Sermons

Got Church?

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  March 23, 2003                    Exodus 20:1-17/Matthew 5:1-12

Several months ago, we designated this Sunday to be something called “Spotlight Sunday.” It still is that. Spotlight Sunday – if not our first then most certainly our most focused of recent times – was designed to be a day when the church would seek to invite and welcome visitors – friends, neighbors, co-workers – and light up the church for them. And so let me first say two things.

First, thanks to those of you who extended invitations for this day. The word is “evangelism,” and it doesn’t easily roll off the Presbyterian tongue, for reasons good and bad. Nonetheless, a simple, gentle invitation was the order of the day, and thanks to those who took up the invitation to extend an invitation. Thanks also to members of the Evangelism Committee and its chair, Maryjane Link, for shepherding this event, and to many others for your organizing work.

And secondly, and more importantly, welcome. If there are visitors with us this day, we are delighted and grateful that you are here. And, if you are here because someone invited you, all I can say is “holy cow!” and welcome some more.

Following worship today, there will be displays and information tables and refreshments all over the place so that you may learn more about this congregation. One very attractive side benefit of all this is that church members as well should visit these displays, a kind of in-house information extravaganza.

In fact, all of us should wear a name tag – don’t be afraid to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know, and don’t worry whether it’s a person walking in the door for the first time or a person who has been walking through these doors for 50 years. Don’t worry, be friendly.

And again, if you are a visitor, we are particularly pleased to welcome you. Perhaps you are searching for a church home. Perhaps you are simply curious. Whatever…we are glad that you are here. Please learn more about us today. Ask questions. Take brochures. Please take brochures. We would love to welcome you back to join us and more so, for you to bring your gifts and commitments to this community of faith as we seek to make a difference, as we seek to transform lives and have our lives transformed, as we like to say, seek the light.

Allow me to say a few brief words about this church. We are in the midst of celebrating our 175th anniversary. We are made up of all kinds of God’s children. We are diverse and inclusive, and seek even to be hospitable. We are situated in the city, a context we take very seriously. We are metropolitan, county-wide and beyond. People drive here from many places as well as from quite nearby. Our vision is cast in the city, in the broader community, across the country and around the world.

Music and the arts are very important to us. Outreach, serving the common good of the community, is very important to us. Learning and nurturing are very important to us, sharing ideas, caring for one another. Children are very important to us, God’s great gift.

We are growing. We are a large congregation as congregations like ours go. Our size should not be an impediment to getting to know people, but rather it is an invitation to become involved, in a fellowship group or a volunteer activity. And, our size means that we have resources, energy, critical mass, to do some interesting and creative things within our walls and beyond our walls.

And, we are Presbyterian. In previous generations, that might have been a more important factor than it is today, particularly at the point when people made the choice about what church to attend. The literature nowadays seems to suggest that such “brand loyalty” is less important than it has been. But I will still argue that us being Presbyterian is important, only in that it gives us access to a tradition of doing things that has proven itself to be useful and faithful over many generations.

This morning is not the time to review our organizational chart and to wax eloquent on the beauty of our committee structure. Not at all. It’s probably enough to say that in the Presbyterian way of doing things, people matter. People generate ideas and make decisions, because people have been given gifts by God so to do. How we do things matters, and how we do things grows out of what we believe.

And again, this morning is not exclusively about what Presbyterians believe, about what Reformed Christianity, a family of which we Presbyterians are a part, about what we believe. That is a life-long conversation, and is equally about watching what we do and listening to what we say, service enacting beliefs, or practicing embodying preaching.

Yale theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff, who comes out of the Dutch part of the Calvinist, Presbyterian tradition, has written recently on what we believe. It works for me: “…at the heart of the Reformed tradition is a passion for totality, for wholeness, for integrity, for not allowing life to fall into bits and pieces but to constantly ask, ‘What does my faith – what does the gospel of Jesus Christ – have to do with this and what does it have to do with that?’ And then never being content with the answer ‘Nothing!’” (Perspectives, November 2002, quoted in Context, March 1, 2003)

There is a source to all of this, of course. In the midst of all that we do, the organizing, the Sunday school teaching, the choir rehearsing, the potluck suppering, the volunteering, there is a source, and its pivot point is in these moments, when we open the Bible, what we call “the word” and seek God’s blessing as we seek to understand what God is saying to us, what God is saying to the church, what God is saying to the world.

