Re-Thinking the Faith, Part 3 - "Heaven & Hell: Really?"

                         (Based on Mark 1:1-11 and Matthew 25:45-53)  

   One of my favorite poems is Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” In this classic, we witness a sort of debate as to the merits of the fences or walls we build between our neighbors and ourselves. On the one hand, Frost says that “Good fences make good neighbors,” and much of the poem narrates the annual spring ritual of two farmers rebuilding and repairing the fence along their property line. But the ultimate message of Frost’s masterpiece is found in its opening lines:

   Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 

   That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 

   And spills the upper boulders in the sun; 

   And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

It seems that Mother Nature, herself, strikes down the fences we 

humans build.

               This morning, as we continue to re-think our faith, I want us 

to consider the fact that this is how God works as well, as the Great 

Destroyer of the many fences and barriers that we build, not only

between ourselves and others, but between ourselves and God.

The two passages we looked at this morning both tell stories of 

significant barriers being broken, punched through, by God. In the

story of Jesus’ baptism, which Gloria read, as Jesus is being baptized,

he looks up and sees “heaven being torn open and the Spirit 

descending on him like a dove.” The phrase “being torn open” does

not suggest a temporary opening that’s there only long enough to let

this little dove squeak through. This tear is permanent, allowing God’s 

spirit to come and go, to dwell in both places. It suggests that the 

barrier between where God was believed to reside  - heaven - and

where we humans reside – earth – is gone – shattered, torn,

 eradicated. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

               In the passage I presented of Jesus’ death on the cross, 

another long-standing barrier is torn down, ripped apart, 

permanently removed.In the ancient Hebrew temples, their was

a huge, heavy, thick cloth that hung between that part of the temple

where people were permitted to worship – like our sanctuary – 

and a portion of the temple where only the priests could go – like our 

altar. That place reserved for priests was where the holiest of 

objects were kept – like the torah scroll and the ark of covenant. 

The “holy of holies” as it was called, was believed to be the part of 

the temple where God’s presence dwelled. Matthew’s crucifixion 

account says that when Jesus breathed his last and died on the cross, 

that massive, heavy curtain that had hung there for thousands of

years was ripped in two.  

        Now, whether you take the Bible literally or figuratively, the 

symbolism here is unmistakably clear. God doesn’t like fences. God 

doesn’t like barriers. God doesn’t even like the idea that where God 

lives and where we live should be thought of as separate.

        This brings us to the doctrinal dimensions of our faith that I’d like

us to rethink this morning and in the week to come. Most Christians

grew up with a three-tiered understanding of the world, the notion 

that the whole cosmos is divided into three distinct parts: heaven, 

earth, and hell. Heaven, we were taught, is where God lives, along

with angels and certain qualified dead people – those with the

“right” beliefs. Earth, as the traditional doctrine has it, is this 

temporary dwelling place, the proving grounds that determine 

whether we’re good enough for heaven or condemned to hell.  

Hell, according to traditional thinking, is the underworld, the burning, 

fiery land of suffering where the devil and his children – those with 

the wrong beliefs – spend  eternity in torment, weeping and gnashing

their teeth. 

       In our Lenten Bible Study this past Tuesday, I challenged the 
thirty participants to examine their understandings of heaven and 
hell and ask, “Where did my understanding of these realms come 
from? What is their origin?” What was true of those who were 
with me on Tuesday is that their images and understandings of
heaven and hell are not biblical at all. They are, instead, like the
cover of your bulletin today, much more heavily influenced 
by medieval writers like Dante. Richard Rohr puts it this way: 
 “Our Christian notion of hell largely comes unbiblical sources…
Hell is not found in the first five books of the Bible. It's not 
found in the Gospel of John or in Paul's letters. The idea of hell
as we most commonly view it comes much more from Dante's 
Divine Comedy than the Bible. Dante's Purgatorio and Inferno
 are brilliant Italian poetry, but horrible Christian theology. 
Dante's view of God is largely unbiblical.” 

            In 1986, I had the opportunity to travel to Jerusalem. While there, I worked with an archeologist, who took me to the southwestern gate of the old city. As you know, ancient Jerusalem was a walled city, essentially a circle with seven gates at different points around it. The southwestern gate opened out to a large valley below, known as the Valley of Hinnon or “Gehenna” in Old Testament times. He told me that this where the ancient Israelites threw their trash, they literally dumped it down in the valley. Gehenna is also the site where ancient polytheists conducted their 
human sacrifices. Kings and others sacrificed their sons or virgins on these huge pyres, and their remains were left in this valley of Gehenna to rot. Archeologists know this because of the huge number of bones, human remains, and trash they’ve uncovered over the years.

            When I learned this, it gave me pause, because “Gehenna,” 
in my experience, had always been translated as “hell,” in the bible. But here I was being shown an actual, physical place called “Gehenna.”It wasn’t an underworld or a separate spiritual realm; it was an actual, literal place, right outside Jerusalem. So when Jesus used this word in his teachings, all his listeners would have pictured an actual, earthly place! When I saw Gehenna and learned of its history, it made perfect sense to me that Jesus and other spiritual teachers would use “Gehenna” as a place we wouldn’t want to end up someday, right? Because a lot of Israelites actually DID end up there, burned as sacrificial offerings. It was a stinky, smelly, disease-ridden trash dump with a horrible and grisly history.

            This led me to wonder: what if there isn’t some barrier between earth and hell? Could it be possible that “hell” is right here on earth? Don’t many of us know people whose earthly existence has been so full of pain, suffering, disease, abuse, and lack of love that it is entirely accurate to say they have already been to hell? I’ve always found it interesting that the Apostles’ Creed includes the phrase that Jesus “descended into hell.” I’ve read a hundred explanations of what it might mean or why it’s there. Some say that for Jesus to go there, he would liberate any and all souls who were there. Others say that his horrific death brought about the sense of total abandonment and separation from God that the word “hell” had always tried to convey. One Pope actually wrote that in saying Jesus descended into hell, the apostles were affirming that even that place, wherever it is, is no longer separated from God, that Jesus destroyed the barrier that had kept people imprisoned there.

            God doesn’t like fences. Whether they are in minds, in our theology, or in our religious doctrines and rituals, God destroys barriers. In Jesus got sought to destroy the concept of hell. And God may have wanted to do the same thing with our concept of heaven.

            Do you know how many times Jesus even spoke of heaven? Less than a handful, and when he did, it wasn’t some place “out there” or “up there” that we go when we die. Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God, and from the very beginning of his ministry, he spoke of that kingdom as being “here and now,” as being “among us” and even “within us.” Jesus was never interested in an alternative world or in selling us real estate for when we retire/expire. Jesus came to teach us and to show us that God’s presence and dwelling place is NOT up there in the clouds! It is wherever people are doing God’s will.

            So when Jesus was healing people, he was doing God’s will and God was there! When Jesus was feeding people who were hungry, he was doing God’s will and God was there! When Jesus was being with people who were lonely or outcasts, he was doing God’s will and God was there! When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he said, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done ON EARTH!” No pause!

