By The Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
September 2, 2012
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23
James 1: 17-27
I would like you to hear and consider this re-writing of our Gospel lesson for today. It doesn’t apply, of course, to St. Stephen:
“Now when the leaders of the church and those who did all the real work around here had gathered around Jesus, they noticed that the new members and the youth and the homeless were eating with defiled purpose, that is, that they hadn’t done anything to earn their meal. (For the Presbyterians, and all Christians in those days, believed you were not taking Christianity seriously if you didn’t serve on at least five committees, thus observing the conventions of their society; and they did not eat anything from the market unless it was free-range and safe from causing environmental hazard, and there were many other traditions they observed: that church members had their own pews, on which no one else, even visitors, could sit; the correct washing and placement of Tupperware containers in the church kitchen; the correct order of worship; that all should bring a dish to the pot-luck or else not come; and that those who were most like them were the ones most truly welcome and that everyone else was ‘the least of these,’ who were to be helped, but otherwise avoided.)”
Or let’s try this paraphrase of our reading from James:
“Be slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to anger; for your anger certainly produces God’s righteousness. Meekness has no power to save your soul. And if any think they are religious, then they must not bridle their tongues but talk about other church members to as many people as possible. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care deeply about and pry often into the business of other people; for if you are not suspicious of the hearts and actions of others, then your religion is worthless. Leave the care of widows and orphans to someone else, and above all, keep your reputation unstained in the church.”
Now really, and in all honesty, these paraphrases have rarely, in my experience, characterized St. Stephen. But my guess is we all know what I’m talking about. We’ve seen it sometimes here, and certainly at other churches. Back in my acting days, I had the good fortune to play Jack in The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde’s brilliant satirization of the conventions of Victorian society. At one point, the local school teacher is trying to seduce the local clergyman, who awkwardly observes that he is single because celibacy was the practice of the primitive church. And she replies primly, “That is why the primitive church has not survived into the present day.”
And that, of course, is the problem: the primitive church, the church that Jesus gave us, the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth, hasn’t survived into the present day. At some point the church went from a movement to an institution. It was meant to teach counter-cultural values but it became the most obvious fixture of cultural continuity. So the primitive church has not survived into the present day.
Too Difficult?
But let’s not panic. This amazing primitive church that doesn’t exist today didn’t exist then, either. Or at least, it was rare. If that wasn’t the case, the gospel reading and James’s letter would have no relevance for us today. But the problems Jesus and James were addressing then are the same ones we’re addressing now.
Which leads us to the quote I used for today’s sermon title, a famous but unsettling observation by the Christian poet and author G.K. Chesterton: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
So is that the case? Is the truth really that the church has never gotten it—that we have found the values that Jesus taught so difficult that we gave up on them altogether, and replaced society’s values for Christian values; so, in truth, Christianity has never been tried?
No, I don’t think that’s the truth, either. The truth is, the Church and its members do try Christianity, and because of that we’ve found it difficult; but we keep trying. And because of that, there are always times and places when the church, and the church’s people, succeed at being God’s people in incredible ways.
Our challenge is this: our founder, Jesus, and the traditions that the Bible gives us, set a very high bar for us to understand ourselves as a church. We are at our best when we judging ourselves by those standards, rather than the standards of the world around us.
But because we are human, we are easily seduced by the values of the world.
What is the Church?
For instance, right now mainline American Christianity is in an absolute tizzy, just an absolute tizzy, about our drop in attendance and declining importance as an institution. We like to point fingers at who made what mistake so that we can correct it. We don’t have prayers in school! Our worship style is too old-fashioned! We’re too politically conservative! We’re too politically liberal! We are too doctrinal! We aren’t doctrinal enough! The world has changed and there’s nothing we can do about it! The world has changed and there’s something we can do about it! On and on.
Those are the standards, values, and judgments that the world uses to judge success. Numbers and influence, and blaming others. But so far as I can tell, Jesus doesn’t specify those kinds of measures.
On the other hand, He, and Paul, and Peter, and James, and Luke, and the rest, they do tell us how to be the church.
So I wonder if the problem simply is, we aren’t being the church. I wonder if, instead of looking either for outside causes for our decline, or else looking to blame somebody, or else judging ourselves by the world’s definition of success, I wonder if instead of all that, we, the Church Universal, just try to be the church. Could it be that by doing so we’d draw more people, improve our own inner vitality, and be even more of a positive influence in the world?
We ought to look at who Jesus calls us to be. What is it that Jesus has called the church to be?
A Community of Saved Sinners
He are intended The Church to be a community of saved sinners.
