Do We Need the Church?

a sermon preached at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on the Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 3, 2015
by John A.K. Boyd, MD

C.S. Lewis noted that...his respected friends included a number of clergymen. “But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo...

I was sobered a few weeks ago when I read in the Durango Herald that a recent major survey showed “A record-low share of Americans attend church regularly, affiliate with a religious faith and see themselves as religious” and that “Millennials have led the shift away from religious affiliation.” But, I was not surprised. The Church has often been a problem for lots of folks – even folks who are trying to follow Jesus. C.S. Lewis noted that, during his conversion, his respected friends included a number of clergymen. “But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo.  . . . .  I couldn’t yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one’s spiritual life.” And well he might. As a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature, he knew the Church had a checkered history.

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During the early centuries of the Common Era, the Church struggled over its identity: was it a Jewish sect or was it something else? It became the official religion of the Roman Empire and got involved in war and politics. It split into camps that fought about the nature of Christ: was he God and man existing separately in the same container or was he God and man mixed together inseparably in the same container? During the Middle Ages, the Church started burning witches and heretics and launched the Crusades to take the Holy Land by force from the non-Christians who lived there. During the Renaissance, it split over many things and fought major internecine wars. During the Enlightenment, it resisted science, fought more wars and continued burning witches and heretics.

Church struggles and failures not only affected western society socially and politically; they affected individuals at a very personal level. In Scotland 1696, Thomas Aikenhead, a 19-year-old theology student at the College of Edinburg, passed the Tron Church in that city along with 3 friends. Despite it being the month of August, it was cold and blustery, and it had been raining and freezing all summer. As they walked past the church, Thomas remarked, “I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.” Someone, however, overheard this remark and informed the kirk (church) authorities. When those authorities investigated the accusation, they learned from other students that Thomas Aikenhead had been systematically ridiculing the Christian faith and making claims including the following:

• the Bible was not the literal Word of God, but the invention of the prophet, Ezra;
  
• Jesus performed no actual miracles;
  
• the story of Jesus’ resurrection was a myth;
  
• if Moses actually existed at all, he was a better politician and magician than Jesus and that Mohammed had been better than either;
  
• Jesus was an imposter;
  
• God, nature and the world were one, and had existed since eternity.

Aikenhead’s remarks constituted blasphemy as defined by an act of Parliament in 1695, which decreed that a person “not distracted in his wits” who railed or cursed against God or the persons of the Trinity was to be punished with death. He was, therefore, put on trial by civil authorities per the recommendation of church leaders. Despite repenting and recanting all his heretical statements, following a lengthy trial during which he received support from the philosopher John Locke and other Anglican “latitudinarians,” Aikenhead was finally found guilty and hanged on January 8, 1697. With his last words he forgave all concerned in his trial – including Mungo Craig, the other student who was the chief witness against him. Aikenhead also noted that his fall had been initiated solely by his pure love of the truth. Thomas Aikenhead was tragically and cruelly executed due to the failure of his own church.

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...if history and our own lives are rife with examples of church failures, problems and pain, why do we need this community we call “church”?  

So, if history and our own lives are rife with examples of church failures, problems and pain, why do we need this community we call “church”?  Why can’t following Jesus just be about Jesus and me? Why does Matthew’s gospel quote Jesus saying that he will establish his “church” and that the very gates of Hell will not prevail against it? Why did the early Christians continue meeting in churches – those communities reminiscent of Jewish synagogues – even when many of their members were gentiles? Why did St. Paul seem to care so deeply about churches, calling them “the body of Christ”? Why does John in today’s gospel describe our relationship with Jesus using a metaphor that includes not just Jesus as the “vine” but “branches” – other Christians – connected to us in a community that often gets messy – a community that finds itself involved in conflicts of leadership, kinship, membership, economics, and aesthetics. Why did Jesus and his apostles seem to recommend participation in the Christian community over a simple individual “personal relationship” with Jesus and heroic, uncomplicated “Lone Ranger” spirituality? In short, what could God have been thinking?

...could it be that God’s primary intention for the Church is that it be a school or training ground for forgiveness?

Trying to second-guess God’s purposes can be a bit dicey, but since I’m a doctor (and we often play God) I thought I’d give it a whirl. Some of the unique benefits of participation in a church community seem rather obvious: the experiences of transcendence that sometimes occur during corporate worship – particularly the sharing of Eucharist and music; the mutual support we garner during times of joy and sorrow such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals; the healings experienced in corporate prayer and the laying-on of hands; the learning and sharing of a common Biblical narrative that forms our identity, and helps make sense of our humanity and our relationship to our Creator.