            As theologian Brian McLaren put it, Jesus came to give us a plan to refurbish and renovate the earth, not to provide an evacuation plan from it! Even John, who wrote the impossible to interpret, highly metaphorical book of Revelation, ended that book about the end times with this image: “Then I saw the Holy City coming down out of heaven, prepared as a bride dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, NOW the dwelling of God is with people and God will live with them.”

            When Jesus was baptized, folks, 2000 years ago, this is the same essential image he saw! The heavens tore open – wide open – and the living Spirit of God shot through that new and permanent opening and made God’s dwelling place with us.

            Being a follower of Jesus is not about believing the right stuff or doing the right stuff, so that we can get beamed up to heaven someday. Being a follower of Jesus is about seeing in him living proof that God is here and now, that that same Spirit that came into Jesus at his baptism has come into each and every one of us. Being a follower of Jesus is about understanding that we are participants in the ultimate renovation project. And our master builder has torn down the walls – all of them – beginning with those that separated heaven from earth and heaven from hell.

            What a privilege we have! What a calling we have! What an 
opportunity we have! This faith of ours is not an evacuation plan. 
My grandmother may have said it best when she said, “Too many 
Christians have their heads so far up into the heavens, that they’ve 
become no earthly good.” May that never be said of us. Thanks be 
to God, who doesn’t love a wall. Amen.

Re-Thinking the Faith - Part II - "Is Jesus Divine?" (Feb 14, 2016)

     

                        (Based on Mark 15:33-37 and Mark 10:17-22)

            What if someone from the great beyond were to appear before us this day to tell us that Jesus of Nazareth was not divine? What if that heavenly being were to tell us that Jesus was a human in every sense of that word? If that message turned out to be true, what would that do to your faith? What would it do to your relationship with Jesus? What would it do to your life and how you lived it?

            Most Christians, assuming we were born sometime after the Council at Nicaea in 325 AD, were taught to believe that Jesus and God are one and the same, two forms of the same essential Reality. The great council of Bishops that gathered in Nicaea, 300 years after Jesus left the planet, tried to articulate and systemize the tricky matter of who Jesus was and how, exactly, he was related to and connected to God. Let’s give a listen to just how “clear” they made it:

            “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father…who for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven…and was made man.”

            Are you with me? You tracking with all this? Any questions, or does the Nicaean Creed pretty much clear it all up for you?

            The whole reason these bishops decided to get together was because of this outside-the-box thinker, a disciple named Arius, who running around the Middle East between the years 250 and 336. (Remember Nicaea was in 325.) And Arius was teaching that while Jesus was the messiah, he wasn’t God. Arias saw Jesus as separate from God, a distinct being who was created by God but was not God. Arius didn’t really like the way John’s Gospel had put Jesus with God from the beginning of time. In the very first chapter of John, we find, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God. He was with God from the very beginning.” It goes onto say that “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us…” Jesus, as the Nicaean bishops took it, was “the Word.”

            Well, like so many human arguments about God, things got ugly between the bishops at Nicaea and our independently-minded disciple Arius. These theological opinions seemed incompatible, and something had to give. So right after the Nicaean Council in 325, Arius was arrested and condemned as a heretic, all because he didn’t like the idea of Jesus being divine. He was thrown in jail in 325 and there he remained for ten years, until another council, that met in Tyre, exonerated him. But then, shortly after that Arias died, another council met and condemned Arius all over again, and this time they anathemised him – I LOVE that word! Anathemised! It means to declare something “dedicated to evil and thus accursed!”

            So, I ask you again, if someone trustworthy and reliable came to us right here and now and told us definitively that Jesus was not divine but was fully and totally human, would it make any difference to you? Would you want to kill someone, start a war, or perhaps anathemise the messenger? The question of whether Jesus was divine certainly seemed to make a huge difference to some people back in third and fourth centuries after Jesus. And in many ways, people have been arguing about this since the time Jesus walked the earth, and we’re still arguing about it today.

            A lot ill-informed Christians think that if you are going to call yourself a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, then you have no choice but to believe he was divine. I can tell you that that isn’t true; it never has been true. There have been flavors of dedicated Christians going all the way back to the Ebionites in the first century after Jesus, who were fervent about following Jesus, adamant about living out his teachings, but they did not believe he was divine. And even today, there are many large and legitimate groups of Christians, like Christian Scientists, who follow Jesus intensely - without believing he was divine.

            Let me tell you why some of these fervent and admirable groups of Christians don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. Let’s imagine that I wasn’t able to be here next Sunday and I asked you to preach in my place. How many of you would do it…show of hands? Those of you who wouldn’t, why not? (Out loud; this isn’t a rhetorical question.)

            Ok, so some of you don’t feel qualified. Some of you don’t think you have the necessary training or background or gifts. Some others, it’s more the Austin Powers excuse… “Preaching’s just not my bag, baby!” I understand that, because if a doctor at the hospital couldn’t be in the OR tomorrow and asked me to fill in for her, just to do a little, light brain procedure and a heart valve replacement, I wouldn’t do it either, for the same reason some of you wouldn’t fill in for me here.

            Now do you think I’m divine? Of course not, any more I think that the doctor who called me is divine. But there is still a perceived gap between us. Sometimes it’s a gap in training or education; sometimes it’s a perceived gap in ability or experience, right. But the bigger the perceived gap, the less likely it is that someone will step up to try to do what the master did, right.

            So with that in mind, let’s jump back into Jesus’ day. You have been following him around for two or three years. You’ve eaten with him, you’ve camped out under the stars with him, you’ve prayed and worshipped with him, been there when he’s fed huge crowds and healed people who were sick and lame. And then one day he says, “I can’t go to Ceasarea Philippi today. So I need you to go. Tell them the stories you’ve heard me tell; feed those that are hungry, heal those who are sick, and do all that you’ve seen me do.” So are you going to go?

            We’d all be scared and nervous, to say the least. But would you be more apt to go or more reluctant to go if you were convinced that Jesus was divine? If you were sure that Jesus were simply a human – just like you - with no special powers abilities, wouldn’t that make you more apt to believe that you could – with time and practice and a little help from your friends – come to do what he did?

            You see, the Ebionites, the Christian Scientists, and the millions of other flavors of Christians world-wide who choose not to believe in a divine Jesus have good reason for doing so. They take seriously – very seriously – Jesus teaching in John 14:12, where he said, “Are you amazed by these things I do? Truly I tell you, you will be able to do all that I have been doing and even greater things than I have done.”

            The argument of those who don’t see Jesus as divine is as follows: if Jesus is divine, I have no chance of doing any of what he did. If he is divine instead of human, there is no point in me even trying to follow his example, for in my humanness, I am doomed to fail. If Jesus is divine, then there is no way God could ever expect me to do the stuff Jesus did. I’m off the hook. However, if Jesus is human and only does the things he does because God’s spirit is in him in the same way that God’s spirit is in me, then maybe I actually CAN do the things he did. If Jesus is human, then God can expect me to imitate the works of Jesus. I think this is why Buddha and Muhammad and Gandhi refused to allow their followers to call them divine. They didn’t want to let them off the hook.

