Scripture: Matthew 16:18
I feel like I’m just passing through this morning. Maybe I feel that way because I am just passing through. As some of you know, four of us—Becky Garrity, Millie Fife, Deb Winslow, and me—spent last weekend in Newark, Delaware at the annual meeting of the Central Atlantic Conference. We returned last Sunday afternoon, and this afternoon I leave again for two weeks, one of which will be vacation for Ava and me, but the other week, most of it, will be spent at the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, called General Synod, which Archie Thornton and I will be attending. I no sooner got back from one church meeting than I had to start preparing for the next. Church is on my mind this week, has been for a while, will be for a while, and so I can hardly avoid the topic in my preaching today. So, some comments about “church” today. Sorry, it’s where my mind is.
My first comment is that preaching about church—the institutional church in any of its forms, Sojourners, the United Church of Christ, the whole Christian church—makes me just a bit uncomfortable. You heard me just now. I apologized for preaching about church, and it does seem to me that apologies are in order. I always feel that the purpose of our coming together as church is not church, that the proper focus of the church’s attention is never really the church, and that therefore one of the last things we should be talking about in church is the church. We can and should talk about God, about our relationship to God, our sometimes suspect ideas about God, our sense of where God is to be found and when God is most real, and so on, and we can and should talk about Jesus and how we relate to him and what his teachings say to us, and how his way of life touches us and guides us and what he may reveal to us about God, and we can and should talk about the world we live in and what our faith has to say to realities of our world and how we are to struggle in that world to bring wholeness and holiness to that world, and we can and should talk about what role faith has in our personal lives, and what we can believe, and how we hold on to hope, and how love can be threatened and how it can grow, and all sorts of other topics. Way, way down on the list in my view of things is talking about church, though I do do it from time to time, usually somewhat sheepishly and apologetically.
Related to this apologetic line of thought and growing out of it is the idea that I have sometimes expressed that at Sojourners we are a church that is trying as much as we can as much as it is possible to do so not to be a church. Two weeks ago I was preaching on the text about the early church where the early Christians were described in this way: “Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home ate their food with glad and generous hearts…” I commented at the time, but didn’t elaborate on it very much, that these early Christians probably didn’t even think of themselves as church, that their church, the institutional part of their religious lives was represented by the temple. These Jewish people, who also understood themselves to be followers of Christ, expressed this Christian side of themselves in a way that would probably be more accurately described as a spiritual movement within Judaism, and even as the numbers grew and the identity became more distinct from their Jewish roots, the movement was not known right away as a church but was referred to simply as “the Way”. Anything that could be called churches came later. The Christian Church came much later. I have always been attracted by that more primitive version of Christianity, the not-yet-church version. And I have been so bold as to assert at various times that we at Sojourners are trying to recover something of that not-yet-church or not-exactly-church kind of spirit.
However, I know my view is not a unanimous view, and I have sometimes been challenged when I talk that way. People point out, for instance, that we do after all want a Sunday school program for our children, and a good Sunday school program is a well organized one, not a spiritual movement, and if we want such things we need to grow and grow up as a congregation, becoming more of what we think of as a church. At a different level, people will say to me, “well, you do after all choose to wear vestments; that’s pretty church-y”. And people will point out that although we had some spirited discussions about the pros and cons of having a building, when the opportunity presented itself, we arrived at consensus that it would be a good thing on the whole for us to have a location, a place to be, a space of our own, that it would be a good thing to become more institutional in these ways, and that although “the church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a dwelling place, the church is the people”, nevertheless, a building can help, help a congregation to become a church in good ways, and that the permanence and stability, not to mention all the good uses to which space may be put, that all of this is a good thing, or can be a good thing, and that trying not to be a church is a little bit little like refusing to grow up, not always a very attractive quality.
I know all that, and I accept all that, but I don’t completely give in to all of that. I believe there needs to be a voice in our heads, we church people, I believe there needs to be a voice alive among us that questions the institutional side of our church life, a voice that doggedly and inconveniently reminds us that our concern is not with the needs of the church but with the needs of the world around us, reminds us that the good we seek is the good of God’s world and God’s people everywhere, not the good of the church, not the good of Sojourners, of the UCC, or of the Christian Church, reminds us that we are not a club of like-minded believers complete with our own language, magic words, and rituals but rather people who, in covenant with each other, hope and work and pray for the reign of God on earth. If there is not a persistent, persuasive voice alive among us always asking us what we are really here for, troubling our consciences, then we are missing a crucial part of what it means to be a church. Any church that is being true to what it means to be a church will always be hearing a voice that calls it to be something other than a church. It’s one of those paradoxes that goes with being people of faith.
None of these thoughts are new at Sojourners. We have said such things to each other as we talk about budgets, and benevolences and property acquisition and maintenance, and many other issues. In fact, that question of how we go about being church in some untraditional or unchurchly ways, lies behind many or most of the discussions we have. I have said some version of these thoughts in sermons many times, I think, not because I think we at Sojourners are in special need of hearing such things, but precisely because I think the tension I am trying to describe is especially part of who we are at Sojourners and as such needs to be lifted up on a regular basis, just as we lift up other parts of who we are, such as being an open and affirming congregation.
