Scriptures: Amos 6:1-7; Mark 1:14-20
I have always been uncomfortable in Christian churches. You are now expecting me to quickly add, “until I came to Sojourners.” But no, I have always been uncomfortable in Christian churches, including the time I have spent at Sojourners. The thing is, there are good reasons to feel uncomfortable and bad reasons to feel uncomfortable, and I want to talk some about both this morning.
Or we could switch that around and say there are good reasons to feel comfortable in church and not so good reasons to feel comfortable. Occasionally someone visiting at Sojourners will make a comment to the effect that when they walked in, or at least after they had spent an hour or so in worship with us, they felt they had come home. It’s not because of the surroundings. I heard that comment occasionally when we were at JABA; I’ve heard it occasionally since we have been here. It has more to do with the spirit of who we are.
I didn’t think of it in those words exactly, but I can say that even before I experienced Sojourners on a Sunday, I had come to the conclusion that I was going to find myself among kindred spirits at Sojourners. The church profile, interviews, conversations, the name, rumors that even at that time were circulating nationwide about Sojourners—it might have been wishful thinking to some extent, but I was pretty sure that I would feel at home here even before I experienced it first hand, and of course time proved that to have been a right assessment on my part.
In a slightly different way, and at a deeper level, we want church to be a safe place for people. Physically, of course, we want church to be a safe place. Once upon a time churches pretty much took that for granted maybe. Now, sadly, we can’t do that anymore and we take steps to try to insure the physical safety of our children and everyone. But also the spiritual safety, that people will not be made to feel like they don’t belong because of who they are or the questions they bring. “A safe place to begin; a safe place to begin again” our bulletin says, and such a statement covers a lot of ground. Of course we want people to feel comfortable here in all these ways. We want people to feel comfortable enough here that they will make this their church home.
But, you know, some people just never will feel that comfortable at Sojourners, not because we are unfriendly, sneer at people as they walk in, or neglect them to such an extent that they feel unwelcome, but just because we are who we are and not everyone is just automatically comfortable with that, any more than anyone is automatically comfortable in different church settings. I have always thought and often said out loud that Sojourners is not for everyone. No church worth its salt is for everyone, and we shouldn’t try to adjust who we are in some misguided effort to make more people feel comfortable. Trying to make everyone comfortable would lead to a “least common denominator” kind of church, and that is not who we are called to be. Sometimes, thankfully, people hang in even if they are not entirely comfortable. But if not everyone feels comfortable at Sojourners, it may be because of a variety of legitimate reasons. Sometimes, not all the time to be sure and of course the crucial thing is to be able to discern when, but sometimes it’s just the way things are, and it’s because of who we are, and it’s ok.
That kind of attitude has been my basic, initial response in a couple of situations recently where it happened that different people have related very similar experiences.
They said basically that they had been in conversation at some point with people who were looking for churches and the comment had been made that “oh, yes, I’ve heard of Sojourners. That’s that ultra-liberal church. I wouldn’t go there.” Which causes me to think to myself, “Well, fair enough. Sojourners isn’t for everyone. And although I’m not sure exactly what ultra-liberal might mean to someone using that term, I’m not someone who thinks liberal is a bad name and therefore ultra-liberal, though I realize the term was probably not meant as a term of affection, it’s also not the worst thing to be called, and in fact I take it as a sort of a compliment, that we must be doing something right, that we’re not hiding our little light under a bushel, that we’re known for being something that might very well not be comfortable for some people and that whatever the person meant by ultra-liberal it probably refers to something that in fact I am not ashamed to be. So that’s fine. People have a right not to feel comfortable with who they think we are at Sojourners. It’s may even be that it bears some relation to who we actually are. I’m comfortable with their not being comfortable, and I might even be willing to wear the label of ultra-liberal proudly. That sort of depends, but maybe.”
All of that tends to be my first reaction to the reported comment about our being ultra-liberal and therefore not a comfortable place for some people. But then upon reflection—upon further review, as the referees say in football games—I think, “Wait just a minute here. Ultra-liberal? Is it ultra-liberal to care about and make some modest effort to do something about racial justice? If that is ultra-liberal, it’s pretty sad. Is it ultra liberal joyfully to include gay and lesbian children of God in our community of faith, affirming their gifts for the body of Christ, and “coming out” on behalf of justice for lgbt folks in the society around us? I understand that for some people that would be a definition of ultra-liberal, but if so, that has its sadness as well. Here all we thought we were trying to do is live out our faith, imperfectly but the best we know how, and it gets reflected back to us as being ultra liberal. There’s something that’s not ok about that. And if that’s not what ultra-liberal means, then what does it mean, pray tell?”
The idea that we are ultra-liberal, I think, should not go unchallenged. Of course, I can only imagine what I might say if such a thing were said in my presence. If it actually were, I would likely not be either quick-witted or forthright enough to say all the things I just said, so I have to be content to imagine myself challenging the term ultra liberal.
