Sermon Tone Analysis

The Gathering of the Good News

Alright this week, we are going to explore what it means for the good news of Jesus Christ, the gospel, to reshape our idea of community and friendships and relationships together.

So we’re in Hebrews chapter 10.

I’ve taught in other contexts the entire chapter 10 of Hebrews, but its so long.

I remember thinking to myself, if I could just hone in on this little paragraph, there’s so much for us here as a church.

So lo and behold, I have the privilege of doing that here with you all this morning.

So we’re gunna be in .

We’re going to read these verses as a hole, to get the overarching structure, and then we’ll dive into the particulars.

Scripture Reading:

The Author, and we have no idea who that is, says,

Therefore, brothers, and that includes both the brothers and the sisters in the community.

Therefore, since, because, we have confidence, to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain that is through his flesh and since we have a great priest over the house of God, here is how we should respond.

Let us draw near with a full heart and a full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water, referring, I think, to baptism.

Christian Baptism is a symbol of us being washed with the grace of God.

How also should we respond.

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful and third response, let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

The Gathering of the Good News

This is one of the most power and dense statements about genuine christian community that you have anywhere in the Bible.

What’s important us that in the last couple of sentences, you have a couple of the practices of genuine christian community and just in verse 24 and 25, we’re going come back to them in just a second here, but the description of what genuine community looks like, only comes after the power and the source that generate it.

So that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to talk about does it actually look like practically to be in gospel reshaped types of relationships with each other and as a community.

And where does the power to do those types of things come from.

I hope that’s clear, because it sounds like an easy task, but Hebrews is a long hike up a mountain.

That’s what this paragraph is all about.

Let me give you all a big framework for how to understand this using a metaphor that I came across while studying the passage that has been helpful for me.

So here’s what I’d like you to consider and we’ll keep coming back to this metaphor again and again as we go through the passage.

Who played marbles as a kid?

I had a large bag of marbles but I never played the game of marbles with the circles.

I always used them as cannon balls for my legos.

But I had a lot of marbles nonetheless.

So I’d like you to consider a bag of marbles, think about a bag of marbles with 200 glass marbles, you have a collection of 200 individual entities.

And I’d like you to consider how a bag of marbles is similar but also different from a cluster of grapes.

Because a cluster of grapes is also a collection of individual entities, isn’t it.

So marbles are a bunch of individual entities, it makes a very distinct noise when you clack em around and they might crack or break.

If your mesh bag had a hole in it sometimes a marble would fall through and you wouldn’t really notice it because there’s just so many marbles.

They are alike and similar, but if you shake the bag the marble that’s down here is gunna kinda wind it’s way up here, and nobody would be able to tell the difference or have missed it.

There’s a lot of slippage and movement in a bag of marbles.

It’s transient.

Contrast that to a cluster of grapes, which is also a collection of individual entities that are about the size of marbles.

There’s a profound difference, say you laid the bag of marbles side by side with a cluster of grapes.

If you were to to examine the cluster of grapes at all, what would you discover?

You’d discover this organic network that is connecting all of the grapes together, and so while it’s a bunch of individual entities yes, they are all connected to the same source.

There’s one source, one life energy source, coursing through the network of vines that leads to all the individual grapes.

If you were to to examine the cluster of grapes at all, what would you discover?

You’d discover this organic network that is connecting all of the grapes together, and so while it’s a bunch of individual entities yes, they are all connected to the same source.

There’s one source, one life energy source, coursing through the network of vines that leads to all the individual grapes.

So here’s what this means for us.

No grape can touch all the grapes at one time, there’s only five or six grapes grapes around any individual grape, but because of how the network works a grape on this side might be connected to a grape on this side just by two degrees of separation.

So let’s say a grape goes bad here, is that only a concern to that grape?

No that’s a sign that there’s something happening one or two links up the chain and it might affect another grape on the other side that you would never have put the two together.

There’s an organic connectedness to a cluster of grapes because they are all connected individually and personally to a life source.

You can kinda see where I’m going with this.

