Sermon: The State of the Church

[ previous | index | next ]

The State of the Church

By Charles Rush

May 18, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 7Mb) ]

r about 10 years, there was a guy in town that I would run into a couple times a year. Every time I'd see him, I'd say ‘so How are you doing?' ‘Great' was always the reply. ‘Great, it's all great.' And then I'd ask, “Yeah, but how are you really doing?” And he would say, ‘Well, you know, you gotta take the good with the bad right? No free lunch right?” And I would say, ‘but beyond that… how are you doing?' And he would say, “My life is in the toilet.” And then he would explain that he hated his job, his kids were a worry, etc… I would nod, listen for a bit… and say something completely false and stupid like ‘well hang in there'. And he would wave, ‘Great… see ya'. I'd say ‘have a great day.' Great.

We did this over and over, after we stumbled on it by accident. It was like a good “Monty Python” routine that you don't get tired of watching again and again. Somehow it was emblematic of men, careers, mid-life, and all of the contradictions that that make it what it is.

But, throughout mid-life this question keeps getting a little louder all the time- what are you doing with your life? There are a lot of things that men think about I won't bore you with. There is the success dimension, the ego dimension and all of that stuff…

But the other dimension is the integrity piece: Are you really actualizing fulfillment? Are you for real? Or are you just faking yourself out in your marriage, your career? Sometimes you have to fake it to make it, as they say in AA- you have to go through the motions of your vision even when you can't see much fulfillment. But it keeps growing, the question of are you really real?

It is a funny thing, but there comes this point in your life where the wrong answer to this question can really be debilitating. I know the important part of the answer to this question on ministry and spirituality. I was thinking about it this year during Confirmation. I had Emily Jones and Ellie Smith in our confirmation class. When I came to Christ Church, the first month that I was here, their parents called me up and wanted to have those girls baptized, and we did. For thirteen years, I watched them grow up. And last week, I confirmed them with a brisk dunk in that freezing water.

Longevity, in and of itself, is necessary but not sufficient for meaning. But, in those times, when you are able to be with people through the changes of their lives- when you are able to share in the ordinary as well as the highlights- it really helps… There is something very grounding for me about performing the wedding for say, young Annie Salario, quite a few years from now, since she is just in High School. She is going to go off to college, get some education, and become someone really interesting- mark my words.

Occasionally, it is profound. When you are very new to ministry, you worry about how you will be a compassionate presence when those really difficult times come- like when someone dies. We have courses in psychology now at Divinity school that teach you mostly what not to do. People will occasionally say to me, “I'm glad I don't have to do that” and I'm glad you don't have to either. It is awful and there simply is no dilution of the pain and fear around death.

But, it is much more natural when you know people fairly well, week in and week out, over the years. I remember going to see someone whose spouse had died. They were afraid. They were in shock. They were tense and alone at the moment that I got there. I think I walked in the room. I think I said ‘hey'. I think I hugged them. I think they cried like they were safe.

There is a lot of important stuff that you learn in those psychology courses … but it really helps if you lucky enough to be involved enough with people that you can genuinely be a refuge, a comfort, and strength. At the end of the day, I think of that song, ‘You will know they are Christians by their love'. I think of that line from 1st John, ‘Brothers and sisters, love one another'. It is not exactly a skill set that you learn, it is a way of being. We can learn skills of communication and we can understand the cycles of life, but loving is being present and involved. It is like Hegel's criticism of Kant. He said “Kant taught us this great abstract approach to swimming on the beach… But at some point, you have to jump in the water”.

This is what we really hope develops at the church. And what really pleases me and I know Julie would say the same thing… what really pleases me is when I see this happening in our congregation. I love it when I see people that are getting to know one another, spending time socializing with one another, and, over the years, actually developing what you would call profound friendships. At the end of the day, this is the point of spirituality, I believe.

And there is another dimension of genuine integrity that I am privileged to witness with regularity and I had occasion just this week. We had a Mayor's diversity committee meeting for Summit the other day, leaders from all quadrants of town, probably 30 people total. I love to walk in late and see the Mayor addressing the agenda. I look around the room and see all of these Christ Church people: Ann Bushe, Pat Calhoun, Michele Stevenson, Frank Bolden, Richard Poole, and someone was running the meeting for Geoff Worden. Among the people they recognized for important volunteer service to our community, Michael Radutzky. I love it when one of the Clergy says to me, “Chuck, how do you know all of these people?”

Christ Church people get involved. Christ Church people make a difference. Christ Church people serve… and this is true in all of our surrounding towns as we increasingly live all over our county. If I'm asked to pray at a United Way function or I get invited to a charity golf outing or if I go to a fund-raiser for practically any cause in our metropolitan New York area, I can count on running into a few people from Christ Church, often at the microphone. I know that some of you are thinking that this is also partly because Christ Church people like to party- and that is true- nothing wrong with that. This commitment to service runs deep and, again, isn't this the point of our spirituality? The ultimate goal of spirituality is – developing the common good, embodying justice, learning to do the things that make for peace.

So whatever else that we may want to do; whatever else we might want to become, we want to keep these things going and find ways to do them better. We want to be more loving, more emotionally healthy, maybe more profound people. And we want to live in such a way this makes our communities healthier, more beautiful, richer, inclusive, integrated.

We need your help to think through what we need to develop to make us stronger. What is it that you could use in your family to help them develop more fully and to relate to one another better? What is it that you could use in your marriage that would help you both to become better partners? What do you need that would help you become a more loving person? For our many single people, what is it that we could do that would support you? And all of us together, what is it that we could develop that would give us the opportunity to share our lives together in ways that are mutually enriching?

