Why Church?

Luke 23:13-35

 

Why church? Why go to church? Why are you here this morning and every other morning? What gets you out of bed and instead of having a lazy breakfast, a potter in the garden or a trip to the footy, why do you come to church?

 

What is it about this place that is important to you?  Some of you have been coming here to this particular church for several decades, most of you have been going to church since you were a small child, why? What is it about church that matters?

 

We live in a world where truth is questioned, metanarratives like the Christian faith story are not trusted or believed; instead it seems to be a mechanical world in which only scientific or productive narratives hold sway. Every action, thought or idea must have a practical and financial outcome. We are looking for product, return on investment and ownership. We need progress; the key indicator for a successful society is one that is growing by an agreeable percentage point each year. Our businesses must be more successful and earn more, we must produce at the cheapest level possible and sell at the highest level possible. We ignore local communities and exploit foreign workforces to do so. Local, small and connected to a narrative that gives life to community simply has no place in the modern economic kingdoms of large corporations and the governments they control.

 

Even the church, the institutional church, is on about growth, numbers, systems, programs, key performance indicators and outcomes. No longer are we allowed the time to simply cogitate on life and bring forth wisdom to feed and nurture our local communities.

 

The success of indigenous communities over the ages, where ever they have been found, has been their connection to place, people and time. They know the place they live in deeply, they understand their interdependence upon each other and they also know that the greatest asset they have is time. 50,000 years is what it took for indigenous communities to learn to live in harmony with place and people. It has taken the mechanistic world a little over 200 years to have a serious impact upon it.

 

Why church? Why the seemingly use-less-ness of church? Why is it important? And why should it have our full attention and support?

 

On the road to Emmaus two men are deeply engrossed in the politics of the day. They were personally involved in this story and it has apparently collapsed without producing the outcome they sought – revolution and a new world. They are despondent and closed in on themselves, having lost the narrative giving meaning to their existence. They are joined by another whom they hardly acknowledge, just as we would as we bump into people on the train, the tram on in the corridors of Chadstone shopping centre – aware that they are there but not taking notice of particulars.

 

Their eyes are closed. Their concern for their own worries prevent them from seeing who is right their in front of them. It is so easy to walk around with eyes closed. Even when we come to church, we can come with eyes closed. We bring with us all the concerns of our daily grind and go through the motions. We are comforted by the presence of familiar faces, familiar music and the familiar liturgy, but are our eyes open? Do we see who is standing next to us and who we owe our very existence to? Do we understand that this not about our concerns and our issues, but about the amazing hesed – unfailing companionship and compassion – of the Christ and that we owe everything to the Godhead who keeps and empowers us – even in the midst of our ordinary lives?

 

In this story, Jesus becomes the interpreter of the political events, of the events of society and explains what has been playing out in the world around them. And their eyes are still closed. Knowledge and information do not open closed eyes. Recent scientific evidence suggests that people are so impacted by preconceived ideas and prejudices that facts do not change their minds. Here is a case in point. Despite hearing everything about what had happened from the one who was there in a way no one else could, their eyes remain closed.

 

This is often the case for us, we are so committed to our opinions on, our knowledge about God and faith,  and our expectations about life and church that we fail to see what is happening and what is needed; we fail to see why we actually come to church. These men almost get this.  They are moved, challenged, enlightened by what Jesus says, but their eyes remain closed. The intellectual and evidential truth of Jesus’ words fail to move them out of their own self-interest – out of their concern for themselves.

 

Jesus stays with them for dinner and something happens, we are not sure exactly what it is but in the breaking of the bread a light goes on in the head and their eyes are open. In this moment of deep personal encounter with the symbolism of faith they see, as for the very first time, who is at the centre of their lives. Not just their faith but their lives. 

Here is a deep recognition of the centrality of the Christ to our identity, existence and being. Their world is refocussed and instead of going on with their ordinary lives centred solely on themselves, they return to Jerusalem, driven by the realisation that their life is no longer their own. 

Even though their hearts burned with in them on the road, nothing changed for them. We can be made warm and fuzzy by our attendance at church without being revolutionised by the Christ. It is the deep sacramental realisation that there is no thing else but the church and that our lives are to be completely oriented toward the church, the body of Christ, and its advancement counter-culturally into the world.

 

They get up immediately, abandon whatever their plans were and go back to Jerusalem and take up the mission of the church. There is no hesitation, no second guessing, no concern for their needs or desires; they return empty handed but open eyed into the church.

