Sermon For October 1, 2000
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Knowing What Choices to Make ~ Mark 9:37-50
SERMON: The God Competition ~ Going For The Gold
This must be pastor's confessional day. I already started with the youth and talking about how I had to come to terms with my favored status or lack of favored status in my family as I grew up. There isn't anyway for a preacher to talk with a congregation other than to share how the scripture affects me and my life. I share that with you so that you might be able to determine what the scripture has to say to you in your life. There was a time a couple of years ago when a friend of mine asked if he could borrow this black robe in order to perform a marriage. This friend is not an ordained minister and is not serving a church. I'm not sure if he had any licensing at all with the State. I think that he had what we usually refer to disparagingly as a mail in ordination. Send ten dollars down to California and you get a credential that will then allow you to officiate at services of marriage. He asked if he could use the robe and I thought about it. I thought about the four years of college for a liberal arts education and then I thought about the three years of seminary and the one year of internship before I was ordained. Then I thought about the eighteen years of ministry I had gone through. I thought about what my feelings were about him performing this marriage service. Finally I decided that what was important was the marriage and a spiritual, a loving, a Christian experience. I realized that a diploma from a seminary or a credential from a religious denomination wasn't what was going to determine whether that was a good worship service or a good experience for the bride and groom. Knowing my friend, I knew that the service would be done with integrity and that it would be a spiritual experience for those involved. So I said, "Sure, you can use my robe."
I thought about that instance because it's very similar to the scripture passage this morning. Jesus is preaching. The disciples have gathered around because they think that Jesus is a special figure. He has been gaining more and more popularity. Gaining a reputation. Now, somewhere off on the side, there is someone doing some healing in Jesus' name. But he didn't have a certificate of graduation from the Jesus Institute of Theology. He didn't have any kind of credentials from any Christian denomination. He was casting out demons in Jesus' name on his own. The disciples didn't like this lack of control so they came to Jesus and said "Listen to what's going on over here. What do you want us to do about it? Should we make him some cement shoes and drop him in the Jordan? How do you want us to handle this?" Jesus said, "Let it go. Let it go. If he is doing good in my name, he's not against us. So let it go."
It's hard for all of us who want to believe that we have found a truth worth believing in and worth holding on to. It's hard for us to let go of ownership of that truth and to let it work in different ways in different parts of the world. The history of the Christian Church has been a long history of trying to determine what is acceptable within the Church and what is not acceptable; who is following the appropriate set guidelines and who is a heretic. The history of the Church is not one long story of an organization of people that were always in agreement. Instead it's a continual history, from the very earliest times, of people who disagreed about who Jesus was and what Jesus said and what Jesus wanted us to do with our lives. The structure of the Church grew to ensure that those who were sure that they had the truth would be able to control the ministry of the Church. There is no doubt that they felt called by God and empowered by the Holy Spirit to stand up for that truth. In order to guarantee that that truth continued on, the structures developed. For a long time, almost the first 1,000 years, the Pope and the bishops were the structure of the Christian Church. That's not to say that there weren't some disagreements even within that structure, but there was only one group. Then the Eastern Orthodox Church broke off. Five hundred years later, the Protestant Reformation and from that point the splintering took off at greatly increased rates. Whenever people had a theological dispute; whenever people had a personality disagreement; when someone thought that the bread should come first and then the cup or the cup should come first and then the bread there was a split and then there was another church. Go home and page through the phone book and see how many different denominations there are. Hundreds and hundreds of denominations. How can that be in a religion where we say we are all part of the body of Christ? That we are all one in Christ Jesus our Lord? All of those splits occur because people insist that they have the truth. If someone is doing something different, they obviously must be wrong. Steps must be taken to ensure the purity of the truth. If you were to stand on the outside and view the Christian faith with all of its' different factions you would say, "What is wrong with those people?" They claim to be the body of Christ but always fighting with each other. They fight over doctrine; they fight over worship practices; they fight over church government; they fight over buildings; they fight over everything. In the midst of all of that, there have always been efforts to try to work for the unity of the Church.
Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is a unique creature on the American religious scene. We come from different strands of the religious tradition that didn't have that many similarities to each other. Historically we have four branches: the Congregationalists, going back to the Pilgrims; the German Reformed Church, German immigrants in the 1700's in the Pennsylvania-Ohio area; Christians sharing some similar roots with the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. Christians that were unhappy Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists on the prairie that said, "We want to get away from this church bickering and so we're going to try to return to an early New Testament model. We're going to baptize by immersion and celebrate Communion every week and just be Christians without all of the red tape." The last group, coming in the 1800's coming down through St. Louis and settling up the Missouri and Mississippi River Valleys, the Evangelical Germans. Those groups carried on their history for a number of years but the one thing that all of them did have in common was the need to express the unity of Christ's Church. So, in their own ways, they were always trying to find opportunities to work together with other groups. In the 1930's, the Congregationalists and a branch of the Christians came together to become the Congregational Christian Churches. At about that same time period, motivated in part by a common German heritage, the Evangelical and Reformed Churches came together to become the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The E & R's, as they're referred to, carried a strong Lutheran influence and a government similar to the Lutheran's or the Presbyterian's with a hierarchy and a national body making rules that were binding on a local congregation. The Congregational Christians, as many of you well know, carried through the Congregational polity which is that every local church makes its' own decision. Even though we gather together at a state level and at a national level no one can tell the local church what it can and cannot do.
In 1957 those strands came together. It was a celebration of Christian unity unlike any other that had occurred because they came from such different spots in the religious spectrum. They came together driven by the need to demonstrate the unity of Christ's Church. When the conversations took place they didn't do by-laws; they did not even do a statement of faith. They said, "We are committed to the unity of Christ's Church." They agreed to merge their churches together into one large denomination. It was only after the merger was complete that the by-laws were developed and the statement of faith that we used all through this summer was written to express the faith that we shared in common. We are still a Congregational polity denomination, the local church having the final say in matters of faith. We are also a non-doctrinal church. That means that we do not have a statement of faith that you have to swear to in order to become a member of this church. We recognize unity in diversity, that we all have different understandings but we come together to celebrate the unity of Christ's Church.
At the same time, even in the United Church of Christ, that urge to push apart, to split, continues to be in existence even while there is a strong effort to continue to work to bring things together. So we have, in the United Church of Christ, some very liberal churches that include Christians as well as people of other faiths. On the other hand, we have churches at the other end of the Christian spectrum that believe in the literal interpretation of Scripture and in a step-by-step program to salvation. We have all those together in the mix which sometimes makes it difficult to function as a denomination but also adds a richness to our life together. The thing that holds it all together is a commitment to be one church, to allow for those differences. Now, it takes the maturity of faith to be able to allow for those differences. It makes a maturity of faith to be able to be in a relationship without having to insist that your truth be everyone else's truth. We struggle with that all of the time. There are certainly times where I feel that I have the truth and I want to convince all of you that it's true. At the same time, as part of our Congregational piety, you have freedom of conscience and you can listen to what I have to say and you can disagree with me. That does add a richness to our life as people of faith. It also means that we have something special to offer to our society in these days. There are a lot of groups who will offer an answer and if you're looking for the guarantee of that answer, you can find a church that will offer that to you. There are not very many churches that welcome people saying, "Come together and we will walk the path of faith together searching and learning and growing in our spiritual lives." I think that's the kind of church that Christ calls us to be. When we celebrate World Communion this day we celebrate the way in which God's spirit is at work around the world - different expressions, different denominations, different ways of worshiping. But when we share in this meal all those differences drop away and we celebrate our oneness as children of God, as part of the body of Christ. It's an exciting day. I'm glad you're all here to share in it. We give thanks for God's Spirit also among us.