“The Church”

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Gracious God of us all, you are God of all Creation, or every creature and every thing. We bow down in the company of saints across all time and every nation, as we worship you. Help us to be the church you have called us to be, so that we might encourage each other in growth and faith. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Today is Worldwide Communion day. People from all over the world will be gathering around the table, with their different ethnicities, their different theologies, their different ideologies, and will gather as family, where we celebrate our unity as God’s children.

Today it seems like the Church, capital C Church, is in a wrestling match with itself. The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. finds itself bombarded by voices from within disagreeing, sometimes forcefully disagreeing, about what we will do with ordination standards and the definition of salvation. It feels like we are wrestling with a large unnamed opponent. Something that the speaking character in our Bible reading will know about soon enough. In our chapter today, Jacob has just had a vision of the ladder, the corridor between heaven and earth, with angels ascending and descending on it. And he wakes up, and realizes what I hope the whole Church, capital C Church can soon realize. So, hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Genesis. Listen. Genesis 28.16-17. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

Today is about a couple of different things I think the church is called to be today, in the year 2005 and in the Post-Modern World. I’m using five main sources. The first is the book Credo by William Sloane Coffin from which I have preached three sermons this year already. The second is a book called ReallivePreacher.com, from which I read a portion during our worship service around the mission trip. RealLivePreacher.com started as the blog of a Pastor in rural Texas. A weblog is the 21^st Century’s version of open diary so that all may read, and RealLivePreacher was so good and theologically poignant, and was so popular that they complied many of the postings and made it into a book.

The third source for today is a blog from a friend, who read the RealLivePreacher book and began to blog her theological thoughts and ramblings. I commend her blog to you, at http://girlgonegreat.blogspot.com/. She has a hilarious entry entitled Day in the Life (1) which is also worth a read. Anyway.

In the midst of church disagreement, there are always folks who say we should split. And I wonder, where is the Spirit of fellowship and community in that? “Church is where all hearts are one so that nothing else has to be one. Church is where there’s such a climate of acceptance that each of us can be his or her unique self. Church is where we learn to be free, strong, and mature by sharing with one another our continued bondage, weakness, and immaturity. Church is where we so love one another that it becomes bearable to live as solitaries.”¹

A fourth source here, the Book of Order, one of our two Constitutional documents. In the first section, third page actually, you may find G.1.0305. “…it is necessary to make effectual provision that all who are admitted as teachers be sound in the faith, we also believe that there are truths and forms with respect to which (people) of good character and principles may differ. And in all these we think it the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.”²

We are meant to be here for each other people. We are meant to live together, holding each other on the way. We are not meant to agree with each other on every little thing. We are meant to exercise mutual forbearance, which means we are to tolerate each other.

“There are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse – to have limited certainties and unlimited sympathies – is not only more tolerant, but far more Christian.”³

We need each other, folks. We need people to help us along the way, to give us support. In faith, you will need someone to carry you. In the dark night of the soul, you need someone who can offer you a hand out. And in faith, you will carry someone else, during their dark night of the soul.

This is from my friend, girlgonegreat. “Local churches, and the support they provide to their congregations, are integral to the world not only finding hope but sustaining hope. There are many different complexities that affect each individual’s path to, and walk with, Jesus. When the gray shadows and twisting turns of the sea of faith find one pilgrim lost, the local church community can be something to hold on to. Please understand, I am not saying that the church community itself is the lifeboat nor am I trying to insinuate that the church takes the place of Jesus in saving you; but rather, that if you have fallen out of the boat, they are the people who will desperately hold on to your hand so you don’t get separated. How wonderful it is to be involved with a community of believers who love you so much that if you fall out of the lifeboat, even if you are swimming away, they will still be calling out to you and doing every thing they can to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the boat.”⁴

That’s church, my friends, as written by my blogging friend, girl gone great.

Recently, the PCUSA heard from a task force it created in 2001, called the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. Strife as we are with our divisions, it was charged to find a way we can continue forward. It was formed with folks on both sides of the big issue, homosexual ordination, and ordination standards, on it. At the end, what they found, was that through meeting together, allowing for the Spirit of God to work within them, that they could agree to disagree, something we all talk about, but find hard to do. They report that they still disagree about the issues, including ordination standards. But they think that they have modeled how to have the church go forward, to love each other enough to disagree and still be brothers and sisters in Christ. In the Greater Presbytery of Atlanta, we have begun something called Common Ground Clusters, where people that disagree about the issues are intentionally put together to discuss these matters. The point is not to get folks to all agree, but to see how to live together. I commend highly the taskforce’s work, which can be found on the PCUSA.org website, and I’ll include the link in the sermon on our website. It is simply http://www.pcusa.org/peaceunitypurity/, and you can find the report and a study guide about it too. I also recommend our Presbytery’s work and their witness to meeting as folks who disagree, and the growth therein.

