That We May Be One
By Charles Rush
November 5, 2000
I Corinthians 12: 12-26
love our
children's commentary on the Church.
A
friend of mine told me that he had his congregation sing the
Star Spangled
Banner on the 4th of July last year. At the end of the hymn one of the 4
year olds in the congregation yelled, “Play Ball”.
A Sunday School teacher at another church had her first graders write
letters to God. Amanda wrote this. “Dear God, We had a good time at church
today. Wish you could have been there.”
Another Sunday School teacher decided to teach her kids the Lord's
Prayer. She over heard young Daron Kilpatrick in kindergarten say “Forgive us our
trash passes as we forgive those who pass trash against us.” Not
bad.
A boy was watching his father write the Sunday sermon. The young lad
comes up to his father and says, “how do you know what to say?” The father
doesn't want to be distracted, so he just says, “Why God tells me, I suppose”…
The Son looks back at him and says, “Then why do you keep crossing things out?”
A little girl was getting fidgety as the sermon droned on and on.
Finally, she leaned over to her Mother and said, “Mommy, if we give him the
money now, will he let us go?
Many of us felt that way about Church when we were younger. I know that
many of us wanted to escape the churches and synagogues we grew up in from the
day we were able to give voice to the thought. We were like Washoe, the
15-year-old chimpanzee at the University of Oklahoma. Researchers there did
some of the first experiments on primates and speech. Washoe was 15-years-old
and they taught her to communicate using sign language. Over a long time, she
learned 140 different signs. Washoe had a good life, by the researchers
standards. She had a great room to sleep in. She was well fed. Every time she
got ill a team of vet's descended on her to nurse her back to health. She had
great exercise and lots of human interaction. The day came when the researchers
wanted to get Washoe to conceptualize with language. They wanted her to express
her own thoughts. They were not ready for her first sentence though. Over and
over, she repeated a three word phrase,
“Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.”
I know that I grew up in a church where everything was neat and orderly
and everyone was nice. But there was something oddly soporific about the whole
scene, oddly contained and not really real. If you've ever read any of Walker
Percy's novels, you know what I mean.
When I was in seminary, I was part of a peace making coalition that
sponsored a conference for Ministers in Kentucky, and invited a number or
renowned speakers, among them Walter Bruggeman, perhaps the most popular Old
Testament Scholar living. The conference was quite popular and it was mainly
attended by Baptist and Presbyterian gentlemen who had been in ministry for a
couple decades. The room was covered with silver and white hair, in
conservative dark blue suits.
Bruggeman led a workshop entitled something like “Recovering our
Prophetic Voice”. He began his talk with a number of examples of how the
average Minister had been tamed into an innocuous pet rather than a fiery
prophet of the Old Testament. Then he quoted several passages from the major
prophets where vivid and searing condemnations were invoked against those who
had settled for the easy life.
Like this from Amos “Thus says the Lord, I will smite those who have a
summer house and a winter house, houses full of ivory. (That would be most of
us). Hear this you women, you cows of Bashan, who oppress the poor and crush
the heads of the needy, who say to their husbands, ‘Bring more, that we may
drink'. Whew- ruins the Sunday brunch at the club after church, doesn't it?
Bruggeman suggested that we had lost the use of subversive language to
call into question the principalities and powers of our day. He wondered aloud
what kind of language would shock modern hearers the way that the prophets of
old shocked their audience in Jerusalem. He then proceeded to let loose a
string of curse words to describe various situations of injustice and
oppression that existed all around us.
The room of graying gentlemen sat there ever so politely as expletive
after expletive zipped by them to the back of the room. You could see jaws drop
slack and hair blow straight backwards. Half of the students that organized the
conference were giggling uncontrollably. The other half were anxiety stricken.
Bruggeman made his point.
Over the years, I have been able to reflect on that day constructively.
The Church that I grew up in during the 60's in the South had lots of ministers
that were thoughtful gentleman. They were kind and made a point of getting
along with everyone. They always had something nice to say. There was a sense
in which they had confused good manners with good morals. They were so nice that
they never did seem to be able to speak a word over against the culture. I once
asked my mother why I didn't remember any sermons on the subject of integration
because it was such a huge cultural challenge at the time. Her answer was as
simple as it was damning. “Dear, that is because one was never preached.”
It wasn't that the subject of sin was never broached. It was to the end
that we would come to appreciate our need for salvation offered through the
atonement of Jesus Christ. Curiously, whatever we were taught about sin, it
never seemed to have much to do with the social world we constructed for
ourselves and even the interior world of sin was culturally contained.
There were simply a number of things that you didn't talk about. We had
a homosexual that lived down the block but you didn't talk about that. We had
neighbors that were going through a divorce but you didn't talk about that
either. Everybody knew that a couple of our Deacons drank heavily but no one
talked about that. A woman down the block suffered from depression and took her
life one day and again no one talked about it. This was just the way that our
culture was and that was the way the Church of that culture was as well.
I was grateful, 2 years ago, when a gay couple came to us and asked us
to bless their relationship, Christ Church said, “We can talk about that”. And
we talked and talked- some say too much- but we finally voted for compassion
and blessing.
The next week I was walking downtown and ran into one of our High School
kids. They were there for the vote, came to some of the talk-back sessions.
They said to me, “I will never say that Christ Church doesn't stand for
anything.” It was a small comment but it made my day, made my year really.
I was grateful that for once the Church was a headlight rather than a
tail light. I was moved that we could be a thermostat- changing the values of
society- rather than just a thermometer- reflecting the values of the society
around us. It can be different.
