Acst 2:42ff
And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God, our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ. Amen. We're in the middle of our series on the core values that our congregation has selected as part of our strategic planning. So far, we have looked at three of our active core values that is worship, catechesis and sanctity of life. Today, we're starting to move into the aspirational core values. The aspirational core values are those values that we want to see active in our congregation, in the funeral, and not in the funeral in the future Yeah, in the future, sorry about that.
They are human care, outreach and evangelism. Tonight, we're looking at human care. The program we're using defines human care this way, we are moved to show the mercy of Jesus in tangible ways. We share His mercy with one another through acts of compassion, and we extend God's love and mercy to people outside of our congregation through ministries of human care.
Now, unfortunately, what that does is that uses the phrase to define the phrase. It says, Through ministries of human care, hmm, so we have to define it a little bit beyond that, human care is taking care of all of the things of the body and mind that are not the gospel. Human care is taking care of the human being, the person, both in their in their sustenance and their bodies, but also their intellect and and their emotions. It is caring for the whole person.
This is why I chose the reading from Acts chapter two, because it shows the relationship in the early Christian congregation between the gospel message that they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching the breaking of the bread and the prayers that is to worship. And then they had all things in common. They shared with one another what they needed to survive, and made sure that everyone in the Christian community had enough to live on, so much so that they would sell their possessions human care extends out of the love of the gospel that Jesus Christ has given us into caring for the needs of others. It begins as for Christians inside the Christian congregation, but then extends out into the rest of the world, and we see a number of examples of human care in the Holy Scriptures, Jesus' miracles of healing, every one of those was a ministry of human care. When you heal someone of their diseases, it doesn't save their souls, but it is good to save their bodies too.
In Acts 242, we saw the distribution of food amongst the people in the congregation. Saint Paul talks about distribution amongst the churches of food for those who are in need. That is a regular incident, but perhaps the most famous of these is Jesus's parable of the sheep and the goats, where Jesus gathers all the people in front of him, one on one side, one on the other to the to the goats. He says, When I was in prison, you didn't visit me when I was hungry. You didn't clothe me when I was naked, you didn't feed me. And they went, when did we see you? And he said, when you did this, when you did not do this to the least of these, you did not do it to me and to the sheep. He says, You fed me, you clothed me. When I was in prison, you visited me. And they say, when did we do this? When you did this to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. One of the things that most people miss about that parable is the identification of who they're doing the visiting. It is the brothers and
so Matthew, in that parable, is primarily pointing to the care inside the congregation, human care, then is an overflow of that love from within the the Community of Christ, within the congregation. Conversation to the world around us. We see human care in a number of different ways that we do it in the congregation.
Now our preschool is human care. We don't just gather the children around and read them Bible verses all day. We teach them colors and letters and not to hit each other, you know, those sorts of things. These are important pieces of growing up to be a good human being and a good Christian, and are necessary. Trunk or treat is primarily human care. We invite our neighborhood into our parking lot, and we give them candy and popcorn and hot chocolate. Don't forget the hot chocolate. Oh, and we let them bounce! the the idea behind that is, is that what we're doing is we're developing community. We are gathering people into our space and building bonds of a community in a civic sense, that is human care.
We have an ESL class teaching English human care, helping the refugees and the immigrants who come to our neighborhood have the skills that they need to be able to work and survive in a country that doesn't know their language, human care.
And when you look at all those activities, you'll notice that human care is actually the job of every human being. It is not specific to the church. We call this vocation. Human care is what parents do to their children. It's what grocery store clerks do when they scan your food. It is all of the things that we do out in the world to care for each other, and in fact, in many ways, human care is best done when there's money exchanged, because Walmart does a better job of distributing clothes to the poor than most free food distributions or clothing distributions, and McDonald's feeds the hungry better than all the food banks in America can buy right, inexpensive food that they can buy.
So human care is not just limited to that, but sometimes to these, these kinds of exchanges. Now for us as a church, we are doing human care because we want to care for our neighbors. It begins with the gospel, love of Jesus Christ delivered to us as it was with those first apostles in the city of Jerusalem. As we gather around His grace and His mercy, He fills us with love and then extends to each other to make sure that we care for each other, and that overflows into our community.
What we have to remember, though, when we do that, is that human care and evangelism are different, and we should not confuse the two. When we give food to someone, it is good, but it is not sharing the gospel. When we hold a blood bank, it is good, which we're going to do pretty soon. We've got the posters in the office. You should come when we have a blood donation drive.
This is a good thing, but it is not sharing the gospel. One of the challenges American churches have had over the past several decades is believing that giving up food, painting walls, offering blood drives will bring in members, but only the gospel of Jesus Christ does that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do human care. Human care is great, because God cares about people's bodies too. I bring this up simply to help us understand that if we want to reach out with the love of Jesus, to gather them into Christ, human care is not the way to do it. You have to share the gospel. Now that doesn't mean human care can't lead. To that, I think one of the great ways that we can see that happen are the conversations that I get reported from our ESL classes, our volunteers sit with Muslim immigrants, and they talk about all sorts of things as they're learning English, and inevitably it leads to questions about Christianity and the relationships and the gifts and the sharing leads to talking about Jesus. ESL is awesome, and we do it because we care about them, and we're overjoyed when that leads to sharing the Word of God.
We have to remember that there is a distinction between these two. So as we go and we do human care, we will remember that we also have to focus on outreach if we want to share the gospel and separating the two in our minds, understanding which is which? Because God cares about our bodies, and he cares about the bodies of the people out there, and we filled with the love of Christ as a congregation, we have chosen to make that a priority of caring for people's bodies and minds in our communities, while we also offer them the gospel of Jesus Christ in His name. Amen.
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