Sermon by Rocky Supinger | May 7, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 7, 2023

I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church

A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 57:14–21
Ephesians 2:11–22

The American sociologist of religion Diana Butler-Bass wrote in one of her books about the impact of the preposition “in” on religious faith. She said,

“‘In’ orients selfhood in a larger relationship; we are still ourselves, but we are not isolated individuals. We exist ‘in’ something. In order to understand ourselves spiritually, we need to reinsert the prepositions. Prepositions link words; they connect objects in a relationship, thus locating the subject in time and space. In the spiritual life, they act as markers for reflection and discernment.”

In the spiritual life, prepositions act as markers for reflection and discernment. Especially the preposition “in.”

I believe in God …

And in Jesus Christ …

I believe in the Holy Ghost …

The preposition is there in all of those declarations of belief taken from the Apostles’ Creed, the ancient summary of Christian belief we have been reflecting on in our worship since the end of February.

Faith is belief in something, someone. There are things we believe about God and about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit, to change the preposition. God is the Father Almighty. Jesus is the Christ who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was crucified. To have faith is to believe certain things about God.

But faith is more than belief about. Faith is belief in. The preposition makes a difference. Faith is belief in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit.

What’s the difference? I think we believe about with our head, but we believe in with our heart. Both matter, but they’re not the same. Believing in God means trusting God with our heart, with our life. I believe things about Jesus — that he was a rabbi who lived and taught a couple thousand years ago in Roman-occupied Palestine and who taught people to love their neighbors. But I also believe in Jesus, and so I follow him and stake my life to his teaching and his example.

Faith is belief about and belief in.

And we believe in the church. The church is an article of our faith, and the preposition “in” applies to it as much as it does to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We believe things about the church, certainly — the creed gives us the descriptors “holy” and “catholic,” for example, but we also believe in the church: we trust the church and we invest ourselves in it.

Another religious sociologist, Robert Bellah, wrote about how we live our lives through institutions, things like schools and companies and states and, yes, churches. These institutions get the benefit of the time and energy and commitment we give to them. The degree to which we believe in an institution is the degree to which we spend time in it, give money to it, and make sacrifices for it.

I decided about twenty years ago, reading Robert Bellah, that the church was the institution that I wanted to receive whatever time and energy and imagination I had to give to an institution for my vocation, my profession. I wanted to live my life in the church.

Because I believe in … the church: I believe in its ministry and mission to the world so much that I couldn’t see spending my life in any other institution.

But I also believe … in the church. The church is the context where my belief is shaped and strengthened.

I believe in … the church, but I also believe … in the church.

I believe … in the building itself, which was constructed long, long before I got here and will endure long after I’m gone, with its pews and chairs, stained glass and inlaid labyrinth — all things that thoughtful, faithful saints built to express devotion and awe and belief.

I believe … in a room filled with teenagers, playing games and learning the Bible; In Anderson Hall, serving Sunday Night Supper or hearing about someone’s upcoming surgery over coffee; in the Gratz Center Commons weekday mornings watching Social Service Center staff welcome and offer men and women clothing and food and dignified personal attention.

I believe … in worship, as we sing these songs and hear these scriptures, pray these prayers and baptize babies and break the bread of the Lord’s Supper.

I believe … in you. You, gathered here on a Sunday afternoon when you could be lots of other places doing lots of other things, you give rise to my belief. You situate it and shape it and challenge it and strengthen it. You are the church, and I believe … in you.

Belief in … the church has always also been belief … in the church. All the way back to the church in Ephesus, a bustling city in first-century Asia Minor, now western Turkey. We read a portion of a letter to that church as our second scripture this afternoon, a letter most likely written by the Apostle Paul.

He started that church, as described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 18 and 19. On his missionary travels spreading the gospel of Jesus, Paul found himself in Ephesus and did what he typically did when he arrived in a new city: he went to the synagogue and started teaching about Jesus. But as typically happened whenever he did this, he soon wore out his welcome and moved over to the city’s lecture hall or town square with his message.

Paul spent about three years there, and by the time he left there was an actual church there, the kind of thing you could believe … in, the kind of thing you could believe in.

So who were the believers in the Ephesian church? It feels like we should know, since the Ephesian church is in the “holy” church we believe in. What’s so holy about the church in Ephesus?

