There were about 80 people in church. It was a sunny Sunday morning in Spring. The clear windows let the light fill the room, but the time of day and the woods outside filtered away the harshness. It was a medium sized crowd - a little sparse looking at the beginning, but people dribbled in until the nave looked comfortably full. There was plenty of room if you wanted an uncrowded seat but there were no big bare patches of rush seated chairs without occupants.
As I sat, I listened to the words that had been passed on for generations. The words told a story, gave advise, passed on knowledge, and warned of future challenges. The stories described the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. Not only did the words tell of the care of God for God's people, the preservation of the words themselves bespoke the care of God's community for the future. The words were preserved for God's people by God's people. They were and are the DNA of God's church, the means by which God's community regenerates itself. This means that people who are alive today can participate directly in a community long dead in the flesh, but living through us.
The communities that created and preserved the words we hear today spanned centuries before and after Jesus. They were living communities, full of challenges and conflicts, subject to the strong influence of culture. As they grappled with the meaning of God's word for them, they sought the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They used their reason and the tradition of their community to discern its meaning. The words, once dormant like unhatched eggs or seeds in the ground were brought to life by the need of their listeners. In the process, the words gained meaning. The words spoken by God or Jesus or the Prophets in a time long past gained the meaning of the struggle. The words were tested and faithfulness of their authors was proven true once again.
As I looked around at the people I knew and admired, I saw that they were mostly of the generation that were the beginnings of our church 49 years ago. Some of them remember worshiping in a gymnasium, some remember building the church, but all of them here that day had a story. They were sitting in that chair for a reason and that reason is part of the story of our church. There were around 80 people there, some well over 60 years of age and some well under. I figured out that there were 4800 years worth of stories. That's 240 generations, or 1,750,000 days. If you strung all those years backwards in time, they would take you to 2790 BC, around the time of the founding of the Egyptian Empire. That's a lot of stories. And the story of God's people lives in all of them.
