Sermon for January 5, 2003
Scripture: John 1:1-18
I have a number of things on my mind as we come into a new calendar year and begin a new season of the church’s life as well. The week between Christmas and New Year both Ava and I were on vacation and although we stayed in town, we succeeded pretty well in shutting ourselves off from the world, not answering the phone, not paying too much attention to e-mail, and so forth.
I have to confess, however, that I compromised somewhat on my intention not to do ministerial-type work while I was on vacation. As I went about trying to prepare myself for the New Year in various ways, I did allow myself to make a list of things that occurred to me that I needed to do or contribute to when I returned to work. I was firm about not actually doing any of the things that needed to be done, but I allowed myself to think of them and make a note of them and it wasn’t long before the list began to look fairly long—and daunting. And it was, and is, only a partial list. I’m well aware that there are a lot more things to be added.
So I start my year behind. Lots of things to occupy my time and my mind, many of them left over from the previous year, unfinished business that didn’t go away just because New Year came around. We don’t wipe our slates clean at New Year. We just hope, I hope anyway, that I can come back to those waiting tasks with some little bit of new energy, or resolve, or perspective. It’s the perspective that I want to talk about some this morning.
I don’t need to trouble you with my list. There are different times and various ways to address the various items on my agenda for the church, and your agenda for the church. For now I just feel a need to try to put into words what I’m thinking about how to think about the church and all the specific items that may be on its agenda at any given time. I need a framework in which to think about things, and for better or worse you are the captive audience I get to try to share my thoughts with, or inflict my thoughts upon, and I’m not even sure how clear I can be in describing what it is that’s concerning me or why I feel a need to talk about it. But here goes.
I remember thinking about this time last year that this was going to be an important year for Sojourners, what with it being the first year we were to be on our own financially and still being a young church and experimenting with different ways to do things like Sunday School and considering what we want to do about things like a place of our own, and so forth. Obviously these are a few of the things I refer to that we are carrying over as concerns to this year as well. And I find myself thinking the same thing this year, that this is going to be an important year for Sojourners.
But…there’s a very important “but” to all of this. None of those things I just mentioned, or any of the other things on my agenda or yours for the church, are quite so important if it is all about, if all it is about is making Sojourners into a relatively strong, stable, and successful institution called a church. Even if that church is called Sojourners and does lots of good things and has some good ideas about what a church ought to be that it’s trying to put into practice, still if all my church “to do” items are focused on strengthening an institution called Sojourners, then all those things are important (because I do want Sojourners to succeed as an institution), but they are not quite as important as I want them to be.
These are not new thoughts for me, but I need reminders every so often, and this week the reminder came in the form of the scripture reading for this week. The reading from John is meant, I think, to close out the Christmas season. We’ve read verses from it at several different times over the last month. For some people this is a beautiful reading. For others it is, I know, hopelessly obscure, all this talk about the Word in the beginning and was not anything made that was made. For some it is both beautiful and obscure. I think I fall into that category, though I have chosen to hear it in a way that makes sense to me. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” For me, that is not a statement about what I am supposed to believe about Jesus, nor about some metaphysical event where something heavenly was transformed into something earthly. What it says to me more simply is that in the person of Jesus faith became flesh, became embodied in human life, was not just words, ideas, theories, theologies, beliefs, but took on in Jesus a human form, became in other words a way of life. And it is not a long or difficult jump for me to hear in that statement that I am not supposed to sit back and admire Jesus but that for me too faith is meant to be a way of life.
And it is not a far jump at all from that thought, that faith is meant to be a way of life, to the realization that this is the context of my church “to do” list. The context is not the church. It only appears that there are these things to do that would be beneficial to Sojourners United Church of Christ. Building up the church is not, I hope, what we are about here. Not that that’s a bad thing. Most of us, I know, want to see this organization thrive. We want it to be a healthy, vital organization so that as an organization, together we can do a bunch of good things. But as much as I want that to be the case, that Sojourners does well as an organization, it is not where my heart is. Where my heart is and where my prayers are in a larger sense is in my effort to make faith a way of life for me, and in what I hope is our common effort to make faith a way of life for us together. That is the necessary context for whatever it may be that we do as or for Sojourners the church.
