October 7, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Fellowship

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 24
Acts 2:37–47

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship.”

Acts 2:42 (NRSV)

Communion is a key word within Christianity’s special terminology, one without which much that matters cannot be well understood. Its basic sense is to translate the Greek koinonia, meaning fellowship, association, partnership.

Adrian Hastings
in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought

I was fortunate to have a wise preaching mentor when I was starting out in this task of preparation for ministry back in Glasgow, and he often had good words of advice that were useful to a young, budding preacher. One that may seem obvious but that I remember very well was this: he said that it was very important that you do not alienate the congregation through your preaching. Don’t alienate the congregation. So I’ve had that in my mind this week as I’ve been preparing for preaching this morning. A mantra that has been going through my head is this: Don’t mention the Ryder Cup. Don’t mention the Ryder Cup, Calum. No matter how perfect an illustration for a sermon about mutuality and teamwork and fellowship, don’t mention the Ryder Cup. So I won’t mention the Ryder Cup. I promise.

These are busy times at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Just around six months ago the Pastor Nominating Committee was elected to undertake a process of searching for a new pastor for our congregation, a process that is anticipated to take anything up to eighteen months. I can tell you that the Pastor Nominating Committee, the PNC, have a list of around 200 candidates, some of whom have submitted their own names, some names that have come from church members, and some recommendations from the more than forty leaders in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the larger church whom the PNC has consulted. The committee is now working on thoroughly reviewing those candidates, a process that will be a lengthy one. Confidentiality requirements around that will also keep the committee from having anything really substantive to report going forward really until they have a candidate, a nominee, to present to the congregation and that will not be until sometime next year. This week the committee posted an update on the website outlining all of this, and there is also a checklist there of the process; there is a summary of the Pastoral Search Survey, which many of you have participated in, and other information from the PNC. There is information in your bulletin insert that will direct you to the page on the website (www.fourthchurch.org/pnc).

The PNC is working hard. Our Gratz Center Planning Committee is working hard to prepare for the November 18 dedication of the Gratz Center. We’ve seen all of the busy events and programs going on around the church these last couple of weeks, kicking off the church year. Tutoring is back in session this past week; we’ve had the fall kickoff of Sunday School and Youth activities. An excellent and well-attended adult education program resumed last week and as have fellowship opportunities across the board. All of this points to, I hope, an exciting and busy future for this congregation.

Now it is also stewardship season; we have kicked off our 2013 Annual Appeal. Many of you will have received a letter from me about that, and I would encourage you all to get involved in the life of the church using your time and your talents and also, importantly, your financial support. If we want to keep strong and keep the momentum going with some extra costs for operating with the Gratz Center, it’s important that we get everyone in the congregation involved in pledging and giving.

All of these busy activities and events and programs can be described using a New Testament word that describes the activities and the life of the community of faith, which is the church. It’s there in Acts 2 in the passage that we read earlier on. The Greek word is koinonia. Now you can find that word in the quotation on the front of your bulletin. Koinonia. It can be translated in a number of different ways as mutuality, community, communion, or, as it is in our Acts passage, translated as fellowship. A New Testament scholar Matt Skinner writes this about the second chapter of Acts: “Acts 2 describes a community of faith that operates in the power of God’s spirit. The virtues of justice, worship, and mutuality (koinonia) are not accomplishments of extraordinary folk; they are signs of the Spirit within a community of people who understand themselves as united in purpose and identity—not as a dispersed collection of individual churchgoers.”

How much do I pray for that to be a reality for our community of faith—that we would be a community of people united in purpose and identity and not a dispersed collection of individual churchgoers.

And when we think of that word fellowship, I wonder what it sparks in your mind. In some sense it is an awfully churchy word, an insider’s word. It may even have some weak connotations. We might think of fellowship as coffee and donut holes—and there’s nothing wrong with coffee and donut holes—and polite chatter on Sunday after church, and yet fellowship as koinonia is a very strong concept, a very strong word. It is the very lifeblood of what it means to be community, to be a community of faith as we are.

