also aware that, even years later, I am still trying to figure out what kind of ministry is needed to reach the modern mission field that is American society. It’s clear to me that neither my denomination nor I are anywhere near being willing to take the risks and make the radical changes that are necessary to doing such ministry.

And then there's the grace and judgment of today's words from I Peter. There is the grace of knowing that we are God's chosen race, royal priesthood, and holy nation – that we are people who were once nobodies but who are now precious some-bodies in Christ.

There’s also the judgment of knowing that we who have answered a call to be holy - to be morally, ethically, and spiritually different from our surrounding culture - are all too often not all that distinguishable from the non-Christians of our communities. There is the judgment that comes from knowing that we are not proclaiming - at least not in ways that many of the emotionally wounded and spiritually starving people around us can authentically hear - the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Grace and Judgment. Judgment and grace. Grace: the wonderful, beautiful, life-giving, soul-saving grace made flesh in Jesus. Judgment: the hard-to-hear and harder-to-admit reality that we American Presbyterian Christians all too often take God's grace and our faith for granted. Judgment: knowing that we who have been handed the privileges of political and religious freedom, and given economic advantages found no place else on earth are either wasting or greatly under-utilizing these wonderfully precious blessings from God.

Grace: God's merciful, freely given call to men, women, and nations throughout history to be his people - his holy, healing, loving, missionary people. Grace: The two thousand-year-old invitation of Jesus to come, follow him and be fishers of men and women. Grace: the Pentecost gift of the Holy Spirit's power that enabled the earliest Christians to be uncommonly successful witnesses for Jesus in a hostile world. Grace: the knowledge that God is always with us in the living Spirit of our risen Lord. Grace: the reality that each Christian is given a spiritual gift and empowered to use it in fruitful ways.

Judgment: the words of the prophets to God's people when they had become chronically unholy, unrighteous, and unjust. Judgment: the words of Jesus to the Pharisees and other religious leaders of his day who had corrupted the sweet smelling holiness and righteousness of God into an unholy, self-righteous, self-centered stench. Judgment: all the good gifts we selfishly or carelessly ignore, deny, misuse, abuse, and waste.

But it always comes back to grace: the grace of God that moves him to keep calling us, empowering us, and gifting us for his work in the world in spite of the fact that we keep acting in ways that bring judgment upon ourselves. In the face of such grace, what must we do? In light of the faithful witness of people like Deborah MacPhail, how must we respond? In learning about the faithfulness of Christians around the world who are not blessed as we with freedom and material things, how must we react?

Are we to send more missionaries? Yes. Are we to give more money to missionary endeavors? Yes. Are we to pray for our missionaries and far away mission churches? Yes. We are to do all those things. But above all we are to answer God's call by becoming missionaries in the here and now of Prince George’s County, Maryland. All these communities in and around Lanham are our mission fields.

Our society is in desperate need of the loving, saving news of Jesus. Our own children and grandchildren need to see what holiness looks like. We are supposed to be a chosen, holy, priestly people. We are called to be witnesses by our very lives to the saving love of Jesus. We are commissioned evangelists, who by word and deed, are to proclaim the mighty, saving, gracious acts of the God who has called us out of darkness into light. Jesus wants us to be passionate about our faith. We have been created by a gracious God to walk daily in the light of his love.

But above all, we are to be evangelists. By the grace of God and through the power of the Holy Spirit we are to respond to God's calling in a variety of ways. We need to be out in our communities telling and demonstrating the love of Jesus. We need to be reaching out in healing ways to touch the lost, hurting, lonely, and bewildered people who often live only a few blocks from where we live and worship. We need to live as counterpoints to our culture's all-too-often immoral, unethical, unloving, unrighteous, and unjust ways. We need to be about the task of building safe, welcoming, loving, healing communities of faith in an unsafe, non-welcoming, unloving, secular world. We are called to be holy. We are commanded by our Lord to be his priestly people. Jesus himself has commissioned us to being his witnesses in the world, his evangelists who are out and about proclaiming the mighty acts of God.

God has not called us out of the world to simply gather together and care for one another. While we most definitely must be doing that, our hearts should also be burdened for the strangers, the outcasts, and the lonely folks outside our doors.

God has not called us out of the world to just mingle with people whose, heritage, politics, lifestyle, and place on the social or economic ladder are the same as ours. The church is to be a class-blind community where all kinds of people can join together to celebrate both our wonderful human diversity and our Spirit-given oneness in Christ.

God has not called us out of the world to hoard his wonderful gifts. God has called us to share them. God has not called us out of the world to intellectually debate the Gospel message with one another. He has called us to share the Gospel message indiscriminately, and to do so with passion, conviction, and integrity.

Granted, God doesn’t call all of us overseas to be missionaries. God does call each of us to be a missionary where we are. Why? We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

We are the ones chosen by God for the high calling of priestly work and holiness, people he has chosen to be the instruments of his work and voices who speak for him to those who need to hear about the night-and-day difference he has made in our lives. We who once were the world’s rejected nobodies, but are now the accepted some-bodies of God, have a job to do. We are to let others know that they too can join the ranks of God’s very own some-bodies.

It is for these tasks that we have been set apart. Amen.