And that brings me to some comments in the spirit of pride month and also in connection with the church meetings I have just come from and am about to go to. From a certain perspective I should be avoiding these meetings like the plague. If the local church can run the danger of becoming a little too institutional, that danger is magnified at the regional and national level. Bigger budgets, more staff, lots of time, energy, and money put into church meetings, some discussion about what it means to be a follower of Christ in today’s world, more discussion, seemingly lots more discussion, about what it means to be a member of the United Church of Christ: how do we strengthen our denomination, how do we attend to its needs, promote its welfare, conduct its business. One of the major items of discussion at the meeting Archie and I will be going to is a proposal about how to reorganize the governing structure of the denomination. It’s a controversial proposal and the discussion will likely be passionate and contentious. It will be that way because many people feel important values are at stake, but it will also seem to some like church politics, and in any case this is very much the institutional form of the church. It is not all about loving God and loving neighbor, not all about doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. Nevertheless…
Well, for one thing it’s not all as bad as I am making it sound. I will be so bold as to speak for Millie, Deb, and Becky as well as myself in saying that we actually enjoyed being at the meeting last weekend and found it to be much more of a blessing than a burden. But what I want to say is more than just that meetings like these can be worthwhile, have speakers well worth hearing, workshops that are interesting, resources to learn about, and people you’re glad to meet. What I want to say is that in spite of everything I have already said, I believe my denomination is not all about institutional/organizational matters. If you go to the web site of the Central Atlantic Conference, you will be greeted on the home page with these words: Welcome to the Central Atlantic Conference, an open and affirming conference where God is still speaking. I don’t know if that seems like a big deal to you. It is a big deal to me. It says that the Central Atlantic Conference is out and proud. It doesn’t have the attitude that “well, we adopted this stance a while ago in favor of full inclusion of lgbt people in the church at the conference level as well as in local churches, but let’s not flaunt it. Let’s be sort of low key about it. Let’s not go looking for controversy. We can be quietly open and affirming.” It doesn’t take that attitude at all. It says this is who we are, this is who we proudly are.
It is not a stance that is driven primarily by what is in the best interests of the conference as an institution or organization, as a church in that sense. Neither was it necessarily to the UCC’s best interest when it became the first mainline denomination to ordain an openly gay candidate for the ministry in 1972, just a few short years after Stonewall. Or when we took a stand for marriage equality four years ago. In spite of the weight of “institutionalism”, if I can coin a word, the United Church of Christ has often ventured into areas where the institutional church has been reluctant to go. Like Sojourners, I believe the United Church of Christ is trying at least in some ways to be an unchurchly kind of church, living in that tension between the need to be responsible and grown up on the one hand, but on the other hand never being so grown up that realism trumps all other values and willing to go in some directions where being who you are is not necessarily in your own self-interest.
Just one more thought about church for today. Barbara Brown Taylor is a widely read author, an Episcopalian priest who has published several books of sermons and has written about both “the church” and “being a Christian” from the perspective that those two things are not necessarily the same and can sometimes be in contradiction to each other. In one of her books she has a section about all the ways language is being misused and corrupted these days. Among many examples, she uses the rather homey example of misleading phrases used in grocery stores such as “all natural ingredients” or “vine-ripened tomatoes”. She goes on to say that the church does this too, and she gives as an example church signs that say “all are welcome”, which she says always makes her think of vine-ripened tomatoes. She has seen that sign, she says, on churches where she knows it to be blatantly untrue. In fact, she says, she has never really known a church where truly all are welcome (though I would insert here that some can come a lot closer to that goal than others). Instead of church signs that say “all are welcome” she says, she would prefer a sign that said “danger: Christians worship here; enter at your own risk.”
I suppose she could have meant by that that Christians are people you just might not want to associate with, the reality being that they can often be found to be of questionable moral character. She might have meant that, or partly meant that. But I hope she also meant that there are encounters that take place in churches—encounters between people, encounters between people and the scriptures, encounters between people and God—that there are encounters that take place in churches that might result in one becoming less well adjusted to a world that shouldn’t be adjusted to, that might result in asking questions that we wouldn’t otherwise ask, important, even crucial questions, but maybe uncomfortable questions, encounters that might lead us to feeling some call or claim upon us that we didn’t know was there or that we had been resisting. In any case, what I think Barbara Brown Taylor did mean is that you just never know what you may find when you enter the doors of a church. You might find friendship, support, forgiveness, profound peace, a deeper relationship with a God you weren’t sure about, or you might find restlessness, a troubled conscience, more questions than answers, and less peace than you had before you entered. You might find just what you were looking for or things you never imagined. Danger: Christians worship here. Enter at your own risk…in the sense that if we enter with an open spirit, we will not be entirely in control of what happens as a result, if we enter with a spirit open to God, we never know where it will lead. May God help us to be church in that way, open indeed as much as we can be to all God’s children, open also to the spirit of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 21, 2009