RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - October 5, 2008

“Church Fights”

A Sermon Preached by Marilyn Johns
Matthew 21:33-46

Good morning. I bring you greetings from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, and from the Summer Collegium. It’s wonderful to finally meet with the congregation of the Raymond Village Community Church – it has been over a year and a half since I was introduced to you and your pastor when she first applied to the program. I was impressed with this church when I read about you in the application, and I continue to be even more impressed meeting you in person.

Nancy and Joe and I went out for a great dinner last night – you folks do seafood pretty well here! And thank you for arranging the breathtaking colors on the trees for my drive up from Portland!

One of the parts of my job I like the best is that I get to visit all of the churches who participated in the Summer Collegium. The purpose of my visit this weekend is to connect you with the project, because we believe that the Collegium will be stronger if the congregation is involved along with the pastor. We want to encourage you and offer you a word of hope about your faithful ministry in the small church.

In the various places I’ve visited, people have asked me if I was there to do a final evaluation on the pastor – a report card if you will. While that is not my purpose in visiting you, if I WERE giving Nancy a report card, I’d say she did very well in being on time for class – although we did lose her temporarily at one point - she turned in her assignments on time, she wrote an excellent case study, and she played nicely with the other kids. So she passed the Collegium with flying colors!

Actually, you can be very proud of your pastor and your church. We received 150 applications for 25 spots this year, and Nancy and Joe and this congregation were one of those 25 chosen. For the Summer Collegium we chose the healthiest churches and the healthiest clergy, and your congregation and pastor are a good example of that.

One of the greatest challenges to small congregations is that many of them feel alone and isolated, even though most of the mainline churches in the United States – about 70% - are small. We at Virginia Seminary believe that small churches are unique and valuable and needed and their people should be encouraged in their ministry. We believe that numerical growth is not nearly as important as spiritual growth and health, and our hope is to help small churches to be more healthy and vital. It’s not about how large a church is; it’s about how strong the people’s faith is, and how they live out that faith. It’s not about how many programs a church has, but about how the church and its people are living out the Kingdom of God through their mission and ministry.

Today is World Communion Sunday, which is a creation of the Presbyterian Church. It was begun with the hope that a Sunday when the Lord’s Supper was celebrated in churches of all Christian denominations would mark the unity of the church and a hope for peace in the world. This was in 1936. You know that five years later the United States entered World War II, and hopes of world peace were merely distant memories. So much for the idealistic thoughts of unity and harmony in the church. But the occasion has persisted, and here we are, 72 years later, undaunted in our hopes. A Presbyterian is preaching in a UCC church on World Communion Sunday. Churches all over the world are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ through the bread and cup today. It does give us hope, even though here in the church in 2008 we find ourselves again in a war-torn world. We live in a country where our religious beliefs are dividing us, rather than uniting us; where our interpretation of scripture and our understanding of the church put us at odds with one another. Some are most concerned about following the exact words of Scripture; others are concerned about the intention of God – the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Does it give us any comfort knowing that this kind of conflict has been happening since even before the church was born?

Jesus and the Pharisees and other religious leaders were in conflict with each other for the entire three years of his ministry, from the time of the call of Matthew when the Pharisees accused Jesus of eating with the dregs of society and hanging out with the wrong sorts of people, through Jesus’ violating the Sabbath regulations that the Pharisees were imposing on people by healing and plucking off heads of grain on the Sabbath, through these recent passages in Matthew where the Pharisees are out to get Jesus, to trip him up, to catch him in his words so they could destroy him. They were so angry and threatened by Jesus that they wanted to kill him; they were that full of hatred.

This is where our story for today is found. In fact, Jesus told this parable to the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the chief priests, and it is about them. There was a man who was the owner of a vineyard; the owner took a trip and put the care of the vineyard under the supervision of some renters. These renters were expected to make a payment to the owner for the rental of the vineyard. The owner was gone for awhile. He sent his messengers to collect the payment due and the renters beat up them up and even killed one of them. The owner then sent a second, larger delegation to collect the payment due and the renters acted even more viciously. The owner, being a persistent man, finally sent his son, thinking, “Surely they will respect my own son.” But the renters actually decided ahead of time to kill the son. This was premeditated murder. Can you imagine the renters getting together with this perverted logic that made them believe that by killing the son, they would inherit the vineyard? Jesus continued the story by asking the Pharisaical leaders: What will the owner do? And the chief priests and elders in Jesus’ audience answered, “He will come and kill those evil renters and find new renters who will pay him the rent that is due.” And Jesus, without missing a beat, said “You’re right. The kingdom of God will be taken away from you Pharisees and given to people who will pay the rent and produce the fruit of righteousness. And the Pharisees’ response? They began to put their heads together to figure out a way to kill the Son of God.

This was Jesus’ in-your-face way of telling the Pharisees just who they were and what they were doing to God’s dream for God’s people. Their vision was clouded by the law, and because Jesus was not keeping their idea of the letter of the law, they saw him as threatening and evil, and something had to be done about him! Their faith in God had become faith in the law and not faith in God’s purposes. They were so caught up in keeping the rules as a way to please God that they were willing to kill God’s Son over it. They really lost their perspective. Even when Jesus pointed out that the tenants in the parable were like the Pharisees, their response was not a humble acceptance of their responsibility and the consequences of their thoughts and actions, but instead they tried to think of ways to get rid of this radical newcomer who hit a little too close to home for them. In telling them the parable, Jesus wanted the Pharisees to know that God knew they were the ones to kill the prophets, and that they were the ones who were going to kill God’s son. And all over the disagreement of law vs. spirit of the law, and the threat the leaders felt when Jesus questioned their authority by saying they weren’t fulfilling God’s dream for humanity.

