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What good is the Church? I mean, really, can we take this morning's readings seriously? Is all this stuff we do here only so much "church talk," or does it have anything to do with life? With real life, I mean, with life lived in the streets and the shopping malls, and at home and at work and at school. During Lent several years ago, the youth group of our parish in Wisconsin was talking about the temptation of Jesus and about Lent, and it was clear that only with great effort were any of them able to imagine what relevance the wrestlings of Jesus with Satan in the wilderness might have to the wrestlings of their own lives in the wilderness of the world today. And that reminded me of the story Father Griffiss, my seminary theology teacher, used to tell about his own seminary days at General Seminary, when he was teaching a youth group in a slum neighborhood in New York. He was a young, bright seminarian, and one day he laid some of what he had just heard in class on the youth group. "Jesus died for your sins," he told them. And a street-wise girl of 15 or so said, "Who asked him to?" Sometimes theology plays differently on the street than it does in the classroom. This is not meant as a reflection on young people, who tend simply to be annoyingly honest about religion. What it is, really, is a reflection on us, their elders. The honesty about religion expressed by young people is honesty about what we adults are often afraid to be honest about, honesty about what's really important in our lives. Who asked Jesus to die for our sins? Or, to put it another way, who asked God to speak truth to us? Who asked God to confront us, as God confronted Moses in that burning bush in the desert, with his call to truth and a godly life? Did we ask him, we parents and grandparents of those honest youth group kids who never gave a moment's thought to Lent? Well, yes, in one sense we did ask God to confront us with truth. After all, that's why we're here in church this morning, isn't it? We want the truth about ourselves. We want to hear the truth about the holiness of God, and about our sinfulness, and about our own inability to do anything about it ourselves, the truth about temptation and death and repentance and life. That's why we're here, isn't it? Or is it? Well, yes, we do ask God to speak truth. But, no, we don't ask him to speak the truth he speaks. We want the call of truth, don't we, truth reaching out from God and grabbing hold of our lives? Isn't that why we put ourselves through the hassles of this church business: Sunday morning rushes to be on time, commission and vestry meetings, shelling out money. Don't we come to church for the same reason Moses went to the burning bush and the folks in Luke's Gospel went to Jesus -- because, without truth, without God, we sense that, like Moses, we're just making do, just marking time wandering in the wilderness looking after someone else's sheep? And the Church, because of the fact that it's good for nothing else -- because it's "of no earthly use," as Michael Marshall used to put it -- the Church beckons us aside, as the burning bush beckoned Moses aside and as Jesus beckoned the people aside, to find truth. And before we're fairly seated in our cushioned pews this morning, we hear the voice of God himself: "Take off your shoes and keep your distance!" (I wonder. Could we take the voice of God more seriously is we did take off our shoes in church, if we swallowed our chewing gum and checked our water bottles and coffee cups at the door and took off our shoes and felt the hard marble reality of holy ground and real life beneath our feet? Or maybe, if there ever was fire in this bush, it has gone out. Maybe so. The honesty of that youth group, the truth their honesty reveals about us as adults, would suggest it.) Anyway, shoes or no shoes, we hear his voice: "Those Galileans Pilate murdered while offering sacrifices in the Temple, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices, do you think they were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you too will all perish." Can we take this word seriously as truth for our lives? Or is it meant for others, for folks who don't come to church, this truth about temptation and death and repentance and life? "Unless you repent, you too will all perish." Can we take this seriously? Some people wonder why I don't display more energy about the election of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Well, one reason I don't is that Lent and Jesus' struggle with Satan in the wilderness have a way of insisting that I listen for truth in a more immediate context. And when I listen this morning, I hear Jesus asking, "Those two hundred who died on the trains in Madrid this week, do you think they, because they suffered this way, were worse sinners than all the others living in New York? Those people in New Hampshire and Minneapolis last summer, do you think they were worse sinners than all the others living in Colorado Springs? No, I tell you; they weren't. But unless you repent, you too will all perish." That's the truth I hear this morning. The truth is that we can't tell from what happens to other people whether they are worse sinners than we are, or whether we are less guilty than they are. The truth is that we've got an awful lot on our own spiritual plates here at home, and some of it will kill us if it isn't taken care of. We human beings have a way seeing sin as something that infects the other person, while the truth that shouts from the burning bush and that Jesus whispers from Luke's Gospel is that we might more profitably look to ourselves, where there is plenty to hold our attention for a lifetime. Sixty years ago, in his little book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis reminded us that "the sins of the flesh" -- those sins that get an awful lot of our attention, especially when we think we see them in someone else -- "are the least bad of all sins." "Though I have had to speak at some length about sex,"...Lewis says in concluding his chapter on 'Sexual Morality,' "I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, ...he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual, [not carnal]." And then he ticks off a few: sins like "the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. [And] that is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." Lack of repentance, lack of charity and forgiveness -- that is where Lewis locates the center of the human struggle with temptation and sin. And then, of course, there are those other seven killers still at large -- greed, envy, lust, gluttony, anger, pride, and sloth, seven ways of living and behaving and thinking which Christians of an earlier day knew could be counted on to ruin the lives of people and of the world, seven deadly sins which Christians of an earlier day knew had to be controlled and ruled if the true joys of life were ever to be found. But how are they to be controlled? Who is there to help us order our lives and wills and affections so that the true joys of life may be found? For as we prayed just a moment ago, God knows we have no power to do it ourselves? Greed, envy, lust, gluttony, anger, pride, and sloth. The list used to be committed to memory by every school child. And it's sobering, isn't it, when we realize how many of these really vicious killers, under the guidance of Satan, have been turned into virtues in our own day. Envy, a vice, a sin? Surely not. For without an appeal to envy, how could we ever stimulate the economy to create the commodities and jobs we want this year? "Keeping up with the Joneses" is surely, in our day, a virtue, not a vice. Gluttony, a vice, a sin? Surely not. The world as we know it would fall apart if people were satisfied with modest consumption, even if it were at levels which our mothers and fathers would have thought luxurious. No, surely gluttony is not a sin. Lust, a sin, a vice? Surely not. We have grown beyond the simple-minded repressions our ancestors had about sex. And anger, its cousin? What about anger? Without lust and anger, what would happen to movies and TV? And the three remaining known killers, greed, pride, and sloth? Of these, it is perhaps only sloth, only indolence, that has in some measure successfully resisted our tendency to turn vice into virtue. "Unless you repent, you too will all perish." Is Jesus talking to us? What good is the Church? If the Church is "of no earthly use," what good is it? Not much, if we judge by the daily obituaries. If our hearts are where our treasure is, then where we or our families invite people to place their treasure in our memory after we die would suggest that the Church is not very important in the whole scheme of things. I did a little survey of the "in lieu of flowers" part of the obituaries in the Gazette this past week. During the past nine days there were eighty obituaries. Thirty-six of those eighty suggested no memorial gifts at all, so by default the gold medal has to be awarded to nothing. Second place, with thirty suggested donations, goes to hospice and various other medical institutions. A distant third place is awarded to the seven donations suggested for social agencies such as Silver Key, the Boy Scouts, and the Pioneer Museum. Churches, which received suggested donations from only five of the eighty people who died in Colorado Springs this past week, shares a distant fourth place with five miscellaneous charities such as family memorial funds, the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, and P. O. Box 26117. It seems clear that Michael Marshall is right, that the Church is of little earthly use to many. But what about us? Is there still fire in this bush for those with eyes to see, still truth in Jesus' word for those with ears to hear? It would seem so. Here we are again! Recently I received a newsletter from a parish where the rector, a seminary classmate of mine, seems to have the same struggle with "the world, the flesh, and the devil" that most of us experience. And Father Carlyle, who is the father of young children, also struggles with what lots of other parents struggle with -- with wanting his children to be in church, but also with not wanting to "force" them to do something that might cause them to come to hate church and not want to be there. So Father Carlyle's question in his article this month is, "Should I Require My Children to Go to Church?" And he answers, "Yes, of course. No doubt about it." He says that when his son Austin came home from school the other day, he asked him, "How was school today?" And Austin's answer was the universal response of kids: "Boring." "Well, did you learn anything in school today?" his father asked. "Yes, I did," Austin replied. And then Austin went on to explain what he had learned that day. Father Carlyle says that he expects and requires that Austin go to school, even if it's "boring," because school is essential to Austin's formation as a person. It is the same with church. Church is the only place Austin goes where a counter-cultural message is likely to be heard, the only place where people consistently come together to affirm the holiness of God and the value of virtue over vice. Church is the only place where people regularly gather to affirm the value of love over lust, the value of forgiveness over revenge, the value of generosity over greed, the value of thankfulness over arrogance and pride, the value of the denial of self over the assertion of self. Church, in other words, is the place where people consistently come together to affirm the value of repentance. Church is the place where, if we have ears to hear, we can hear the truth about God and about us, the truth about sin and death and repentance, the truth of the life that repentance offers. Were those on the trains in Madrid this week more guilty than the rest of us because they suffered the way they did? "I tell you, no!" says Jesus. "And besides, the question is irrelevant, because there is plenty of deadly sin for us to deal with on our plate right here. And unless you repent, you too will all perish." And, when you think about it, that's great news! Because of the bush, the fig tree. You remember the fig tree. "A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard. He came looking for fruit on it, but found none. So he said to his vine-dresser, 'For three years I've come looking for fruit on this lousy fig tree without finding any. Cut it down. Why should it go on taking goodness from the soil?' But the vine-dresser replied, 'Leave it one more year, sir, while I dig around it and fertilize it. And if it bears bears fruit next season, well and good. If not, then you can cut it down.'" God is like that, Jesus tells us. "Unless you repent, you too will surely perish. And there is still time." The fig tree story is not a story about us and our limits, not about our three-strikes-and-your-out mentality. The fig tree story is a story about God, a story about mercy, about God's saying, "Let's wait and see how it turns out. Rejoice, there is still time." No one can go back and make a new start, of course. But the good news is that anyone can start from here, and make a new ending. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |