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The computer age can be pretty awesome.    The Internet, for example, is absolutely incredible for how easy it now is to find information.   Once upon a time, you had to leave your home, go to the library and deal with things like card catalogues and microfiche in order to find certain kinds of information.   Other times you may have had to go to the city hall to look things up.  Even with that, it took a good amount of skill and even luck when it came to finding what you were looking for.    Now all you have to do is type in some key words into a long narrow box on an Internet page with a name like “Google” or “Yahoo” or “MSN”, and the computer will come up with sometimes hundreds of places you can access with the click of a button  to get the information you are looking for.  Who could have imagined a generation ago that this would be possible today?  It is nothing short of amazing!

   The computer age can be scary, too.   It is not just easy for you to find information about a great variety of subjects.   It is also very easy for people to find information about you.     In fact, it is now possible for someone to actually steal your identity to apply for a credit card in your name or to access your bank account or take over the title to your home, or to do great harm to your reputation.   

In fact, the downside of the Internet age is so creepy that many people are becoming extremely worried about losing control of their personal information.    They are so cautious about what they let others know about themselves that they are isolating themselves and becoming ever more private.    

This raises an interesting question: what is the right balance for a Christian when it comes to what you choose to share with others and what you want to keep private and personal?

This morning our Bible lessons give us an answer to that question.  Together, those readings give us insight into what is God pleasing when it comes to Christian community.   Jesus said His prayer for His disciples in our Gospel lesson this morning, “I pray also for those who will believe in Me through their message that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You.”    God has give us a very special identity in Christ.   He has brought us into that place where we can freely share out identity as believers with others!

 

That is where we need to start this morning.  God has worked something marvellous in you.  By God’s Word that was shared by the Apostles, by the Word that is available to you and to me through the Bible that came to us through these saints, you were saved.   You were brought into God’s family, and this is no run of the mill kind of family.   Some families are just really a group of strangers who barely talk to one another and have lives that go into so many different directions that they barely know each other. This family of God, in contrast, is very tight knit.   It is so closely bound in love and forgiveness and grace that talking to one person is like talking to the whole family.   It’s like that kind of family where the friends of one child are automatically accepted as a friend by all the rest of the children.   It is a family that is connected to Jesus Christ Himself, and through Jesus each person is connected to one another.   You are so connected that you can speak God’s Word to each other and it will be as if Jesus Himself has spoken.   You are so connected that you can forgive another person and that forgiveness is just as real as if Jesus Himself had spoken those words.   The blood of Jesus that was shed for you, does not just wash you so clean that God the Father rejoices in you, but it also unites you with everyone else who has been washed by the blood of the Lamb.

This is a very, very basic Biblical point, one that we are in danger of forgetting today: your faith is not about you alone!  You did not receive it by anything that you did, but instead it was given as a gift that many other people have also received.   You did not receive it for your own purposes and your own pleasure and your own blessing and your own joy alone.   You received it as part of a package, so to speak.   It is a part of a package with information that is very personal to you, but with information that is also very public and very much intended to be shared.   In Jesus’ prayer in our Gospel lesson Jesus said, “May they also be in Us so that the world may believe that You have sent Me.”   By this, He was saying that it is our Lord very real purpose to make us into examples and models and anything else it takes for the people of this world to say, “Hey, those people are on to something!”

Just what does Jesus mean about the “world” in this passage?  In the Greek, the word that we translate as “world” is “??????”.   With Greek, as with English, one word can mean many things.  “Kosmos”  can mean the entire universe, which is what we have borrowed that word to mean in English.    It can also simply mean “the entire sum of mankind”, which is the meaning that it has in our lesson today.   The Bible will sometimes talk about the “world” as being the people who do not yet believe in Jesus or who will never believe in Him, like the “world outside” compared to our own home.  In this context, though, Jesus is speaking about people in general, both believers and unbelievers. 

The first thing is that the faith that God gave you has been given in such a way that you have a responsibility to other believers to encourage them in their own faith in Jesus Christ.  

St. Paul put this concept into some very clear words in Romans 14:7-8, “For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone.  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.”   You might think this means that we are never alone because God is always with us.  Well, that is right, but the context of this passage goes beyond God’s promise to never leave you or forsake you in your personal relationship with Him.   The context of this happens to do with how you use your Christian freedom to celebrate certain days as being more special than others, or how you use your freedom to eat a bacon double cheese burger.     It happens to do with how you handle your responsibility toward other  Christians when you make the decisions to do what you do.

