Why We Go To Church

 

The following is an edited version of a sermon given at the First Congregational Church of Rochester, July 30, 2023.

Why Do We Go To Church?

I got the idea for this message's subject from a friend, Mary, while we were sitting in the local coffee shop. "You know what I want to hear a sermon about? she challenged. "Why We Go To Church". That was a fine subject, I thought, so I did a little research. 

Everybody doesn’t go to church. Half of Americans don’t go to church even once a month. Interestingly enough, though, a lot of people who stay at home on Sunday mornings actually believe in God. Barna research says that ¾ of unchurched people own a bible, 2 of 3 say they are spiritual.

So, some folks who believe in God go to church and some stay home and we still have to answer Mary’s question. Why do we….the ones in church this morning….go to church? I thought I knew why I did, but needed to see what other folks had to say, so I asked them.

ANSWERS

When I was a very young Christian, this is what I was told: We go to get fed by the Word. That sounded right at first. Another answer was that we go to be encouraged or corrected in faith matters. — also sounded right, but these days, when I'm a little farther down the faith road, it seemed a little too pat and didn’t get to the root of the matter.

A surprising number of the people I asked said they go because they’re supposed to or because they’ve always done it. That's also true, but also falling short of a real motivating reason.

So I kept asking. As it turned out, a lot of the people I asked had answers like these;

We go for the fellowship of people who think like we do.

I go because I need a positive influence in my life, because it makes me feel good, because the people are nice, because I’m accepted as who I am.

I feel closer to God when I go to church, in a small church around people who are like me, who have God in their lives.

Church is the pillar that holds the rest of my life together. It is not a foundation for my faith, but self-preservation. I need it.

Now I was getting somewhere.

This last group of people all thought it had something to do with supporting and being supported, with sharing and understanding. That made sense.

We sometimes refer to the church as the house of God and Ps 84 says that one day in God’s courts is better than a thousand elsewhere, but Jesus said that God doesn’t live in this or any building. God lives primarily in us. So maybe we come here because even though there is enough God in every believer, when two or three are gathered He isn’t just in us individually, He’s in us corporately, and when we’re together, we are enabled to do something new in His name. I liked that and thought it was leading me in a significant direction.

It does feel good and right to spend intentional time with people who think like we do, who believe the same way, and with whom we can build and work and contribute. It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel effective. We belong. But there are also dangers that come with doing that – the unintended consequences of hanging out intentionally and regularly with people we love and who think like we do.

DANGERS

Danger #1: It can lead to self-satisfaction and complacency. When everyone around us agrees with us, we tend to think we’re right.

Danger #2: It resists change and change is necessary. Warm fuzzies don’t usually come with change. We want to do what we’ve always done, but we are an ever-changing group gathered around an eternal gospel and it’s only the gospel that doesn’t change.

Danger #3: It can make it hard to fold in the new people God brings us, people who will necessarily upset our familiar apple cart, or at least rearrange it.

Don’t think that can happen here? It happened in the good and loving church that helped me to my first intimacy with God. And it happened slowly, so slowly that we hardly noticed. In the end, the devastation was so complete that it broke some of our hearts. For others, it broke their faith. And I learned something in the process. I learned that any church can lose its way, but there are some warnings signs for churches that start to stray.

1)    One warning sign is treating church like a club– Clubs are by definition exclusive and we don’t get to exclude anyone because Jesus didn’t. We have to take great care that whatever membership we establish in a church doesn’t artificially lift up members simply for the reason that they belong. We are to be set apart for God, but we are not to set ourselves apart from our fellow men by pride in ourselves as being members of this church or Congregationalists or Protestants. Those are man’s separations, not God’s.

2)    Another is thinking of church as a theatrical display to be watched. Our times together are not to be observed but a common prayer to be participated in. We are here to be together, to raise one voice to God, to be more together than we can be alone. It doesn’t matter how eloquent we are or how good our singing voices sound. We gather to give our best to God, whatever it is, and not to the ears of other men, even our own parishioners.

