Sermon delivered by Anne Turner on Homecoming Sunday, September 18, 2022.
This is Welcome Sunday, so I want to extend a wide and loving welcome to everyone here and everyone listening in. As you know from the earlier words, the Haydenville Congregational Church is known for and proud of its welcome. This is not braggadocio (only English majors get to use this word) or a falsehood. It is true.
A quick story to illustrate: in September 2005, my husband told me that Andrea Ayvazian was the new pastor at our church. He had worked with Andrea before in racism training, so knew what a dynamic person she was. On a hunch, I went to this church to check it and Andrea out. I believe that she sang some of the words to the wonderful “Cold Play” song, “I will fix you.” I got goosebumps all over and tried hard not to sob, leaning on the pew ahead of me. It was a near thing. I came home, tossed the bulletin on my husband’s lap and said, “Honey, I’ve found our church!”
I also know that some of you have come from parishes in your past where you felt unwelcome, shamed, shunned, and so much more. It can get very hard to untangle the threads of church and our relationship with God. I know that. So, in this sermon I want to talk some about the central beliefs of our Christian faith and also about what it means to “be church,” and to be a beloved child of God. That can be hard to take in and believe when earlier experiences have told us otherwise.
What does it mean to be church for me?
— It means first of all that we are a COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS, not the Grange, not a book club, not a political action group, but a community of believers. Does that mean that we all hold the same tenets? Not at all. If we went around this church, wrote down what we believed and put it in a basket, we would have almost as many views as there are people. But—if we call ourselves Christian, there are some basic things which are important to hold to or at least think deeply about and pray over.
THIS IS THE 1981 UCC STATEMENT OF FAITH:
We believe in you, O God, Eternal Spirit, God of our Savior Jesus Christ and our God, and to your deeds we testify:
You call the worlds into being, create persons in your own image, and set before each one the ways of life and death.
You seek in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.
You judge people and nations by your righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.
In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Savior, you have come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to yourself.
You bestow upon us your Holy Spirit, creating and renewing the church of Jesus Christ, binding in covenant, faithful people of all ages, tongues, and races.
You call us into your church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship, to be your servants in the service of others, to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil, to share in Christ’s baptism and eat at his table, to join him in his passion and victory.
You promise to all who trust you, forgiveness of sins and fulness of grace, courage in the struggle for justice and peace, your presence in trial and rejoicing, and eternal life in your realm which has no end.
Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto you. Amen.
Isn’t that quite wonderful? Gives me goosebumps every single time. Let me set forth in my own words what I see as the central tenets of our Christian faith:
— We believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, else we would be folks belonging to an old, heretical sect like Arianism which denied the divinity of Christ.
—We hold that Christ was both human and divine, which is essentially one outrageous thing to say. What other religion in the world holds to this? Only Christianity. Once when Fr. Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest, theologian and author was being horridly ill in a toilet one night, he comforted himself by saying, “I bet Jesus threw up too.” I don’t know if this would comfort me, but it attests to Jesus’s humanity.
— Christians hold fast to the Trinity, God in Three Persons which is pretty hard to wrap your mind around. I like the explanation that Bishop Barron gave of what the Trinity is: God the Father, God the Son, and the love flowing between them like a sigh being the Holy Spirit.
— Some of us believe more in the power of sin than others. I like the UCC statement of faith which talks about the “aimlessness” we are rescued from. I personally hate, detest, and want to throw the word sin under the bus. Me? A sinner? But there are other ways of looking at this. One Greek translation in the Gospels calls sin, “missing the mark,” as an archer does not hit the target with her arrow. I prefer this and find it much more to my taste to look at the ways in which I do not get close to God, do not love my neighbors, and do not work for justice and love in the world. And along with our belief in missing the mark is our repudiation of the works of the devil. Not all of us believe in the Father of Lies, of course, but many of us do, including our beloved Phil Hall.
One funny story about this occurred when I was coming into the Catholic Church in 2002. Those who had never been baptized were wearing special white robes, standing by the baptismal font which was like a hot tub, ready to immerse themselves in it totally, including their heads. In the liturgical rite Fr. Gene asked one teenage boy called Clarence, “Do you renounce the works of the devil and the glamor of evil?” Clarence hesitated, stayed silent, maybe crushed by the enormity of what he was about to do. After several moments of silence, Fr. Gene said, “Well, Clarence, are ya thinkin’ it over?”
— Christians believe in the historical Jesus; that he lived, walked, talked, healed, preached, loved, and got angry in 1st-century Palestine. Two authentic sources attest to this: one from the Roman Jew, Josephus, in the first century and the second from the Roman Consul, Tacitus, in the early 2cnd century. They both mentioned “the exorcist, Jesus” and his healing powers.
—T he UCC statement in your Hymnal, declares that we hold that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. In case you have trouble with this—as did John Dominic Crossan–who said Jesus’s dead body was just thrown in a ditch along with the dogs—think about it, pray on it, and read the post-resurrection accounts at the end of all the Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of John also tells of the wonderful story of the Road to Emmaus as well as the story of Doubting Thomas. Caravaggio painted a magnificent work on this which is my favorite painting in the entire world.
How does all this this apply to you and me? It means that we will have resurrected bodies, as Jesus did. Do we know what that will be like? Of course not. But Pope Francis, in his ongoing celebration of the elderly, recently said, “The life of the risen body will be one hundred and one thousand times more alive than we have tasted it on this earth.” I believe we will have a risen body just as Jesus did.
— Christianity is a deeply incarnational faith, from “In Carne” meaning in the flesh. We believe in a God who once wore diapers—the 1st-century version of them, that is; was a toddler who fell down; was an adolescent who scared his parents when he stayed behind to listen to the rabbis teaching in the Temple; who was baptized by John the Baptist; and who then began a 3-year odyssey around the villages in Palestine: preaching, healing, welcoming outsiders, curing the woman with a 12-year hemorrhage, curing a woman who had been paralyzed for 18 years, healing a blind man with spit and mud, welcoming a prostitute to a table indoors, raising Lazarus, and so much more. I hope you see here how inclusive Jesus was to women, something almost unheard of in his day.
— We are called to love and serve our neighbors, even when they have signs saying, “All lives matter,” on their lawns. This commandment goes back to the Hebrew Scriptures where we are called to welcome refugees, as we once were refugees in the promised land.
Okay, these are at the core of our faith, some of which you may accept, some of which you simply cannot accept. But given that these are the floorboards on which we put our feet, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE CHURCH?
I think it means these things:
— We take care of each other. When Lynn Goodhue had to go to the Memory Unit, as did our dear Phill Hall, we write cards to them telling them we are thinking about them and sending our love. This means they feel not forgotten, a huge, important thing when memory fails.
— If we see one of our members weeping in the pews, once the service is over, we go up, put a hand on their shoulder, and give them a little hug. We sit down beside people in trouble and say, “I am here, with you. Tell me about it, if you wish.” We walk beside each other.
— We lift people in prayer as Nan and so many others have done on Zoom church in the past few years. You would be surprised at the power of prayer, and how someone who is being prayed for can feel them, can feel lifted up on wings of prayer and love.
— We give resources to our church, whether that is money, time, effort, or whatever we have to give. I remember when I was back attending the Williamsburg Congo church, one poor woman put in a booklet of stamps to the offering plate because that is all that she had, like the widow in the gospels who put in 2 pennies to support the Temple.
—I think we make it our business to grow in the faith by reading Scripture, thinking about the lessons, maybe joining a Bible Study group which we used to have, and by sharing our faith journeys with others. Yours might be telling a friend, “I haven’t felt God’s presence in over a year. I have trouble loving my neighbor who is so cranky.” There is nothing so wonderful as sharing our flaws and failings with others and finding out they have the same journey as we do. I believe it was Carol Reinehart who suggested that we—in the church—could reach out to another parishioner and start up a conversation with them, checking in with them weekly by phone. I do this with Trish LaFrenier.
Remember what the UCC Statement of Faith tells us when you think about how to be a disciple, how to gather God’s love into your hands:
“…you have come to us…”
“…you bestow upon us…”
“…you call us…”
We are in a relationship with God, or, as my favorite Richard Rohr has said, this is a relational universe. God comes to us. She gives to us. And she calls to us to share her love with the world, not just our dog, our partners, or our kids.
— I also think that being church means singing hymns together. Who knows how the old words and melodies can lift us up and join us together? “Love Like a Yellow Daffodil” is one of those or “Here I Am, Lord.” Music can mend the rifts between us and send us out into the world with our hearts singing. In the Catholic Church the priest, after blessing us, says, “Now the Mass is ended, go forth in peace to love and serve the world.” Missa est is the Latin in case you are interested. And St. Hildegard of Bingen, the 11th-century mystic, nun, musician, ecologist, healer and more, said that music binds up the discord that Satan created.
Sheesh. When Jan Varnon—and what would we do without the people who keep this church afloat day after day, week after week, month after month, putting together a service, printing out bulletins, governing the church and its finances—when Jan told me my sermon would be on our Welcome Day—I got nervous in the service and suggested maybe I should do another day instead. But, damn! That Holy Spirit acts in the most astonishing ways. Or, as Anne Lamott once wrote, “God is such a show-off.” With the Holy Spirit singing in my brain and heart, I sat down on Aug. 25th and wrote this entire sermon, although I have revised and tweaked it many times. How does that happen? Do you know? I don’t. All I know is something happens that is beyond me, that takes me by the hand and leads me to places I had never imagined and sometimes did not want to go.
My fellow believers, take heart. We are not in this alone. I know this. I have been through such dark times that sometimes I wondered how I would survive, how I would get out the other end alive. But once, in a hard family time, when I was sobbing in bed at night in the darkness, I prayed to God and said, “I don’t know how we are going to get through this. I feel like I am sliding down the back of the Devil’s throat.”
God replied instantly, in my thoughts: “Read Romans 5.” Ok, I thought, blowing my nose, turning on the light, and taking up my old blue New Testament from Sunday School in 7th grade. I leafed through to Romans 5, which I hadn’t a clue about, other than that it was a book in the Bible. This is what I read:
…we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5: 3-5)
And man, if that didn’t calm my fears, put ground under my feet, and light the flame in my heart telling me that God was near. Always. You are never alone, even when you think you are. Or, as I recently found out, one translation of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is, “I am who am.” But another translation reads thus: “I am the one who is there.” Amen, my sisters, brothers, trans, non-binary folks, and all who worship with us on Sunday morning. God is the one who is there, always with us, whether we know it or not. Can somebody say Amen?
Annie Turner is an author who lives in Williamsburg and worships at Haydenville Congregational Church. Her blog “Faith is My Operating System” can be found at https://faithismyos.blogspot.com
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