Meeting Together
In our current worship series, we are taking a look at how our membership vows as United Methodists are means of grace.
When we join the church we promise to support it with our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness.
Last week, Jim Melrose was here to talk about our financial giving to the church. We’ve looked at prayer as a means of grace. We looked at witnessing as a means of grace. This morning we are going to look at “presence” as a means of grace.
Believe it or not the church during the time described in our text from the Book of Hebrews was having a problem. They were having a problem.
Let’s look at v.25 to see if you can identify it.
This is William Barclay’s translation from his commentary:
“Let us not abandon our meeting together — as some habitually do — but let us encourage one another.”
I also like the King James Version translation, “forsake not the assemblying together of yourselves.” It just has a nice poetic quality to it.
As I have said before, Bible study is a lot like real estate in some ways: location, or context is everything.
Let’s think about the context of this passage. Here it is again: “Let us not abandon our meeting together as some habitually do.” “Meeting together” is just another word for “church.”
Pretty straight forward, the context is public worship.
That is not rocket science, it is not deep theology. You don’t have to have a PhD in religion to figure this out. This verse is just the Bible saying as clearly as it can be said that it is really important for Christians to come together to worship God on a regular basis and encourage one another.
Of course, apparently, even in ancient times during the days of the apostolic church when there had to be pretty good preaching, (Peter, James, and Paul among others) some folks developed a habit of not meeting together.
Unfortunately, things didn’t change much down through the years.
St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo who lived in the 4th century faced the same challenge.
Here is a quote from one of his sermons from 391 AD.
An ordinary day it may be on the church calendar, but it’s also right in the middle of the December gladiatorial schedule. It’s no wonder, then, that the church is only half full. The rest of you must be in the amphitheater, looking more for entertainment than salvation. I could say – “They’ve given themselves to games of the Flesh, as it were, but have yet to pay attention to games of the Truth” but I won’t. Ah well, for their salvation as much as for ours, let’s pray to God without distractions of any kind.
What is Augustine saying? Augustine is saying what the Book of Hebrews is saying:
“Let us not abandon our meeting together—as some habitually do—but let us encourage one another.” It couldn’t be any clearer.
I know it is not always easy to show up on an ordinary day on the church calendar and be an encouragement. There are days when it’s easier for me to show up than others.
You may have heard about the Christian who was stranded out on an deserted island for several years. The rescuers finally found him and when they got to the island they saw that he had built three structures of bamboo and leaves. They were pretty impressive. He had obviously put a lot of work into them. They pointed to the first and said “what is that?” He said, “that’s my house.” They pointed to the second and said, “what’s that?” He said, “O, that’s my church.” They pointed to the third and said, “what is that?” He said, “That’s where I used to go to church.”
Going to church on a regular basis is important at least according to the Book of Hebrews and St. Augustine has never been easy.
As we all know, the world-wide pandemic we’ve just gone through didn’t do us any favors in helping us be consistent in attending worship. It is also pretty clear that our current political divisions in the nation and even in the church don’t make it any easier to come to church and encourage people we’ve been arguing with on Facebook all week long….
Some of our small groups here at Bethlehem have studied books and resources written by Brene’ Brown. I love her writings and podcasts and all, but she has had her struggles with the church.
One of the things I love about her is her honesty. I once heard her say, “I can just imagine what couples’ therapy with the church and me might look like.”
Maybe the therapist would sit down with me and the church and say: “What’s wrong?” And I would say, “The church drives me crazy. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” Then the therapist would say, “Can you be more specific?” “Sure, we need to talk about social justice issues in the church or we’re not relevant (all the ism’s, gun control, abortion, homophobia, racism.) But at the same time the church has to stay out of politics.” And then she said, “I would say I need the people at church to be confident in their faith, but never self-righteous and never pushy. And I want ever thing in church to be well ordered and exact, but there has to be a lot of room for spontaneity. “She said, “I could go on and on with what’s wrong with the church, but then I could see the therapist say, ‘tell me what you love about the church. Is there anything you love about the church?’”
She said, “that is when I would light up.” And she mentioned some things I think many of us would mention.
She said “I love the church because you can find things in the church you can’t find anywhere else. I love worshipping God with people who are not like me and who do not always see everything the way I do. I love singing with people on Sunday who I don’t even know.
The bottom line is, while Brene’ has struggled with the church, she loves the church. It is okay and even normal, to have struggles with the church.
One of my challenges, struggles has been trying to come to grips with the fact that for some people church just isn’t that high on their priority list. They are going to go to the gladiator games on Sunday – just like they did in Augustine’s day. They have gotten out of the habit of worshipping on a regular basis, just like in the days of the apostolic church as we read about in the book of Hebrews.
One important thing for me to remember is to encourage people when they are here, so that maybe they will be here more often and be an encouragement to others.
Because if there is one thing we need in our world right now, it is to worship God and to encourage one another.