Sermon: Dreaming Dreams, Seeing Visions

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Dreaming Dreams, Seeing Visions

By Charles Rush

June 2, 2013

few years ago, I ended the Confirmation year allowing the Confirmands to ask me any question they wanted to ask. I was kind of looking forward to some meaty questions about creation and the meaning of it all. First kid raises his hand. “Yes, Mr. McGillicutty” I say. “Reverend, what is it like to have a job where you only work one day a week?”

I looked dead at him and replied, “It's great and technically speaking it is only one hour”. Yes, I suppose that I might have dreamed when I was younger that I'd have everything so down at this point in my life that I'd be able to devote my energies to my golf game and enjoy a Yorkshire Peppermint Patty every Thursday. It hasn't worked out quite like that.

Some things haven't changed at all. People are born, families celebrate baptisms, need a place to give their kids some spiritual grounding, we dance at weddings, support one another when we are ill and our families fall apart; We stand with each other in consolation at death. And through all of it, we come together in worship and share a time of silence and prayer, expressing our gratitude to God in the midst of whatever anxiety our work world is dragging us through at the moment, giving back in service and with our money, remembering that even when we are crabby and cross, our life is full of blessing.

Some things have changed completely. Even when I was in college in Connecticut, we still had blue laws in the late 70's. No stores opened before 1:00 p.m. and there were no alcohol sales in the state all day. Even twenty years ago, when my children were little, organized sports were all on Saturdays and they really only involved soccer and baseball.

But in the last 10-15 years, we've not only filled up all Saturday and all Sunday, the number of sports has escalated to include lacrosse, football, hockey. Sports have broadened to include as many leagues for girls as boys and most of them have a fall and a spring schedule. There are a couple months in the fall and a couple months in the spring when most of the weekend is spent driving to and from another game, coordinating various kids in various leagues and some weekends you hardly see your spouse. My daughter has a kind of flow chart on her refrigerator to monitor it all.

And the weekends have changed too with our holiday weekends becoming times to pull the extended clan together for a little celebration, spaced throughout the year. We have more destination events with families and reunions with friends and we spend the money to go do them. Our lives are fuller, maybe even a little overfilled on the weekend.

Church just has to be fitted in with all this other stuff going on and there is no longer any sacred time set aside by our culture for spirituality. It competes head up with all these other things, so it had better be interesting and it had better be meaningful. Even still, we may not be able to make it just because…

And our richer, fuller lives also mean that we have more things going on during the week, more involvements for our children. All of this involvement means that we are more intentional and guarded with our time. Between all of the things that we have to do with work and all of the things we have to get our kids to in our family, we are more guarded about our time, our volunteer efforts, because there is not very much free time. So we are more selective about saying ‘yes'.

What this means for doing Church in the future? In all likelihood, we'll have to have more families in the church and offer more variety of ways to plug in order to have about the same number of people actually showing up on Sunday. Or will it be only Sunday? Maybe one of our services will be on Saturday in the future because that fits in our family schedule better.

It is not all negative, at least not for Churches like Christ Church. Caroline, Julie, and I have been attending workshops on the renewal of the church. And stock is rising for Churches that have a progressive social view on the world which means primarily that women are equals and gay families are normal. We had a surprise visit at our second service this Spring. The gay couple that asked us to bless their union that led to our Congregation voting to bless Gay unions and reach out to Gay families came back to our church. I asked them how long ago that was? 15 or 16 years ago… Wow, it just doesn't seem that long ago because today, it is not longer a big deal. We made the right choice for the future.

One of the things I learned at these workshops is that religion is slightly down nationwide, people are less involved in Church. However, the Churches that have an open and inclusive agenda for their congregation are actually up and they trend looks like it will continue for some time.

