Scripture: Philippians 2:1-13
Again…good morning. You will forgive me, I’m sure, if I’m a little rusty at this. I’m grateful to Kathy, among other things, for making it possible for me to work back into worship sort of gradually. I requested to just do the sermon this morning, a little bit as though I were a guest preacher, which is a little how I feel. So Kathy prepared most of the bulletin and agreed to be here to lead worship so I could focus a little more on other things both this past week and this morning so I am grateful for that.
As I’ve said to a number of you individually, and as I’ve said silently to myself as I was driving to church last Monday and again as I was driving to church this morning, it’s good to be back. As the saying goes, it was good to be away, and it’s good to be back. I’ve been aware that I’ve missed some good stuff and some important times while I’ve been away: Desi’s baptism, Lee Walters’ last Sunday with us, Lee’s last sermons at Sojourners, not for ever and ever I hope but probably for quite a while, sermons by Kelly East’s father, Chris, and Allison Linney’s brother, George, by Richard Vaught and Adora Lee and Rebecca West, and a bunch by Kathy Baker, dancing by Kelly East and various special music contributions, gay pride observances, and much else that I’m overlooking or didn’t know about. Thanks to all the folks who made worship happen, and to everyone who put in extra effort on other aspects of church life as well over the last three months. And a personal welcome to those folks who may have visited with us for the first time over the last three months. Please don’t be shy about introducing yourselves to me when you get a chance.
As to my time away, I will try not—today or any other time—I will try not to turn the sermon into a report on “what I did on my sabbatical”. At the same time, sermons are always for me partly a result of how the world affects my inner life, and so the sermons in weeks to come will be suggested, inspired, instigated, heavily influenced by where I have been and what I have done these last three and a half months. Today, I think not so much. Today I’m focusing more on the “it’s good to be back” part, and I’m focusing on that because just to say it and go on to something else seems so weak. What else am I going to say? Out loud and in front of everyone? So I wanted to say a little more than just “it’s good to be back” and explore some of the thoughts I’m having about being back that go beyond the polite and perfunctory. For better or worse, what I have to offer this morning is a kind of extended meditation on the theme of “it’s good to be back”.
That needs to begin though with a few words on the theme of “it was good to be away.” There are all sorts of things that could be said along those lines. Sabbaticals are often spoken of in terms of rest, and respite, and renewal—words like that—and they all apply. I remember talking some in the last sermon before I left about how I anticipated that for me a sabbatical would be a release from the need or the temptation to attend constantly to what is most immediate and to become immersed in day to day tasks and how I was hoping to benefit from not being tied in for a while to everyday, needs, concerns, and projects. I think I was heading toward saying something that I didn’t quite get to that day—I honestly didn’t go back and check on what I said that day. But I think maybe what I was heading toward but didn’t quite get to then, is what I want to try to say today, so I feel like I’m sort of picking up from where I left off.
The thought I’m having is just that “faith” and “church” are two different things, that being immersed in church life is not the same thing as being close to God, though hopefully there is some connection between God and the church, but that serving the church is not the same thing as serving God, not for you and not for me.
Now none of those thoughts are difficult thoughts to have. None of them are new to me. They aren’t things I haven’t said before. They aren’t anything I don’t already know perfectly well. Nevertheless, knowing those things is different from having them impressed on you bodily, inescapably. For me more than most people there was need to be away, literally, physically, emotionally, in every way away to have that lesson embedded in me, firmly planted. I was ordained in 1969. After two years at a church, I took a year to do course work for a Ph.D. The following year I accepted a call to a church and since that time, for almost 35 years, I have not been away from church life for as long as I have just been away. I can think and talk all I want about how church and God should not be confused and faith life and church life are not the same. I can talk all I want about such things, but the reality is that I my faith life has been all tied up with my church life for a very long time. It was good for me, good for my soul, to have that connection broken for a while.
One of the books I read during the sabbatical is a book called “Leaving Church”. It’s written by a woman, Barbara Brown Taylor, whose writings I have appreciated in the past, and this book has been favorably reviewed, and it was fairly short, so I decided to read it. Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest who for a number of years served churches in Atlanta and then in a more rural area of Georgia, dedicating herself to her parish tasks and along the way earning herself a reputation as a writer and a preacher, to the extent that at one point Baylor University included her on a list of the ten most effective preachers in the United States.
The book describes how this woman, who had dedicated her life to the church, who always thought she would spend all her working years in the church, and who was doing very well by outward measures in what she had chosen to do, how it came to be that she felt she had to leave the church. I won’t try to tell the story she tells here, and I frankly wish she had reflected a bit more on some of the things that went into it, which included but are not limited to theological questions about whether Christianity is superior to other faith traditions and the conflict within the Episcopal church over homosexuality and the demands she felt ministry placed on her, many of them the demands she placed on herself, but my summary—these are my words, not hers—would be that she felt she had been waylaid in her journey toward God, and that rather than the church being the vehicle for that journey as we might hope would be the case, it had been the church in a very real sense that did the waylaying. Her way of putting it was more in terms of wholeness, that the church had ended up being an obstacle in her journey toward wholeness as a person.
