Today is the seventh Sunday of a special season here at the Village Church that began on the fiftieth anniversary of the first worship service held in this community by the people who would become the first members of this congregation. As we begin what we hope will be another fifty years and more of faithful service and witness as a part of the Body of Christ, we have launched a significant new effort to expand our church home and thus support the current and future expansion of our church life. This is a season of pivotal importance for us, and so we have gone back into the ancient documents and stories of who we are and what we are about, to connect again with the foundational truths that must always be uppermost in our minds and deeply imbedded in everything we do, so that we never lose sight of our true purpose as a church.

We began this season together by going back to the ancient story of God’s visit to Abraham. God revealed his master plan to Abraham, a plan to bless him and then through him to bless the world. God’s plan of blessing us is a plan that builds us into the kind of people he wants us to be, people whose minds and hearts are transformed into the image of God in human form, the image of Jesus. God’s plan to build people is a plan that is centered in a place, the house of God, which takes physical expression in the buildings of a local church, and which takes spiritual expression in the structure of people who together comprise the church. God supplies the provisions for building his house, as he supplies the physical resources necessary to erect structures and as he supplies the spiritual resources necessary to create mature Christians. This process of building a single person into a Christian or building a family of persons into a church begins with a step of faith and a step of faithfulness, the kind of courageous leap that Esther took when she agreed to risk her life in order to save the Jewish people from destruction. The process is not a one-shot thing, however: it requires persistence and patience to allow God’s plan to unfold, the kind that Noah exercised when he built his great ark. When all is said and done, because of God’s faithfulness to us and God’s commitment to his plan, it all comes together in a grand expression of praise: praise for what God has done in the past, praise for what God is doing now, and praise for what God will do in the future. Today is a day of celebration and praise for the provisions God has supplied through your commitments of giving that will enable the expansion of the ministries and life of this church. Today we give praise for God’s plan to build people through the ministries based in this place. Today we give praise for the provisions and the process and the persistence God has given us. Today we give praise for God’s vision that is taking shape in us, a vision to build us as he has always built his people, into a living witness to his grace and truth and love that welcomes us into an abundant life here and an eternal life with him forever, through his Son, Jesus Christ.

It is appropriate, I think, that we take a moment in this joyful time to remember two instances from our spiritual history that embody God’s design for the kingdom he is building through his people here on earth. The first is the story of when the exiled Jews are allowed to return to their homeland, beginning in 538 B.C. When Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians, he sent the Israelites home, and then they began to rebuild their nation. The brief scripture we read a moment ago tells of the laying of the foundation of the temple upon the old foundation of the temple Solomon had built but that had been destroyed by invading armies many decades earlier. The rebuilding of the temple was an important visible manifestation of the rebuilding of the spiritual life of the Hebrew people. They sang the ancient songs of King David, songs that affirmed God’s steadfast love and God’s unshakeable commitment to continue his plan that he had announced to Abraham, to bless him and to bless the world. Just as the returning Jews rebuilt their house of worship, and just as they reaffirmed their commitment to be God’s people, and just as they celebrated and praised God for keeping his covenant with them, so do we, the people of the Village Church, continue to build upon this house of worship, and reaffirm our commitment to be God’s people and celebrate God for his faithfulness to us these last fifty years.

The second illustration from our history comes from a time over five hundred years later, in the great vision the Lord gave to John during his exile on the Greek island of Patmos. In a wonderful book written to encourage the beleaguered and persecuted little bands of Christians now popping up throughout the Roman Empire, John outlines the picture of the establishment of a New Jerusalem, at the consummation of all history. In that vision, a voice comes from God’s throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” From the time when God first came to live among his people in the symbolic presence of the tabernacle that Moses built as the Jews wandered in the desert after their escape from Egypt, to the time of the building and then rebuilding of the permanent temple under Solomon and then after the Babylonian exile, to the time of the early church as people gathered in synagogues and then in homes and then finally in buildings of their own, God’s people have found their spiritual lives enabled and enriched by houses of worship. And it all has to do with our understanding of God’s plan to be with us.

As we celebrate the coming expansion of the house of worship that serves our congregation, we must never forget our true purpose, however, which is not to build buildings, but to build a church. A house of worship serves the higher purpose which is worship itself. This is not just worship in the technical and formal and limited sense of what we do here on Sundays, but worship in the larger sense, worship that encompasses everything we do in our lives of discipleship to Jesus Christ. To worship God is to allow God’s vision for us to take shape in all that we say and do and are. To worship God is to become the kind of people and the kind of community—the kind of village, if you will—that God envisioned for us from the beginning. I can think of no better summary of this higher and truer purpose than that expressed in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church as the “Great Ends of the Church.” These are the purposes of the church: of you and me as individual followers of Jesus and as Jesus’ continuing body on earth. “The great ends of the church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”ⁱ

As we gather around the table that the Lord Jesus has set for us, let us give praise with gratitude for what God has done for us in the past fifty years of our life as the Village Church and for the past centuries, stretching all the way back to the time of Jesus, the time of Ezra, the time of Moses and of Abraham. Let us give praise with humility and the conviction never to allow our church home to become a monument to us or a museum to what once was. Let us give praise with faithfulness to God’s purposes for us and for his church and for his world as expressed in the Great Ends of the Church. Let us give praise with hope, that until God’s Kingdom finally comes in all its glory and power, the Village Church will remain a strong and true witness, both here in our community, and around the world. We have been blessed in order to be a blessing. This is God’s vision for his church, here in this place, and to the ends of the earth, to the end of time.

Amen.

ⁱ Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church, G-1.0200

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