Scripture: 2Corinthians 4:1-12
I have known for quite some time what I wanted to preach about this morning. In January, at our congregational meeting, we adopted a proposal regarding how we intended to live out the outreach and social justice commitments, which are important to us here at Sojourners. We agreed at that time to the idea that we would establish a certain limited number of groups with a particular focus in some area of outreach and social justice, and that we would ask each person who is a member of Sojourners, and anyone who is so inclined, to commit themselves to one of these groups.
The idea has been from the beginning that we would do this, not just in some random or haphazard fashion, but that we would do this in a formal ceremony, during worship, as a sign of the covenant we have with each other, members and friends of this community of faith, that just as we bring our monetary gifts every Sunday during worship and once a year bring our pledge commitments forward during worship, that on some occasion we would bring our commitment to one of these areas of outreach and social concern during worship as an additional sign of what our commitment to this community of faith consists of. And then we would follow up in some way with those who were not present on that Sunday.
When we adopted this proposal, we left several matters unresolved: For instance, how many groups would there be and how would we decide what those groups would be? So the church council had a bit of processing to do after the congregational meeting, and then there were already plans in place for many of the Sundays during February and March, including an early Palm Sunday and Easter, so it was difficult to move forward before now, but it has been clear that we wouldn’t want to delay in moving forward after Easter. So I have known for some time that I would want to say some words on this topic the Sunday after Easter in preparation for the Sunday when we will actually make that commitment, which will be April 20.
I haven’t known exactly what I would say today, just that I would want to say something about this new venture on our part. It does feel a little bit, even to me it feels a little bit, like bringing church business into worship and making items of church business the subject of my sermon. That’s something I don’t like to do and don’t think is particularly appropriate, so I guess the first thing I want to talk about, partly for my own benefit, is why this is not a matter of church business, not really.
It can be thought of that way in one sense of course. In one sense it is just about creating a structure that we think will help us accomplish a few things more effectively. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. And if it doesn’t we’ll try something else. In one sense maybe this could be seen as a matter of organizational judgment, the way we decide what committees we want to have, how we’re going to organize ourselves to do the business of the church.
For me, however, there’s more at stake here than that. Of course it’s often true that there’s more at stake in church business than just “business”. It’s often the case that how we go about doing what needs to be done day by day and how we make seemingly small decisions involves values, not just questions of prudence or efficiency. But this matter particularly lies close to the core of who we are and what we hold to be important and how we understand Christianity, not just how we may choose to go about our business.
I think pretty much all churches recognize that outreach and social concern are part of the Christian life. A typical way of recognizing this is to have as part of the organizational structure of the church an outreach committee or a committee on social concerns. It’s one of the things the church offers for those who are interested in such things. And so the church ends up having a group of liberal/activist type people, usually a relatively small group of liberal/activist type people, who plug away at various projects, sometimes with a moderate amount of success, but who are more often mostly ignored, tolerated, humored, and in general marginalized.
At Sojourners we have intentionally not taken that route. In choosing to have a leading concern as a whole congregation we have tried to say that social justice is something we do all together, that it is an essential part of being Sojourners, that it is not one of the menu items at Sojourners that people can choose from, not something that is part of the range of things that happen here, but rather that it is crucial to what happens here and is at the core of who we are and hope to be.
I made the statement last week that whether or not the pursuit of happiness is at the core of what it means to be an American, it is not at the core of what it means to be a Christian. I didn’t go on to say what I think is at the core of being a Christian, but this would certainly be one answer to that question. It is not the only answer but it is an important answer, an answer that we offer as a community to the question of what are some of the few things that are at the core of being a Christian. We are saying that seeking that world where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream, that seeking a world where each person is treated as a child of God, that seeking a world where swords have been beaten into ploughshares, that seeking a world where the earth itself is treated as sacred creation, that all these things are not just “nice”, that all these things are not just worthwhile, that all these things are at the core of what it means to be a Christian. At least we claim this to be true for us here at Sojourners. Other congregations may have other ways of answering that question. This is our answer, maybe not the whole of our answer, but an important part of our answer.
In this regard a few comments about the idea of membership at Sojourners. We are pretty laid back about membership here. We don’t require very much, hardly anything really at all except that for some reason a person wants to be part of this particular group of Christians with all our eccentricities. We trust that our covenant with one another doesn’t have to be spelled out, that we implicitly understand that when we join the church we are committing ourselves to support the church financially and otherwise in whatever ways we are able, and we trust others to do the same.
Since we value diversity, we know that being a member of the church will mean very different things to different people, that people will find varied ways to be part of this community, that people bring with them different gifts and very different church experiences, positive and negative, various past church affiliations or none at all, and so forth. We especially do not insist on a common belief or creed, recognizing that words can only inadequately represent our deepest thoughts and feelings about God, our spiritual longings and impulses, our different combinations of doubt and belief.
So we embrace diversity at every level, not only in the various social categories that may describe us a little, but a kind of spiritual diversity that recognizes the different places we all may be in our religious lives; we embrace a diversity that values those different places, assumes that we can all benefit from the spiritual paths and pilgrimages of other Sojourners. And out of this rich diversity we hope to build, and it is our challenge to make of ourselves, a community, not just a bunch of diverse individuals who rub elbows on Sunday morning.
