A Fourth Church Sermon by John Wilkinson

February 18, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Patterns and Rhythms, or Why the Church Matters

John Wilkinson
Executive Associate, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 6:27–38

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

Luke 6:30 (NRSV)

Several weeks ago, my colleague Calum MacLeod began his sermon with a story of something called a “book” [said with full Scottish accent]. This sermon will begin with a story of something called a “book” [without accent]. Actually, the story is about something deeply more profound than any book, about stewardship and generations and the church, which, in its best days, transforms our lives and calls us to acts of faithfulness and integrity and love.

The “book” is the Book of Mormon, a version of which was obtained, somehow, by a Presbyterian minister serving in Utah in the early 1900s. That minister’s grandson is a retired Presbyterian minister named David Steele. One day, David’s wife Joan read an article about a Book of Mormon selling for an astronomical price at auction. And she remembered an old, dusty book on the Steele family bookshelf: a Book of Mormon. After a circuitous journey, a retired professor at Brigham Young University finally appraised the book and a handsome deal was struck, for more money than anyone, especially a Presbyterian minister and his wife retired in Sun City, could ever imagine.

And it gets better. Wrote David Steele: “I am clear that the money is not mine. . . . The book is Grandpa’s, collected in those early days when he was knocking himself out in ministry in Utah, . . . so I decided the money belongs back in the Presbyterian church.” And so the Steeles gave grants to several Presbyterian groups, including the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, asking them to spend it, in their words, for “inclusive, joyful, justification by grace ministries.”

The story carries enough meaning so far as to let it stand, but it carries deeper meaning when one knows a bit more about David Steele. For many years, he has written a column called “Parson on the Loose” for a Presbyterian publication called the Presbyterian Outlook. His column is delightful—well-written, appropriately progressive. A recent column garnered more attention than usual, titled “Living With Mortality.” It began, “Yesterday Joan and I joined Hospice of the Valley. It was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever faced. By doing so I affirm that my cancerous condition is terminal and that in all likelihood I will die within six months.” He concludes: “My hope is to live until April 6. On that day I will be 70. As a boy I recall when my grandfather turned 70. He told me ‘three-score years and 10, that’s what the Bible says is a full life.’ If I could make that I’d have no grounds for regret, would I?”

No regrets at all, I would say, and rather, gratitude, gratitude for the story of a grandfather, for the story of a creative act of giving, and now for the story of the end of days, which will bring a tear and also a hopeful smile; stories of gratitude that are all told in the confines of the church that nurtured, challenged, taught, provoked, prayed for and now will support this brother, this friend, and embrace him until life’s end.

For that is what we do. That is what the church does, I would submit, on its best days. It loves. It challenges. It welcomes. It transforms. It proclaims. And while it does not always dwell on the higher plane of its best days, even then, it claims the grace of God, whose justice and mercy allow it to be, as the hymn suggests, a “new creation.”

I am aware of these things even more acutely than usual this morning, about how the church is and could be. I am aware that most stories are more modest than David Steele’s, but profound nonetheless. I am aware that the church, and we who live in it, mostly live between events such as these—big checks arriving in the mail, news of great celebration or great sadness. But I am aware even more acutely than usual this morning that the modesty of it all, the simple patterns that evolve into more complex rhythms, are exactly the places where God has chosen to sojourn.

I am aware more acutely than usual of the patterns under which we gather. Some are obvious. The majestic architecture of this room, from the stenciled ceiling to the bits of color in the stained glass to the intricate carvings above the chair in which the preacher du jour is privileged to sit. Every time I enter this room I discover a new pattern, and I am thankful. But it is more than that, clearly and obviously. I learned as a child that the church is not a building; the church is a people, and so it is. Even then, patterns take deep root. The pattern of cups in coffee hour that will be used to serve the coffee, a.k.a. Presbyterian petroleum, which will fuel conversation and connection. The pattern of older adults engaged in exercise class in Anderson Hall. The pattern of cement blocks stacked not-quite-professionally by earnest Chicago Presbyterian house builders in Jinotega, Nicaragua. The pattern of sleeping bags strewn about the floor during another youth group lock-in, and the pattern of circles under the eyes of adult leaders the morning after. The pattern of lilies lined up in the Dining Room, awaiting delivery to our homebound members during Holy Week. The pattern of families lining up to enter the Sanctuary on baptism Sunday. The pattern of trays on the communion table, ready to be uncovered and distributed, as once again bread is broken and the cup is poured.

For some reason these days, the patterns of tables has been particularly compelling. The tables arranged decently and in order for a staff meeting or a committee meeting. The tables in the Dining Room hosting our Sunday Night Supper. Tables surrounded by children and teachers for Sunday school, or by students and tutors on tutoring nights. Tables anchored to Chestnut Street for our first Fourth Fest, and then us chasing after them as gale force winds blew them all over the place. And then finally and obviously, this table, the Lord’s Table, where it all begins and where it all ends. All these patterns are interesting, I would submit, but their interest hovers only at the surface. It is when those patterns—like lovely notes assembled to build a marvelous symphony—it is when those patterns come together to form deeply majestic rhythms that this whole business takes on divine dimensions.

