"People With a Purpose" Part IV: The Fellowship

Sermon: Fifth Sunday of Easter year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

I don’t know what it is about our lectionary these last two weeks, but again today the readings are spot on in line with where we are in our sermon series. This Sunday we’re moving on to the third task of the church listed in Acts 2 which is to be devoted to the "fellowship" of believers.

The word “fellowship” is kind of a churchy word when you think about it. I never use the word fellowship anywhere else but in church. I don’t call up my friends and say, "Hey let’s go fellowship." But, often at bible study or after church I find myself thanking God for the fellowship that we’ve had together.

This distinction that I make unconsciously between hanging out and having fellowship is a good thing, because the word fellowship in Acts 2:42 refers very specifically to coming together as a church for purposes that include but go above and beyond just hanging out.

Christian fellowship is in fact different than any other kind of fellowship you find anywhere else on the planet.

How many here have heard or used the phrase, “blood is thicker than water.” What does that phrase mean? It means usually that the family, blood relationships are more important than anything else. You might say it when you find yourself stuck in a position of having to choose between friends and family. My little sister was very attractive when she was in high school and my friends were like vultures and I had to constantly fend them off and sometimes that would cause problems between me and my friends, but I didn’t care because, “blood is thicker than water.”

Well, we’re not the only ones who put our families first, it’s a fundamental trait of human nature. Once when Jesus was preaching a message a guy came up to him and said, “Jesus I’ll follow you anywhere but let me bury my father first.” Does anyone remember what Jesus said? “Let the dead bury their own dead.” Now that sounds incredibly cruel at first. But it really wasn’t. When the man said, let me go bury my father first he wasn’t saying, that his father was dead and laying around unburied, he was repeating a common phrase back then that meant, “I can’t leave my family while my father is still alive because he needs my help.” The guy’s dad not only wasn’t dead yet but he could have been decades away from the grave.

The man wanted to follow Jesus but he also felt an obligation to his father, his family, and so he essentially said, “hey Jesus blood is thicker than water.”

And Jesus said, “I’m not water.“

I’ve got to be your priority, you need to follow me first and foremost.

Your calling to be a follower of Jesus Christ comes before everything even your relationship to your family.

So we can say that there are some things thicker than blood; there are some things that are more important even than your relationship to your family. And at least one of those things is your relationship to Jesus Christ.

Now, when Jesus says that he’s most important. He is not saying your family is not important. He is not saying reject your family and follow me, he is saying that if ever the two relations come into conflict, which should be very, very rare, your duty is to Jesus first. So if your husband or wife says, I don’t want you to read your bible anymore or pray or go to church, you then have to say lovingly, I’m sorry and I love you but I can’t agree to that. Or if a family member wants to get you involved in something that would lead you to sin against God, you’ve gotta say, sorry, I love you but I can’t follow you there.

The reason Jesus says he has to come before your family is because, and this is important, vital, to our understanding of Christian fellowship, if Jesus is not first, if you don’t love him more than everything else, you won’t be able to love anyone else, your family included, in the right way.

What do I mean?

If he is in your heart giving you all that you need, satisfying your desires and giving you the peace and the joy you were made for you won‘t be looking to the people around you to satisfy your needs, instead you, being satisfied and content in Jesus Christ, will be able to and want to serve and sacrifice to bring joy to others, your family and everybody else.

If you are part of the Vine, then you will be full of life-giving sap. You won’t need to suck off anybody or anything else. So Jesus has to be first, or in the long run, you dry up and your family suffers. One of the first things you should notice when you become a believer is that your family crises and problems begin to smooth out. That’s because Jesus is in the house.

So Jesus is thicker than blood, he comes first and through him we have the sap, the life giving power to love and sacrifice for our families, but now where does the fellowship of believers come in? How do we as individual believers and as families relate to the church?

God intends for the church to be the place where individuals and whole families are interconnected into relationships with each other and with the entire family of God on a level that transcends, that means rises above, blood relationship.

In other words the fellowship, and by this I mean us, the fellowship of believers is not more important and not less important than your family but instead it includes and transcends family relationships.

