September 7, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The School of Love

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 149
Romans 13:8–10
Matthew 18:15–20

“Where two or three are gathered in my name,
I am there among them.”

Matthew 18:20 (NRSV)

Lord, can this really be?
Is this your church, the people that I see,
who gather here and worship you with me?

Is this the very place, the school of love,
where we would see your face,
and through your Spirit gain enabling grace?

from the hymn by William Rutherford

Well, folks, here we all are back from vacations.

The first Sunday of September in church, the beginning of the church program year, is called Rally Day, I believe, in some churches in the United States. I’m not really sure what that means, but so I’m told.

I know that in the Buchanan household this day is known as Opening Day, with all those baseball overtones, of course. So we have our youth kickoff today, with all the activities going on for our children and families and our high schoolers. We’ve got a full choir loft as well—nice to see them all back and smiling and fully commissioned, as well, this morning. Excellent.

Perhaps it’s a good day to ask, “Why do we do all this? What is this whole church thing about?” Let me try to find a way into that question for us this morning.

Reflecting a little on one of these things I find to be a real peculiarity about American culture—which as something of an outsider I like to be an observer of—is the issue of church signs. Now we don’t really see them in the city so much, but as you travel in the suburbs and in some of the rural areas in the Midwest, you’ll see the sign outside the church not just with the preacher’s name or the sermon title, but often with a pithy little saying, little quote, little pun, or something.

My wife Missy’s work takes her to Wisconsin often, and the office she works out of up there is right beside a church, where they are fond of putting signs out. My favorite is when she came home and said, “The sign today”—and you’ve got to listen carefully to this, people—“the sign today said, ‘If Jesus was a refrigerator, your picture would be on the door.’” There may be some deep Gnostic philosophy or something in there; I can’t really get it, so if you can, tell me. My colleague Adam Fronczek heard this sermon at 9:30, as he was first liturgist, and he just passed me a note on the chancel, and it reads this, “My two favorite signs: ‘Heavenly forecast: Jesus reigns’ and then ‘For all you do, His blood’s for you.’” Well done, Adam. Thank you.

Not to continue this interminably, but there is one going around on email at the moment that is from Wisconsin, as well. It’s a reference to a certain well-known quarterback and the latest part of his story. The church sign reads, “God won’t leave you for the Jets.” (I don’t know if you’re really allowed to use Packer gags in the middle of Chicago.) There is one sign that I like, and it’s kind of an obvious one, but let me just share it with you because it is a way of getting us into a conversation today. It’s a church sign that goes “C H blank blank C H. What’s missing?” And the answer is: “U R” (you are). I know that’s meant to be a kind of guilt thing for people who don’t come to church, but there’s actually some great theology if we just turn it around a little bit and it reads “U R church.” You are church. There’s truth here. I love a children’s hymn that sings about this, very simply and very profoundly. The hymn goes like this:

The church is not a building;
the church is not a steeple;
the church is not a resting place;
the church is a people.

The church is a people. God’s people gathered together offering songs of praise and psalms, praying together, living in community. The church is a people.

I took my family to the island of Iona when we were in Scotland this summer. Iona, the beautiful island, a small island, is the place where Christianity first came to Scotland from Ireland, brought there by the saint we know as Columba. Columba founded his community on the island of Iona and from there spread Celtic Christianity through Scotland and Northumbria in the north of England. Currently in the abbey on Iona there is a modern-day community, the Iona community, which was founded by the Church of Scotland minister George MacLeod in the ’30s and ’40s. Part of what the Iona community did was rebuild parts of this ancient abbey, parts of which go back to the 11 and 1200s, and they rebuilt the living quarters so there would be places for people to stay.

The Sunday when the rebuilding was completed, George MacLeod led his people with prayer. MacLeod’s prayers are one of his great gifts to the church. Listen to the prayer he offered that day.

We are your temple, not made with hands. We are your body. If every wall should crumble and every church decay, we are your habitation. Nearer are you, O God, than breathing; closer than hands and feet; ours are the eyes with which you in the mystery look out in compassion on the world.

Nearer are you, O God, than breathing. The promise of that presence we find in our text from Matthew, which we heard read earlier, a text that is sometimes described as a desperation text. Let me see if I can explain that. The famous words of Jesus—“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them”—has been used in my experience when people gather and there are not many people worshiping. I worked a summer in the resort town of Aviemore in the Highlands of Scotland. There’s a little chapel in the hills there that myself and my colleague, the minister, would go to on a Sunday evening to offer worship for any of the holidaymakers who might want to come. Quite often it was just he and I, and whenever that was the case, you can be sure that his opening sentence would be “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among you.”

