Trust at the Blind Curve Up the Hill

Sermon for Feb. 25, 2018
St. John's Episcopal Church, Columbus, OH, part of its Reimagining Church conference
Genesis 17:1-7,15-16; Mark 8:31-38

Good morning! I bring you greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus from the good people of St. Andrew’s in Kansas City, a congregation a little larger than St. John’s but no less concerned about the future.  I think that’s true everywhere across the Episcopal Church, everywhere across mainline Christianity, for that matter.  It seems we’re all anxious about attendance, and membership, and pledging – and how, in most of our congregations, when you look out across the nave from the back of the church, what you see is 50 shades of gray.  In my congregation, we call it the “demographic cliff.” 

For decades, since the Second World War and the Baby Boom, Episcopalians have gotten used to the notion that people will come to us, if we just don’t mess things up too badly.  The neighbors eventually will come to a place in their lives where they’ll want to take advantage of what the church has to offer.  Our kids eventually will come to a place in their lives where their negative memories of a boring church will somehow switch to fond remembrance, and they’ll bring their own kids to endure it just like they did.  As crazy as that sounds, it worked for us for a while, in the days when social and business contacts happened at coffee hour rather than the coffee shop down the street.  It worked for us to expect the kids would go through their rebellious period and eventually find a church because many did come back.  Not anymore.  Nationally, the Episcopal Church has been shedding worshippers for decades, and the trend just keeps going. 

So, aren’t you glad you brought in some inspiring out-of-town preacher to bring you the Good News this morning?

Actually, I think Good News is exactly what this situation reflects.  And that’s not because I have a death wish for the Church.  It’s because the two vital pieces of the puzzle are coming together for us.  First, we’re being honest about our situation, as individuals, as congregations, and as the larger Episcopal family – honest about where we are, the part we’ve played in it, and our call to turn in a new direction.  That’s the first piece, the one about us.  And second, just in case we needed reminding, we worship a God who brings light out of darkness, joy out of sorrow, life out of death – and nearly always when it’s the last thing anyone would have expected.  Put those pieces together, and you can solve the puzzle.  Leave either one out, and we actually are sunk.

So first, about us:  Let’s remember what time of year it is.  It’s Lent, which isn’t about wallowing in our wretchedness but about being honest.  It’s about self-examination and repentance, as we heard on Ash Wednesday – like an annual physical.  It’s about acknowledging where we are and deciding where we’re going from here – changing our minds about some things and acting differently, which is what “repent” means in Scripture.  So the time is right for us as individuals and congregations to look at where we are, acknowledge where we’ve been missing the mark, and turn in a new direction. 

That’s what you’re doing here at St. John’s, what Lee Anne has been leading you toward – turning toward the neighbors coming among you.  Now, for some Episcopal congregations, making that turn might start with just realizing that there are people among you.  You’re a long way beyond that.  You’ve given your hands and your hearts in serving people who are hungry, people sleeping in the cold.  You’ve built those relationships into a worshiping community, which I can’t wait to experience this afternoon. You do amazing things here.

And still, those words we heard in today’s Gospel reading hang like Jesus’ thought bubble over all our best work.  “If any want to become my followers,” he said, “let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the good news, will save it.” (Mark 8:34-35)  It’s tempting to hear those words and think, “Absolutely, Jesus – that’s what our feeding ministry is all about. That’s what our street church is all about.  We’re bearing that cross right alongside you.”

And so you are.  So is my congregation, in the way it helps feed and educate kids in Haiti, feed and clothe people in Kansas City, and foster social enterpreneurship.  And Jesus sees all that: “Absolutely,” he says back to us – “and bless you all for walking alongside me.  And now, the path is turning.  Will you stay with me as we carry this cross up a new hill?  Will you let go of just a little more, so you can become ever so much more?”

I’ve been blessed to talk with people in the Episcopal Church, and our cousins in England, who are saying “yes” to this call to give up some of what we’ve known in order to love differently and love more.  I’ve talked with folks who’ve invested themselves deeply in the places and the people God has given them.  There are a hundred different ways to go about it – dinner churches, or community partnerships, or pastoral presence, or kids’ play groups, or community organizing, or sharing physical space, or preaching with kids each week.  And there is no Holy-Grail sort of solution that will bring young adults and families through our doors for Sunday-morning worship.  But there is a common thread, and that thread is individual connection.  It’s taking the person in front of you completely seriously, and linking her up with the next person in front of you to build networks of relationship, networks of blessing for the real, live human beings nearby – whether we would choose them, or not.  Whether we feel comfortable with them, or not.  As one of the priests I interviewed told me, the key to building ministry with young families – or with anyone else, for that matter – is wanting to.  The key is wanting to invest ourselves in easing the burdens or spurring the passions of real, live people you come to know and love.

That’s possible.

But it’s not enough simply to want to.  It’s not even enough simply to try hard.  The second part of the equation is trust – trust that God will be God.  God does not offer us easy solutions – not even to God’s good friend Abraham, the ancestor of many nations, chosen by God to model what it means to walk side by side, in loving covenant with the sovereign of the universe.  For Abraham, that path began with leaving everything he knew to come to a land God was promising but that he’d never seen.  It continued with a dangerous sojourn in Egypt and conflict with those who’d become his neighbors.  And it included big promises that must have seemed pretty empty in the moment.  A couple of chapters before the reading this morning, God had said to Abraham, “Here, I will give you land and descendants, innumerable like the stars of the clear night sky.”  Then decades pass, and Abraham doesn’t have much of anything to show for those promises.  His wife, Sarai, hasn’t had any kids, and it’s hard to have descendants without any kids; so they figure a child with Hagar, whom they hold as a slave, is better than nothing.  But God comes to Abraham again and says, “Wait, the story gets better than that.  Your descendants shall come from your 90-year-old wife, Sarah.”  That’s a laugh line, by the way.  Scripture does have laugh lines, and this is one of them.  Abraham falls down laughing, but God is serious.  “I know you can’t see it now,” God says, getting serious, “but this is the way I work.  Trust me.  The best outcomes are the ones you’d never expect to see.”

The Episcopal Church is not a bunch of slackers.  Many congregations, like yours and mine, have worked faithfully for a long time to deny ourselves, and take up our crosses, and follow Jesus.  We’ve tried hard.  We’ve offered feeding programs, or school partnerships, or new worship experiences, some of us nearly killing ourselves trying to come up with the right things that will bless our world and draw in new folks.  What maybe we haven’t done so well is to be open to learning how we might serve different people in different ways.  Maybe we haven’t done so well at setting aside what we understand and how we’ve always done things, and learning from people in our midst whom we don’t really even know.  That’s one of my congregation’s growing edges, and I think that’s true for most of the Episcopal Church.  There are people around us yearning for spiritual meaning in ways a standard worship service may not sufficiently address.  There are people around us hungry for connection with God and each other in ways we’d never think about ourselves.  There are people around us already tapping into the power of the Holy Spirit to solve problems in the neighborhood and bless people’s lives. 

We can trust that God will bring us wisdom and insight and new life, for ourselves and our congregations, if we will set aside some things we’ve always done and hear the wisdom that real, live people will teach us over a hundred cups of coffee.  We can trust that God will bless us to be a blessing in this time when church is shifting under our feet and the road ahead has hit a blind curve.  Even in the dark of Good Friday, even along the way of the cross, we can trust that Easter is on its way because that’s how God works:  The best outcomes are the ones you’d never expect to see.