A Vision of the Church

 

A Vision of the Church

A Sermon from 1992

Slightly revised, October, 2022

Given again at Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ

Shoreline, Washington

October 23, 2022

 

In 1992, thirty years ago now as hard as that is to believe, I was, as I told you last week, a practicing lawyer who had never had a thought about going to seminary and becoming a church pastor. My late wife Francie and I were members of this church at the time. One Sunday our pastor, Rev. Steve Hanning, whom some of you at least remember, was going to be away, and either he or someone else at the church asked me if I would preach that Sunday. I agreed. I gave a sermon with the title “Vision of the Church.” I recently rediscovered the text of that sermon and reread it. I thought it was really quite good, good enough to be worth giving again this morning. I thought, perhaps a sermon on what the church could be might be helpful to RBCC in their interim time. I have edited it a bit to reflect some of today’s realities. I also made a few other edits, but much of what I say here is exactly what I said thirty years ago. When I reread the sermon I thought, gee, I guess it was inevitable that I would end up going to seminary and becoming a pastor, which, as you know, I eventually did. This sermon certainly did not give me that thought back when I first gave it. So, for what it’s worth, here it is.

A Vision of the Church

In 1975 and 1976 Francie [my since deceased wife], our son Matt (who turned two while we were there and who is now Division Chief of Training for the Everett Fire Department), and I lived in what was then the Soviet Union while I was doing research for my PhD dissertation in Russian history. (Yes. I have one of those too. I go to school better than I do anything else.) The Soviet state was officially atheistic. The society it created was, in its outer, public aspect at least, bleak, humorless, largely hopeless, and oppressive in a way that it is difficult for most Americans to conceptualize. The official values of that society were entirely material. Outer conformity to standards of conduct and to a system of belief, Marxism-Leninism, was rigorously enforced by a system of secret police and secret informers, and any deviation from the imposed norm was punished, not so much during my time there by arrest and jail, thought that did happen, as by the withholding of career, housing, recreational, and other opportunities, the absence of which made life, already materially difficult in that country, even more difficult. Most Soviet citizens adopted a survival strategy of coldness, even rudeness, in public life that made the accomplishing of even routine daily tasks difficult and unpleasant. Although in private Russians could be the most gracious and engaging of hosts, daily life in the Soviet Union was depressing and oppressive in a way I had never experienced and could hardly have imagined before living there.

In that oppressive atmosphere, I was exposed to an alternative—actually the only intellectually consistent and comprehensive alternative to materialism available in the Western world then or for that matter now—religious faith. Francie, Matt, and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church associated in those days with the American and British embassies in Moscow. The Church became for me a refuge from the materialism and despair of Soviet society. The contrast between the warmth and love expressed in the church and the coldness and meanness of Soviet life was overpowering. In the church, I came to see the humanizing and enabling power of faith in God in stark contrast to the dehumanizing and diminishing effect of faith in human beings under which the Soviet Union operated

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church in contemporary America? I submit to you that the society in which we live is similar to the society of the now defunct Soviet Union in at least a few important ways. The problems we face aren’t identical to those the Soviet Union faced by any means. As flawed as our country is, it is nowhere near as oppressive as the Soviet Union was.  Nonetheless, we have more than enough of our own shortcomings. In our society—

·        People are valued for what they produce not for who they are.

·        Success is equated with wealth, and it doesn’t much matter how that wealth was acquired.

·        A times we  elect top national leadership which legitimizes racism by calling white supremacists fine people, failing to provide leadership for the continuation of the civil rights movement, and catering to bigotry in the guise of code words like law and order.

·        Bigotry based on sexual orientation and gender identity or expression still destroys families and blights the lives of millions of God’s people.

·        We tolerate the most gun violence in the industrialized world, and we refuse to enact the obviously needed ban of the assault-style weapons that massacre our schoolchildren and other innocent people, including people gathered for worship.

In short, we live in a society which falls so far short of its expressed ideals, so full of violence, so full of injustice that one is tempted to react with nothing but despair and a self-defensive apathy in the face of seemingly intractable problems.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church? I suggest to you that the church properly understood is the only institution that offers a viable alternative to the failings of the society in which we live. Only the church offers a consistent, intellectually honest, and spiritually satisfying belief system that answers the problems and vices of the world.

