This is adapted from a sermon preached at midweek services at Zion Lutheran in Lake Bronson, MN.
This summer at
Grace and Red River we’re taking a narrative
lectionary tour through Revelation so I’m going to share a little bit of that
with you today. Together with the Acts reading we have a pretty clear central
theme for the service which is: churches in need of repentance. And I know there’s
nothing like a guest preacher coming into a place that is not his own and
preaching on churches in need of repentance, so here we go!
The truth is, whether I’m here at Zion or home at Grace or Red River
or basically at any church in the world, we have the same basic need for
repentance because we mostly have the same problems. I know some churches are
big and others small; some are financially secure and others barely holding on, so it might seem on the surface like these churches have very different
problems, but I want to suggest that it actually comes down to much the same
thing. The book of Revelation was written to seven churches in seven different
situations, but I can guarantee that your church fits into more than one of
these categories; in fact, if your church is like mine then it fits into all
seven. Every church has a problem sometimes with complacency, sometimes with
assimilation, and sometimes with fear of the outsider. And I know this because,
in spite of the fact that some churches are big and others are small, some are
secure and others are struggling, we are nonetheless part of the same big,
stinking church.
Now, clearly Zion is a different place from Grace in
Hallock, and it’s certainly a different place from the Covenant church down the
street. We believe some different things; we have some different sounding
people; how we express ourselves is different. Across the county and the state
and the nation there are churches that are richer and poorer; churches that are
big and small; churches with good preachers and bad preachers; churches that
are welcoming and unwelcoming; churches that are accepting of outsiders and
tight-knit; we could probably list one hundred things that distinguish one
church from another. There are a lot of churches out there, and even in
homogenous Kittson
County we know “our
kind of church” is and what is not.
“Brothers, what should we do?” ask
those early church leaders in Acts.
Laodicea had one response. They said, “I am
rich. I have prospered and need nothing.” Wealth, riches, comfort. Comfort is
what we all want—it’s what we want from our churches; it’s what separates us
from those others who make us uncomfortable.
Comfort is our joy and our goal. And it’s exactly the number one thing which we
need to repent of. Comfort is a universal sin for the
Christian church in places that are rich and even in those places that are
legitimately poor. Either we have comfort and we deify it, or we don’t have
comfort and we want it.
Laodicea was a church that heard the message
of Jesus Christ. They knew a man came down from heaven, died on a cross so that
they could have eternal life and then
he came back from the dead. This is no small thing. In fact, some of the people
in Laodicea
might have been there at the crucifixion, they may have been with the disciples
after the resurrection, and still—only thirty years later—they have decided
that what saves them is not as important as what makes them comfortable. It
seems like this church in Laodicea must have been made up of some particularly
stupid people, incapable of even an ounce of faith, except this is basically
the story of every church in every time. On some level we all think, Yeah, you died for my salvation, but what
have you done for me lately?
Being a Christian
should be an uncomfortable experience. We are so blessed to live in a time and
place in history where our faiths are not persecuted but accepted and often
expected from us. That’s a blessing but also something of a curse, because the
side effect of living in an overwhelmingly Christian society is that we find
our own ways to divide ourselves and distract ourselves from the poignancy of
the gospel. There is one church; we confess it in the Nicene Creed—one holy
catholic and apostolic church. One—not twenty-four in Kittson County
alone. I’m not so naïve as to think that our geographic, theological and social
boundaries do not matter, but I do know that they matter a good deal more than
they should.
The truth is that Zion
Lutheran in Lake Bronson, Minnesota is God’s church and, because of
that, it is also my church because we
belong to the same church, and though we have all been tempted and given in to
the desire for comfort rather than faithfulness it does not make you any less
my church. It does not make Grace in Hallock any less your church, because
Grace and Zion and Maria and Eidsvold and the Covenant Church and the Catholic Church (and even
those churches that don’t acknowledge that we are a church at all) are part of
the same church. Laodicea
needed a wake-up call and so do we. They needed the voice of those Acts leaders
a generation before. “Brothers, what should we do?”
Well, the same
thing you’ve always done. Cue Peter, “‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven.”
So, I do bring a
message of repentance for you today. Repent. Because we are all called in the
name of Jesus Christ. That’s what it means to be the church—not a building in a
location, not a clique, not a group of Scandinaviany-Germanic-homogenous human
beings, but the people of God, baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. And if
that makes you uncomfortable—if you don’t like me coming into your space, your church and telling you that it’s not just yours and in fact it
never was—then good, because Christians are called to be uncomfortable.
No comments:
Post a Comment