But, it wasn't just that the Church was socially innocuous, it was also
more of a formal institution than an organic community of love. I remember
standing one Sunday morning in the vestibule of the first Church I served,
waiting for Sunday worship to begin. I was just out of college at the time. I
looked about at the people standing around me and I thought to myself, “These
are all nice people but this is the last place in the world I would feel safe
to actually deal with the real issues that are happening to the real me.” At
the moment, I felt like the Church was a place where we put on our Sunday best
and bring out our best Selves and put them on display for ourselves and others
for a couple hours. It is an important goal, in and of itself, but it is not
enough and I suspect that this remains one of the principal reasons that young
people are skittish about the church. Our kids still think that this is all
the Church is about. They want something that is honest, authentic.
Years later, I was a psychiatric chaplain. One of my duties was to
escort a couple patients to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I went to quite a
few during that period of my life. We attended one AA meeting that was
particularly effective. The people in the group had been meeting for several
years. In a strange way, I looked forward to going to it each week. Finally, it
occurred to me why. In this place, people were sharing deeply about their
lives. They were bluntly honest with each other. They were free to acknowledge
serious shortcomings and struggles. They reached out to each other in support.
They built one another up. As Carlyle Marney would have said, church met
amongst them. That is what real church is all about.
In real Church, you can hear a word of confrontation because you know
deeply that you are accepted, supported, loved. In real Church, the context of
acceptance and honesty opens you up for the possibility of profound change and
genuine commitment because that is what the community of love is about. In real
Church, God indeed shakes things up (Heb. 12:26) because we are on an adventure
towards spiritual transformation. That is the point of our lives.
Now, the Church will never be an AA meeting. We are not simply about
dealing with addiction. But, on our best days, we are like the description from
St. Paul in Corinthians. We are all parts of a body. We bring different gifts
and functions together. And when are in harmony, we are all edified by each
persons contribution.
It is phenomenal to me the way that people contribute their gifts when
we need them. We started this building campaign. Just at that time, Tim Bland
and Peter Szego got involved in the church again- a structural engineer and an
architect… just when we needed to hire an architectural firm. You know how much
easier it is to hire the right firm and keep them honest with an architect and
an engineer on the committee?
Bev York, each week, organizes our Sunday School… a retired teacher in
special needs, no less. A full career of education and diffusing problem
situations.
John Ross showed up just in time to work with our youth a few years ago.
What a talent.
Last week, we did an Adult education forum on dealing with end of life
situations. We had someone from the hospital come. But we could also draw on
Roz Kendellen, a lawyer in the congregation, whose practice is involved in
ethical and legal dilemmas at the end of life. And Pete Saur was there, words
of wisdom from his distinguished career in medicine.
A few years ago, we needed to figure out what to do with our small
endowment, to get the most bang for the buck. Thank God for Neale Trangucci,
Ben Merrick, Dan Keane, David Bunting and others who got it invested prudently.
Decades of investment experience on that committee.
We need to run the capital campaign, thank God for Sarah Rosen and Pat
Calhoun, the experience they bring from years of raising money professionally.
You know how much easier other committee members breathe just knowing there is
someone around in the know?
Paul Tukey spends hours every week keeping our computers working, the
web site going. We get the advantage of years of research training at Bell
Corp. for our silly little problem.
Or if we need someone to facilitate a group therapy session or do
something on Emotional well being. Kay English, Barbara Von Klemperer, Margaret
Thompsett, Jim O'Brien, Carol Spellman and others.
And the cadre of actors that are willing to get involved, all of them
great, some of them old pro's.
I made a list three pages long of gifts that people bring like this.
We'd be here til One if I read the whole thing. But it is very impressive. We
need each other. We need each of you to share your gift with us. What is it
that you can contribute to our wider world through this place?
As St. Paul points out, your gifts don't have to have years of
professional expertise to be important. Even seemingly small gifts are
important to the well being of the whole body.
Young Jamie Scott tried out for 4th grade play in his school. His mother
was worried that he wouldn't get a part and would be crushed. But Jamie had a great
director, probably like Ron Wells. She went to pick him up after school. Jamie
was beaming. He said, “Mom, I've been chosen to clap and cheer.” That's great.
We can all clap and cheer. And the play is not the play without clapping and
cheering. Frankly, we could use a few more of you around Christ Church.
Every gift is important. Every body part is vital as our text says
today. There is an old African proverb that says, “When the foot has a thorn,
the whole body must bend over to heal it.” This is what it means to be a
community of love. That is what was missing from the churches we left in our
youth. That is what we really want to be a part of today. We want to be part of
a community of love, something that is really real.
There are some important things we are wrestling with here that none of
us are experts at, like dying. We just need each other- together- to face it
down. Leo Buscaglia tells of a four year old child whose next door neighbor was
an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry,
the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap and
just sat there. When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the
little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry”. That is really real. We can
hold on to that. That is what the community of love can be. I think we gave up
on the church in our youth because it wasn't that enough of a community of
love. But, holding each other up, we can learn to love. We can become that.
A woman was walking down the street in Brooklyn at
the end of the day, getting ready to go home after a business call. She sees
this young boy, about 10 years old, staring in the window of a shoe store. She
stops next to him. He is looking at sneakers and mumbling to himself. “Who are
you talking to?” She says.
“I was asking God to give me a pair of sneakers.” She looked down. He
had on some old boots, the back split and held together with duct tape. For God
knows what reason, she said, “Come on.” They go in the store, sit down.
The kid takes off his shoes and his socks are so old, they have to be
thrown away. The salesman is schlepping after shoe size, the woman gets a rag
from the manager and wipes off the kids dirty feet. Salesman comes back with
the sneakers. They fit. The woman gets the kid half a dozen pairs of white
socks. They walk outside. She is about to turn to leave. The kid looks up at
her and says, “Are you God's wife?” Maybe so. At least for that day.
What is your gift? Will you share it with us? Be God's wife to someone
else. We need you.
Amen.
