A good friend asked me the most interesting question this week.  “If you could go back to one moment in your life that would be the pattern for all eternity for you, what moment would that be?”  My mind went skipping across my memory like a rock across a glass-surfaced pond looking for the exact perfect spot to sink in.  There are the obvious moments that stand out in no particular order:  baptism, the day I knew I was called to full-time ministry, graduations, getting married, the first time I held my boys, the first time I kissed a girl and, then, kind of wished I hadn’t, the first time I saw the miracle of birth, even if it was baby pigs, the first time I saw Telluride, Colorado, all in the running for the moment.  Pretty soon, though, my memory boomeranged back across these forty-nine years to a more immediate moment.

It was Wednesday afternoon when my friend asked, “If you could go back to one moment in your life that would be the pattern for all eternity for you, what moment would that be?”  In only a few seconds my memory settled on just the right moment.  “Last night at home,” I said.  Tuesday night.  If I had to pick one moment of my earthly existence that would be the pattern for all eternity for me, it’d be this last Tuesday night at home. 

Both boys were home for at least one hour at the same time.  We had dinner around the table.  I told a goofy joke that even made Cameron laugh.  For the first time in weeks Nancy and I held hands while we watched a rented movie with Beau lying between us and without me falling asleep.  At bedtime, all four of us had prayer together after we talked about how blessed we truly are.  It just doesn’t get much better than that.  Aside from the fact that I truly hope all dogs go to heaven, if there is anything more heavenly than holding hands with your wife, having your children close, breaking bread and sharing laughter and then communing with God with those you love most, I don’t know what it is.  If I could go back to one moment in my life that I would pick as the pattern for all eternity, I’d go back to last Tuesday night at home. 

Of course, going home can be a mixed bag.  For some, home is the last place that would pattern eternal bliss, but, it’s still home.  If going home for you is both the most thrilling and most threatening possibility you can imagine at one and the same time, you and Jesus have a lot in common.  We’re taking a walk with Jesus between Christmas and Easter, from his birth to his death and beyond.  We’ve walked with him into the waters of baptism and then to a wedding reception where we tasted the Jesus vintage.  This week and next our walk takes us back home with Jesus.  It was a place where many of those who’d watched him grow up would first welcome him with blessings and then try to kill him.  What can we learn from Jesus’ decision that it was worth that risk?  Maybe there are just some things that can only be settled by going back home before you can really leave home for anyplace else. 

Central to this journey is a question that we need to keep asking over and over.  What can we learn from Jesus about what it means to have a faith relationship with God that doesn’t just seal our eternity but transforms our lives now?  We’re not just trying to review history here.  We’re trying to make a connection with Jesus by walking with him in the same places he walked, listening to the things he said and learning from the ways he dealt with life and with people and sin and temptation.  What should it tell us when we read this particular chapter in Jesus’ earthly journey?  “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.  He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.” 

“As was his custom,” his habit, his pattern of life, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, the day set aside for all God’s people to worship together.  The synagogue was full of the very same people who would some day kill him.  It was full of people whose faith was inadequate and unfulfilled, even unholy.  But, the synagogue was where Jesus got his start.  As full of humanity as it was, it was also the place where he’d first learned about God and still met God in worship.  It wasn’t perfect but the synagogue was the house of God to Jesus.  If we want to experience the life Jesus experienced, this story ought to get our attention.

Those who had watched Jesus grow up were impressed at first when he read so eloquently from the prophecy of Isaiah.  That is until he identified himself to them as the messiah Isaiah prophesized, the one who would “‘bring good news to the poor . . . proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind . . ..’”  We’ll get back to that next week.  For now, it’s good enough to know that Jesus was willing to go back into the very same place that gave him his faith and struggle with those same people about what his faith had become, about what he’d learned the scriptures meant to him.  As I see it, that is a lesson central to the meaning of this story.  If we are going to be connected to Jesus, we must be connected to other people of faith in whose presence we struggle with scripture, who know us completely and thoroughly, who challenge the ways our humanity conflicts with their understanding of God.  There is no other way. 