            So I’m hoping you can see that the historical and theological argument that took place between Arius and the Nicaean Bishops was a pretty darned important one. There was a lot at stake there. And I’m not sure the Nicaeans got it right, but I am pretty sure that if they’d been able to see the kind of Christianity that resulted from their decision to declare Jesus fully divine, they might have wanted to reconsider their declaration.

            Look around. Jesus said over and over again that following him involved giving away much if not all of what we have, financially and materially. Do you see many Christians doing that? Jesus told us over and over again that violence and taking up arms is not what God wants us to do. I heard a report this week that showed that the most heavily armed nations, the ones with the biggest stockpiles of weaponry of every size and kind, are the ones with the highest percentages of Christians in their populations and in their leadership. Jesus told us that God didn’t dwell in temples made by human hands. So why is it that Christian churches spend an average of 85-95% of our annual budgets on maintaining our own buildings and less than 5% feeding the poor and hungry?

            The trouble with a divine Jesus is that his followers don’t even bother trying to follow him. The problem with a divine Jesus is that those who bear his name focus more on worshipping him in his divinity than on following him on his human path. Take a look at the front of your bulletin today. You’ll see a picture of people actually following Jesus back in the day, doing the very things he did. Beneath the picture is the following quotation from Richard Rohr, which says much better than I have the trouble with a divine Jesus:

          “We worshipped Jesus instead of following him on his same path.

            We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of a journey toward union with God and everything else. This shift made us into a religion of belonging and believing instead of a religion of transformation.”

And the second quotation comes from Robin Meyers:

   “Consider this: there is not a single word in Jesus’ Sermon on the 
     Mount about what to believe; only words about what we should do. 
     Yet just three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the 
     official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about
     what Christians should do, only words about what to believe.”

            Folks, I don’t know if Jesus is merely human, divine, or some mysterious combination of both. But I do what has happened to the vast majority of his followers since the Council of Nicaea almost 1700 years ago. Little by little, we’ve done less and less of the things Jesus did, and more and more of very things he warned against. And I can’t help but wonder if at least part of the reason for this huge gap between the actions of Jesus and the actions of his followers is that we’ve become mere admirers of his divinity instead of genuine followers of his path.

            I’m guessing that if Jesus were given the choice between us worshipping him or following his teachings, he’d probably prefer that we follow his teachings.

            “Good teacher,” the man asked him…Jesus replied, ‘Why do you call me good…God alone is good.” Amen.

ReThinking the Faith: Original Sin vs. Original Blessing (Based on Genesis 1:24-31, John 9:1-27)

              Today we begin an exciting sermon series entitled “Rethinking the Faith.” To help you understand why Christians like us should even bother to rethink our historic faith from time to time, I want to share a terrific metaphor that contemporary theologian, Rob Bell, uses in his first book.

            Imagine an incredible painter - like Rembrandt - finishing a painting he took years to complete. And imagine, as he unveils it to the world at a press conference, he says, “Now that I’ve finished this – the ultimate of all paintings – all of you other artists in the world can put down your brushes permanently and retire, for there is no reason for any further paintings ever again.” We would all know instantly that Rembrandt was crazy, that he had clearly lost his mind, for we all understand that art and artistic expression can never stop. It must continue. We would hate for our children, for example, to be denied the joy, pleasure, and creative expression of finger painting, not to mention the other gifted artists across the world.

            Rob Bell uses this painting analogy to express a similar truth about theology – the study of and human expression of God. Throughout history, great theologians have come up with amazing metaphors and expressions of who God is and what God is like. Various communities of Christians have gotten together in particular moments in history to set down in writing what they believe about God. If we look at the gospels, written between 70 and 90 AD, they give us four distinct paintings of Jesus. Several hundred years later, we can read early church creeds, like the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed; again human attempts to speak about God at a particular point and place in time. We know, for example, that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others felt compelled to produce new “paintings” about God in the 1500’s, because they felt that the Church had gotten off track and gotten too attached to ancient paintings. These theologians produced new works of art that brought millions of people into the Christian fold, people who had not been moved or inspired by the older paintings.

            The UCC is a denomination that encourages new paintings and new expressions of God and faith. Our denominational motto is that “God is still speaking…” and therefore “everything we say about God ends with a comma rather than a period,” right? So I want us to spend lent this year rethinking our faith, re-examining some of the old paintings, and showing you some newer ones. And I want to begin today by rethinking this old Christian doctrine known as “Original Sin.”

            Original sin is the idea that Adam and Eve sinned or turned against the wishes and will of God in the Garden of Eden, and that somehow their sin, all those millions of years ago, was transmitted to every other human being. The doctrine of original sin seems to suggest that everyone who is ever born inherits or is born with the stain of Adam and Eve’s sin all over them. It’s vitally important to note that this particular “painting,” known as “Original Sin,” was actually produced NOT by Genesis 3 itself, which says absolutely nothing about Adam and Eve’s sin being passed down, but rather it was painted by 3 major figures who lived thousands of years AFTER Genesis 3 was written: St. Paul, St. Augustine and Martin Luther. These three are most responsible for producing and refining this Original Sin painting. Then John Calvin came along, and he loved it! He took a look at it and added some black and red hues to it, saying that we humans were “totally depraved,” “utterly worthless,” “stained by sin,” and “doomed to the fires of hell.” One contemporary theologian writes that the influence of theological painters like Augustine, Luther, and Calvin is so strong, that it is virtually impossible to read Genesis 3 and NOT think of it as a story about “original sin” and the “fall of man,” even thought those words and concepts are nowhere to be found in the story itself.

            If you don’t think this notion of original sin is alive and well and still the most influential painting out there, let me a tell you a story that happened right here in Gaylord, Michigan, not so long ago. A loving couple that you know very well, Jim and Kay Boughner, were committed foster parents. They would periodically receive calls from the Dept of Child and Family Services, asking if they would be willing to take in an orphaned child for a period of time, which they usually would. In one particular instance, the request came for them to foster a tiny little baby girl who was terminally ill, expected to live only a month at most. Kay and Jim said yes, they would take in this vulnerable, terminally ill baby, and shower her with love for her for as long as she was alive. As this happened, a friend of Kay’s, a Christian, was talking to Kay on the phone, and when she heard that they had taken in this sickly infant, immediately asked, “Have you had her baptized? You must have her baptized right away! What if she dies unbaptized?” Kay’s friend’s implication was clear; this tiny, helpless, newborn was a hopeless, depraved sinner, stained from birth by Adam and Eve’s hereditary sin. If she were not baptized before her impending death, she would burn in hell for eternity. This same “Christian friend” of Kay kept calling and needling her about getting this baby baptized. Then she even had her priest call to harass Kay. He offered to come over at once to perform the baptism that would save this child from the fires of hell.

