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What are the signs of the true Church of Jesus Christ, that which we call the Beloved Community. Let me suggest three:

First, in the Beloved Community people are being fed. They are being fed not just anything. They are being fed what truly nourishes. God speaks through the Prophet Isaiah:

"Hey there! All who are thirsty, come to the water! Are you penniless? Come anyway – buy and eat! …Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy? Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best, fill yourself with only the finest. Pay attention, come close now, listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words. ("The Message", a version of the Bible by Eugene H. Peterson.)

Jesus said, "If anyone thirsts, let them come to me and drink." Being fed here means, of course, not just in body but in spirit. Look at the world around us. We North Americans sate ourselves with junk food, sleazy entertainment, and overwork. So our souls go undernourished. We wear masks and put on false fronts to the world, and then wonder why we are so lonely. The minute we have intense feelings of any kind – love, anger, passion, pain – the curtain comes down and we douse ourselves with alcohol or pills. The number one cause of preventable death in America will soon no longer be tobacco, but obesity. We are filled with questions about the meaning of life, but the answers we settle for are killing us.

So what does the Beloved Community offer? We need to nourish people with meaning, with wisdom, with compassion and caring, with intellectual stimulation, with help for real life problems. And to do this we must listen patiently. We must not act like we have all the answers because we don’t. But we have to offer a sound diet of spirituality and caring community.

The second sign of the Beloved Community is people are being transformed. I was chatting with a spiritually gifted person recently and the name of someone in the church came up and this person said, "I think he is about to break." I wasn’t sure what he meant, for this person didn’t seem to me on the brink of a nervous breakdown. "Break?" I said. "Yes," he said, "A spiritual breakthrough." That’s right, I thought. The Beloved Community is about people having spiritual breakthroughs. We should expect this, encourage this, and celebrate when it happens. Big breakthroughs. Little breakthroughs. Sometimes painful. Sometimes joyous. St. Paul said, "Be transformed through the renewal of your mind." A spiritual breakthrough is not us breaking out, but God breaking in. God’s love transforming us. The world doesn’t really understand this. The message of the world is "hold it all together." The world is very happy for you to be a zombie. The message of the Gospel is let it all come apart. Open up, don’t close down. The purpose of faith is not to equip you to get out there and make more money, have more influence, achieve success, etc. The purpose of the Gospel is to help you to give up your life, to let go of the need to control, to let go of attachments, not to accumulate them. It is to become a new person. A new creation. And for this the old person must die.

And the third sign of the Beloved Community is that people are bearing fruit. Jesus tells a parable about the owner of a fig tree who comes for three years in a row, expecting fruit. He is ready to cut the tree down this time, but the vinedresser pleads for one more chance. The tree stands for your life, the vinedresser is your conscious will, and the owner is God. Your purpose in this world is to bear fruit. You are charged to manage your life here, but in your management you are accountable to the owner, to God. And if you manage your life the right way, listening for God’s will for you, your life will bear fruit. That is the meaning of true religion. John the Baptist said to those who came out to him in the wilderness, "Bear fruit that befits repentance." James writes in his epistle, "Faith without works is dead." Bearing fruit means acts of love and compassion and forgiveness and justice. Bearing fruit means seeking to make a difference in the world. And God says, like the owner of the fig tree in the parable, "Bear fruit now - and the clock is running." The message is, in other words, urgent.

See how these three signs of the Beloved Community all connect? God’s Word feeds and nourishes us in what is most important. That nourishment transforms us into new people. And as new people we bear fruit in the world. This is what happens in the Beloved Community.

What is the relationship between this Beloved Community and the world around us? Jesus calls us to be "in" the world, but not "of" the world. There is a tension here. Twin temptations really. On the one hand, we can lose our identity and become just another organization. On the other hand, we can forsake the world totally and flee to the margins. I believe we are to be what theologian Bill Webber called "God’s Colony in the Human World." I hope many of you will have a look at the video to be shown following the worship service. It is entitled: "More Fun, Less Stuff: the Challenges and Rewards of a New American Dream." I recommend it highly. It is not preachy at all. But the scriptural reference could easily have been Isaiah 55. It shows how real people all over our country are taking practical steps to pull back from consumerism, from meaningless media, and from work driven lives. It talks about reducing waste and trying to change the reality that we Americans consume far more than our share of the world’s wealth. A simpler lifestyle is not a pipe dream. People are doing it. Check it out.

My dream for this congregation is that we can more and more model out simpler ways of living as alternatives, and support one another in this - that we accept the challenge that our lifestyle here and in our homes take into account what is right and just globally, and not just what is easiest and cheapest. For example, I really support the idea of regularly using free-trade coffee here. Churches and synagogues all over the country are doing it, so why can’t we? Last week Mable Elliott told me some moving stories about growing up. Like so many others she could say, "We were poor, but since we didn’t know it, we were very happy." She remembered all the children gathering on their grandmother’s front porch in the summer, to hear her tell family stories that went back for generations. Beautiful, peaceful, and happy moments. That happens much less today, doesn’t it? At its best, I believe the Beloved Community is a kind of support group for those who seek true nourishment of body, mind, and spirit; those who are interested in making lasting positive change in their lives, and making a real difference in the world.

Finally, being a part of the Beloved Community involves sacrifice. We should expect this. We should welcome it. We find life by letting go of it. We find freedom by shouldering responsibility. We receive by giving. Simply put, the Beloved Community is not a society of consumers, but a fellowship of servants. The life of servanthood is the life of sacrifice. Servanthood is at the heart of Christian Stewardship. What was the title of the Children’s Time we heard this morning? It was "The Gift of Life." We heard that in giving blood, our own lifeblood, we give others the gift of life. Do we sacrifice in doing this? Yes, in a sense. We give up an hour or so of our time. We experience a momentary pinprick on our finger. Maybe we even get a headache and have to lie down for a bit. But the blood we give is soon replaced. And where does it come from? From where it came from in the first place. From God. We didn’t create the blood the flows through our veins and arteries, earn it, or manufacture it. God gave it to us. A gift, a gift God replaces again and again as long as we live. Why? So that we can have life in abundance, and so that we can give it away – over and over. The Stewardship of the Beloved Community is exactly like this: the gift of life that God keeps on giving; the gift of life that we are called to keep on giving. The more we give, we more we receive. Our Blood. God’s Blood. Our life in God. That is the Beloved Community. Amen.

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