Texts: Rev. 21:10, 22-22:5; Acts 16:6-15; John 14:23-29
Prayer: O God, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and the longing of our hearts, by the words of my mouth and in the meditations of our hearts. Amen.
Three seemingly disparate readings from our Scriptures address the concerns of the young church: John reports that Jesus tried to comfort those who already felt as if they were falling into some crazy abyss of abandonment, as Jesus prepared his followers for his death. The seer who wrote the book of Revelation gives us a glorious vision of the world—this world, not heaven– as God desires it and as God promises us, so that we would not lose sight of the hope. And Luke describes the way the young church keeps moving on—in directions they never would have anticipated, expected, or perhaps even desired.
As the director of the state council of churches, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the church as institution: its nature and purpose; its current institutional health; its needs; its future. One of the more depressing things I had to do is attend denominational conferences and annual meetings. Denomination to denomination, I heard and still hear the same stories: internal divisions over how scripture will be interpreted—not about the big things such as all the hungry children in the world, or violence and war—but over the matters of our private lives; and I see the statistics of churches withdrawing from fellowship of the denomination, of declining membership, and fading, if not totally absent, understandings of mission. Churches talk about their mission programs and outreach programs, missing the point that the church is mission, is God’s outreach to the world—not something set along side all the other things we do for our own personal comfort.
One of our chronic church illnesses is the belief that somehow we can be independent, autonomous entities. This false belief mirrors, of course, our secular misconception that we, as individuals, have individual rights which no community rights may supercede, or that we can and may live autonomous lives quite without regard for our neighbor, or for nature and the very life of the planet.
This drive for autonomy comes, I think, from fear: fear that we might be rejected; fear that there is no community to take us in; fear that we are alone, orphaned if you will, in the universe. So we stake out our claims; get a grip on our things; our places; our ways of doing things. We throw up our walls, and frame our creeds, and define our values, and Christ who is our peace is left outside.
Writer Anne Lamott says somewhere that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. We more evangelical Christians sing “How firm a foundation” quite often, but what we have done is made God’s word rigid, and a stick with which to beat one another; or so stony hard that we use it to build walls to keep others out.
Clearly Jesus anticipated our very human reaction to loss and change. Just a few verses prior to the passage we heard this morning, Jesus promises the disciples: “I will not leave you orphaned.” And in the Gospel reading for this morning, we are told that if we love him, and keep his word—abiding in him, he calls it elsewhere in this Gospel—that Christ and his God will come and make their home with us. Again, as with last week, this is not about what happens to us after we die. It is about the here and now, this life. Isn’t it true that when you have a home where love for you and hospitality is experienced, you don’t have to hold on as tight to the things of this world? Isn’t the most liberating thing in the world the assurance that you have a sanctuary of love and hope?
Just as the Gospel promises us the liberating freedom of that safe abiding place where God and Christ dwell with us, it also promises us the Holy Spirit who will teach us, educate us. The Latin word for education, “educare” means to call us or to lead us out. The Spirit leads us onward and outward. No wonder our denominations are shriveling and dying. A true home is never confining; it is the place where we find the love to leave the nest and join the larger family of the world. So Jesus tells us: love one another. Do not be afraid. Move on out.
At the omega point of history—described in Revelation as the time when the fusion of the divine and the creation will be complete–, I do not think the God is going to ask: did you believe in the virgin birth? Did you believe marriage was limited to heterosexual couples? Did you believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible or the Pope? Did you post the 10 Commandments on school walls? Did you believe in the Trinity?
When we have finished our days, as we are gathered into the loving embrace of our Creator, the questions are going to be more like these: What did you live for? Did you love me? Did you keep my word about not judging, about forgiveness, about looking after the little ones? Did you love your neighbor? Did you care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the poor; provide homes and shelter for the homeless? There will be no examination on doctrine.
Did you notice , in the readings from the book of Acts during this Easter season, that there’s a lot of “coming” and “going” going on? They weren’t staying put. The young church, remember, was called “the way.” It wasn’t an institution, it was a movement.
Sometimes we think we know where the church ought to be going. To many think it should stay put in the old understandings, the old ways, so that the 7 last words of the church are: “We never did it that way before.” But the reading from Acts today—and these past weeks since Easter–suggests something quite different: Paul and Barnabas thought their mission was to go to the communities in Asia Minor, in what is now known as Turkey. But somehow, they were inarticulate amongst the “Asians”. Luke tells us that they had been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Then they tried to go along the coast, into a town called Bithynia…which was a Roman settlement. Again, Paul was not permitted to go there, amongst people that he probably thought were like himself.
But listening to God, Paul hears a man from Macedonia, on the European continent, saying “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” They arrived in Philippi in Macedonia, which was also a Roman colony, but certainly outside the limits that Paul had originally considered for his work. There was, in this city, no Jewish synagogue where he might go and preach, but the missionaries went instead to a place outside the gate by the river. There they met, not with the upstanding men of the community, but with the women who had gathered there probably to do their laundry, to draw water, and to meet together for trade in goods and for mutual support. The leader of the group was Lydia, a worshiper of God—which means that she was a follower of Judaism—a business woman who dealt in purple cloth, which meant that she was probably very wealthy, yet there she was down on the river bank with the washer-women.
The reading from Acts says several things to me: First the church needs people, members and leaders, who are open to thinking beyond the limits of what is customary and usual. Paul and Silas were “boundary leaders”. Boundary leadership ignores lines and moves beyond, across, and among vital emergent zones. Boundary leaders may function in and amid structure and organizations, but they never confuse them as being ultimate or even lasting. Boundary leaders focus on what endures and what matters, relationships and the values and commitments that shape community, so others can move on the Way. A boundary leader hopes for the whole, not just his or her own sphere.
Second, the church needs people who believe the church’s job is, as it has always been, to teach and to heal: to teach the world, as Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe—the founders of Mother’s Day in America knew so well– that hate and vengeance solve no problems; that material things will never satisfy; that with wealth and talent come responsibilities; and to heal all the many hurts and wounds in our world. And third, it says that we need not worry about what will happen to OUR church, because it is not up to us to do more than to see it as God’s church.
Nowadays you hear people say things like: “I didn’t leave my church. It left me.” I don’t think that is possible. The Gospel of John keeps telling us that Jesus came to save the world, not the church, and that he came so that we might have eternal life which John explains as God abiding with us. Both in our Gospel reading and the lesson from Revelation, we are told that God is moving in with us, so we can neither leave God nor will God leave us. God is moving in so that we might move on. And sometimes it is going far afield from where we thought we were supposed to go, that we begin to recognize the place where we really ought to be. And we find that autonomy is not all it was cracked up to be, as we learn slowly to live in the word of Jesus, to abide in him, and to love one another.
