This past Spring one of my responsibilities as an ordained elder and as the cluster leader for the UM churches in our area has been to work with Pastor Nancy Goff of the New Hope UMC. You may remember that at Christmastime, the Axemann and Weaver Churches voted to merge, in effect get married and live
together in a new relationship. Several months ago they adopted a new name: New Hope UM Church.

In some ways it has been a shotgun wedding, although through an outsider’s eyes it made sense for them to come together; they were made for one another. As many of us may know, the state is planning to build a high speed ramp from Interstate 80 to rt. 26, and it goes right through where the church currently
sits. So there was no choice but for Weaver to build a new building elsewhere or to merge with their sister church. I say it was a shotgun wedding because they couldn’t afford to build on their own, and not everybody wanted to merge. It wasn’t that the some people didn’t like their sister church, they just didn’t want to leave their building. Some people just can’t accept the fact that they have lost their building and so they don’t want to do anything. They would rather sit there and cry and complain and do nothing, as though this will
change the situation or that this is what church is all about.

So this past Spring I was asked to coach Pastor Goff through some of this difficult process, and the District Superintendent asked me to preside over some of the special Charge Conferences that had to make what I call “red tape decisions.” To change their name, to get a new bank account, to restructure themselves to work and live together, they had to jump through prescribed hoops that the State of Pennsylvania requires in order to be legal. There is no choice in these matters and they are not controversial, just time consuming,
but they have to be done if the church can continue to operate as a church.

Well one of the things that I noticed in the brief time that I have been with their church leaders has been the overwhelming support and enthusiasm for this new thing that God is doing. As one of their leaders said one Sunday morning, “We should have been together years ago, but we wouldn’t do it. So God has
brought us together through the loss of a building so that we can do ministry together in new, exciting and effective ways.” There are a lot of good and faithful people who are working hard to make this new church of God happen. Mark Johnson, who is appointed to our church as a local pastor to do youth work
and lead the praise and worship service as well as lead in establishing a new church East of Zion, is a member there and his wife Lynn is the chair of the merger committee. Lynn’s mother Joanne, who is also the wife of Dan Eberhart, one of our church members and leaders, is the Administrative Board Chairperson.
And these are just two of many people who are helping to make a new congregation.

Of course there are about a handful of people who have been fighting this marriage tooth and nail. They are small, but as always vocal. There isn’t a choice because one of the original congregations has ceased to exist because it lost its building, but they’d sooner be miserable and make it miserable for everyone else. Isn’t it amazing that God calls us into new directions and there are some people who get contentious because they don’t want to hear God’s word or do God’s word. “I don’t care if the state is going to take away my
church building I’m going to stay right here.” After the road is built, it could be real interesting on Sunday mornings finding the family pew. Remember the old computer game “Frogger” where you had to dodge a frog across a 6 or 8 lane highway through heavy traffic without being squashed? I hope their pew
can dodge the traffic on this high speed ramp with all those trailer trucks and cars zooming by at 60, 70, or 80 miles an hour.

Well anyway, for any endeavor of God to be successful, like the beginning of a new church, it takes a lot of people to make it happen, each responding to his or her call from God. Take the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. God had promised Abraham and Sarah a son in their old age and they would be the parents
of a great nation; and God had kept the divine promise of the son. But for there to be a great nation of descendants for Abraham and Sarah, the son Isaac needed to get married when he grew up. Isaac needed to have children if the divine promise was to be fulfilled. After Sarah died and Abraham was in
extreme old age knowing that he doesn’t have that many years left, Abraham wanted to ensure that his grown son Isaac got married so that the divine promise would continue to be fulfilled. And Abraham didnn’t want just any wife for his son. A divine plan was unfolding and it needed the right person. In
the Abraham family, they took wives from the old home town, the place where Abraham and Sarah originally lived before God sent them on their journey to a promised land. The wife of a Hebrew patriarch couldn’t be one of the local pagan girls, but had to come from a family who understood the culture and beliefs of this family of outsiders, and who could understand and accept her place in the divine plan.