            Talk about an influential painting! Can there be any doubt as to the incredible influence Augustine, Luther, and Calvin have exerted through their particular painting? And can there be any doubt that it’s high time we repainted it? Two questions beg to be asked at this point: 1) What sort of God would operate this way, condemning innocent, children? And 2) who in the world would ever want to worship, much less serve such a God? Can you see in this story a need for another painting, for other painters to rethink who God is and who we are?

            Fortunately, in 1940 in Madison, Wisconsin, a wonderful new painter was born. His name was Matthew Fox, and in the 1970’s he painted a terrific and beautiful painting, which he called “Original Blessing.” Fox’s theological expression sought to celebrate Genesis 1, the creation story, which is filled with the recurring phrase, “and God saw that it was good.” Fox believed that all creatures are created in the image of God, that all of us are loved and cherished by God, conceived in love, not sin. Fox saw no evidence that human beings were filled with darkness; he saw no reason to decry humanity as sin-stained and totally depraved. He painted the human race with bright, bold, brilliant colors, and felt that each child that was born was blessed rather than stained. Fox entitled his masterwork “Original Blessing” not “Original Sin.”

            Folks, I’ve studied the Bible and theology for a long, long time, and I, like many of you, grew up in a family and in a church that had the Original Sin painting prominently displayed, front and center. But I am far more inclined these days to hang Fox’s “Original Blessing” painting in my living room, in my church, and on the mantle of my heart, rather than Luther’s, Calvin’s, or Augustine’s. It’s not that I don’t see my own sin or all the ways that we humans go astray from time to time. But I simply can’t understand how a God who lived and loved as Jesus did, would ever see us – his own precious creation - as hopeless, stained sinners, in need of saving.

            To me, the whole Original Sin painting stopped making sense on Jan 7, 2008 at 12:20 a.m. That is when the midwife at McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital handed Eloise Anna Jones into my new daddy arms for the first time. I beheld this incredibly beautiful, perfect, loveable girl, and the whole notion of Original Sin simply stopped making sense. She was and is pure blessing, pure love, pure goodness, and nobody – not Augustine, not Calvin, not Luther, nor anybody else – will ever convince me that Eloise is stained with sin or in need of forgiveness, anymore than that little girl the Boughner’s welcomed into their home was.

            I’m here to tell you this morning that Original Sin didn’t make any sense to Jesus either. Just look at the John 9 passage I presented a few minutes ago. A blind man enters and religious leaders ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that resulted in him being born blind.” You can hear in their question that they grew up with the Original Sin painting prominently displayed on their mantle, right? But Jesus completely rejects the premise of their question. He responds by saying, “Neither this man nor his parents’ sin has anything to do with his blindness. Sin has nothing to do with it. But his blindness is an occasion for God’s love and power to be manifested.” So Jesus heals him.

            Jesus’ whole life was filled with religious people who were obsessed with sin, always judging and evaluating whose sins disqualified them from church membership or from having fellowship with others. They were constantly offering animal and blood sacrifices to try to get their own sins forgiven. Jesus spent his whole life trying to convey the message that God wasn’t interested in sin, but with people living in ways that served, fed, healed, and lifted up others. And the saddest part of all – when Jesus himself was killed for all his loving and serving, theological painters got right to work, arguing that even his death was blood payment for human sin. We’ll be repainting that later in this series when we rethink the cross together in March.

            But for now, I offer, for your consideration, this new painting entitled “Original Blessing.” I ask that you hang this new painting on the mantle of your heart for a while and see what a difference it can make in your life. I challenge you this week to look at everyone who crosses your path as an originally blessed child of God, as a person who is not in need of some baptism or cleansing from sin, but rather as someone who just might need to be reminded how blessed and loved they are and always have been. And while you’re at, it you might also want to look at that person in the mirror the same way. You might want to tell that one that he/she is loved, blessed from the very beginning. You might want to remind that person and everyone in your life that the Bible begins in Genesis 1, NOT Genesis 3; it begins with Original Blessing NOT Original Sin. May the painting continue… Amen.

ReThinking Church Part 4: The Church as a Minority Insurgency

All month long, we’ve been re-thinking church – what it is, what it isn’t; who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing as a church community. In today’s final installment of this series, I’d like us to consider the Christian Church’s proper place in society.  

            As everyone knows, Christian churches, across denominational lines, are in rapid decline. Membership is in a free fall, and this has church leaders deeply worried, not only about their shrinking numbers, but also about the church’s loss of status, power, and influence in society. I understand their worry, but I don’t share it. I happen to think that the less power we Christians have in our society, the better!

            Perhaps a little history lesson will help explain my unusual perspective. We know Jesus lived sometime between the year 1 and 35, and we know that his church got rolling in the years following his death, resurrection, and ascension. In its first 300 years or so, Christ’s Church was nothing more than a bunch of tiny, unnoticed, secretive communities. We know that there were all sorts of codes and symbols – like the fish and IXTHUS – that early Christians used to get the word out of a gathering in someone’s home or basement for prayer and worship. We also know from the account in Acts that the apostles were traveling around doing the very things that Jesus had done: preaching, teaching, and healing.

            But something dramatic happened in the fourth century that would change the place of Christianity in society for the next 1700 years. First, in 323, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued a decree protecting Christians and limiting pagan practices. Then in 380 AD, Emperor Theodosius went even further, declaring Christianity to be the official religion of his entire empire. In very short order, Christianity went from a barely visible, persecuted minority to occupying the seat of power, prestige, and influence at the emperor’s own table.

            So, thanks to these two emperors’ decrees, quite rapidly, this little, counter-cultural, obscure, minority insurgency was not only protected throughout the Roman Empire, but also catapulted to prominence and power within it. It was this new status for Christians that led to the construction of the first church buildings. And with each successive generation, churches built larger, more dramatic buildings in every major town, and soon there were even huge cathedrals in major cities.

            To be fair, much was gained for 4^th century Christians and those who would follow them – relative safety, far less persecution, the ability to “come out of the closet,” as it were. But I believe that a great deal more was lost than was gained when Christianity wedded itself to the powers that be. In fact, I would argue that Constantine’s and Theodosius’s decrees may be the worst things that ever happened to Christ’s Church, in terms of Jesus’ followers staying true to His vision.

            As I scour the New Testament – particularly the gospels and the Book of Acts – I find no evidence that Jesus wanted his church to become huge and powerful. Look at the passage that Mary read; Jesus compares his kingdom to a tiny amount of yeast. Yeast does its invisible work gradually, slowly, subtly working its way into something much larger than itself. Jesus also compares his kingdom to a mustard seed, the tiniest of all garden seeds. While a mustard seed does grow into a nice, healthy tree, it doesn’t take over the entire garden; it isn’t a pernicious, aggressive plant, over-growing its allotted space, or devouring other unsuspecting plants. Jesus taught us to “render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s,” not to dethrone,replace him, nor climb into bed with him! Let’s not forget that Jesus disappointed a great many of his disciples by submitting to the powerful authorities rather than becoming the new authority himself.

            A great deal of Jesus’ purpose and his desire for his church can be discerned from that temptation story that I shared earlier. In tempting Jesus, the Devil offered him fame and popularity: “Throw yourself off this high building!” He offered Jesus power and authority: “I offer you all the kingdoms of the world!” Jesus consistently walked away from worldly and political power. But then, ironically and sadly, when he was gone, Constantine and Theodosius “gave” Jesus and his church the very things Jesus had rejected.

            To me, these emperors’ acts would be akin to someone leaving our church a wonderfully generous memorial gift with particular directions for us as to how it was to be used. And then we take the money and use it for something entirely different – even at odds with the expressed intention of the deceased.

            As I look at the relatively short history of American Christianity, I see this very same, sad, grab-for-power story repeating itself. Obviously, the huge indigenous population of Native Americans was not Christian, and neither were the majority of immigrants who risked life and limb to come here, escaping famine, disease, and all manner of ills.

            But over time, Christians began to build our numbers in America, gained popularity and strength, we built even more church buildings, as big and as ornate as we could! We flexed our muscles, pushed our way into political power, and even lobbied for a Christian government.

            All of us who are over 40 today grew up in a time when Christianity in America was right where Constantine and Theodosius wanted it – large and in charge, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the religious world. But that’s no longer the case today. Christianity today is in a free fall. Churches are closing their doors and going belly up at a rate of almost 3000 a week according to some reports. We’ve reached a tipping point, where soon more Americans will not attend church or affiliate with a Christian community than those who do. What this means is that we Christians have, once again, achieved minority status, and while the Christian Right and many other Christian leaders lament our descent into both minority status and far less cultural influence, I’m not sure Jesus is bothered by it at all…and I know for a fact that I’m not.

            It’s high time we got back to our roots. We’re supposed to be mustard seeds; we’re supposed to be yeast, leaven, salt. We’re the little guy – David, not Goliath; The widow’s mite, not Bill Gates’ billions; Jesus, not Pilate or Herod. We’re supposed to be the voice crying in the wilderness; we’re supposed to deliver the minority report, not the edicts of Constantine or Theodosius. Power corrupts, and we’ve had centuries to see what happens when Christianity gets into bed with the powers and principalities of the world. The results have not been pretty. They include the Crusades, the slave trade, the horrific colonization of Africa, the Holocaust, and the Religious Right, to name a few.

            I believe that a great and necessary pruning is going on in the Christian church in the 21^st century. I believe that God is undoing the damage that was done going all the way back to 323 and 380 AD. I believe that the only churches that are going to survive are the ones who, rather than grasping for power, give themselves away in mission, in service, and in love through millions of tiny acts of Christ-likeness.

            If you read my second book, you’ll remember a story I told in it of a little dying church in NYC, The Church of the Holy Apostles. Its denominational leaders sent a priest to that congregation with the instructions to conduct its funeral and bury it. As this designated “hatchet-man” priest delivered the bad news to the church council, they decided that if their church was going to go down, they might as well go down “doing a little something Christ-like.” So they decided to use their remaining funds to start offering free lunch to homeless people in NYC five days a week. It began with sandwiches and 30 people or so lined up outside their free lunch sign. In a week or two, it was more than a hundred people. Just as their supplies and church coffers were emptying out, some passers by noticed the line and the feeding that was going on and offered both to provide funds and to volunteer. Soon there were 300 people in line and almost as many folks volunteering, donating supplies, and offering funds to support it.

            About this time the church roof sprang a leak, and its historic sanctuary with solid oak pews anchored to the floor were being damaged. The roofers detached the pews and moved them out of the building until the roof was fixed. Meanwhile, the feeding program continued to grow, but the coffers were somehow filling up rather than being further depleted. Local businesses were now giving large sums of money to support this simple cause, and the volunteer corps now included Jews and Muslims, Atheists and Christians of every flavor. The homeless guests were being fed in the church basement, but with the leaky roof now fixed, something even more Christ-like occurred. The roofers asked the pastor if they should put the pews back in the sanctuary and anchor them down. But the pastor said, “No, let’s leave them out and sell them. We can use the money for the feeding program, and if we keep the sanctuary pew-less we can move the lunch program up there and serve way more people than we can in the basement.” And so they did.

            That little church has now served lunches to millions of hungry homeless folks. And by the way, their church didn’t close down. That funeral the priest was supposed to conduct never happened. The Church of the Holy Apostles is alive and thriving, and that lunch ministry is at the very core of their congregation’s life and identify.

            The Christian Church’s days of power and social prominence are over. And thank God for that; for now we can get back to the Christ-like business of giving ourselves away in love and in service. We can get back to being sprinkles of salt, pinches of yeast, and tiny mustard seeds in our very need world. Amen.

ReThinking Church Part 3:The Church as a Messy Refuge

We continue our series on “Rethinking Church” today. So far
we’ve considered the fact that a church is supposed to be a hospital for
sinners rather than a hotel for saints. We’ve also noted that a church is
not a building; nor is it a gathering that takes place on Sunday mornings.
Rather, the church of Jesus Christ is to be a collection of people who are
involved in a constant rhythm of gathering and being sent…gathering
and being sent. And it’s what we DO when we are outside of this
building, out there, that determines and defines who we are as a church.

Today, I’d like us to continue Re-Thinking Church by listening to a
story I stumbled upon years ago and have never been able to forget. It’s
a hauntingly accurate depiction of the most common path American
churches tend to take. Let’s give it a listen together… (you tube link is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxgAbxaspg - The Parable of the
Life Saving Station).

I had to come to terms with the deep but sad truth of this parable
of the life saving station when I was 24 years old and fresh out of
seminary. I was a naïve but fired up young pastor, ready to change the
world. I was serving a little church over in the Chicago presbytery,
almost an hour north of the city. During my first year on the job, I began
meeting for lunch monthly with 6 other area pastors. We shared
common concerns and resources, and it became clear that all of us were
seeing a big increase in the number of homeless people stopping by our
churches in search of help. Many were women and children. So we
decided, back in 1987, to start a little emergency shelter ministry. We
thought if each of us could open our churches’ basements or fellowship
halls just one night a week, then these folks would have a warm place to
go during the cold winter months, from October through April. All the 7
of us had to do was go back to our respective churches to sell the idea to
our various boards and get the volunteer support we would need just
one night a week.

“What could be easier?” I thought. This is the ultimate no brainer,
a slam-dunk. Our church building sits empty most nights anyway. We
might as well use it for the “least of these,” God’s children.
I’ll never forget that church board meeting and what I felt like
after it – for weeks after it. I can still hear the voices of the church elders
when I pitched my idea…

“You wanna do WHAT? Here? In OUR church building?
“What about the new carpeting?”
“What about the stained glass windows?”
“Can you imagine the mess these people will make? Who’s going
to clean that up?”
“I don’t think our neighbors are going to be too happy when you
start importing all these homeless drug addicts in from Chicago.”
“Aren’t most of them criminals?”