Given that approach to our common life, which I’m not sure I’ve described very well, several people have suggested that this approach we’re talking about is a kind of an un-Sojourner-ish thing to do. We’re actually saying that there is something we expect of each other as members of Sojourners, that because outreach and social justice are so central to our Christian faith, so much at the core of what it means to be a Christian, that we want everyone who is a member here to commit themselves to this goal in some intentional way—so that our common commitment can be strengthened.
Of course we’re not going to track down and excommunicate people who don’t sign up for one of the groups for whatever reason. But we are attempting to be serious about this, to say by this expectation that this is very much at the heart of the covenant we have with each other, to say that in committing ourselves to Sojourners we are not really committing ourselves to Sojourners at all, but that we are committing ourselves to what Sojourners is committed to, that our commitment to Sojourners gets immediately turned around, turned into a different and larger commitment.
That is an important thing to say about ourselves, about membership at Sojourners, and talking about this is not just talking about church business. It is about what defines the spirit of Sojourners, or rather the spirit of Christianity as we try to practice it at Sojourners. It is about what lies at the core of our common faith, and so this all needs to be brought to worship, where we bring ourselves to give expression to the spirit that lies at our core and where we come to become a community of faith. This, dear God, we bring as an offering. It is not an organizational structure. It is a large part of what the life of the spirit consists of here among us.
In this connection I need to say also a couple of things about the success of this arrangement that we are embarking on. The first thing I want to say is that structures do not make things happen. Structures do not solve problems. By itself, having a new structure for our social justice impulses here at Sojourners, having a new diagram that we can put on a wall, will not make much of a difference at all in the life of this community of faith.
Having a new organizational structure for our social justice work here at Sojourners will not make social justice work any more of a reality in our congregational life, any more than having a structure for worship, setting aside a time and a place and having an agenda we follow, any more than all of that guarantees that genuine worship, spirit-filled worship will actually take place during this time that we have structured with all these words. What kind of worship takes place during this time we are together, whether anything we could really call worship at all takes place during this time, depends on the spirit we all bring with us to this time. The structure for worship can only allow for the possibility of worship, and at best maybe offer some encouragement for worship. Whether worship takes place, as I say, depends on the spirit we bring to it each week.
And so I will be praying not that this new structure somehow works, but that we will bring to it the kind of spirit that will make it come to life and make of it a work of the spirit, and I hope this will be a matter of prayer for all of us. If it is not, it will not succeed.
Which leads me to the last thing I want to say today, which is that we will not succeed. We will fail. There is no other ending to that sentence: We will fail, if… this or that. We will fail.
When I was choosing a scripture for this sermon, the first one that occurred to me was one of the scriptures about how the church is the body of Christ, how we all have different gifts, different roles to play, different jobs to perform, all of us different but all of us necessary, none of us very impressive by ourselves but all of us together the body of Christ. It seemed like a good metaphor for what we are talking about, not only because there will end up being six, or seven, or eight or nine groups each with a separate role to play and allowing for various interests and gifts—but not only because there will be these various and varied groups but because each group will consist of people with varied gifts and within each group we’ll want to find ways to use the varied gifts people have to offer. The body of Christ seemed to be an appropriate image for what we’re talking about.
But then I thought that it’s also a kind of—I don’t know—a kind of a presumptuous image, maybe a little grandiose. In any case, another more modest image occurred to me. This one also comes from Paul’s letters and it describes the church, or the people of God, as clay jars, or in some translations earthen vessels, a very different image in my mind from thinking of ourselves as the body of Christ.
We are very imperfect vessels, very human vessels, limited in what we can do, breakable, vulnerable, sometimes not seeming very much like the body of Christ, even all of us together, but more just like a collection of clay jars, nothing so impressive as the body of Christ. On a different occasion I might remind myself and us that Christ was not so impressive to a lot of people either, that his was a very human body and broken and so to think of ourselves as the body of Christ is not at all immodest or grandiose if we have the proper view of Christ.
But today I was just thinking that we will fail in this venture and that maybe the image of clay jars somehow rang truer to me today. We will fail because we won’t have all members buying in to this idea and we won’t have everyone signing up, even though that’s the intention. And we will fail because some groups will have trouble getting off the ground and things will interfere and we will get distracted and sometimes some of us will have the best of intentions and just won’t follow through on them, and so forth. This idea will not work perfectly because ideas don’t work perfectly, not even close, because we are human, because we are clay jars. And because what we are able to do will always seem inadequate to the task.
And it is important to confess that going in, not in the spirit of being pessimistic or thinking negatively, but so that we will not grow discouraged by our own failures, so that we will keep coming back to those tasks we are called to by the spirit of God, so that we continually remain open to being guided and strengthened by the spirit of God. May we know ourselves as the limited, imperfect vessels we are; may we also know ourselves called to tasks of love and justice, and through it all, may we also know ourselves beloved of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 30, 2008