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But We Have This Treasure Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 27, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 2:4-9 II Corinthians 4:1-12
Whenever our denomination appears to be on the brink of division (as has been the case a number of times recently), I return to the words of Paul in what likely was his fourth letter to the Corinthians. I also revisit the reflections of journalist Gary Dorsey about his return to the church. "Before our marriage," Dorsey writes, "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; it was a church made up of merely human beings. Because we are part of a denomination struggling with doctrinal and ethical problems, part of a national church whose order has been eroded by a lack of trust and love, part of a connectional body divided into camps and factions, we would do well to consider how it is that 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," writes my former colleague Wallace Alston, "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. Perhaps it was a general need for community. As Barbara Kingsolver said in her commencement address to graduates of Duke, “Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.” But why specifically all of you got out of bed this morning and, instead of pulling on a pair of shorts to retrieve the Sunday Inquirer from the driveway before settling down to suck a few cups of coffee on the deck…why you have appeared instead in the fourteenth pew, lectern side, by the window, why you have come to this community, God only knows. Perhaps 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, gain a better perspective…the need to put your children in the way of grace…the need to confirm your worldview or have it challenged…the need tangibly to trust your life and death or the life and death of one you love, anew, into a greater hand than your own, a hand you are not absolutely certain even exists! 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. Yet as we are gathered to be Christ’s church, there is this dissociation 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? Still we speak of the church as though it were a third person who “ought to do…ought to be this or that.” Moreover 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. There are rules against that, these days, in the Presbyterian Church. 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 (Pelagius believed the church to be the society of the morally perfectible), we are certain that our fellow Christians will never quite be the paragons of virtue we believe they should be; if we are mystics, we are disappointed that we never 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 are dying for 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, begging the question raised by a sociologist of religion, to wit: "Must faith inevitably come to terms with religious consumerism? 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?" These are the questions of an academic in need of a summer vacation! Yet as churches across the land gear up for the “program year,” religious consumerism seems not far off the mark. How often the church finds itself in the business of becoming the institution everyone had in mind, thereby missing the earthen vessel we have been called out and given to each other to be in Christ’s name? “We who love our dream of a community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of the latter” warned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “even though our personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.” His words echo 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? Remember that other word for the church: ecclesia. We are those called out by the Word of God which is Jesus Christ. “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 must 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 the one who gave us this one, precious, fragile and finite life. 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: our need for God's nearness offered us in the humanity of Jesus Christ…and in these latter days through the humanity of 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 clue I have that this might possibly be true—contrary to all evidence I see in the death and darkness and destruction around me—is Jesus. The catch to the proclamation of the church’s hope is that God has chosen to use cracked and leaking, fragile 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 they come…to hear the Word God alone has spoken to our need 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. |