So Abraham sent his servant back to his birthplace, to his brother’s family, to find a wife for Isaac, instructing his servant to look for signs from God, for God would choose Isaac’s wife, not a human being. And here is where we find that it takes a lot of people to fulfill God’s grand designs. It’s a marriage of two people, but so many people are involved. Abraham out of his faith in God’s grand plan sends his servant to find the wife. The servant out of his faith and his prayers is prepared to meet the woman God has chosen when he stops for a drink of water. Rebekah out of her faith offers hospitality to the servant and agrees to leave her family in much the same way Abraham once did when she hears the servant’s story. Rebekah’s father and brother agree to send
Rebekah into an unknown future because they see the hand of God in this event. And then there is Isaac, who does not meet Rebekah until she steps off of that camel, who out of faith enters a marriage designed by God to fulfill the divine promise given to her husband’s parents so long ago.

It took every person in this story to be attuned to and accepting of God’s will and purpose to make this common everyday event of a marriage possible. Without this marriage, there was no future, and without the faithful involvement of all of the characters in this story, there could not have been a marriage.

Now I know marriage is a special event, a life changing event, in the lives of a couple and in their families. It’s one of the high points of every couple’s relationship. Yet in the scheme of world events, marriage is a common,
everyday event. We conduct a number of weddings in our church every year, we see marriage announcements every week in almost every newspaper, we ourselves may have been married and have been involved in weddings of family, friends and neighbors. Marriages are not unique or rare to everyday life, although they
are to us individually. But we need to understand that even this common, everyday event of marriage needs the hand of God if it is to be successful. Even everyday events such as marriages and births and new jobs and the church family we adopt need to formed by the will and purposes of God if they are to have any meaning, if they are to have any purpose, if they are fulfill the grand design and plan that God has for this world. Because you see, God is involved in every aspect of our lives, and brings a lot of other people into our circle to help us and for us to help them so that everything that unfolds in our lives can have the stamp of God’s love and grace and will.

You know, those other people are important. They are important because God has sent them to us to make it possible for God’s will and purpose to be fulfilled. We may not know fully what that will and purpose is, but we have an idea, and God knows exactly what the end looks like. So what about those other people
who come to join us?

Think about this for a moment, and I hope you do more than think about it, I hope you take it so seriously that you do something about it. Every new person who walks through the front doors of this church is sent by God. They may just be searching for a church home, or for the answer to a problem, or may not even
know why they were led here. But God has sent them, and they have been sent to help us fulfill our mission of “making disciples for Jesus Christ in order to proclaim the Gospel.” They are a gift to us. Do you look for God’s gifts on a Sunday morning? Do you offer them God’s gifts and gladness that God has sent them here to help in God’s work? Think about that. It takes a lot of people to make God’s purposes successful, and if God sends you a gift, are you going to reject it and perhaps mess up God’s divine plan?

And for those who have been newly attending for at least a month, not only have you been a gift from God, but because God has sent you here and you have kept coming back, you are now in this ministry with us. It is now up to you to look for the additional gifts that God has sent and to welcome them. It is now up
to you to enter in prayer and be willing to join others in fulfilling God’s mission for this community of faith. God has called you because you have unique spiritual gifts and talents that God needs to use in this place. And
the question is, are you ready to acknowledge your faith in God’s plan so you can be a part of it.

You can look at this in all of our ministries and even in our personal lives. For instance, for those who minister at FaithCentre, do we graciously welcome and appreciate each person who walks through the doors? Do we welcome and make sure to include fully each volunteer who comes to us to minister to our neighbors? Do we humbly help the least, the lost, the last to find Christ and to serve Christ? Because all of these people help not just us, but Christ, to fulfill his great commission to make disciples of all people and to proclaim
the saving grace of Christ so that all may know and accept Jesus. They are gifts to fulfill God’s plan, not ours.

It’s the same way in our personal lives. In every day life, God sends us gifts that help us to know God more deeply and to do Christ’s ministry more fully. I sometimes find it hard to be interrupted when I am on a roll doing something, like a sermon, until I am reminded that God has sent me a gift and it’s not an interruption but someone or something that will help to fulfill Christ’s ministry in this church and in my life.

I guess what it all comes down to is this: “Do we look for God in every aspect of our lives, the good and the not so good?” God in Christ is our constant partner in this journey called life. God is with us in every aspect no matter how small. You may think you don’t need God, but God needs you in the ministry of the church and in the ministry of your life. God’s needs you, I need you, and so does everybody else sitting here. So what’s holding you back?