The
Possible Church: Sermon on the Installation of the Rev. Thomas Schmidt as
minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland, Texas, by the Rev. Ron Robinson…Sunday, March 25, 2012
Ancient
Text:
Very
truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit….from John 12…or
in the version from The Message by Eugene Peterson: Listen carefully, Unless a
grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more
than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself
many times over. In the same way anyone who holds onto his life just as it is
destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it
forever, real and eternal.
Contemporary
text: From Church Do’s and Don’ts by Michael Durall: “Churches should always be
places of respite and comfort for those in need. But the ultimate goal of
congregations cannot be safe harbors, places only for wandering souls, or for
those who are comfortably settled in. Churches should also be ports of
embarkation for new and adventurous voyages. The most vital churches encourage
members to form ad hoc groups that conduct short and long-term ministries
throughout the community. If you church can do this, everything else will fall
into place….Ministers and lay leaders need to believe they are leading the
church somewhere. The #1 destination is increased outreach to the
community. Put this at the top of any
strategic or long-range plan. Everything else is a means to this end. The true
purpose of leadership is to create congregations of activists not
spectators. Church members who are passionate
about external ministries can be trusted to do a good job. Church is not about
managing programs and budgets. Church is about seizing opportunities to serve
when they arise, because once past, opportunities are usually irretrievable.
Church is about creating people whose hearts are full and generous, who embody
a compassion for others. This is the true spiritual journey, one that crosses
many denominational boundaries. Of course the modern day cop-out is that people
are busy and can’t possibly add one more thing to their lives. But I believe
people find time for things that are important. Being a member of an outwardly
focused church may mean missing a football or baseball game, a NASCAR race, a
movie, reality TV, time spent surfing on the internet, or countless other
distractions that pass for life in America today. What is their value in relation
to a hungry child that is fed, a lonely person who finds companionship, a
broken heart mended? Church is about peoples’ real lives. Period.”
........
It
is an honor and privilege to be here today, for a celebration, a commitment,
and a challenge of what it means to be church. Let’s be clear that not many in
our world are interested in what it means to be church. What we do here today is
not even on the margins of their consciousness.
And we, the church, too often return the disfavor; our rhythms of church
life, and our decisions of how to spend our time, talents, and treasure, all tend
to be focused primarily on ourselves; we
keep our neighborhoods at best within our peripheral vision, and those
neighborhoods that are more often than not not our neighborhoods we keep out of
our congregational sight and mind and presence.
Today
we have charges and greetings from other ministers, and from other faith
communities. Think of this sermon as a greeting too, and a charge too, from the
world, especially from the world of people who do not share our values and
beliefs, who will never become members of this or perhaps any other congregation,
but who are struggling to have life and have it abundantly and who need us, in
our own struggling and our own blessings of imperfections, need us to walk together
with them, and need us to work with them, and need us to make life worthy with
them. As we need them to constantly remind us why we, the church, exist in the
first place, why we need to keep dying to what we have been, as people and as a
people, so the world will bear more fruit.
Walking together. It is a phrase that
epitomizes our covenantal way of church. It comes from our past, from the
promises made to one another by the band of courageous souls, or ship of fools
many would have said, who had separated themselves from the Church of England
at the village of Scrooby in the year 1606, risking their lives, to live
faithfully by a covenant, to be as they called themselves, ‘The Lord’s free
people, to walk in all his ways known or to be made known.” In 1620 when part
of their group departed the Mayflower at Plymouth, they became the church that
is now the oldest one in our Unitarian Universalist Association.
In
his book titled Walking Together: polity and participation in Unitarian Universalism,
the late Conrad Wright, professor of church history at Harvard, describes the nature
of the covenantal relationships that lie at the heart of the church that shall
be free. There is the covenant, promises, requirements, between a person and
church; between church and its ministers; between church and other churches; and
between minister and other ministers. These are the four internally-focused
covenants helping to establish right relationships among us, and they are often
the most visible relationships, ones out of which we form organizations, write
codes of ethics. They are about us. Think of them as like the materials of a
ship that hold it together and give it the particular shape one sees as it sits
in the harbor.
But
Conrad Wright reminds us that there is more to our covenanted relationships, equally as important
if not moreso. These are more externally focused covenants: one is between
church and world, be it known as a particular parish area, or a neighborhood, or
some other body of people---a campus, an apartment complex---beyond our own; and
then there is one ultimately between church and God, howsoever is called the Spirit
or Source that is within, among, and yet beyond us, that which calls us or
rises within us, but that sets us on a journey together with and for others
beyond us. If the internal covenants are like the materials and design of the
ship called Church, then the two externally-focused covenants are like the Sea
and like the Wind; they are what give purpose to the ship, its reason for being
built in the first place, and the reason for its particular shape. But when the
Sea or Wind changes in drastic ways, as they have and will, it can sink or
stall a ship built in the best of ways for other environments.
