Sermons

April 13, 2008

“The Four Essentials”

Rev. Phil Blackwell

What makes a church a church? Certainly, not a beautiful sanctuary. We had one before all of this work began, and we will have one again by the end of the summer. The stained glass windows will be brilliant, the angels up above will glow, the pews will be restored to the original wood tone, a new floor, adequate light, crisp sound, an access ramp to the altar area, and a welcoming space at the back under the balcony – all of that will be. It is just a matter of time and money.

But even when all of that work is done and this sanctuary is beautiful, it will not make us a church. What makes a church a church is contained in this brief passage from the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. If you were to read Luke and then Acts, you would have a full narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and all that followed for his disciples. These two books are companion pieces.

Now, admittedly, Luke gives a much sanitized view of the first generation of the church. Read Paul’s letters, which are chronicles of what was going on at the same time, and find out that there was a lot of contention and infighting . . .who is “in,” who is “out” . . . what are normative beliefs, what are heresies. You do not want to be on the losing side of that last controversy. Luke, in contrast, writes something like one of those Christmas letters we get. “Hi, everything is wonderful here. Jonathan is going to Harvard, Cynthia was voted high school athlete of the year, Bill made it into the “Millionaires Club” at work, and I became CEO. And, Daphne had puppies, all-purebreds.”

Luke records that they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. . . All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”

Here are four essentials that make a church a church: worship . . . breaking bread together and praying; education . . . devoting themselves to the apostles’ teachings; care and fellowship . . . they were all together and held all things in common; and, social responsibility . . . they distributed their wealth to all, as any had need. Worship, education, care, social responsibility . . . everything we do as a church falls into one of these four categories.

Worship is the defining activity of the church. That is what we exist to do -- to praise God, to offer thanksgiving, the central act of our faith. It is worship that distinguishes us from a school when we study, from a social club when we gather, from a social service agency when we reach out to help others.

Wednesday morning Holy Communion for those on their way to work, Wednesday noontime worship for those who can spend 25 minutes here at the Temple. Thursday evening prayer in the Sky Chapel; just gather in the second floor elevator lobby by 5:15 to go together to the steeple of the building. Taize worship on the first Friday evening of each month in Dixon Chapel. Saturdays at 5 p.m., and Sundays at 8:30 and 11 in the morning, a majority of those including Holy Communion except two eleven o’clock service a month.

That is what we do, worship together. It keeps the clergy and office staff busy all week long. During an average week we might have a total of 700 to 800 people in worship. During Holy Week it was about 2000 worshipers. Different kinds of music, different liturgical forms, different emphases throughout the week and around the Christian calendar, but all directed toward praising God. We are most obviously the church when we worship. “They devoted themselves . . .to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

But, that worship must be informed worship. John Wesley, the patron saint of the Methodist movement, claimed that, “All irrational religion is false religion.” The Christian faith is more than intellectual understanding, but it must include our best thinking. His brother, Charles, the poet, wrote for the opening worship service of the Kingswood school year, Kingswood being a school the Methodists established for the children of the miners and farmers in the southwest of England because these children had no other options, “Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” Thinking and believing go together, and so we study together.

Most pointedly, we study the scriptures together. We have an aggressive schedule of Disciple Bible Study classes that go throughout the year and are at every level. If you ever want to read that Bible, that is the way to do it . . . in an organized and guided fashion with other people. How many of us have vowed to read the Bible, and so we open it up to the first page and read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And we read some familiar stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah. And we get into the Exodus story with Moses. But too soon we hit Leviticus, with all of its obsolete laws (most of us do not ritually slaughter lambs in the back yard, and it is against the law, anyway), and then we hit Numbers with its genealogies of strange names, and we are done. We are defeated.

It should help us to know that the Bible is not a book, but a library. It is sixty-six books arranged in some sort of thematic order and bound together in a single volume. And it makes no more sense to read it from beginning to end than to go into a library, pick out a shelf, and read the books on it from left to right. It helps to know, for instance, that Luke and Acts go together. And it is good to understand how we ended up with four gospels, who wrote them to whom, when, and why there are some contradictions among them.

And we are not limited to studying the scriptures, though that is our “ur” document. I have invited anyone to get together periodically to read current books in the general area of religion and science because I think that some of the most provocative “theology” is being written by scientists, even though they would quiver to hear their work described in such a way. “Theology” means to think, “logos” is “word,” about God, “theo.” So, we are reading John Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in the Age of Science and will discuss it on Saturday, April 26th, from 10 a.m. until noon on the second floor in James Parlor. Everyone is invited to come whether you get around to reading the book, ort not. Thinking as an act of faith, devoting ourselves to it.

