"Is Organized Religion Really the Best We Can Do?"

7/6/08

First of Four-Part Series: “Holy Disappointment”

Text: 1 Cor. 12: 12-14, 21-27

 

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

 

For the last two weeks, our Youth Director has offered us a challenging portrait of what the Church, the community of the baptized in Christ, is supposed to be like. She proposed that Church is the place for the on-going transformation of each and every one of us as we are in the process of being saved, being made new in Christ. It’s also the place where our shared experience of transformation turns us outward with compassionate hearts for the world around us. That’s a beautiful vision. I’d say it’s quite faithful to what Jesus intended his Church to be.

But what do we do when our best, most inspired vision of the Church seems so little like the place to which we come on Sunday? What do we do with the sense of letdown when we, like Eugene Peterson, who wrote The Message translation, note that the Church is at least as much mess as mystery? Sometimes we pile the mess pretty high in church. At times, even people who love the Church are let down by its majoring in the minors, its petty politics of division, its numbing routines of sameness while the world is howling for salvation.

In the course of my ministry, I have come across a great many people who love God, who sense of the mystery of the One who made them, but have experienced along the way a lasting disappointment with the Church. Accordingly, on each of the Sundays of July, we will consider the pain of those who have experienced some ‘holy disappointment’ in their faith walk, and today we begin with anybody and everybody who’s ever asked: is this what God had in mind? Is organized religion really the best we can do?

What is quite interesting, and what I have come to see over the past few years altogether clearly, is that the world is wondering the very same thing about the Church. Even if the secular world seems mostly to ignore the Church these days, there is evidence that they expect us to be different in some way. This was evidenced by the media’s coverage of a story last year, in which a Texas megachurch cancelled the funeral of a man, a Desert Storm veteran, whom it discovered had been a homosexual. Now had such a thing been done by a funeral home, it might made the local news. But no, this was a church, and the story went nationwide, just like the story this year of a young man with autism who was finally banned from his church in New England for disrupting worship services. Had the autistic man been banned from a private school or from Starbucks, it’s hard for me to imagine a national news story, or even much notice. What is it that the world senses about us, about what the Church is supposed to be, that makes stories like these news?

Even the world knows that Jesus made us to be different. Stories like these, even if the details are muddy and the facts complex, folks know that when one of its members is suffering, the Church is supposed to act out of love, to touch and heal as Jesus did, to restore if at all possible the wounded party to the fellowship of believers. THIS community, called Church, is just plain different that way, an eccentric bunch that goes all out for the one lost lamb, the one endangered sheep. Somehow, even the AP newswire knows this about us! But do we?

I bet just about everyone here can remember a time when a member of the church was wounded, was hurting…and somehow, they felt that we did not reach out and embrace them, did not go and sit in the ashes of the past with them. I bet that for more than a few here, that person was they themselves. Someone was struck down along the way by the intrusion of an illness or a job loss, the death of a loved one or of a marriage, a period of depression or the disruption of a relationship. You knew, on some level, that you needed the Church…and the Church let you down. In time, you overcame it, enough so that you are here today, after all. But I am betting that for at least someone here this morning, on some level the memory of pain is still there.

If that is true for you, here, or if that is true for someone you care about who is not here, then I have two proclamations for you right now:
One: it was not, it is not OK that the Church let you down. Because our instincts are right – God did intend better for us than this! When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, probably the earliest writing of the New Testament, he tackled just this gap between what the Church is supposed to be and what we actually experience. You see, Corinth was a lot more mess than mystery! Struggling to define for these bickering Corinthians what their duty to God and one another really is, Paul says in Chapter 12 that all members of the Church are part of, are members of, the living Body of Christ. As such all are to be loved and cared for as special and indispensable, just the way we love and care for our eyes, our toes, our elbows. Paul lays it out explicitly: when one member of the Body suffers, all members are to suffer with it. Just like when you hit your thumb with a hammer. The pain is a summons to care as Jesus cared, to serve as Jesus served. So when you hurt, we all are to respond to that hurt. It’s just that simple.
Second proclamation: We, together as a church, have to do better – and we can. The world we live in is hungry for compassion and community like never before. Pain in our day and time brings not members who are caring for one another, but rather loneliness, isolation, and depression. We have to rise to the occasion, and the world is watching us to see if we will – or to point out when we do not.

The stakes are high, friends. Quite often someone, feeling this sense of isolation and woundedness, takes off a Sunday or two, maybe three. They need a rest, a break, from what they see as the polite brutality of Sunday religion, from going to church and seeming to have it all together. (And Heaven save us all from religion like that!) So they take a break, and guess what happens? In those few weeks, nobody calls. Nobody asks, are you OK? Tell me what’s going on with you. Almost by experiment, the injured person then spends a couple months away from the community. Now they have a sense of embarrassment about coming back, but more than that – there’s a sense of hurt much deeper than before, because nobody even cared enough to call. You see, they knew somehow that the Church is the one place that’s supposed to be different.

Somebody’s thinking: that’s the pastor’s job! And if so, you’d be right. It is my job – because I too am a baptized member of the Body of Christ, and when one member suffers, I must remember that I suffer. That I have a calling to heal, to be an agent for healing. But there’s just one of we pastors here, and there’s five hundred of you. And if Paul can be believed, when one part of the body is dealt a blow, a healthy Body reacts with every body part, not with only an eyebrow or a pinkie.

So are we, the Body of Christ as St. Mark’s, looking out for one another? If someone you know is not here for a Sunday or three, will you call them as a minister of the gospel of reconciliation? If you do not know someone, will you get to know them, to incorporate them into the Body, so that we may care for them, and they for us? If you ever suspected that God wanted something more for us than this organized-religion thing, then pray, friends, pray for a more loving church, a more care-giving, risk-taking, wound-binding church. Pray for it because you deserve it. Pray for it because Jesus gave his life for you to have it! Then, when you’ve prayed, open your eyes, and discern that we are together the Body of a crucified Savior. We’re all wounded. None of us, not one, “have it all together.” That’s why we’re in need of a Savior. Perhaps, in the midst of the mess, you will see that our response to this present pain can shape us into what we were created to be in the first place. Some would call that beautiful.

Amen.