24 January 2010

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthains 12:12-31
Luke 4:14-21

When I was in Seminary in the early 1960’s, I often engaged in “bull sessions” with classmates where we shared visions of what an ideal parish would look like for our first call.  My “perfect church” one where the members would be eager to listen to my sermons and even more eager to attend adult classes I would teach.

There, would (of course) be no conflicts or squabbles of any kind -- and no financial issues, either.  I did not expect to get rich there, but counted on enough income to pay the bills and provide us with a comfortable parsonage to accommodate the growing family we were planning, and enable us to start saving for the future.  Finally, my ideal, dream church would be in an area with growth potential; there would be a huge pool of people who could not wait to become part of a Lutheran congregation with our emphasis on the grace and love of Christ.

In 1964, I accepted a call to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, an inner-city parish in Camden, New Jersey -- my first and only parish experience before I spent the bulk of my active ministry in Lutheran Higher Education.  I quickly realized that Holy Trinity was a far cry from my ‘vision’ of an ideal parish.  We were a small, struggling congregation, mainly made up of caucasian members, most of whom lived in the suburbs and commuted some distance to church.  The church it had become integrated a few years before my arrival, so we had fairly large number of people of color in our Sunday School and as part of our total membership.   And while we were able to add a few new members during my years there, it was not easy, since the bulk of the people who now lived near the church were more familiar with Southern Baptist theology and worship than our Lutheran ways.

Unlike the dream I had of a parish that would not struggle with finances, Sunday income was so unpredictable that I was paid in cash weekly instead of monthly, just in case some unexpected expenses came up as the month wore on.  And that dream of a church without conflicts or squabbles?  Fat chance.  Before the first year was over, one of our “big givers” twice stopped coming to church, and the council commissioned me to go visit her to see if there was an issue we could resolve so she (and her weekly offering) would come back.  The first visit was o.k.; she was simply miffed that no-one had saved one of the calendars we got each December from a Camden Funeral Home, so I gave her our copy and all was forgiven.  The second occasion, some months later, did not go so well.  This time she said she was not coming back, because on a previous Sunday her experience of kneeling at the altar rail for communion had been ruined when she realized that she (forgive me: these are her words not mine) “kneeling next to a dirty nigger.”  This time, the council agreed it was best that she did not return.  In the mid-60’s, the Civil Rights movement was gaining steam, and as I became more and more involved in local gatherings in our city, inspired by the words and example of Martin Luther King, Jr., I learned quickly that she was not the only member at Holy Trinity with feelings of racial prejudice.  One Saturday, I joined several other clergy in a protest for increased wages for the African-American laundry and maintenance workers at our local hospital, where I was cursed at and was spit upon by a member of the council who vowed he would have me fired.  Although that did not happen, I learned years later that on evenings when I would be away from the parsonage, often attending community civil rights meetings, members of the church regularly called my wife, urging her to “work on me” to cease being involved with issues on which they disagreed.

Not surprisingly, the church I served in Camden fell short of my naive seminarian dreams of serving a “perfect congregation.”  And that also proved to be true of the Lutheran Colleges I would serve in Kansas and Nebraska in subsequent years -- as well as the various Lutheran Congregations our family has belonged to since we left New Jersey.  The church -- whether it be in the form of a local congregation like this one -- or a denomination such as the ELCA -- or “church” in the sense of all Christian bodies and denominations -- has never been perfect nor without conflict.  The church is after all, a human institution, made up of people like us -- people who say and do stupid and cruel things -- and yet it is at the same time a divinely inspired institution, capable of doing great and loving things, and even daring to call itself the “Body of Christ.”

This past week, as I began to put thoughts together for a sermon based on the passage from I Corinthians which was read a few minutes ago -- St. Paul’s analogy of the church being like a human made up of a multitude of parts, all of which are important for the well-being of the whole -- I was reminded of two things.  First:  this is the week in the church year set aside to pray for Christian Unity -- in a world where denominations and church bodies seem more comfortable focusing on issues and practices that keep us apart than focusing on ways for us to express our unity in Christ, and where our own  Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seems to be more and more divided as each week passes over the actions taken by the ELCA this past August that opened doors of leadership for clergy in committed same-sex relationships.

And second, in this same week, we remembered as a nation, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose inspired leadership awakened our country to the reality of pervasive racism and the need the expansion of Civil Rights  to all who are oppressed in our land -- initiating a movement toward justice for all that is still far from finished today.

Some months ago, I reviewed a Book by Rufus Burrow, Jr. entitled God and Human Dignity, which provided an study of the theology and ethics of Dr. King.  Among his many insights and contributions, there was one that was new to me -- King’s vision of the church as “The Beloved Community.”  Dr. King, as we know, had powerful dreams for what America could become for all people, but what we may not have known, is that he also had some powerful dreams of what the church could become:  a place in which persons would live together as brothers and sisters, in a thoroughly integrated community inspired by the principle of Agape Love -- a community where justice, righteousness, love and mercy would reign supreme.  In one of his sermons, he described the Beloved Community as being “tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, so that whatever affects one directly affects all individually.”  (Sermon delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968)  And in his speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he said that man must evolve for all human conflicts a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retribution.  The foundation of such a method is love.”