Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 6/29/08
Welcome One Another
Psalm 13
Matthew 10:40-42
About thirty years ago I was attending a church down in Washington, D.C. The church had a magnificent sanctuary filled with beautiful stained glass windows. It was very formal; the ushers wore morning suits with the striped pants, tails and gloves. And it was rich with history. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been baptized there when he was President.
I usually sat up towards the front of the sanctuary, just to the left of the pulpit, but on this particular Sunday I joined some friends up in the balcony. Part way into the service something caught in my throat and I began to cough fairly violently. Hating to disturb the service, and feeling like I was choking, I quietly got up to get a drink of water. Just as I was approaching the door, the usher swept in front of it, trying to bar my exit. His face was red with rage; “You can’t leave now,” he whispered, “we are in the middle of a prayer.”
It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever encountered in a church. If I had been a first-time visitor, I never would have visited that congregation again. If, even worse, I had been visiting a church for the first time (perhaps out of some personal crisis) I probably would have given up on Christianity there and then.
The central message of this text is not just clear but fairly obvious: we should welcome one another. I’ve never met anyone who would disagree with that as a general principle. My guess is that even that usher in all his fury would have agreed that the church should be welcoming. We agree on the principle. It is in the application that we struggle.
About seven years ago I had a pastor from another denomination confront me. I considered him a friend. We were both part of a local clergy group that gathered each week just to pray. We had gone through the tragedy of Columbine side by side. But on this particular occasion he wanted to get together because he had heard that we were allowing an openly gay person to remain a member. He thought we should kick the person out. He never spoke to me again.
That pastor was a deeply committed Christian. His church was doing some wonderful ministry. But clearly we had some different ideas about the implications of the gospel, and what it means to be the church. That, in turn, led us to two very different understandings of Jesus’ call to welcome one another.
One of the issues here is just where we would draw the line. If we are going to kick one person out because we think their behavior is contrary to Scripture, then we should probably be going after the parent who is ignoring his or her child; or the gossip who is spreading poison all through the community; or that greedy individual who is keeping everything to him or herself. Jesus said a great deal more about love and about money than he ever said about our sexuality.
The truth is I don’t think Jesus would want us to go there. He doesn’t want us judging each other. In fact he tells us very specifically that that is not our role; “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1). It is one thing to say “I disagree with what you are doing.” That is part of being in community, and being accountable to and supportive of one another. It is quite another to say “you don’t belong.”
Our role, our call is to come up alongside people and say in effect, “Come and meet this Jesus, and then let’s explore together what it means to follow him.”
This, I think, is something of what Kathleen Norris is getting at in her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. In a chapter on the church she writes, “From the outside church congregations can look like remarkably contentious places, full of hypocrites who talk about love while fighting each other tooth and nail. This is the reason many people give for avoiding them.” She continues:
On the inside, however, it is a different matter, a matter of struggling to maintain unity as “the body of Christ” given the fact that we have precious little uniformity. I have only to look at the congregation I know best, the one I belong to. We are not individuals who have come together because we are like-minded. That is not a church, but a political party. We are like most healthy churches, I think, in that we can do pretty well when it comes to loving and serving God, each other, and the world; but God help us if we have to agree about things.
We aren’t the same. Here in the church we disagree about all kinds of things from what good worship looks like to what color the parlor should be painted. I once consulted with a church that was actually splitting over whether a new sidewalk should be flagstone or concrete. Sometimes the issues are just plain silly. Other times, on questions such as abortion or homosexuality, the ramifications for people’s lives can be enormous.
The point is, when someone joins the church, we don’t ask them where they stand on abortion. We don’t require them to be a Republican or a Democrat. No, the questions of membership come down to just two points: is Christ your Lord and Savior, and are you going to be a faithful member?
It is our way of saying, “Come with me and get to know this Jesus, and let’s explore together what it means to follow him.”
The result, of course, is that we’ve got people all over the theological, and political and social spectrum. Our congregation has some 1800 people, but in all those 1800 people you aren’t going to find even two who agree on virtually everything. Bonnie and I don’t agree on everything. And that, I think, is exactly the way God planned it.
At one level, that diversity is the strength and glory of the church. A couple of days ago one of our members sent over a few lines from a piece by journalist David Brooks: "Life is complicated,” Brooks wrote. “The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people that are dangerous are those who can't admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."
Not one of us, no matter how brilliant, is always going to be right. It is why we need each other. It’s why the church needs this breadth of opinion and perspective. A page later in her book, Norris references a letter she once received:
“The church is still a sinful institution,” a Benedictine monk wrote to me when I was struggling over whether or not to join a church. “How could it be otherwise?” he asked, and I was startled into a recognition of simple truth. The church is like the Incarnation itself, a shaky proposition. It is a human institution, full of ordinary people, sinners like me, who say and do cruel, stupid things. But it is also a divinely inspired institution, full of good purpose, which partakes of a unity far greater than the sum of its parts. That is why it is called the body of Christ.
And that is the other part; the reason why every one of us needs the church. For all its imperfections, this is the place where God has promised to be. For all its flaws, this is the instrument that God has chosen to make his presence felt and known.
Some of the deepest hurts I’ve experienced in life have come at the hands of other Christians; people who were sure they had a lock on God’s truth, people who just knew that they were right. Yet it is this same community, this same church, that first introduced me to Jesus. It is this same church that has supported me and educated me and called me into ministry. For all the hurts and all the flaws, I would still say without hesitation that the church that has been one of God’s greatest blessings in my life.
There is a wonderful passage in Henri Nouwen’s study of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son:
As I now look again at Rembrandt’s old man bending over his returning son and touching his shoulders with his hands, I begin to see not only a father who “clasps his son in his arms,” but also a mother who caresses her child, surrounds him with the warmth of her body, and holds him against the womb from which he sprang… Now I understand better also the enormous stillness of this portrait of God. There is no sentimentality here, no romanticism, no simplistic tale with a happy ending. What I see here is God as mother, receiving back into her womb the one whom she made in her own image. The near-blind eyes, the hands, the cloak, the bent-over body, they all call forth the divine maternal love, marked by grief, desire, hope, and endless waiting.
We, the church, are the embodiment of that old man bending over his returning son. We are called to be that father who clasps his son in his arms; that mother who caresses her child, surrounding him with the warmth of her body. It is through us, and through our care of one another right in the midst of all those differences that others come to feel the loving embrace of their Creator.
Jesus tells the disciples, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” It is precisely here, in our capacity to love and welcome each other, that we open our own lives to the light and the power of Jesus’ transforming presence.
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith, (Riverhead Books, New York, 1998), p. 272
Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, (Doubleday, New York, 1992), p. 96