Well, as we've noted, it's volunteer Sunday, you won't find that on the liturgical calendar, but we're talking about our heart of who we want to be as a community, what it means to be church together. And one time in my life, in the life of this church, that I really felt we had a strong sense of who we are and how we wanted to relate to one another and build this church was a bit over four years ago. In 2020, where our founding pastor Mark Booker had announced that he was leaving.
His last Sunday with us was on February 23rd, 2020, and that triggered a global pandemic. And a number of us, about that time, gathered in the Green House, which is a house with a long history with Church of the Cross, to talk together about ‘where to next’ and to pray together. And one of the things we kind of had to realize in that moment is that this is not a church about a particular person or a particular style of leadership or anything like that, but that we, the people, to use an American phrase, were the church. And we had the resources within ourselves, within one another, to be the church God was calling us to be. In short, we were realizing that call to be the church as God had intended it; that fruit of his Holy Spirit, the church following the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I always think it's interesting to think about that moment after the ascension. What could have happened? Because we kind of accept what did happen, it's described in the Bible, but it could have been something else. It could have been a political movement to influence the powers of the time. It could have been some sort of academic school, which valued precision of thought over everything else. It could have been some sort of monastic community going out and living in isolated practices out in the wilderness. It could have just died out. But this is what God did. He gave us a community, a people who broke bread together, who shared their lives together, who gave to one another as there was need. That was God's plan. But that real community, that sense of true bondedness and uniting with one another, is an increasingly rare thing in our culture.
We have an extremely isolated culture, in increasing measure. Andy Crouch in his book “The Life We're Looking For” talks about the idea of a household. And not necessarily a literal household. He describes it like this:
“You are part of a household if there's someone who knows where you are today and who has at least some sense of how it feels to be where you are… You are part of a household if someone would check on you if you did not awaken.”
And increasingly, people in this country in particular, but it's around the world too, are finding themselves householdless, without a real people that they are bound to. This phenomenon has been described for a while by many people. Robert Putnam, a secular sociologist, described it in his book, Bowling Alone. This is 25 years ago now. The title of that book comes from the fact that Americans were bowling as much as they always had. But they were not bowling as parts of clubs or teams anymore. They were increasingly bowling alone. And he describes that in the 25 years since his book was published, attendance and club meetings has decreased 58%, family dinners have dropped 43%, and having friends over has dropped 35%. We are an increasingly isolated and lonely culture. And no one wants that isolation. Many people have commented on it. But there are some streams of ideological thought that have really made the space for these historic levels of isolation.
And one of those ideologies is individualism. It's a vision of human flourishing that is all through the waters that we swim in. And it's this idea that we are most alive, we are most ourselves when we stand alone. When we have declared independence from other people's influence so we can authentically express our own unique self in a way that is unhindered from being bound to some other bigger thing. We cherish autonomy, self-law, the right to do what you think you want to do. And the voices of other people speaking into that are generally unwelcome.And so we often tell stories, in fiction, or other places, of people who have broken away from the shackles of the people who are holding them back from finding their true individual self. And it's not that people don't want community in theory. But our vision of community has increasingly become a more specific narrow thing of people who have a very similar frame of reference to you, entered voluntarily, for the mutual benefit of the individuals, that is kind of left when it stops meeting that purpose.
We also have a very consumeristic culture. Whether we might not use this exact language, but often we associate the good life with good consumption, with receiving and intaking a series of good things, whether it's goods or services or content online. And there's a series of professionals and corporations out there which are producing this stuff. And your role as just a person in society is to consume it. And it's highly produced, it's top quality in terms of professionalism. And it's personalized just to you. This is where the individualism kind of meets the consumerism. Your TikTok feed, which you shouldn't have, but you might: It's personalized just for you. It's tailor-made for your preferences and your set of experiences. It's personalized, but it's not personal. You're not encountering a person. You're not engaging in a relationship of love and kindness. There's an algorithm which is learned to sort of hack your psychology so that you are getting this experience that is going to meet your very particular way of liking things.
Growing up in the church in my setting, we loved the idea of being counter-cultural because we listened to DC Talk. But we weren't as critical as we could have been of some of these streams of thought that were shaping the visions of human flourishing that were really dominating our culture. And often churches have shaped what it means to be church around these ideologies. A sense of individualism, where the gospel is presented as this unique thing you have with God and community is kind of some secondary benefit if that. A gospel that's suited just for where you're at and what you need in your own individualized experience.