For some of you in this very room, that’s been easier than it has for others.  I’ve lost count of the number of adults who’ve told me of the times they went crawling through the rafters of this sanctuary as children and youth.  Some of you think your parents still don’t know to this day.  It may well be that some of the people who don’t attend here any more are actually lost somewhere up there in the rafters, somewhere between the pews and heaven, still trying to find their way out.  It’s one thing to play in the rafters as a child; it’s altogether another to come down out of the rafters, find your place in one of these pews and work out your faith in the presence of those who once changed your diapers in the nursery.  It’s not easy to grow from childhood to adulthood in front of the very same people.  It takes a lot of work and a lot of courage and a lot of conviction.  We don’t know if Jesus ever played in the rafters of his hometown synagogue.  But, in the same place he’d once been a child, he’s now come home as a man, to work out his own faith in the presence of those who first gave it to him. 

That’s part of what it means to be a part of the church for us.  If we are going to fully experience the Jesus connection, we’re going to have stay connected to Jesus’ people, the same people who know our faults, our weaknesses and immaturities, and work out in front of them what it means to grow into spiritual adulthood.  It was Jesus’ custom to go to the synagogue.  It was as much a part of his routine as anything else in his life.  Now, for us, those who are a part of the church Jesus’ died to create, there is no way to be what it fully means to be Christian apart from his gathered body of believers.

Apparently, from the very first days of the church, there were those who thought they could be lone ranger Christians.  I’ve heard it many times myself, “You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian.”  Technically, that’s true.  Our relationship with God is our own personal experience.  One of truths we hold most sacred is that “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5).”  We believe that means that no human being can or needs to go to God on your behalf to make your salvation possible.  That work was accomplished by Christ and Christ alone.  That also means that, if we are going to find our way to God, we can only find it through Christ.  We can’t blame anyone else for our failure to believe, or let’s someone else’s humanity stand in the way of our responsibility to respond to the call of God on our lives through Christ.  All of that is true. 

It is also true that is not possible to be all that it means to be Christian apart from the body of Jesus on earth, the church.  When the church was less than two generations old, one biblical write put it this way.  “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.  Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:24-25).”  The closer we get to our spiritual destiny, the more we need each other.  We need others to help us define what it means to be loving and to define what goodness is and how to practice it, to challenge our laziness and our tendency to keep our faith to ourselves instead of sharing it with others.  We need encouragement that we only get from others who are on this faith journey with us.  In short, again, it is impossible to be all that it means to be Christian apart from a family of faith.  If Jesus, the very son of God himself, found it essential to his faith to meet week in and week out with those who were also seeking God, what makes us think we can make it on our own?

This month, the response to this 31 Days Of Prayer has been nothing short of phenomenal.  More than one has suggested we ought to do this all the time.  Scores of cottage prayer meetings have been held all over the city.  We’ve lost count.  People have been sacrificing their routines to make it to one cottage prayer meeting after another.  Why is that?  Is it because there is one kind of praying we can do alone but yet another we can only do when we are together?  It is because it’s easier to have faith in God’s future for us when we are together than when we are flying solo?  What do you think?  I think lives are being changed.  Even in our Home Teams that meet regularly, we’re making connection with God and each other in ways I know I never have in my life.  There is just a part of our faith that lies dormant until we are challenged and encouraged by the faith of others. 

There is rarely a week that goes by that someone doesn’t tell me how they were once very active in church until they saw how human it was.  One woman visiting our city not long ago told me about how she grew up in this very church, but hasn’t been to church in decades because she can’t stand how institutionalized churches have become, how human they are.  She’s flying solo.  Just for the record, if you want to start telling me about how human the church is, I can finish the sentence for you.  But, when we finish that sentence, I’d like to start another.

