Today is our Annual Meeting as a congregation. I always resist talking about church for its own sake. I suspect you are here not to preserve the church but because of the life and work to which Jesus Christ calls us. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church says much the same thing among its very first lines, that ‘[the church entrusts] itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its own life.” (F 1.0303) The church is never supposed to be about its own self-preservation. But it is absolutely worth spending some time thinking together about what the church is for—and our Annual Meeting day seems as good a time as any.
My favorite part of today’s Psalm, Psalm 27, is verse 4: “One thing I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” It makes me wonder, what would church be like, if this were the place where we wanted to spend all the days of our life, the place where we wanted most to be…?
Let me tell you a personal story: I didn’t recognize it at the time, but looking back I can tell you when church first became important to me. It was high school, when I spent lots of time in youth group and became deeply involved in my church. I had attended worship regularly with my family all my life, but in high school I started to know other young people and adults I’d see on Sunday mornings; I knew the songs and the prayers and I felt like I belonged. My church and youth group were deeply involved in mission. Through church I found myself in the impoverished neighborhoods and churches and soup kitchens of my hometown and doing disaster assistance work around the country in the summers. And perhaps most importantly for a teenager, youth group itself offered me the community that high school never quite was, absent the judgment and stress of adolescence and just full of grace and welcome. Church was my second home.
I know other people who can tell a similar story, and plenty of them grew up at Knox. But my ministry has been marked by an awareness of something different—the fact that for so many people, church has been something quite different, and tragically, something quite less. Churches, like so many other human institutions, are full of the flaws and brokenness that are part of every other part of human life. Add to that the suspicion of all kinds of institutions that has grown in the last couple of generations, and across the board, many folks have decided to leave church rather than to stay and try to reform it. And when you hear the stories some of them tell you can hardly blame them.
But these days there’s something else going on, something different than just a story of the decline of the church and religion. The studies show us that declines in the church have mostly leveled off, and that especially among younger people, religion is experiencing a resurgence. The resurgence is especially strong in more traditional contexts, and the explanation seems to be that young people are looking for some kind of anchor or grounding in a world where so much seems tenuous and uncertain, and when so many in leadership do not seem worth following.
A journal I read recently described what’s going on, not just in the church, but in all kinds of places—it described it as an “institutional reckoning.” For a good long while the conventional wisdom has been that institutions don’t matter anymore; they are irrelevant and bureaucratic, hypocritical and interested only in their own self-preservation and who would want to be part of that. But lately we are seeing that a culture without honorable, durable institutions has its own costs, from young people who are without grounding to government institutions that are ripe for takeover by unprincipled people—a society without good institutions is in trouble.
The church is no exception to this rule. The Christian Nationalists and white supremacists have taken to the internet in force, drawing young people into a version of Christianity that compromises the Gospel for the sake of political power, divides people rather than uniting us as children of God, and asks them to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior without a passing reference to what our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ actually said and did regarding compassion for the weak, resistance to violence and greed…, dare I say it: love!
But it’s easy to be a critic, and Jesus didn’t invite us to be divisive in our own right. So if we don’t like other versions of Christianity that may be getting a lot of public attention, the question really becomes: “what kind of Christianity are we offering?” If we seek to be an institution of integrity, if we seek to offer the next generation a church that is genuinely shaped by the love and grace of Jesus Christ…will we be up to the task?
So in the past month we have begun a journey of looking our core beliefs through stories of the Bible, to ask what kind of Christians we are hoping to form in the world. We began with affirmations. First, that in Creation, God called the world and called its people good—all races and nations, even religions, God blesses humanity in all of its variety. Second, that in the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis we meet flawed and imperfect children of God encouraging us that we all belong…and cautioning us not to be so judgy. Third, we saw in the story of the Exodus from Egypt a God who seeks to set us free from a life of anxiety over not enough money, not enough control, not enough power, but instead freedom, that we can trust. And Fourth, that the prophets call us to a world of creative imagination, where, in spite of the broken world in which we find ourselves, we can live in hope for something better. And today, on the Sunday of our Annual Meeting in this congregation, my question to you is, will we be worthy of this calling? The church is a home for all, a source of help for the suffering, a voice of moral grounding in a world without values, a place of beauty in a world of noise… Will we be up to our calling?
