5-17-09

Today is the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide. In two Sundays we will celebrate Pentecost. Our gospel lesson for this morning is both appropriate for Eastertide, in that it is a Resurrection appearance, and appropriate for Pentecost as well, for in John's telling this text is also the birth of the church, also known as Pentecost.

It is the Sunday evening following the crucifixion. The disciples are gathered in fear. Suddenly the risen Lord appears, "Peace be with you." It is Easter for the disciples.

Then the risen Lord breathes upon the disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." In this act the church is born. It is Pentecost for the disciples as well. All on Easter evening. John gives us the seasonally condensed version.

In Luke, we have resurrection appearances for forty days, then the Ascension, and finally, ten days later, the Holy Spirit filling the disciples on Pentecost and the birth of the church, as told in Acts 2, which Luke wrote. Kama will preach on this in two weeks. I am sure of it. The church calendar follows Luke.

But inasmuch as this is our Annual Meeting Sunday, I thought Pentecost would be a fitting theme. So I give you John's short version that we might get to our 119^th annual meeting on time.

Of course, the real question is, "Why do church?" Why spend the last half of this lovely morning in a church meeting, besides the fun fellowship and tasty brunch? Indeed, some of you are already planning to skip out. We'll be watching you.

So why do church? Most of your neighbors don't. In the latest poll, 18-22% of Americans attend church regularly. I did not catch the definition of "regular," but I suspect it means two or more times a month. 18-22% regularly. In Montana it is 17%. Four out of five of your neighbors are not in church this morning. Don't you feel like a fool?

It is not a matter of belief? Studies show of those who do not attend church, 80% of them are believers! But they also believe it is not necessary to belong to a church to be a Christian. As we might agree as well. So they are left to wonder why it is we are getting up so early on Sunday morning. Except to play golf. Or go fishing. Or our kids have the early morning soccer match.

So why are you here? Besides the free coffee and cookies. Well, you can guess my reasons to do church are legion, but let me present just three this morning, and then we'll meet. Ushers, bar the doors!

1) First of all, did you know the church is part of a community of faith that dates back 4000 years, to the time of Abraham and Sarah? Some might date us only 2000 years, to the Day of Pentecost as mentioned, but before Pentecost was ours Pentecost was the Jews, and I believe ours is a Judeo-Christian story, with Abraham as the Father and Christ as the head and cornerstone.

It is an incredible, God-saving story, which we read about in the Old Testament as well as New. Before Abraham, people believed in many gods, who could care less about us. If you think about it, these many gods were made in our image. Right? They behaved pretty much like us, being jealous and angry, prideful and greedy, revengeful and selfish, quarreling, cavorting and carrying on.

Mostly what these gods wanted from us was our stuff, in the form of sacrifices. We had to appease these gods in order that the gods would pay attention to us and look favorably upon us.

Beginning with Abraham our theology changes. God, who is one, is revealed as the Creator who cares about us. God relates to us, graciously, and chooses Abraham, and Abraham's descendants, to be the people of God, not because they are better or special, but that they might live in covenant with God for all the world to see and learn how to live in relationship with God and with one another.

After Abraham and Sarah the point of religion is not to live in fear, tip toeing around to keep the many gods happy, but to live with faith, in relationship to the one God, trusting God to love us, even as God trusts us to love one another.

What God did for the Jews in Abraham, God did for all people in Christ. We believe as Christians that God sent Jesus into the world for the same reason God spoke to Abraham 2000 years before Jesus, to tell us that God loves us and invites us to be a part of God's family. As Paul put it, the "good news" of the Christian faith is "not that we loved God, but that God loved us," sending God's son that we might have new life.

So just as the response to the old covenant with Abraham was to live a life of faith, so the response to the new covenant given us through Christ is to live a life of faith. The central act of our faith is gathering as a family of faith to worship, i.e., to sing, to pray, to study scripture, to break bread together, and collect alms for God's service.

Of course, I suppose we can have all the benefits of our faith without gathering for worship and without the church, with no costs and no commitments, with no "living sacrifice to God and (no) dedication to God's service" as Paul appeals to the Romans in our epistle lesson for this morning. But who would want to do this? I don't know. Ask your neighbors.

We do church because we are part of the greatest organization ever assembled, the most magnificent body ever put together, a rich heritage of prophets and apostles, saints and martyrs, philosophers and theologians, as well as good ol' salt of the earth common folk, like your ancestors and mine, who have made the journey faithfully before us. And we are humble enough to accept that what they needed to make the pilgrimage, we need as well, which includes the church, the body of Christ.

2) Second of all, we do church because church is a fellowship of caring, and there is not one of us who does need fellowship and caring. Even those of us here in Marlboro country.

