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
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