I Peter 2.2-10 18 May 2008
“THE ENDURING GOODNESS OF THE CHURCH”
I begin with the parable of the starry-eyed bachelor. It’s about a man who married later in life. A staunch supporter of marriage, he saw lovely couples he admired and sang praises of wedlock. Eventually, he also met the woman of his dreams. And not long after that, he proposed. Things went very well at first. After all, she was beautiful, intelligent, and witty. This fellow described her as “all he ever hoped for in a woman.” And everyone marveled at this marriage made in heaven.
Sadly, his bliss was fleeting. Gradually, in day-to-day living, he began to notice imperfections in his wife. She was beautiful, even stunning, when they went out. But then he observed how she loved to wear a favorite faded sweat suit as she puttered about the house. She was also intelligent, an authority in her field. But whenever they spent the evening at a dinner party, and conversation meandered in many directions, he noticed she had serious gaps in her knowledge. She was witty as well. She could hold people in rapt attention with her stories. But after hearing her anecdotes several times over, he began feeling less than enchanted.
Slowly, of all things, the former bachelor found himself cooling toward his wife. Marriage had turned out to be much different than he had thought. Going out on Saturday night was one thing. But marriage wasn’t at all like that. Marriage was stale corn flakes for breakfast because you-know-who neglected to seal the box. Marriage was sleeping next to someone with untrimmed toenails who is, shall we say, territorially ambitious. Marriage was arguing about how much to spend on a dishwasher, a van of in-laws piling in from Arkansas, or a tacky lamp on the par-lor table. Yes, the former bachelor still believed in love. He insisted upon that. He still yearned for a perfect partner. The catch was that his pure and noble ec-stacies of love had little patience with the actual ambiguous experience of loving.
Last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, the birthing of the church of Jesus Christ. The story of Acts chapter two was dreamy. The rush of a mighty wind. Tongues of fire. People speaking out of their diversity and fully understanding each other. Also, we were in our new church for the first time. The flush of new space, new sound, new smiles in a dreamy place that we waited and sacrificed so much for.
Today is the first Sunday after Pentecost. We begin a season that lasts six months and is fairly anonymous. Some churches call this season Ordinary Time. As we settle into this renewed space the first euphoria begins to wear off. The new pew cushions don’t fit correctly. The furniture arrives in dribs and drabs, so we haven’t been able to move in as quickly as we had hoped. We are slowly perfecting new systems like light, sound and temperature. That will take time. We move from the dreamy to the decidedly more earthbound. Our epistle lesson reminded me of my opening parable. For it likewise invites us to iron out wrinkles.
Could you hear that in I Peter? In one breath, we hear the dreamy side, “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” However, in the next breath, we hear the decidedly more earth-bound side of our experience. Some of the faithful have drifted away at the first real tests of their commitment. “They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do,” I Peter laments those leaving. The glamour is gone. The church has moved into the struggle of making it work in our workaday world.
Notice the lesson here. It is tempting and easy to have high-flown, abstract ideals of what the church should be. It is easy grow disenchanted to learn that it is otherwise, more human, more imperfect, and more pedestrian. We become disappointed that the church doesn’t fully square with our dreamy spiritual ideals.
People are fascinated with Jesus. People see themselves as deeply spiritual. But they look at the body of Christ—the church--and what do they see? It does not always measure up. They want to criticize and that is easy. After all, we have real blind spots. We have feet of clay. And our best response is not starry-eyed, idealistic rhapsodies. It is much better to talk about the church of Christ as the New Testament candidly represents it, as we have experienced and known it.
“The church is a gift of God which we cannot claim,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God to be constantly taking its temper-ature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”
Bonhoeffer is right. We owe the church more than we know. And it is in a week-to-week walk of gratitude that the true nature of the church is fully revealed to us. We surely don’t need glamour Sundays every week. Maybe the everyday grind reveals over time the enduring goodness that is the church to the discerning eye.
I love how people in Dennis Union Church take the initiative when some among us have need. I love how our people share each other’s sorrow in times of loss. I love how we are not content to celebrate any joy until there is joy enough for all. In such kindred moments and feeling, I perceive the enduring goodness of the church. I could not begin to number the many kindnesses that you extend to me.
I saw this replicating itself last Wednesday night at our new member gathering. About 20 of us exchanged stories, our faith pilgrimages and a lighter side as well. It wasn’t just Dennis Union Church that was being renewed, but Christ’s church. It was touching, the connections being made, the sharing of sorrows, the rippling of laughter. With spiritual eyes, we could see the ties that bind forming among us.
Christianity is by nature a communal phenomenon. At no point does the New Testament even consider the possibility of us being a Christian off by ourselves. Following Jesus is no private moral daydream or home correspondence course. Sorry, but you cannot get baptized or receive communion in your den through a TV tube. No wonder televangelists rail against the evils of what they call “churchianity”. It is no mistake that our New Testament lesson depicts Christians as set within a family, a household, a colony, a flock, a race, a body and a nation.
I had a day last week when by dusk I was surprised that nothing on my desk had gotten done. Why was that? It was a day of surprise visits and talks when person after person stopped in and asked, “Do you have a minute?” Cindy to talk about the youth retreat this weekend at Craigville. Lo to catch up after our winter of being apart. Judy to talk about the Décor Committee and my furniture arriving.
It was a veritable parade of friends to talk about vacations, the elaborate plans for Celebration Sunday, and the result of my back procedure, which went well. That is the essence of church, not my individual to-do list, but all of us interacting.
When we say that the church is a fellowship, we are talking about something bigger than serving up coffee and cookies after worship. It means we encourage one another, teach one another, and set examples for one another. We hold each other’s feet to the fire to do what is good, compassionate, and godly. When we say we are a fellowship it means we take up challenges together and share in urgent tasks that can only happen all of us together act in concert. Fellowship is about a common enterprise and a shared journey where all have a special role.
We’re far from perfect. One of us sniffed at a visitor a few weeks ago in a harsh way. We need to see things through the eyes of those new and vulnerable here. Of course, the world will jump all over us when we are not at our best. They will say things like, “See, they are no better than anyone else.” But if you make a commitment to Christ’s church and live into that loyalty, wonders begin to appear.
I for one know I couldn’t be Christian apart from the church any more than I could be a tennis player apart from being on a court with other tennis players. I mean, if the alternative is going to Starbucks and reading the paper on Sunday morning, the last time I checked, they are no taking up offerings for Myanmar in the coffee shops. They are not praying over grandchildren with cancer. Neither are they organizing overnights with the homeless. At least, not any Starbucks that I know.
People can be as petty or selfish in the church as anywhere else. And the starry-eyed spiritual bachelors and bachelorettes will hold out for an idealized perfect spiritual community that will never exist before uniting with any church. Yes, the church is an oft-broken vessel. But God pours out his mysteries of grace through us anyway. It is the grace of Jesus’ body, crucified and resurrected. God gives us this grace to live, to share, and to proclaim. You and I are stewards of sacred mysteries. What honor God has given us! Despite its sporadic obtuseness, the Church knows more about God than we do. Despite its scandals, it is holier than we are. Despite how we would have decided to save the world, the Church is the instrument of God’s choosing. In a word, the goodness of Christ’s life lives in you.
Your witness shows what it means to be God’s people. You illustrate the church’s enduring goodness. It is rooted in the actual communities who hang in there through joy and struggle doing their level best to love, as Jesus did. In a word, the church is where God translates dreaminess into experience. All I can say is what God has joined together, in Christ and his people, let no one put asunder. Amen.
God of Spirit, sometimes we imagine ourselves high and lofty, as uncompro-mising people of unassailable standards, as we stay within ourselves and our high-flown dreams of lovingkindness, rather than venture outside ourselves, living in the nitty-gritty of relationships with other people as imperfect and difficult as ourselves. Show us that this does you no favors. Remind us how you took on our flesh and lived among us despite how ungrateful and even resistant we were.
Threefold God, the love that only exists in the abstract but is never shared is no love at all. It is a phantom and an illusion. Thank you for sending your Spirit to quicken and bless our imperfect love, our fallible forgiveness, our halting mercy, and our self-conscious compassion, and our awkward grace. These are not lovely as pure symbols but they are beautiful in your heart because they are real. Only you, O God, are equal to such perfectionism, because only you are perfect.
Remind us that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move mountains; that love attempted is always better than love abstracted; that you will honor those who work out their salvation in the mix of life’s give and take rather than hold themselves at a distance, removed from the fray where your work gets done.