What does this mean to us today, especially those of us in small congregations? Well, we know that disagreement and conflict are no stranger to churches, and certainly not to small churches. Churches today, large and small, often find ourselves in the midst of disagreement. We fight about holding on to traditions. We fight about the best ways to attract visitors. We fight about not having enough money and we fight about how to spend the money we do have. We blame the pastor or other people because the church is not what it was 50 years ago. I’m sure you can add to the list from your church experience – I know I can add to it from mine. Why do we, people who meet together in the name of Jesus Christ, why do we fight so much? I think there are a few reasons, and I think they’re related to one another.

First, I think we fight because of fear. We’re afraid of losing our identity in times of change in the church. We fear the unknown. We get comfortable in the way things always were, and we’re afraid of shaking that up too much. Fear can look very much like controlling behavior. I’ve recognized that in myself and in some of the people in my church who seem to want to be involved in everything, and don’t have much tolerance for trying new things. And the reason is that they’re afraid of losing their place, or losing their identity as related to the church.

Connected to that is the fact that we care deeply for our church and we want it to thrive. We honestly believe that the way we see things is the very best thing for the church. What people sometimes do in small congregations is bemoan the “good old days,” the 60s and early 70s. I encounter this all over the country – ‘our church had 300 people in worship and 100 children in Sunday School – we need to get back to that.’ So we try to do things the way we did then and wonder why they don’t work. And then we blame ourselves and each other when no matter how hard we try, we still have 50 or 60 in worship and we struggle to have enough children to make a Sunday School. We forget that our society has changed, and it has nothing to do with how we are managing our church. Fewer people go to church, there is competition with sports and jobs and over-programmed lives. Sometimes the town has lost a major business and people have moved away. This is not the fault of the church or its members; it is just the way things are.

A third reason for fighting in churches is that it’s a habit that has developed over years of practice. Some churches have “always done it that way,” and don’t really know any other way to deal with change, but to fight with one another.

If we look back at the passage from Matthew, we can see that the reasons for the conflicts between the Pharisees and Jesus are not so different from our church fights today. The Pharisees were understandably fearful because this person had come into their territory, and was changing everything they knew. They understood the godly thing to be following the laws and they did that well, but then here comes this Jesus who says, No, the laws weren’t meant to be used this way. If we give the Pharisees the benefit of the doubt, we can see that they loved the Lord, and really were trying to be faithful, but they just got off-track. And it does seem that there was some habit developed – in the same way we do, they got into a pattern of looking for things Jesus did that were against what they considered the righteous thing to do.

Where’s the good news in all of this? Well, I think there’s a lot of good news, especially in the Raymond Village Community church. For one thing, you are a small congregation, and small congregations tend to weather conflict one of two ways – they either split, which of course can be devastating, or they realize that they are a family and they decide that the family staying together is more important than fighting. This church has chosen to keep the family together. If we could take all of those family qualities present in the small church and impart them on the Christian church, on global religion, on our country’s politicals, on the world, God’s dream of peace and reconciliation would become a reality.

This congregation has worked hard over the past few years to find more productive ways to engage in discussion and think of ideas for change in this church without getting hung up in fights. That’s remarkable, and you should feel good about that. And even if sometimes the fear takes over, or your love for this church makes it hard for you to see the other side of an issue, or if you just fall back into the habit of fighting, still this congregation has made extraordinary strides, and can only go forward.

The diversity of this church is a blessing – even though at times it may not seem that way. Your congregation is richer for it, and even though it causes bumps in the road at times, it gives you a much fuller picture of God’s world and God’s will when you are making a decision. And when you can agree on things, I just know God smiles at God’s children playing nicely together!

There’s an absolutely wonderful book by Bishop Desmond Tutu called, God Has a Dream, in which he says that if we truly recognize that God loves us, we must also recognize that God loves our enemies as well. All of our humanity is dependent on recognizing the humanity in others. I believe this is the key to finding God’s will in our decisions. The respect and trust we show for those who are not like us or who don’t agree with us is, I think, the closest we will get to discovering the true desires, the dream, if you will, of God.

Which brings us back to World Communion Sunday. Some of the biggest and most devastating church fights over the ages have been about those very elements, bread and wine, that we took earlier in the service. The story of the vineyards and slaves and owner seems strange to us today, and seems a long way from silver trays and broken bread. But the tenants are still with us, and often ARE us. World Communion, peace and reconciliation and hope and unity, are the true dream of God. Let us give thanks from the bottom of our hearts that the vineyard owner, the most patient and persistent and always hopeful God, is still with us, wanting the best for us, weeping with us when we fail, but cheering and celebrating when we get along with one another because we respect and love one another. And Raymond Village Community Church, that’s great news!

Amen.

Sermon - October 5, 2008

“Church Fights”

A Sermon Preached by Marilyn Johns Matthew 21:33-46

A Sermon Preached by Marilyn Johns
Matthew 21:33-46