Brad Sullivan
St. Mark’s, Bay City
April 24, 2016
5 Easter, Year C
Acts
11:1-18
John 13:31-35
The Church: Jesus' Community of Love, Faith, and Grace - Not an Institution
I give
you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you
also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another."
Hearing
those words makes me love Jesus even more and want to follow him and trust in
him. His commandment that his disciples
love one another is part of his farewell speech and prayer for his disciples before
he is crucified. Jesus knew he was going
to die, and he knew he had a pretty good following. He knew that if he chose to, he could have asked
them to fight for him, and they would have done it. They might have even kept him alive in their
efforts. Of course, some of them would have
died in the process, and he loved them far too much for that, not to mention
that he knew it was not God’s will.
Rather
than disobey God, rather than risk harm for those whom he loved, Jesus chose to
be killed. Not only that, but remember
that Jesus had been working for years to reform people’s understanding of God,
of their relationship to God, and of their relationship to each other. He’d been working for years to show people
that love, faith, and grace are at the heart of their way of life. For the people of Israel, he didn’t abolish
the law of their religion, he fulfilled it through love, faith, and grace. For the gentiles, who were added to Jesus’
movement after his resurrection, he came to show them as well, that love for
one another, faith in God, and grace given by God and accepted and re-given by
us, is the way of life, the way of life abundant and life everlasting which he
gives to us.
This
movement of Jesus, this movement of love, faith, and grace which he had spent
years working on, was just getting started as Jesus was about to be killed, and
he chose to trust his movement to his fledgling disciples rather than risk
their lives or take up the sword against another. That is the Jesus whom we love, the Jesus
whom we follow, the Jesus in whom we have faith, the Jesus who loves us and
gives us grace that we might receive his grace and then offer it to others.
Love one
another, Jesus said. Have faith in me,
and follow me even when you doubt.
Receive grace to forgive you of all your misdeeds, grace to heal you
from the shame of the past, grace to offer to others just as I have offered it
to you. Such is the life and the
community which Jesus gave to us. When I
think on that, on that community for which Jesus gave his life, I cannot help but
love Jesus and want to continue on as his disciple.
That is
what I see when I see the church, not an institution. There is a paradigm shift in that when we can
see the institution of the church as the church, but it is not. The shift is to see us as that community of
people whom Jesus loves.
Last
week, Kristin and I watched Spotlight,
the best picture last year which told the story of the Boston Globe newspaper
breaking the story of the immense systemic abuse of children in the Roman
Catholic church. As I was watching the
movie and then thinking about what Jesus commanded his disciples, I kept
thinking, "How did Jesus’ community of love, faith, and grace become an
institution so powerful and corrupt that children around the world were being
abused by priests for decades with almost total impunity?"
The
reasons and many and vast and would take looking at most of church history to
fully understand. Without going into
centuries of church history, however, I will look at one culprit that allowed
this to happen, and that is the near deification of clergy.
Children
often thought of the clergy as God, or at least as speaking for God. Adults did about the same. Clergy were put up on a pedestal throughout
the institution of the church so much so that no one dared go against
them. The people ended up under the
thumb and under the rule of the clergy, and it wasn't just the clergy's fault;
the people also elevated them. There was
a partnership there in raising the clergy up so much so that the people were
under the clergy's thumb, the clergy claiming the place of Jesus within the
church, but in the total opposite way that Jesus led his church.
While
the clergy were elevated above who they actually were, Jesus descended. That was Jesus' way.
Though
he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as
something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. And being
found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of
death-even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)
Over the
centuries, the church began exalting their leaders so much so that when
corruption and abuse became systemic, no one would stop it, because they
couldn’t go against these exalted people.
Now the
abuse of children in the Roman church is one example of how far the church
often can be from the community of love, faith, and grace which Jesus
began. It's a graphic example, but there
are many ways that we can stray from the community of love, faith, and grace
which Jesus began. We also need to
remember, lest we end up casting unfair aspersions, the Roman Catholic church
is also a wonderful church which full of people and clergy of love, faith, and grace. I brought up the abuse as a graphic example
of how divergent the church can become
from the community which Jesus began.