Let me be clear here. I am not suggesting, I am precisely not suggesting, that church become a way of life. It’s too easy for churches to think that they deserve that. Or since churches don’t really think, maybe it’s the ministers, for whom church really does become a way of life, who think that the same really ought to be true for everyone. You’ve probably heard ministers say, I know I’ve often said, that religion is not just some compartment of life, some segment separate from everything else. Religion is not something to do when we are not doing other things that are more immediate or more important or more interesting. Religion is not one of the menu items we choose from every day. Religion is not a part of life but more like the framework within which all of life takes place. It’s a worldview that determines how we see things and the decisions we make. It is what shapes the way we live in all its aspects, or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. That’s what it is when faith becomes a way of life. But when we recognize that religion is not just a piece of life, church people, ministers especially, make this little clever switch to talking as if church should be this all-pervading reality in people’s lives. After all church is about religion and religion is all pervasive, we say, or ought to be.
But—and this may be ridiculously obvious, but nevertheless necessary to say on a regular basis—church and religion, church and faith are two different things. A life that is full of church is not necessarily faith-full. And it is a faithful life that we seek, not a church-full one. What we are doing when we come together here is not to build up a successful church, but to encourage one another in faithful ways of living. A successful church is at best only a by-product of that effort, to have the word become flesh in us, to make faith into a way of life. The church has a legitimate claim to make on us as one of the many organizations that we may want to support with our time and ideas and money. But it does not have a claim on our souls. Only God has a claim to make there. Only a calling to turn religious faith into a way of life has a claim that goes to the center of our being.
This is the perspective I referred to at the start that I need to have and keep when I think of my churchly “to do” list or any of our agendas for the church. They only make sense, they only have real meaning if what we are doing is not church work, exactly, but is the human, extra-churchly effort to help one another turn faith into a way of life, to have the word become flesh in us. This means to me, among others things, that it is not the job of the church to fill all our needs for worship, but in our worship to equip us to be worshipful in other ways at other times and places. It means that our work of justice does not need, must not be limited to, what we are able to do or find it convenient to do as a church, but that the our work of justice here help us to build the doing of justice into the fabric of our lives. We need to be determined that the church do what it can and what it is called to do. But we also need to be clear that the church is not the only vehicle we have for making faith into a way of life, and that may mean sometimes being gentle with ourselves about what we are not doing as a church. God’s work is not always done through churches.
But it’s also not just the effort to help one another do this as individuals. It’s also the effort to build faith as a way of life among us. I enter the New Year hoping to make my life more faithful. It’s already quite church-full thank you. It’s not yet quite as faithful as I would like it to be, or in all the ways I would like it to be. And I do look to other Sojourners to find companions in the search to turn faith into a way of life. In the end it’s not an individual task. It’s not something we’re likely to be successful at individually. It’s also something that’s much richer when we do it together. A way of life is meant to be led not just in isolation. It is meant to be a shared way of life. And honestly, I think that is not easy, really not easy because of the realities of who we are. We tend to go our own separate ways and just come together for specific purposes or projects. And that’s o.k., that’s suitable if all we’re trying to do is get this or that done, or build up an organization that has this and that program and has done that and this project. But if we’re trying to forge a way of life for ourselves, we need to overcome that individualism that is so deeply ingrained in us.
I seek, I know, as I enter this New Year, more than to spruce up my own way of life as one that has faith as its center. Even more, I seek a caring community of people who want to make faith into a shared way of life. People who also see themselves that way don’t necessarily have to agree from the beginning on what that means. They only have to share that understanding and that prayer that faith become a complete way of life. Speaking just for myself and using just the words I can come up with this week, I feel I am seeking a way of life that will be characterized by honesty, mercy, reflectiveness, reverence, gratitude, inclusiveness, peace-seeking, and justice-making. Again, we don’t have to agree on how to go about any of these things, or even what they mean. We only need to agree on the value of letting such words become flesh in us, and on our need to do some of this work together. That something like this take place among us here at Sojourners in the coming year is my prayer. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 5, 2003