Sermon from December 26, 1999
I cannot explain myself apart from the Church, and I cannot explain the Church at all. This is a profound mystery (Eph. 5:32). Among our best symbols for this ineffable reality is the Apostles' Creed. This creed that unites Christians around the world and throughout the ages has in it a line that says, "I believe in the holy, catholic church." That does not mean that Christians accept without question everything their pastors and theologians say. It does not mean that Christians expect or imply that the Church is morally above reproach, or that the Church is immune to the characteristics of every other human institution. It does mean that the Church belongs to that small core of eternal realities, which will ultimately determine the destiny and blessedness of the human race. Thus the Church takes its place alongside the Father Almighty, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, forgiveness, resurrection, and eternal life. That is the company it keeps.

The Apostle Paul used an image for the Church whose emotional overtones and intellectual ideas give us a feeling for the unique place the Church holds as one of the eternal realities. He said in 1 Corinthians 12:27, Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. The name "body of Christ" suggests a range of ideas that helps us to grasp the true nature of the Church.

For example, Jesus took five loaves and blessed and broke them and served 5000 people. When He took bread and broke it at the Last Supper, He was offering, He said, His body to be the spiritual food for all who would come to Him with their spiritual hunger. Now, along comes the Apostle Paul and says that we the Church are His body. We are the loaves, so to speak, that carry His eternal life to all humanity.

It is a daring image, but it is His daring image. Certainly, eternal life is His alone by nature. We participate in it only because He has imparted it to us. But He has imparted it to the Church, and the Church with its deeds of love and mercy and with the Gospel of salvation for the world carries His eternal life to other hungry souls, as surely as bread loaves carry life to hungry flesh.

The image works in another, different direction. We the Church are flawed people. Justly or not, the Church has been blamed for everything from the fall of Rome to the rise of American slavery. It has been blamed for oppressing women and for enslaving men. Its failure to act has allegedly led to the degradation of American culture, and its zeal to act has allegedly led to an attempt at the political coercion of American culture. It seems that any stick at hand will serve to beat this ecclesiastical dog.

But the Church is not an ecclesiastical dog. It is the body of Christ, and that image gives our heart a place to rest as the flaws and failures of the Church weigh (heavily at times) on us. Our hearts find that place of rest as we allow our imagination to go back and forth between the body of Christ, as it hung on the cross on Good Friday, and the body of Christ, the Church, spread out all over the earth in its weakness and vulnerability.

For example, nothing was weaker or more vulnerable than a crucified man. Medical doctors have written in clinical detail of how crucifixion kills a person. It was awful. We read the gospels' accounts of how Jesus was arrested and legally condemned and passed inexorably from the hands of the Sanhedrin to the hand of Pilate to the hands of Roman soldiers to the crucifying hand of death. His fate is a study in human weakness. There was nothing in the cross to catch the eye of the world in its insatiable lust for power, wealth, and fame.

When His enemies taunted Him to come down from the cross, so that they might believe in Him, they were anticipating all the taunts that have been hurled at the Church for 2000 years. Like the body of Christ that hung on the cross, the Church, the body of Christ, appears weak and negligible, nothing to be reckoned with in the life and death struggles of humanity. Let it seem so. The weakness is real enough. All efforts of the Church to compete with the glamour and glitz of the world seem pathetic and ill conceived. Even when the effort succeeds, it never has much lasting effect. Far from being an occasion for despair, the Church's weakness is its glory.

When Joseph of Arimathea rolled the stone across the entrance to Jesus' tomb, he figured that was an end of it. It was not. He failed to reckon with the power of God. When people write off the Church as a hypocritical irrelevance to human life, they fail to reckon with the power of God. The power that raised Christ from the dead is the same power that animates the Church. I can understand a person's skepticism, because to the naked eye the body of Christ appears as a kind of lumbering weakness. But to the eye of faith there is resurrection power embodied in this unique divine-human institution.

The Apostle Paul prayed for the Church to see this truth about itself. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know ... his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come (Ephesians 1:18-21).

These realities give rise to a question. How can we believe in Christ and be indifferent to His body? A husband does not love his wife only from the neck up. He loves the whole person. To love Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, means that we love the Church, which is His body. To be devoted to Christ means also to be devoted to the Church, His body. After all, He is devoted to His Church. He loved her and gave Himself up for her. If we say, "Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world," the Church is implicated in His saving intentions, because the Church is inseparably His body.

The moral and spiritual deterioration of our public institutions points to their need for a Savior. It points also to their need for the Church, which offers to them and to all humanity permanent moral and spiritual values that point people beyond themselves. The Church also offers the power to restore and renew people who make a mess of their lives and the lives of other people. It also bears God's eternal life and forgiveness to the world.

No wonder that Richard Hays says of the Church, "The community, in its corporate life, is called to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God's redemptive purposes in the world."

My ministry grows out of this very high view of the Church. I am mystical and at times even misty-eyed about the Church. The only part of the Church I can do anything about is the congregation I serve and love and for whom I expend my life. But I live in the awareness that there are myriad other congregations around the globe, and together we belong to the Church, the body of Christ.

