Scripture: 2Corinthians 5:16-21
My first foray into organized church work took place just about forty years ago. Until this week, I hadn’t thought about that experience in a very long time, maybe because I’ve been blocking it out, maybe just because I didn’t have any particular reason to. But I guess the direction of my thinking for the sermon this week triggered the memories.
I was a newly enrolled student in the ministry program at the University of Chicago, having switched into that program from the Ph.D. program. I had amazed myself making that decision and for some time, I think, had had fairly frequent out of body experiences, looking at myself and wondering if that was really me who had done this strange thing, and maybe thinking that I ought to tell that person, whoever he was, that he had made a big mistake and should get out while the getting was good.
As I gradually collected myself, got my self together, and became a little more comfortable with the decision, I also decided that I should probably explore the ministry not just by reading books and sitting in a classroom talking about it, but by at least dipping my big toe in the waters of life in an actual Christian church. It had been a while since I had been in any church at all. I had grown up in a church, liked it, been about as active as you could expect a teenager to be, but then stopped going for a period of about seven or eight years. And since my childhood church had been Unitarian of a certain variety, I had never actually been active in a church that considered itself Christian.
So I went and applied for a job at a church in the area of the university, which happened to be both United Church of Christ and American Baptist. It was a church where a good number of Divinity School faculty members attended, as well as faculty from the neighboring Chicago Theological Seminary, a United Church of Christ institution. It turns out that a good portion of the teenagers in this church were the children of these faculty members who made their living in the field of religion, and that these teenagers were almost without exception not coming to church. The church wanted someone to work with these teenagers, establish some sort of a connection with them. I was told, and later found out for myself, that these young people had issues, lots of issues. They had issues with their parents…of course. They had issues with the government and with the Vietnam war…it was the ‘60’s. They had issues with the church…because they didn’t necessarily believe what they thought the church wanted them to believe, and because the church, though composed largely of people of liberal persuasions, was not nearly as engaged as it should have been in the civil rights movement. They saw the church as applauding politely, and safely, from the sidelines. They had other issues too, but those as I found out, were some of the biggies.
I knew, when I heard what the situation was, that—dispensing with any false modesty here—that I was the best person for this job. They were not likely to find anyone better suited for this job, because I had all those issues too, or most of them. I wasn’t all that different from the young people I would be working with. In fact I maybe identified with them too much to do a good job. But the good church folks who interviewed me ended up agreeing that this was probably a good match, and they hired me. They hired me to do a few other things, but mostly to teach what they thought of as a senior high Sunday school class, though I convinced them not to say those words out loud.
It was clear from the beginning that this senior high class, discussion group, whatever it was that I was supposed to organize, that this was not going to be a Bible study group. What we came up with, the Christian ed. director and I, was a plan where we would pretend that we—the teenagers and I—were going to start a church of our own. We sent out personal invitations to the teenage members of the church to come to a meeting where we would discuss starting a church from scratch, an alternative church, a church that could be different in any way they wanted it to be different, where there were no “givens” as to what a church had to be, where the people were completely free to imagine the church the way they thought it should be, not just suggest some improvements to the way the church actually was. The idea of course was that this could get us into all sorts of discussions about things like the purpose of worship or what a church should say it believes in or stands for, or what a church should use its money for, or what the role of a minister might be…and all sorts of other worthwhile topics. We thought it was a pretty good idea, worth a try, but of course had no idea whether anyone would come.
Amazingly, a fair number of people did come. Not all of them came with a great attitude, but those that didn’t have a great attitude at least had attitude. And even more amazingly a fair number of the fair number kept coming, more or less regularly, for the better part of the year. It seemed to spark at least some interest among the teenagers to try to imagine what they would do if they were starting a church, and the exercise actually proved invaluable to me, as I thought through some of the issues myself and came to understand myself a little better, why I thought a life in the church might be for me. At the end of the year we decided we had milked this idea about as much as we could and when summer came that was the end of it. It had just been play after all, pretend. We all knew we weren’t really going to start a church.
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to relate all this to you. I guess I sort of got into it. But maybe you sense a little bit where I’m going with it too. When I came here in 2000, I don’t precisely recall recalling the experiment with high schoolers in the mid-60’s, but obviously I’m recalling it now. And I do know that one of the things that appealed to me—I’ve talked often about how I wanted to serve a church that had significant diversity in lots of ways, that was open and affirming, and that in addition to nurturing the spiritual life cared in concrete ways about social justice—but in addition to all that, one of the things that appealed to me was certainly the opportunity to be part of something new. Being called to serve at Sojourners was a little bit like receiving one of those invitations we sent out to the high schoolers. “You are invited to participate in starting a church. Your ideas are welcome and needed about what a church should be like. Whatever your ideas are, they are welcome. They don’t have fit with anyone else’s ideas, or with what you think someone else wants you to think, or with anything that’s like any church you know about. You are free to imagine the church the way you think it should be, not just the way it is but a little bit better, but the way it should be.” Coming to Sojourners had that kind of appeal for me, except that in this case it wasn’t pretend; it was for real. I’m thinking now that it was like coming full circle, in a way back to where I started, except now with more than 30 years experience in real life churches where the weight of the past was very real and there were a whole lot of givens. I was more than happy to come to a situation where there was a chance to create a church, not just figure out how you were going to act in a situation where most everything is a given.
