2026 08 30 - Ahh, I Made It! - Engel

Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I have to apologize up front. Sermon's a little long today. I didn't think it was communion, so I usually don't preach on Communion Sunday, so I'm going to give you the whole bail anyway. I know it's kind of a strange title to a sermon.

Ah, I made it. But perhaps you'll understand a little bit better by the time we get to the end of it. As you know, my sermons sometimes take a different tack from what you might expect. This one is about Christian fellowship. We're in the Book of Mark, or Romans, as Pastor Pop's been preaching on us for the past several weeks.

And all that he's preached on in the past, UP through Chapter 11, has been theological. Paul has written about, you know, our salvation saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. He's talked about the how, the what, the when, and the why. All that stuff's done. Now in chapter 12, he gets to talk about the nitty gritty of how do we live that faith?

How do we live? Because all this has happened to us. So that's what this is about. It's about Christian fellowship, which is a term that is battered about a lot today. But to be honest with you, when I look into the many churches, I don't see a lot of Christian fellowship.

Christian fellowship today seems to be like entering into the narthex or coming into the entrance of the church and greeting your friends, asking them about the week, how it went, maybe reaching out and shaking a hand with another person or two. And then you go into the sanctuary, you sit down, you go through the liturgy or go through the informal worship. You sing the hymns and the songs and hear the readings and the prayers and the sermon. And you go home. You go home.

But is that what Christian fellowship is supposed to be? Let's find out what Paul says. Some of you might remember quite a while ago, there was a TV show called Cheers. It's still very popular in the reruns, I understand, but this was a show that was set in a bar in Boston featuring a cast of offbeat characters who gathered in the bar every day after work to kibbutz and to tell war stories and to tell a few jokes and to blow off steam and to commiserate with one another. And each week, millions of people tuned in to watch Sam and Diane and Rebecca and Carla and Norm and Cliff and Dr. Fraser, Crane and Woody sit around and talk about their joys and their sorrows.

Their victories and their defeats, their good times and their bad times, their problems at home and their dreams for the future. That was the whole show.

It wasn't very profound. And yet Cheers touched something deep with the American public. And each week, these quirky individuals, in their own way, these characters talked about life and America, tuned in and listen. Perhaps you remember the theme song for the show. You want to be where you can see that troubles are all the same.

You want to be where everybody knows your name. Somehow I have the idea that that's the kind of fellowship that Christ wants for the the church. When you think about it, a bar is the kind of place that is very accepting of anybody. It's very tolerable, it's very inclusive, it's unshockable what happens there. It's democratic, very democratic.

You could tell your secrets there. Nobody's going to tell about them. The bar flourishes, I think, not because people are so alcoholic, but because God has put into the human heart the desire to know and to be known, to love and to be loved. And I believe that Christ wants the church to be a fellowship where people can come in and say, I'm beat. I can't do it anymore.

I just cannot handle it anymore. This is going to be a little tough for us, perhaps, to handle for ourselves today, to hear this, because despite the social media all around us and despite our desire for privacy, today we really want to be private people. So many people today are hungering for a close relationship and for lasting friendships because you want to be where you know the problems are all the same, and you want to be where people know your name. So what do people do? Well, today they turn to bars and clubs and parties and neighborhood groups, and they join softball teams and bowling leagues and gyms and spas.

And nowadays they might spend hours and hours on social media networking sites trying to make a connection with someone who might probably understand what they're going through. But you'll never meet them in person.

Maybe, just maybe, they might turn to the church, but what will they find there? The New Testament contains a phrase that catches the essential quality of. Of a caring congregation. The phrase is brotherly love, you've heard comes from the Greek word Philadelphia, which itself comes from two other Greek words. One is philos, which has the idea of tender affection.

The other is Adelphos, which literally means to be born of the same womb. And so it's translated, brother. If you put these two thoughts together, you have Philadelphia, or tender affection, owed to those who are born of the same womb. I have two brothers and four sisters. I owe them tender affection because we all come from the same womb.

And even if I haven't seen them or talked to them in quite a while, when we do talk, we are instantly familiar with each other. Now, when you apply that to the spiritual realm in God's family, we are all born of the same spiritual womb. And this relationship has nothing to do with our status in life, nothing to do with our achievements, nothing to do with our race or ethnic background, nothing to do with the money we have in our pocket or the education. Education we've had. Nothing to do with our talents, our language, our sex, our age, our culture, or any of the other barriers that might divide the race into different groups.

Everyone belongs. Who belongs to Jesus belongs to me. Everyone. And I owe all of them the tender affection or the brotherly love that God intends for us to share. God has put into the heart of every Christian a desire to love all of his people, no matter where they are in the world.