By birth I’m related to my mom and dad. By marriage I am related to Anne. But by my new birth in Christ, I keep those blood relationships, but on top of those blood relationships another deeper and higher sort of relationship is established that will not end when our blood stops flowing.

Anne is not just my wife, but in spiritual terms, she’s also my sister. There’s a real true deep spiritual bond there that goes far beyond the physical marriage bond or the romantic love that we have. In fact the marriage vows end when our lives end, “till death do us part” but the spiritual bond as sister and brother continues forever.

It connects our hearts together intimately and eternally. And, most important, this particular bond I have with Anne as my sister is not exclusive. It’s something I share with every believer and so does she and so do you. You’re not just my friends. I am not just your pastor. We’re bound together in our hearts forever. Ten-thousand years from now you and I will still know each other and we’ll still have fellowship together as brothers and sisters.

In this way God establishes a relationship between all believers that transcends blood and connects each one of us together at the deepest and most intimate level.

Think about how wonderful this connection is for people who don’t have families, or who’ve been left alone by a spouse or abandoned by parents. When I was a new believer I was single and living far away from my family and then suddenly I was surrounded by a new family; people who made sacrifices on my behalf that no friend and not many of my real family members would ever make.

Why does this happen and How does this work? We don’t have the same blood? Maybe not, but everyone here who’s given their life over to Jesus Christ shares in the same Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is like the sap in the Vine.

The Holy Spirit who dwells in me is not different from the Holy Spirit who dwells in you, he’s the very same spirit who lives in each of us and flows through all of us. Like family members are connected by blood and genes, but believers are interconnected by the Spirit. There’s a difference.

The blood in our veins can’t speak or communicate or inspire. The Spirit can do all of that.

The blood in our veins stops flowing one day. The Spirit living in our hearts never stops.

The blood in my veins can’t speak to the blood in your veins. But the Spirit in me can speak to the Spirit in you and vice versa. That’s why sometimes when you come to church you might feel led by a small voice inside of you to walk up to someone and say something encouraging or to offer to help them with something you know they need help with. The Spirit living in you knows what your brothers and sisters need because he’s also living in them and can speak to your heart and move you to help them. Or, on the receiving end, you can come to church really upset about something or trying to work out how you might be able to solve a problem in your life and then seemingly out of the blue someone will come up and say exactly the right thing or offer precisely the right kind of help. That’s because the Spirit living in you prompted another believer who shares the same Spirit to minister to your needs.

The Spirit is One even though we are many and this one Spirit dwells personally in each of us, giving Jesus’ life and Jesus’ love to the whole fellowship.

The reason this fellowship that we have here and that the new believers had in Acts 2 is so different from any other kind of fellowship or friendship or association, is precisely because it’s not just a horizontal relationship.

It’s not just a bunch of humans getting together to be a community for the sake of community. If that was all we had then we’d be the Elks club or the Moose Lodge.

No, our horizontal relationship is grounded in the vertical relationship we all have with the Lord Jesus Christ.

For that reason we cannot forsake Jesus Christ for the sake of fellowship. We must be faithful to his gospel and his Word for this fellowship to function. The fellowship exists for the sake of Jesus Christ. It‘s about Him not us and when it starts being about us, we‘ll lose our connection to Him.

That’s why the Vine image of the church Jesus gave us today is so important. Our fellowship together depends on our being faithful to, or abiding in, the Vine, Jesus Christ. We are brothers and sisters in him and in him alone.

The sap, the Spirit, that runs through that vine gives this fellowship life. When churches or a large number of individuals in a church cease to be faithful to Jesus Christ, cease to spread the gospel to the lost, cease to be faithful to the Word of God, the fellowship cuts itself off from the vine and dries up.

The fellowship we share here is deep and intimate and eternal, through the One Spirit dwelling personally in you and me God binds the souls and hearts of families and individuals together forever, but we can’t forget our first love, Jesus Christ.

He and he alone binds our family together as one.

Remain in the Vine and He will remain in us and we will remain with one another for all eternity.

Amen