Fifty years certainly is something to celebrate, and we are all rightly happy and proud today that our church has survived and thrived for so long. But we do so in the context of a much longer and prouder history. We mark our golden anniversary in the light of a long and glorious past that still is only a beginning in the eyes of the Lord. Well over three thousand years ago, the Lord came to Abraham and promised him that he would become a great nation. Through the successive lives of Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, the promise remained healthy and alive but when the Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt, God’s promise seemed lost and dead. After four hundred years, God rescued his promised people, calling Moses to lead the people out of oppression and bondage and into the future that he had promised to Abraham. Moses spent nearly a whole lifetime leading the people out from Egypt and into the wilderness. For a generation the people wandered in the wilderness of the desert, but when they were on the verge of moving into their promised homeland, Moses died. Eventually the people inhabited their new territory and they became a great nation, only to find themselves and their posterity threatened again several hundred years later at the hand of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Once again, the nation was taken into slavery, and once again, they were released, this time at the hand of a benevolent foreign king. God’s promise to Abraham took many twists and turns over the course of an entire millennium, but somehow, the nation always survived, and the promise survived with it.

Around a thousand years after Moses there came a new prophet into Israel’s life. He came during a time when Israel was not so much a nation as it was a conquered people, a mere shadow of its former self. Israel’s hope had not gone away however, hope that God’s promise to Abraham would someday be realized. Well over a thousand years had come and gone since the Lord had first spoken to Abraham, but the people still held on to their dream. And this new prophet seemed to have the same dream himself. One day, in a normal synagogue in a small town, he read words that were at that time about seven hundred years old, words about release, recovery, freedom, and good news. And he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The story of the Christian faith is the story of promises made and promises kept. God promised to bless Abraham and his offspring. Abraham never saw the fulfillment of that promise. Isaac and Jacob and Joseph held on to the promise, but they too never saw its fulfillment. Moses risked his life for the promise, but before he could take the people into their new land, he died and did not see the promise fulfilled. The nation was born, and thrived, and then died, only to be reborn again. But still Israel waited for the fulfillment of the blessing of the Kingdom of God in their midst. When Jesus came, he proclaimed that the promise was finally realized, the promise made was finally the promise kept.

One of the great discussions of Christian theology is about whether and how Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s plan for the world. Clearly, Jesus completed God’s plan in an unexpected way. But through Jesus, God kept his promise, to bring ultimate and eternal blessing to his people. And yet, though Jesus lived two thousand years ago, that promise still is being born among us. God’s plan to bless his people still is working itself out in human history, and it is a history that is much longer than any of our individual lives. When you and I look at fifty years of history, we see only a tiny portion in one small place of a much larger story, the story of God’s plan and God’s process of blessing the world.

As we celebrate and mark our congregation’s small part in God’s grand design, we do so with great humility and great appreciation for the faithfulness of those whose courage and vision helped bring this church into existence. Only a handful are left with us today. But their legacy lives on. And, perhaps most importantly, their legacy is one of looking forward. While we must celebrate the past we must never lose sight of the importance of the future. We mark fifty years, but it is just the first fifty! We look forward to fifty more years, and then even more beyond that. This golden anniversary year has found us in a forward-thinking mode, as we dream new dreams and plan new developments in our ministry, so that we can continue to serve God in greater and greater ways.

I am sure that there are many profound and wonderful things that can be said on a special occasion such as this. But I am compelled to ask us to consider just what our community and our lives would be without the Village Church. Half a century ago this church had just come into being, but what would our life be like had the Village Church never existed? How would people know of the love of God and the abundant life in Christ without the ministry of this congregation? Thankfully, we do not need to contemplate that possibility for long, because the Village Church does exist and it is healthy and growing and strong. The promise of a new congregation so long ago is a promise that has been kept, through the faithfulness and work and prayer of successive generations of church members. You and I did not see the birth of the Christian faith, just as most of us did not see the birth of this church. And this church will outlive us all, God willing. We will see only a part of its history, but that is the way it has always been with our faith: God alone is the one who sees all things from beginning to end. What you and I see is this: God makes his promise to us, and he keeps it, and that is enough for us to know. Our job is to keep following Jesus, to keep trusting the promise, to keep living each day in the hope and confidence that God will continue to bless us and to bless our community through the life of this church. May the Spirit of the Lord be upon us. May we bring good news to the poor. May we proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. May we help the oppressed go free and may we proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, this year, and for many, many more years to come.

Amen.