The
church that is not grasped by the external covenants will not be complete, not be
church, and will have added stress placed on the internal covenants; it will
become, in Professor Wright’s words, “merely a collection of
religiously-oriented individuals,” ones who, if or when they were to disappear,
would not cause much of a disturbance in the lives of the people in their
surrounding community. That’s a good
question to ask in determining our success; it is a part of what’s called the
new scorecard for the church: are we creating the kind of disturbance in the
world that if we were to disappear would be noticed and felt by people in our
community. And, who are the ones in our community whose absence would be
greatly felt, and how are we in relationship with them?
While
today we are celebrating one of these internal covenants, that of church and
minister, Know this: this covenant will only be as strong as are all the
others. Where any one of them is weak or broken, the others will suffer.
Strengthen any one of them with more trust and permission-giving authority,
such as the covenant we celebrate, and the others will grow stronger.
Especially, though, to strengthen this particular covenant we now need to put a
priority on the external covenants because we have neglected them for so long.
Our
very DNA was church reformation in the 17th century and as a kind of
Protestants of the Protestants we have had a history of efforts to keep the
Reformation in a Process of Reforming Itself, usually, though, we have focused
on reforming the theological mind rather than the theological body, or church. One of the notable exceptions on the Unitarian
side was the work of James Freeman Clarke in Boston beginning the Church of the
Disciples in 1841, which was purposefully created to broach the social issues
of the time, and which broke the inward focus of church ownership by doing away
with people paying for pews, who otherwise had no church life, and by growing
more active involvement by members in all aspects of the church.
In
an 1866 book, Clarke wrote about the church of his era in a way that speaks to
us today, especially as we look for ways to be a movement that is more than
congregationally based in this emerging period where fewer and fewer people are
turning to congregations to nurture their spiritual life, regardless of how
healthy and vibrant the congregation may be. This fact about the changing
religious landscape means we need ever more radical ways of being and becoming
what Clarke called The Possible Church.
He
said the church may itself still be a blessing to the world if it overcomes
three tendencies in order to become a
fourth option. One tendency we have to overcome is seeking to recapture a Primitive Church
nostalgically, but which cannot be done as no church was perfect to begin with;
he says a second tendency to overcome is to remain stuck in our Actual Church,
which he describes as “doing some good in the world but nothing up to its
potential, and that it too often preaches to itself, ignores the poor and
outcast and those unlike its own members; it is a church where people go in but
not out, one that is timid, afraid of both love and truth, is sectarian, and
more for clergy than for people”; he says, the third tendency to overcome is to
aim for and judge church by the standards of an Ideal Church, “a kind of heaven
on earth, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, one that
penetrates every haunt of sin and pollution and brings forth the half-ruined
child and places them in new homes, that is full of life, love, power, and
freedom.” But, he asks, where is this church? and he answers “it was never
here, is not here now, but is always coming before us.” The lure and the
longing to live in the Ideal Church may in fact make the Actual church worse.
That
leaves us with his fourth option, the creation of The Possible Church, “that
which can be more than it is,” one he says that “lets in the bad with the good,
that is not organized around creed or belief but around working together, not comprised
of those who unite for the Lord’s supper but for the Lord’s work, who preach
not to pew-holders but to the whole community, whose mission will be to go out
to highways and hedges to seek and save the lost, and whose admission criteria
is to get good and do good, contributing to a larger liberty and a deeper life.”
The
Possible Church needed for our time is the one dedicated to making another
world possible, especially for those who have given up on possibilities.
To do this we must act
counter-intuitive; we must quit being anxious the church, about changing the
church, and worry more about changing the world, right around us. I should have
really titled my sermon The Possible World. Here is how we do it: we move from
a church having a mission to The Mission having a church. The first way keeps the focus on us as the
church instead of the world. It is our
default mode. What are the church’s problems, issues, changes needed? We keep
asking and trying to answer. But the
more we treat these churchy organizational questions and concerns as Ultimate,
the worse they will get. And we will treat mission as something we can change,
create, discard—like we do bylaws, leaders, buildings, ministers, and churches.
But if mission is defined by the hurting, bruised world we live in, it is the
Constant, and in response to it, the church is free to create and to change
itself.
Is it right, after all, to have a successful
church in a failing world? Especially successful measured by the standards of
the American Dream Empire (one that is affluent, accomplished, with a great
appearance, upwardly mobile, autonomous, taking care of its own, with lots of
choices accessible to it)? What profit is there if you gain the world’s
favorable impression, but lose your soul? Instead, from the fallen and buried
seed that appears to die in the sight of the world and its expectations, will
come the real transformation that will bear much fruit.
That
is not only the wisdom attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, but it is the
story of our tiny church back home in Oklahoma which turned even smaller and became
more out of sight, became dead to the world, in order to seed a missional
community bearing much fruit in the world.
