I wish to summarize in a brief series of notes the New Testament’s presentation of Koinonia.  This Christian partnership is 1) based on shared belief 2) has tangible advantages 3) comes with its own protocol and 4) is a discreet concentration in practicing the Christian religion.

But those four points can be illustrated by a family meal…

Have you grown up in a house where your family, at least once a day, would eat together?  If so, you are well into understanding the important New Testament word, Koinonia. Koinonia is translated by “fellowship” or “partnership.”  Luke uses it first in the New Testament, in his account of the newly formed church, which I’ll render in a popular paraphrase:

That day about three thousand took him at his word, were baptized and were signed up. They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers. (The Message: Acts 2:41,42)

“They committed themselves to…the life together.”  That’s a good rendition of koinonia.  And a good, accessible (but alack! becoming less so) picture of koinonia is the convivial scene around the family dinner table.

Our dining room has the potential for being one of the most cheerful spots in the house.  It’s a large room holding a large table with an artificially distressed hutch on one side and an authentically weathered piano on the other.  We have two beige linen-curtained windows looking out on the expanse (ok, the seven feet) of our side yard.

But still, something is a little chilly about the room, and I think we need something on the walls going away from the austere, maybe even something excessive.  Tonia, how about some Impressionists!

Around our large table sits a bunch of individuals.  For sure, you could never confuse Colin for Tonia!  These are two people coming at things from different, sometimes competing, angles.  Of course, in honest moments I have to admit that her angles are normally right and mine, at their best, are merely (a)cute.

I’m at the head.  Tonia sits on my left, with her back to the kitchen entrance.  She’s up and into the kitchen and back at least twice in the average meal.

And then the smallish individuals: Ben is at the end and has an open seat (never to be filled!) across from him.  Between him and Tonia sits the Terror.  To my right is Paul, a fellow third-born with two brothers.  (We often commiserate at our lot and complain together of our antecedents.)  The chair next to Paul holds Kai and all his quirks.

We’re all different.  That’s most true if you compare Tonia and me.  But we’re all different.  Sure, sometimes I’m chilled to see my uglies have been passed down, but never in the same degree as they’re in me.  In Ben I see Tonia’s purity, but he has other traits she doesn’t have.  Our brooks of depravity have unluckily come together and formed a swollen stream with Tess!  You get the message—we’re different.

Yet we find ourselves night by night gathered around the table.

But hurry to my point: We’re not eating our meals together by accident: A combination of commitments, common blood, shared histories, and—yes—commands bring us together.  We have basis for our frequent meals together.

Such is true with Christian koinonia.  This partnership is formed among dissimilar individuals.  We look around the Christian table and sometimes cringe to find so very few points of connection with our fellows.

But our close partnership can’t be called such merely because we happen to dwell beside each other.  That could be just an accident of history. And it can’t be on the basis of superficially shared interests.  I know EBCers don’t sit next to each other because we all like classical music and clever conversation or have shared political views.  This is the Unitarian mistake—gathering around shared interests and common causes under a vague religious auspice.

I give you our one connection, the basis of our koinonia: our belief in the true stories of Jesus Christ and the significance of those stories.

I have heard of persons within our assembly who voted (gasp) for Mr Obama.  And I have heard of persons within our assembly who voted (gasp) for Mr McCain.  Is there space at the Christian table for Democrats and Republicans? How can third-borns sit by first-borns?

Two questions; two answers.  Of course.   And they must.  Not because holding-in-common isn’t important, but because only one thing must be held in common: detailed faith in the history of the Christ.

That which we have heard and seen we declare to you, that you also may have koinonia with us; and truly our koinonia is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ – 1 John 1:3

“I pray that your [koinonia], which arises from your faith, may lead you effectively into a deeper understanding and experience of every blessing which belongs to us as fellow-members in the body of Christ” – slightly modified O’Brien’s paraphrase

“Yet thus life rolls away with too many of us in a course of shapeless idleness. Its recreations constitute its chief business…amusements are multiplied, and combined, and varied, to fill up the void of a listless and languid life; and by the judicious use of these different resources, there is often a kind of sober settled plan of domestic dissipation, in which with all imaginable decency year after year wears away in unprofitable vacancy. Even old age often finds us pacing in the same round of amusements which our early youth had tracked out.” – William Wilberforce

“As the traveler on serious business may be tempted to linger, while he gazes on the beauty of the prospect which opens on his way, so this well-ordered and divinely governed world, with all its blessings of sense and knowledge, may lead us to neglect those interests which will endure when itself has passed away.  In truth, it promises more than it can fulfill…And hence it is that many pursuits, in themselves honest and right, are nevertheless to be engaged in with caution, lest they seduce us; and those perhaps with special caution, which tend to the well-being of men in this life.  The sciences, for instance, of good government, acquiring wealth, of preventing and relieving want, and the like, are for this reason especially dangerous; for fixing, as they do, our exertions on this world as an end, they go far to persuade us that they have no other end.” -John Henry Newman

Where is God working? Of course this question assumes that God exists, and that He starts and brings to completion, and the question hopes that what He is working will turn out to the good. We assume and hope all that.

But we also believe that some things will turn out miserably. That some people will continue under the original curse and end themselves in hell, away from God and life forever.

So the question is urgent. Where is God issuing the blessing? Genesis 12 helps us refine the question: Who are the children of Abraham, the people inheriting the place, protection and blessing from God?

Out of all the possible answers to that question, there came a consensus. The children of Abraham were those who were under Torah. God was rescuing people who were under the Law, having attained that elite position either by birth or through signing on in detail to the ancient, Divine constitution. Because that’s what Torah was: the Divinely given Constitution of the children of Abraham!