As Adam Fronczek mentioned in the announcements, we mark and recognize World Communion Sunday this Sunday. That is why Joyce and Adam have on their colorful stoles, which come from Guatemala. And I’ve got my white one, but this actually has the Church of Scotland emblem on it, so it reminds us of our connection with our brothers and sisters in the Church of Scotland. We recognize this morning, as the hymn puts it, “One great fellowship of love across the whole wide earth.”

Now if this concept of a worldwide fellowship seems abstract to you, I have some ways this morning that we can help make it perhaps more concrete for you. Again, as Adam mentioned, in Coffee Hour today there are tables from the Global Mission Committee giving information about opportunities for traveling together to parts of the world and doing mission trips in which we learn about the situations that people are dealing with in these different parts of the world. There are a number of very interesting opportunities to do global mission. I would say that it has been one of the central formative experiences of my ministry—leading groups to places to do mission, places such as Honduras, Guatemala, Ghana, Prague, Northern Ireland. And whenever I undertake a trip to another part of the country, to another part of the world to another community, I always reflect on these words of a woman called Lilla Watson, who is an Australian aboriginal woman. She said once, “If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
One of the important aspects of our concept of world mission is that we do not go to save as great messiahs, but rather we go because our experience of Christ, our liberation, our salvation, is bound up with people who are among the world’s poor. I know it’s hard for many people to commit to a time away and doing global mission trips, but even if you are unable to go on a trip, you are still in relationship, you’re still in fellowship with people throughout the world who serve the church on the ground as mission coworkers.

You see a few years ago, in addition to the regular money we send to the denomination in Louisville, the headquarters for Presbyterian World Mission, we sent an extra pledge of a gift of $1 million to support the mission coworkers who are serving in the field. That pledge will be paid off over the next number of years. So you and the money you give to support the church are helping to support these mission coworkers. People like my great friend Josh Heikkila. Josh was a member of this congregation for many years and then studied for ministry, served as a pastor in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is now in Ghana as the West Africa Regional Coordinator for the work of the church in partnership with the Presbyterian churches in Ghana. It was one of those churches, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of the village of Akpafu Odomi, which gave us the very colorful communion cloth that’s on the table. Do come up and have a look at it. It celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of that church in 2010. That is the church that a group of us from this congregation went to in 2003 to help them rebuild their church building, which had been destroyed in a flood. That relationship continues between the Presbyterians of Akpafu Odomi and Fourth Presbyterian Church, and it’s my hope to go back out and to visit that village and to renew some of the friendships that we had developed.

The money that you gave is going to help support people like Jeff and Christy Boyd, who are in Cameroon and who are doing lots of advocacy around poverty and food justice. Jeff and Christy will be visiting here, as will Josh who is back in the States for two months, and you’ll have an opportunity to come and hear them speak about the important work that this congregation is supporting.

Or Joella Holman, who works in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and around the Caribbean developing relationships. And that’s a very important relationship for us because of our ongoing relationship with the First Presbyterian Church of Havana in Cuba.

And so as I reflect on coming to the table this World Communion Sunday, friends, I do not come to the table alone. I come to the table this morning with Sam Nyame from Ghana. It was his congregation who gave us this cloth. I come with Sam, who strives for good health and education for the people of his village, of which he is a village elder.

And I come to the table this morning not alone because I come with Evangelina, who is living now in her Habitat for Humanity-built home in Siguatepeque, Honduras, a home that was built in partnership with a group that went from this congregation. I think of Evangelina hosting her women’s Bible study on the porch she had built especially for that purpose.

As I come to the table this morning I do not come alone. I come to the table with Bill, working hard for peace and reconciliation among Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

And I come with Martin, committing his ministry to fighting poverty in my own home country of Scotland.

And I come to the table with Josh and Joella and Jeff and Christy and all our mission coworkers and, through them, with the people that they serve throughout the world.

And, of course, I come to the table not alone this morning but together with you, dear brothers and sisters in Christ at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, a people united in purpose and identity, committed to fellowship.

And so as we come to the table together, reflect on these words by poet and hymn writer Brian Wren:

At this table all share the cup of pain and celebration
and no one is denied.
These gifts shall be for us the body and blood of Christ,
our witness against hunger,
our cry against injustice,
and our hope for a world where God is fully known
and every child is fed.

This is koinonia. Fellowship, communion, let us live it, let us eat. Thanks be to God. Amen.