Series: "Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don't Belong To," part 3
John 2:13-22
As
you may know, I was out of town last weekend presenting at a conference. And as I was traveling, I made what many
clergy would consider the most boneheaded of mistakes: I wore my collar on the
plane.
You
have to know that airports and airplanes are like confessionals or the 5-cent
psychiatrist stand from the Peanuts cartoons.
If you’re wearing a clerical collar, you can expect somebody to come
looking for information, or advice, or – more likely – just the chance to get
something off his chest. It’s one of the
lessons of clergy life they teach you even from seminary: Don’t travel with
your collar on.
Well,
I’d gone to the airport directly from church last Sunday, so I was still
dressed out. I was sitting in the gate
area, waiting for my flight, when the woman seated to my right turned to me
with a dubious look, a look of restrained judgment. She was trying not to offend, so she started
out in safe territory:
“Are
you a minister?” she asked.
“Yes,”
I said.
“What
kind?” she asked.
“Episcopalian,”
I said.
Now,
in conversations like this, the person’s next question or statement is the
branching-off point. One possible
response is, “You’re Episcopalian … is that like Catholic?” In that case, you know you have a little
common ground, though you have no idea whether they go to Mass every day or they
can’t stand the last priest they knew 30 years ago. But this time, when I said “Episcopalian,”
the response went the other way. The
woman’s eyes narrowed a bit, and she asked, “Is that Christian?”
OK,
I thought, here’s a different opportunity.
So, I said, “Yes, you bet.” But
before I could go any farther, she came back with a series of more specific
questions.
“Do
you think the Old Testament is the Word of God, speaking of Jesus all the way through
it?”
“Yes,”
I said, “we believe the Old Testament is Part I of the story of the Good News.”
“And
the New Testament – that’s also the Word of God?”
“Yes,
the New Testament, too,” I said, beginning to wonder what she was thinking.
“Even Revelation? Do you believe in Revelation?”
“Yes,”
I said, “Revelation, too. That’s where
the whole story comes together, where heaven and earth become one again.”
“So,”
she asked, “are you like the Mormons?”
OK. Clearly, she wanted to ensure that she and I
were on the same page, that I wasn’t spouting heresy from whatever pulpit I
inhabited on Sundays (or whatever day my strange religion might honor). “No,” I said, “we’re not like the
Mormons. Mormons believe in some
different things than Christians do, and Episcopalians are Christians.”
“So,”
she asked, “do you believe Jesus died for your sins?”
This
didn’t seem like the right moment to explore different models of the doctrine
of the atonement, so I just said, “Yes, ma’am, for the sins of the whole
world.”
“Well,”
she said, “what’s your religion’s statement of faith? What’s your doctrine?”
I
said, “We root our faith in the creeds of the ancient Church, the Apostles’
Creed and the Nicene Creed. That’s what
we believe about the nature of God.”
“So,”
she drilled down, “the Father? And
Jesus? And the Holy Spirit? All three?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How
about speaking in tongues. Do you all
speak in tongues?”
“Well,
no, not so much of that.”
Finally,
I think I’d convinced her that Episcopalians are Christians, even if we don’t
speak in tongues. From there, we went on
a bit more easily, hearing some of each other’s story. Professionally, she worked in hospital medical
technology, but her passion was the Good News.
She said she’d written several books, and she said God was calling her
to become a traveling preacher. I could
see her doing that. She had the absolute
(and slightly chilling) certainty that sort of life would require.
Then
she started wondering about the people around us waiting for the flight. “How many of these folks do you think are off
God’s path?” she asked. “How many of
them have given their lives to Christ, and how many don’t even know what
they’re missing?” I said I didn’t know,
but probably most of them are wandering … like me, lots of the time. And she said, “Well, God has anointed me and
sent me out to share the Word with others so that they can have what I have –
so they, too, can live 100-percent Jesus.”
You
know, I’ve been sharing God’s Word for 15 years now, and I’m not sure I know
what it means to “live 100-percent Jesus.”
Well, maybe I do, but I don’t think I’d use just that language.
It’s not that it’s bad language.
It’s just insider language for
a particular way of being Christian – one that, sadly, may shut people down
when what the speaker wants most is to open them up.
This
is the third week of our sermon series reflecting on Lillian Daniel’s book Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t
Belong To. And I share this long
story with you because I think it gives us a glimpse into at least one way of
being church that might close as many doors as it opens. You know, all things considered, I feel
fairly comfortable talking about my faith – which is helpful, given my role. But I felt attacked and defensive when this
well-meaning woman next to me began her interrogation. She had a crystal-clear sense of the
way to do church, and clearly I wasn’t measuring up.
