On
the Fringes of Faith
Sermon by Cynthia
A. Jarvis
November 3, 2002,
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
II Corinthians 4:1-12
Matthew 14:22-26
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"But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent
power belongs to God and not to us." "…and they begged him that they might
touch even the fringe of his cloak and all that touched it were healed."
"Before our marriage," writes journalist Gary Dorsey, "my wife joined a
little Presbyterian church in rural eastern Connecticut. A place of hard
pews and stale air…. Their sanctuary smelled like an earthen vessel, a homely
pot of ancient scents left over from one hundred years of ham-and-bean suppers.
Molting palm fronds, spicy bathroom disinfectants, and…ladies' perfumes
tinged the air. On Thursday nights they sold dinners of homemade cabbage
soup and garden salads prepared by a small group of women who never seemed
to leave the kitchen. On Sundays, they met in a cold sanctuary to sing hymns
and hear meditations from an Irish interim minister or his anemic female
associate." We have this treasure in earthen vessels said Paul to a
particular local congregation in the middle of the first century. It was
a church struggling with doctrinal and ethical problems; it was a church
whose order had been eroded by a lack of trust and love; it was a church
divided into camps and factions and accusations; it was a church made up
of merely human beings. On this Sunday after having received letters calling
for a special General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) due to
a constitutional crisis…as part of a denomination struggling with doctrinal
and ethical problems whose order has been eroded by a lack of trust and
love…as a congregation made up of merely human beings, we would do well
to consider how it is the humanity of the church is held within the intention
of God. And we might as well begin with ourselves, since that is what
we most naturally and humanly do in relation to the church. "When viewed
from below," says my former colleague in his book on the church, "the church
is seen as a community of human need. It is a congregation of men, women,
and children--be it at a local, regional, national or international level--who
have physical, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual needs: the
need for food, shelter, acceptance, support, values, friendship, relationships,
intimacy, stimulation, community, meaning." One way or another, each
and every one of us woke up this morning with some degree of need that could
not be met simply by staying put. Why specifically you got out of bed and,
instead of pulling on a pair of jeans, retrieving the Sunday Inquirer from
the driveway and settling down to suck a few cups of coffee in the kitchen…why
you have appeared instead in the fourteenth pew, lectern side, by the window,
God only knows. Perhaps it was the simple need to be with other people…the
need to hear something more hopeful than the morning news…the need to get
away from the place you call home and the people who call themselves your
family…the need to sort out what happened to you this week and gain a better
perspective…the need to put your children in the way of grace…the need to
confirm your worldview…the need tangibly to trust your life and death, the
life and death of one you love, anew, into a greater hand than your own.
Ecclesia, another word for the church, means those who are called out and
we know ourselves to be called out, in the first place, by our need. We
are human and therefore afraid, lonely, hurting, insecure beneath our arrogance,
struggling for a purpose, seeking something we cannot quite put our finger
on, dying. We have come with our aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, social,
and political agendas on our sleeve. We are human--some, of course, if pressed,
more human than others--and we have wandered through these doors in expectation
that the church can do something for us. We have come like the crowd long
ago: to touch the fringes of his cloak and be healed. Yet as we are
thus gathered to be Christ's church, there is this dissociation, to use
a psychological term, which takes place. For here we are. It is Sunday morning.
The sign outside says the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. Who else
could that be but us? Though when we are gathered--be it locally or regionally
or nationally--an unreasonable expectation overtakes us: we would like the
church--its members, its officers, its ministers, its teachers--to be something
more than merely human. Gary Dorsey soon left that smelly little Presbyterian
Church in part because the interim minister left and the congregation decided
to call the anemic female associate as the minister. Says Dorsey, "After
a few Sundays, I remembered why I hadn't been back to church in twenty years…Of
course," he goes on, "it never takes long in our culture to grow weary of
religion's failures and conceits." The church we are given, you see,
is never quite the church we had in mind. If we are Pelagians, it is certain
that our fellow Christians will never quite reach the moral perfectibility
we believe should be possible; if we are mystics, we are disappointed that
we never quite experience God the way we feel we ought; if we are Zealots,
the church is forever wasting expensive oil on Jesus when it should be denouncing
the powers that be or giving it all to the poor; if we are theologians,
the church is simply wrong most of the time. But even more critically, if
we are lonely, the church has not found us best friends; if we are in pain,
the church keeps passing on the other side when we really need its care;
if we are sad or afraid or angry, nine times out of ten the church fails
to be for us what we need. The church, as an institution, partakes of the
very failures we have come here to have fixed. It is a bunch of human beings
doing the best and the worst they can to each other for Christ's sake. Much
of the time, we believe it is not enough. "Must faith inevitably come
to terms with religious consumerism?" asks a sociologist of religion. "Must
the churches be related to each other primarily as similar but not identical
institutions operating in the same business: that of meeting, in return
for financial support, whatever 'religious' needs are out there in the market?
[Will the churches] thrive so long as they meet personal needs?" There are
days and long nights when that feels like the business we are in, my friends,
especially in Stewardship season: the business of becoming the church everyone
had in mind and thus missing the earthen vessel we have, by grace, been
given together to be! "We who love our dream of a community more than
the Christian community itself become destroyers of the latter, even though
our personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial,"
writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, echoing the underside of Paul's affirmation.
Paul is saying, in part, that the church is as God intended the church to
be: an earthen vessel, frail, imperfect, always in need of reforming. The
one, holy, catholic and apostolic church has another critically important
mark: its humanity! So that we who want divine revelation institutionalized
are given, instead, a shifting group of people wrangling about doctrine.
We who want a society of the moral elite continue to be stuck with a bunch
of moral failures in need of forgiveness. We who would like to find psychological
health for the price of our pledge continue to walk away wounded. We who
want a voluntary association of like-minded ideologues are invariably a
party of one. "There have at all times," declares the Second Helvetic
Confession, "been great contentions in the Church, and the most excellent
teachers of the Church have differed among themselves about important matters
without meanwhile the Church ceasing to be the Church because of these contentions.
For thus it pleases God to use the dissensions that arise in the Church
to the glory of his name…." It is our only hope: the humanity of the church
held within the intention of God. Though the matter cannot be left there.
For if we say the humanity of the church is within the intention of God,
surely frustration is not the final purpose God had in mind, but fulfillment;
surely brokenness is not the end God intended, but healing and wholeness.
What more does God intend by gathering, by calling out this human community
of need? "The ecclesia," writes Emil Brunner, "is the actual
and real fellowship with Christ, as real as are the faith and love and hope
which belong to the ecclesia. Furthermore, the ecclesia is
the fellowship established in Christ among those who are bound together
through him, a fellowship which is as real as are their concern for one
another, their love towards one another, the sacrifices of funds and goods,
of time and strength, of safety and of life which they make for one another."
When we consider the humanity of the church, we need begin our true considerations
with Him in whose name we are bound. For in Him, the second Adam as Paul
elsewhere calls Him, fashioned not from dust, say the theologians, but begotten
from the very same substance of God…in Him we behold the humanity for which
we were made. The purpose of God breathing life into that mythical clod
of dirt was that we live and breathe and have our being in relation to God.
I promise you, every other need we have carried into this sanctuary, any
other expectation we have come with of a Sunday morning, is but a cover
for the truest need of all: the need to touch the fringe of his garment
which is, when all is said and done, our need for God's nearness offered
us in Christ's church. His is the humanity the church has been called to
proclaim. What we preach is not ourselves, says Paul, but Jesus Christ as
Lord. In the place of hard pews and stale air, at the table laden with
ham and bean suppers or homemade cabbage soup, in the midst of any given
sanctuary smelling like an earthen vessel, each of us has come to hear that
God is for us...that God is with us. ..that God intends us, in all our humanity,
to be with and for each other. The only catch is God has chosen to use cracked
and leaking and broken earthen vessels for the purpose of being heard. We
would prefer not to listen save that we are perishing. "Five minutes
to ten [writes Gary Dorsey in the end]: the organist and choirmaster took
his position in the loft…. Suddenly they came striding across the yard,
dodging traffic in the street, strolling through the cemetery, dressed in
dark suits and wooly red and blue tartans: the old guard, a batch of newcomers
wearing boutonnieres, widowers and newlyweds, alcoholics and mothers of
alcoholics, winners in the stock market, women battling breast cancer, men
fighting mental illness, successful doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers,
husbands without jobs, a few former ministers, a solitary stranger whose
wife had died just the day before. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred
shuffled noisily through the arched doors…." To hear the Word God alone
has spoken to their need, to touch the fringes of Christ's garment, they
came…we come, even if God in these latter days were to speak through the
words of an anemic female minister: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels,
to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us." Thanks
be to God! Amen.
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