 

Why church?

 

·      Because there is no other response to the love of God and the indwelling presence of the Christ;

• Because there is no other response to the faithfulness of God to us;
• Because there is no other response to the beauty and mystery of creation;
• Because there is nothing more important than the maintenance and advancement of Christ’s body in the community in which we live.

 Why church?

• This is why we give of ourselves sacrificially in service and financial support. 
• This is why we give to the church before we give to ourselves.
• This is why we give up our comfortable beds to be here, because there is no other choice for us.

Why church? 

Because all the other experiences in the world do not open our eyes to the truth about the Christ we encounter like the moment we meet Jesus in the Church, his mystical body alive in the world. 

It Is Written

Matthew 4:1-11

 

As we begin the Lenten journey we will discover texts and stories we know well. We may have already decided what these texts tell us, what they are about and what they reveal about the Easter story we will soon hear. They fit a narrative we have breathed in over many years and a narrative that has informed our daily living and our worship/faith story. It is now so familiar we have forgotten it’s nuances and finer points, and may have difficulty in identifying how it influences our live.

 

Yet there are many, if not the majority of our present day society, to whom these familiar stories are foreign and unknown. A student at the school where I was chaplain said that if she hadn’t gone to the school she would not have known about Jesus let alone the Easter story. There was no family history of church, Sunday School or religion. Easter was just another embedded public holiday with no particular significance for her and her family. This was true of most of the students and when we began to read and unpack these stories it was a revelation for them.

 

While it was a revelation for them, the ideas within these stories were not immediately or readily understood. Living in a society where success, recognition and power were the valued goals and most were working for through good exam results, successful businesses or being discovered as a musical or sporting protégé, they found the ideas in todays story unimaginable.

 

Who, in their right mind, would say no to immediate gratification, adoration by the masses or the power to do just as you pleased? Who in their right mind would put themselves in a place to have to even confront such ideas? Who would decide for a way of life that put you at odds with all that you were being taught by an education system committed to a consumerist world?

 

The danger for those who hear or read this story is that we place it firmly in the Jesus tradition and see it as a story relevant only to his experience and the fact he was God incarnate and therefore responded to the challenges by conforming to type. It was inevitable he would reject these seemingly external temptations by a personalised evil.

 

The idea this was a battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil lets us off the hook. We may presume we do not have to face such questions for we are but ordinary human beings without the power or the options of Jesus. If we read Jesus with a high Christology, in other words as one whose divinity reigns above his humanity, then we find little in which to relate to in this story.

 

If we read Jesus with a lower Christology, where his humanity is as important as his divinity, we begin to understand this story as not only relevant to us, but as our own personal story. The decisions and developing self-awareness Jesus experiences are akin to the decisions and developing self awareness we experience as we move through the various seasons of our own human life.

 

Jesus goes into the desert to make sense of the events of his baptism – John, the call to repentance and the voice from above. This deep spiritual experience unnerves him and he needs time and space, a lot of time and space as indicated by the words 40 days and nights (a long time), to make sense of it all.  He has to wrestle with his human needs and desires and find a way to reconcile his awareness of God’s call on his life.

 

The temptations mentioned are a summation of the many different and difficult questions he faced, some minute in impact, others of great consequence. They are not just boxes to tick in Matthew’s attempt to define Jesus as the one expected, but are representative of the battles human beings face if they are serious about living lives committed to wholeness in relationships and experience.

 

At some point in our lives we have to make decisions about the importance of objects such as money and possessions, of objects such as success in work and life, of objects such as power and control over others; the failure to address these issues results in these questions returning unresolved in violence, anger, frustration and more.

 

Domestic violence, child abuse, racial vilification, persecution and more are examples of a failure to answer these questions effectively or not to answer them at all. Ignorance does not excuse us for our behaviour. At some point these are questions that come up in wedding vows, adulthood, communal living and more and if we fail to confront them they will not just go away. Our subsequent life will be in some punctuated by their breaking in on our lives.

 

Jesus understood this and confronted these questions with the experience of the saints and the scriptures. He resorted to tradition, both lived by others and experienced in the natural world – “it is written” – not just words on a page but words in lives and the created environment. Tradition in this context is the lived experience of those who translated their experience to oral and ultimately written record. He was not standing against these inner urges based on his own limited life experience, but reaching back to the community of saints who had found proven ways to deal with human nature. 