It’s not the church’s moral purity. There’s nothing in this letter about how moving their services of worship are. There’s not even a word about the church’s pastor. The holiness of the church does not consist in any of those things.

No, the church in Ephesus is holy because God made it, and not out of nothing. God created the church out of previously existing material: a “we” and a “you,” peoples who were hostile to one another and divided from each other are the raw material that God uses to create something new, something holy, the church.

To Jesus’ first followers, the disciples and the apostles, this was not exactly welcome news. Because they’re the “we.” We, then, are Jewish, like Jesus, like Paul, the author of Ephesians. We are heirs to promises to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; inheritors of the law of Moses, God’s great gift to God’s people showing them the best way to live; inhabitants of a special identity rooted in a grand story about God blessing a particular people to be a blessing to the world, promising them a land flowing with milk and honey, delivering them from bondage, sending them prophets when they’d lost the plot; sending them a messiah — Jesus! — to save them.

“We” left behind family and custom to follow Jesus and to be part of the new community he was forming, the church.

But people are coming to Jesus now from other peoples, and they are the “you.”

You don’t speak Aramaic like Jesus did, but Greek. You don’t worship God in the synagogue; you eat meat that has been sacrificed to pagan idols; you don’t keep sabbath. You are alien to us — and to God.

We detest you as Godless. We call you “Gentiles.” You revile us as atheists and troublemakers because we won’t participate in your religious cults.

“Us” and “you”: it’s a fundamental element of human experience to be part of an “us” or a “we” over against a “you.” And it’s not evil; we need to feel a sense of belonging to groups that are larger than us. “We” are a family, a team, a nation. Those collective bonds and shared stories and identities are important. The Surgeon General’s office released a report last week describing an “epidemic of loneliness” in America, where people less and less feel like they belong to a “we,” that they have an “us” who knows them and cares about them. That is a crisis.

We need a “we.”

And we need a “you.”

You need to be allowed to be who you are, not forced to be who we think you should be. Too often, in the name of unity, we try to erase differences between you and us, by saying things like, “We’re all human” or “All lives matter.” But what that communicates is that “we” determine what “human” means and “all lives” conform to our definition of a life.

This was the impulse of the Jewish Christian “we” in the early church, to require the Greek-speaking Christian “you” to adopt “our” way of being Christian by conforming to “our” expectations and our habits. It is the major part of the holiness of the church that that impulse was countered and overcome.

The holiness of the church consists in the reconciling of the you and the us, not their erasure. The church is called “holy” because in it God has taken a sledgehammer to the wall dividing you from us while keeping us both fully intact. God made peace by breaking things, and so the theologian James Cone says, “The church must be a revolutionary community, breaking laws that destroy persons.”

The church is holy because through it God has made peace between you and us by putting to death, through Jesus’ death on the cross, the hostility you have for us and we have for you. God broke the division and killed the hostility to make peace. That’s what makes the church holy.

I mentioned the theologian James Cone a moment ago. Cone was an important American theologian (he died in 2018) who wrote about the Christian gospel from the African American experience. Perhaps his best-known work is A Black Theology of Liberation, which contains a chapter on the church that begins with a quotation: “Carl Michalson once said: ‘The Christian Gospel is a proclamation which strikes the ear of the world with the force of a hint. Some ‘get it’; some do not.’”

It continues with Cone’s own assertion: “The Christian church is that community of persons who ‘got the hint,’ and they thus refuse to be content with human pain and suffering.”

Getting the hint is, for me, what believing in … the church is all about — placing my trust, my very life, in the hands of a holy community that is striving to realize the hint of peace and reconciliation we’ve picked up from the gospel and from our life together. It’s when we really get the hint that we are the least content with the pain and suffering we experience, the pain and suffering we see others experiencing.

Getting the hint is about opening our doors to refugees and organizing against homophobic and transphobic legislation and simply feeding people, week after week, day after day.

That hint is always competing with other proclamations that strike our ear with the force of a bullhorn: fear and anxiety and mistrust, even outright hostility. But the hint is always there, if we’ll only listen.

Believing … in the church means giving one another that gospel hint over and over again, by sharing our stories, inviting one another to this table of plenty without fail, and by praying with and for one another. For prayer, to quote James Cone one more time, “is the spirit that is that communion with the divine that makes [us] know [we] have very little to lose in the fight against evil and a lot to gain.”

Amen.