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Who Needs the Church? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 19, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill John 1:43-51 Romans 15:7-13 "Welcome everyone, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, A few decades ago, no doubt with a hint of cynicism in his voice, Alfred Loisy said what many a preacher has repeated from pulpits like this one at low points in the church's life. "Jesus," he said, "foretold the kingdom and it was the church that came." In other words, Jesus promised the reign of God on earth and what came into being, instead, was a human institution riddled with frailty and divisions. I remember, as well on this Sunday, the sermon of Martin Luther King Jr. to American mainline Christians: "When the church is true to its nature," Dr. King proclaimed, "it knows neither division nor disunity…. The tragedy is not merely that you have such a multiplicity of denominations, but that many groups claim to possess absolute truth." One wonders, when Jesus summoned the twelve simply to follow, to "come and see" everything from loaves multiplied to lepers healed to sinners forgiven to a friend crucified to an empty tomb, one wonders if Jesus had any thought that those who followed him would be credited with founding a new religion in his name. And now, some two thousand years hence, we are left to wonder, in the face of a declining membership and dwindling resources (as well as the growing threat of a literal division within our own denomination, especially given a call this week from the conservatives for an emergency meeting of our General Assembly or else…), we are left to wonder what difference would it make if the institution of the church were no more? What would anybody miss if, suddenly or subtly, the church simply ceased to be? In other words, who needs the church? The question pushes us to ask ourselves, in God's name, what we think we are doing here together? Why, for Christ' sake, have we been called together at all? If the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill suddenly closed its doors on Germantown Avenue, what would be missed? The question pushes us to come clean about what Dr. King called the "nature" of the church, what theologians call our "ecclesiology." What is your doctrine of the church? You have one, whether you know it or not! In an article on the phrase which we repeat variously in the Apostles' and the Nicene Creed-I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church-William Abraham caricatures four popular ecclesiologies of the church in contemporary society, against which the reality of the church is measured in people's minds. "Some see the church as a country club," he says in the first place. "It is a nice place to visit regularly. It has a loyal band of officers, on occasion it does laudable charitable work, it provides a network for meeting important people in the community, it has beautiful facilities in which to meet, and sometimes the music is excellent." In the second place, we may liken the church to Noah's ark: "The world outside is stormy and difficult, and the church is a place to which we can escape for shelter. It provides a protected space to shield us from the harsh realities of the world. When the church itself become harsh and corrupt, we remind ourselves of the aphorism, 'We can endure the smells inside the church because we know the floods outside are always worse.'" William Abraham's third caricature describes the church as a "therapeutic community that provides rest and acts as a support group. It is not a place of service or challenge; it is a place to relax, unwind, [to] lie down and receive psychic and [especially these days] spiritual massage." Finally, he says, the church is seen "as a loose confederation of states. In the political arena each state has its laws, principles, customs, ethos, ethnic makeup and so on. The task of leadership is to foster tolerance, hold the ring in disputes, and work for as pluralistic and inclusive a community as possible…. Its goal is to accommodate as much diversity as is manageable within a minimalist vision of unity." Assuming that none of these images has much to do with what Christ's church has been gathered by God to be and do on earth, Abraham offers them as a warning to those without "a proper theological vision of the church." Without a biblically and theologically sound ecclesiology, he says, "other visions, expressed informally in images borrowed from hither and yon, will rush in to fill the vacuum and rule the day." This warning is no idle threat. In the vast majority of congregations representing mainline Protestant traditions, the kind of institution we say we necessarily have become, given the secular competition, melds all of Abraham's images-diverse marketing, you know-into the contemporary Christian community. The only question before the church has been a question of emphasis. Which needs should our church specialize in meeting: social, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, political, material or, to sound a deceptively high note, should the church exist to meet our narcissistic construal of spiritual needs? Though lately and locally, no matter the answer to this question, something in our ecclesiology from hither and yon is not working anymore. In part, people are wising up to the