It's part of the DNA of being a follower of Christ. If you are a Christian, that love is already in your heart. It's just a matter of letting it loose.

So what does Christian fellowship mean today? What does this tender affection, this brotherly love look like in the church today, in the nitty gritty of where we are in this place called grace? Well, Paul gives us four answers to that question in the Epistle. Lesson for today. There's a lot more we could preach about, but I've only chosen three verses.

That gives us an idea of of what this Christian fellowship is supposed to be about. Here's how Paul puts it. When God's people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you.

Don't curse them. Pray that God will bless them. Be happy with those who are happy and weep with those who weep. Wow. I said this was going to be a little difficult.

And it truly is difficult because according to these verses, what does brotherly love look like? Well, the first thing I see is generosity. Paul mentions contributing to the needs of the saints. The word contributing doesn't always have to do with money. In fact, it doesn't.

It doesn't mean money a lot in the New Testament. It has a broader sense to it, a broader meaning, which means to share something with a partner. God wants his children. That God wants you and me to identify with the needs of other people around us and make those needs our own. You see, today we have isolated lives.

Despite how close we live to one another in our communities, with houses so close together and apartments so close together, we hardly see each other. Someone could be suffering and we hardly even know it. A neighbor might die and we have no clue. A member of the church may be going through battling stage four cancer for months. And we just find out about it because we have become very private people.

But here's the thing about Christian fellowship. We have to first pay attention to one another, and then we have to come close enough to one another so that we see those needs in order for us to do anything about them. It's very difficult for us to do in our society because we kind of pull away from one another. But Paul has some more to say about this, and he explains a little bit more what it means. In the second half of verse 13, he talks about hospitality, genuine hospitality.

Paul says, am I still on?

I don't know what. There we go. Maybe that'll help. Paul says that we are to pursue hospitality. Now, what does pursue mean?

It means what it sounds like. You run after something, you chase after it. Hospitality comes from that Greek word meaning kindness to strangers. Maybe you need to all talk about that word, strangers. Because hospitality, first of all, is not something like entertaining.

It's not the same. Entertaining is when we invite friends over for or a party. It's a good thing to have people over. Have a Super bowl party at your house. It's a good thing.

But that's not what Paul's talking about. Hospitality involves reaching people who are strangers to you, reaching out to people who you don't know very well. And that leads to another thing we need to recognize. The word stranger conjures up these images of hot people who do weird things. Well, there are people like that in the world, and we are to love those people in the world.

But that's not the focus. God wants us to think about people that we don't know very well. They might be sitting on the end of the pew from you, but he wants us to focus on them. He wants us to focus on people that we don't know very well and find ways to reach out to them. And that's the kind of hospitality we are to pursue and chase after.

Well, does that work today in our society? This is where it comes hard to understand. Our hospitality seems to have gone out of style in our society today, 21st century. Is it even possible? I think it is because I've seen it in other cultures.

I've seen it among the Maasai. I've seen it. They have cell phones. They're on their cell phones a lot. That's the only kind of communication they have.

They don't have landlines, they have cell phones. But they are very intentional about relationships, and we can learn something from that. It requires us to be intentional about our relationships, wanting and sometimes even going out of our way to first pay attention to people we don't know very well and then to actually approach them. Genuine hospitality. But then Paul goes even deeper.

He talks about forgiveness. I call it gracious forgiveness. Because when you understand what Paul's saying here, you've got to have a lot of grace to do this. This is what he says. Bless those who persecute you.

Don't curse them. Pray that God will bless them. Obviously, this is easier said than done. After all, when someone curses you, the last thing you want to do is to bless them. And yet, this is God's word we're dealing with here.

We are to bless those who curse us even when we would rather give them a piece of our minds. In short, we are being asked to do the opposite of what comes naturally. So it's not good enough to just grin and bear. We're not simply to bite our tongues. You know, there is such a thing as cursing under your breath that no one can hear.

It sounds better than cursing them to their face out loud. But cursing under the covers isn't any better. Paul's not saying, curse them while you can get it out of your system. And then you'll feel better and then you can bless them. He says, no, you bless them from the start.

I wonder if you ever heard of arrow prayers. An arrow prayer is a prayer that goes straight from your heart to the heart of God. It's the kind of prayer you just speak in a moment when you need something from God. In other words, you ask the Lord for a direct quality that you need at that precise moment. Lord, I need your patience at this moment.

Lord, I need your compassion. I need your love. Lord, I need your understanding right now. It's an arrow prayer. We need to learn how to pray those prayers so that way we can hold back those bad words that we might want to say.

We can hold back when we say, lord, I need it. Now, here's the fourth principle. After we get through that gracious forgiveness, Paul just keeps on going. He says, true love leads to friendship. And I'm talking about a gut level friendship.