Here’s church according to RealLivePreacher, in his book, and on his blog.

“Things have been unpredictable around here… My friend Tom called to tell me his life is falling apart, and I found a Superball at church. It has a chunk gouged out of it so it bounces funny…

“Perhaps I should explain about Tom. He’s a Baptist pastor in a town near mine. His wife came home recently and told him she wanted a divorce. They have three children, and he has to leave the house. He lost his family and his home in just a few hours.

“It gets worse. Most Baptist churches do not want a divorced person to be their pastor. Pastors can be greedy, manipulating (people), but they better not be divorced. It’s hypocritical and stupid, but that’s the way it is.

“I grew up Baptist, so I feel entitled to speak my mind here.

“I met with Tom and his deacons the night he told them his family was falling apart. They were surprisingly gentle and sympathetic. They told him he could stay on as pastor. They laid hands on him and prayed for him. They promised in Jesus’ name they would stand behind him and walk with him through these hard days. He burst into tears because it was the first moment of grace he had received since the whole thing started.

“That was Thursday night. Sunday morning they fired him, the (chickens). They lied. I don’t even know why. Maybe they wanted to be nice and polite in front of the visiting pastor. So they prayed to Jesus while they made plans to toss Tom out like trash.

“So now Tom is jobless and homeless. And I promise you Baptist churches aren’t lining up to hire a divorced pastor who was fired from his last church. After eight years of education and ten years of service, he’ll have to find some other way to live.

“I’m so… mad the only thing I can do is change the subject rather abruptly and tell you about the Superball I found at church.

“Kids left it, I guess. I found it under the communion table. Tom was (up the creek), so I threw it as hard as I could against the wall and watched it bounce around the church.

“However it sounds now, it made sense to me at the time.

“A wall, a beam, a “bud-ah-bump” under a chair, a bad hop on the grout, and so on. It finally came to rest on a tile by the back door. I walked over to it and considered the unlikely series of events that brought the ball and me to this spot. I had to say something.

“‘Behold. Of all the tiles in the room, you were chosen.’

“My second throw took a weird bounce off a music stand and (darn) near broke the communion chalice that Francis gave to the church in memory of her mother. I had a vague sense that this wasn’t the sort of thing responsible pastors do in church. I am called to be something of a caretaker around here.

“So I took the chalice down from the fireplace mantle and put it in the kitchen where it would be safe. Then I ran back to the sanctuary to play with my Superball some more.

“I found that even if I threw it at the same spot on the wall, it never ended up in the same place on the floor. What with the irregular surfaces in the room and the chunk missing from the ball, there was no way to predict where it was going to end up.

“Chaos. Our ancient foe.

“Genesis says God hovered over the waters and brought order out of chaos with mighty words. I don’t know about you, but that impresses…me. When you bring order out of chaos, you’ve done a day’s work.

“And since God went to all that trouble, lots of people come to church hoping to find an easy way out of chaos. They want to know the future or make sense of the past. They hope that preachers like me will speak a mighty word and bring order out of the mess.

“I got news for you. I ain’t God. I’m just a guy with a bad haircut bouncing a ball around the sanctuary and talking to himself.

“Welcome to our church.

“There are a lot of irregular surfaces here. Pews and tables and pulpits and that kind of stuff. And most of the people are wounded in one way or another. You take a guy with a chunk missing and bounce him off a communion table, and he’s liable to end up just about anywhere.

“Shoot, that’s half the fun.

“People come through the doors broken and hopeless and end up teaching Sunday School. I’ve seen it. Other people come though the door with all the answers and end up crying on the floor.

“I mean, you just never know with church.

“Tom said he wants to come to our church on Sunday. A big chunk has been taken out of his life, so he should feel right at home with us sinners. When he walks through the door he’ll meet Evangelina and Pepe. He’ll see Stan, Carol and Elliot. God help him if Chloe gets to him first…

“And even though Tom’s life seems like chaos right now, he’ll be welcome to bounce around these walls with us as long as he likes. And who knows? One good bounce off the communion table could make all the difference.

“The Superball? I took it to my office and gave it a place of honor right in Tigger’s lap. I might take it down now and then and toss it around. Sometimes I need a little reminder of what church really is.

“When life seems chaotic, you don’t need people giving you easy answers or cheap promises. There might not be any answers to your problems. What you need is a safe place where you can bounce with people who have taken some bad hops of their own.

“You need love and understanding and lots of room.

“That’s what church should be.

Let us create the environment where that is exactly what church is, not a series of arguments, but love and understanding and lots of room. Amen.