But I am going to ask you, at any given church community or is it more like a bag of marbles, or maybe you can say it this way, that the great and constant challenge to any church community is the constant temptation to drift from becoming what it ought to be which is a cluster of grapes and instead drifting into the weak bag of marbles.

And actually I think that’s the precisely the type of idea that’s underneath this paragraph that we just read.

Look at verse 25.

Something that was a warning or a danger for the some of the people in this little house church community was to stop meeting together to stop connecting, marbles falling out of the mesh bag and so the author says “No, that’s deadly!”

He says “Don’t neglect meeting together.”

The greek word that the author uses right there is a word you actually already know, can you guess?

It’s a word you already know even if you don’t know that you know it.

it’s a greek word, συναγωγή.

From which we get our english word, synagogue.

So all of the early communities followers of Jesus were Jewish because Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.

They later came to refer to themselves as the greek word ἐκκλησία or the assembly, but the earliest term they used was this Jewish term, it’s a congregation.

And a congregation is very different from an aggregation.

An aggregation is a bunch of marbles in a bag, an aggregation is a bunch of people who might have a common interest, or they might look a like or have similar backgrounds, they all like the same music or like to ride bikes together.

I don’t know whatever, people do in LA.

But in an aggregation, apart from that superficial connection in that common interest, they exist unto themselves.

They aren’t there for each other or because of each other, they are there because of the common interest.

But with a cluster of grapes, in a congregation, genuine christian community is very different.

Because there is a common fate and interconnectedness between them.

If there’s something wrong with one grape of one person is falling through the cracks, that’s a sign of somebody some where in the community losing contact with the source.

And there’s a noticeable gap when somebody plucks one of the grapes.

Not that everybody can be close friends with each other or that we have to all be best friends and know each other.

But there is something else that transcends us just being congregated around music that we like, there’s something deeper and much more personal connecting us.

Each grape or each person in the congregation has a personal connection to the source of life.

This might come as a shock to you when I say this, the Gospel does not create people who love Jesus and then get together to love Jesus together and that’s the reason why we gather.

No not at all, or at least not primarily.

No the Gospel creates a community of people who are personally being impacted and transformed us into a people , a community that leads to a personal connection within the community and the transformation happens when the story of Jesus gets retold through the lives of the community.

That is why we gather, because we met Jesus and he brought us together.

Our relationship with Jesus is deeply and absolutely personal, but it is never private.

It’s personal, but never private.

And so what this means is that whats happening between me and Jesus is actually deeply connected to what’s happening to you and you and you and you and Jesus.

Because odds are, that you know somebody who brought you to this church and you brought your family because of that one person who lived up the street from you.

Did you know that the world average for degrees of separation between people is now 4.7 because of the internet.

That means at any given time you are 4.7 introductions away from any one person on the planet.

But at a community as small as this, it’s probably as low as 2. Whatever is happening to one grape, because we are connected to a common source, whatever is happening with you, is not private.

It’s not just you and Jesus vs the world.

There is a common fate.

Because we have a common source.

This personal Jesus interconnectedness is what is underneath genuine Christian community.

And this is very counter cultural, do any of you guys read online news papers, not online news sources, but newspapers that publish online?

Any way, I do, and a few years ago there was a popular opinion poll about what west Coast Americans think about money, sex, race, god, love, and death.

And I was actually shocked at some of the numbers concerning what people thought about religious belief.

64 percent of west coasters, don’t believe that we are just random molecules just crashing into each other as an accident.

2/3 people believe there is something bigger going on here related to a spiritual realm or to god or to the gods.

2/3 the odds are really good among your co-workers that they have some kind of intuition or some kind of bigger idea.

Of that 64 percent, here’s what’s interesting, 25 percent describe themselves as religious, meaning they describe themselves as affiliated however loose to some form of religious institution or community.

So that’s 39 percent left that describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

This is a growing category or mindset in american culture.

And this isn’t just among people who are not christian.

It’s prevalent in people who are christian’s because of the idea that I have a personal relationship with Jesus so that means my business with him is between me and him.