Matthew 7:24-27
The scripture for this morning and the hymn we just sang both lead in, in a rather unsubtle way, to what I want to talk about. I have been wanting to talk about our possible plans for a Sojourners building project for some time now, feeling that we need to put our concerns in this direction in the context of worship. Next Sunday at the congregational meeting there will be an update and some opportunity to share thoughts and feelings at this point in the process, and so it seemed to me like this Sunday would be a good time for me to try to gather some of my thoughts and offer them to you for whatever they’re worth. The timing of this must have been pre-ordained because when Ellen Ryan and I met about worship for this morning and I told her what I had in mind to talk about, she pointed out to me that the lectionary reading for this morning is the one you heard about building houses on rock or sand. It was meant for me to be talking about building today. And so of course I had to do the obvious and choose a hymn which is also about building.
It’s not my intention today to offer some definitive or last word on any of the many issues we will need to discuss as we move along on this. I always hope that my sermons will be received as open-ended, encouraging further thought or discussion, not closing it off. And that is especially true on this subject. I see what I have to say today as just a small part of a much larger discussion that we will all need to have and that will take a while for us to have. (A good opportunity to engage in that discussion will be Tuesday night, as well as next Sunday.) But what I want to try to do this morning is not so much to weigh in with my opinions on any specific issues, but to try to offer a possible context for the discussion, to offer a reminder that all of our discussions do take place in the broadly spiritual context of who we understand ourselves to be as a community of faith.
I went to seminary at a time when it was commonly assumed that churches suffered from something we called the edifice complex. Referring of course to the tendency of churches to get lost in the building and maintaining of church buildings, losing track of what churches were supposed to be about in the process. This could take the form of building committees who saw children as terrorists bent on smashing M&Ms into pews and making spontaneous attempts to decorate church walls with crayon.—to large amounts of money spent on plush carpeting or pipe organs—to refusing to allow homeless people to sleep in the church basement because there might be some damage to the property. We all knew at the time that the edifice complex was an unhealthy condition, and we knew that most churches had it to one degree or another, that where the condition actually appeared it was almost always undiagnosed and untreated, and that quite often it was fatal. We seminarians all hoped to avoid serving in such churches and vowed that we would not put up with it if we ever found ourselves, God forbid, in such a situation.
Here I am, roughly thirty-five years later, serving a church that has decided to call itself Sojourners, that has in fact led a kind of nomadic life all throughout its existence and has prospered doing so, that is, as I read it, very clear that institutional maintenance is not what a church should be about, that wants to talk about and act upon “things that matter”, and that does not include the color of carpets or cobwebs in the corners, that might want to travel light in the world and not be weighed down with too much “stuff”, that knows it doesn’t need churchly stuff to be a church, but that nevertheless, in spite of all this, is seriously considering entering in to a serious building project. Does it make you slightly uncomfortable that we are talking about spending a major amount of money and devoting a major amount of attention to a building project? That we SOJOURNERS are doing this? It does me.
There are other things that make me nervous here. What is the most boring part of the Bible? I know. There are a lot of right answers to that question. But surely one of the prime candidates for the most boring part would have to be those sections, in 1Kings and 1Chronicles and elsewhere that give us verbal blueprints for the building of the temple.
“In the fourth year of King Solomon’s reign, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord. (It was) sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide across the width of the house, and thirty cubits high. The vestibule in front of the nave of the house was twenty cubits wide, across the width of the house. Its depth was ten cubits in front of the house. For the house he made windows with recessed frames. He also build a structure against the wall of the house, running around the walls of the house, both the nave and inner sanctuary, and he made side chambers all around. The lowest story was five cubits wide…and so on.” This goes on for a while.
There are some parts of the Bible that are inspiring, some that are intriguing, some that are challenging. There are parts of the Bible that call us to justice or love or forgiveness or praise. There are parts of the Bible that are none of those things but that are at least juicy, at least tell a good story. But the parts of the Bible that are concerned with the building of a house of God are none of those. Whereas the Bible at its best at least points our minds and spirits in the directions they need to be directed in—toward God, toward other people—these passages about building do not. They are not only boring, which I admit is a judgment call on my part, but more than that they distract us from “things that matter”. Does it make you at all uncomfortable that if we were to decide on a building project of some kind, of any kind, we would necessarily be devoting our attention to how many cubic cubits of space we would need for this or that, and how many side chambers there will be and whether there will be a vestibule out front or cherubim on the walls. Does having our attention focused in those directions make you uncomfortable? It does me.
Our storybook of faith, the Bible, actually does address this issue. It does much more than offer us descriptions we didn’t ask for. It deals with how building things can be a danger to faith. It suggests that settling down and settling in physically can lead to settling down and settling in spiritually. The stories send very mixed messages about building projects and of even having a place of one’s own.
