A CHURCH FOR OTHERS

Jesus didn’t call the disciples to leave their nets

and follow him so they could become holier than thou,

or more enlightened than thou,

or learn 12 steps to highly effective living.

He called them to become fishers of people,

            to catch people up out of the sea of despair

where so many of us are drowning.

Jesus recruited his disciples into a mission “for others.”

World War II martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

            called Jesus “the man for others.”

Bonhoeffer then said, the Church is Christ’s Body,

so, “the Church is the Church only when it exists for others.”

We are not here to save our spiritual skins,

            stay out of Hell and go to Heaven when we die.

We are not here top off our spiritual gas tanks,

or to enjoy the music, architecture, and pageantry.

We are here to become the Body of Christ

ushering God’s Love-Kingdom into a hurting world.

Over a quarter century ago,

            I made a rule for myself.

Don’t preach about the Church.

People don’t come to hear about the Church.

I am going to break that rule today.

I don’t break it lightly.

So, I hope you’ll stay with me on this.

It’s important.

You have undertaken to be our Cathedral.

The most important part of a Cathedral’s mission

            is to model for all our congregations

the true way to be the Church.

Becoming the Cathedral is about being the Church for others

on steroids.

Your new role is to constantly remind our diocese,

            that we all have the same mission,

            we are all on the same team,

            we are all part of one body – the Body of Christ.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

            “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’ or ‘I belong to Cephas’

            or ‘I belong to Apollos’ . . . Has Christ been divided?

You are the Body of Christ and each of you is part of it.”

I want to paraphrase Paul.

            “Each of you says, ‘I belong to St. Paul’s’ or ‘I belong to St. Peter’s’

            or ‘I belong to Trinity’ . . .  Has Christ been divided?

            You are the Body of Christ and each of you is part of it.”

Bishops and Cathedrals are ligaments holding the diocese together.

The Cathedral serves the other congregations this way,

modeling life as a church for others.”

That mission flies in the face of spiritual consumerism.

Spiritual consumerism means: we want our spiritual needs met.

But here’s the Catch 22 of that desire.

We can never get our spiritual needs met

            as long as we’re trying to get our spiritual needs met.

The New Testament says it over and over and over.

The way to happiness, wholeness, and completion,

            the way to be born all the way

            is to forget about yourself in the love

of brother, sister, neighbor, and even enemy.

Mohandas Gandhi said,

            “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself

             in the service of others.”

Have you heard people say,

            “I stopped going to Church

            because I wasn’t getting anything out of it”?

If we go to Church to “get something out of it,”

            we may get something but it won’t be the gospel of Jesus Christ,

            because his gospel is about taking up our cross

            and living for the broken, bleeding world.

That can be Mother Theresa stuff, Martin Luther King stuff, or

Dietrich Bonhoeffer stuff.

But it isn’t usually that dramatic.

It’s more like holding a training event for other congregations,

            having something fun for Reno kids whose parents don’t belong here,

            hosting a music event for the community,

            or a blood drive or a 12-step group.

You are already doing a lot of this ministry.

That’s why you are the Cathedral.

But what’s this got to do with each of us individually?

Everything. It makes all the difference for who we are,

            not just at Church on Sunday but wherever we are all week.

Cleopatra’s Shadows is a novel about first century Egypt.

The Egyptian gods were a violent bunch,

and things had turned violent in the earthly palace of Queen Berenice.

The queen’s servant made the theological connection.

She said, “Bloody gods birth bloody people.”//

Nothing shapes our souls more than who we worship

            and the character of our worshiping community.

If our God is a genie in the bottle to support our personal ambitions,

and our Church is a spiritual filling station catering to our preferences,

            it makes us mean-spirited, hard-hearted, and small-spirited.

But when we are a Church for others

worshiping the man for others,

            something gracious seeps into our very souls,

            something at odds with the expectations and demands

                        of me-first consumerism.

Our hearts begin to beat in sync with the heartbeat of God,

            the God who loved the world so much he gave his only son

                        to save it.

We start to think with the mind of Christ,

            who, as Paul said,

            “though he was in the nature of God . . .

            emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant

            being made in human likeness . . . .”

“In human likeness” -- with all its vulnerabilities, frustrations, and sorrows.

Like Jesus, we join the human race.

That sets us free from our essential loneliness.

We call it Communion.

Albert Einstein said we belong to the universe

            but we are deluded into thinking we are separate.

That delusion is, in Einstein’s words,

            “a prison . . . restricting us to our personal desires

             and affection for a few persons nearest us.”

“Our task,” Einstein said, “must be to free ourselves from this prison

            by widening our circle of compassion

            to embrace all living creatures

            and the whole of creation in its beauty.”

That’s Communion.

Anglican priest John Donne explained Communion this way:

            “No man is an island

             Entire of itself

            Every man is a piece of the continent

            A part of the main . . . .

            I am involved in mankind . . . .”//

That’s what it means to be a Christian.

It is to be involved in humankind.

Jesus is God choosing to be involved in humankind.

A Cathedral,

            starting with the other congregations

            and the world right outside your walls,

            is involved in humankind.

Do you see what you get out of that?

Release from the prison of self.

Communion with all living creatures

            and creation in all its beauty.