Of course, by the time I got to Sojourners, we were no longer creating anything “from scratch”. A lot of the really hard work that is necessary to create a church had been done already. A whole bunch of issues had been worked through. The people who were here in the early years had made lots of decisions about what they wanted this particular church to be and to stand for. I’m sure a lot of the work that had been done was hard, both in the time and effort that went into it and in working through disagreements. I hope that work was also exciting. I guess I’ve never really asked people who were involved in it this question, whether they felt it as exciting or whether the exhilaration of creating something new tended to get buried under the difficulties and the worries about whether the effort would succeed and so forth.
In any case, the thought of being part of that effort was exciting to me, even coming into it eight years down the road. There were still lots of choices to be made, lots that wasn’t given, lots of opportunity to be part of the shaping of Sojourners. And in addition, Sojourners had said, in its name and in lots of other ways, that it saw this creative spirit as pretty much at the heart of the kind of church it wanted to be, that it didn’t want to get stuck in places or just settle in to ways of doing things without thinking about them, that faith was a journey and that the faith community needed to think of itself as being on a journey, always ready to think about new things, to question itself, to be “open to God’s call to move on”.
And that was not just a nice sentiment. The reality of life I found at Sojourners in 2000 was pretty much that way. And, in my experience of it, it still is, six years later in 2006. When Martha Haertig and I started talking about a couple of worship services around the theme of creation, she commented (these are my words, not hers, but to the effect…) that it feels much these days like we are recreating ourselves all the time, learning to live in a building that is ours, welcoming visitors and new members and being re-created in that sense, starting new programs, and so forth. We are finding ourselves in new places, literally and figuratively, looking around and asking ourselves how we want to go about being church in this new place we find ourselves. It can be unsettling sometimes, but then Sojourners has said it means to be unsettled in an ongoing sort of way, and that if we are to be faithful to that spirit we will constantly be in the mode of creating, re-creating, shaping Christian community, almost, but not really, but in a way as though we were starting from scratch, and never doing things just because “that’s what churches do” or because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” or because that’s what the church growth gurus say you should do if you want to appeal to generation x, y, or z. If we were able to hold on to that spirit of creating something new, it would keep faith fresh and church life vital.
Maybe something like this applies in our personal lives as well. It would be a blessing, wouldn’t it, to wake up in the morning and receive the world as brand new, as though it were fresh from the hand of God, as though morning had broken like the first morning, as though everything was fresh and alive, not the same old same old, but filled with wonder. It would be a blessing to receive everything, each day, as a gift, people too, everything, no place for world-weariness and cynicism, just gratitude. Maybe that’s part of what Paul meant when he said that if anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation, maybe he meant in part that such a person lives as though each day were a new creation.
Honestly, I’m not often in a good enough mood in the morning for that to be the case. I’m mostly not awake enough for a while to be filled with wonder and gratitude. But there’s another reason that’s not going to happen. We may be able to work at opening ourselves to the wonder of being given a new day, but we don’t come into that day as a brand new creation. We come into it with things to do that we really need not to forget about, or that maybe we aren’t prepared for. We come into it with worries or resentments or other leftovers from the day before. We come into it with hopes that have been hard won, and hurts that won’t go away. We come into it with all sorts of things, good and bad, painful and joyful, all the things that make us who we are. We may try to approach each day with some measure of wonder or gratitude, but that’s just a small part of it. We also try to enter each new day somehow being true to the person we have become and everything that has gone into that and trying to put the hope and hurt, the joy and the pain to some good and loving purpose.
So too with the church. As important as it may be to have a faith that is not habitual, as important as it may be to have fresh approaches to what it means to be a faith community, as interesting and as energizing as it may be to have the opportunity to shape a church from the ground up and to continually re-shape the church as you go along, we don’t create a church from scratch or make it up out of ideas that we dreamed up all by ourselves. We are here because of what has gone before, and who has gone before. We are surrounded, as Hebrews says, by a great cloud of witnesses. Some of them are our ancestors in the faith. Some of them have done terrible things in the name of our faith and our God. Some of them have done extraordinarily selfless things, have lived extraordinarily selfless lives because of their faith. Some have sacrificed a great deal to try to make sure that the faith that was handed down to them will be handed down to future generations, and we are indebted to them. Some of the great cloud of witnesses that surround our efforts to create a church, some of those witnesses are people who have been condemned, abused, or turned away by the church, and we are aware that our church-creating efforts are being witnessed by them too. And now just 14 years into the life of this faith community some of that cloud of witnesses are people who preceded us at Sojourners, people who have now crossed over or who have simply moved on to other places. All Saints Day and All Souls Day are just a few days away. It’s a good time to remember that in what we do here we are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful in saying this, but just as as individuals we enter the gift of each new day with a lot of baggage that keeps each day from being entirely new, so in our efforts to create and recreate the church we come to our tasks with lots of baggage. Some of it is good baggage. It carries treasures that we don’t want to lose. Some of it is baggage that just weighs us down. In any case it affects how we go about the project of creating a church. However free we mean to be of assumptions and stereotypes and molds that we’re supposed to fit into as we try to make up the church, however good it may be to think of ourselves as entirely free to make the church more the way it is supposed to be, we don’t come to that task free of baggage, or perhaps I should say that we don’t come to that task free of our inheritance. We bring with us all that the Christian church as been for good and for ill, and we try to make something of it that is as good and as loving as we can manage.
It is that tension between being willing to rethink and re-examine everything and trying to be open to all possibilities on the one hand and on the other hand being aware of being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and being aware of our indebtedness to those who have gone before—it is living in that tension between acknowledging where we have been as Christians and being true to the best of what has been and trying to move in some new, fresh direction toward what the Christian church needs to become—it is living in this kind of tension that gives life at Sojourners its vitality. It is, for me, one of the things that makes life at Sojourners right now—excuse the expression—priceless. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 29, 2006