Paul says to be happy when people are happy and to weep when people weep. You know, we have extremes in life. Sometimes we're on A mountaintop. And we are just so happy. We're elated.

Then we're down in the valley. We're weeping all over the place. We can't get our life together. So if our friends are happy, let's rejoice with them. If your friend is celebrating the birthday or is getting a promotion or having a baby or her daughter graduates from college or his grandson scores two touchdowns, laugh with him, cheer with him, shout with him, smile with him, share the joy with them.

Because life is so hard around us. It's when we have a joyful moment, when we have those moments of victory. We need to come around one another and share that same joy with them and rejoice with them. Maybe sometimes we think they don't deserve that.

Maybe that's the way we think. But when you think about that, of course they don't deserve it. They don't deserve rejoicing when you're sad. None of us deserve to be rejoicing, except to recognize that all of it comes as a grace, as a gift of God's grace. Every blessing comes from Lord.

We rejoice with people when they're happy. We weep with people when they're sad. We weep with them when they cry. And we don't like to do this because our other people's tears, they frighten us. Because it's such a raw emotion.

It scares us. And so we tend to run away from it. Or we simply offer these empty platitudes like, things will get better. God will take care of you. I know everything's going to work out for you.

And you know, I believe those saints. I really do believe them with all my heart. That God will take care of us in our suffering. But I've got to tell you something. Even a verse like Romans 8, verse 28, that everything works for the good of those who love God.

Even that verse can seem like cold comfort when the doctor says, there's nothing we can do. And sometimes the best we can do is simply to be present, to hold somebody's hand and to weep with them. To cry with them in their hour of sadness. But you know, to do this, to rejoice with them when they're happy and to weep with them when they cry. To do that requires that we not keep the world at arm's length.

We can't do that, because as long as we keep the world out there and don't let it get too close to us. This verse doesn't apply to us. By definition, you have to walk close enough with people to Know when they are rejoicing and to know when they are weeping. If we keep them on the other side of the street, so to speak, we can wave at them while we're listening to our favorite music on our ipod. We can't obey this verse from long distance.

We can't do it if we're too busy. We don't like to hear that, but it's true. We all need someone to laugh with. We all need someone to cry with. So greatly do we need this that we will do almost anything to get it.

And if we can't find this sort of friendship in the church, we'll go somewhere else. And perhaps that's the attraction of the local bar. We will go almost anywhere and almost pay any price to find someone who will care about what we're going through.

But that's what brotherly love is all about. Being there, being present and caring. When I was in seminary, I became friends with another student, an older man who had been a policeman in Chicago for a long time. He was a big, burly man. I'm sure he made a very tough cop.

And he got himself into some situations that were very nasty. He ended his career from the force, retiring early because of some physical injuries suffered on the job. He would tell me stories that I could hardly believe.

And when he came to Christ, he talked about how that so transformed his life. He said if he would live those six days of the week when he was dealing with the violence and the drugs and the cursing and the lying and the stealing and the killing and things we can't even imagine. He would spend those six days just so he could come to church on Sunday morning. And he recalled entering the church on Sundays after that week of violence and all of that. He would come and he would say to himself, ah, I made it.

I got through the week, and I made it where I belong. You see, that's what the world desperately needs more than just policemen and firemen. But we can't seem to find it. We need that oasis in a spiritual desert, because that's what we're living in. We need a place where we can find relief from what's going on out there in the world.

We need a place where there's a group of people who truly love each other. A place where we can connect with God and with people who will walk with us on our journey. A place of healing, hope and change. A place where we can see that all the problems of the world are the same. A place where people know our name.

So I believe this is God's dream for the church, for our church, that through the preaching of the gospel, men and women everywhere can experience the life of changing power of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And to be that kind of place where no matter what kind of week you have had, you can come into God's house and you can say, ah, I made it.

Paul talks about generosity, he talks about genuine hospitality, he talks about gracious forgiveness and he talks about this gut level friendship. So where do we begin today? Well, since we are the church, the answer is always the same. We begin with us. And so we're reminded of the Chinese Christian's prayer when he prayed, oh Lord, change the world, but begin I pray with me.

Let us pray. Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for calling us out of the spiritual challenges of the world, calling us into your family, the church. Teach us what it means to truly love one another. We know why you love us and how much you loved us, but teach us to love one another. And we pray that your love might unite us and that your spirit might break down the barriers that do separate us, so that we may become a people with a loving purpose, quick to give to those in need, eager to reach out to strangers, ready to bless others.

Rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep, fill us to overflowing with your your love so that the world may see Jesus in us. We pray this in his precious name. Amen. Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.