One Body

One Body

1 Corinthians 12:1-12

January 27, 2019

And the apostle Paul said to the church at Corinth: “Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes …” This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

That’s the quite completely revised, not quite at all standard, preschool translation of First Corinthians. We are one body, and individually members of it. Every member brings something to the whole, and each one of these gifts matters to the whole. Indeed, without them, the body is not actually whole. It is fractured and broken and not able to function as intended by the One who created it.

So, whatever part you play matters. There are no small parts, as they say in theater, only small actors.

We all know that it’s wise to get regular check ups to assess the health of our bodies, and so it is with the body of the church. We go to a physician to get our head, shoulders, knees, and toes; eyes and ears and mouth and nose checked up. We know that there are standards to measure our vision and our hearing, our heart rate and blood pressure, our strength and flexibility, and we trust medical experts to assess our health according to such standards.

What are the standards against which we judge to health of the body of Christ, the church?

At the congregational level, the traditional measure of institutional health used for the better part of the past century has been “butts and budgets.” That is to say, congregational and denominational health has been measured according to membership, worship attendance, and budgets.

By those measures, let’s be honest, we are a marginally healthy part of a dying body. That is to say, Clarendon Presbyterian Church has a reasonably stable membership, some significant questions about attendance, and a decently healthy budget – all of which we’ll look at in more detail together in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, lest we forget our context, we are a congregation of a denomination that has lost about three quarters of it total membership since 1965, and whose membership has continued in decline every year for decades from a peak of about 4.5 million in the mid-60s to the current total that is a bit less than 1.5 million. The denomination is barely more than half the size it was when I entered seminary in the mid-90s. Denominational budgets have, of course, tracked membership.

We are a part of a body that is dying. Moreover, many, perhaps most, of the individual parts of the body – that is to say, the congregations that make up the denomination – are also dying. Locally speaking, there are six Presbyterian congregations in Arlington County this morning. I would be shocked if more than half of them remain as stand-alone congregations 15 years from now. In fact, I’d be somewhat surprised if more than half of them remain by the time I retire. And, oh, yeah, I turn 60 this year.

We are a part of a body that is dying.

We can weep and wail and gnash our teeth. We can huddle together and sing songs of lamentation. We can wax nostalgic and dream of by-gone days.

Or, we can rise up and live into the fullness of our faith as a resurrection people.

That is to say, the heart of our faith beats with the conviction that God can bring new life out of death; that God can speak a creative word into the chaos and call forth the ordered creation itself; that God can breathe into the dry bones and then watch those bones dance.

We are a resurrection people!

What does that mean for us? What does that look like in our context? Where can we look to see signs that God is already bringing forth new life in our very midst?

To some extent, those questions beg us to think differently about how we assess the health of the body of Christ in our context. Thinking differently does not mean ignoring traditional metrics and measurements.

We are right to be pleased with the shape of our budget; we are also right to be concerned with dips in attendance on Sunday mornings.

But we ought also to be thinking about what it means that so many of us participated in last summer’s CAT assessment that the folks at Holy Cow, the consulting firm that administers the assessment tool, did IP address checks to make sure someone wasn’t stuffing the virtual ballot box. We also ought to be thinking about what it means the almost a hundred folks were gathered in the sanctuary last Thursday evening to talk about green energy, and that about a third of them were young adults. And we ought to be thinking about what it means that way more people tuned in to at least part of our Facebook worship service two weeks ago in the snow that ever come in person on a Sunday morning.

These are also signs and signals about the health of the body. We just don’t fully understand what they are signaling and how they might be signs pointing toward a future of new life.

One year ago in this “state of the church” sermon, I suggested that we are being called into a larger story, and we launched a season of discernment that led us, last summer and fall, to create a new staff position and set out to raise funds to support it. This winter and spring we will conduct the search and hiring process to give life to that vision cast one year ago.

That, also, looks to me like a sign of vitality.

But, I confess, I’m not always sure about such signs nor about the various ways we endeavor to measure and assess the state of the church.

I’m not sure that my confusion is anything new under the sun.