3)    Another is thinking of church as a religious jamboree designed to make us feel good. Church is a privileged encounter with Christ. With or without bread and wine, it is supposed to be an intense communion. It’s like any time we get together with someone we care about. We talk and eat. Orderly but not by rote. Organized but not automatic. An outpouring of love from all sides. God speaks to us. We respond.

4)    There is also danger in thinking of church in terms of an institution or a denominational affiliation. The giveaway is saying "I am a…". Those are the creation of men, not God. God’s church is a movement of believers where people share collectively and apply what God has given them. Locally, we are a very small part in a worldwide machine that Jesus set in motion to encourage people to holiness – different but not better, faithful in fellowship only to Him who gave His life for us all.

We love our church and we love each other. It’s one of the reasons we show up Sunday after Sunday, but we have to be aware of the bear traps, because when we have the courage to declare ourselves to the world as a group gathered for the specific purpose of honoring the creator of the universe, bear traps come with the territory. Labeling ourselves a church tells the world we are different. It wasn’t always that way.

HOW WE GOT HERE – HISTORY

For the first 1500 years after Christ, everybody in western Europe was Catholic. The word Catholic means universal because it was. Nobody was anything else. The sacred was part of everyday life and everybody shared in it together. During the Reformation, common life began to be separated from faith life because, for the first time, Christians had choices.  Reformers expected at first that they would fix what they thought was wrong with the Catholic church and go forward united in belief and practice, but that didn’t happen. The Reformation created division not only from a corrupt Catholic church but from other protestant denominations to the point that competing denominations went to war. Things got so bad that Reformers could see no way to stop the bloody conflict other than to worship separately in order to govern corporately. This is the origin of the separation between church and state and ultimately, between church and every other aspect of life, but it worked. The new protestant denominations that resulted from the Reformation eventually stopped killing each other and figured out how to live socially side by side, but only by coming to terms with an institutionalized separation between sacred and secular that persists today and continues to widen so that God is disconnected more and more from common society.

So, In the 1500s or 1600s, religion and politics parted ways and here we are, 500 years later, dealing with the aftermath. It’s easy to forget that one of the only places left where we can combine our faith and community lives is in the church. Now, the church as we know it has become the only place where the sacred and the secular can come together again. Church is the place we come specifically to learn from God and also learn how to live those lessons outside the church. This is where our feeling of community comes from. This is why it feels so special, because it is.

 The church is the only place we can teach, exhort, encourage, and advise one another regarding how to live our faith in common ways in the world. We have to gather to do this because there is nowhere else to go. The divorce between community and faith life is virtually complete. 

This is the legacy of the Reformation:

1)    Religion changed from a way of common life to simply ones’ own choice and opinion regarding God, beliefs, devotion, and worship. We call this religious freedom but it has become at the same time religious confusion and detachment. Religion became intellectual rather than visceral, a mind activity rather than a heart one.

2)    We now have the right to our own religious anything, subject to our own rules and opinions and we can change our mind at any time for any reason to the point of absurdity. One of my college classmates had his drivers' license picture taken with a colandar on his head because he convinced the DMV that is was part of his religion. The prank started as a test and ended up an example of the scrambled religious world we live in. No civil law reins us in. Church has become about self – our decision to believe. Our decision to join. Something that started as very public became something private.

3)    Religion has been demoted to just another pastime to be taken up or put down, a kind of hobby like fishing or painting rather than what it was intended to be – the most important way we inform, educate, and guide our lives together. It may not be a good thing for faith to be dictated by the state, but it is also not a good thing for faith to be parted from the fabric of our lives altogether.

4)    We are now a secular, not a religion-based society – not a religious world. Not anymore. There is a kind of strength and growth in learning how to agree to disagree but it does not bring with it a clear way forward. As a result, our common society feels lost.