fact that they can have their particular needs met better by other institutions-Yoga classes, AA meetings, season tickets to the orchestra…or Veteran's Stadium, a membership at the Cricket Club, therapy, even Habitat or tutoring if the need is to make a difference--leaving the church with less and less people needing what the church thinks it has to offer. Who needs the church? Furthermore, there is also no question that the rolls of these same churches are inflated by members who have absented themselves from active participation in the community which they obviously joined to meet their needs and which, once upon a time, must even have done so. However, in these latter days, by their absence they have come to conclude, some with hostility, some with indifference, "Who needs the church?" Chalk it up to my own ecclesiology, but I cannot help noticing that, in all of Abraham's caricatures, there is not one word about the gospel, about being the community called into being to tell the story of God's redeeming purposes from generation to generation, about being the community that proclaims God's nearness in everything the community says and does in the world, about being the people who invite all people to "come and see" the God whose love has been made known in Jesus Christ. Who needs a church, I am left to wonder, unless the Word which called the church into existence, the gospel given into our keeping, is the Word we alone speak to human beings: to human beings whose real need is for God? Our existence as the church is pointless unless--in worship and music, in classroom and beside the hospital bed, in the hungry fed and the homeless sheltered, in the little ones baptized and bread broken-unless using these means at hand, we bear to the world evidence of God's tangible love in Jesus Christ, saying simply to any we meet along the way who would know the God he has come to reveal, "Come and see." Early on in its history, the church believed there was only one human need that, if not met by the church's proclamation, would be left unaddressed in human history. The word the church used to name this need was "salvation." It is a word that makes us nervous on the mainline of the church these days! By that word the early church meant to say that we are lost in the world without God unless the institution, whose purpose it is to proclaim news of God's coming in Jesus Christ, says so! The church is in the business of announcing that the lost have been found and saved from a life lived without reference to the living God. The church fathers were so bold as to claim that, outside the church (extra ecclesiam) there is no salvation (nulla sallus). No doubt, this is an understanding of the church, an ecclesiology that has been much abused and used by the church throughout the ages to cower people into belief, to threaten them into church membership. Yet for all of its abused meaning, I would counter that the doctrine's actual meaning just might return the church today to the only reason I know for you or me or anybody else to get up of a Sunday morning. Essentially, the church-and by implication, the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill--exists to invite people into a relationship with the living God made known in Jesus Christ. All that we say and do is for the purpose of knowing Him who has come to save us from a life lived pointlessly, narcissistically, selfishly, shallowly, hopelessly, helplessly, ungracefully: from a life lived without God. While I would not deny that other institutions in our society meet a multitude of perceived or manufactured human needs in the 21st century, I do not believe our rising early in the morning for Yoga or staying up late for an aesthetically moving performance at the Kimmel Center or availing ourselves of upwardly mobile seasons in the Cricket Club or even seeking out the regular mention of a Higher Power at AA, can address the deep and abiding need human beings were made to have for the God who is God, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, this need is not marketable. God knows the church has tried and has seemed, in some circles, to succeed. But what has succeeded, often times, is an institution defined to fit the needs people will show up and pay to have met. The proclamation of God's grace and love is free…or in the popular marketing jargon, it is priceless. All Jesus himself could say is, "Come and see." All we need say is the same. When the church is true to its nature, Dr. King told the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1968, "it says, 'Whosoever will, let him come.'…any church that violates the 'whosoever will, let him come' doctrine is a dead and cold church and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity." I would be less than honest this morning if I did not confess, given this denomination's current theological struggles and this congregation's current financial struggles, that I have said to myself a time or two these past few months, "Who needs the church?" Apparently I do. My ecclesiology demands it, demands I put my life into the hands of the very human beings who have been given to me by God to be the church. Your need for God's grace and my need for the same find us meeting in Jesus Christ, who has said to each one of us, "Come and see." For that grace freely given to me for you, I can only say, "Thanks be to God!" |