Ephesians 2:13-18

Luke 18:15-17, 15:11-13, 17-28, 31

How does one preach about the UM Social Principle on the Nurturing Community on a Sunday overshadowed by Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration on Monday and Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration on Tuesday?

Well,Easy! We first celebrate their magnificent contribution to the wider community our Christian spirits now inhabit: Brother Martin’s widening of our social communities to include all of our black and poor neighbors; and President Obama’s widening of the spirit of our national community to seek peace for our whole world and climate healing of our whole planet. Then we rejoice in what made it spiritually possible for them--the depth of their communion with the Spirit of Jesus.

The reasons for rejoicing in the empowered life of Martin Luther King are already so well known they require little amplification in this sermon: His early commitment to and service in Christian pastoral ministry; his translation of Jesus’ vision of the coming reign of God into the civil rights struggle for the "beloved community;" his readiness to walk his own via delarosa toward a cross that took him through Selma, Birmingham, Chicago and Memphis; his own experience of transfiguration when preaching in Memphis the night before he was killed, saying that like Moses he had been to the mountain top, had looked over Jordan and seen the promised land; he foresaw his own death that night, saying he might not get to God’s promised land, but he assured them, and I hope us, that we would enter the beloved community, where we would be free at last from the racism that has bound our country for so long, and be able finally to judge a person, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Which brings us to Barack Obama! Many have been saying, especially our black brothers and sisters, that they had thought they would not live to see the day when a black man could be elected president of the United States. Yet brother Martin foresaw it with Moses and Jesus from his mountain top, and now millions of us on Tuesday will see it with our very eyes as Barack Obama lays his hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and is inaugurated president of the United States of America. One of my wonderful young daughters recently told me she thinks God doesn’t answer prayers because there are just too many millions of them from Christian people every day. Maybe, but I tell you God has answered and is answering the prayers of literally millions of Christians this Tuesday. Hallelujah!

We know the depth of Martin Luther King’s communion with God in Christ; but what about Barack Obama’s? Some know so little to mistakenly think he is a Muslim, perhaps because, unlike Daddy King who was a beloved pastor in Atlanta, Barack’s father was a Muslim in Kenya who studied in this country and returned home after getting a Harvard doctorate. But Barack’s grandparents, who helped raise him in Hawaii, came from Baptist and Methodist roots; Barack describes his grandfather’s church as "God-fearing Baptist," and his grandmother’s as "a straight backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both." Both of his grandparents, however, had long left the church by the time they helped raise the young Barack in a quite secular household in Hawaii. His mother too had rejected the form of Christianity she had experienced in her youth to become, in some of Barack’s own words, a highly spiritual free spirit.

Barack then had to enter deeply into Christian faith by conversion. While doing community organizing for a group of largely black churches on Chicago’s south side, he was able, in his own words, " to see faith as an active palpable agent in the world," nowhere in his experience better than in the Trinity United Church of Christ, "sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives." Beginning to worship there, he heard one Sunday Jeremiah Wright’s powerful sermon on "The Audacity of Hope" that concluded with his prayer, "Oh, I thank you Jesus for not letting go of me when I let go of you."

As the choir sang, a boy sitting next in the pew handed him a pocket tissue, and Barack says "It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks." His ardent heart, you see, was beginning to respond to the Spirit of Christ that had been nurturing him from the beginning and never had let him go. It was sometime later, in another worship service, when Barack committed his life to God in Christ and was baptized. Hear his own description:

"It was because of these newfound understandings—that

religious commitment did not require me to suspend

critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic

and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world

that I knew and loved—that I was finally able to walk

down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day

and be baptized…..Kneeling beneath that cross on the

south side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me, I

submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to

discovering His truth."

Brother Barack, you see, entered by conversion into the same deep communion brother Martin had known earlier in his family experience, which empowered them both to help create God’s universal beloved community that their and our Lord called the Kingdom of God.

However much it may sound like it to some, I did not come to this pulpit today to preach a political sermon, and I am not-- even as I have tried to set it in the context of this momentous week. This is a sermon from beginning to end on the social principle of The Nurturing Community-- that deep spiritual empowerment which both requires familial, community and congregational nurture, and creates inclusive, just, nurturing communities. I mean as a Christian preacher the kind of community we heard of from St. Paul in our Scripture reading this morning, where writing to Jews and Greeks in the newly inclusive Christian community in Ephesus, he reminded them that "those who had once been far off had been brought near by the blood of Christ"—that is, by the holy, healing, saving compassion of God revealed in Christ’s death. The Christ, St. Paul told us, who had "proclaimed peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near" so we all "have access in one Spirit to the Father."