The Hebrew people wandered for forty years in the wilderness, and the story of those years is not a romantic one. It’s filled with hardships and people grumbling and getting tired and discouraged and losing their faith. It’s not that those forty years were just a picture of perfect faith and love. But on the other hand, when the people get ready to enter the promised land, they are reminded, they are warned that they should not forget what it was like to be a sojourner in the land of Egypt, not forget what it was like being journeyers through the wilderness, remember that they do not need to go anywhere to find God but that God finds them, remember that worship is a moveable feast, remember that the people of God do not need a place in order to be a people. Arriving at the promised land is a good thing, but not if it causes you to lose your sense of being on a journey with God. Building a temple may be a good thing, but not if it makes your God smaller and your imagination smaller. In ways too numerous to describe this morning, the people of God knew that they were headed for a more settled way of existence but were uneasy about doing it, or maybe it was God who was uneasy. In any case, it was possible that in settling down they could lose their soul.
Jesus taught in the temple and cleansed the temple in order to purify it and make it what it was supposed to be, a house of prayer for all people, but he also suggested that true worship, worship that is carried out in spirit and truth, has little to do with the temple. He worshiped in the synagogue but just about everything he did was elsewhere. The early Christians went to the temple to worship in the ways of their ancestors and met in homes to try to figure out together what they were being called to in this life that had come about as a result of their association with Jesus. Houses of worship have a role, but a small role, in the ministries of Jesus and his followers, and they have a role, but a small role, in the way I think about communities of faith. So how do we deal with this uneasiness about church building that is rooted in the Biblical stories, that may be rooted at least for some of us, in our own attitudes? And how do we hear the words of Jesus when he speaks of building on rock rather than upon sand? How would we apply his words to our situation?
Of course I don’t have the definitive answer to that, or an answer that’s going to work for everyone. But I have an answer to suggest. It helps me if we don’t think too quickly or too specifically or too clearly about buildings, about rooms and fixtures and whether we want this or that, but if instead we think more about the ideas and the values we would want to be expressed in a physical location, wherever it is and whatever it consisted of. And I have some thoughts about what some of those ideas or values ought to be, again offered not in any spirit of being a formal proposal, or anything firm, but in a spirit of contributing to a discussion.
I think, for instance, of hospitality. We are a welcoming congregation in the broad sense of that word. We have understood ourselves that way from the beginning. It is written in our mission statement. It is an important part of who we are that we extend a welcome to people who may have felt unwelcome elsewhere, because of race or gender or sexual orientation, because of expectations to believe in a certain way, act in a certain way, dress in a certain way. We mean to be inclusive. We mean to be accessible. We mean to share whatever it is that we have as a congregation in the community—money, time, skill, space.
All of this has implications of course. It would mean that any place we would occupy would need to be literally accessible, physically available to be people. It would need to look welcoming. Perhaps it would need to open out onto the world, rather than have the appearance of being walled off from the world. It would need to have space for guests or partners or collaborators. We continue to work at developing some more or less formal working relationship with partners or collaborators, and you’ll hear more about that next week, but whether or not we are able to develop such a relationship in some formal sense, there would need to be built into our own planning the thought of offering hospitality in some form, of having a building fit for guests.
Another word or value that comes to mind is simplicity. One of the things this means to me is that a building project not cost too much. By “costing too much” of course I mean that it not take too much of our money, because there are other good things to do with money besides build a church structure. But I also mean that it not cost too much in terms of what it takes from the world around us, that it not cost too much not only in terms of your resources and mine but of the earth’s, that it not be too much of a wound into the natural world of Charlottesville. Many people know that one of the world’s leading figures in earth friendly architecture is William McDonough, whose firm is based in Charlottesville. Ellen read from a sermon of his given at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. I don’t know what his religious affiliation is, if any, but his thinking is clearly religious. Whether or not we were able to engage his firm in any project we did, we would certainly want to engage them in conversation as much as they were willing.
Another word that comes to mind, and the last one I’ll deal with for now, is usability. Of course one sense of this word is the kind of discussion that comes naturally. Thinking about space means thinking about some place we can use for worship, and education, and communication, and a bit of storage. We want a building that is functional for certain basic things. But it also means to me—and this goes along with simplicity too—that we don’t want or need a structure that does more than what we need it for. We don’t so much seek a structure to have as a structure that we will occupy, when we need to. It will be a building that we may own in a legal sense but that does not own us. It will be a building that will not so much house a church as be one of the places we carry out our life together. By no means the only one. And by no means intended to turn a living, breathing community of God’s people into an institution.
This is in no way an exhaustive list of values. I know I will be thinking of others and you will too. And we will be thinking of all the ways, for instance, that a spirit of welcome might be expressed in a building or a place. And of course all of this is a lot easier for me to say than it is to actually have a building, for instance, that we will own but that will not own us.
There is a lot more thinking to be done. More importantly there is a lot more talking to be done among ourselves. We will get tired of talking if there is too much talking about square cubits. I hope we will not get tired of talking about how we are going to be Sojourners in the community of Charlottesville and what place a building or a space may have in our plans and our prayers. We will need that kind of talk if we are going to build on rock rather than sand. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 2, 2002