Another insightful sermon from a colleague of
mine, Rev. Tom Keyte. (Before he died, he gave me permission to
reproduce any/all of them. You’ll meet him again – in both senses,
I hope).

Matthew 18:10.

`See that you don’t despise any of these little ones.
The angels in heaven, I tell you, are always in the presence of
my Father in Heaven. What do you thnk a man does who has a hundred
sheep, and one of them gets lost?… He feels far happier over
the one sheep than over the 99 who were not lost… Whenever two
or more of you agree on something and pray for it… it will be
done by my Father in heaven.’

There was a blind man who regularly attended a church,
and always knew when there was a samll congregation, because the
pastor would always include in his prayers, `When two or three
are gathered in your name, there you are in our midst…’

That’s my text this morning. It’s more than a conventional
promise for occasions when there are fewer than usual at a Christian
meeting. It’s a profound statement of fact, in which is embalmed
the true idea of the church. Numbers aren’t really involved. There’s
no virtue in the two or three as such. Please don’t consider that
it doesn’t matter if there are only two or three. It does. My
friend Doctor Ithel Jones recalls a service in a small church
in Cardiff the day after a visit by King George V and Queen Mary.
The next day the patriarchal presbyterian minister entered the
pulpit and looked at his tiny congregaton. Then he prayed thus:

`Lord, who from everlasting to everlasting art God,
yesterday the King of England came to Cardiff. Months before,
they painted the shops and the houses, they decorated the place
with flags and bunting. Hours before they themselves thronged
the streets. And when the moment of his arrival was made known,
they raised their hands and voices because the King of England
had come to pass. Thou, King of kings and Lord of lords didst
promise to meet with these thy people at 11 o’clock on this Sabbath
morn, and they have failed to keep the appointment. God, forgive
them.’

I don’t imagine anybody would pray that kind of prayer
now, but it does remind us of something we tend to forget. But
numbers don’t really matter in the last analysis. Two or three
are simply togetherness reduced to its common terms. What does
matter profoundly is that, having come, whether we’re few or many,
we are meeting with Jesus Christ in the midst of his people. That’s
what makes it a church.

When there is a unity of purpose, with at least two
people whose hearts are uplifted together, there is the church.
There Jesus is in the midst. If that be so, even if there are
only two or three, they are more vital ultimately in the whole
scheme of things in their influence than nominal agreement between
thousands more who are drawn together out of curiosity or self-interest
or another motive.

However small the Christian group may be, even if
it’s literally two or three, it is really a stupendous thing,
for it is a focal point of the church of all the ages and all
the world. It’s not a church, it’s the church. It’s
an outcropping in that spot of Christ’s universal church.

Like the story of the old priest… trudging home
through the snow after early morning mass, on All-Saints day,
on which he was the only worshpper. He saw a member of his flock
working in the field who asked him, `Father, were there many at
mass this morning?’ He said, `Yes, millions!’ And he was right,
for when his people meet with him in the midst, they are the centre
of a series of concentric circles, extending to who-knows-where.
In that moment we are bound with all who love him in every land
under heaven, whatever the colour of their skin or language of
their tongue, whatever denomination they have… and there’s a
wider circle still, going right back to the beginning, of the
apostles who saw him in the flesh, and the martyrs who died for
him, and all those countless millions of people who have loved
him through the ages.

Among them are faces dear to you and me, all involved
in the meeting of the two or three, for they all have a common
centre, and a common love, a common loyalty to Jesus. Because
that is so, that group becomes more than a group of individuals.
A new thing comes into being – a new entity the New Testament
calls the Fellowship, not merely an organization, but an organism,
a living thing, whose very life is Jesus.

If you can think of iron filings as possessing wills
of their own, iron filings dropped near a magnet are not longer
isolated bits of metal. They’re magnets themselves, and they’re
formed into a pattern by the magnetic field in which they lie.
Take the magnet away and the pattern disappears. They’re isolated
bits of metal again.