Paul’s point is that, whatever you do as a child of God, there will be another Christian watching you.  Some of those people will be stronger than you are in their faith.   They may be watching you in order to help you and to encourage you as they themselves live out their responsibility to encourage you.   These strong Christians will be watching you as they count on you to live a godly life right there beside them. 

There will be other Christians, though, who are not so noble or not so strong in their own faith. They will struggle in their personal relationship with God if they see you doing things that they have heard “good people” don’t do.   A Seventh Day Adventist, for example, may struggle when they see you eating a bacon double cheeseburger, because such a person is stuck in the wrong idea that real Christians don’t eat bacon.    Many a Pentecostal would get very disturbed at the idea that Christians are allowed to drink wine, especially for Communion.    Some of these people may try to keep you from enjoying your God-given and God-blessed freedom to do these things, but others may seriously suffer in their relationship with God if you went to them for a visit and brought your own wine and bacon!

Paul made the point that, as a Christian, you are not just you anymore.   If you are comfortable with the idea or not, Christians who consider you to be a fellow Christian  will rightly expect more from you than they would of people who do not go to church.   They will be much more disappointed with your moral failures and much more hurt by your hypocrisy than if they did not consider you to be a brother or sister in Christ.  They treat you differently and challenge you more often than they otherwise might because you don’t just represent yourself.   You represent your congregation.   You represent your denomination.   Most of all, you represent Jesus!    You represent the Lord in whom you and your fellow Christians are made one, just as they, in turn, represent Jesus to you.   

In Matthew 5:16 Jesus says these very well known words: “In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”    Who you are, then, as a child of God does not belong to you as your sole property or your sole personal right.   It is not something that you can personalize to the point where nobody else has any stake in what you believe and in whom God has made you to be.   If you, as a Christian, have chosen to make some decision that you know is not pleasing to God, you can’t say that your personal life is not the business of the person in the pew beside you.   Your wilful sin is their business.   Your open disregard for God’s Will is their business.   Your unrepentant attitude is their business.    It is their business because what you do to hurt your faith can hurt theirs, too.   Your own sins, at any time, can be an excuse for another Christian to walk into that same sin, as in “If he or she can do it, why can’t I?” 

You share your identity when you believe in the same Lord and the same Saviour for the same salvation as the next person believes.   You share your identity when you behold the glory of Jesus which the Father Himself has given to Jesus.    You share your identity when you know, along with other believers, that God the Father has sent Jesus to make God’s mercy and His grace freely available to you.   You share that identity each time you witness a baptism and each time you confess your faith.   You share that identity each time you stand beside another believer at the Communion table and receive the Body and the Blood of the Lord in, with, and under the bread and the wine.   All that is simply part of being part of the family of God.

You are part of God’s family, but you are a person who also lives in a world where many people do not belong to God by grace through faith.    Even on this level, what you do is far more public than you may want to think.   Peter said in 1 Peter 2:12, “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us.”    These pagans might first notice the Christians in a negative way, but in the end, they will see the light of Christ shining upon them.   Even more so, many will even notice the source of that light, Christ Himself, and glorify God on account of Him!  

There are things about you that are private.  There are things about you that are quite public.  The real challenge for a Christian, then, is to know what should be kept private and personal, and what should be openly shared.   If you keep your faith in Christ too private, for example, then you are interfering with God’s plan to use you as a witness to Christ.   If you are too public, though, you can put yourself at unnecessary risk.  How can that balance be found?

When it comes to the congregation, you are in a setting where you should be able to trust your brothers and sisters in Christ to a pretty fair degree.   It is perfectly right  to expect the people who share this particular family to sincerely ask how you are doing.   It is perfectly appropriate for them to know your personal information and to use that personal information as a way of sharing God’s grace with you.   How can we pray for you if you won’t let us know that you need those prayers in a very specific way?  How can we visit you and listen to your sorrows and help carry your burden if you insist on being so private that your door is not open to anyone?  

As a pastor, I often minister to people who are going through some very difficult and scary times.  Once I was ministering to a woman who learned that she had a very painful and very fast moving form of cancer.   She said to me, “Pastor, promise that you won’t tell anyone in church about this.  You can pray for me in church, but only in a general way and certainly not by name.”   I did that, just as she asked.  Only a couple of months later she was in her deathbed.   She was still very sharp and very much aware of what was going on around her.   That day she complained to me, “Pastor, I have been part of our congregation for many years and I have always been there to help other people.  Now I am dying and nobody in our congregation cares.   Not once has anyone come to see me and ask how I am doing or show me that they care about me.”   My answer to her was that she had made me promise not to tell anyone in church that she was sick, and I kept that promise.   If they had known she was sick, I’m sure she would have had a great deal of support.   Her reply?  “Pastor, when I made you promise not to tell anyone, I was hoping you wouldn’t keep your promise!”