The promise is there, but interestingly, in the text it grows out of recognition of something about the nature of the life of the church. And that is that the church is not perfect. This is a text that comes to us out of the experience of conflict. And yet there at the end of this is this great promise of Jesus: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Christ is present through the Spirit when God’s people gather, binding us together as one body.

I couldn’t begin to think of reflecting on the church without referencing a new book that John Buchanan has just published, called A New Church for a New World. John particularly asked me to give the book a plug this morning. No, he didn’t really; he didn’t.

It’s a lovely little book in which John reflects both on the history of the church and the continuity of that into today. He’s got a great definition of what makes church different from just kind of philosophical reflection, and he writes this: “Human beings have always pondered the mystery of life—how we got here and what life is for. When people become church, God is doing something, taking the initiative, calling, forming, inspiring, and equipping people to be a new reality, Christ’s body on earth. The church is the way God continues to be in and to love and to save the world. When we think about the history of the church and where we are today, we do realize that part of the way that the church that has lived its life and sought to define itself is by understanding the church over and against something else, over and against the world, or society, or the church, over and against the pagans, or the heretics. Tools used in this are exclusion, excommunication working towards purity of doctrine and practice, and, undergirding all, the exercise of power.”

And that’s true not only in the obvious places, like the medieval church in Europe; it’s true for the history of the church in the United States. Northwestern history professor Gary Wills recently published a fine book called Head and Heart: American Christianities, and he starts off that book by exploding one of the myths of the founding Puritans in the colonies in New England, namely that they came here in order to provide for freedom of religion. Wills says that’s not the case. He writes, “The founders of the New England colonies did not come to America to protect any variety in religious practice or to assert the primacy of the individual’s conscience. Far from it. They came to set up the one true faith where corrupt versions of it could not intrude.” That is another example of providing a place to define church over and against the other. Wills goes on to talk about how in the early days in the colonies that view resulted in violence against, for example, Quakers, who would be executed for not abiding by the Puritan understanding of church and doctrine. This is still, I think, the case in our day in parts of the church, and it’s one of the tragedies for those who watch the church to see.

To see the Catholic church delivering documents from Rome and declaring that the Roman Catholic church is the only true way to salvation or Missouri Synod Lutherans unwilling to engage in ecumenical or interfaith worship or Presbyterians excluding people from full participation in the life of the church because of sexual orientation.

One of the great thinkers for the church of the twentieth century, and still alive today, in fact, is the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann wrote his theology after the Second World War. He is a post-Holocaust theologian, and part of his struggle in his theology is to understand where God was in that and where God is calling us to be in a post-Holocaust world. Moltmann has a lovely book in which he takes some of his complex theology and speaks to what that means for the church. It’s a theology of hope and of liberation, and he writes in the book, The Open Church, about what the church can be. He writes, “We would no longer come together just in order to confirm for each other the eternally same stories, jokes, and opinions, but would rather create an open and hospitable community which would bring friendliness into the unfriendly corners of this society.” What a charge that is, what a call that is, for the church: to bring friendliness to places where there is unfriendliness. Moltmann goes on: “Congregation then is no longer the sum of all those who are registered as members on the church rolls.” Rather, it is a new kind of living together for human beings that affirms and hears Moltmann’s manifesto for the church. “That the church affirms that no one is alone with his or her problems, that no one has to conceal any disabilities, that there are not some who have the say and others who have nothing to say. That neither the old nor the little ones are isolated, that one bears the other even when it is unpleasant, and that finally that one can also at times leave the other in peace when the other needs it.” I love that manifesto; I love Moltmann’s clear thinking, thinking of the church not in terms of exclusion or some ideal of teaching the right doctrine. In the words of William Rutherford’s hymn on the front of your bulletin this morning, the church is “the school of love.” The school of love.

Towards the end of John’s book A New Church for a New World, he says this: “What’s the church for?” To answer the question that we started off with, John says the church is “there to convey the transcendence and mystery of God. And to show the world what community looks like and to help men and women give their lives away and in the process save their lives.”

Our hymn after the sermon this morning is not from the hymnal. It is printed in your bulletin. It’s a hymn called “The Summons” or “Will You Come and Follow Me.” It’ll be new for some of you, so the choir is going to sing the first verse for us, and then we’ll stand at the second verse and sing the rest of the hymn. “Will You Come and Follow Me” is a hymn written by John Bell of the Iona Community, and it is a hymn of commitment. It’s called “The Summons” because there is a dialogue, so listen as you sing the words to this song. As we sing it this morning, I invite you to reflect on commitment. I invite you to commit yourself to the church, to the people of God on this “Opening Day.” Commit yourself to the school of love; commit yourself to teaching love and learning love and living love in this place and in this city and in this world, trusting in Christ’s presence when we gather. The same Jesus Christ whom to know is life abundant and whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.