Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
January 30, 2005 Annual Meeting Sunday
Micah 6: 1-8
In a Doonesbury comic strip from a few years ago, Mike Doonesbury is talking to “The Rev” about his new church. “So how’d you get your new church started, Rev?”
He answers, “Aerobics.”
“Aerobics?”
Says the Rev: “I needed something to attract folk from the community. The focus group suggested an aerobics class. It worked, so I added yoga and bingo and then a few 12-step programs, and then we opened a soup kitchen which led to cooking lessons. Before I knew it, I had my own denomination.”
“Wow,” responds Doonesbury, “so that’s how religion spreads.”
And that certainly is one model for church growth and vitality: find out what the people need, better yet, what the people want, and give it to them…everything from rock bands to Starbucks coffee.
Here is another model – another concept of church. It is a story coming from Africa, but it could be from anywhere. A missionary was coming home from an outlying church when a woman flagged him down and asked for a ride.
“Are you a pastor?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Are you a Christian?”
“No,” she answered, “But my brother was. He was the only Christian in our house.” Then she told her brother’s story: “Amos was a teacher. Then he got sick. AIDS. First he tried local medicines, but they didn’t work. Then he went to the hospital where he stayed until his money ran out. When I went to visit him, the nurse said, ‘We cannot cure your brother. Take him home, care for him. Don’t be afraid. You will not get his disease.’
“So I took my brother home. Nobody would visit him, or even come near our house. Not even our parents. I took care of Amos, cooked his food, ate with him. One day my brother said to me, ‘Please go to the next town, where my church is. Ask the church members to pray for me.’
“The next week a group from his church came to our home. They brought food. They visited with him. They prayed for him. After that, they came every week. They were with him when he died. After he died, not one of our family members came to bury him. They were all afraid. The people from his church came, washed his body and buried him.”
After she told her story, the woman looked at the minister and said, “Pastor, I want you to baptize me as a Christian. I am a believer.” “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love… “ Now that’s church.
God has a dispute with the people of Israel. In fact, God decides to take them to court – to put them on trial. Creation itself – the mountains and hills, the very foundations of the earth – will be the jury. God’s lays out the case against Israel. The people have forgotten their own story, they have forgotten God’s faithfulness, they have forgotten God’s saving acts. You might say they have forgotten God. And the people really have no answer. There is no way they are going to beat this rap. What can they do? How to avoid a guilty verdict? How about special offerings and sacrifices? How about proper rituals?
But God, the prosecuting attorney, will have none of this. It’s going to take more than the external trappings of ritual and sacrifice – it’s going to take something deeper, something more lasting. And indeed, the people already know what the Lord requires – they know what the life of faith looks like. And it isn’t about ritual and sacrifice, and, I hate to say this on our Annual Meeting Sunday, it isn’t about buildings and budgets. No, it’s about lives and communities that show forth justice and mercy and faith.
I think back to that Doonesbury cartoon – ministry by focus group, church and ministry existing solely to meet people’s needs. I once heard Craig Dykstra, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, say that too many pastors today have become shopkeepers with a shopkeeper mentality. What most occupies us is how to market the product – how to keep up with the competition. Transformation has given way to accommodation. And church members and visitors have increasingly taken on a consumer mentality – “What can you do for me?” But is that what God is calling us to be, here and now – the consumer-friendly, meet every need, be all things to all people church? Go back to the prophet – justice, mercy, faith – there is so much more involved here than simply molding ourselves to what the church-shopping culture would have us be.
First of all, in these words of the prophet, I hear a call to radical inclusiveness and welcome. It just seems to me that the religious life of this nation today, perhaps reflecting the sad state of our civic and political life, has become so polarized, even mean-spirited. Religion is used as a way of excluding others; the Bible is used more as a weapon than as a source of healing and inspiration. I think of how Jesus spent so much time making sure everyone was invited to the table. So now, why, in the name of Jesus, are we finding so many ways to exclude people from the table?
Years ago Shirley Taylor Haizlip wrote an article reflecting on her growing up in a small black church in the rural south. She said, “I learned about the lives of church members from the comfort of my mother’s side. I grew to understand that there, in that place, every single church member was somebody. In God’s house, if nowhere else, they were CEO’s and presidents, directors and chairmen, counselors and managers. In God’s house, if nowhere else, they were women of infinite grace and men of profound dignity… In their roles as deacons, trustees, missionaries and choir members, those domestics, handymen, cotton and tobacco farmers sang and prayed – validating and celebrating themselves and one another, warmly and well, week after, year after year. And not only did they attend to church business, but they cared for their community. It did not escape my understanding that the church encompassed all.”
