Stan Moody

POB 240 Manchester, ME 04351 207/626-0594 1434 Ohio St., #44 Bangor, ME 04401 207/607-3055

The Recovery of Koinonia

Commencement Address, Grace Evangelical College and Seminary, Bangor, ME, May 9. 2012

I find myself in a very curious position tonight. I stand before you as one who has experienced the best that the American Dream has had to offer. Yet, I have found the American Dream to be sadly wanting and full of pitfalls. At every turn, I came up against a line in the sand and stepped back, knowing that to cross that line would be to surrender to Mammon. In the words of a song made famous by Peggy Lee, Is that all there is? God faithfully has answered the question that has dogged me since my teenage years and, I suspect, dogs you tonight, What do you want me to do, Lord? The answer that I received over a lifetime of struggle has been, I want you to completely trust me in whatever you do. I want a relationship with you. I want to be your friend. We as believers in Jesus Christ as Lord are locked in a battle that has far less to do with our politics and far more to do with our selfishness. We have dragged our faith along for the ride to bail us out on our journey to becoming winners instead of servers. We have claimed a divine right to our own pursuit of happiness, leaving the Suffering Servant of Calvary in the margins and our neighbor in need of love. This idolatry of self has left us seeking affirmation from an unbelieving world through the trappings of prosperity and success rather than through the resurrected life. Sadly, we have carried that ethic into the church. In preparation for tonight, Dr. Phillips pointed me to a writing by theologian Rudolph Bultmann in his book, Jesus Christ and Mythology. He says, and I paraphrase, modern man is in danger of forgetting two things. First, that his actions should be guided not by his own desires for happiness, security, usefulness and profit, but by obedience to the commandment of God to live lives of goodness, trust and loveSecond, that it is an illusion to suppose that real security can be gained by men organizing their own personal and community lifeHistory goes on and pulls down all the towers of Babel again and againThere is no real, definitive security.

I would add that it is those very towers of Babel that we build as monuments to our own happiness and security that isolate us from the present, dynamic, victorious Kingdom of God that beckons us to die in order truly to live. Our great God has created us with a hunger and thirst for something the Greeks called koinonia to share real, intimate fellowship with Him and with each other. Instead, the great American experiment, in its glorification of the individual, has left us isolated, rejected, hopeless and superficial. We drag that isolation, rejection, hopelessness and superficiality into a church that is accepted but not embraced; tolerated but no longer relevant to our neighbor. Koinonia with myself or with those who fail to challenge my thinking, you see, is not koinonia at all. It is hell on earth. The Church of Jesus Christ will survive and flourish because its one foundation is Jesus Christ, our Lord. However, When the Son of Man appears, will He find faith where we as believers have staked our claim? The Age of Enlightenment, known also as the Age of Reason, gave us the Industrial Revolution, the two Great Awakenings, a new nation conceived in liberty and the American church culture. The enemy of faith was reason. The invitational system of salvation became the bridge from the rational to the mystical from Caesars world to Gods. Until around the mid-1970s, the label of Christian was reserved for the irrational. Did we lose something critical to our witness as a peculiar people set apart for the glory of God when President Jimmy Carter and Chuck Colson popularized being born again. Since around 1945, just as the last of the great evangelists, Billy Graham, began his ministry, our culture has been moving away from the god of reason and toward the god of relativism. We now live in a world in which truth is no longer absolute. A Church steeped in 19th Century culture reels from the lack of a definable enemy. Prophetically, in the words of Pogo, We have met the enemy, and he is us! In this relativistic world, tolerance has become the only truth form. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, instead of leading us through the desert, has been invited along as an accomplice to our 5-year plans. We find ourselves desperately devising clever strategies for grabbing an increasing share of a declining church market 9.9% of the population in Maine, while the world around us is drowning in its collective pride and self-indulgence. I submit to you tonight that the church of Jesus Christ must get down and dirty with the least among us so that the world might see the difference between sacrificial love and the sappy sentimentality that goes along with building our towers of Babel. On that note, I have both bad news and good news. The bad news is that the government is broke. The good news is that the government is broke. The Church may once again step in and serve the ground it has surrendered to a ship of fools, and I use that term biblically to refer to those friends of Pontius Pilate who cynically ask, What is truth? You graduates have made a life-changing, ethical decision that will prompt a radical change in your lives. It has been a decision to seek first the Kingdom of God. What may surprise you, however, is that you are now faced with two choices. The first is to apply for a position in the existing church culture and assume that you can slap a little duct tape on the old ecclesiology and fix the church from the top down. The other choice is to pick up your cross daily and follow Jesus, the Suffering Servant, fixing the church from the bottom up. Following Jesus is not about you and me as individuals. It is about HIM, and about US. It is about the recovery of koinonia.

