July 8, 2012
Why Go to Church?
- Matthew 16:13-19
- Rev Ruth Chadwick Moore
About a month ago, my husband Mark brought home a signed copy of a new book written by our good friend David Johnson. Now some of you may know David – he was once a member of this church, served on its session and his father, the Reverend Dr. Gerry Johnson was Northminster’s interim pastor before Fred Mathias came to be our Senior Pastor. David has written a book called “Learning from My Father – Lessons on Life and Faith.”
As a freshman at Harvard David felt displaced, homesick and overwhelmed sometimes by his new intellectual challenges. So he began exchanging letters with his father – this was obviously back in the 70’s when we still wrote “real” letters to each other. Years later David discovered these letters and he shares excerpts from them in this book. Learning from My Father is a book that contains fatherly advice – but it also contains wisdom, reflection on life and death, and talks about faith and doubt. David is an excellent writer – even for a lawyer – and I read the whole book in about 3 days. I have recommended it to our ChristCare groups and 2 of them are studying it. I bought copies for the church staff so they could also read it. I recommend it to all of you as well. It is a book about love, faith, marriage, work – a book about living your life as a Christian – and what that entails. I will be using excerpts from this book for the next two weeks in my sermons.
I guess I have been preaching long enough that I am starting to repeat myself on sermons – at least on sermon titles. When I went to save this sermon in my Word documents I found that I preached a sermon on why we should go to church way back in September of 2010. It was probably a boring sermon and I hope you have forgotten it. And of course I am hoping this sermon will have different insights – but if you are bored with this one, just greet me after worship with a friendly handshake and a smile.
Our Director of Christian Education, Debbie Bulloff, gave me a copy of Rev Anne Russ’s blog post entitled: “Ten Reasons Why You Should be Going to Church.” Now I realize I am preaching to the choir this morning as you are actually in church. But I thought these reasons made sense (even though the word “should” is too parental for me.) Copies of “The Ten Reasons You Should Go to Church” are on the Welcome Table in the Gathering Place. Next Sunday is Invite a Friend Sunday and these reasons might be helpful in sharing with someone why they might consider coming to church. They are in ascending order of importance.
#10. Coming to church doesn’t mean you have no doubts about God or faith or religion. It means you have a place you can share with people who have their own doubts.
#9. Bad stuff is going to happen in your life. It just is. A church community cannot be everything to everyone in times of crisis, but when the bottom falls out of your world, it’s great to have a community to lift you back up.
#8. Bad stuff is going to happen in your life, part two. The time to build a relationship with God is not when life turns ugly and you’ve run out of all other options. Attending worship regularly helps build a relationship with God and others that will give you a solid foundation when the winds blow and the storms come.
#7. Not all churches are anti-something. Most of us are for people, for acceptance, for hospitality. Really, we’re out there. We just don’t get the good press.
#6. Any church worth its salt has good food on a regular basis.
#5. Churches offer paint-by-number opportunities to serve. Many people would like to help the poor, the hungry and the homeless, but they don’t know how to get involved, how to make the time to be involved, or what they can do to really make a difference. Churches offer you ways to plug in to help those who need it.
#4. You’ve got a gift. Probably two or ten of them. Becoming involved in the ministry of a church will help you discover and use gifts you never even knew you had.
#3. Not all churches are after your money. Good churches want you to have a healthy relationship with money. Sure, churches need to pay the electric bill and the pastor and youth director, but money and the church is more about you than it is about the church. It’s about your own relationship with money. World events have proven that it’s much better to put faith in God than in a bank account. Church can help you with that.
#2. Taking a break from our hectic lives to come to church is accepting the gift of Sabbath. Wayne Mueller says, “Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.” We don’t take Sabbath and come to worship because we have time and have finished everything that needs to be done. We take Sabbath because it is time to stop, and we are designed to stop, rest and reflect. Those who don’t are destined to crash and burn.
#1. Jesus is really cool. Even if you don’t know if you can believe in the whole Son-of-God thing, even if you refer to the resurrection as the Zombie Jesus event and even though those of us already in church often do a lousy job of following him, come to church to get to know Jesus. The more you get to know him, the more you’ll understand why people call his way The Way.