This holy, catholic Church faces many dangers to its integrity and even to its existence. Many temptations threaten to undermine its congregations. The Book of Revelation points to one besetting temptation for many congregations, including ours. Revelation 3:14-16 says: "To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm – neither hot or cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth."

It almost seems like a mistake to call the church at Laodicea arrogant, when it seems only to have sunk to apathy. It did not so much refuse to open the door to the splendid Patience that knocked; it was too lazy to get up and do it. Jesus' next words explain where their spiritual indolence came from. "You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing'" (v. 17).

That slams the door against Christ and allows, not only a human soul, but also an entire church to live long unchallenged and fiercely determined not to admit the Lord of the Church to its life. I know that people have charged the Church across the ages with being only for the weak. As with all the devil's lies, the charge almost tells the truth. The truth says, The Church is for those who, however strong they may seem to the world, know they are weak. In Revelation's words, they know they are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. They are the ones who become receptive to God's gifts.

It is not easy to see yourself as being this spiritually impoverished. The most unsettling thing I have had to come to terms with in the last dozen years has been the failures of evangelical leaders. I don't think I exaggerate to say that millions of people looked up to these leaders. Some of them loomed large in my life. I had to come to terms with their failures, because if it could happen to them, it could happen to me.

But an unexpected result has come from their failures. Many evangelicals find they don't have to pretend we are perfect any longer. I don't know exactly how this result came about in my soul, but it has proved to be liberating. I am not walking on eggshells any more. I know that congregations, including and especially pastors, are flawed and liable to public disgrace. Nothing anyone does can change that, and sooner rather than later the flaws and disgrace will show up.

What I hate is for people whose failings become known in the congregation to say, "Oh, I could never show my face there again." Why not? I mean, you don't need a doctor because you are healthy. We don't need Christ and the Church and each other and Communion and Scripture because we are holy.

I know, I know. You can't show your face again, because you can't bear what people are saying about you behind your back. Some people will still do that, but I tell you that more and more Christians have stopped pretending the Church is perfect. I for one am not surprised at anything any Christian does any more. I do not think I am alone.

I do think we don't know how to talk with others, even those close to us, about their failures. It is perhaps even harder to talk with people whose lives have been profoundly affected by the failures of someone close to them. We still come across as too pious or too much in a hurry to make everything okay the way it used to be, or we are so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we say nothing. We lack a lot of skills.

I still think that if I messed up or if someone else in my family went through a bad time, this is the place I would want to be. I would want the general facts of my failure to be public knowledge, and I would want the details known to a few people who would help me and my family be restored and who would know it may take a while.

You may say to me, "Pastor, it sounds to me like you are willing to settle for a congregation that doesn't behave much differently from non-Christians." That is not true. We Christians are called to be holy as God is holy. I am just saying that pretending to be holy when all the time we are hiding the terrible things we do is not behaving much differently than non-Christians. Maybe it is behaving worse.

Here is the trick. Can we press on to take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of us, and at the same time can we be realistic and compassionate about the casualties we suffer along the way? My attitude, when you confess your failures and sins to me, is to say, "Today you need me. Tomorrow I may need you." Let's help each other get back on track and press on toward the goal. Yes, that means confessing our sins to the Lord and to each other. It means sticking with each other for as long as it takes until the wounds we have inflicted and incurred can heal. It means sticking with each other when we can't make things like they used to be.

That is what it means for a church to accept the Book of Revelation when it says, "You are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked." Many years ago, T.S. Eliot expressed the difference between a church that acknowledged its flaws and failures and a church that pretended it was something it was not. He expressed it in a totally unexpected and memorable figure of speech. The title of the poem is "The Hippopotamus."

The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
while the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peace
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts'
God works in a mysterious way –
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the marty'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

When I was younger, I heard Christianity and the Church taunted as being the white man's religion. Then, I looked around the world, and discovered that most of the Church is people of color. I was told that preaching was an outmoded way of doing ministry. I lifted my head from the disheartening news to the somewhat disconcerting fact that people communicated that message by preaching their hearts out. I heard people from the UN say that Christian missionaries were destroying unique, primitive cultures. I listened to the evening news and was told that it was oil companies, mining companies, and logging that were destroying primitive cultures, not to mention the Amazon rain forests. I heard the world accuse the Church of being hypocrites, but I saw Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Baker, Gordon Macdonald, Jerry Falwell, and many ordinary Christians repenting of their evil. I didn't see repentance coming from Nixon or McNamara or JFK or LBJ or Reagan – all of whom had much to repent.

In other words, if you look steadily at reality you will see the terribly mixed character of the Church. White Christians do not have an unblemished record of how we have treated people of color. Pastors really do use the pulpit to bully and bore and ride hobbyhorses. Missionaries have damaged primitive cultures. We still have hypocrisy. But this wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked Church is still the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. The power that raised Christ from the dead is at work in it. It is the bride, the wife of the Lamb. It is the New Jerusalem to which the nations of the earth may come for healing even now as well as in the future.

In this mixed state in which we enter the third millennium of the Church's existence, here is a trustworthy saying to challenge and sustain us on the journey.

If we endure,
     we will also reign with him.
If we disown him,
     he will also disown us;
if we are faithless,
     he will remain faithful,
     for he cannot disown himself. (2 Timothy  2:11-13)