People just beyond our reach by our own design are drowning in a sea of fear, isolation, mental illness, drug dependency, brokenness and despair, and we are counting heads on Sunday mornings as proof of Gods presence and our conformity to His will. If your time at Grace Evangelical has been effective, your settled doctrines and theology will have been rattled. Take that quest for truth with you as you prayerfully and restlessly go forth from here. But expect to be divested of a traditional career path. You are headed for the ride of your life. God, you see, doesnt have a 5-year plan. He has an eternal plan. In order to share with us that eternal plan, He invites us to give up OUR plans. I have plans for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you; plans to give you hope and a future. Do we dare count on that? Do we dare abandon our fallback position? To be awakened to the surprise of Gods plans for us, He wants us to step into the deal stream. To step into the deal stream is a kind of death of self. We dont know where it is going. We dont know where WE are going. We cant define what we are doing. And, as with the Prophet Elisha and the Apostle Paul, we have nothing to which to go back. Thats pretty scary stuff, isnt it? Let me try to qualify it for you. To those of you who may be thinking about becoming pastors, I would encourage you today to set aside all desires for a career. The first question you will hear from your neighbor steeped in relativism is, How many people do you have in your church? The answer you give will identify you as either a winner or a loser. In fact, God is calling losers to get down and dirty with other losers who need the Lord we so cleverly avoid with our committees, our suburban ethos and our homogeneity. This little gem of the Kingdom, Grace Evangelical College and Seminary, has a purpose statement that I hope is locked into your brain by now: Grace Evangelical works to enable the student to meet the challenges of real world life, rather than to be defined by an insular existence, avoiding the implications of human imperfection and difficulty. There is embedded in that statement the clear message that God is calling us to get out of our insular Christian ghettos and into the world of human imperfection and suffering, for it is there we will find Jesus and the pearl of great price, His Kingdom. In the time we have left, I want to share with you what I have learned in my search for the Kingdom of God. It begins with Micah 6:8: He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Can we get beyond the nouns justice, mercy and humility into the walk? There is a conjunction between every noun. to do justly AND to love mercy AND to walk humbly with your God. What is required of us is not just occasional justice; not just occasional mercy; not just feigned humility, but all three in harmonious interrelationship. That is impossible in the flesh. The natural man, you see, wants to replace the conjunction and with or justice OR mercy OR walk humbly with your idol of the month. The modern Christian, on the other hand, wants to find refuge in occasional justice or occasional mercy and congratulate himself for walking humbly with his God saved and proud of it. The question that burns in the heart of the seeker of righteousness is, however: What does the Lord require of me? We look around us for a vehicle to practice Justice, mercy and
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humility and find that there are as many interpretations as there are people. Both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats think they know all there is to know about justice, mercy and humility. The chaotic state of our nation is living testimony to their wisdom. You/we/the Church of Jesus Christ can do better and show the way by example. Lets focus on the action words the verbs: do, love and walk. DO justly; LOVE mercy and WALK humbly with your God. If we can get the do, love and walk right, the how, when, where and why will fall into line. Our Lord offers two judgment scenarios in the Matthews Gospel that go to the question of whether or not we have done what the Lord has required of us. These judgment scenarios seem to be telling us that, in fact, we wont have a clue until the scorecard is read. If we dont have a clue, then, that throws us totally at the mercy of divine grace. Praise God? In the first scenario on the judgment, from Matthew 7, are those of us who say, Lord, Lord. Thats pretty much all of us here tonight, isnt it? Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons (and bring many to repeat the sinners prayer and pass out millions of tracts and copies of the Four Spiritual Laws) and perform many miracles? Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers! What is the critical missing factor? It is to do the will of the Father that transcends all the rest that we do, including becoming stars for Jesus. The second scenario on the judgment is from Matthew 25. There, we see the heavenly throne with sheep on the right and goats on the left. The Son of Man, who has come in His glory, judges both sheep and goats by exactly the same standard. Where were you when you saw me hungry, thirsty, naked, sick and in prison? The response from both sheep and goats is exactly the same. Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, sick and in prison? Neither the self-righteous nor the children of God have any recollection of seeing Jesus as hungry, thirsty, naked, sick and in prison. But the righteous those whose sole mission is to do the will of the Father hear the words, Come, you who are blessed of my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. The will of the Father, then, must be that we seek Jesus among the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick and in prison. Your mission, if you should decide to accept it, is to go where the suffering Jesus is. It is not an upwardly mobile vocation or career path; it is a life of uncertainty and service doing, loving and walking. So that which we DO, we are to do justly. If we are to love mercy, we will pursue it vigorously everywhere we find suffering because the one suffering may be a brother or sister of our Lord. There is, however, a defining 3rd condition for fulfilling the will of the Father. It is that we walk humbly with Him. You cannot do justly nor love mercy while walking proudly with God, advising Him on His next move. If you cannot get beneath God the Father, how can you possibly get beneath the sufferer in order to demonstrate for him or her the authentic Suffering

Servant, Jesus the Christ? Deciding what God ought to be doing and when He ought to be doing it while we are building our towers of Babel is the height of arrogance and unbelief. The calling for which you and I long, then, does not begin with an invitation for an interview as a program director in a church. It begins tomorrow morning after your breakfast and your shower. Go to your quiet place, pick up that cross and take it with you into your day. Keep that cross handy to crucify the flesh when it is tempted to seek affirmation in a world for which truth is relative. Keep your eyes open for Jesus. You will find Him in the homeless shelters, the jails and prisons, at the soup kitchens, in the tattoo parlors, in the bars anywhere but behind gated communities of upwardly mobile, white suburbanite relativists who write the news and pass the laws. In closing, I will share with you how this pursuit of the Kingdom of God has unfolded in my life. Answers to my prayers came only in retrospect decades later. When as a teenager I fell on my face asking God, What do you want me to do with my life? the answer came back in retrospect, Whatever you do, son, do it justly. The pitfalls into which I fell along the way came when I walked through doors but left justice behind. When 30 years later, I fell on my face pleading with God not to let me leave this life until I had been given a glimpse of the Kingdom, the answer came back in retrospect, Love mercy, son, and you will find my Kingdom. Then, in recent years, when the prayer of my life has been, Father, please deliver me from my self-absorption, the answer has been, Walk humbly with your God. Our mission as disciples of the Living Lord is clear. It is forcefully, in the tradition of John the Baptist, to lay hold of the Kingdom of God outside the city gate and get dirty doing it. I plead with you today to drop mission as a vocation and prepare to die with the suffering Jesus in order that you might live in the joy and peace promised by our Holy and Infinite God. God bless you and fortify you with the hosts of heaven as you go forth from this beginning and this place.