God, however, is still working. The same confusion that we inherited from the reformers puts the church in a unique position. It makes churches stand out. It gives church special status and visibility. And most important, it makes the church a potential haven for the sacred. The church, of all the places we can choose in this world, can be the one place we remember and act out something better.

We Can be a Haven for the Sacred in This Secular World

This is how it’s done – this is what the church does that helps us fulfill God’s intent for us as the bride of Christ:

We share bread and wine in a banquet that’s happened for hundreds of years, and will happen into eternity. God feeds us, we feed one another, and become one people in Him. We don’t just remember – we participate. This is the communion He made specifically for us and it is, like every other behavior He specified, the best of what we can know in this world.

We pray together, not because we’re eloquent, but because we’re needy. We state our faith together. We sing not because we’re good singers but because words sometimes just aren’t enough to express the glory we find in God. We come together to learn how to make all the parts of our life work together again – the sacred and the secular – and we do that because we understand that nothing is really secular if we do it right. Everything belongs to God and is for God.

We study the Bible together because even though we do it alone and hear God in the silence of our private hearts, He reveals another layer of Himself when we do it together.

We make church a place of conscious and active participation in building up not our own parish customs, but building up the universal kingdom of God. Where two or three are gathered isn’t just His promise to be here in church – it’s a reminder that He is already both here and in the larger world and He wants us to engage with it in His name.

When we do these things, we declare to whom we belong, in church and out, we become the light Christ asked us to be.

 CONCLUSIONS – The Answer

So why do we go to church?

1.    We go to church to learn to live together in spiritual health and holiness. If we depend on ourselves for spiritual understanding, all we get is ourselves. We may get input from God if we’re listening carefully, but we won’t get the benefit of what God has done in anybody else. There is value in learning the layers of meaning and the richness of the Bible, and in understanding church doctrine and history, but we can read the Bible at home and God will speak truth to us. We need each other to discover more.

2.    We go to church to learn to live together in practical union. The head of the church is Christ and we operate only in union in His name. In union. As one, in His one church, but with different views, backgrounds, and opinions. Being patient and grace-filled with one another. We go to church to learn how to apply our faith in the real world, first among the brethren who think like us, then in the world of those who do not.

3.    We go to church to work. Not like we do a job – to build or to achieve or to earn money. Instead, we come to church for its own sake, for the sake of the encounter itself, not to support a building or gather money to pay our pastor or to establish relationships. We do it for love, immediate love for God, like we hug a child or feed the hungry or tend the sick. Church is a corporate declaration that God is the highest possible good and we come to church to show Him in ways beyond those we can do alone. We bring the best of what we have individually and put them together to make more.

4.    We go to church because God’s lessons have to be applied in flesh and blood. The church is at its root messy. We all have to be prepared for messy -  it’s part of the church and what we’re supposed to learn in it – how to get along. That’s why we call it a family.

From the beginning, the church functioned not as a separate, privileged entity, but to show believers how to fold their beliefs into everyday lives. Our primary connection to God remains individual, but our way of working it out has to be communal. After all, we need to learn to share earth because we will undoubtedly share heaven. We may choose our companions in this life, but God will choose them for us in the hereafter. This is why living a Christian life alone isn’t enough. Trying to live a life of faith alone is like learning to play the piano on a cardboard keyboard. You never make a mistake because no real music is produced.

1.    Hebrews 10:24-25: "And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

2.    Acts 2:42, 46: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer... Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.”.

3.    Colossians 3:16: "Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts

 We show we are Christians by our love, because when we live and work together in Christ, we make each other better and thereby glorify God. Our personal experience of God is enlarged by what we share together.

Church is the place where the gospel comes alive. The setting may be a living room, a coffee shop, or an intentional building like this one. They can all be churches when they all share two things in common –seeking together the truth of God and the desire to live and love it out in the real world.

And that, Mary, is why, and how, we go to church.