Christianity starts with the individual to be sure.
But if it stays there, it dies. God speaks his first and last
words to us as individuals, but in between, God’s deepest insights
are given to us as members of a fellowship of believers.

There are two principle things I want to say:

Over the whole spectrum, the experience of Christ
we have in the fellowship is a richer thing than we can ever have
as individuals. The second thing is, what constitutes this characteristic
group in Christianity is that they meet in the name of Jesus.

Some may question this; that the experience we have
of Christ in the fellowship is richer than we can have as individuals.
In isolated moments, maybe. But what a group of devoted Christians
see together is more than an individual sees. No individual has
ever seen all there is to Christ. We’re so different in our personalities,
in our temperament, in our needs. Each of us sees something suddenly
different in him. What we see is screened somehow by who we are.
Paul says this in so many words: it is with all the saints, he
said, that we are able to comprehend the length and breadth of
Christ which surpasses human knowledge.

There’s a grand illustration of that from his own
experience with the other disciples. When you think of the enlargement
that came to their thinking about Jesus; when Paul compelled them
to think what Jesus might mean to a non-Jew – that’s about the
most mind-blowing revolution that ever came to human minds, as
far as they were concerned. We enrich each other’s experience
of Christ. I often quote that lovely hymn of George Matheson:
‘Each sees one colour of thy rainbow light/ Each looks upon one
tint and calls it heaven/ Thou art the fulness of our partial
sight/ We are not perfect until we see the seven/ Gather us in…

Our own insights are tested by the experience of
the group. We might be mistaken. We might see things wrongly.
But when what we see is confirmed by the experience of the Christian
centuries, there’s a good reason to believe that it’s true. The
lonely soul has a glimpse of heaven, to be sure. Somehow it remains
spasmodic and casual, and too often depending on one’s circumstances
and mood. We experience complacency on the one hand, and fear
on the other. But around the instability of the individual is
thrown the stability and strength of the people of God. Who can
tell what that does for any one of us?

We’re concerned for each other. We are prepared to
pray for each other in times when some of us are so stretched,
that we can’t pray for ourselves. We are part of the fellowship
of believers, and great strength comes from that. In a group,
we are a more effective tool in the hands of Christ than we could
ever be as individuals. We’re not meant to be a series of instrumental
soloists, but members of a symphony, conducted by Christ.

Imagine each of my hands possessing a will of their
own. I could do things with my hands together that I could never
do if they were separate. There’s a unity of purpose. They’re
obedient to me. But, suppose through a broken bone or torn muscle
one of them no longer obeys me, immediately it’s out of fellowship
with its brother hand. That’s the picture of the church.

I remind you that these words are dealing with people
who disrupt the fellowship – people who break the rules. Jesus
says these are the concern of the whole community. They are our
responsibility. There are some words in John that mean a lot to
me: `If any one sin, we have an advocate with the Father.’ When
you see someone failing in their obligations to the fellowshp
and to Christ, this isn’t a matter for condemnation. This is your
responsibility. You are responsible for exercising the priestly
ministry of the church.

What makes this Christian gathering distinctive?

Is it that it’s in the name of Jesus? It’s important
to ask what that means. First, obviously, we gather as believers,
in him, with a common love and loyalty and faith, with convictions
about him that we all share, with hopes that he himself has kindled,
and he alone can fulfil. A common experience of his saviorhood
might have come to us in very different ways, but they all centre
in the reality that it is to Christ that we have come.

And it mustn’t be an exclusive gathering if it’s
in the name of Jesus. It is the fellowship of Christ, not our
fellowship; the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Anybody who comes
in the name of Jesus must be welcome. Anybody. You can create
a human institution and impose on those who join it any tests
you like. But if those conditions go beyond loyalty to Jesus Christ
and what he requires of us, then we have no right to call it a
fellowship at all.

It’s the fellowship of Christ. Immediately we claim
that, it’s a fellowship where we hand over responsibility to God.
We hand over the right to define the membership on any other terms
than he himself requires. You may differ from me radically on
all sorts of different things; the way you read the Bible, the
way you think the church ought to be governed, the way you believe
Christians ought to behave. We might differ radically on those
things, but if you love Jesus Christ the way I try to love him,
you’re in the fellowship, by the same right as I am in it. It’s
my duty to acknowledge your right to be in it, whoever you are.