What would you like to learn about that could make your spiritual life richer and substantive?

We know that we do worship well, particularly when we are able to involve quite a few of you to plan it and put it together. I heard a report from a teenager who was a church service in town that was bored and boring. Everyone was sitting stone faced, waiting for it to be over. One young wag taped a note on the back of his head that read “Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here”. Thank God, I've never yet found that card in our pews.

We know that, relatively speaking, we do a pretty good job of educating our kids and getting them involved in the worship life of the church.

We know that we need to develop better programs for our youth, particularly our high school kids because this is too important a time of life for them to be left without spiritual direction and support from their peers.

What we are most concerned about for the next decade is the community piece of the church. We know what the challenges are and so do you. We have more people with more commitments on the weekends and more opportunities to do interesting things in their lives. So we have more people that are less regular.

It makes it harder to get people to commit to leadership and involvement. It makes it more challenging for us to physically see each other and therefore more difficult for us to share profoundly with each other. Within the confines of the lives that we lead, what is it that the Church can provide that can develop community?

Developing opportunities for community is a large part of the impulse behind what we have been doing with our community service partners that meet here during the week. We partner with groups to provide healing, empowerment, and service.

Healing and empowerment go hand in hand. That is why we have three AA groups that meet here. Alcohol is simply such an issue in practically every family we know.

That is why we have Good Grief which sponsors two nights of peer support for children that have lost parents. I was reading the statistics that in our region immediately around the church, there are, on average 60-80 children going through this every year. It is a big issue that regularly has social consequences we don't notice. We have a saying, ‘They aren't bad kids, they're sad kids'… Too many of our children have developed drug problems and have acted out in destructive ways because they haven't had someone lead them through grief productively. No one church has the resources to address this, so I'm glad that Mary Robinson developed her own board of directors, raised the money, got the staff together and we are hosting these sessions here.

At the moment, I would love to develop a program quite like it for divorce recovery. Divorce is so pervasive in our society. As you know, we have children, parents, spouses- all of them are bereft of resources on how to put something new together in a spiritually productive manner after the original family has been rent apart. We've tried 25 years now of toughing it out, going it alone with one on one therapy. That hasn't worked so well. I think it is time to develop a new model. Again, it is not something that any one Church can actually take on, so I'd love to start another non-profit with this single devoted mission and see what they can do to make a difference.

And that has gotten me to thinking more broadly about how we as a church might actually supplement some lectures that take some of the basic dynamics that you learn in psychotherapy and in psychology classes and make those more broadly available to strengthen all of our families, all of our marriages, all of us as spiritual people.

And service… This year, we are going to be recognized in the fall by Family Promise. They are 20 years old I believe. Karen Olsen had a heart for homeless people, thought that churches ought to be more directly involved with the problem, and set out to coordinate churches so that they would cooperatively sponsor a few families, house them in the churches and synagogues, help the families, and provide the rest of us with some realism about the issues surrounding homelessness. The very first Church in the country to actually house the homeless in the program was Christ Church.

That program is now national and everybody who is anybody is doing it. And it has become a routine thing that if you grow up in Christ Church, you will be involved serving the homeless.

Or Bridges… This Friday, we had a whole crew from UBS, I think, making lunches for Bridges in Barnwell Hall. They made hundreds of them. We give out those grey blankets that we get from Church World Service. A few years ago, I was in Central Park before the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and my daughter ran off for a minute. I saw her under an underpass talking to this homeless guy laying on the ground. I started to do that parental thing- you know, ‘honey, what are you doing?-… She says to me, “Dad, look at the blanket that this man has. He's Christ Church people.” Out of the mouths of babes … and she's exactly right. What a change of perspective we are developing all the time.

I had a friend of mine that developed another great service opportunity. He went around to retailers at Pottery Barn, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Pier 1 Imports. He took any merchandise that was slightly damaged or left over from last season and gave it to poor people, to churches, to worthy missions abroad like our Women's cooperative in Nicaragua. The problem was that he was retired and within a year or two, he had created a full-time job for himself and others. He called me up on the phone and asked me to take it over. And I would love to do it if we had the space, the leadership… And he told me that the reason that he called me up is because if any Church would pick it up in our area, it would be Christ Church.

What we need is more space and a new building campaign… now that's a good idea. No, the truth is that we are already close to being filled up and we have to manage just how many worthy things we are involved in. It is true that next year that we will have so much going on that you cannot just casually drop in and expect to have free use of space. We have scheduling issues… and it is a headache… but this is a headache that is good to have. It reminds me of advice I got from my grandfather… “Charles I'm not worried about you burning the candle at both ends. I know too many people that don't have it lit on either end.”

We need you. We need your input. We need your leadership. We need your support. We are not like other organizations or clubs where you pay dues and everyone does stuff for you. No, we are only as good as you are involved. So add us to your prayers, seriously, that we would realize our potential together. Pray for a common vision. Open yourself to acting on in, in your way, with your family. Let's think together about how we can become a more profound community, that we can heal one another, and lead our community in service and giving back.

I don't want to become the biggest church in the area but I do want to be the best. And we can be. I'm reminded of the Priest that addressed his church and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have all the money we need to fund this project. The bad news is that it is in your pockets.” Real giving hurts. Good giving is not completely easy. And that is true of love too. The profound love that we need to develop real community we already have. It is sitting in resident potential, welling up in your hearts. What I hope for all of us? That we let it flow. Brothers and sisters, let us love one another… For God is love.” Amen.