Epiphany 6A 2020

1 Corinthians 3:1-9

Matthew 5:21-37

The Rev. Dr. Kathy Kelly

 

Later this morning, six of our brothers and sisters here at Grace will commit, or in one case re-commit, their life to Christ. Joy Hottenstein will be baptized and confirmed, Terry Nester will reaffirm his baptismal vows and four others will be confirmed including our acolyte - Ryan.

Preparing for this service has made several conversations about joining the church come alive for me this week.

One, which I shared in Grace Notes was about a mistake Samantha made, or maybe it was her spell check software. She misspelled Confirmation as Conformation several times as we prepared the bulletin for that service.

I thought it was funny. But Mark Carper pointed out that joining the church should be taken seriously and we should realize that it is conforming. We use the word confirm because the people say vows together of our belief in Jesus and our commitment to follow him and behave in certain expected ways. The clergy confirm the vows that the people make to support the persons who publicly profess faith in Christ.

But Mark is right. When we join we agree to conform to certain expectations.

What then does it mean to belong to the church? One rule of thumb I learned as a young person was that it means a commitment to supporting the church with “prayers, presence, gifts, and service”. The gifts are about money but showing up and praying for and with each other is important too.

Another rule of thumb I have heard used more recently is that membership means that you attend often and “have a relationship with the treasurer.” That last part is about money and the attendance part is so that we can spend time together and pray together in order to build community.

Some see joining any organization as like being on the same team. This means, however, that to be on one team is to be different than any other team. The teams for the church get segregated by denomination, cultural values, liturgical style and doctrine among many divisions.

The most profound questions to ask about what it means to be the church are along the line of elitism. Are we just a social club? Are we a tribe? Do we thrive on “us against them” perspectives which keep us in our corner, exclusive and not O.K. with the them in the equation?

Another way to consider this is, are we inclusive? Are we diverse? Are we open to anyone who wants to join us in prayer, sacrament and mission? Are we inclusive enough?

In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul defines the church as the body of Christ. This description of the church is very familiar. Jesus is the head, everyone has a part to play or a talent or gift or job. And it is “only God who gives the growth,” as the reading this morning says.

But in our tendency toward divisiveness, do we make the mistake of wanting to cut off a foot or pluck out an eye because we don’t like the way that part thinks or behaves, or believes? Do we trust that Jesus is in control?

While our tendency is to elevate certain spiritual gifts over others, Paul's words are a deliberate claim of even-handedness, even-giftedness. When it comes to how and in what ways God chooses to work in and through our commitment to faithful living, we are equal.

The Gospel reading today is the last section of the Sermon on the Mount. In it Jesus speaks of membership rather directly, though not using that language. He is talking about the Jewish law and there were certainly tribes among the Hebrew people who came together through the Jewish law.

Though it may sound like he is suggesting a new law with all those times he says, “You have heard it said something something but I say something something,” that’s not what he’s saying.

It seems as if Jesus is proclaiming, “You previously have heard this commandment, but now I am setting a new one before you, for the law was inadequate, insufficient, and is thus now no longer applicable; here is a new set of commandments to replace the supposedly outdated ones you previously followed.”

But that’s a misinterpretation.

Jesus is actually preaching not about replacement of the law but intensification of the law. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus calls his listeners not to avoid the laws of righteousness but to dig that much more into them, to align our lives that much more with the abiding divine values these commandments communicate, to commit ourselves to the transformative power of God’s law and commandments.

Among those laws is the commandment of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a prerequisite for coming before God at the altar. That is why we pass the peace so that we can make sure we are all in reconciliation with each other before communion. But what about those who are not here to pass the peace? What if broken relationships among neighbors, family, and friends are not just social obstacles among the larger community but a barometer for our relationship to God too?

Jesus constructs a particular kind of community, one organized around love and not power. It is a community that centers on trust, a trust that does not rely on oaths and vows but on the deep commitments God’s children make to one another. Such trust, such commitment is not born of human will but of God. Only God calls and makes possible such belonging. Only God does the growing.