In this way the desert confrontation is one of human experience versus the base desires within each human being. This is the universal challenge commenced at the beginning of creation and continuing today. It is the evolutionary urge for wholeness and the conflict of random chance, order and adaptation.

 

Imagine for a moment how different the Jesus story, our meta-narrative would be, if Jesus had responded differently to the questions being human asks? Image for a moment how different our lives would be if Jesus had agreed to follow his basic interests and left each person to find their own way?  Now some will say this could never have happened for Jesus was God’s Son, God incarnate; but may well have happened because Jesus was also human, every bit as human as you and I.

 

“It is written”, the tradition of the communion of saints sits at the core of Jesus response to being human, it also sits at the centre of our own. Reading the Biblical stories or spiritual biographies and reflections, retaining the values and parameters of faith and experience, and spending time in reflection with a spiritual guide or mentor all help us to make our responses to the temptations of being human. We cannot do it alone and neither did Jesus. He was surrounded by nature, the image of God in creation, by angels and by the Holy Spirit, he was surrounded by the saints. “It is written” everywhere for us and our guidance. The temptation is to rely on our own experience and feelings and to ignore those who have made this journey before and with us – people, places and creatures.

 

Jesus embodies spiritual practices necessary for our wise handling of life. Let’s begin this Lenten period to read what is written all around us and to find what is necessary to live a Christlike response to being human.

Church in a 100 years?

Today we celebrated 100 years of Anglicanism at Tweed Heads at St Cuthberts, and it got me to thinking, what will Anglicanism look like in 100 years time?

As I looked around the church, with the exception of the choir from Lindisfarne Anglican Grammar School (founded 28 years ago by the parish), I wondered who would be in the church with us in in the next 20 years, let alone 100 years from now. And what would their experience be of God, spirituality and worship? How different all that is today from those pioneering days and the glory times of big numbers when going to church was the accepted norm.

Events of the 20th Century have changed that norm. The horrors of wars, the fading optimism of the post-war era, the so-called moral 'revolution' of the 60's and the increasing pace of change brought on by technology and consumerism has indeed changed the place of church and worship in our society.

No longer do we participate in the communal life as we, as a society, once did. We are now passive consumers looking exclusively for 'what is in it for me'. We are focussed on our individualism, pragmatism and rational thought. We seek to explain all things and leave little room for wonder, surprise and transcendence. We are bombarded by information, entertainment, choice - noise - which simply entices us away from the mystery of life. We seek answers and are uncomfortable with questions, we want solutions not the untidy process of life, and we want it all, now.

So, what do we as the church do to ensure that we are in fact still here, actively engaged in worship, in 100 years time? For the purpose of the church is to worship God and to do so in all actions it is engaged in. It is worship first, action and activity second. Worship is our core business, all activity grows out of that worship.

Richard Neuhaus defines the purpose of worship: "The purpose of worship has no purpose other than the worship of God. While worship has many benefits, we do not worship in order to attain those benefits. The simple and radical truth is that we worship God because God is to be worshipped."

It seems to me that worship is what we do, authentic and connected worship, worship that grows out of Scripture, tradition and contemporary life. Worship in the Anglican tradition is solid on the first two, and challenged on the third. Contemporary life, with all its accoutrements, asks questions of who we are, what we do as worship and how we do it. It is fair to say that we must remain attached to authentic Anglicanism in it's worship model of scripture, sacraments and community worship.

Yet it is how that responds to the push and pull of a modern faith experience which is less about religious form and more about spirituality, and less about denominational allegiance and more about discovering a spiritual journey which connects you to your self, others and God, how ever God maybe perceived.

I have watched over more tan 40 years as the church has moved through a number of phases in its engagement with change, from maintaining the tradition, to chasing every whim and marketing ploy available, to retreating into a walled fortress seeming to accept the inevitable while railing against all and sundry for the predicament it finds it self in.

Yet, God has survived greater catastrophes than this and will survive this one. And it's God's unending faithfulness and presence which we need to follow as our model for the future church. That is, let us not be stampeded to chase relevancy as the key to our survival, let us re-mind our self of the purpose of the church and its worship - "The purpose of worship has no purpose other than the worship of God. While worship has many benefits, we do not worship in order to attain those benefits. The simple and radical truth is that we worship God because God is to be worshipped."

If we remain faithful to the purpose of worship we will rediscover a Triune God active in our modern world in places of unexpected enchantment and we will wake to find ourselves involved in a church worshipping in new ways within an old tradition.

Hang in there.