I did not identify with Barbara Brown Taylor’s story in every respect. But she did echo and in many ways reinforce thoughts that I was having anyway and that I continue to have as I return to work at Sojourners. And those thoughts go something like this: that the church has value and is worthy of our energy and support only insofar as it serves as a gathering place for people who are finding their way to God. The church is not the sole vehicle for those journeys. It is not the determiner, the determinator, of how we ought to make those journeys. It does not dictate what those journeys are to consist of. It does, by the grace of God, provision us for those journeys, which of course is part of what communion is about. And it does offer a gathering place for people who in all our very personal, very different, very human, very wandering and sometimes misguided ways are finding our way to God. Many people, I’m sure, would not use those words to describe themselves, but it’s one of the ways I think about it and maybe the words resonate enough with you for you to know what I mean. I return to be part of a community where I look around and know myself to be one of a group of people who are all engaged in finding our various ways to God.
Those journeys are not all about church. The church ought to be all about those journeys, though we fail at that on a regular basis. But in any case the church is always, inevitably, by its nature of a kind of secondary importance in the overall scheme of things. And it is true that sometimes rather than being of assistance in those journeys, the church can actually get in the way.
Nevertheless, (you knew I wasn’t going to stop there), nevertheless, I also know for myself that I can only go so far in finding my way to God without the encouragement, the example, the inspiration, the insight, and the accountability of others. I know that for my relationship to God to be full I need to see the faces of God’s children all around me. I know that I need to be led to prayer by the joys and concerns of people. I know that I need to be inspired by the different expressions of faith I find in those around me. I know that I need to be given the insight to be gained from the way others are engaged in journeying toward God. I want to know that I am accompanied along my spiritual journey by people who may be journeying in very different ways from me. I want to be held accountable for tending to that journey, because it’s easy to get distracted. I know that although it was good to be away, good for my soul to be away, it’s also good, not just good, necessary to be back for me to continue on the ways I have of finding God and embracing God. It’s good to be back among friends. It’s good to be back at work I enjoy. It’s also good to be back so that I can continue my own faith journey in ways that would otherwise not be possible.
Our faith journeys can indeed be seen, I believe, as journeys toward God. They also can be understood as having a lot to do, to use the term Barbara Brown Taylor used, a lot to do with wholeness. It’s a term I find helpful as well. I chose the scripture reading for this morning not so much because of the admonition from Paul for Christians to be selfless in their dealings with each other, or his similar words about Christ, and how he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” and so forth. I chose the passage more because of the verse near the end where Paul encourages us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
That does not mean that we are supposed to be going around piling up points that will one day get us into heaven and that we’re supposed to do that with fear and trembling because if we don’t pile up enough points we will be punished rather than rewarded in the afterlife. Once upon a time I might have thought that that verse meant something like that, but I can still remember pretty clearly the day when I began to understand that salvation meant something different from heaven and hell. It was a college class on Christian theology and the teacher explained to us that day that salvation came from a Greek word that meant health or wholeness. It was not all about what happens to us after we die but was about this basic, lifelong human quest for wholeness, which is something very much akin to what I have been referring to this morning as our finding our way to God.
They may not be exactly the same thing, finding our way to God and seeking human wholeness, but they go together. And we work out our salvation, we seek wholeness, with fear and trembling because our understanding of what wholeness is is not just crystal clear, and it’s not a simple process, and it can be frustrating, and it’s not like having some single powerful religious experience that you can hold on to, and we don’t always know how best to do it, and we stumble along the way, and we don’t approach it with confidence and certainty. Nevertheless, as surely as I believe at some level we are all engaged in finding our way to God, I also believe that at some level we are all reaching toward wholeness, and sort of by definition that is not something we can do by ourselves. To be whole we need each other.
And, since wholeness, whatever it may or may not be, certainly involves seeking a wholeness for God’s creation, not just a kind of personal wholeness that we somehow imagine we can achieve in isolation, since wholeness for any of us involves seeking wholeness for all creation, it is an impossibly large task, one which we can hardly help but approach with fear and trembling. But it is also one which we as the church cannot do without. It is our salvation that is at stake, the church’s salvation, our wholeness. So I return with high hopes, knowing we are each finding our way to God and seeking wholeness and that it is our task to support one another in those crucial quests of ours and that this involves us necessarily in seeking the wholeness of the world, an impossible task, but one we cannot do without and be the church. At the same time I return with modest hopes, knowing how frail, imperfect, mixed-up, human our strivings toward wholeness are, and how merciful we need to be toward one another and ourselves. I return with high hopes but in another sense with very modest hopes. And it is good to be back. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 5, 2007