From the beginning the church believed its mission in the world was to be a new community, one that was different from any other community. And it was. The barriers that separated people in the world came down in the church. You know the text, "neither Jew nor gentile, free nor slave, male nor female..." All kinds of people came together in the church to make visible that we are all God's children. In this way the church was a light upon the hill, leaven in the loaf of humanity.

This is why the Spirit came down at Pentecost, so the disciples could speak a language that would unite all people, a language that everyone could understand. And the language was the language of God's love.

The Church has a special word for this fellowship of love. It is called "koinonia." It is a Greek word that is translated as "a fellowship of caring." The church at its best is a fellowship of caring for one another the way Christ cared for us.

And it is a love that is expressed not only in words, but a love that is expressed in deeds as well. We are called "to bear one another's burdens," as Paul writes to the Galatians in one of my favorite passages.

The single woman had not been active in her church. But tragedy struck and she found herself fighting for her life in the hospital, hovering between life and death, in and out of consciousness, a victim of a senseless act of violence.

She could have been alone. But she wasn't. Church people came and visited, keeping a vigil by her side, praying for her and speaking to her, even when she was unconscious and they could not be certain she could hear them.

She recovered, and commented, "I was blissfully aware of their being there. I felt as if I had been gathered up in a cocoon of love. I felt part of a beloved community."

"Beloved community" is a description of the church. You cannot do "beloved community" by yourself. The church is a fellowship of caring, a caring in which we not only receive, but we also give.

3) And finally, we do church as a collective way to answer Christ's call to serve. The church, including your denomination, has long said that piety without passion is pointless. Which is to say, if we have experienced the grace of God, it should not only make a difference in our life, it should make a difference in the lives of others as well. That's service.

Most of the caring institutions in the world were created by the church. This was the church living out the gospel that every human being is loved by God, including those who were not Christians or a part of the church. No other faith did this.

This is where hospitals came from. Hospitals were started by monasteries and nunneries to care for those people who had been rejected by their communities. The Christians practiced "hospitality" as a part of their religious order, so they provided homes for healing called hospitals for those who were sick and had been cast out by society.

The same is true for orphanages, and homes for the elderly, and shelters for widows. The church created these institutions of healing ministries, including your own denomination, where we still have 341 institutions of health & welfare related to the UCC in the USA.

Though most of them, like the Deaconess hospital movement we began with the Methodist Church in St. Louis, have since spun off into their own independent institutions of caring.

Likewise, it was the church that began universities and schools to lift God's children out of the darkness of illiteracy, so that every child on earth, including girls and people of color, could have the opportunity to become what God intended for them in creation. The church embodied Jesus' words, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

So your denomination created over 500 schools of higher education in the south following the Civil War, as well as the finest schools for girls in Muslim Turkey and the best school for blacks in South Africa, because Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Andover, Oberlin, and the like, which we also created, were not enough.

Why it can even be argued that democracy had its beginning in the church, for though we rightly attribute it to the Greeks, the practice of democracy in Greece was for the few elite. It was the church that said "everyone was equal in the sight of God," so that as the people assembled for worship there was the noble class and the servant class, free people and slaves, the rich and the poor, Olympic champions and the lame, all equal in Christ.

Some argue, well, if the church has been here for 2000 years, then how come the world is not a better place? I respond, can you imagine what the world would be like if it had not been for Jesus Christ and the church?

Of course, the church is not perfect. It is a human institution, as well. Like our silent meditation for this morning says, "When we compare (the church) with all human institutions, we rejoice, because there is none like her. But when we compare her with the mind of her Master, we bow in contrition."

Of course, we fall short. But in spite of our human failings, no matter how corrupt the church has been, and some periods of history are more painful than others, the church has always been able to reform herself, and approximate the body of Christ, however broken, by the grace of God.

This is because of what happened on Easter eve in the gospel of John. The risen Lord appeared and breathed on the disciples. And the Holy Spirit entered them, empowering the lives of these ordinary men and women to do extraordinary things for the love of God in this world.

And this Spirit has never left us. It continues to come into our lives, and calls us into a fellowship of caring and into a mission of serving in the name of Jesus Christ.

Harold Bales is a white Methodist minister who a few years ago served a church in a changing neighborhood in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. With more poor black people living around the church, he organized the church's ministry in a way to serve them. A day care, a food pantry, a literacy center, and other programs were begun to care for the neighbors, who more and more frequently came to the church, at least during the week, to take advantage of the programs.

One week day a respectable white woman of the congregation walked into the church and saw all these dark strangers there. She asked the minister, "Rev. Bales, what on earth are you doing here?" "Well," said the Rev. Bales, "I'm trying to save people from hell."

"Well," she reflected, "I guess that is all right. I suppose somebody should be trying to save them."

"No, no" replied the minister, "you don't understand. I am not trying to save them. I am trying to save us."

Thanks be to God for each of you for doing church! Maybe one day we will be saved. In the meantime, let's take an offering and get to the Annual Meeting. AMEN.