Sunday, May 5, 2024
/Easter 6 (Year B)
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
The Rev. Clint Brown
To jog my memory from high school biology, I looked up what are the seven characteristics of all living things. The first might strike you as a bit alarming. It is dying. Dying is one of the characteristics of a living thing. But along the way, from birth to death, living things must also do many other things. They must move, reproduce, grow, respond to stimuli, and, finally, metabolize and synthesize energy; or, as we more commonly put it, eat and digest. It is not for nothing that we say, “You are what you eat,” because that is precisely what we are. We are made of whatever we give our bodies to build and repair itself.
“Abide in my love,” says Jesus. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” It is not just that we need good nutrition for our bodies; it is just as important for our souls. And so, if you’ll indulge me, I would like to take the next few minutes to make this case…for something, in fact, that you have already shown yourself quite capable of doing, and that is that one of the keys to good spiritual health is to make it a habit to regularly go to church.
To begin with, did you know that it is a scientific fact that going to church is good for you? Study after study, year after year, confirm the remarkable mental health benefits of regular church attendance. Less anxiety, less worry, less fear. It’s not that people who go to church never suffer from any of these things or are somehow able to walk through the raindrops, it’s just that when we consume a regular diet of church we have a larger story in which to understand our own. This is our hope, and as Edgar Cayce once wrote: “For as long as there is life, there is hope. [And] so long as there is hope, there is possibility…” We set our hope on Christ, and Christ opens up for us possibilities that would not be possible without him. Church is for that.
And church is also good for families (my second point). It introduces our children to God and the things of God. I have known many instances when a parent has confided in me that they had for a long time put God in a box on a shelf, forgetting all about him, until realizing one day that they suddenly had little humans they were responsible for. “Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray” (Proverbs 22.6), assures the Book of Proverbs. This is as much a responsibility as any of the other responsibilities we feel towards our children – to clothe them, feed them, shelter and protect them, and see that they get the best education possible. All of these are important, but there are spiritual needs, as well, and getting the kids to church is attending to those spiritual needs.
Third, going to church means community. While salvation may be individual, worship certainly is not. It requires others. In fact, did you know that we priests are absolutely forbidden to celebrate Holy Communion alone? It is actually a cause for discipline, as far back as the Reformation, to make “private Eucharists.” The reason is that this is just not the way we understand the sacrament. The making of Eucharist is a fundamentally communal action, an expression of the whole Body of Christ, and it is simply not possible for any one particular member of that body to do it alone. What we are saying by gathering together this morning is that we Christians are all in this together, inseparably so. We need each other’s companionship. We need each other’s encouragement when times are hard. And, yes, we also need to learn how to get along. It is only by having to deal with each other that we learn the most important thing – how to love each other. You might think that there has never been a time when culture wars and tribalism and partisanship has been as bad as they are now, but that is not true. Conflict is what happens as soon as two people have to share a water well or a road to market or discover when they got to church that someone was sitting in their pew. Dispute and disagreement is nothing new to us, and while it doesn’t get the press it should or the notice it deserves, it is nonetheless the case that through the ages Christians of all persuasions have knelt together at the altar rail to affirm that, at the end of the day, we are all sinners simply trying to do our best. Sin and sinfulness are the great levelers. This realization, also, is a gift of community.
Sometimes I hear people say that they can find God in nature and don’t need to go to church. The beauty of the forest or of the seashore, the majesty of mountains, the roar of a crashing wave – all this is the cathedral of nature, they say. Or why not just read my Bible on my own? This thinking is not misguided. I do not wish to minimize it. But I do feel that both of these postures suffer from the same thing – they are simply not enough. The danger of being off alone with God, whether in the cathedral of nature or at your desk, is that you are likely to create a God in your own image, who likes what you like and hates what you hate. This God of your creation is, of course, very acceptable and not very confrontational, because this God conforms to your expectations. The value of coming to church is to be confronted with the bumper rails of tradition, to hear the good and pleasing bits of Holy Scripture right alongside the challenging and uncomfortable, so that together we may take a stab at discerning truth. Not only is going it alone selling yourself short, it may very well cause you a great deal of harm.
But I think that the overwhelming good of going to church comes down to this: going to church requires something. It is active. It means choosing to make your faith a priority by simply walking through the door. Here is as good a place to start as any in that struggle all of us have to put God first. The great Phillips Brooks said: “Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.” You could just as well say the same thing about faith. Heroic faith does not arise in any one moment, it is something practiced and built in a million smaller ones, when the choice is made to continue to trust despite all evidence to the contrary; when we do the right thing in a moment of moral testing; and, as I am suggesting, in the mundane choice to get out of the house and get to church. While going to church can be as meaningful or as empty as any exercise of spiritual discipline, I submit that the decision to go regularly to church is at least a choice to prioritize your spiritual health and well-being. In my experience, God takes it from there. “Abide in my love,” says Jesus, and Jesus wants you in church. Amen.