Paul tells all those who believe in Jesus, “Serve one another in love.”  (Galatians 5:15)   Part of serving one another is making yourself available to be served!   It means allowing people to help you in the name of Christ.   It means telling people what you need when they ask you, and making it clear that you could use some help even if they don’t ask you.   It means graciously and humbly accepting the help that people offer you in the name of Christ.   It means allowing other people to share your joys and your sorrows with you!  It means taking the risk that the people who learn personal things about you as a member of the congregation will use that information in ways that will please God.  It means taking a leap of faith by trusting the people who are Christians in that congregational family into which God has brought you!

Too many times members of a congregation are so worried about invading someone’s privacy that that they miss out in sharing some of the most meaningful experiences of walking together with their Christian brothers and sisters.   

The examples from the Bible show us time and again that God’s people shared their happy times and their challenging times, coming together in prayer and for mutual encouragement.   Baptisms were something to share as a great celebration in which the whole congregation welcomed the new Christian personally.   Funerals were a time that belonged to the entire congregation, and not just to the family that was most directly affected.  The wedding of a Christian couple was a celebration for the entire congregation, and often took place right in the Sunday morning worship service.   They did this because they understood that the entire family of God has a stake in what happens in the life of each one of us.  They did this so that together they could be blessed as they “received these things with thanksgiving and consecrated them to God by the Word of God and prayer.”  (1 Timothy 4:5)

To this day, many Christians choose to mark these events with a worship service, but few seem to know anymore that every worship service in a church belongs to the entire congregation.   Few seem to realize that the worship life of a congregation was never intended to be privatized to the point where an entire worship service is just for one couple being married or one person being baptized or a few young people being confirmed, or one family in mourning.   A church funeral is not a private, invitation only family event.  Neither is a wedding, a confirmation, or a baptism.   These things all belong to the entire family of God.   

It is a sad thing when people avoid such worship services in order to allow people their privacy because when you do that, you lose the chance to celebrate that God has made us one in Christ Jesus.  You lose a little bit of the understanding of who you really are as a forgiven sinner and cherished member of God’s family.

It is the same when it comes to the people whose remains are now resting as their bodies wait to be reunited with their souls in heaven.   The death of a mother or father, husband or wife, brother or sister, parent or child or grandparent is a reality that does not belong to the immediate family alone.  The grave of each believer in our cemetery is the grave of one of your very real brothers or sisters in Christ.  The reality of their death means a change in your own congregational family.  The grieving of their birth family or their blood relations or their spouse is your grief to share.    The death of each one of them really is an influence on you to move you to contemplate your own death and to prepare you for the future death of someone whom you dearly love.   Just as each of us does not live to ourselves alone, so none of us dies to ourselves alone.  

The death of a Christian is a sharing of hope, too.  It is a witness and an encouragement to all who believe.   Some Christians give a wonderful witness by the way that they die that they do not fear death because Jesus has taken the sting out of death.   Some Christians give a testimony to the fact, that even if they don’t feel so brave themselves, they trust that the courage and the strength of God’s own grace is more than enough for them.  Always, the death of our brothers and sisters in Christ is a reminder to us not to focus on what has been lost, but on what has been gained.   

In our second lesson this morning we have a reminder of what has been gained.    Our loved ones who have died in the Lord have gained an abounded joy as they look upon Jesus without any doubts or fears to get in their way.   Our loved ones with Jesus are far removed from the curse of sin.   They see the light of God plainly and clearly.   The Word of God moves them and guides them as they know it perfectly.  Even more so, they are experiencing exactly what it means to have an identity that is shared with Jesus.  They are united with one another and with Jesus in such a way that they even rule with Him for all eternity.

Of course you have very real concerns when it comes to protecting your identity in this day and age of identity theft.    Certainly, there are reasonable things to do to protect yourself when you consider the dangers that are beyond your doors.   It makes no sense to take risks with strangers and threaten the safety of yourself and your family.   

At the same time, it is even more important than ever to make sure that trustworthy and loving people know you.   It is more important than ever to reach out to your congregational family as the true family that it is instead of retreating behind locked doors.   You have very much to offer people in the name of Jesus Christ and they have very much to offer you.   You have been given great opportunities to help others and let them help you.  You have been given opportunities to live in such a way that the unity of God’s family is plain and that others may see your witness of faith in Jesus Christ.  

May God bless you to live your life in such a way that others may rejoice and be grateful for what Jesus has done for you and for them.  May He move you to this for Jesus’ sake.  Amen.