David Johnson’s gives us his reasons for going to church in a chapter entitled, “Showing up for Work.” Just like all of us, David can come up with excuses for not coming to church. But he knows that he is missing something if he doesn’t participate in worship. This is what he says: “It’s not that I’m not going to be a ‘worse person,’ or even, most likely, forgo some blazing insight imparted in the morning sermon that will cause me to see and make life’s choices more clearly. It’s not even about going to church for self-improvement. It’s about showing up. It’s about affirming that I am part of something larger, part of a community that has made an important choice, part of a group that has much to say and a great deal to do in the world.”
This is what his father had to say:
I don’t think we can overlook the church as the ultimate source of many of the answers you and I are seeking. If Jesus Christ is real, then the church must also be real. It is Christ’s church. He made it. It is his body. In a very literal way the church is Christ alive in the world. The person who says, “I don’t care for the institutional church; I don’t like the bureaucracy of it,” may be perfectly right. But that person also has to see that everything about the organization is not bad, and some great things get done through the bureaucracy and all those committees – services, gifts, programs that would not happen if a person were simply going it alone. Someone once declared that “Christianity which does not begin with the individual does not begin, but Christianity which ends with the individual simply ends.” Not a bad point don’t you think?
David also talks in his book about doing a research project one summer while he was in college – so this must have been the late 70’s. He worked with a large Methodist church in Indianapolis and did in depth interviews trying to figure out why over 1000 busy, sophisticated and thoughtful people – well at least for Methodists! – regularly choose the traditional church as a place to devote a valuable portion of their weekly time, as well as their resources and energies. The answers he found are probably ones we would still find today and even here at Northminster. People wanted a true perspective on their lives, and a context for making decisions. They said the church offered a unique place where learning, reflection and conversation about “what matters” were not only possible, but also expected. They talked about finding a community. Others found church to be a private and personal refuge.
These are the reasons David gets up on Sunday morning and goes to church – although he is the first to admit his worship attendance could be better. “To start with, at least for me, the church remains the only place where I can have an open conversation with others about faith, and learn more about my own through the message of good pastoral preaching.” He also says, “… if we are believers in the relevance of Christ’s teachings, then we should probably take pretty seriously his directives to Peter and the apostles to ‘build my church’ (Matt 16:18) From the start, we’re supposed to understand that Christ’s legacy is not only eternal but also, in a very real sense, institutional. Our belief is designed and mandated, to be wrapped up in our belonging.” His father makes a similar observation:
When Jesus was physically here in the body, he healed and comforted and taught and preached. He did all these things personally. Now Jesus is no longer physically present. So he has given the world his new body in a different form – the church. And a body – any body – must be organized or it can never function. So the real work of the church is to get organized and be obedient to the head, which is Christ. The real work of the church is to do the same work that Jesus did when he was physically present – ministering to others, being compassionate, healing, preaching, teaching. I think this is precisely how Jesus planned to make his impact on the world – through people, organized to present his message and do his work.
David and Gerry know there are problems with the church. David, like many of us, especially worries about our children who are interested in church and spirituality but do not affiliate with any particular religious faith. But listen to what Gerry tells his son about the church:
I know a great many more things are wrong with the church than does the average critic. … but I know other things too. Without the church and its message, you could not believe and think as you do. The church is really the only institution, the only agency, to bring people to an understanding of God. There are a lot of organizations for recreation, for study and fellowship, for moral uplift. But only the church speaks to the total person. Still today, the church that Christ founded continues to serve, continues to administer the life-affirming sacraments, continues to preach the gospel, continues to engage in good works. The church does what no other group on earth can or will do; it points to God – and even in its often poor way, tries to work his will.
David and I both believe there are other institutions beside the church that in their own ways carry out the will of God in the world. But we both agree on Gerry’s final point – the church is just part of the package when it comes to any Christian’s relationship with God. It’s not optional; it’s inseparable.
I am going to finish this sermon using David’s words and I thank him and his dear departed father for helping me to write this sermon today.
“Christianity at its heart is not an individual, soul searching, or soul saving pursuit; Christ’s whole point was to create a community of believers who are individually important but whose corporate existence is also supposed to work as something valuable in and of itself. The church is not a venue for our entertainment, a show that we can take in or ignore as we choose. If we put our faith in the authority of God and the love of Christ, then the church not only comes with the territory – it is the territory. And if the church isn’t measuring up to its goals (which, of course, it fails to be on a regular basis), then it is our institution, our problem to fix… For those of us who call ourselves Christians, it’s past time to get to work.”
Amen.
Resource: Learning from My Father, Lessons on Life and Faith, The Seventh Lesson, SHOWING UP FOR WORK, by David Lawther Johnson, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012.