Much like freedom of speech has become the epitome of a democratic society, circumcision was the rite that epitomized Torah observance. So circumcision was an ethnic marker but also signified God’s uncommon blessing begun in Gen 12. And we also note that circumcision was applied to the organ of biological continuity (I’m trying to be delicate!). So built into Torah was the assumption of biological perpetuation of the children of Abraham.

In short, the consensus was that the children of Abraham were Isrealites.

Paul is challenging this belief in Romans 4. Paul was announcing a shift in God’s redemptive purposes. Not an abandonment of an original plan; not a shift that wasn’t without historical causes; but nonetheless a real shift.

We sympathize with the Jewish people in Paul’s day for holding on their belief in Torah as the sign of the people of God, because for a long time Torah was the divinely sanctioned indication that its adherents were the children of Abraham. In fact, the details of Torah were intended to give ethical and spiritual substance to the pronouncement of Jews being Abrahams’ children. So the Jews were wrong, but were understandably wrong.

Today there are still wrong ideas of who are the children of Abraham. We’re looking for signs of connection to Abraham. Surely the sparkling, the drivers of the BMWs, (Just kidding, don’t be so sensitive!) the strong, the wise of the world, the shakers and shapers.

Or more subtly, the westerners or the easterners or the oppressed or the oppressor or those of this church or that. The authentic, the Catholics, the Protestants, those who partake of the Sacraments, the baptized, the moral, the immoral “keeping it real,” those standing in a tradition of godliness

The point is, from either sacred or profane base-line understandings, we’re trying to lay claim to being the “children of Abraham”: Who’s the lucky or who’s the called. And we’re looking for some “bling” or sign to substantiate the claim – bling of power, success, authenticity, spirituality, materialism, anti-materialism…

The 1^st century Israelites had historical grounds for their claim to being descendents of Abraham. As I said, they were wrong; they faced horrors for not accepting God’s new word, but we can see why they mis-stepped.

Paul says in Romans 4 – the children of Abraham (concentrate enough to value the term!!) are those who believe in Jesus as Messiah. They hear of Jesus, hear what happened through and to Him, hear what it means, and receive Him as God’s Word.

What joins them in Abraham? Partly they are joined to him because they come into God’s blessing (the reckoning of righteousness) as Abraham did, by hearing God’s word and believing it. This hearing-believing links a person to Abraham more truly than any “sperm-egg reality.” It is the believers who are Abraham’s seed.

And of course the children of Abraham share a look with their father: faith appears the same across the centuries – lived out in hopeless conditions, enduring, even growing, bringing God glory.

And finally they enter into the same promise – but more on that later.

Incredibly, Romans 4 doesn’t mention the Messiah until the end of the chapter. Paul’s task in this chapter was “merely” to link the Christ-believers of today with Abraham and his promise. It will become his task in other places to link Abraham and his promise with Messiah.

There are many different terms used for the elect people. The sacred writers to emphasize something particular used these distinctive terms. Paul uses one in Romans 4 in addressing the question, ‘Who are the children of Abraham?’

“Children of Abraham” -I don’t have to tell you the problem with taking time to listen to Paul. The experts believe that people disbelieve Christianity for three reasons: 1) Christians are weird 2) Christianity isn’t true 3) Christianity is irrelevant. Well, any serious talk about the ‘children of Abraham’ seems to confirm the third allegation! This seeming irrelevance is definitely a hurdle.

But let’s get over it!

Just discussing the fact of Paul’s discussion can impact us with the point: Paul took the Old Testament really seriously. Not just seriously as in, ‘there are some great lessons here for us (about honesty or God’s provision, etc)’ but as in ‘this is where redemption has started.’ He takes the story seriously. 1800 years after the call of Abraham Paul thinks it still as important as the day Abraham received it. The fact that 1800 years has elapsed is actually unimportant.

21^st century Bostonians, if we were smart, would grapple with this question too: ‘Who are the children of Abraham?’ The fact that now 3800 years have elapsed since God’s summons of Abraham should be considered hugely unimportant. Long periods of time have always been the enemy of faith (and is there a better evidence that the curse has invaded our habitation with space-time?).

The reason that the question is so important is that the children of Abraham are the inheritors of God’s promise to do something unmistakably good and permanent in the middle of a world that is become unmistakably bad. Everything is defined by God’s curse, His write-off, and His condemnation except for these descendants of Abraham.

The fact is that people today don’t normally think theologically. But they do always think in terms of success and failure. The big question in the secular mind is ‘Who has handled life?’ Who has property? Who has obtained? Who is shaping things? Where is the influence? Who sparkles?

Different questions, and not stated theologically, but still closely related to Paul’s in Romans 4. We’ll never escape the baseline categories of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’; or stated more theologically: ‘blessing and cursing.’

It’s so important that we not let ourselves think of Abraham and his goings on as general religious examples or material for moral lessons. He has to, in our minds, retain his particularity. And what makes Abraham’s call particular is that it was – is! – God’s answer to the human problem: “I will bless.” ‘You and yours [and no one else] will be given a place.’

Can we let this Abram talk come off as a-historic, general, in-the-bad-sense spiritual? May it never be! Who are the heirs of this world? Shouldn’t this macro-question be at least hovering in the background as we see our 401ks heading for the drain? What I mean to say is, ‘this is practical stuff.’

Is Abraham really my ancestor? must take priority of place in my mind. But even as I write that I see how much hard work is in store. I’ll have to shake off the archaic feel that overwhelms when I pose the question. I’ll need to become habituated to thinking of myself as connected with something that began with Abraham. I’ll have to allow the New and Old Testaments a closer association.

It takes a lot of concentration to be a Biblicist in 21^st century Boston! (Especially when you know that the Broncos and Patriots are playing next Monday night at Gillette Stadium!)

All these words to stress the importance. But who are the children of Abraham?