I learned how to be in relationship with my neighbors from the church in which I grew up. And, since that was really all about how to behave within those social constructs, I learned how to live inside of that particular family and that particular church.

This was most revealing when I was sent to our church’s summer camp. There I learned that there were others who believed and behaved like my home church which validated my ideal that all people of the earth did, or should, see things our way.

It was the beginning of my path to elitism.

Fortunately, that path was interrupted early when some of my teachers invited me to dig a litter deeper and some of the preachers who came and went in that church talked about a Jesus who was not the Sr. Warden of our parish and didn’t look anything like that white guy with the too-long legs in the picture over the altar.

I began to learn to live into the Universal Christ. I began to learn to trust in the Jesus who died and lives for and within all people who will receive him.

To borrow from a number of authors, instead of the tradition of Believe, Behave, Belong - many summer camps for kids practice the opposite: Belong, Behave, Believe. Being a camper was being a part of something special. And everyone was a part of that specialness and so we all felt loved. Belonging is a deep desire in our hearts. Belonging comes first, then we learn from the community how to behave and what to believe.

Maybe it should be the other way around.

Many of our brothers and sisters who did not grow up in the church came to the church for belonging and are looking for how to behave and what to believe. Others of us, and this is true for most of us in this room, were raised in the faith and taught what to believe first, how to behave second and this gave us a sense of belonging. Maybe we have trouble letting go of that old way of belonging and need to check out what it means to belong now, here, in this world. In fact, instead of focusing on belonging, perhaps it would help to focus on becoming the body of Christ.

To truly follow Jesus, to truly become part of the Body of Christ, you have to do just that - become.  This means changing and growing always. If we already know everything, we can’t grow. If we are already right about everything we can’t grow. If we can’t practice forgiveness we are certainly stuck and certainly not practicing relationality.

When I was about 12 my friend Ava called one evening and invited me to go with her to a kite flying contest the next day. Ava was quite adventurous and I liked her ideas so I went out and bought a kite for a quarter at the market down the street and put it together that night with a little help from Mom and met her up at the high school practice field the next morning.

What Ava didn’t tell me was that this was a Boy Scout event. We were the only girls there. We had to sign in a pay 5 bucks each. She did tell me that part so I had 5 of my mother’s dollars in my pocket, but when we got to the head of the line the adult there said, “no”. He told us this was a contest for boys only.

Well, Ava had done her homework and argued that the stipulation in the advertisement in the paper said that you did not have to be a Boy Scout and said nothing about having to be a boy. The adult looked at another man who nodded and so we were in.

We also won one of the categories like highest or longest flight, I can’t remember. At the end of the day all the kids there congratulated the winners and encouraged the losers and forgot about gender or membership. We were joined in our love of kites and our love of our town, our community.

 That experience left me with the realization of what it means to join a group. It takes some profession, some passion. It also may mean taking a stand and will certainly involve some amount of initiation. But in the end it is a shared love of something and a shared community.

But the church is not a club. Joining the church means laying down our lives, dying unto Christ and picking up our cross and following him as committed disciples. It means keeping the commandments and staying open to all the possibilities that are out there in the people who God calls us to love.

Being a member of the body of Christ means an absolute, out-and-out conjoining of one with the other, a sister or brother in Christ. To exist in division, to see only difference and not the unity we are able to profess because of Christ, to demand conformity without the celebration of difference - this is to entertain the notion of dismemberment. If we follow the desires of dismemberment, we will find ourselves cut off from the very source of our life, our existence, and in a way, our ability to be most fully who we are. To what extent are we able to live out fully our callings if we are not able to rely on and give support to others to live out theirs?

Once again, we are reminded of our interconnectedness as a community of Christ. We need to keep learning how to be the body of Christ. We need to keep growing in God. I hope you will continue this conversation with me and with each other. Let’s name the ways we are complicit in divisiveness. Let’s put aside our desire toward elitism. And let’s do the difficult work of joining Jesus on The Way.

Amen.

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