It's been shaped by consumerism, where churches are often presented as this thing that is provided for you by a set of professionals and your purpose in coming to church is to consume.
“Oh, so well fed, at church this morning.” And in different churches, what it means to consume is kind of emphasized in different ways. In some churches, many churches, it's the sermon. That's really the content that you're eating. In some churches, it's like a musical worship experience. And there's other things as well. But what you start to realize when you're really leaning into these ways of thinking is that you can get a better sermon through a podcast than you can at your local church. I'm talking about other local churches here, not this one. You can get a better musical experience on Spotify than you can at those other local churches. It's actually part of why in our church service, we seek to be deeply multifaceted and embodied. We stand up, we sit down, we meet one another, we have the passing of the peace, we have a sermon, but it doesn't dominate the whole service. We have musical worship, but it doesn't dominate the whole service. We share in the Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist together, all these things coming together, because we don't want what we are doing here as Christ body together to be something that you can put in a can and get on an app. It's not God's heart for the church.
And people respond in like turn to these trends and their relationship to church. They see church as a potentially useful tool that may not actually be useful because what really matters is your individual faith. And so commitment to a body is kind of not necessarily part of it. And people bounce around, they like the experience maybe of being new. This is a trend that people like to experience being new because when you're new, more things are tailor-made for you, more things are pointed towards you and that meets our sort of consumeristic needs. And when it starts to fade, you see the cracks behind the service, you start being asked to be involved, some people then find a different experience at a different church. People go to church, expecting to be able to consume, and you can find a church that is personalized to you that will kind of allow you to consume in your own personalized unique way. Obviously it varies a lot how people experience and enter a church, but these are trends that have shaped how people have received being the church.
But when we let these wider cultural trends shape, what it means to be church, we nullify God's purpose in the church. Because the purpose of the church is to enable us to live out the full humanity that God has given us in Christ Jesus. And this kind of gets back to something I was alluding to before, that there was all these other options.
But we don't need a political movement to live out our full humanity.
We don't need to the perfect precision of thought that an academic school might have given us.
We didn't need to be an isolated community in the wilderness.
What we needed was to be a body, to be bound to one another in love, to put down our dramatic declarations of independence and instead make bold declarations of dependence on one another. Because it is there that we are fully alive. So when we talk about this vision, particularly on volunteering Sunday, about being the church, this isn't to satisfy God's cravings. And this is not to primarily to meet the mechanical needs of running an organization. This is for us to live out the call to be the body of Christ because God who made us knows that's what we need. We need to be people in a household. We need to be bound to one another in love. We need to be a body.
The first thing God says that is negative about His creation is that it is not good for the human to be alone. So He made more, He made more in diversity so that there might be bonded relationships of love between people because that is what it means to be fully alive in Christ. And this image that God gives us in 1 Corinthians 12 that we read this morning is the image of being a body, but not just any body. To be the body of Christ. And so I want to dwell on that image for just a little bit.
First thing, it is the body of Christ. We enter in and our full humanity is not something that we assert by ourselves and create for ourselves, but it's something we enter into and we share together in Christ. We participate in Him together. We find this thing together in the person of Christ.
And then we get this profound image of it being organized like a body. Now the first thing you can perhaps say about a body is that it's one thing. We were doing an event on campus back in the old days when I was a campus minister, where we had a Rabbi, the Muslim chaplain and a Christian chaplain talking about this question of what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself. And then the Rabbi, Getzel, my friend, he brought out an image from a rabbinical source of when you're hammering against the wall like a nail and you miss and you hit your thumb. The idea of your left hand taking revenge against your right hand for hitting it is kind of ridiculous. The body does not work like that because it understands that it is part of the same self. And then we bring that idea of what does it mean to love the neighbor as your same self. We are the one body.
The body is a wild thing. If you hold a lung and a toe together you would never think that they're part of the same thing yet they are. It is so diverse yet it is so unified. And this vision of being the body is really rooted in the kissing point between unity and diversity. It is a deeply diverse thing and here some elements of the culture get validated. That we are all different. God loves diversity. He made us in different ways. He created all things in different order and in different kinds. But all of a sudden the purpose of our difference, the different giftings that God has given each one of us is not to go and seek personalized experiences and to consume in personalized ways but to bring our gifts together in the bondedness of love for the purpose of serving one another. And the ways that we all need, we need one another. The hand cannot say to the foot, I do not need you. So we need to affirm the ways in which we are different but let that be a call to be bound to one another, have an obligation or duty - these unpopular words - to one another because that is love, to have a duty to the other.