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a slam-dunk. In fact, it wasn’t even close. I
darn near lost my job over this, and why? Because providing emergency
shelter to a handful of God’s neediest children one night a week might
sully the building. It might make a bit of a mess.
Christians and church people are notorious for wanting to keep
things neat and tidy. Dirty hands, dirty feet, and dirty clothes make us
church folk a little uncomfortable, a little squirmy. We get nervous and
uneasy when people track in dirt or snow or anything else into our
precious sanctuaries and fellowship halls.

I was pretty bummed when I learned this lesson back in 1987, just
one year into my pastoral ministry. I tried to come to terms with it, tried
to put it behind me, but it really got under my skin. I was embarrassed
for Jesus. I just couldn’t accept that his followers, his church, would have
such different priorities and concerns than he, himself, had. I stuck
around that church for a couple of years, and, to their credit, they did
eventually consent to becoming one of the 7 shelters. But I wound up
leaving the church to become the full-time director of that very shelter
ministry I helped start. I came to realize that my work with the
homeless shelters felt more like “the church” than the church.

If there’s one thing I hope we never do here at 1st Congregational
UCC of Gaylord, it’s that we would come to love our building more than
we love the people who might need to use it. I remember the first week
or two I started work here, I attended a couple meetings where the hot
topic was cigarette butts on the ground outside where they shouldn’t
have been. The culprits seemed to be the AA guys, and a couple
committees were debating how to handle it. I was new at the time,
so I didn’t say much. But let me tell you how
I see it. As a son of an alcoholic who never got sober and who did some
irreparable damage in a couple drunk driving accidents, I would be
more than willing to pick up those cigarette butts myself every Tuesday
morning after they meet, if it meant we would keep letting them meet
here.

What I’m trying to say is that a church is a messy place. Or at least
it’s supposed to be a messy place. Serving the least of these is messy
business. You don’t do the things Jesus and his disciples did and keep
your hands – nor your church - clean the whole time. That woman who
crashed the Pharisees dinner party for Jesus made a mess, but Jesus
wouldn’t have had it any other way.In that passage Jody read for us,
once again, the religious people
wanted to keep things neat and tidy. So they took the one man from
their town who was mentally ill – demon-possessed, as they called it
then – they took him way outside of town, to the caves near the
cemetery, and chained him up so they wouldn’t have to deal with him
and the mess he made.
But when Jesus came to town, he walked right up to that man,
called him by name, and set him free. And to further prove my point
about church folks not liking messes, you gotta love the line where Mark
writes that “when the people saw that the man was dressed and in his
right mind, they were afraid.” You’d think that they’d rejoice or give
thanks. But you see, these church folks were already concerned that
they might have to let this unpredictable, potential mess-maker back in
their church building, not to mention back into their lives.

One of my favorite pastors and writers of all time is Mike
Yaconelli. He tells a story in his terrific and well-titled book “Messy
Spirituality” that I want to share. A pastor in a downtown church had
installed a security camera in the sanctuary to protect the church from
possible crime and undesirables. One day during a staff meeting, the
church receptionist interrupted the meaning to report that a homeless
man was lying down on the altar steps and had been there about 3
hours. She said that every once in a while he would stand up, raise his
arms as if to say something, only to lie down again. One of the staff went
out to speak to the man and determined he was praying. They decided
to let him stay. The man returned every day doing this same thing. His
clothes were filthy, his hair was in knots, but the pastoral staff informed
the sexton and the altar guild not to disturb the man and to work
around him whenever he was there.
Well, when Sunday rolled around and the pastor arrived for the
early Sunday service, there was this same man, blocking her path to the
altar. The pastor was afraid and began to wonder, “What if he’s crazy?
What if he disturbs people at our service?” She explained to the poor
man that a service was about to begin and he’d have to leave. He replied
in a heavy Haitian accent, “Ok” and left. Listen to how the pastor
describes the service that was to follow and the space left by this man’s
departure…

“The 8 o’clock service began right on time. The faithful took their
places and I took mine. We read our parts well. We spoke when we were
supposed to speak and were silent when we were supposed to be silent.
We offered up our symbolic gifts, we performed out duties and there
was nothing wrong with what we did, nothing at all. We were good
servants, careful and contrite sinners, who had come for our ritual
cleansing…But one of us was missing. He had risen and gone his way,
but the place where he lay on his face for hours - making a spectacle of
himself – seemed all at once so full of heat and light that I stepped
around it on my way out, chastened if only for that moment by the call
to a love so excessive, so disturbing, so beyond the call to obedience that
it made me want to leave all my good works behind…I wish I’d invited
the man to stay for the worship service…”

A church, at its best, when it’s really serving Jesus, is a messy
place: dirty hands, dirty feet, lots of tracks. That’s one of the things that’s
made me so comfortable around here in my first few months as your
pastor: I’ve seen a lot of the right kind of messiness around here. I see it
on Friday nights at the community meal. I see it on Tuesday afternoons
when a few of this congregation’s saints meet individually or in small
groups to tutor a blue-haired gal in search of her GED and a direction for
her life. I see it when guests from The Refuge stop by here to warm up
and have a cup of coffee when the shelter is closed. And I see it on
Monday nights, when I’m leaving and the AA group is here, and some of
the guys are out under the gazebo, sharing cigarettes in the freezing
cold, not always putting the butts where they belong.
May this church, the 1st Congregational UCC Church of Gaylord,
always embrace and celebrate the mess that following Jesus brings. May
we never be more concerned about the condition of our building than
we are for the people who need its warmth. Amen

ReThinking Church Part 2: Is the Church a Magnet or a Bridge?

This week we continue our series on Rethinking Church. Our task this month is to take a fresh look at what it means to be a church. Last week we looked at the fact that so many Christian churches mistakenly think of themselves as a hotel for saints, when, in fact, God calls us to be a hospital for sinners. Today we’ll examine another subconscious metaphor that has distorted Christ’s church.

            It seems to me that the vast majority of American churches operate as if our chief purpose is to lure or attract people into our buildings on Sunday mornings. If you look at the cover of our bulletin today, you’ll see my somewhat crude attempt to visually depict what I call the “Magnet metaphor.” This corrupt way of thinking has been affecting churches on a subconscious level for decades. This morning, I want to see if this magnet model stands up to biblical scrutiny.

            If the church is a magnet with the purpose of sucking more and more people into its building, then that would explain why churches do things like hire a younger pastor in attempt to “bring in more young people.” It’s also the magnet metaphor that leads churches to want to modernize their music, thinking that a more contemporary service will be the key to fuller pews on Sunday mornings. And it’s the magnet metaphor that is at work when a church decides to build a huge new worship center or a Sunday school wing. The church leaders are thinking “if we build it, they will come,” right?