I still am pursuing discussions with the folks out at the Adler Planetarium to have them offer some of their classes here at the Temple during the week, over the lunch hour or right after work. They have the expertise; we have the location. Imagine a sign on the sidewalk at noon inviting passersby to come in and sit with an astrophysicist as she shares her new findings in space. What does it all mean? How does it help us see our place in the universe? Surely, twenty out of the thousands on the loose over lunch would like to do that. And imagine, too, even for those who do not come in, an invitation from the planetarium and the church telling people that faithful people are not afraid to learn new things. Thoughtful faith is not an oxymoron.

Caring for one another . . . it is hard for us not to be envious when we read that they were all together. One of the greatest challenges to this congregation being a church is that we seldom are all together. We are spread out across the city and deep into the suburbs. We even are proud of it; “We have members from every zip code in the city and 30 or 40 suburbs.” But it also means that there is no routine association among us. We do not see each other at the supermarket, we do not attend the same school meetings, are children do not play in the same playgrounds, we do not run into each other at the same libraries.

We do not have a “grapevine.” Out in Apple River, our first assignment, a farming community of 431, I walked into the post office one morning to get our mail. A member saw me and asked, “Preacher, how are you feeling?” I told her, “Fine. Why do you ask?” “Well, I saw your bathroom light on this morning at 3:30 and hoped that you were okay.” That is a grapevine. We do not need that here, but we do need to hear from one another what is going on in peoples’ lives.

Developing “community” in the middle of the city is a hard thing to do. But every little effort makes a difference. Students get together after worship, classes meet between the Sunday services, folks go out to eat after church, a quick cup of coffee upstairs. Some of you already have commented favorably on there being fewer pews in the sanctuary. Do not worry – in the final arrangement there will be more seating with the pews extending to within four feet of the walls. But you have said that it has been good to have to sit closer together, even to share a hymnal with someone you do not know. And when we create a welcoming area in the back under the balcony, there will be an even greater chance of us meeting up with each other.

Beyond that, lists of names from “Care and Connection” to tell us who stands in need of our prayers, ninety-four groups, classes, task forces, choirs, and committees that help us to be a church together, the bereavement group that reaches out to those who are grieving and teaches us how to cope with our own loses in life. Being together and caring for one another, a crucial mark of the church being the church.

And reaching out to help others, essential. “They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as they had need.” I was in a play in high school, “Teahouse of the August Moon.” I was Captain Fisby sent to a small village in Okinawa after World War II to restore the economy of Tobiki. I was supposed to build a factory so that the people could make cricket cages for export, but I was seduced by the locals into making a distillery, instead. So, when Colonel Purdy comes to inspect, he is appalled, and asks me where have all the proceeds gone. I tell him that they are in a bank in Seattle.

“Oh, that’s despicable,” Purdy cries, “making a personal fortune off the labor of these humble people.”

“I haven’t touched a cent for myself, sir. It’s deposited in the name of the Tobiki Cooperative. The whole village are equal partners. Share and share alike.”

And Purdy explodes, “That’s Communism!”

I wonder what Colonel Purdy would have thought about the early church. Share and share alike, that’s Christianity. What a radical concept; no wonder people in our day and age and culture find it so threatening. But we do not have to look far to see the results of our not sharing. A small article in the local paper documents that in Chicago “a minimum-wage earner would have to work 97 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, in order to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in the Chicago area.” The article ends with this warning, “Thousands of families are on the cusp of homelessness.”

The church is a voice of compassion and conscience when we share what we have with those who have very little. Look in the bulletin at the invitation to be part of our ministry with people who are in great need. Seven days a week we minister to desperate people here in the middle of the city; it takes time and money. And most directly, we are the church when we feed the hungry and distribute new socks and underwear, and when we try our best to direct people to needed social services. For a decade we have done that on Tuesdays at noon; you will see that now we are collaborating with the members of Grace Episcopal to offer this ministry on Saturday mornings at their facility on south Dearborn. The shift is being made at the request of those whom we serve, who say that their need is greatest on the weekend. Also, it could expand our pool of volunteers. And too, the Grace space is particularly well-suited for this outreach.

But our social responsibility does not end when we share; we also must advocate. There are governmental resources that are misdirected. There are not-for-profit efforts that duplicate, while some things go undone. There are housing decisions that make things worse, and there always is the inadequacy of the minimum wage. As our former bishop, Joe Sprague, liked to say, our social responsibility is not only to pull people out of the river who are drowning but also to go upstream and see who is throwing them in.

What makes a church a church, the four essentials: worship, education, care, and social responsibility. It was there right from the start, claims Luke. Now, whether we enjoy the goodwill of all the people and experience day by day the increase of our numbers, that is God’s work, not ours. We have enough to do: to break bread and to pray, to devote ourselves to learning, to draw near one another in loving support, and to change the world by sharing what we have.

Let the church be the church. Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
April 13, 2008