Scripture: John 3:1-10
Today is February 1. That means several things to me. It means that it’s the exact beginning of black history month, which we will be celebrating in various ways as the month goes on, not so much today maybe, but more in the weeks ahead. It also means, since the first falls on a Sunday and since this is leap year, that there will be five Sundays in February, which has to be a pretty rare occurrence—just a little oddity.
More importantly to me, I mention February 1 because it is the exact day four years ago that I began my work as pastor of Sojourners. It was, I think, a Tuesday, and there had been a snow storm very much like the one we have just been through with ice on top of snow, and I made my way to the funky little house behind Belmont Baptist Church, which was our church office at the time, and looked around and tried to imagine what ministry at Sojourners was going to be like and figure out where I should start.
I don’t keep a lot of dates like this in my head, and I’m not real big on celebrating things like birthdays or anniversaries, but this is one I do remember, because it was and is an important marker for me. Since February 1 falls on a Sunday this year, it offers me an opportunity I can’t refuse, an opportunity to say out loud what I say quietly and privately every year: thank you. Thank you God, and thank you Sojourners, for calling me to be here.
This is, I should say, more than an ordinary thank you. Coming to Sojourners represented, for me, much more than a new job. Coming to Sojourners was for me the second step—second of two—the second step in beginning a new life, the first step being meeting and marrying Ava.
Of course you didn’t know that. You were just calling someone to be your minister. You thought you were offering someone a job, not a new life. But I know better. I know there’s a danger here of being self-indulgent, and overly personal and sentimental, but I wanted to say explicitly today what I suspect most of you have no clue of and what others may have only a clue of: that coming to Sojourners has been for me the beginning of a new life. I don’t want to overstate that, but I don’t want to understate it either. And I want to say, again, thank you for offering me some gifts that you were aware you were offering, and some you were not, thank you for offering me the opportunity, if you’ll allow me to put it this way, of being born again.
Besides the opportunity to say thank you, the occasion offers me the opportunity and the encouragement to reflect on life at Sojourners in a way that I don’t usually get to do and don’t usually allow myself to do. In general I don’t think it’s a good thing for churches to think about themselves very much, and so I am reluctant to talk very much in sermons about the church as church, its needs, its wonderfulness, its strengths and weaknesses, its past, its prospects, and so forth.
There is, of course, some purpose for us, both as individuals and as an organization like the church, to be introspective. and self-aware and inward looking in certain ways—but only in certain ways, in certain very limited and focused ways. Just as our concern as persons is not primarily focused on ourselves as persons, so our concern as a church is not meant to be focused primarily on our own life as a church. We are called to be concerned for the good of God’s people, concerned for the good of God’s world, only incidentally for the good of the church, and so I don’t like to talk about that much in sermons. But I’m allowing myself to do that somewhat today.
One of the things that Sojourners unwittingly offered me that was part of this new life I was referring to was an environment in which success is desired and at least possible, maybe even likely. I had not experienced that kind of an environment before. For almost thirty years I had spent my working life in churches where success, if it was thought of at all, was remembered as a thing of the past, not anticipated as a thing of the future, where the goal was not success but survival, where an unavoidable question faced you every time you came to church and loomed over every worship service, meeting, or pot luck dinner: what is to become of us? I had become over the course of those thirty years something of an expert, if I do say so myself, at ministering in situations of pervasive congregational grief.
Sojourners offered me a needed change from all that. Not that success for Sojourners has always been assured, not that it’s ever assured for new churches, where (I don’t know the exact figures) the failure rate is much higher than the success rate. Four years ago some people were talking somewhat nervously about the future of Sojourners. Over the last four years various of us, including myself, have at various times talked a little nervously about such things as whether we would make it on our own, without subsidy from the UCC, whether we would make it through the year without a financial crisis, whether we were growing in numbers as fast as we thought we should, and so forth. Mostly not nervousness about total failure, but some nervousness about whether we were going to succeed.
Mostly though, in my experience, the mood at Sojourners has been upbeat much more than nervous. Mostly we have come through nervous times quite well, often surprising ourselves with just how well we ended up doing. Mostly the atmosphere here has been an atmosphere of success. It would take way too long, and it would be inappropriate for me to try to tell you here all the reasons why that changed atmosphere from gloom to success was and is so important to me, why it really does represent a new life, in a much deeper sense than just the fact that most people like being in a situation where things are going pretty well.
But what I can do, I thought to myself as I was thinking about this sermon, what I can do is offer some reflections on what success might mean for churches in general maybe, but also for Sojourners in particular. At first I thought I would offer you my answers to the question: “What does success mean for us?” “If Sojourners is successful 3, 5, 10, 20 years from now, what will it look like, what will we have to say about ourselves and to show for ourselves?” The answers to those questions are not obvious, at least not to me, so I thought it would be sort of fun, actually, to sit down and try to figure out how I would answer those questions, and then tell you what I came up with.
And then I thought—not. I actually do have three thoughts that I will tell you about, but the first of the three is that at least for today those questions are better left as questions. I hope I don’t think this just as a way of being lazy and finding it a lot easier not to try to answer the questions. But I do think that sometimes answering questions is a way of dismissing them. You come up with what you think are some pretty good answers to questions, and therefore you don’t have to think about them any more. They’ve already been answered. Or you come up with what you know are not very good or complete answers, but you’ve done your best for the time being and so again you can at least put the questions aside until you think of something better. At least for me, it is sometimes better to discipline yourself not to answer questions, to think about them of course but in an open-ended way, treating any answer you come up with as tentative, and avoiding any kind of closure. That’s where I am on this question of what success means for Sojourners. I think I better just keep that question open for a while, though of course I do have thoughts about it, but keep it open and therefore maybe the best I can do this morning is lay it on the table for us, and assert that it’s an important question for us to be thinking about. What will success look like for Sojourners? What do we think of as success?
But having said that, that I think the question needs to remain a question, I do have two more thoughts I’m willing to share. The first of them is more like a comment on the question, rather than an answer. And that is the rather simple thought that we should not ignore crassly measurable things like a growing membership and a growing budget as part of the overall picture of success. We do that sometimes, at least I do, and I have heard other church-type people do it too. I will say that the church is not supposed to be involved in a numbers game, that it is not our main goal to get bigger and richer, that if all we’re doing is counting up our members and our dollars then we have given up being the church. And I believe all that is true—obviously true, basically and fundamentally true. And yet…
Almost as obviously true is that growing numbers, in membership and in dollars, is not to be dismissed as part of the picture of success. Not, of course, because those are the things we are in the end trying to achieve, but because having enough of them affords us the luxury, or maybe I should say the freedom, of even asking what success means. You’ve heard sayings like, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and rich is better.” My version of that is, “I’ve had enough, and I’ve had not enough, and enough is better.” I’ve been in churches that didn’t have enough, where the annual report every year showed a dwindling membership, dwindling reserves, and a deficit budget. In such situations, it is hard, not completely impossible, but very hard to get past the question, “What is to become of us?” Churches can’t help but think about themselves. Everything is secondary to the question of how we’re going to continue to exist. The options for how to think about success don’t seem to be that many. Success is reduced essentially to survival. It was of course not the main thing, but at the same time it was not an insignificant part of the new life I felt I was beginning in coming to Sojourners, that I was coming to a place that was growing, tangibly, measurably growing, and where there was the option not to obsess on the church and its problems and its future, or lack thereof.
Which brings me back to the idea of new life, or being born again. This is the third thing I had to say about the question of success and this is more like an answer than a comment. I know I am not the only person for whom Sojourners has offered a kind of born again experience. Maybe not in the sense of representing a whole new life, as it did for me, since a large part of my life is wrapped up in and around the church. Although maybe for a few people it has meant, as it did for me, a new life. Or maybe just a new, previously unimagined, relationship to the church. One of the ways Sojourners will be successful is if it continues to offer people, wittingly and unwittingly, the possibility of being born again, not in the way we sometimes think of being born again, but nevertheless born again.
Some of you are familiar with the writings of Ann Lamott. In several of her books she tells the story of how she found her way, actually almost literally stumbled in, to a predominantly African American church at a point in her life where she was, well not exactly the picture of success, by anyone’s standard including her own. Her life was pretty much of a mess and she was pretty close to desperate. Actually I think her life was a complete mess and she had become thoroughly desperate. In any case, she writes: “When I’d first started coming to the church, I couldn’t even stand up for half the songs because I’d be so sick from cocaine and alcohol that my head would be spinning, but these people were so confused that they’d thought I was a child of God.”
For me, that’s a pretty fair description of a successful church. Ann Lamott is very clear about it: that little church gave her a whole new life. I’m pretty clear about it too, though my story is less dramatic than hers. But there are lots of ways to offer new life, and I know we have, and I hope we will continue to do it, and even more so—continue to be so confused that we believe a person is a child of God when maybe he isn’t sure of it himself, so confused that we see a person of faith in someone who doesn’t believe she has any, so confused that we continue to say thank you to people who themselves were so confused that they didn’t think they had given us anything, or even had much to offer. Believing in God is part of what church is about. But so too is believing in each other when we have trouble believing in ourselves, believing each other into new life, maybe in big ways, maybe in tiny little ways. And when we take the bread and the wine is it not a sign of our belief that everyone is a child of God? How could anyone ever be turned away from this welcome table? And when we take the bread and the wine, is it not a sign of hope, hope for new life for people—ourselves, one another, and even dare we hope it, new life for this glorious, troubled world God has given us. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 1, 2004