It is that access, enabled by loving families and nurturing congregations, which empowers United Methodists and other Christians to deal wisely and compassionately with the many kinds of often very controversial issues this United Methodist social principle tries to encompass—homosexuality, divorce, abortion, family violence and abuse, sexual harassment, and even suicide—all the while focusing first on the family as the basic human community and on the sanctity of marriage, while also affirming the equality of women and men, the gift of sexuality, the sacred worth of homosexual persons, the beauty of adoption, and the faithful care for dying persons. Even a professor would not try to deal with all of these topics in any one sermon, but you will have opportunity to discuss some of them this morning in the 10:30 class taught by Pastor Gramley, and think and pray about them for a long time to come.

Let me now conclude with Jesus: There are hymns that enter our memory never to leave, which we sometimes are even surprised to find ourselves humming or singing. One of these for me is "Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, (but then comes a more ambivalent phrase for me) and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, (some things of course do, but I find myself sometimes substituting) and the things of earth will grow gloriously bright, in the light of his glory and grace."

One of these glorious moments is his touching of children, as we heard from St. Luke this morning, when he insisted that the kingdom of God belongs to them, and sternly warned his disciples (that is also us) not to hinder them. There is a more stern, even terrible, warning we did not read this morning: Whoever harms one of these little ones, it would be better for him that a millstone be put around his neck and he be drowned in the depths of the sea. That should not be heard as a threat of judgment, but a powerful description of the terrible gravity of the fault. The nurture of children so that they can fulfill their God-given potential in every way, and finally come to love their God with all their heart, mind, and soul is one of our greatest responsibilities.

Another moment of glorious brightness is to listen to Jesus telling his stories about family. The Bible tells us as little about Jesus’ father Joseph, as Barack knew about his absentee father in Kenya. But Jesus knew something wonderful about Joseph and every father at his best, so he didn’t call God the usual Jewish "Jahweh" or "Adonai" (Lord). He called him "Abba", the intimate term Jewish children still use for their Daddy. Did you see the family grow gloriously bright as Jesus told his story of the unconditional love of a human Abba.

Sometimes we focus too much on the prodigality of the younger and the resentfulness of the older sons. But the real point of Jesus’ parable is their Abba rushing to welcome his younger son with great celebration back into the family fold, and saying with great love to his older son what all good parents feels for all of their children, "You are always with me and all that is mine is yours." When we live our lives before the face of Jesus, a family never stops nurturing their children; even a broken, what we sometimes clinically call a dysfunctional, family, like the one in his parable, never stops caring for their children, whatever their age or condition. And it is also how a congregation never stops sharing the grace of God as children become youth and move in their various ways into maturity, sometimes away for a while. always ready for them to come home.

I want to close, however, with a word to those of us, like me, who feel a bit uncomfortable before the face of Jesus as he calls us to unconditional nurturing love as His and our Abba loves us. Barack Obama’s mother must have felt some of this. She was, of course, a caring mother, getting up, for instance, at 4:30am in Indonesia to make sure the young Barack mastered his English language, and when he complained about being awakened so early for such a task, telling him "it is no picnic for me either Buster." She also had him read the literature of the world’s religions, but with no commitment to any of them. Despite her professed secularism, her son says she had an "unswerving instinct for kindness, charity and love," and "worked mightily to instill in me the values of honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work."

He was wonderfully nurtured by his mother, but as a young man, he says, he had "to confront a dilemma that my mother never fully resolved in her own life: the fact that I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs" Without an unequivocal commitment to a community of faith, which we already have seen him make in Trinity Church, he says he might have always remained "free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone."

Here, some of us particularly, and perhaps all of us eventually, need the nurturing of a community beyond the family and especially the nurturing of Christ’s Spirit in a congregation. May God continue to bless us as persons, as families, and as the Kingswood congregation, as we nourish our children, youth and each other into the fullness of personal, loving relations that can be ours in God’s universal "beloved community."

Thank you Martin, thank you Barack, and above all, thank you Jesus. Amen

Dr. James Will