But it occurs to me, that there may be an even more important reason for those of us trying to follow Jesus to participate in a church. According to Jesus, there are only two things that are really important in life, two things that we really need to learn: 1) to love God, and 2) to love our neighbor as ourselves. According to today’s epistle from IJohn, we learn to love God by loving other humans – all other humans. But we need a place to start, and most of us can’t begin by loving neo-Nazis, ISIS militants or even our own politicians. We need to start with the basics. The first basic, the prerequisite to love according to Jesus, is forgiveness. We can’t really love others until we have learned to forgive them when they have hurt us. So, could it be that God’s primary intention for the Church is that it be a school or training ground for forgiveness? I think it might be so.

Why might the Church be uniquely qualified as a school for forgiveness? It could be because a church community is a place where we have expectations of one another – legitimate expectations of goodness. In Church we expect our brothers and sisters to try to act like Jesus – to value us, to care for us, to sacrifice for us. But our brothers and sisters occasionally, if not frequently, fail us, and we fail them, because we are, in spite of being Christians, imperfect human beings who are often self-serving. Great expectations coupled with human imperfection create not only challenges – they create the soil wherein we can be transformed, wherein forgiveness can be learned and practiced by the grace of God in the power of the spirit.

...our brothers and sisters occasionally, if not frequently, fail us, and we fail them, because we are, in spite of being Christians, imperfect human beings who are often self-serving. 

Jesus praying in the garden after the Last Supper, while the disciples sleep, by Andrea Mantegna c. 1460

In this way, we are no different that Jesus and his disciples. They had expectations of each other, and they failed to live up to them. Jesus’ disciples frequently failed to understand his teaching, they fell asleep during his emotional turmoil, they deserted him during his trials and execution, one of them denied him, and one of them finally betrayed him. And Jesus didn’t always live up to their expectations: he wasn’t the triumphant militant Messiah they wanted, he did not restore the Davidic kingdom, and he died like a common criminal on the garbage dump outside the city. 

The imperfect community of Jesus’ followers, what we now call the Church, is ironically the perfect environment in which to practice and experience forgiveness leading to love. Forgiveness can certainly be tough – but not as tough as we often think. In my own case, I did forgive my church of origin and have continued to love and respect my friends and family who are still participating in that Christian tradition. Doing so, however, was not the result of heroic spiritual effort on my part. Forgiving my church happened slowly, almost mystically, over several years as I continued to muddle along my own spiritual path in other Christian communities. Of course, part of that forgiveness was coming to understand that I had misjudged my church – coming to understand that some of those folks were not just interested in being doctrinally correct. Some of them sat with my mother, prayed with her and read her the Psalms as she lay dying. Some of them prayed for my nephew while he served a 20-year prison sentence for the murder of a homeless man, gave him a good job when he got out of prison, and helped him rebuild a life from ashes. My church helped me understand the fallibility of my moral assessments of other people. It taught me to be less righteous about my resentments and grudges –especially those that were fueled by my perception of motives I had imputed to others. Forgiving my church was, I think, the work of the Holy Spirit mediated through the lives of other Christians who forgave, loved and mentored me along the way. 

And what about here and now? In case you hadn’t noticed, St. Mark’s is an imperfect Christian community. It is also a place where we have legitimate expectations of our sisters and brothers – expectations that we do not and will not consistently meet. But it is a place where many of us have continued to experience forgiveness and genuine love – in spite of our warts. In this season of transition, I hope we can realize that what we need to do is probably not rocket science. The grace to continue forgiving and loving one another comes from being connected to (or as John says “abiding in”) the Jesus Vine – and thus connected to the other branches. The pruning described in today’s gospel is not about us cutting the bad people out of the church – it is about our choices to remain connected and about God removing the sickly, dying pieces of detritus from each of us so that we all can flourish communally in God’s vineyard. But we must stay connected to each other through Jesus. To do so, we will probably, as Stanley Hauerwas has written, “have to break our habit of having church in such a way that people are deceived into thinking that they can be Christians and remain strangers.” The practices that keep us from remaining strangers, practices that help us remain connected to each other as branches on the Vine are, fortunately few and relatively simple: worshiping together, praying together, eating together, studying together, playing together – and perhaps even putting a few more shekels in the collection plate. Mostly, I think we just need to show up.

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References:

• John 15:1-8 (NRSV)
  
• 1 John 4:7-21 (NRSV)
  
• How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman
  
• Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas & Will Willimon
  
• Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis