Becoming Common Ground: Week 1

I'd like to offer my welcome to you as well. My name is Jeff Krayeski. I serve as a lead pastor here at Commagram Midtown. I wanna just say welcome. If you're visiting with us, we're glad to have you this morning. We're starting a new series here today. And it's sort of in response to the fact that we're stepping into our 25th year of ministry as a congregation this year, which gives us the opportunity to do some reflection and also to celebrate all of the really good things that God has done throughout the years. We stand here, sit here today because hundreds, maybe thousands of people over the last 25 years said yes to an origin story that was compelling enough for them to give resource in time and energy to support the work of what God was doing through the vision and the mission of Common Ground Christian Church. And it all started with a group of elders from our sending church who believed that God was up to something with a smaller group of young adults that were gathering. And these elders prayerfully committed resources and people to launch the church. At the same time, an aging congregation in Broadruple, anybody familiar with the co-hatch over there in Broadruple? Anybody worked there? You may work in my old office. That was our original building. And the church that was there at the time was getting ready to close the doors, but they wanted to give their building to a young congregation. And they didn't know who we were and we didn't know who they were, but we started praying that God would give us a free building. And then we met them. I don't know if you've been to a real estate closing where no money exchanges hands, but it goes very fast. (audience laughing) There's two pieces of paper, right? And we cried and we prayed and they blessed us. And in those origin days, we had these aspirational dreams of what we would become, who we would be, what we were hoping to accomplish as a church, a new church. And the senior minister of the sending church at the time, his name's Howard Brammer. And he sent an email to the elders of our sending congregation. And now it's seen the beginnings of the church. I actually have this artifact. If you've been in some of our conversations, you'll see the date is December 10th, 1999. We were all preparing for the world to end. (audience laughing) Why 2K? But we made it. And in part, there was this piece in the description. This was his description of what he thought we wanted to become. The church will focus on cross-cultural, cross-economic ministry emphasis, a hands-on approach to meeting basic physical needs, an emphasis on the meeting place as an oasis for those with both physical and spiritual needs. Someone asked me last week, they said, 25 years, what's changed at common ground? And as I reflect on the founding vision, I would say that, materially, not much has changed. Now we've grown, hopefully matured. And we would maybe say things differently. Hopefully we know a bit more now than we knew then. But the essence of our founding vision still persists strongly. We believe that Jesus transforms people's lives, that He saves us and that He invites us into a new way of living. And the gospel from the very beginning days for us was more than just what we believed in our heads, but also how it affected our hearts and our hands and our feet. And I don't think our name could be more descriptive of what we continue to believe that God is doing in reconciling all things in Jesus, creating a space for people to experience this transformational encounter with God, regardless of their background, regardless of where they come from to participate fully in the ministry of the church. I wish I had a dollar for every politician or social commentator I've heard, say that we just need to find some common ground. Because that's what we've been trying to do. And I'm more committed today than I've ever been in embodying this vision that Jesus has called us toward. And so as we begin our 25th year, I thought it would be good for us to just reflect on our story, how we became who we are to dream about the future that God might have for us. And so I've titled the series "Becoming Common Ground," not to elevate our particular congregational expression, but to acknowledge that we are always in the process of becoming the people that God has created us to be. And this transforming power of Jesus, this is what shapes our lives together. And there's so many different ways that we could do this, but I thought it would be good to spend some time on our values as a congregation. And the practices that anchor us to those values, remembering that we are always a people in process, we are always learning, we are always growing, and we are always serving one another in our city. And so this morning, I'd like to just kick us off with this idea. Before we can talk about what we hold in common, which I would call our values, I would say we first have to establish the ground. And the ground for us has always been that Christ's love holds us together. His love gives us a new way of seeing people, gives us a new identity, forms us as a new creation community for the sake of the world. And I just want to look this morning at 2 Corinthians 5, just really briefly, that's kind of an anchoring text for what it means for us to live into the story that was given to us 25 years ago, and the one that we still want to continue with today. So if you have your Bibles, if you turn to 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, 1 Corinthians chapter 5 is a very different chapter, you can check that out later. But 2 Corinthians 5 is where I'd like to start. And we're going to start in verse 14. This is the Apostle Paul. "For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died." He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here. All this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And He's committed to us, the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making us appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf. We reconciled to God. God made Him who had no sin to be sinned for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God indeed. Let me pray for us as we begin. God, we thank you for the power and the capacity to remember, to reflect. And we thank you for it, Father, with both the joy that is brought up when we reflect. But also we thank you for being present with us when the memories are hard. And so as we congregationally look back on the story that you birthed 30 years ago on a group of people, we thank you that were attached