It is very good to be back with you at St. Matthew’s.
I continue to be grateful for your faithful ministry.
Your deacons have been the ones most involved
in our efforts to organize
Nevadans for the Common Good.
You have taken up the work of Communities in Schools
as well as any of our
congregations, better than most.
You do good ministry here and I am grateful.
Something bothers me about today’s Gospel lesson.
It’s the way the folks who do the lectionary
have separated this piece
of the Gospel
from what came
right before.
Taking it out of context has stripped the lesson
of its point.
I think the Church may actually be hiding the point.
I intend to set that straight
But first, I want to tell you the story of my new friend,
Pastor Theodis.
I met him this week at a training for community organizers.
Theodis grew up in a small rural community in Arkansas,
an innocent place to be a child.
But when he was a teenager, Theodis spent a summer
in Los Angeles.
There he got into all sorts of mischief
that was just unavailable
back home.
Today, we’d call it gang activity.
But his parents got him home and he straightened out.
He went to college on a football scholarship,
and married a lovely
upright woman
from a poor
neighborhood in a Western city.
Today, Theodis is the pastor
of an evangelical African-American
congregation
in
that poor neighborhood
where
his wife grew up.
When they moved to her hometown,
they found the neighborhood
torn apart by gang violence.
So Theodis set out to befriend the gangs.
Before long, he was having meetings of the gang leaders
at the Church.
When the gang leaders got to know each other,
they lost interest in
killing each other.
Friendships formed.
After one year of this ministry,
drive-by shootings went
down by well over 40%.
You might think the police would have been happy.
But they weren’t.
They didn’t trust having a formidable African American man
gathering gang leaders and
teaching them to get along.
So instead of getting a medal, Pastor Theodis
has been in the cross hairs of law
enforcement.
But he hasn’t stopped.
He believes this is what God called him to do.
He believes God put his church in the neighborhood they are
for a reason – to serve
that neighborhood.
Pastor Theodis said something I took to heart.
He said, “A church exists to support the community,
not to get the community to support the
Church.”//
Now let’s talk about our Gospel lesson.
Right before the verses we read today
is the passage where Jesus
sees the widow
putting her last
two cents into the collection.
Jesus is in the Temple.
He has just said:
“Beware of the scribes . .
. .
They devour widow’s houses . . .
and say long prayers.”
The next thing we hear is the story of the widow
giving the Temple all she
had to live on.
She gave all she had – for what purpose? –
the upkeep of the Temple.
We usually like to preach on that for stewardship.
“Wasn’t that widow generous!
We should all do the same thing!!”
But what did Jesus think of the Temple
soaking a poor widow out of her livelihood?
He got up, walked out of the Temple,
and pronounced God’s
judgment on it.
“Not one stone shall be left upon another.”
God will not have a Temple built by bilking widows.
Jesus isn’t praising the widow’s generosity.
He’s saying she got ripped off by the religious establishment.
So God took the religious establishment down.
Let me be clear.
I love the Church.
I don’t love some abstract universal idea of the Church.
I love the real Church with its water bills to pay,
it’s potluck’s to plan,
and it’s budgets to meet.
I love the institutional church, organized religion,
with services on Sunday
and all that goes with it.
But we had better take warning from this lesson.
And we’d better listen close to Pastor Theodis.
“A church exists to support the community,
not to get the community
to support the Church.”
The Church is a good thing.
It’s a network of committed human relationships.
We take vows to be there for each other.
That’s a good thing.
But the Church, like most institutions,
is prone to forget its
purpose.
The Church is apt to forget its mission
and get obsessed with its
own survival.
Too often, the Church uses people.
We need someone to serve on the vestry,
be the treasurer, head up
building and grounds.
We need more pledges to meet the budget.
If we have children we need someone to teach Sunday School.
If we don’t have children, we need children to reassure us
the Church will live on.
So we use people for our institutional agenda
Instead of supporting them
in their lives in Christ.
But what did Theodis say?
“A church exists to
support the community,
not to get the community
to support the Church.”
The Church is like the Sabbath.
Remember Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for people,
not people for the
Sabbath.”
Well the Church was made for people,
not people for the Church.
Instead of looking at the ways we always do things
and pressuring people into
doing them,
the Church’s job is to
find out what people need
and help them do those
things for each other.
See the difference?
It isn’t about saving the Church, building the Church
or
growing the Church.
It’s about helping each other live
fuller, happier, holier
lives.
But we don’t just exist for the sake of those
inside these walls.
Archbishop William Temple said
“The Church is the only
organization that exists
for the benefit
of its non-members.”
We are here for each other.
But we are also here for the world outside these walls.
We are here for our neighbors.
At first that sounds like a contradiction.
We think we have to decide whether we are here
to be a mutual support
group
or a servant to
outsiders.
But the truth is those are two sides of the same coin.
When we engage our members in helping our non-members,
it is good for both of
them.
It is good for us to serve others, good for us to care
about the whole community
where we live.
It makes us more whole. It makes us more human.
Today’s Gospel challenges us to make sure
that everything we do at
Church,
we do for people.
We don’t use people for our institutional agenda.
