The Conversation

Preached on Thursday, May 18, 2006 at Low Mass.
(Easter 5, Thursday: Acts 15:7-21, Psalm 96:1-10, John 15:9-11)

Have you ever had one of those conversations where you were talking to someone about something and then suddenly you find you are talking about something else, and they you move off onto another tangent, and before you know it, the conversation is about something entirely different and you can’t remember what you were first talking about? Sometimes, that makes for stimulating conversation, but usually it makes for nothing more than interesting small talk and pointless babble.

Life in the church can be like that as well. Throughout Eastertide we read the Acts of the Apostles, and its amazing to see in Acts how often the work of spreading the gospel gets sidetracked by discussions about other issues. Throughout the early church there were many different issues that often changed the conversation from being about Jesus to being about something else. Some of the earliest disciples seem to have been more interested in bickering about whether or not Jewish customs ought to be observed by Gentiles than in talking to others about Jesus. The second century church was often more concerned with casting out members who had publicly rejected Jesus in the face of persecution than in unconditionally forgiving them. The third century church was often more interested in rebaptizing people who had been baptized by bad clergy than they were in baptizing new members. Its not that the issues themselves weren’t important, the problem is there has been a tendency by many Christians to forget that the conversation is about Jesus and not about the issue.

In our own church there are many things that can distract us from the fact that it is by the grace of God that we are saved and given eternal life. We can’t earn it, we can only believe and accept this grace and abide in this free gift of love from God. No matter what part of the current conversation of the church we might be interested in, it is always of utmost importance to remember that God loves us all unconditionally. When we abide in that love we realize that many of the things that we care so much about, that we think are the conversation, turn out to be things that are nothing more than distractions which keep us from accepting the grace of God in our own lives and seeing it in the lives of those we are talking to.