Jesus articulated for his followers a set of aspirations, summarized simply and powerfully with three words: love your enemies. But stronger than that is Jesus’ crystal clear recognition of the way that human life works, that human life reflects a set of experiences and responses that bring out our very best and very worst: hate and love, curse and blessing, scarcity and abundance, self-interest and self-giving, sacrifice and reward, judgment and forgiveness. Jesus understood our humanity more than we could ever understand it ourselves and offered words, hopes, and aspirations, but more so, called us into community, the church, what the apostle Paul called the body of Christ, in order that we might lean on each other, rely on each other, baptize each other and feed each other at table so that we might love; so that our patterns might find articulation and our rhythms find meaning. Jesus knew those rhythms, and he offered us ways to transform them: alienation to reconciliation, confession to forgiveness, violence to peace, brokenness to grace, death to life. Look around and sense those rhythms; look deeper and sense God seeking to transform them.

It happened again last week at our annual meeting, in a ritual often called the necrology. Our Clerk of Session Clyde Bowles invited us to stand, and we did, and he read the names of twenty-six church members who had died in the previous year. It is a powerful moment. And then we sang. We sang “For all the saints who from their labor rest.” And the pattern of life and death was transformed to life eternal, just as we announce with simple beauty each Sunday the red roses that signify birth and white roses that signify death and our gratitude for the gift of life and the gift of life eternal.

It is easy to think of religion as a set of restrictive rules. It is easy to think of organized religion as an institution that gathers to enforce restrictive rules, putting up obstacles rather than lowering thresholds, using the Bible as barrier rather than invitation. “Why should I go to church?” ask people from my generation and others. “I do good things, turn the other cheek, even.” “I am spiritual,” they say. “Why should I join this institution?” We don’t make it easy for ourselves. There are compelling arguments to be made, far beyond those of better things to do on a Sunday morning. But at the end of the day, I would submit, whether in a fading neighborhood congregation, a simple country church, or a grand gothic structure like this one, it comes down to the church being people and people needing community and the body of Christ being the only place, the only place, where the deepest rhythms of life transcend self and loneliness and find transformation. It is in the church where we move beyond the self of spirituality to the body of community, as John Buchanan has reminded us from the soaring words of Paul.

It is surely countercultural, surely. This “love your enemy” business flies in the face of what we learn and absorb. And yet we know. We know. We know that this place can make a difference in our lives, in the lives of our neighbors, in the life of the world. It is not about spirituality. It is about coming together. With an awareness more acute than usual this morning I am aware of the grand and simple ways that the church matters and how empty I would be, and you, I would submit, and the world, whether it knows it or not, how empty we all would be without it. While the church has participated in awful moments in human history, it has also addressed the world’s most horrible atrocities. Often the church follows, but in some joyous, surprising moments, it actually leads. Whether in the grand oratory of preachers or the modest, behind-the-scenes witness of ordinary people, the church matters on the world’s stage, and on the stage of your own life. A simple, gracious touch. A whispered prayer. A meal shared. A moment of light or laughter, or, even, love.

The church matters because on its best days it gathers for one reason: to love, to love God and to love the world with a reckless, countercultural, nonsensical love that transcends and transforms. Anne Lamott wrote, “When I was at the end of my rope, the people at St. Andrew [Presbyterian Church] tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The church became my home in the old meaning of home—that it’s where, when you show up, they have to let you in” (Traveling Mercies, p. 100). She is right, which makes our current efforts to keep people out all the more silly and unhelpful. The church as home. I like that, especially when we have so much trouble finding any other kind of home. William Placher quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “It is the mystery of the community that Christ is in her and, only through her, reaches to [humanity]. Christ exists in us as community, as Church in the hiddenness of history. The Church is the hidden Christ among us” (Narratives of a Vulnerable God, p. 139).

And so this place becomes more than it possibly could be if we were to rely on our sheer human cleverness. The words we say and the songs we sing and the decisions we make become more than they possibly could be if we were to rely on our own feeble abilities. The questions we ask and the answers we seek find a holy ground for their consideration, not because we are so insightful but because the one we follow, the one who leads us beside the living stream, the one who dies for us, tells us to “do to others as you would have them do to you,” and when we do, when we do, nothing is ever the same again. Those words, “love your enemies“ and the words that follow them are given by the shepherd not to saints to prove our worthiness but given to the rest of us to build community, to become his body, to find home and to build home and to be home. Annie Dillard writes,

There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted. . . . But there is no one but us. There never has been.” (Holy the Firm, p. 56-57.)

And so in this awkward time, in these days of miracle and wonder, may we become the hidden Christ, for the world, for each other, because there is no one but us, and we do matter. “For thy church that evermore lifteth holy hands above, offering up on every shore her pure sacrifice of love, Lord of all to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.” Amen.