But what I say here I don’t have to imagine, and as I think about it, I don’t wear that label of ultra-liberal proudly after all, not at all. Really I think we don’t or we shouldn’t wear any label proudly, as if we deserve it. A label, any label, is more something we are trying to live into, something that challenges us to be what we say we are. And liberal is not the label we are trying to live into here. We are a Christian church and Christian is the label we are trying to live into here. It’s just a label. The realities of our lives, and particularly the realities of our relationships to God, cannot be reduced to a label even if the label is Christian. And sometimes we may live in tension with the name Christian because of meanings that others have attached to it or that for whatever reason we have come to associate with it. Still it is who we are, or rather who we are trying to become. Christian in the best sense of that word is what we are trying to live into, and it’s important that we are clear about that for ourselves so that we can be clear about it with others. It is not a label we wear proudly because it doesn’t confer any great privileges, and besides, we’re not there yet. In that sense, we shouldn’t even be comfortable with it, much less proud about it. No Christian should be comfortable with the name. It’s not something you can lay claim to. It’s something that we are being called toward.
And so I come back to where I started. I have never felt comfortable in Christian churches. Not because they are so often homogeneous in race or class or any of a number of other ways. Not because they can sometimes seem too certain of themselves and of their beliefs and of the importance of being Christian and of what the best path to God is. Not because some of them can get confused and mix up Christianity with patriotism. Not because some of them can fall into caring more about their own lives than about the life of God’s world. Although I have experienced all of those things, and more, and when I have, it has made me quite uncomfortable. But that’s not what I am talking about today. The reason I have never felt comfortable in Christian churches is that at their best, even at their best, especially at their best, they remind us that being Christian is something you are reaching out toward, not a place you have arrived, something as I say that we are living into, and as such Christian is something that is impossible to feel comfortable with. It is a contradiction in terms.
“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion,” Amos says. This is a passage that comes right after those more famous verses, more famous I judge partly because they were quoted by Dr. King in the March on Washington speech, “I hate, I despise your feasts,” Amos hears God saying. “Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos is angry at a style of religion where people come looking for forgiveness, looking to be told that God loves them, looking to be assured that they can find peace with God because of what they believe, never mind that the poor, as Amos says, are being trampled at the gate, never mind that hundreds of thousands die and hundreds of thousands more suffer from an earthquake in Haiti, never mind the injustices and the violence God’s children see fit to inflict on one another. Woe to those who think their religion can make them at ease in the world and at peace with God, when God is not at ease with the world.
That’s Amos. I hear his outrage at the injustices of his day and at a faith that was way too casual about them. I hear him also saying to me, to us, that faith is never really about being comfortable in any sense, that it asks us to give up our certainties in favor of trusting God, that it asks us to be always straining toward something, never to be happy with where we are. To transfer this to a Christian context, if we imagine ourselves coming into the presence of the sermon on the mount every time we walk into church, how could we be comfortable? If we hear Jesus saying, when we walk into church, “the kingdom of God, the reign of God, at hand, it is before you, turn around (which is what repent means), seek it, it’s right there, believe in it, it’s calling you…well those may be encouraging words, they may be gospel, good news, but they are not meant to make you comfortable. If we measure ourselves against Jesus’ teaching, is it likely we’ll feel comfortable? Even if we’re not sure what some particular teaching is saying to us, does that make us feel comfortable? If we ignore what Jesus has to say, do we feel comfortable? And then there is the call to the disciples. Each time Jesus says “follow me”, whoever he’s talking to—Peter and Andrew, James and John, later Matthew—whoever it is just sort of drops everything and follows. It’s easy to get caught up in how unrealistic that story is. But I’ve always read it as an account of how the call of faith is never one that allows you to sit still, to be comfortable. All through the gospels there is this sense of movement, of moving on, never being comfortable where you are. There is something about being Christian, I have always felt, that doesn’t allow that.
There is something about coming into the presence of God that doesn’t allow for feeling comfortable. Of course you don’t need to go to church to come into the presence of God. There may be better places for that. But at least church ought to be a place where we are reminded that being in relationship with God is not a comfortable thing. I think I remember remarking in a sermon not so very long ago that there seems to be a lot of attention being paid these days in what is being written in the religious field, a lot of attention being given to calling our attention to the presence of God in the ordinary and everyday activities of our lives, or to put it another way our ability to transform things we usually think of as ordinary and commonplace into some kind of spiritual practice. I would explain more what I mean by this, but that’s not really what I want to say. I have appreciated some of those insights, but I’m thinking along different lines right now.
What I’m thinking this morning is that in the light God’s presence, nothing is ever ordinary, that in the light of God every day in this world is startling, not at all ordinary or commonplace but startling in both its beauty and its horror. And it can be part of the purpose of church to put us in that frame of mind. Of course it doesn’t always happen, maybe even not very often. We may arrive at church feeling groggy and quite ordinary. The minister may do nothing to help summon that sensibility since he or she felt nothing very out of the ordinary in writing or giving the sermon. But when we are at our best, all of us together, we will remind each other of how nothing is routine with God in the equation. There is always something urgent about our lives, something that needs to be said, needs to be thought about, something that needs to be done. We are being called, all the time, and every time we come to church we take a chance that will happen; we put ourselves at risk. And sometimes, more likely together than by ourselves, we will find the resources to say yes to some worthy call. I have seen it happen here. After all, at Sojourners with a capital S we have said to ourselves that we intend to be sojourners with a small s, always open to God’s call to move on, always open to move on. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 24, 2010