Scripture describes beautifully the kind of spiritual home we are seeking. Don’t make the Gospel more complicated than it is, it is summed up simply and beautifully in 1 John 4: “God is love; and all of those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.” When we want to know what we are called to do as a church, the answer is always obvious: do the loving thing.
Psalm 27 takes the message further with a real, human story. Psalm 27 is a Psalm of David, the quintessential blessed but human leader. David’s story begins as he is a humble shepherd boy, the youngest of his brothers, who has no idea that God wishes to do something with his life, but it is he who slays the giant Goliath and is anointed to become King. God draws around him a great nation and even Jesus will be numbered among his descendants… But David is far from perfect. His adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband makes him as flawed as any man ever was; and in his loss of his son Absalom he learns the very depth of human pain. Yet even out of this complicated story, David cries out to God, “the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear…and David’s vision of a good life is a life with God—a God who loves him, who loves all of us. In the presence of such a God is where David wants to be: “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life…” The life David wants is the life with God, full of all of its triumphs as well as its failures, it’s great challenges as well as it’s graces in the midst of grief and loss.
This vision of life with God, this vision to which God is calling us…it is not impossible to reach…for just as it is full of the highest of callings for love and for justice, it is also full of grace. We are regular people. When we come to church we should expect disagreement, we should expect to meet flawed people…we should expect mistakes… And that’s okay as long as we can speak the truth to one another remembering that we also believe in humility, and forgiveness, and chances to start over when we have failed.
Some days I daydream about starting a new church, one with no complicated history or baggage; no staff to pay, no building to maintain, no old traditions to be careful with—in some ways it would be so much easier; but then again in such a place there is much less source of inherited wisdom, and a story we hold in trust for the people who have gone before us. Might a brand new startup get me back to the way I experienced church as a teenager? Maybe. But here’s the thing: I was a kid. And the truth was this: my church was far from perfect; it’s just that at the time I wasn’t able to see it. I didn’t realize it was just made up of flawed, broken ministers, Elders, musicians, and other regular members of the church…regular people who were trying their best to follow God, even in the midst of their brokenness. I did not yet know how much the cultural comfort of the churches of the last century often kept them from really following the call of Christ—and today I know…we do not want those days back.
What we really need isn’t a the church of my childhood or the one I idyllically dream about, but a real church, a church for people of all ages that is a church of maturity and reality. We need a church full of history and messy stories, full of great work and some big mistakes, and a calling all around us that is too loud to ignore: to bring the love of Christ to God’s people, whatever it takes, because in these days it is as important as ever. The church that we need isn’t some other church—it’s the church that God has given us.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great poem “Ulysses” is his song of maturity. It’s the song of the aging, but not yet old king Ulysses who gazes out the archway of his castle to the horizon beyond and dreams of shaking off the dust of the kingdom and heading out on a voyage to renew the adventure in his life. So he calls to his mates and his crew: “Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world…for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset…”
You might choose to imagine that this is a song for the church, a church like this one, with rich history and tradition, and with all of the new people and new possibilities that greet us every time we swing wide the doors and look outside. Here we gather in our old stone castle, and plenty of churches that look a lot like us have been content to put up their feet, bury their Elders, and wait to die; but that is not what we will do here. For we look out beyond the arch at the horizon, and there is work to be done, and we are the ones to do it. The old and the young, those who have been here for generations and those who are coming for the first time, together, with all of our human flaws, we are the ones God has placed here for such a time as this. As Ulysses called to his companions, so God calls to us: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides…that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate but strong in will…” And what is our task, as we serve God in love? “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is God’s church. Amen.