We
decided we exist not to attract like-minded or common values people into a warm
supportive community, but we exist for the healing transformation of our
immediate neighborhoods, ones which have the lowest income and lowest life expectancy
in our area, 14 years lower than in the highest area just six miles from us. We
took down the signs that said we were a church and when we worshipped, and we
moved out of our small rented space and we moved into a much larger rented
space nearby at a higher lease we had no certainty we could pay for; and there
we re-emerged as a free community center with a library, computer center, food
pantry, health clinic, clothing and giveaway room, meeting space for the
community invited to come voice their hurts, dreams, disappointments, visions,
and there connect with one another and with our partners. We still worshipped,
often more times than we had before, and in various ways, but our gatherings
were right there in the center, we became a guest in our space given away for
others, or we worshipped out in the places of the community we were working on,
our blight to beauty sites, or we worshipped with other churches.
The
church or missional community as it is known, went organic, and we created a
non-profit foundation with others in our community from a variety of faiths to
handle the organizational matters and help us do more with our neighbors. And
just within the past year, we have, for example, purchased a city block of
abandoned homes and turned that space into a community garden and orchard and
park to produce healthy food for our unhealthy area, and it is becoming another
public space for community to happen among people who otherwise wouldn’t
connect. And we have bought the largest abandoned building, at the time, in our
area, an old church complex that had been rundown and vandalized, and we have
moved the community center and programs into it, expanding our food pantry by
doing so, and making the building such as it is an asset again, and keeping our
money turning over in our community rather than going to a landlord who lived
outside our area.
Our
food pantry gives out sometimes 11,000 pounds of food in a month. We also have
coordinated the daily summer free lunches for more children in our area than
anywhere else in our town, and we put on free community celebrations that
uplift and feed hundreds of people and provide free entertainment in an area
where no venues exist.
We
are a tiny group—sometimes four to a dozen worshipping together—but we partner
with many and are always looking for ways to incarnate ourselves in and with
others, and we have our hearts and hands and heads in everything in our
community from food to parks to the schools to health projects to streets to
trash to crime prevention to animal welfare to working on incorporating our
community so it can have more of a voice of its own. We see ourselves as The
Church of Possibilities in this abandoned place of Empire.
Find
ways to relocate to such places, to be neighbor-driven instead of needs-driven,
to redistribute goods and The Good, to seek reconciliation. Do that and it will
give you something to rejoice in worship; then worship will refresh you for
service; it will become not a destination point for a spiritual life, but a
departure point.
Originally
church was not a “come to us, be us” proposition, but it was a “go be with
them” movement of diverse peoples, and is becoming so again.
Here
is what we need to remember: The church is not, fundamentally at heart, a 501c3
nonprofit religious organization; it can and has existed, in ancient and
emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets, and buildings, and clergy. Church
does not have to be thought of as “a” church, that one “goes to” on the corner
of this and that, and is even named a certain thing, but church can be lived
out organically as a way people, two or more at a time, in covenant participate
as expressions of “the church.” Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime.
For
Church does not have to be only in the mode of help an us to become bigger and
better, more competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the
means to some organizational end; that is to follow the default mode of
consumerism, of the Empire which is always seeking to co-opt the church; church
doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment,
at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they
will leave us; church can be about turning outwards, helping others grow,
serving the ends of others, giving ourselves away, incarnating who we are into
the greater life, and of course always inviting others to do so with us.
Church
may in the end choose to live its mission being an organization with boards,
budgets, bylaws and buildings, with resources spent on creating worship crowd
experiences that fill its buildings, and producing an array of programming
aimed at meeting people’s needs throughout their life. Churches are finding
ways to launch experiments in missional community even as they continue growing
better their current ways. But that one
kind of Ideal church doing basically what it did in the 1950s and 60s just
improved and on a bigger scale will not be the only or dominant model. Long
gone is the one size fits all world, the three interchangeable as one broadcast
channels world, the phone attached to the wall world, and in this new world,
this new religious landscape described as post-denominational, even
post-congregational, what we need is a bigger bandwidth for church.
Returning
to our metaphor of the church as ship, with the world as sea, and God as the
wind, my own struggling and amazing community has helped me push this metaphor
even further. But here in the land of the drought, we might need to rethink
such a watery metaphor. I am reminded then of one of my favorite novelists,
Wright Morris, of Nebraska, who opened his novel The Works of Love, from 1952,
with these sentences: “In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers
run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.”
For in our world today, our task is not to craft a ship in dry dock then launch
it into the world, worried that it might sink, worried about its captain and
crew; instead today the church that wants to become possible for our times is best
viewed not as a ship at all, but as a
group of swimmers already adrift in the sea, survivors of wrecked ships already,
the wreckage of both sacred and secular lives, survivors who have to band together and assemble
in the churning waters of contemporary life these various and diverse makeshift
rafts to hold them and whatever of use they can salvage; rafts that are built
so if they capsize, and they will, oh they will, like all our covenants, they
will now easily right themselves again, and will be beacons themselves out in
the water, for other shipwrecked survivors they encounter as the wind and the
waves take them all toward distant shores.
Perhaps
in our world so fluid today, it is not walking together, but floating and
rescuing together, that should become the new metaphor for our covenants, for
what makes us church, a church possible of making new worlds possible. I believe it is possible.