            I got very familiar with this misguided but prominent metaphor when I was serving as the moderator of what’s known as the Mackinaw Presbytery – a 42 church region within the Presbyterian denomination that stretches from Traverse City to Alpena and all the way up through the entire Upper Peninsula. It’s sort of the Presbyterian equivalent of the UCC’s United Northern Association. Anyway, in my capacity as moderator, I traveled all around that region visiting with churches, pastors, and church boards as a sort of consultant. I can’t tell you how clear it became to me that churches evaluated themselves – and each other - solely on the basis of how many people were coming to their services on a Sunday morning. It was like everything they did was a part of their attempt to get what my friend likes to call: more “butts in the pews.”

            Now let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with wanting more people to worship with us on a Sunday morning! There is nothing wrong with re-evaluating who our pastor is or what music we’re playing or anything that might make our Sunday mornings more meaningful and our worship more powerful. But if that is what we think we are here for – more people from out there coming in here on a Sunday morning – we can be sure that we’ve totally ignored the life and teaching of Jesus.

            The Mark 6 passage I presented a few minutes ago begins with these critical words: “Calling the 12 to him, Jesus began to send them out…” This is just five chapters in to the very first gospel. The calling and gathering the disciples has hardly finished, and already Jesus is sending them out! SENDING THEM OUT!

            And what were the sent disciples supposed to do out there? What were their instructions? Were they supposed to invite or coax people to some big service in their home chapel? No…let’s listen in. Jesus tells them: “Take nothing with you as you journey…” Then, Mark reports that the twelve went out and preached, drove out demons, visited and healed the sick. Then, here’s the part I love. The disciples go back to Jesus, to report to him all the cool things they’d seen and experienced out there – out there where they were BEING the church!   

            You see, folks, being a church is NOT about bringing people into some building; it never has been! Being a church is about getting OUT of the building and doing the very things Jesus did out there in the world! There’s a rhythm to our lives as followers of Jesus, as a part of his church, and the lion’s share of that rhythm is being sent; it’s going out to the highways and the by-ways and wherever there are people who are hungry, thirsty, sick, lonely, or in need.

            And then, periodically, the rhythm of following Jesus also requires us to pull away to rest and refresh. Jesus, himself, says to all of his followers from time to time: “Come away with me, by yourselves, to a quiet place and get some rest.” To some extent, that’s what Sunday morning is. Sunday morning is NOT the church. This beautiful building in which we gather weekly to worship is NOT the church. Sunday morning in this place is our gathering time, our worship time. It’s a break in the action; the time-out that is called during the game of life, when we come away for awhile to get some rest, to celebrate the exciting work out there that has made us tired, and to worship the One who makes it all possible.

            I wish we followers of Jesus – including me - would be a little more careful, a little more precise with our words. I wish we would stop saying that on Sunday morning we’re “going to church.” I wish we would stop referring to this building at 218 W. Second St. as “the church.” What we should say is that on each and every Sabbath morn “we come together to worship,” we “gather to worship.” Then, as we leave this worship service, we should say, “It’s time to go back out there to BE the church.”

            Words make a difference. They affect the way we think. For decades and even centuries now, our words have reinforced a false model, an un-biblical understanding of what it means to BE a church. The magnet metaphor for what it means to be a church needs to be abandoned, buried, put to rest – forever!

            I had an experience just this week that confirmed how important it is that we kill this magnet metaphor once and for all. There’s a guy I know who has been struggling to get his feet on the ground. He’s a single dad with a daughter just about Eloise’s age. He has worked so hard to get and stay sober and get his life on track. I called him because I was thinking about him. I come to find out he’s out of work, trapped in an isolated living situation out in the sticks, and on top of all that, his car just died.

            Almost immediately, do you know what he started to say to me? He started apologizing for not making it to church lately! He went on and on about how sorry he is that he hasn’t been able to make it here on Sunday. It was incredibly clear to me how much the magnet metaphor had poisoned his thinking where the church is concerned. The moment he determined that the pastor of a church was calling him, his immediate assumption was that I must be calling to find out why he hasn’t been here for the all-important Sunday morning worship service.

            Can you imagine? The dude has no job and no car; he lives 25 minutes from here, and his first thought when a pastor calls is that I must be calling to bust his chops about not coming to Sunday worship! That’s the fallout from too many years of the magnet model dominating the way people think about church. Eventually, I just had to interrupt him. I said, “Bud, I’m not calling so that you’ll come to worship on Sunday! I’m calling because my friends and I want to BE the church for you and for your daughter, whether you can ever make it here or not! There may come a day when you can come worship with us on Sundays. But that day is NOT now. You’ve got much more pressing concerns to address. Now is not the time for you to come to church; now is the time for the church to come to you.”

            As followers of Jesus, we are in a constant flow of being sent and being gathered, being sent and being gathered. Sunday morning worship is the gathering part. It’s a vitally important part, and I’m so glad you are here. But the Sunday morning thing is a tiny part of what it means to BE the church. It’s less than 1/7^th when we do the math, right? Mark 6 shows us that when Jesus’ attempts to gather the disciples together for worship and rest were thwarted, he gave priority to meeting the needs of a hungry world.

             Mark tells us that the disciples weren’t too happy when the needy crowds kept hounding them. They went to Jesus and said, “Rabbi, this is a remote place and it’s already very late.  Send the people away so that they can go buy themselves something to eat.”

            And you know what Jesus said, right…? “No, I’m not sending them away…You give them something to eat.” Why did Jesus say that…? Because he had compassion on the crowd; he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. WE’RE supposed to feed them! WE are. And do you know why? Because THAT’S what a church DOES! THAT’S how a church rolls. THAT’S what defines us as followers of Jesus.

            The church of Jesus Christ is not a magnet that we hold at the open door of this building, hoping to suck people in. The church is the bridges we build with our actions out there in the world, when we’re loving people, serving people, feeding people, housing people, and doing all those things Jesus and his disciples did.

            Thank you for gathering here with me today to worship and to rethink what it means to be a church. I hope you’ll come back next week to worship and gather and rethink church some more. But in the meantime, in these next six days, I hope you’ll leave this building and BE the church – out there, in the world. And if we all do THAT…we won’t need a magnet…Amen.

ReThinking Church Part I - Hospital for Sinners or Hotel for Saints?

One of Abigail Van Buren’s – better known as Dear Abby’s  - most memorable quotations ever is this one: “The church is supposed to be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints.” As we begin our month-long sermon series on “Re-Thinking Church,” I can think of no better starting point than this quotation.

            You’ve heard me say before that when non-church goers in this country are asked what they think of when they even hear the words “Christian” or “church,” they immediately think of judgment and exclusion. They think of all the things Christians and church folks are against and all the groups of people we try to keep out of our church communities. This Christian tendency to judge and exclude others goes all the way back to before Jesus’ time.