I’d like to tell you the story of something that happened just this last week.  It was very encouraging that, last Sunday in one worship service, you pledged fifty-six percent of our 2004 budget!  That’s incredible in its own right!  Inside that story is yet another story.  It’s the story of a child in our church.  I asked Kathy Priester not to tell me the name.  I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.  For the sake of discussion, we’ll say that she pledged last Sunday, too.  Her 2004 pledge is for $10.40.  And, I believe she’ll do it, too.  I’m holding a copy of her giving record, with her name deleted, that dates all the way back to the fall of 2000.  Ten, fifteen, twenty-five cents a week.  Two dollars on Thank Offering Sundays.  One dollar for missions, above her tithe, here and there.  I know how human this church and every church is.  I also know that kind of giving inspires me to believe that there are children still young enough to play in the rafters who are already catching on to the joy of giving and who already believe in laying up for themselves treasures in heaven.  That kind of joy is contagious; it challenges me, shames me, encourages me.  You don’t get that kind of joy and encouragement flying solo. 

So, let me cut to the chase, if I may.  Before Jesus finished the work God called him to do in this world, he went back home.  “As was his custom,” he went to the synagogue, read the word of God, worked out his faith in the presence of others, all of it so that he might take one more step toward being our savior.  I don’t know about you, but that speaks volumes to me. 

If I want to be a disciple of Jesus, I need to be with a group of people every week who remind me that I am more than just a sack of flesh and bones, that I have a heart that is empty unless it is full of God.  I’m thrilled to be a preacher.  But, I am even more thrilled that I am part of a faith tradition that doesn’t just assume that because the preacher said it, it’s true.  I am so glad to be a part of a community of faith that holds me accountable to my confession in Christ, where my faith is challenged, and I get to experience week in and week out what it means to work out my faith with “fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).”  I am so glad that in a world that is increasingly technological and e-connected, there is one place I can come home to every week where I can touch and be touched, hug

and be hugged, love and be loved by real people, where I experience

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genuine community.  The closest thing to heaven on earth is a place to come home to, every single week. 

There is no experience we will ever have in this live or in this world that will ever replace the need for us to be physically together so that we can look into one another’s eyes, share hugs, laugh and cry with each other, hold hands and walk together down the hall, sit next to each other, sing together, hear each other pray, study the Bible together where, disagree with each other so that we can find a way to what we should agree together about, encourage each other, challenge each other, break bread together, share the cup of communion with God.  The spiritual transformation we spend so much time talking about and for which we long doesn’t happen in isolation from each other.  Certainly, there is some praying and some study we can only do alone.  But, until we are together, studying together, challenging each other’s faith and ways of living, praying and worshipping together, there are just deep pockets in our soul that never get exposed to the Light.

We often focus so much on how much the church needs you.  And, it does.  It needs the gift of the Spirit that resides uniquely in you.  It needs your sense of calling to whatever ministry God has given you.  It needs your creativity, your ingenuity, your physical and spiritual energy.  It needs your money and your time.  I could make a long list of things this church needs from you.  I can make one even longer of the reasons you need this church.  And, if you don’t need this church, then, by all means, find one you do need.  You will never be all that it means to be Christian, all that God has created you to be as a part of his heavenly family, until you are a personal, intimate and vital part of some family of faith here on earth.  It may not look like it sometimes.  The music may not always suit your taste and the preaching may be a few bricks shy of a load at times.  The way the church does its business may make you as angry as a hornet now and then; the humanity of it all it may disillusion you and it may even discourage you.  Coming home to this church every week may sometimes be a mixed bag of frustration and joy.  But, even when it isn’t clearly visible to the naked human eye, God is still doing his work on this earth in and through families of faith just like this who call the church their home.  You, Cliff Temple, are part of the church for whom Christ died and Christ never died for anyone he didn’t intend to resurrect to new life.  People are dying and being raised every day in this place.  Friday morning, Maurice Townsend died.  She died on Friday.  By Saturday night, we were celebrating her resurrection to new life.  That’s the way it is church, part dying, part living again.

I’ll go further than that.  God is not doing anything in all of eternity or anywhere in all of creation that is more important than what he is doing in the lives of the people who gather every week to worship, serve, discover their spirit-given gifts, witness and work out their salvation with fear and trembling than what he is doing in this family of faith called Cliff Temple Baptist Church.  Even in this very moment, this very earthly, very human moment, because we have gathered in his name, the risen Christ is here among us, right here, right now.  In ways that are not always visible, people are making a connection with Jesus in this place. 

And, if you only would, you can make the Jesus connection, too, right here and right now?

Would you?