 Jesus called it “abundant life.”

LOVE DON'T COME EASY

First Corinthians is hands down my favorite Epistle.

Paul is trying to help the Church in Corinth

            work though their human frailty

to become the Body of Christ and carry out his Kingdom Mission.

Paul is teaching the Corinthians how to be the kind of community

            that attracts people to Jesus by showing them

                        who Jesus’ followers become.

Paul wants people to see Christians and say two things:

            “I want to be with them” and “I want to be like them.”

Jesus said, “This is how people will know you are my disciples.

                        By your love for one another.”

St. John said, “Dear friends, let us love one another for love

                                    comes from God. . . .

                        If we  love one another, God lives in us

                                    and his love is perfected in us. . . .

                        God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God. . .

                        Those who say, ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters

                                    are liars,

            For those who do not love their brothers or sisters

                        whom they have seen

                        cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

200 years later, the Father of Western theology, Tertullian,

            summed up the basic strategy of how to show pagans

                        the beauty of the Christian way. He wrote:

“’See how these Christians love one another,’ the pagans say,

            for they themselves hate one another,

‘and how they are ready to die for teach other,’

for the pagans are ready to kill each other.’”

But to turn to another kind of Scripture,

            in the words of Diana Ross, “Love don’t come easy.”

It didn’t come easy to the saints in Corinth.

The first thing we hear about is the faction

            over some folks being fans of one apostle

            while others were followers of another.

Paul urges them to put aside those divisions. He says,

            “As long as there is jealously and quarrelling among you

                        are you not of the flesh

            and behaving according to human inclinations?”

So stop dividing up according to which apostle you like best.

Then he turns to lawsuits between church members

            and says it is better to be defrauded than to sue a brother.

Then there was the biggest fight of all.

It was about eating food that came from pagan sacrifices.

1^st Century Christians were as worked up over what they ate

            as 21^st Century Christians are worked up over sex.

Paul says that the ones who eat the meat are right theologically

            but he tells them to abstain anyway

            out of love for those who are offended by it.

And so the letter to the Corinthians proceeds

            petty issue by petty issue, church fight by church fight,

            until he breaks into a spiritual aria to explain his point.

That’s the famous 13^th Chapter of 1^st Corinthians,

            the hymn to love we always read at marriages,

            but it isn’t about marriage.

It’s about being a congregation.

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels,

but have not love, I am a nosy gong . . . .

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful

            or arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way.

It is not irritable or resentful.

It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,

            endures all things.”

That’s what love means.

God is love. Those who abide in love,

            those who follow the discipline of love

–      and it is a discipline because Diana Ross is right                                                                   – love don’t come easy –

those who follow the discipline of love, abide in love,

God lives in them and they live in God.

And when we abide in love

            the 87% of Nevadans with no faith of any kind

            will say, “I want to be with them and I want to be like them.”

Paul never again wrote anything so beautiful as 1^st Corinthians.

But I’m sorry to say they didn’t get it.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending

When we get to 2^nd Corinthians, things have just gotten worse.

40 years later, decades after Paul was dead and gone,

            the Corinthians were still fighting.

By then, Clement, the bishop of Rome, had taken over Paul’s job

            and was still pleading with them to just get along

            and treat each other in Jesus’ way, not the world’s way.

Corinthians is pretty straight forward,

            but the Epistle to the Romans gets misunderstood

            and misused most of the time.

Actually, it isn’t the theological treatise people think it is.

It’s just like Corinthians, an effort to smooth out a church fight.

In Rome the Jewish Christians and the gentile Christians

            were going at it.

It got so bad the Emperor Claudius threw the whole lot     

            of them out of town kit and caboodle.

Paul wrote Romans to try to show them that it is better to be kind

            than to be right.

The Romans may not have gotten it right away.

But I think the point eventually sank in.

Here’s why I think they got it.

Between 165 and 180, a plague swept through

            the urban centers of the Empire,

            killing one-third to one-half of city populations.

The city of Rome was particularly hard hit.

It’s named Galen’s plague after Galen,

the Emperor’s personal physician.

Galen is famous because he figured out

            that people were catching the plague

            from contact with each other.

It was the first discovery of contagion in the Ancient World.

So Galen told everyone who had the wealth and ability

            to get out of town.

Well, that was fine for the people who could do it.

But it left the sick and the dying to their own devices.

It wasn’t pretty, a city of the sick, the dying, and the dead.

And everyone ran away – except the Christians.

The Christians had an odd notion that the love of God,

            that is God’s love living in their own hearts, would protect them.

And if it didn’t, then they’d just die in God’s service and go to heaven.

So the Christians stayed and nursed the sick, prayed with the dying,

            and buried the dead.

The pagans looked on in wonder.

They said, “See how these Christians love one another.

            See how they even love us.”

Christianity remained illegal in the Empire for another century.

But by the end of that century, one third of the Empire

            had converted to Christianity     

                        largely because of the love

            Christians displayed during Galen’s plague.

For us human beings, love don’t come easy.

But you know what G. K. Chesterton said,

            “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.

            It has been found difficult and not tried.”

Nothing good comes easy.

What is best may be hardest of all.

But the reward is to live in God

            and have God live in us.

The hardest thing is the thing most worth doing.