Sunday, September 10th: "Why I'm Staying With the Church"

Watch the sermon here

 

First United Presbyterian Church

“Why I’m Staying with the Church”

Rev. Amy Morgan

September 10, 2023

Matthew 18:15-20

15 “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If you are listened to, you have regained that one. 16 But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If that person refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

A lot of internet ink was spilled in the last week over the post from a Presbyterian minister about why he is leaving ministry. If you’re active in ministry and social media, it couldn’t be missed. It went viral, mainly because there were such energetic reactions to this manifesto. Some cheered this pastor’s decision and his courage to speak out publicly, including in his final sermon to his church, about the overwhelming challenges of ministry in this age. Others condemned his move and public diatribe against the church for a multitude of reasons. 

But I think this post also gained traction because it aligns with the broader public conversation around people leaving the church generally. I’ve read dozens of articles, polls, blogs, social media posts, and opinion pieces about why people are leaving organized religion in droves. And they have been for decades, by the way. So this isn’t really news to me. But it is fascinating to hear the great variety of causes people name for the exodus of both church members and, more recently, clergy. 

These causes range from political and social divisions to scandal and hypocrisy. Some people don’t believe in God because they feel religion is antithetical to scientific fact. Some people feel the church has embraced the values of a capitalist society and is only concerned with membership and money. The pastor who posted his swan song online echoed what many clergy have felt in recent years: ministry is insanely stressful and lonely, and the toll it takes cannot be tolerated for the compensation and rewards it offers. 

Ultimately, what this all adds up to is a belief, among church members, clergy, and the society at large, that Jesus is not present in the church. Some think he never was and others think he’s left the building. Many have stopped looking for him. Because if we believed that Jesus was in the church, watching what we say and do, guiding and supporting us, praying with us and preaching to us, sitting in meetings with us and playing with us, the church would look very different. If we truly believed that Jesus was in the church, we’d think about what he’d think about how we act and how we speak to each other, how we spend money and how we spend our time, and how much time we spend here. If Jesus was in the church, the church would behave a lot more like Jesus. 

So when the church instead looks like a bunch of messy people doing totally un-Christ-like things, we might reasonably assume that Jesus is not present in this place. No one would act that that in front of Jesus. No one would say that in front of Jesus. No one who hangs out with Jesus could be that kind of person. Yes, I get it. This all makes sense. 

I’ve chosen not to join the cacophony of voices on social media responding to this situation. But given our gospel text for this morning, I think it would be appropriate for me to share with you, my church, why I’m not leaving the church, why I’m staying. Despite the trends, the accusations, the struggles, the despair, I’m not leaving the church. And here’s why:

Jesus has not left the church. 

Believe it or not, Jesus is here. He is, as he promised in our gospel reading this morning, everywhere where two or three are gathered. Not just on Sunday mornings in worship, not just at choir practice or in Bible studies. Jesus is present in every instance of Christian relationship – whether that’s at the coffee shop or on the softball field, in the hospital or nursing home, in the cemetery or out in the garden. 

Jesus is present wherever we make Christian community of any shape or size. 

And Jesus is present in messy, conflict-ridden, scared and anxious, hypocritical and stress-filled, argumentative and scandalous and divided Christian communities. In the gospel we read today, Jesus is describing the process for restoring relationships in communities where people have sinned against each other. People have been hurt. People have spread rumors and made unfounded accusations. People have been in disputes about what color to paint the bathroom and whether or not the pastor is doing her job right. People have harmed each other’s reputations and caused new believers to stumble backwards right out of the faith. 

And you know how I know this is all going on? Because I read what happened just before Jesus said all of this. In the verses just before what we read today, Jesus expresses frustration at people’s faithlessness; Peter gets badgered about paying the temple tax; and the disciples want to know which of them is going to be greatest in Jesus’s new kingdom. This is a messy, conflict-ridden, scared and anxious, power-hungry and divided community Jesus is in. But he’s still there. No one reads the gospel and says, “well, those disciples didn’t act much like Jesus. Jesus must not be with them.” Clearly, he’s with them. And he stays with them, he hangs in there, even though we could easily argue the disciples never live up to the standard of what we might recognize as a Christ-shaped community. 

That’s the radical thing we miss when we’re judging the church. Jesus is with us, in all our imperfection and even ugliness. And he always will be. He doesn’t give up on the “faithless generation” of the first century, and he doesn’t give up on the “faithless generation” of this century, either. He hangs in there with us. In all our sinning and stumbling, our arguing and injuring. 

But we, the church, have ignored Jesus’s presence for far too long. 

Jesus’s presence doesn’t make us perfect people or even perfect Christians. But if we recognized Jesus’s presence with us, we’d at least have the decency to be ashamed when we do or say something awful instead of pretending that our actions and words have no impact on other people or the community as a whole. We might even feel empowered to address someone who has hurt us and try to reconcile that relationship if we knew Christ was right there with us, loving us both beyond measure. We might be able to listen to each other instead of monologuing our self-righteous excuses for our inexcusable behavior. This is what Jesus hopes we’ll do if we really can believe in his promise to be with us in community. 

He hoped so much that we could be united and act lovingly toward one another that he prayed for it over and over. And he entrusted to us a ritual, a practice, a way of remembering his presence in things we use every day. When we come to the table, when we talk about the bread that is Christ’s body and we pour the cup that is filled with his life-blood, we remember, we remind ourselves and each other, that Jesus is here with us. We remember that everyone is invited to this table, not just the ones who’ve been good, who live up to our standards for being Christian, who never do anything hurtful, even accidentally. We remember that Jesus desires our unity, our reconciliation, with God, with each other, and with the whole creation. This is a powerful remembrance.

And I am privileged to be the one who gets to break that bread and pour that cup. I am privileged to be the one who gets to remind us of that promise that Jesus is here with us. And no matter how stressful or strange ministry may be, I want to be here, in the church, because Jesus is here. He is in the bread and cup. He is the host at the table. He is in the pews and in the fellowship hall. He is in the choir (I’m sure he has a lovely singing voice), and he is in the nursery (he does, after all, invite all the children to come to him). 

Just because the church doesn’t always, or even very often, behave like Jesus, that does not mean Jesus is not in the church. Even the institutional church, for all its flaws and failings, its bloody history and brutal oppression, its ties to power and exclusion of truth – even the institutional church still has the presence of Jesus. We gather in his name. We exist by his power and will. And by his grace, we can still witness to the inbreaking reign of God on earth. 

Church, the world needs to know that Jesus is still here. Not because we need more members or more money. But because people need to be in a community that can practice reconciliation, at least sometimes. People need to be in a community of grace, a community that proclaims that Jesus is with us, even when we aren’t perfect. In a society that is rife with judgement, trolling, cancelling, whatever name you want to put to sinning against each other – in this world, what people desperately need is a community that believes the promise that Jesus is still with us. 

We are that community at 1^st on 4^th. We are a community that believes Jesus has not left the building, and you have a pastor that is not trying to scoot out on you when things get hairy. When people lose their cool or fall down on the job, when we aren’t perfectly loving or Christ-like, we know how to practice reconciliation, and we know that Jesus is with us in the hurt and in the healing. This is a gift, not just to those of us in this church right now, but to all the people out there who are literally dying for this kind of community. 

We can transform our relationships with our friends and family and neighbors, we can transform the city of Loveland, we can transform our little piece of God’s great world, by simply recognizing, remembering, acknowledging Jesus’s presence, in this place, and wherever Christian community shows up. Instead of leaving church, or even dwelling on the decline of church membership, we can stand on the promise of Jesus and take hope from his presence with us. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.