Of
course, by the same token, a stalwart Episcopalian might reflect similar
judgment about her – the other side of the same tarnished coin. We pride ourselves on being welcoming and open
and accepting … right up until we judge others for their judgmentalism and
close ourselves off because of their closed-mindedness. We may be quieter and more polite about it,
but we can be just as full of assumptions as the woman at the airport. “What, you don’t say the Nicene Creed? What, you don’t have Communion every
week? What, you speak in tongues?
What, you don’t agree with my politics?
Oh, you’re one of those
Christians….”
It’s
good to remember whose church the Church is.
And here’s a hint: It’s not ours.
Or theirs. It’s the Church of
Jesus Christ, which means it’s his.
And
in this morning’s Gospel reading, we see and hear Jesus staking his claim to
the church of his day, in the story of the cleansing of the Temple. Now, in the Gospel of John, this story comes
at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He’s called his first disciples and performed
his first miracle. He’s literally just
getting started, and he comes to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. He makes his pilgrimage to the Temple, and there
he finds people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, along with the Temple
moneychangers. And he’s not too happy.
Now,
this is not as black and white as it may sound to our modern ears. Temple worship involved animal sacrifice; and
only certain animals were fit for that use, according to the Law – so the
Temple had to provide them. And a
faithful Jew couldn’t use ritually unclean Roman money in God’s Temple; so the
moneychangers converted it into holy currency that met the Law’s
requirements. But…. Were the official livestock dealers gouging
the poor because the dealers had a monopoly on sacred animals? Were the official moneychangers gouging the
poor with exorbitant exchange rates? You
bet. So, Jesus drives them out because
they’re acting in opposition to the ways of the God they’re supposedly there to
honor, and because they’re missing the point of the worship they’re helping to make
possible.
So,
what would be the point of worship? Why
are we here this morning? I don’t mean
that as a rhetorical question. I mean,
why are you here this morning? You may have a role to perform or an
obligation to meet – and on some Sundays, that’s why you’re here; I get
it. But beyond that: You’re someone who
actually attends worship, or shows up for it online. That’s an increasingly exclusive circle these
days. What brings you here?
I
like the way Lillian Daniel puts in her book.
Now, this may or may not ring true for you, and that’s OK; but it does
for me. She writes, “Worship … is not
about hiding from the world but transforming it. Through worship, we hope to be better than we
would have been otherwise, and for that to work, we need to show up.” (123, emphasis mine)
I
don’t say “we need to show up” in terms of finger-wagging; I say it in terms of
practice. To build our skill and grow
our capacity at anything, we have to practice it. And I’ll tell you, day-to-day life in our
world doesn’t give us much practice in recognizing God’s loving sovereignty and
our dependence on it. So much about our
culture tells us we can have what we want, when we want it, because it’s all
about me. Worship tells us just the
opposite: Life is bigger than me. The deepest truths are life’s mysteries. Meaning comes from pouring ourselves out and
giving ourselves away, just as Jesus did for us. Sacrifice gains us more than
acquisition. God is God, and we are
not.
Deep
in our hearts, we know these things – and we know we find our healing and our
rest in them. The hard part is living
them out, which is why we need to practice.
As Lillian Daniel says about worship, “There is no other area of our
lives where we pretend something important takes no work” (124).
And
that’s all the more true when you remember the scope of the life we’re talking
about. If we believe nothing else as
followers of Jesus, we believe this life is not all there is. So, worship isn’t just tuning us up for the
sprint of next week’s earthly existence.
It’s conditioning – deep conditioning – for the marathon of life that never ends.
So,
don’t be afraid to claim it. When you
find yourself in a conversation with someone who doesn’t get why on earth you’d
spend your Sunday morning here, doing this – don’t apologize for your
faithfulness, or write it off to habit, or blame your mother. Have something to say. Maybe the reason you’re here is about the
prayer book, language that expresses your heart’s deepest joys and longings
when you don’t have the words yourself.
Maybe it’s about the music, especially this being the one chance we get
in our modern lives to sing our hearts out in public without anyone thinking
we’re crazy for doing it. Maybe it’s about
the hope we receive from words of truth that have nurtured saints and sinners
for centuries. Maybe it’s about the Body
and Blood of Jesus, broken for you, poured out for you, because he loves you
enough to die proving it. Maybe it’s
about the power of the Spirit, binding us together as that Body of Christ and
sending us into the world to love it into submission.
The
Church can feel like something we have to apologize for because so often we do miss the mark. Some of us miss by trying too hard, like the
woman in the airport; some of us miss by not trying hard enough. But look, you’re here. God’s pumping life into your broken or empty
heart, one way or another. Name it for
someone else – because that person needs to be made whole, too.