What does the church offer in response to the seemingly overwhelming problems of society? There are two major aspects to its response—a pastoral response and a prophetic response. On the pastoral level it offers refuge, comfort, and hope. Christianity teaches us above all else that God loves and accepts us as we are. That we don’t have to be perfect or even good to be saved. Church is a place where we can bring our cares and burdens and be assured of understanding and forgiveness. When life can be so overwhelming, we need more than ever the refuge and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness and acceptance that the church offers us when it is functioning as God calls it to function.

But if the church’s response to the world were merely pastoral, merely a place for us to go for comfort, it could and likely would deteriorate either into a narcissistic self-indulgence that would ultimately be spiritually damaging and irrelevant to the world or a country club with some Christian symbols attached. But Christianity, and the Judaism out of which it grew and with which it is so closely connected, when properly understood, do not stop with the pastoral response. We are the heirs of a great prophetic tradition going way back into Old Testament times. The ancient Hebrew prophets are important not because they predicted the future but because they spoke God’s message of justice for all, or at least many of them did. The saints of our spiritual tradition have for millennia called on the societies and states in which they lived to repent and to improve. Inspired by their understanding of the divine will, they have fearlessly challenged the powers of the world to live by the eternal truths in which they and we believe.

The church today is called perhaps as it has not been for many decades to continue that prophetic tradition. Our faith compels us to speak out against the evil we perceive. Our faith also empowers us to do it. We know that God will forgive our failures and our shortcomings. We know that ultimately the world can do nothing to harm us in terms of eternity. And we know that we can be true to ourselves and to our faith only by speaking out, by demanding that our leaders and our society as a whole turn away from the paths of violence and bigotry which they so often travel. Only the church has the great legacy and the great faith which empower it to be prophetic. If the church does not speak out for what is right, no one will.

Now the question arises of what I mean by the church. Obviously a great many churches do not stand for the kind of end to bigotry and violence I am talking about. Sadly, many churches are more a part of the problem than they are of the solution. Large, socially respectable Christian churches stand today for a subordinate status for women and for scripturally justified bigotry against God’s LGBTQ+ people. They preach an anti-intellectual and intellectually dishonest fundamentalism and offer a faith that is so self-centered that it loses all sense of social responsibility except for concern with a few narrow issues around which they preach the end of individual freedom and responsibility. They preach not the infinite vastness of God’s love for all people but a judgmental doctrine which requires not a life of faith and love but fear-based, rigid adherence to traditional life-styles and a restrictive morality that results in wide-spread misery and the alienation of huge numbers of people from the faith. Today, a great many of them identify Christian faith with American nationalism, something I find to be simply beyond comprehension.

What then is the proper vision of the Church? It is of a church that is true to its real self. A church that responds to the evils of society by spreading the priceless treasure of the good news of God’s love for all people, where all, regardless of their station in life, regardless of their sex, race, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or other distinguishing characteristics can come to know the love of God and the tremendous power of God’s forgiveness. And it is of a church that fearlessly and tirelessly calls our society to be true to itself, to its professed ideals, not to seek to impose Christianity on anyone but to offer to all the vision of life we have received from Jesus Christ, a life of love and forgiveness for all.

As a church and as individuals, myself included, we have been too timid in our prophetic mission. We have been too complacent and too comfortable. If the church is to be what it can and should be, we must more aggressively speak out for what we know to be true. Way back when I was a member here, this church took a good step in the right direction by adopting the open and affirming covenant by which you still live. (I was a member of the Open and Affirming Taskforce that led the church to adopt that covenant, something of which I still am quite proud.) We Christians must continue to speak out, and we Christians must do so more visibly. We must take to heart the message we profess to believe, that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. In that forgiveness lies an infinite empowerment for good if we will only truly believe and act on it.

So as you go through this time of transition, I pray that you will continue to commit yourselves to making Christ’s church all that he would have it be—a refuge for our souls and a source of inspiration for good for all of society. May it be so. Amen.