Brunswick Baptist Church 18 April 2010

Readings: John 21:1-14

Theme: Church membership

After the service we have a special church meeting where church members will make a decision about a change in the pastoral team. Everyone is welcome to attend but only members of this congregation are eligible to vote. After the church meeting we will be having a forum about the meaning of church membership in the Brunswick Baptist Church. So it seems appropriate that church membership is the focus of our reflection today.

I want to begin with a couple of important assertions:

- Membership of a local church is not the same thing as citizenship in the kingdom of God. There are many fine Christians in the world who are not members of any church, and I am sure that there are people who are members of a church who would barely scrape into the kingdom of God. The judgement about who is or is not a citizen of the kingdom of God is God’s business, but the judgement about who can belong to a local church is made by ordinary human beings like us. In Matthew 7 Jesus warns that ‘Not everyone that says to me, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’.

- Membership in a local church identifies you with the Christian community. In our society that may cause someone like me mild embarrassment when I am introduced at a cocktail party as a Baptist minister and the response is, ‘You’re a what??????’ But think about some of our friends who are awaiting permanent residency. They know much better than we do that membership of this church could bring disastrous consequences on them if they are returned to their country of origin. So let’s not take the privileges and responsibilities of church membership too lightly, when for many people around the world it is literally a matter of life and death.

The New Testament doesn’t refer to church members as such, it talks about believers or better still ‘faithers’, people who heard the message about Jesus and then were baptised – just like Hamid two weeks ago. The believers gathered together every day in their homes to share a meal, to pray, and to encourage each other in the life of faith, so the author of the book of Acts tells us.

John’s Gospel unlike the book of Acts is not at all prescriptive about membership, it allows for people like Thomas who want concrete evidence of the resurrection, it allows for a woman caught in adultery liberated from her shame, it allows for a Samaritan woman who is a serial monogamist. John is a story teller, and it is through the stories that we are invited to discover what it means to be a follower of Jesus and a member of his community, the church.

But John the Gospel writer did not write the story that we heard this morning, the story of the barbecue on the beach. If you look at the last two verses of chapter 20 you will see that they were the original ending of the Gospel:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

One of John’s friends or maybe a later disciple felt that something was missing, something that the church needed to know. What if that later editor of the Gospel thought that these were stories that told us in story form, or even coded form, what it meant to follow Jesus and to be the community of Jesus which we call the church? Let’s trace the steps:

1. Some of the disciples go fishing. They know that Jesus is alive, but they return to their familiar territory in Galilee and go fishing. Life goes on, we go to work, we relax with friends and family, we take out mortgages and live in homes, we go camping, we travel. Life goes on. To follow Jesus does not necessarily mean that we remove ourselves from society and withdraw into a Christian enclave. We still go fishing.

2. Jesus appears on the beach and asks if they have caught anything. No! (I know what that feels like). He tells them to drop their nets on the other side of the boat, and suddenly their nets are full of fish, big fish, 153 of them, that are heavy enough to sink the boat. Catching fish is a common metaphor for mission. In Luke 5 possibly this same story is set at the beginning of Jesus ministry – Jesus uses Peter’s boat to preach to the crowds who had begun to follow him. After the sermon Jesus tells Peter to drop the net over the side and immediately the net is so full of fish that it takes two boats to bring them to shore.

Life in the church can so often feel as if we have been fishing all night and caught nothing. We’re going nowhere; no one is listening; we’ve gone stale. I think this community of BBC heard Jesus’ call to pull in the nets and drop them on the other side, when it intentionally set out to become multicultural by appointing Meewon Yang as its multicultural minister; when it intentionally decided to welcome into its membership people who had so often been marginalised in churches – asylum seekers, migrants, people with mental health issues, homeless people, gay people, people who had been baptised in different traditions. We may not have caught 153 big fish, but people have been blessed, people have been strengthened in their faith, people have come to faith. We have seen the miracle with our own eyes.

I wonder what it would mean for us today to pull in the nets and drop them on the other side of the boat. In some ways we will be pulling in the nets for a time when we engage the building renovations. What will it mean for us to drop them on the other side? What miracle is Jesus preparing for us as we move into a new future?

3. When Peter is told that it is Jesus standing on the beach he puts on his clothes and jumps into the water (we normally take our clothes off to go swimming, but Peter was fishing naked). He can’t wait to be with the risen Lord. It is almost an image of baptism, plunging into water that’s over our head because we want to be where Jesus is.

What energy, what enthusiasm. If we lose that impetuous, risk-taking determination to be with Jesus, church membership is in jeopardy of degenerating into a Darwinian struggle for dominance – the survival of the most aggressive – and that rips churches apart. Peter plunging recklessly into the sea is an image of excitement and commitment to the precarious and unpredictable life of discipleship. Does membership of the church excite you? Or has it become a bit pedestrian, distanced from discipleship?

4. Fish and bread, cooked on a charcoal fire at breakfast time on a beach. John’s Gospel doesn’t have a story of communion; but it does have stories of fish and bread that have the same symbolic significance. ‘Jesus took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish’. Almost the same words you find in the story of the feeding of the five thousand in John 6. For us bread and wine are the symbols that are a reminder month-by-month (why not week-by-week or day-by-day?) of the core of our faith: ‘Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again’.

The barbecue on the beach is a beautiful, perhaps somewhat idealised and romantic, image of church membership. It is an image to be treasured and protected:

- Being fully engaged in life, whether that is fishing, or family, or work. Or church.

- Being excited about the prospect of being with Jesus. (Hamid)

- Living a Jesus kind of life focussed on his mission of justice and healing and liberation and peace.

- Sharing in the joy of the worship life of the church, focussed on the communion and gaining nourishment and hope as we gather around the table.

But what does the image mean when translated to the 21^st Century? Or to ask Nathan’s question from last week – ‘So what?’ What difference does being a member of the church of Jesus Christ, and specifically what does it mean to be a member of Brunswick Baptist Church? Listen again to the words of the commitments we make when we come into the membership of this church [slides]

- A commitment to struggle with, care for, encourage, affirm and challenge one another.

- Being prepared to contribute to the life of the community in whatever ways we are able – sharing in worship regularly, coming to and participating in the decision making processes at church meetings, roster duty, leadership positions, committee membership, caring for others – according to your particular abilities and interest.

- A financial commitment. The church relies on its members’ financial support for survival, and membership implies a commitment to support the church financially, at whatever level we are able.

So, we have committed to be so involved with each other that we are able to struggle with each other and challenge each other (disagree), care for, encourage and affirm each other. It’s not possible to do this between the hours of ten and twelve on a Sunday morning. It takes work and inconvenience and sacrifice and risk to live in community this way. But that is what we have committed ourselves to.

We have committed to participating in the life of the church by being present in worship regularly, helping out with the ministries and tasks that are necessary to keeping the ministry and mission of the church on the boil. We need a Treasurer and have needed one for a couple of years. Jennifer needs help on Wednesdays and Saturdays to help tidy up at the end of the amazingly successful sewing group.

We have committed to support the church financially as we are able to. We have learned in recent months that our expenditure exceeds our income by more than $500 a month. Obviously that can’t continue so we either increase our giving or we reduce our expenditure which goes mainly on pastoral salaries.

Reviewing our commitment to the life of the church should not be a burden and an obligation, it should spring from our gratitude to God for the life of faith grounded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It should emerge from our appreciation of the gift that we receive when we belong to a vibrant, loving, accepting Christian community like BBC.

Can I ask that each of us spend some time during this week reflecting on how we express the privileges and responsibilities of membership, including how we serve the mission and the ministry of this church, and whether we are pulling our weight in the financial support that we give.