Ok we just finished with August. I’m not sure anyone wants our fellowship to get ANY warmer than it has been the last few months! Wait…. Did we have something in mind with this phrase besides the temperature? Of course we did.
As children, we played a lot of different guessing games. When we played guessing games, and someone said, “You’re getting warmer!”, it meant that you were getting closer to what you were looking for. So maybe we could say growing warmer in fellowship is about getting closer to being…what? Getting closer to being the kind of fellowship, the kind of community, that is a witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel, in the briefest terms, is this: “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” I have said before that the Kingdom of Heaven is realized in the here and now anytime and anywhere disciples of Jesus are gathered as the visible, tangible expression and experience of God’s grace, God’s love, God’s redemption, and God’s healing. All of these are aspects of what we call salvation.
Of all the expressions mentioned above, only one is directly used in the command Christ gives to his disciples: “Love one another as I have loved you.”(John 13:34) Elsewhere Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this: that one lays down their life for their friends.”(John 15:13) So the community of the Kingdom then is also the community of the Cross. That is to say, the church is an assembly of Jesus’ disciples who give of themselves sacrificially for the sake of one another; and together do so for the sake of the world.
From this perspective, there is always room to grow warmer in fellowship, or closer in community, because we are always missing someone. There is always an extra seat at the table. There is always room for one more, for many more, in God’s Kingdom. There is always room to grow warmer in fellowship, or closer in community, because we can always know one another better. Likewise, we can always share a little more of ourselves: a little more of our gifts and talents, a little more of our story, a little more of our time with and for one another. More and more we can be, and are, a gathering of people who know one another, support and encourage one another, and work together for one another’s wellbeing and for the wellbeing of others. Sharing joys, sharing sorrows, sharing life. May God continue to help us together to grow, more and more, into the community God is looking for in this world.
We’re Getting Warmer!
Pastor Joe