Get out of Church!

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost Year A

June 28, 2020

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

The Reverend Canon Michael J. Horvath

Gospel: Matthew 10:40-42

This may sound odd, and please don’t be offended, but my favorite part of the Sunday service is when you all leave.  You see, I think the loveliest words of the service is said at the end, in our post-communion prayer. In Eucharistic Prayer B, the post-communion prayers says, “Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.”  In other words, we’re asking God for homework until we meet again the following Sunday.  

Sending out is a common theme throughout the entire arc of the Bible.  God sends his servant Moses to confront Pharaoh; God tells the prophet Jeremiah “everywhere I send you, you shall go, and all that I command you, you shall speak”; the great prophet Isaiah said, “the Lord God has sent me.”  In the New Testament, we hear that “there came a man sent from God, his name was John”, John the Baptist; and in Luke, we hear that “Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth” to visit the virgin Mary; in an earlier verse in Matthew Jesus says “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.”

Our Gospel reading today extends that theme of sending, of being sent out.  Jesus sends his disciples out into the world to participate in his mission of proclaiming the Good News in word and deed.  “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” Jesus says today. It is assumed that the church is a “sent” church, one that is on the move, one that is on its feet and ever looking outward.  

I think one of the silver linings in this pandemic is how quickly and abruptly we have had to rethink what church means for us.  For many, the physical space of a church has been missing in their lives for the last few months, and a sense of disconnection and darkness has descended.  People have shared with me how cut off they are from their church family, their sense of place.  Some have mourned not being able to sit in “their” pew.  Others are frustrated that we have not yet opened up the church to a larger in person service.

What this reaction is, I would argue, is less about church and discipleship, as it is about seeking self-comfort and having routines disrupted, whether in the many small or by large seismic shifts that affect us globally.  It is typically about the outer trappings of church – the buildings itself, the quality of the choir, the vestments, the brass, etc. – that means “church” for people.  

It is a fascinating phenomenon, because if we read the Gospels closely, Jesus’s followers or even the early church post-Jesus’s ascension, were rarely comfortable.  I actually think that the healthiest churches are those in which we feel some level of discomfort. 

A colleague once told me that he was proud of how uncomfortable the pews were in his historic church.  And, having sat in them, I can attest to this.  The back of the pews went straight up and ended just below your shoulders; there was no seat cushion, and the seats themselves were not very deep, so you always felt like you were sitting on a narrow ledge.  His church had a capital campaign and none of the funds went to replace the 250-year-old pews, and I asked him why.  He said that he didn’t want the congregation to forget that church is a respite, a short visit, where one comes to gain strength to go back out into the world and do God’s work.  We shouldn’t get too comfortable at church. And I agree with him.  We often use religion as an opiate to shield us from all the horrors of the world, but at some point, the effects wear off and we must still face the realities of the world.  The church isn’t here for us to hide in.

We all need the comfort, spiritual sustenance and space to experience the divine through worship and song, but that’s a means, not an end to a life in Christ.  What we’re doing here, in this building today, is only a small part of our work as disciples.

The theologian Walter Rauschenbusch in his work titled  A Theology for the Social Gospel wrote “The institutions of the Church, its activities, its worship, and its theology must in the long run be tested by its effectiveness in creating the Kingdom of God.”  And the Kingdom of God is where we are filled with God’s presence and the fruits of that presence – love, justice, peace, wholeness - is felt by everyone.

And Rauschenbusch doesn’t hold back any punches because he later says in the same treatise, “If the Kingdom [of God] had stood as the purpose for which the Church exists, the Church [w]ould not have fallen into such corruption and sloth.”  

In other words, if we had God as our focus, we wouldn’t be frustrated at not being able to come to this building and sit in these comfortable pews, but instead figure out ways to serve those in our community for whom there is little comfort due to lack of income, food, access to medical treatment.  If ushering in the Kingdom of God was our main purpose, we wouldn’t be consumed with our failing roofs and broken pipes, without also trying to understand why our failing prisons are filled with a disproportionate number of people of color, or why over 300 trans and gender diverse people were murdered, hanged and lynched last year.  

All around the world statues and memorials celebrating colonial oppressors, dead confederates and systems that erased entire races and cultures, are being torn down and dismantled.  Our perception, as well as our community’s perception, of St. Michael’s as a place that is comfortable looking at its navel and living the life of a museum has to be dismantled as well if we ever intend to be sent out into the world as God needs us to be.

Sunday after Sunday, I pray that we are spiritually nourished, and that the mystery of God is a little more revealed to us.  And I pray that we find ourselves strengthened by our common prayer and sacraments.  But I pray that our time here is beneficial only to the extent that it gives us strength to be sent out into the world to do God’s work.  Because real salvation begins when we go back out those doors.  Do we feel the burning desire to proclaim the Good News to our community, to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, to clothe the naked and heal the broken?  To stand up to injustice, to be the voice of the voiceless, and the hands of the helpless? To comfort the fearful, to soothe the suffering.  

If we don’t feel that burning desire, then may God have mercy on us.   Because there is no other way to usher in the Kingdom of God.  This is the unspoken truth that we as a church try to avoid, but it is time to own up to that truth.  No amount of roof repairs, or colored vestments, or balanced budgets or choir voices or comfortable pews will be able to usher in God’s Kingdom.  But we can, with our hands, our feet, our voices and our hearts, because we are sent out by God.  Being sent out by God, we can usher in a kingdom where love is the password that unlocks all the hidden potential of our lives, where compassion for those on the margins must lead us to stand at those very margins, and where justice will be spoken of as something we already have rather than something we only can dream about.   Being sent out by God, we can usher in the Kingdom of God, and maybe today will be the day we exit this building and start to do just that.

Amen.