Week by week we are offered something called the lectionary, a set of readings, Old Testament and New Testament. This week the lectionary offered us a portion from the book of Exodus, the Decalogue, it has been called, or even more commonly, the Ten Commandments. It seemed somehow appropriate on Oscar day. But it some seems even more appropriate on this Spotlight Sunday, as we focus on core things.

The Ten Commandments are a list, yes, of prescribed behaviors. We will get to that in a moment. But look at the set-up – it is first about relationship, and it is about totality. And it is about integrity. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” It gets no clearer than that. We seek to make gods of other things – the culture, the market, a lifestyle, our own wits or abilities, luck or fate or chance. And coming to us, tenderly and tenaciously, is the reminder that there are no other gods, a relationship forged from deep human need and this God’s desire to save us from that need.

And then a set of guidelines follows. My seminary professor Robert Boling taught us not to take these things as prohibitions so much, but rather as common-sense reminders, like the lists we place on our refrigerator doors at home. Of course we won’t steal: property or husbands or wives. Of course we won’t lie. Of course we will rest every once in a while. Of course we will care for our older ones. Of course we won’t kill. All common sense reminders how those who are in relationship to this God, and to one another, shall live. Not all that radical, except in their fundamental claim, and in our seeming inability to live into them.

And then another list, perhaps even more radical, the Beatitudes, we have called them, from the gospel of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The world offers “that,” Jesus seems to say, and we respond with “this.” Grief, meekness, a deep hunger and thirst for the right things, mercy, purity…these will be our responses to the fallenness of the world, and by so responding, we will be blessed, made total and complete, given integrity.

This becomes not only an alternative scenario for each of our lives, but also an alternate scenario for a world that chooses repeatedly and painfully, other gods, and whose blessings therefore ring hollow. Jesus says that it can be different, and in our hearts, our spirits, we know that he is right.

“Got Church?” became the title of this Spotlight Sunday sermon several months ago (and so I have stuck with it!). The mistake would be to ask, “got church?” in order simply to think about attracting new members, and renewing our own membership. Both are very, very important.

But it has seemed to me that the church at its best never exists for its own sake. A central point of the Protestant Reformation was that we did not need the church to negotiate our relationship with God. But we do need the church for other reasons. It is a laboratory, a “provisional demonstration,” as the old language says. We were created to be in community, in relationship, with God, and with all of the people God has created. If not perfect, the church is a pretty good place to make that happen. The church as the venue for living out the claims of faith, for taking these theological lists seriously and joyfully.

The church, we have proved, has no corner on good behavior, and is, in fact, not the only place where ethical response can be lived out. And yet, the church is the crucible where, over generations, over 175 years in this place, faith has found voice and hands, and people with whom to share this remarkable journey. It is that journey to which we are all invited, and re-invited, this morning.

What does this have to do with the war, which weighs so heavily on our hearts, even as more life is lost this morning? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. Perhaps our task on this day is what it always has been and always shall be, to be the people of God, the church of Jesus Christ, in the moment into which we are called.

We will watch the Oscars and the NCAA tournament, read books, change diapers. We will go to work and tend to our loved ones. We will be the church, singing songs, praying prayers, teaching one another and learning from one another, caring for one another, eating (!), serving those in need, welcoming babies, grieving our dead.

We will pray for peace, pray without ceasing. We will seek to live into the word, and live from it. We will hear words like “thou shall not kill” and “blessed are the peacemakers,” and rather than contriving ways to convince ourselves that those words don’t mean what they say they mean, we will seek to keep alive the rumor that they actually might.

Kathleen Norris writes that “The church is like the incarnation itself, a shaky proposition. It is a human institution, full of ordinary people, sinners like me, who say and do cruel, stupid things. But it is also a divinely inspired institution, full of good purpose, which partakes of a unity far greater than the sum of its parts. That is why it is called the body of Christ.” (Amazing Grace, page 273)

And whether we “got” that or not, whether we “get” it or not, I would add, it is a gift. It is a gift needed desperately by a world at war, needed poignantly by our hungry hearts, needed vitally by our children, and by all children, even we, who would seek to be children of God in such a time as this. In the name of the one whom we call the Prince of Peace, even Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen.