Cornerstone Chapel

May 4, 2011

“Look, Listen, Love”

• I am thankful to be here at Cornerstone today and love getting to know and becoming more a part of this community
• It’s probably appropriate to have an American preaching as the Cornerstone community says goodbye to all you American students.
• I too studied abroad while in University, and I also came here to serve for 3 months before moving here.  
• It’s a beautiful thing to come from a different place and become part of a new community.  It’s maybe even more beautiful to be a community and welcome in strangers among you.
• I am use to being a stranger because my white American family and I live in the coloured township of Ocean View down south, and we are constantly being looked at as strangers.
• We have now lived there for about one and a half years, but early on in our time, I was driving around with one of my View friends Bernadette, and everyone was starting at me as usual, and I just waved back like we were friends.  
• The stares seemed to bother Bernadette and finally she yelled out the window, “have you never seen a white person before?!?”
• Yes, this world has many strangers, and we aren’t always good at taking one another into our own worlds.
• That’s why it’s such a great environment here at Cornerstone.  It’s easy to come in as a stranger and be accepted because you all are very strange.
• No, this is a microcosm of the real world, and you are thrown into a learning environment, you have to work together, you are all growing and being challenged.
• I am sure you Americans were welcomed into the family, and you will finish your time here with fond and happy memories of your new South African family.
• When all of you all look back at your time here, you will have learned a great deal, taken a million tests, and written countless papers that will become lost.  But you are becoming something.  Individually and together.  You are learning the value of community and being united.
• But community doesn’t always form as easy as it does in school.  In Ocean View for instance, no one gave us projects together, people are strange, but think we are stranger for some reason.
• In real life, you have to work at being a community, at becoming one, at walking the ways of Jesus.
• Jesus was a well-respected person, someone who many knew and looked up to.  And yet, when he went into places, he always looked for the strangers.  He always sought out the outsider.  He always moved towards the lonely.
• As I have lived in Ocean View and tried to reach out to the stranger, I have learned there are really three steps to becoming true community, and these follow the steps of Jesus.
• We must look, listen, love.  
• Take Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4.  Jesus enters a new town.  The disciples go off to meet the important people, get what they need, and figure out how to best serve Jesus.  Jesus goes to the city center and sits.  He takes it all in, he looks at what is going on, what is happening in this place.  And there he meets the Samaritan woman.  He takes in the moments with her and meets her right where she is.  
• Next he listens, he opens up conversation and gets her to feel safe with him, so she opens her heart to him.  And he listens.  He doesn’t judge he listens.
• Lastly He loves.  He offers Himself. He offers the living water. He offers a relationship with the living God that will never leave her and fill all she desires.  And she leaves different than how she came.
• We must come in the same way to all who are strangers, to all new people and experiences.  Even to the places where we already are living and existing.
• We must look, who is around us, how are they, what is happening right around us that we never notice.
• Second we must listen, we must help people to open up their hearts and lives and stories.  We allow them to share and create that space for them.
• Third we love them.  Right where they are we affirm and love them, but we also help them to vision and dream of what could be, just like Jesus did.
• Living in Ocean View has taught me that life must be seen out of a lens of missional living.  Jesus lived a life of look, listen, love, not just when he went on a mission trip.  This is our life, to live and love as Jesus did.  

READ 1 John 4:9-19

9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

 13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

   God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

• This is the life we are called to live, and as your relationships show as you say goodbye here, you have done this well.
• I now pray for you that you will go from this community, all of you, and both near and far, will live a life of love that Jesus gave to us as an example.
• By living in this way we enter into the mystery of God’s kingdom continuing to come alive within and around us.  We participate in God’s work in our world, and increasingly we will see God work in ways that are holy and miraculous.
• That is why today we gather to celebrate the holy mystery and ultimate sacrifice made by Jesus Christ
• We gather in communion, today, remembering what Jesus Christ has done for us, and when we enter and live in communion with one another, this mystery comes alive.

Jesus had his last meal with his disciples, a normal meal.  They sat around a table and Jesus broke the bread and said

Take this, all of you, and eat it:

this is my body which will be given up for you.

Then He poured the wine and said

Take this, all of you, and drink from it:

this is the cup of my blood,

the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.

It will be shed for you and for all

so that sins may be forgiven.

Do this in memory of me.

Come to the table.