Unfortunately churches often appear as an exclusive,
in-grown group of people who feel that the faith is their private
concern, and give the impression that they are superior to people
outside it.

An American artist – Jeffrey Killburn – lived in
Paris for many years before the First World War. He became almost
more a Frenchman than he was an American. He loved the country,
and when the war came, he enlisted in a French regiment. Everybody
loved him, because he was a charming person. He and many of his
comrades were killed in the first battle of the Marne. Then they
had a problem. His comrades were Roman Catholics. He was Protestant.
He couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, if a battlefiedl
could ever be called consecrated ground. So Jeff’s comrades were
buried just inside the walls of the cemetery, and Jeff just outside
it. His living comrades couldn’t tolerate this, so in the night
they took down the fence and rebuilt it a little farther out,
and took Jeff in.

And that’s what Christian fellowship always does.
Because it meets in the name of Jesus, it’s a unity. Not because
of what the members find in each other, but because of what they
find in him. If the unity isn’t uniformity, if there’s diversity
in it, it doesn’t require that we all think alike.

One of our distinctive features of the Christian
faith is the power it gives to people who are vastly different
from each other to live together in true fellowship, the only
condition being that they are in tune with Christ. They may be
incompatible. There are some amazing stories about the fellowship
Japanese soldiers, who were Christians, had with Chinese Christians
during the terrible Sino-Japanese war…

It’s that very fellowship that Jesus gathered around
him in the beginning; that group of disciples who were a very
mixed bag indeed. One of the sharpest divisions you see there
is that between Simon the Zealot, a member of the Palestine Liberation
Organization at that time, who was vowed to enmity, even to death,
to the hated Roman overlord, and there by his side in fellowship
is Matthew the publican, who sold his soul to collect taxes to
the same Roman overlord. But now they’re brothers. Not because
of anything they had discovered in each other, but what they had
both found in Christ. That’s it.

One of the delightful things about this church at
Blackburn is that there are great differences of opinion on all
sorts of things. That doesn’t seem to prevent people being drawn
by a mutual love for Christ, and a love for each other. That idea
of diversity-with-unity, I think is a lovely thing about this
church.

The other day I heard a jazz band on the radio. It
was the ‘South Dixie Racing and Clam Bake Dixie Band’! I thought
of true jazz as an excellent example of unity of diversity within
unity. There’s a definite structure that makes it jazz, a structure
of chords and rhythm, but the players within it have the utmost
freedom to do their thing. Every now and again, one of them takes
off for a while and goes all around the universe, still within
the structure. Diversity within unity.

Finally when a group meets in the name of Jesus,
its sympathies are turned not inwards, but outwards. We were never
meant to be small, self-contained, self-congratulatory groups,
here to enjoy our rich spirituality and let the rest of the world
go by. There are churches like that.

Years ago one of my fellow-pastors (now dead) went
to a church not very far from here. He felt that it was ingrown,
introverted, he wanted to turn its energies outward, do something
to reach the people around the church. He was told by the deacons
that wasn’t his business, `You are here to look after us.’

That sounds incredible, but it’s true, and Christ
cannot fulfill his promise to a church like that. The body of
Christ is his instrument, for doing his work in the world. His
final promise, you remember, is to go out to all the world and
make disciples, and lo, I am with you to the very end of things.

The promise is bound up intimately with the obligation.
You can’t have one without the other. No doubt there are many
other things involved in these words, but these are important,
that when we meet, we’re aware that there is an unseen presence
in the midst. It’s more than a text for small congregations. To
grasp the truth that is in it would make even going to church
a great adventure, a thrilling experience. Because there are those
in this congregation who have come this morning in that spirit,
the unseen presence is here, and he has spoken his particular
word to your particular needs. The last of his words are always
these: `Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.’

Shalom! Rowland Croucher