When we were in Rome a few weeks ago we toured the Vatican. Standing beneath the 430-foot dome of St. Peter’s is an awe-inspiring experience. One cannot help but look up, and, clearly, that’s the point. Human beings are invited in grand cathedrals to gaze upward toward the heavens to catch a sense of the divine existing on a plane far above human toil.

There is nothing at all wrong with that, but gazing upward is only one way to catch a glimpse of the divine.

We did not have enough time to get out to see the catacombs when we were in Rome. While the history and meaning of those burial sites remains contested, it’s fairly well accepted that they were used at certain periods in the first centuries of Christianity as worship spaces for Christian communities under persecution by Roman authorities.

I’m guessing that their worship attendance figures were unimpressive. Indeed, I’m guessing they didn’t keep much track at all. I’m guessing their budgets were – well, I’m guessing they didn’t have any budgets at all. I’m guessing their membership figures were equally unimpressive.

But I am also guessing – no, this is not a guess, this is preaching: the faith of those early Christian communities was so vibrant, so alive, and so clearly counter cultural, that they were perceived as threatening to the entrenched and absolute power of an empire that spanned most of the known world.

They didn’t just cast their eyes upward for signs of the presence of God. They cast their eyes down, into catacombs, and there, in the eyes of their Christian friends they saw the presence of God in the body of Christ.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is any entrenched power threatened by us today?

If the answer to that question is no, well perhaps then it’s best if we do simply fade away.

But I do not believe God is finished with us yet. I do not believe that the body of Christ in the world is merely a corpse awaiting last rights and burial.

I believe God is calling forth new life in our midst precisely because entrenched, concentrated, and corrupt power still exercises dominion over the lives of far too many people around the world, including in many places in our own country, and I believe that the body of Christ in the world is called to disrupt that power whenever and however we can. For when we are about that life-giving, death-disrupting work in the world, then the body of Christ is vibrant and healthy. Let us be about that work, in our time and place, for, whenever and wherever we are, then the state of the church is strong. Amen.

Let It Flow

Isaiah 62:1-5; John 2:1-11

January 20, 2019

“On the third day …” That’s surely among the most familiar phrases in Christian history. “On the third day, He rose again in accordance with the scriptures …” says our most ancient confession, the Nicene Creed. The Apostles Creed, likewise, says, “the third day He rose again from the dead.” The phrase shows up a dozen or so times in the New Testament, pointing always toward this fundamental promise of God’s unimaginably abundant grace that flows freely even in the face of death.

So, by the communicative property of familiarity – which I just invented – this story that begins “On the third day” must tell us of Jesus’ most significant miracle. Right? Well, at least for the wine connoisseurs among us!

What a neat party trick! Turning water into wine, and not just any wine, but the good stuff, at the end of the party, when no one is going to know the difference because they’ve all had more than enough!

Still, one wonders, why did the author of John’s gospel choose to tell this story, and, moreover, choose to put it in such a prominent place – the first sign, the first miracle of Jesus’ ministry?

The lectionary pairing with the text from Isaiah suggests one reading: this sign at a family gathering, a simple domestic setting, in a town so small that it is never mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, is a sign that God’s promises, being made manifest in the life of Jesus, are for everyone. “Your land shall no more be termed Desolate […] so shall your God rejoice over you.”

Even if you are people of no great significance living in a town so small that it goes unmentioned throughout the holy texts of its people God will still rejoice over you. Thus, John’s gospel begins its account of the life of Jesus with this simple assurance that the good news is for all people, and that grace flows as freely as wine at the wedding feast.

Moreover, this story suggests that signs of such assurance are all around us if we have eyes to see; and, critically, we don’t have to be rich and powerful and privileged to have such eyes. Who notices in this story? The servants. The waiters and busboys are the ones with eyes to see.

Remember, this is a wedding scene. It seems likely that family patriarchs are on hand. Perhaps some religious official – at least the local rabbi – is on hand to offer his blessing. The most prominent members of two families are probably present, as well. Yet they do not see this sign of God’s abundant grace; the servants see it.

And so does Jesus’ mother, who offers the most significant theological instruction in the story: “do what he tells you.” In other words, if you want to see signs of God’s grace, if you want to participate in the unfolding of God’s grace in the world, then do what Jesus tells you to do.