We moderns squirm when we hear the word “sin,” but that’s one part of the common ground of all people. We’re sinners. We’re flawed and imperfect. That’s the basis of our empathy and of our humility and of our meekness and it’s a key part of the basis of Christian community itself.
If we don’t see our shared common ground of sinfulness and imperfection with all humanity, then we will always have somebody to look down on.
A community of saved sinners doesn’t gossip about the flaws of others; each member knows he or she has enough on her plate just worrying about the log in their own eye to nitpick the speck in someone else’s eye.
A community of saved sinners is a place you can go to and say, “I have this problem in my life. I have this sin I can’t overcome. Can you help me?” And instead of being looked down upon, or gossiped about, these people support you. They offer you a helping hand. They not only promise to support you as you struggle, they actually do it. And they do not judge you because they know that they are as flawed and imperfect as you.
Forgiveness
Because we are a community of saved sinners, the most counter-cultural ethic we practice is forgiveness. We know, above all, that since we ourselves are forgiven sinners, not judged by our flaws but by the grace we’ve received in Jesus Christ, that we have no right to judge the flaws of others.
Instead, we’re committed to helping them with their weakness and infirmity, just as Jesus does with us.
Unfortunately, too often we take on the ethic of the world, which likes to find out who’s at fault, hold a big public hearing, and place the blame, and then treat the blame-ee like dirt. Many people outside the church think that’s what Christianity is all about: placing blame and judging others in a harsh manner.
A Reconciling Community
But a community of saved sinners is a reconciling community. It teaches everybody to live by a higher ethic but understands full well going in that we will all fail at it, and fail at it in unique and distinctive ways that are particular to each of us. So we practice forgiveness. Sure, sometimes that means we have to challenge people’s behavior. But our goal is not to ostracize them, or embarrass them, or make examples of them, but help them change, and no matter what, to hold them in the embrace of this community, the church, God’s community of love, mercy, and grace.
Grateful
A community of saved sinners is grateful to God. A community of saved sinners knows that God has extended incredible generosity to them in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A community of saved sinners therefore meets the needs of others without whining, “What about me?” They know that God has already been incredibly generous to them, and they feel a strong obligation to give to others in return. Oh, sure, there will be times when all of us will become troubled and ungrateful; it’s human. But the Christian culture is a culture of generosity, of forebearance, of mutual love and support. And those of us who dwell in it teach it to one another. A culture of generosity doesn’t say, “This is for us, and no one else.” By definition, a culture of generosity gives itself away. All the time. And its members learn and practice that same generosity.
Whose We Are
In fact, a culture of generosity has a very ambiguous definition of who it is. “Us and Them” is pretty amorphous because if someone wants a part of this, we say, “Take it, it’s for you!” If someone wants to join us we say, “You’re welcome, come on in! This beautiful building isn’t just mine, or the property of the people who paid off the mortgage, or who attend the right meetings; now it’s yours, too!”
Of course, by the same token, anyone who joins such a generous place and truly puts his or her heart into it also understands that they have to give to make sure that this place exists. They have a responsibility and a calling to not to depend on someone else to be generous. They have to be generous too—to the church, to its members, to the world outside, to people in need.
This isn’t simply because of who we are—it’s because of whose we are. The reason we’re pretty loosey-goosey about whose church this is is because it isn’t our church—it’s Jesus’ church. And we aren’t just any people—we are God’s people. We bear the name of Christ. We do not belong to ourselves, we are His. And since Christ died for all, for everybody, we are called to welcome everybody.
A Community of Change
Above all, a community of saved sinners is a community that is constantly changing, constantly growing into our full stature of maturity in Christ, both as a church and as individuals. We are never perfect the way we are, because our goal is Christ, to be Christ’s living presence in the world, to be as perfect as a community and as individuals as Christ was. We’ll never get there in this life, but that’s okay; we’re forgiven, so we have the freedom fail, and the courage to try to strive toward this incredible goal of being the kingdom of God on earth. And so we welcome change—whether it’s a new idea, or a new person, or a new way to do things. Sure we test them to see whether they are of God—but our operating assumption is that change is good. We’re God’s people, born again, born from above, not conformed to the world but transformed by the renewal of our minds and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Change is at the very core of being saved sinners, because we know we have to change; and the good news is that, by God’s grace, we can change. And so, we welcome change, because change is God at work in the world.
So, in a nutshell, that’s what the church is meant to be. And what I bet is, any institution or place that operated like that would be amazing. People would flock to a place like that. If the Church Universal one morning woke up and said, “We’re going to make a point of being like that, like the church Jesus intended,” every church in the world would be filled to overflowing.
At least, that’s what I think. What do you think?