Well that is the kind of welcome, the spirit of hospitality we find in Jesus. It was radical then, it is radical now, cutting against the grain of a society increasingly frightened by the stranger, suspicious of difference and easily seduced by appeals to a security that will protect us from them. One of my mentors in ministry, Browne Barr, said: “God may indeed love us, but we don’t ever know it for sure unless some other human person holds our hand in his or hers, generously, tender-hearted, forgivingly…. The church must be a community where God’s love becomes specific, concrete and immediate where person meets person and hand reaches out to hand in a network of caring.” Again, a pretty radical position to take in a frightened, angry, polarized world. But also, what a gift, a rare and precious gift such a community can be. And we are called to be nothing less – nothing less.
Justice, mercy, faith. It involves welcomeness and inclusiveness, but it does not stop there. A second point is that we also must work toward being a community of transformation. John Thomas, from the national office of the United Church of Christ, has said, “The welcome we extend is to a baptism that names us as children of God and members of the church, a baptism that reshapes us for costly discipleship, resisting those elements of our culture that demean, diminish and destroy.” Our invitation must be more than an invitation to join a community of “amiable tolerance.” It is an invitation to enter into a new world, nothing less than the Kingdom of God.
I think about that African church, in fact I even think about the Homeless Event we hosted last Thursday. You know, only about eight homeless people showed up. And initially I found that very distressing because so many people from our church had come, ready to do anything, interview people, provide food, showers, distribute clothing and sleeping bags, so many people. And there they were, sitting around with nothing to do. But then it occurred to me, so many people – so many people had set aside their day to reach out to these homeless folks, to make face-to-face contact with people who so often are faceless, unseen, unheard. Which meant, so many people willing to risk transformation. And then I wasn’t feeling so bad. The homeless didn’t show up, but many of you did. And as Ernie Erler told me, “We’ll be even more ready next time.”
Anthony Robinson, one of my UCC colleagues says “Our business as the church today is the transformation and formation of persons and communities in light of the vision and values of the Gospel. Those seeking a church today need more than a committee assignment. They need and seek a whole new way of life.” It just seems to me that common, ordinary, pragmatic, “Don’t rock the boat – we’ve always done it this way” goodness just isn’t going to be enough. What is required is a transforming love, a different than expected love, love that is innovative, daring, exploratory and courageous. That actually sounds a lot like the love of Jesus, doesn’t it. A love, which by God’s grace, can become flesh in our life together.
So we are called to be a community of inclusiveness and welcome, a community of transformational love, and finally a community of worship where we can continue to tell that old, old story of Jesus and his love. The prophet was absolutely horrified – the people of Israel had forgotten their stories – which meant that they were in danger of forgetting who they were – who God was. This has to be a place where we continue to tell the story, our story. You see, I remember: I remember Abraham and Sarah, I remember Moses and Miriam and Jacob and Isaac and Rachel, I remember David and Jeremiah and Isaiah. I remember. And God calls us to remember. This is not a call to dead-end, good old days nostalgia; no, we remember because in our stories we find hope, we find possibility, we find alternative paths to those prescribed by the world around us, we discover that chaos and violence do not have the final word.
As my parent’s pastor, Steve Sterner has said: “Too much of what passes for faith today is nothing other than embalmed tradition. We believe in a living faith. How can we set hedges around the scriptures and say everything that God wanted to say has already been said? Everything we needed to know has already been taught? Everything that should have been revealed has already been shown? I do not believe that. God is still alive. If God is still alive then there’s still more to come.”
“God is still speaking,” we say. “Never place a period where God has placed a comma,” we say. And we dare to say this because we come together here every Sunday and tell a story. Each week we make a deposit in our collective memory bank. And it is a hopeful story, a relentless story, maybe even a subversive story.
Caesar and Babylon – the principalities and powers – would have us forget. They encourage amnesia. Then their definition of reality becomes the only one, their definition of possibility - the only one. This is all there is and all there will ever be – just adjust, accept, conform. But the stories, our stories, are relentless. They speak of Abraham finding a new land, Sarah having a child in her old age, Moses freeing a people form hopeless slavery. They proclaim that the future is not limited because God is not limited. They do not give in to despair; they dare to hope. They insist this is not a closed system, but rather one that is open to its Creator, whose possibilities are always limitless. We must come together to worship, to tell our stories, for they speak of a God who always is at work shaping a new creation. And I sincerely believe, if the story is lost, hope is lost.
The young woman at St. Mark’s church in Atlanta, said to the pastor, “This is the first time I was ever in a church.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” he said, “How was it?”
She said, “Kind of scary.”
“Why scary?”
“Because,” she said, “it just seems so important. You know, I never go to anything important. But this just seemed so important.”
I hope we would agree with her. For to be a part of a community trying to live out the prophet’s call to justice and mercy and faith – to be a place of hospitality, transformation and worship – is pretty important stuff. It is a community worth caring for, worth supporting, worth sharing with others. By God’s grace, may it be a community like no other.