Out of Practice

 

This is my piano yesterday morning. Look closely and you will see it. Dust, and a lot of it. Laying on the keys, black and white, like feathers. It's easy to look at the dust and see a reflection of poor housekeeping, and it may indeed be so, but there's more, I think. What I see when I look at the dust on my piano is something between the failure of good intentions and weakness of discipline.

This is the piano I bought two years ago  because I missed having one. I missed the sound and feel of moving my fingers across the keyboard and listening to the rich tones that resulted. I missed Fur Elise and  Greensleeves and the Moonlight Sonata, all of which I knew once, but have mostly forgotten. The hand exercise would be good for my arthritis and the music good for my soul. But somehow, because I once knew how to play these things, I thought they would come back instantly. I can hear the music in my head. Why wouldn't my fingers remember just as easily? 

But it didn't work that way. It didn't work because I didn't practice. I didn't do the very thing I needed to do to make it happen. 

One would think that, by this time we would have figured out some of this out - some of the basic life truths  regarding good and evil, right and wrong. Oh sure, in theory we have. In theory in the world at large, in the great 'they', or in someone else's life. But I don't like those truths when I have to employ them myself. They're hard. They require discipline and focus. The require more than knowledge, more than good intentions. 

In order to play the piano again, I need to actually pay my dues all over again, like with any other learned behavior. I'm out of practice, and it takes practice to do anything well and, eventually, more easily. That's true of exercise, of good eating habits, of learning, of faith habits, and of loving well, as much as it is true of playing piano. It's true of anything worth knowing or living. 

It will take more than a dust cloth to fix this. It will take action. I should have known that all along.

Life after 70, Podcast with David Tracy

 This is a great place to share my own adventure as well as a few nuggets about living life at 70, thanks to my sweet friend, David Tracy--click here!

or click here

Skin

 There is a kind of self-awareness that Descartes, the French Enlightenment philosopher expressed as "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefore I am." In the philolosophy world, this phrase is called simply the Cogito for short, forms the basis for a whole school of thought called Rationalism, and is one of the few philosophical declarations that persists into common culture.  

It's a springboard for self-examination and self-study wherein one ruminates upon one's own condition and place in the world. Based on a basic understanding each person exists as a discrete human being, separate from all others, it is the beginning of our understanding of what we call personhood now. 

As one adds years, however, the nature of that awareness changes because, well, we change. Life begins by building and growing, but if one lives long enough, eventually evolves into shedding and simplifying.  The skin is perfect mirror for these changes. When we are young, the skin can barely hold all that we are and do. It is fine and smooth and full of young oil. 

Like a balloon, however, we can't possible continue to expand. Long lives accumulate too many experiences, too much knowledge and understanding, for young skin to contain and the strain of it is reflected there. 

Skin

 Satin yields to crepe as taut and plump dissolves into slack folds,

Accomplished adventure looking for release.

What is done is not left behind but carried,

Years less burden than welcome weight.

Gradual deconstruction remarks survival and triumph -

Allows accumulated pressures to fall away,

Disassembling their hidden gathered strength

Rather than preserving dangerous retention in visible beauty

Until skin can no longer contain it

And gives way in frantic cogito,

Imploding like a star. 

Some Raspberries Don't Ripen until after the Frost

 Some raspberries don't ripen until after the frost. It wasn't what they were made to do...raspberries  are meant for hot summer days and long sunshine, when their juice gathers sweet and they turn red day after day in tart waves. Then, it seems like there will always be more. I know better, of course. I know that the days will get short and cold, and that the time for raspberries will pass. But they don't.

Some roses don't bloom until October. When all around them, more predictable buds turn to hips, they refuse to prepare for sleep yet. It doesn't matter that so many around them are ready to store up what energy is left to them and save it for other days. They use everything they have left now to remind the world of beauty. They know it will be a long winter and and they've made their job memory.

