I want to tell you today about the
stinky church. Strangely, it’s the story of a boat.
Now, there are a
lot of boats in the Bible. Jesus falls asleep in one; Peter jumps out of
another; the baby Moses floats in his own kind of basket-boat in the Nile, but
no boat is quite as famous as the ark. The big one. It is this boat that so
captures our imaginations.
It’s
also a tough one to preach on Rally Sunday, to be honest, having seen the state
of us, God decides he’s seen enough. Get
rid of it all! Let’s start over! If you’re hoping God doesn’t come to a
similar conclusion today, then you really have to hope that God doesn’t have
Twitter. At the last second, stopping short of obliterating the human race, God
gives us a boat. He gives it to Noah, but that boat just keeps floating, even
to today.
That
boat is the church.
Now, when I say
that, I want to point out that this isn’t some radical, millennial pastor off-the-wall
thought. Boats have been a sign of the church for as long as there has been a
church. In fact, many sanctuaries have been constructed to look like an
upside-down ship. If you’ve ever been in a church with flying buttresses and a
large curved ceiling, there’s a decent bet that the architects had a boat in
mind in the construction.
On
Rally Sunday, we come back together as the church, floating in this boat
together, some of us having left it for the better part of the summer to, you
know, enjoy time in your other boat. So, you return refreshed, or guilty, or maybe
both. Others of you have been here all along, waiting for fall so the pews
could fill back up a bit, eager to lighten that load of coins accumulating over
the summer when we get to Noisy Offering. Still others are not here even yet,
and we might see them on Christmas Eve or at a funeral, or maybe never.
I want to start by
acknowledging something that we don’t often say enough as the church: It is
hard to be here. There are so many other things begging for your time. If you
have young kids, you certainly don’t get much out of the church service. You probably
aren’t even hearing me right now, because you have one eye on the child with
the marker trying to color the pew, and your nose is otherwise occupied,
wondering if that smell is your baby’s diaper or just the person in the pew in
front of you. Others of you find it hard to be here for different reasons—perhaps
because retirement means freedom you haven’t experienced since childhood; you can travel, you can go to the lake. When else are you going to take advantage of
that?
It’s
hard to be here, but the thing I want to say, even more strongly, is that it’s
also hard to not be here, and the reason I say that is because, without the
church, you have to convince yourself of a promise bigger than yourself on your
own. And. That. Is. Rough. If you don’t hear the Gospel preached, not just by
the pastor in the funny robe, but in the voices of children singing, and the
organ playing, and the messiness that is corralling nine-year-olds and ninety-year-olds
and putting them in the same place when one can’t hear at all and the other
wants to hear about nerf guns. If you don’t come into the boat, then convincing
yourself that there is good news is all-but impossible. We need the church,
because even though it’s a mess, it is the only boat we have in a flooded sea.
Shane
Claiborne puts it this way in Irresistible
Revolution. He says, “The church is like Noah’s ark. It stinks, but if you
get out of it, you’ll drown.”
That’s the tension
of Rally Sunday, of this scripture, of this church—all the people here, and those
not here. The church stinks. Never have I been more disgusted with the church
than I have been reading about abuses of power like what we’re seeing again in
the Catholic Church, but it’s not just about us/them, because no matter the
tribal allegiances we cook up, in the end we are all the body of Christ. We
make far too much about people transferring between churches when it’s like moving
down the street in the kingdom of God—to move from Lutheran to Catholic to
Episcopalian to Covenant to Assemblies, you aren’t leaving town; it’s still the
one stinking boat. And, yes, I’d like to believe that the ELCA does a better
job than other churches of holding leaders accountable to appropriate
boundaries, but we all know it isn’t perfect and it only takes one instance—one
person—for the whole deck of cards to come crashing down and for trust to be
destroyed, perhaps never to be rebuilt. Power corrupts pastors and Sunday
School teachers, even those with no official authority but who still represent
the church to somebody on the outside. She is the church. He is the church. And
I can’t accept being a part of that.
The
boat stinks, the church stinks, because the rot of sin is everywhere. We look
like a bunch of hypocrites to anybody who assumes that what we’re doing here is
talking about how rosy we smell. They know that’s a bunch of—in the words of a
seminary professor of mine—male bovine fecal matter. They know this, because
they know what you were like when you were nineteen—they remember!—they
remember how much you stank, and now you’re in church! If only the pastor knew
the stories! This is why people apologize when they swear in front of me and
then one of their friends awkwardly introduces me to them as “Pastor Frank.”
They apologize because in their eyes, whether they realize it or not, they
believe that the church is pretending not to stink. If peoples’ dominant
understanding of the church is a place where people come because we are so
faithful and #blessed, then the hypocrisy will be overwhelming.
But
here’s the thing about Noah and the ark: The only thing that’s going to save
anybody is that stinking boat. It’s going to carry us to Jesus, but it’s going
to stink the whole way, kind of like the place Jesus was born, and, frankly,
the place where he died. So, we’re stuck on this stinky boat of a church,
surfing the waves with stinky animals and stinky people, who are also animals
and remind us of that fact often. So, you might be wondering how it is that we
attract people to this wonderful ship that we are on.
I
tell you what we don’t do: We don’t sell people on the lie that the church is a
luxury yacht. In fact, you don’t sell the church at all. Instead, you point out
to people: “You know, by the way, you are
drowning, and yeah, it smells like a combination of cattle barn and boys locker
room over here, but, seeing as you have no other options, maybe come aboard for
a moment.”
The
boat stinks—the church is not what we imagine it could be, but it’s all we’ve
got. The rest is just flood waters. So, if you’re on the outside, come listen to
the good news, no matter the stench of the people preaching it. And if you’re
on the inside, don’t pretend it smells like roses over here. It’s OK to be who
we are: stinky people in a drowning world.
The
ark is messy. That beautiful rainbow is just a hint of the promise that
persists even through death. We may get on the ship and think it’s going to be
a pleasure cruise toward that rainbow until we see that God just keeps sailing
us further—from the rainbow to the cross. Come, stinky church, come and die,
God says. Then, and only then, on Easter morning, are we bathed in something
that can remove this stench; we’re not there yet, but we’re listening for it in
the good news preached by children singing, in babies being born, in funerals,
in weddings, in Sunday School and lessons never learned, in the sacraments,
which are mysterious, even as they scare us with their gravity, and make us
nervous that we’re doing them wrong even though they are manifestations of
grace, and in the counter-cultural awareness that we are not the ones who will
save ourselves. This is the kind of business that the stinky church is up to. God,
doing God things, while we stink the place up.
Thanks be to God.
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