            In our Matthew 9 passage this morning, Jesus is sharing a meal with tax collectors and other sinners. The Pharisees and teachers of the Jewish law are furious! They simply cannot accept the fact that one of their fellow Jewish rabbi’s – and remember, that’s what Jesus was – would knowingly violate this sacred Jewish principle of holiness, by associating with people who clearly didn’t live according to Jewish laws. They wanted the church – or, in their case, temple – to be a hotel for saints, a prestigious, respectable club of righteous people. But Jesus wanted no such thing, not for His church. “Those who are well,” Jesus said, “have no need of a physician.”

            It wasn’t only the Jews who believed that a true faith community should be for the righteous only. Several of the early groups of Christians were after the very same thing. Those who followed the disciple John – whose perspective we find most clearly articulated in the Gospel of John and in the 3 Epistles of John – were just as concerned as the Pharisees about keeping the church “pure” and free from those who weren’t as “righteous” as they presumed themselves to be. John’s gospel says in its 3^rd chapter: “And this is the judgment: that light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil.” Paul picks up on this same exclusionary and judgmental perspective in his 2^nd letter to the Corinthians, saying, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship could light possibly have with darkness?” (II Cor. 6:14)

            Interestingly enough, this very passage was used against one of my favorite former students quite recently. Her name is Reagan. She is incredibly bright, super kind, very attractive, and has one of the kindest hearts I’ve ever encountered. Her family is not religious and does not attend church. Her mother was diagnosed recently with breast cancer, and Reagan has dropped most everything to care for her mom. Reagan’s boyfriend is from a fairly conservative Christian family that attends a very conservative, non-denominational church in Petoskey. Her boyfriend, a terrific young man, had been volunteering with the middle school youth group at his church for over four years. He loved the work and the kids loved him. One day after church, his pastor called him in out of the blue to talk. The pastor informed him that he was no longer welcome to serve as a middle school youth leader. Puzzled, Reagan’s boyfriend asked why. The pastor proceeded to tell him that since he was dating a non-Christian – or ‘yoked with a non-believer” - he was setting a dangerous example for the youth group kids. Therefore, it wasn’t appropriate for him to be in any sort of contact with the youth group kids anymore. He was relieved of his duties.

            Wow! Reagan would be the first young woman I would WANT my son to date if I had a son! I was dumbfounded! And can you imagine the effect this decision is going to have on both Reagan and her boyfriend in terms of their ever wanting to have anything to do with a Christian or church community again?

            I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be a part of a church family like this one that endeavors to accept all people. I was so incredibly drawn to come here when I got word that you had gone through the difficult but important process of becoming an open and affirming church, and had voted quite overwhelmingly to adopt that position. That is such an important step on a path that must become increasingly open to others. So many churches that bear Christ’s name are sending the exact opposite message. But our world needs churches that not only say but live out the message that “whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, and wherever you are on life’s journey, you ARE welcome here.”

            I’ve always been drawn to what Dear Abby said about the church: that it should be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints. When a person walks into a hospital emergency room, what do the doctors and nurses care about…?  Getting the patient whatever help and healing he/she needs. They don’t concern themselves with the moral background of the patient. They don’t waste time determining if the patient “deserves” their care or not. They don’t bother with how the injury or illness happened or whose fault it was. A hospital’s mission is simple and pure – to help those who are sick or injured. Period. Shouldn’t that be our mission too?

            I’ve always believed that churches could learn an awful lot from Alcoholics Anonymous. AA is a group that understands much better than most Christians do the power of radical inclusion and acceptance. No matter how many times one falls off the wagon, no matter how many times one has tried and failed to get sober, she is always welcomed at an AA meeting. AA is not just for those who have gotten their you-know-what together and kicked the habit of drinking! AA is for any and everyone who wishes they could! I absolutely love the fact that every time an AA member opens his mouth, he begins by saying, “I’m Toby and I’m an alcoholic.” It doesn’t matter if my last drink was 25 years ago or 25 minutes ago; I still affirm my weakness, my addiction, and my absolute equality with every other person in the room and with every other alcoholic in the entire universe.

            It would be great if someday walking into this church felt the same way as walking into a hospital or an AA meeting. Wouldn’t it be great if we affirmed that same truth: “My name is Toby, and I’m a sinner...My name is Toby and I’ve screwed up in life…My name is Toby and I’ve ruined my marriage…My name is Toby, and I managed to break another 3 commandments this week…My name is Toby, and I’m a child of God like every other person in this church and in this world.”

            One of my favorite spiritual mentors of all time is the late Mike Yaconelli. Often called “the father of modern Youth Ministry, he, perhaps more than any other pastor and theologian, helped to set me straight on what Christ’s church is supposed to be. Listen to just a few of his gems:

“The Church is the place where the incompetent, the unfinished, and even the unhealthy are welcome.”

“Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality, not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws, but because we let go of seeking perfection and, instead, seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives.”

“Nothing in the church makes people in the church more angry than grace. It's ironic: we stumble into a party we weren't invited to and find the uninvited standing at the door making sure no other un-invited’s get in. Then a strange phenomenon occurs: as soon as we are included in the party because of Jesus' irresponsible love, we decide to make grace "more responsible" by becoming self-appointed Kingdom Monitors, guarding the kingdom of God, keeping the riffraff out (which, as I understand it, are who the kingdom of God is supposed to include).”

            Here is what I think, folks…I think that every time another person is or feels excluded from a church, another nail is pounded into Jesus’ hands and feet…I think that every time a person feels or hears the whisper of judgment by a supposed follower of Jesus, God’s heart breaks all over again…I think that the mistakes I’ve made over the course of my 54 years of life unite me with every other living, breathing, flawed human being, from the biggest mass murderer of all time to the person who cheated once on his income taxes….I think that God’s love and acceptance of me, as one of his own precious children, unites me with every single man, woman, and child in this universe.

            So when I step over to this table of bread and wine, I step gently, humbly aware that I don’t deserve to be fed here. And yet, I also step confidently, because I am invited here by Jesus, and he will never turn anyone away. But most importantly, I come to this table knowing that I have no reason nor right to be a Kingdom Monitor, keeping the “riff-raff” out, for they, like me, are the very ones God’s kingdom and table of grace were made for.

            How can I be so sure? By taking a look at a few of the other people Jesus invited to this table and to his church…the woman at that well who had been married five times and was living with a sixth man…a woman who’d been suffering with a 12-year bleeding problem and hadn’t been allowed in a temple in all that time because she was considered “unclean”…that Gerasene demoniac who had been kicked out of his town and tied up in chains because the people were so afraid of him…Zacchaeus, the corrupt tax collector who had been robbing his own people for years…that woman who had been caught in the very act of adultery. They’re all people Jesus welcomed. He built his church for them!

            From its very beginning, Jesus’ church was established for the outsider – for the sick and the lame, for the forgotten and the blamed, for the sinner and the criminal, for the widow and the orphan. So it was; so it is; and so it shall be…forever and ever. Amen.