Comments for Jim

Sunday, January 10, 1999

Rev. James A.Todhunter

"The Church: Community or Club"

ISAIAH 42:1-9 ACTS 10:34-17 MATTHEW 1:13-17

In his book Being Peace, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a man who came to enter the religious community which Thich Nhat Hanh oversaw. The man who joined the group was very unhappy living in society. The author writes:

The writer concludes the story with these words about the meaning of a Buddhist Temple, but I think one could substitute the words Christian church as well;

Why do we join groups, whether they be clubs, clans, cliques, parties or churches? There are many reasons, I believe. We join groups because we are lonely, because without a group the world can be a scary place. We join to be known and valued for who we are, and to find meaning by working together with others to change the world. Those are all, it seems to me, healthy reasons for joining a group. Less healthy reasons might include the need to escape the world, to be protected from growing up, and to work together to change the world in bad ways.

In the days of Jesus and of early Christianity in the wide Roman Empire, the church was one of many, many groups. There were a tremendous number of cults, like those worshipping the god Mithra, the cult of Isis in Egypt, and the so-called mystery religions. What most of these groups had in common was that they were secret societies. Entrance to such a group required an elaborate initiation rite, and learning an arcane ritual, complete with coded language, passwords, and holy books. As far as the Romans were concerned, the early Christian church was just another of these groups, and they lumped the church in with them. Most of these groups involved the promise of a retreat from this world, and happiness in the secret mysteries of a spiritual existence. We see, perhaps, vestiges of such groups today, in the practices of some lodges and fraternities, and many religious cults.

But how, then and today, is the Church of Jesus Christ different? After all, don’t we have our rites and language? Our internal processes? Hence, the sermon title. The true church is a community, not a club. So what is the difference?

Let me name three differences. First, the Church of Jesus Christ is inclusive rather than exclusive. For a club, membership is defined by who is excluded, rather than who is included. You can’t say a group is for whites only, and not carry the implication that it excludes non-whites. Bill Gordon loved to tell this story (which I know many of you have heard). A black man in the American south was turned away from an all-white church where he had tried to worship. On the road he ran into another black man, who introduced himself as God. The first man complained that he had not been allowed to enter the all-white church. God replied, "Don’t feel bad. I’ve been trying to get into that church for years."

For a church that is truly exclusive, the point is to be an insider. For a church that is truly inclusive, there are no insiders or outsiders. And there is the recognition that God just may be on the outside trying to get in. During our discussions about becoming an "Open and Affirming Church" we repeatedly heard that for gay people and other excluded groups, the standard phrase "All Welcome!" is no guarantee that once inside they may be made to feel very unwelcome. As we look around at one another this morning, can we not help but be reminded of the sad truth that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America? Becoming and remaining a truly inclusive community does not happen naturally. It happens intentionally. In Peter’s wonderful sermon in the Book of Acts, he declares that "God shows no partiality." When we welcome the stranger, the person who is different from us in terms of race, class, or any other worldly distinction, we may be welcoming the excluded Christ.

Second, a sign of the church as true community is the commitment to individual growth. Growth should be defined holistically to include physical, spiritual and psychological nurture. The church is not a place for people who have arrived, people with all the answers. It is a community of people living the questions. Every person in this congregation, irrespective of age, experience, and depth of faith, ought really to have some sense of where his or her growing edges are. Jesus had a real genius for discerning the growing edge of each person he met. The scribes and Pharisees were people who had stopped growing. They had all the answers. And their hearts had become hardened. And let me add that I don’t think any of us ever really chooses to grow in our faith. Frankly, I don’t. Instead, the painful and challenging events of life itself drag us, kicking and screaming, into the future. And in this Jesus himself becomes a wonderful human example. He does not really emerge spiritually full-blown in the gospels. He himself grows, through a series of human confrontations and interactions. The Jesus who faces the cross is not really the same Jesus who receives his baptism from John the Baptist. In the story from Matthew’s Gospel, John is shocked that Jesus comes to receive baptism. "I should be baptized by you," says John. Today we, as Christians, see baptism as a rite of initiation into the Christian community, the beginning of the journey. God’s love poured into Jesus at the outset of his journey. And he became Spirit-filled. And if that happened with Jesus, it can happen with each of us. We are each vessels waiting to be filled over and over with the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit is what makes for growth in our lives.

If we are not growing spiritually, then we are like the man in the story that the Buddhist monk tells. We become locked in relationships of dependency, alliances designed to keep us from changing. A club is a group where unhealthy dependencies are encouraged, and people are protected from reality. In a club, people are tacitly encouraged not to grow. In a church our shared task is to help us all keep growing up.

I believe that whenever a group becomes an "in group," this happens because people in that group somehow believe that what nourishes us in life is a scarce commodity and only a few can clutch it to survive. An in-group, a cult, or club can be like a life-boat that can only accommodate a few and has limited provisions. The people in the boat can only survive by beating away the drowning people surrounding them. The church is exactly the opposite. We can only survive by welcoming more and more people into the boat. We are not afraid to do so because we know that there is space and sustenance for everybody. God’s great feast never runs out.

And third, the Christian church exists in order to heal the world. The church is about including all, fostering individual growth, and third, it is about preparing us to go back into the world to change the world. This is what we call "equipping the saints." And this is, I believe, a two-fold mission. The first task is equipping us to live in a world that is dangerous to our health, physical and spiritual. The task of the church is not really teaching us how to be successful people. To be successful in a corrupt world is not a worthy goal. Our task is learning how to survive in a fallen world, learning how not to be co-opted by this world. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the Gospel is about calling us to be transformed non-conformists. Here the spiritual disciplines of meditation, prayer, and spiritual discernment are critically important. We have much to learn here from our Christian spiritual guides of the past, as well as Buddhists and others. For them, just making it through the day is fraught with obstacles that threaten to overwhelm us and crush our humanity. For example, just staying human behind the wheel of a car requires more and more spiritual centering. But secondly, our task also includes loving and changing this fallen and dangerous world. Our task is to equip each other to bring the message of God’s healing and reconciling love into the world, through word and deed.

How do we live as a Christian community and not fall victim to the risk of becoming a club? How do we become truly inclusive, encouraging and supporting the holistic growth of the individual, and equipping us each to be God’s people in the world? Many ways, I think. We need to work harder to become a truly inclusive community in terms of race and class and sexual orientation. We need to be more conscious about how to infuse with a lively spirituality all that we do on a daily basis. Spirituality is not just a few highly committed people gathering in the meditation room once a week, as critically important as that is - but should include opportunity and training for each of us to carry our spirituality throughout each day.

And finally, should we, like the Buddhist monk in the story I began with, be a little more assertive about burning down one another's’ cottages? It is a very interesting story about spiritual growth. The monk lodged in his community had become dependent, not on God, but on the community. Its security. Its routine. He had decided that his health and happiness depended on things not changing. But the truth is that spiritual health depends on two things: our response to inevitable change, and our willingness to be intentional change agents ourselves. Change is profoundly painful. Loss is terrifying. Grief hurts, as every single person in this congregation knows. And the monk who burned the meditation cottage wept along side the man whose hut had been destroyed.

He wrote this poem which, I think, captures so much: bold spiritual confrontation, the shared pain of grief, and the hope of new life rising from the ashes of loss:

AMEN

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