to it. I pray that we could look backwards with our eyes wide open through a lens of grace and through a lens of your provision for us. And I pray that it would continue to form the confidence that we have in what you have for our future. We could have never imagined 25 years, 25 years ago, and Father, we can't imagine what you have for us. But we know that it's good. And so we thank you in advance for your provision and ask these things in Jesus' name, amen. Those first verses that Paul uses there in 14 and 15, Christ holds all things together. This is the love that holds us in our relationship with God and in our relationship with each other. It's not our shared preferences that holds us together. It's not our backgrounds that hold us together. We're not held together by religious performance or our natural talents. We are not compelled by guilt or shame or fear. We are held together by the love of Jesus. This is what compels our lives. Paul reminds us of why this is our compelling motivation. Because we're convinced that Jesus did something eternally important that he went before us in his death in order to save us in our own sin and death. This is the reconciling sacrifice of Jesus that destroys the power of sin and death and allows us to experience the life with God that we were intended to have from the beginning. The first thing that Jesus establishes is the common ground of our common depravity. That's a good one, right? Right, we've all rebelled against God's good plan for us. The human story of sin is every person for themselves. We create these lines of value and dignity based on arbitrary categories, right? We use all kinds of criteria to exclude others. We live out of a sense of scarcity and fear. We otherwise and we demonize in order to try to protect ourselves. This is how we exist in that space of the fallen world. But then we have Jesus who comes in and he says, "We are all in the same boat." I saw this picture the other day. I don't know if you can read the caption, but it's a boat that's got a hole in one side and it says, "I'm sure glad the hole isn't in our end." What Jesus does is he normalizes the fact that we're all in the same sinking ship. But it's in direct conflict with the way that God created the world to work. God did not create us to live individually or at odds with each other. God's version was for human flourishing through mutuality. That creation is designed to provide enough resources for everyone to flourish and for no one to go without. Human dignity is inherent and universal because we are all created in the image of God. This was God's vision. And the scriptures tell us that we traded it for a lie. So Jesus enters into the human drama with this revelation, not to condemn us but to save us. He says, "We can be united with God who created us and we can begin to experience the flourishing of the vision that he intended for us from the very beginning to be reunited with our true origin story to recover our lives with God." This is the story that makes common ground who we are. It doesn't matter how you came to know this story. It doesn't matter how well or poorly you live into this story. It doesn't even matter if you fully believe this story right now. We're trying to break down all of those barriers that humans have created to divide us from God and from one another and seek the one compelling center of the love of Jesus together. That's the love that holds us together here, not compelling preaching, not outstanding programming, not dynamic personalities. This is why God's action in our lives is essential for our common mission. I love the message paraphrase of verses 16 and 17. The result or why the compelling love of Jesus is so important, why the new creation that he's given us is so important is because Peterson says like this, because of this decision, we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. He says, "We looked at the Messiah that way once, we got it all wrong. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Christ's love holds us together because it gives us a new perspective on how to see the world. And this is how we know that the gospel is transforming us. It changes the way that we see each other. I'm no longer equating your value and your dignity and my love for you based on these arbitrary categories that the world lives by. And if this sort of vision transformation isn't happening, we just need to go back to point number one and remember that God saw us beyond what we were presenting to him, right? While we were still sinners, God saved us, God saw me. And He saved me and Paul believes that this should change the way that we see each other. We're not resources to be exploited. We are not problems to be solved. We are not impediments in the path to success. We are not irritants to be removed. We are beloved children of God. That's how God saw me while I was acting like a fool when I was up to my eyeballs in rebellion and sin. God looked beyond that and He saw me as He intended me to be. He saved me. Maybe God saw you at a different place. Maybe when you were desperate for healing and help. Maybe you weren't rebelling against anything. You just didn't believe you were worth anything. And Jesus saw you like a hidden treasure maybe. But no one understood the value of it. He lifted you out of the mud of self-doubt and he put a new song in your mouth. We all have a story of how we came to know the overwhelming love of God. And the Apostle Paul says, once we encounter that, that's gonna change the way in which we see and interact with each other. The question this morning is how has God's grace changed you in such a way to affect the way that you see other people? And we have to remember that this is not our own effort, right? We didn't know we needed help until Jesus showed up. We thought this was all that there was. Get what you can get while you can get it before it's all gone. But God acted on our behalf through Jesus to save the world. Paul calls this new creation. He says, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come and I love this. It's actually, I'm just confession right now. It's on my pickleball paddle. I got a Christian pickleball paddle, sanctified pickleball paddle. And I love that this verse is on this. It's one of my favorite verses. New creation has come. And it's a little tricky when we read it in our English translation because when we bring things in from another language, we have to try to make it make sense and flow a little bit in our language. And sometimes we can miss the points. Because when we read this text, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, it seems like there's been this exchange between us and God. We needed something, God had it. Jesus gave it to us. Now this is problematic in a couple of ways. The first is which that if we needed something that God had and now we have it, why do we need God? That's a troublesome. But secondly, it suggests that there may be this work that we need to do in order to get it, that there's some human effort involved. And Paul doesn't say this, actually, in the Greek. He says, "If anyone is in Christ, new creation, hard-stop, no verb, finished." Which means we have to ask what is new creation? If anyone is in Christ, new creation. What does Paul mean there? I think he means, when Jesus showed up and said, "The kingdom of God is at hand." It's a presently available reality that you can now live in. Paul says, "When you're in Christ, new creation, done." What do I have to do to get there? Nothing. What do I have to do to stay there? Nothing. Discipleship then becomes the way in which I learned to live in this new reality. Which, as Jesus shows us, was the reality that we were intended to live all along. Jesus demonstrates for us what it looks like to live as new creation kinds of people. So the kingdom of God that Jesus says is at hand. He shows us what it looks like. He lived in the broken world as an ambassador of this new creation. He infleshed what humanity looks like and acts like when it's living in the kingdom of God, the new creation. And the sermon on the Mount is kind of his detailed analysis of what he means when he says the kingdom of God is broken in to this broken world. That's the third point. Christ, love, and the new creation, full and finished. Which leads us to the fourth and final point that Paul shows us here. He says, "We are ambassadors of Christ's love and we are an embassy of the new creation." I like that ambassador and this kind of language that were representatives, that were located, right? And that the place that we inhabit has all of the rights and privileges and protections of the citizenship that we have, right? And so we are acting as if we live, in the place where our citizenship is, even while we're dislocated from that place. Does that make sense? So the church then, Jesus says, "Is the body of Christ?" So we are inhabiting in our lives together the ways, the practices, the customs and culture of the place where our citizenship lies. The church then becomes the public visible testimony of this good news. It's how Paul could say in Galatians that in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither June or Gentile, neither slave nor free nor is there male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham seed and heirs according to this promise. What Paul is essentially saying, if we put these two things together, is he saying that there was a time when you saw the way that the world sees, you had categories and you had exclusions of the ways in which you related to each other. You let education or resources or social status or skin color or ethnicity determine how you would relate to each other. And when Jesus showed up, he brought in a different kind of world, a different kind of kingdom where none of that matters anymore. All it matters is your relationship with Jesus, the commonality of the saving grace of God. And now we've been swept into that. So what Paul is saying is now you guys act like that's true in the way that you love each other. And do it in such a way publicly so that those who might be interested in defecting would know where to go. Those who want to get out of that old story, who want to get out of that old gride, who want to experience the new life of new creation, that they would know where to go because they see it working itself out in the way in which you love each other. New creation, ambassadors, embassy. We're an outpost, we could say, of the kingdom that God is going to bring. And Jesus said every time you get together and you act this stuff out together, I want you to have a meal because the meal is the unifying practice. It is the handling of the things that are true. Whenever you eat this bread and you drink this cup, you proclaim the power of my death until I come and make everything right. That's the work that we've been called to do. And let me just say, 25 years, it's hard work. Learning to love one another across our differences. Learning to forgive each other when we've been injured, celebrating with other people who are getting things that you really want. But I've been thinking for a while now. I'm like, as we launch into 25 years, what else would you want to give your life to? And I just think I'm convinced more today than I was before, even though it's difficult, even though it's challenging 25 years ago, we wanted to try to live into this vision, a place where people could come as they are, they could meet the transforming power of Jesus. They could learn to live together and love one another in the way of Jesus. And as I've been reflecting on this and dreaming about what could be in our future, I can't come up with anything that sounds better than that. And so we're going to keep going. Keep trying, keep struggling, keep celebrating. Continue to move and live motivated, compelled by the love of Jesus. Let me pray for us. God, we thank you for the gift of our story. We thank you for the gift of the story, which is Jesus went ahead of us. And he offered himself to open up the doorway, the pathway home to our true self. And so Father, we thank you that you planted some very simple, maybe even, maybe out of ignorance, we jumped out into this project. But we thank you for your provision and your faithfulness that by your Holy Spirit you have carried us. And I pray even right now as we think about what it looks like for us to be committed to this vision, I pray that you would give us the courage to continue to pursue the reconciliation of all things. We thank you that we can trust that new creation is coming. And I even pray for those who sit here this morning and who would love to taste a little bit of new creation in their life today. They would love to taste a little bit of your hope or the presence that you promise. I pray for those who are carrying heavy loads right now and who just need to experience a little joy. We thank you, Father, that there is a future hope, but we also thank you for your presence. So we long for new creation to come. And we thank you for giving us the opportunity to experience it some of them now. and pray these things together in Jesus' name.