And it is unified. It is one thing. It is necessarily bound together. I read a shower thought online, probably like 12 years ago now - you know those profound thoughts you have in the shower, people were sharing these online. And the shower thought was this: you stroke your wife's hair thinking it is lovely when it is on her head. But if you find a clump of it in the shower you will think it is gross. Same stuff, what is the deal? And I thought, oh that is a little bit profound. But actually if you think about it, that is actually the least true of hair, out of all the body parts. Like you hold your wife's hand when you are walking down the street but if you find her severed hand in your bed, you will probably have a different sort of reaction. Why? Because we have a pretty instinctual understanding that body parts are supposed to be attached to the body. They are supposed to be in the body.
And sometimes this vision that the world paints of human flourishing, looks a little bit like a spleen living its best life out on the street. Unrestricted from the bonds of the body, living its own way of being. But if you encounter a spleen on the street, firstly it would be like what is that? Because you don't know what a spleen looks like. But secondly, you know one thing about that spleen, that’s a dead spleen, right? And there is probably a body nearby that is really wanting a spleen. The spleen is one of those things you don't think about unless you really suddenly have to. But my point I hope is clear that this image is given to us.
And it emphasizes our difference, our diversity, our uniqueness. But it also emphasizes the necessary bondedness. Not as some sort of optional, nice to have, not some sort of like thing that might help the spleen out on a good day if the body is working right. But as a necessary function of being human together, we are bound to one another. The spleen has an obligation to the lung. The lung has an obligation to the foot. We need one another. We cannot say to one another, I do not need you.
Our vision of being the church is really seeking just to live in tune with what God has told us. That the core for each of us is to bring ourselves, who God has made us to be, into this body for the building of this community. Not as some professional service provided by the clergy and staff to a bunch of consumers to make a message that you want to hear. But something that we are lent into together. Again, not as a pragmatic solution to the slick running of an organization, not so that we can fill all our rosters, but so that we can live into this calling of being Christ's body.
And there are all those details and we are going to talk about different ways to volunteer and things like that. But this is who we want to be. This is our heart to be the church, to be that body, to be that household together bound in duty to one another, committed to one another. Because that is the heart of love and the calling of God has to us and the call for each of us to live into our place in the body.
One of the roles of a Deacon, I'm a Deacon, is to straddle the threshold. A threshold, many thresholds, but one of them is between the clergy and the laity. And that means one of the roles with the laity is reminding them that this is not the professional work of religious professionals. This is all of us called to the work of God in the world. It's partly why the Deacon does the dismissal to send people out and to the work of the world. So that's a little bit of what I'm doing today.
And I also want to be clear, because the goal here is really not to twist a bunch of arms to sign up for more stuff. What it means for you to take your place in the body right now, for who God has made you and where you're at in your season, may look like stepping down from a couple of things, and stepping back from a few things. But nevertheless, the call is there to take our place in the body. You might be new here, relatively new here. And this isn't necessarily a call that you must get involved on week two, though some people do that and they love it. It's about finding your place in the body and recognizing that this is what it means to be the body of Christ together.
You see, a year after our first Rector left, we called and welcomed Dave to be our new Rector, our second Rector. But we didn't really welcome him, actually, because he'd actually been part of the church for a number of years. He was ordained, but he had really just been like a member, someone sitting in the pew involved in some ways and things like that, and he became our Rector. And that was actually a really important moment of self-understanding of who we are. Because it can be tempting, you know, when you're in an interim to imagine some unknown person coming from outside and being some super pastor who's going to provide us the content, then we can just sit back and consume, like we've been taught to do.
But we didn't choose that.
We chose one of us to step into his role in this body to be the Rector. We got the super pastor from the inside as the reminder that we are all called, wherever we’re at, whether we're taking out the trash or we're the Rector, to be in the body and bring our gifts and strengths into the body as God has ordered them. This is who we want to be as a church. This is the direction we're going because we believe it's God's heart that we are all here as the body.
And so the encouragement, I hope, is clear that each of us understand how God has made us and bring those gifts into this body, committing to one another in the bonds of love so that we might live out this version of being Christ's body.