Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4: 14-21

Epiphany 3

January 21, 2007

NUCC

            Today is an important day for our church community.  In about a half hour we will be gathering downstairs for our Annual Meeting.  We will hear reports, elect officers, and approve a budget, and hopefully in the process we’ll be able to maintain our unity as a church.  In less than a half hour we will be offering prayers for the other churches in our Neillsville Ministerial Alliance as we observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and we will recognize that although we are different churches with some different ways of being the church we recognize one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

            In each case we could as the question:  Do I need you? 

• Do I need to be with other people in a church?  Couldn’t I just as well find my own spiritual path ---- all by myself.  Just me and God?
• Do we need to cooperate with other churches ---- either in our denomination, the United Church of Christ, or in a gathering of different kinds of churches like the Neillsville Ministerial Alliance?  Shouldn’t we just take care of ourselves?

Do I need you?  Do you need me?  (Or what’s more crucial --- do you need Audrey?)  After all you could save a lot of money by not having us around.  Just let the chairs of all the committees handle things.

            Do we need one another?

Paul, the great church starter of almost 2,000 years ago thought he needed other people.  He couldn’t start all of those churches all by himself.  He couldn’t keep them running all by himself.  He knew that the church was “many kinds of people with many kinds of faces, all ages and all colors too in all kinds of places.”  He knew each member is special and valued.  He went on to compare the church to the body:

“Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.”

            In our day another great man of the church has come to similar conclusion.  Last week I told you I was enjoying reading a book my daughter Annie gave me for Christmas:  God Has a Dream:  A Vision of Hope for Our Time.  By Desmond Tutu retired Archbishop of Cape Town in South Africa.  The other night I had to make a decision about what I was going to read.  There was a copy of Newsweek with a long article on the mess on the mess in Iraq or this book about “Hope for Our Time.”  I chose “Hope for Our Time.”

            Desmond Tutu introduced an African word to us:  “Ubuntu”.  Actually I had heard the word before because we used it as one of our “words for the day” at Moon Beach family camp.

            Ubuntu.  It is word in the Nguni language of South Africa.  Like many words it is difficult to translate into English.  It means:  “A person is a person through other persons.”

            Tutu writes this about Ubuntu:   “It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours.  I am human because I belong.  It speaks about wholeness; it speaks about compassion.  A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share.  Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong to a greater whole…You are bound up with others in the bundle of life.”

            “Bound up with others in the bundle of life.”  I like that phrase.  I believe that is what Paul was talking about when he compared the church to a body with its many parts, each part needing the other and each part being important in its own right.  I believe that is what Jesus was talking about when he got up in his home synagogue at Nazareth and used those words printed on the front of your bulletin:  words about the poor and the captive.

            “Bound up with others in the bundle of life.”   When Karen and I were in South Africa a couple years ago we saw the rainbow all over the place.  South Africa has become known as the “Rainbow Nation.”  South Africa has become for the world a sign of hope that peace is possible.  At one time many of us thought South Africa would have an even worse outcome than Iraq.  People would be fighting against one another.  There would be massive blood shed.  But that has not happened.  Yes, there is crime.  AIDS is a horrible curse in South Africa.  But people are working together.  The white South Africans I met are glad to work with the black South Africans and realize their future is tied together.  They are the “rainbow nation.”

            Desmond Tutu broadens that concept.  He writes:

“At home in South Africa I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have different races together, “Raise your hands!”  Then I’ve said,  “Move your hands,” and , “Look at your hands ---- different colors represent different people.  You are the rainbow people of God,”  The rainbow in the Bible is the sign of peace.  The rainbow is the sign of prosperity.  In our world we want peace, prosperity, and justice, and we can have it when all the people of God, the rainbow people of God, work together.”

            Today we are gathered in this church.   Most of us look pretty much alike.  But we are different kinds of people even if we do look pretty much alike.  We have different abilities, different opinions, different backgrounds, different dreams.  But we all have one God and one savior.  We are gathered in this United Church of Christ.  We have ubuntu.  We are bound up together in God’s great bundle of life.

Thanks be to God.

Ubuntu (Thursday) –South Africa - Community

                   Peace in community

                   Reconciliation

                   Culture of peacemaking rather than war-making.

                   Bishop Tutu introduced this word to the larger world:

                   Five Stages of Peacemaking Process

1.     Acknowledge guilt.

2.     Show remorse.

3.     Ask for forgiveness.

4.     Grant forgiveness.

5.     Pay compensation. 

                   “Community Means We are One”

Nairobi (ENI). Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has warned it is not possible to win the war on terror as long as conditions that drive people to desperation continue to persist. "There is no way anybody is going to win the war on terror as long as there are conditions in so many parts of the world that drive people to acts of desperation because of poverty, disease and ignorance," said Tutu. [333 words, ENI-07-0049]