Another important positive is the way that we use the internet and what that does to keep us together as a spiritual community of care, even though we are not physically as present as we used to be. We've always mailed newsletters and the like but the internet has created more interesting ways to connect and nowadays when people move away, or when people retire to a warmer part of the country during the winter, our ability to interact with not just the news of the community but also the spiritual themes of what we are doing at any given moment, is much more immediate and grounded. Visitors find us first on the internet so that when they show up, they are already pretty familiar with what we do. And our ability to extend how we reach out to our virtual community is only going to grow and become more affordable. My sense is that more and more of us are going to value having something grounded to think about during the week because most of us have schedules that are sufficiently crammed full and driven by anxiety and stress that we need to stop at some private moment in the middle of the week and reflect for a moment on why we do what we do and what is really important in our lives. We are much more likely to actually forward something meaningful to someone in our family, a friend, because they understand what we are going through and we want to connect like that. The spiritual impulse is growing in all of us, maybe not the Orthodox impulse but connecting with what is meaningful, connecting with the transcendent, is becoming a higher order need with each passing decade.

And here is the thing about Christ Church, about our community. We don't rely on someone else to figure these things out and tell us what to do. We are an owner/operator group. We don't have to wait for the Bishops or the Cardinals to give us permission but neither do we have anyone standing behind us that will step up to the plate if we don't.

Just like the church that Saint Paul was writing to in our letter this morning, we are figuring this out as we go, invoking the Spirit of God to give us insight and substance, developing a character that we learned from Jesus. We are like many other service organizations, except that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. At the school board, as you know, people come with their agenda, hoping to make their point and push along what they think we need. And most of the time, especially these days, it seems that conflict is the basic ethic.

Saint Paul had hopes that with the Spirit of God to guide us and the character of Jesus as our model that we would move beyond conflict, which is inevitable in human relations, toward consensus. So he says, become humble like Jesus. Take thought for others, perhaps even ahead of your own interest. Invoke your empathy and your sympathy and try to become a harmonious community. Win everyone to the point that the sense of togetherness is bigger than your own personal agenda.

It happens to be a particularly insightful approach to our era. Everyone on the staff has been reading books on the changing church and attending seminars on the subject and this theme has come up time and again. We live in an era of rapid enough change that we don't need experts to guide us so much as we need communities of consensus that collectively can discern what is happening around them and be supple enough to make changes and willing to try and fail. It is a more entrepreneurial era and we at least have the right make up to address our times. And we need you, not that you are some spiritual expert, we just need your insights and your commitment to a consensus approach to figuring it out.

Across thirty years of change in the Church, I still hold to the hope that Saint Paul had for the church. We believe that we can actually become a people that live out of the profounder dimension of faith. We believe that we can become people of substance.

We believe that we can become people that connect with God, that learn how to pray and we know that surrounding ourselves with prayer heals us, makes us stronger. And we know that we are going to get to places in our lives, like Ken Grispin this week getting the cancer diagnosis, when we will really value being surrounded by a community that supports us, loves us, invokes God to heal us and make us better.

We believe that Spiritual character formation is important for us and important for our children. We want our children to be comfortable in worship, to grow to become teens that are reflective and involved in service. We want them to not only sing and perform with Mark and Aly, Caroline and Jule but also to be shaped by these role models. We want to be able to work with them so that our children are all exposed to inter-generational examples, so that our kids can grow up seeing us involved in service and simple prayer that they might become holistic young adults one day and have a set of values that are sustainable.

We want to become a community where you can develop deeper friendships because we are committed to that and they people you know here are people you would want to live more deeply with. We want to be a place where it is okay to wrestle with the great questions that are posed to us by life, questions we have to figure out on our own. We aren't going to tell you the answers but we do want to become people that are better and better at wrestling because we pose the questions to ourselves.

And, of course, we have to figure out how to pay for it. The times are challenging but I'm optimistic. We are open, oriented to the future, and collectively we do vision better than most places in our country and in our world. And we will make the changes we need to make. The bad news, Mr. McGillicutty, it looks like I'll have to work more than one day a week. Amen.