That is the heart of the gospel, for John and for us. If you want to be a disciple, then do what Jesus tells you to do. If you want to be a disciple, then follow the way of Jesus in the world.

This is one of those wonderful confluence days in the life of the church: we’ve ordained an elder this morning; it’s also the Sunday of the Martin Luther King holiday; and it’s the second Sunday after Epiphany, when the lectionary points us decisively in the direction of the ministry of Jesus.

Such a time calls forth confession, in the two main meanings of that word.

Calling forth and ordaining leaders in a community’s life is a time for confession as owning up. It is a time to confess that none of us is worthy of the callings to which we have been called. It is a time to recall Barbara Brown Taylor’s observation that “Being ordained is not about serving God perfectly, but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.” I would add to that, by watching you rise again by the grace of God flowing forth around you.

If a community calls forth leaders who do not possess the self-knowledge and moral imagination to acknowledge and confess their own faults and failings, then sooner or later – but probably sooner – the entire community is going to suffer through the inevitable failure of leadership that flows from such self-ignorance. This will be true no matter the size or scope of the community. Such failures of leadership lead to institutional failures, and, in time to systemic disfunction. We need look no further than the White House to see a particularly pertinent example of such a failure of moral imagination.

Calling forth and ordaining leaders in a community’s life is a time, as well, for confession in the sense of stating clearly what we believe about the community’s life. Who is it that we say we are, or want to be, that we should call forth women and men to lead us boldly in the direction of our hopes and aspirations?

We Presbyterians of the PC(USA) are a confessional church. When we ordained Tom a few minutes ago one of the questions I asked him touches on this explicitly. We ask every person ordained in the church – deacons, ruling elders, teaching elders – this question: Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?

That question does not assume that everyone will agree on the meaning or the significance of every line of every confession. After all, our Book of Confession contains eleven confessional statements dating all the way back to the time of Constantine in the 300s, and including, most recently, a confessional statement that emerged from the Reformed tradition struggling under the weight of apartheid in South Africa in the early 1980s.

As a denomination we have begun the process of considering another 20^th- century document for inclusion in our Book of Confessions: Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham City Jail. We used a few lines from that letter in our prayer of confession this morning.

King’s letter, written in 1963 while he was in jail in the midst of the Birmingham campaign, was addressed to eight self-identified “liberal” Birmingham clergy who had published a letter in the local paper early that year scolding King for stirring up trouble, for pressing too hard, too fast for change, and for being an “outside agitator.” King did not write back to them telling them that they were not Christians or arguing that their faith was somehow invalid. He did not argue the finer points of theological interpretation and insist on perfect agreement. Instead, he pointed them in the direction he believed God was calling the church and the nation, and invited them to be faithful to that calling to an authentic justice that could be the ground of true peace.

We do not assume that every ordained leader in the church agrees on a single, authoritative interpretation of all of a confessional heritage spanning almost 2,000 years. Rather, that ordination question assumes that we agree on the importance of an ongoing community that has held itself up to honest questioning, deep reflection, and profound disagreement over many generations. It further assumes that, even in disagreement, the community is bound by a common and core commitment to wrestle with its own confessional heritage because we believe that all of it points, ultimately albeit imperfectly, toward Jesus.

We should also confess one last thing: we look at this heritage in fear and trembling. We do not look with a trembling born of scorn for where those who came before us got it wrong. No, we look with trembling born of fear of following where they got it right.

That is to say, let us confess, that following in the way of Jesus rightly fills us with fear, with terror, for when we point ourselves that way we are turning our faces toward Jerusalem. We are setting forth on a path trod by those whom Dr. King’s critics called “extremists.”

But, as he answered them from jail, “I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love – ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice – ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ – ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist – ‘Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.’”[1]

May all of that wisdom and agitation expressed down through the ages point us ultimately back to Mary, mother of Jesus, and her simple instruction, “do whatever he tells you.”

May we have the courage, at least, to try in our own lives to let grace flow all around us, to let justice roll down like a mighty water, to love without exceptions, to go boldly where Jesus beckons, to be so extreme as that. Amen.

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[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 297.