Looking
at this example, and how it happened, the exaltation of the clergy, we don't
get to just point to Rome for that one either, lest we ignore the log in our
eye for the sake of the speck in someone else’s; we often elevate clergy in the
Episcopal Church too. I’ve often heard
that clergy are held to a higher standard of behavior than others, to which I
continually counter that clergy are not held to a higher standard. People may actually hold clergy accountable
to standards of behavior to which they don’t hold themselves or others accountable,
but there is not a different standard of behavior for clergy and for everyone
else. If there were, that would be an
institutionalized system of ignoring the log in one’s own eye for the sake of
the speck in someone else's. Elevating
the clergy, holding them to a higher standard, goes against what Jesus taught
and is not the way of the community he founded.
Jesus
didn't set himself above everyone else; he descended. He didn't set his apostles above everyone
else; he said to become a servant. Jesus’
church is not a place where we hold one another to various standards of living
at all, in actuality. Jesus' church is
not a place of keeping score with one another, keeping track of sins.
Jesus
said on the cross, "It is finished."
This system of keeping track of
sins and trying to make right for our sins to God is finished. No more sacrifices for sins. No more tallies. No more keeping score. No more gospels of sin management.
Gospel’s
of sin management have often pervaded the church, people thinking that our
prime purposes in the church is to do better, sin less, and get to Heaven when
we die. Even with Jesus’ help, such a
Gospel basically puts Jesus in the role of a ticket puncher. If you’ve believed in Jesus well enough and
behaved well enough (even with his help), then Jesus punches your ticket and
you get to go to Heaven when you die. We'd
like to add that it's not because of anything I do, it's purely because of the
grace of Jesus, but then by how we talk about it, by how we live, these gospels
of sin management basically make it so that you're earning your way to Heaven. You're doing enough that Jesus will finally
agree to punch your ticket.
Fortunately,
that is not the gospel for which Jesus died.
That is not the gospel Jesus taught.
That is neither the faith nor the church which Jesus left his
disciples. “Love one another,” Jesus
said, “that’s how they’ll know you are my disciples.” Jesus’ command to us continues to show his
love for us. His disciples were a bunch
of screw ups, if we’re being honest (if we're going to be counting sins, that
is), and Jesus entrusted his church to them not in spite of their screw ups,
not because they were screw ups, but completely regardless of their screw
ups. Jesus entrusted his church to his
disciples because they were his beloved.
We continue as Jesus’ church simply because we are his beloved.
We don’t
raise ourselves or anyone else up in Jesus’ church. We don't raise ourselves above anyone
else. We accept the fact that we are
beloved, and that is often the hardest task in our life, to simply accept the fact
that we are beloved. We accept the fact
that we are beloved of God, and we e receive the great love Jesus has for us,
not because we are worthy, not because we have earned his love, but simply
because we are beloved. We believe in
Jesus, accept his love, and follow him, even when we can hardly believe,
desperately clinging to this hope of Jesus’ love for us. Even when we give up that hope and faith in
Jesus' love for us, Jesus' love that catches us even and especially when we
fall, Jesus love catches us. So Jesus
asks us, commands us to accept his love. Accept that we are his beloved and then live
and give Jesus’ grace. That is the
community of the church. That is what we
see, or what Jesus would like us to see, when we see his church.
Now, we
often see the church as something else.
We see the church as a vast institution, like how people viewed the
Roman Catholic Church, but the Roman Catholic Church is not an
institution. The Roman Catholic Church has
an institution. The Roman Catholic
Church is a community of people who are beloved of Jesus. Period.
Full stop. Paradigm shift: What is the Roman Catholic Church? Not an institution, but a community of people
who are beloved of Jesus. Then, the
Roman Catholic Church has an institution which at times serves it well and at
times not so well.
Our
church too is not an institution, but our church has an institution. We have a whole institutional structure in
the Episcopal Church, but that institution is not the church. That institution is what the church has
created, what we have created over the centuries to serve us. The institution is the tool we have
constructed to help us order our lives.
The institution is a tool of the church, but not the church itself. The church itself, the is the community of
the beloved. Jesus’ church is the
gathered and often disperse community (those who no longer gather, those who no
longer believe but are still caught in Jesus' love).
The
church is that community of people who know, and love, and accept, and forget,
and mess up with Jesus’ love. The church
are those who believe in Jesus even amidst doubt, or stop believing in Jesus, and
then fall into Jesus’ grace. The church
is not those who are climbing upward and striving to heaven. The church is those who are falling,
continually falling into Jesus' love and Jesus' grace. What is who we are as the church. We are Jesus’ beloved, not because of who we
are, not because of what we do, but simply because we are Jesus beloved. Amen.