Blanketflowers just don't know when to stop. For them, it could still be June, when they first poked strong stems up from sleepy dirt, just then gone warm. All summer, they bloomed thick and sunny and liked it. They must be addicted.

The daisies are probably laughing. In June, they bloomed dense, crowding each other for sunlight in sensational, snowy clumps. Then they stopped, but their leaves stayed green. Now, they give a single gift like a child holding a dandelion to his mother. Here, this is for you. I love you,

I think maple has been listening to them all, having refused to turn proper maple-y red and gold. It concedes only its tips to autumn, telling me that it, like all the others, knows what time it is, but has so loved feeling the sap run and favorable breezes. They are not ready to die.

Me either.

Last Berries

 

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once in July when the sun is high and hot, 

when bees circumnavigate their busy route between blooms, 

leaving me to reach between them for my breakfast -

 and once in September, when dew hangs heavy on their leaves 

and branches don't tolerate bending but, anticipating brittle cold, 

snap when I lift them to peer underneath for the purpling berries hiding there.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once when still young and supple, 

confident of many more risings and settings, 

when, exposing their heads to the sky, 

look unafraid toward productive tomorrows, 

full of juice and beauty.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

once when nearly done, while leave curl dark at their edges,

and their buds are almost spent, 

nudged into fruit that may not have time to ripen.

These branches bend under accumulated weight,

grown from resisting the storms of a full season and 

the weight of small, green berries that will not have time to redden.

My raspberries fruit twice - 

early and late,

young and old, 

carefree and wise,

innocent and full of days.

One life, one season,

producing what they can until one perfect frost cuts them off.

Taste one. These last berries are the sweetest.

That's how I know they are mine. 

Why We Make Love After a Funeral: What to Do With Who We Are after COVID-19

Image credit: Adobe stock

 We live in times unlike even those of us who wear many years have ever known. These last days, we find, take a grim toll on body and spirit. Many died, and many more walk wounded, broken by illness or dread, as though having abandoned hope of ever again living in peace.

We recognize the worst of sufferers by their resolute faces turned toward chaos because there is nowhere else to go. This chaos, the like of which we have never seen before in either scope or magnitude. This chaos, from which we can see little relief or solution ahead. It's a dismal landscape to wander and we feel every sad step of it. This is our post-pandemic world of shared grief, one which will never brag a declaration of victory. We will not have won, but we can survive. 

We Need a Funeral

Deaths are all like that, of course - endings and darkness, and the pains that come with them. What we need is a funeral. We need to lay these sorrows to rest and raise a headstone over them - "Here lies the COVID-19 pandemic. It killed something carefree in us all, but we survived its deceitful malice. We survived." And then, once we have done thrown exultant handfuls of dirt into the grave, raise a toast.

We need do away with dread and panic. Every death leaves survivors wondering how to find a new firm place to stand. It's how surviving is done, and it is always done while grieving. 

Actually, we already know exactly how, having gone to enough funerals during our long years of life to recognize them through song and rhythm, smell and flavor. We know how to preside over the coffin lid's close, over the scattering of ashes. We know how to walk away from the grave and lift faces toward a world still alive.

That's why we make love after a funeral. The love gives loud voice and firm action to the life that remains. It declares that no amount of death can defeat whatever life still holds for the breathing.

And When the Funeral is Over

We will never run out of threatening sorrows. Misfortune constantly lurks, but graveyards do not make nourishing homes. No one residing there thrives. We, the living, bear no fault for turning our backs to the tombs, even as we remember them.

There is no going back. What we've lost is gone forever, but if funerals perform any service at all, they let us leave sorrow and memory where they belong - behind us. They let us remember our living humanity, fully expecting to grin and grow again.

COVID-19 cannot dismantle our humanity unless we let it, unless we make our beds among the dead. If we breathe, we are meant to live, and so rediscover common ground and the joy of rebuilding. Look somebody full in the eye today. They are hurting, too.