I Dream of a Church

June 5, 2022 • Pentecost Sunday
Readings: Romans 12: 1-5, 9-10, Colossians 3:9-17 (The Inclusive Bible)
Rev. Jeff Wells preaching

[You can view the full worship video recording at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhRQw-qSRlo

The apostle Paul was many things – a courageous visionary leader, a theologian, a gifted writer, a practical organizer, a public speaker, and a dreamer. His letters to the churches in Rome, Colossae, and other cities describe Paul’s dream of what the churches could be. Some of the folks Paul wrote to were Jews who had allied themselves with this new spiritual renewal of God’s Spirit in Jesus. Others were gentiles – pagans who came from many different religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and felt called to this new movement. The early Christian churches combined Jesus’ teachings about love, justice, and ministry with the marginalized along with Paul’s theological insights and his vision of creating Christian communities that practiced love, humility, forgiveness, inclusiveness, compassion, and mutual care.

Paul dreamed of these churches being countercultural outposts on the forefront of spiritual renewal and religious transformation. “Don’t conform yourselves to this age,” he wrote. Rather, “be transformed by the renewal of your minds, so that you can sense God’s luring and grasp what is God’s desire.”

According to the Biblical accounts, Peter and Paul were largely responsible for overturning Jewish purity laws to allow non-Jews to fully participate in this movement. The communities they birthed were radically inclusive for their time. They went against the grain by including Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free persons, rich and poor, women and men. 

We see this vision of broad inclusiveness in the Pentecost story, too. First, Peter quotes the prophet Joel, in which God declares, “I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people.” Then,  we are presented with the dramatic image of hundreds of people, gathered from more than a dozen nations, all being able to hear and understand the apostles’ message in their own languages.

Choosing to join one of the early Christian churches was a risky business. They were surrounded by large established religions that had many more followers and influence in high places. Often, these gentile religions – and even Judaism in some places – were backed by the power of the governing authorities. So, periodically, Christians would be subject to persecution. Many Jews must have viewed these Christians as suspect and as illegitimate competitors, who were leading people away from the true faith. Also, because of what Jesus’ followers claimed to stand for and often the ways they acted, many Roman, Greek, and even Jewish leaders surely perceived them as a threat to their hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. At a minimum, many new Christians must have lost jobs or been shunned by their family and friends. Others hid their affiliation.

In his letters to the churches in Rome and Colossae, Paul offered inspiration and instruction on how to live together as one body in Christ. He appealed to the followers of the Way of Jesus in these small churches to let their “love be sincere” and “to love one another with the affection of beloved siblings.” Paul admonished them to “clothe yourselves with heartfelt compassion, with kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with one another; forgive whatever grievances you have against one another – forgive in the same way God has forgiven you. Above all else, put on love, which binds the rest together and makes them perfect.”

The early churches strove to follow the teachings of Jesus and the community values and principles taught by Paul. Yet, like all of us, they were shaped by particular social, cultural, and family backgrounds and experiences. Paul’s letters chided some of the churches for the unequal treatment accorded to some members – as in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians, where Paul castigated the wealthy members for eating before the poorer members and then proceeding to get drunk. 

As much as the early Christians may have desired to break free from conformity to familiar thinking and behavior, they could not do it by simply willing it to happen. They had to work at it continually and make progress imperfectly. They struggled, they moved forward and then retreated, and they learned and grew along the way. Yet, in building intentional community with chosen family, and practicing the values of kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and love, they were renewed and reshaped over time.

Just as Jesus had taught his followers to “let your light shine,” Paul wanted the churches scattered around the Mediterranean to be beacons of light and hope in a pretty brutal world. He saw them as signs of the kin-dom of God that Jesus had proclaimed. I liked the way Jorge expressed it in our worship planning meeting: the church isn’t itself the kin-dom. It is an experimental laboratory of the kin-dom. 

Paul was, first of all, an evangelist. He was determined to spread the story and the message of Jesus and he believed deeply that communities that practiced the values he taught would attract many followers. And they did. Over the next 250 years, Christianity went from being a handful of scattered communities to a mass movement so popular that the Roman Emperor Constantine, himself, converted to it and a few years later, proclaimed it one of the officially sanctioned religions in the empire.

For the past six weeks, we’ve been examining the “living history” of our church in our “Lovers, Rebels, and Prophets” worship series. We learned about the outreach to immigrant communities by the Metropolitan Temple church beginning in the 1890s and by the Church of All Nations beginning in 1904 and extending for decades. We learned that in the 1960s, the Washington Square UM Church was known as the “Peace Church” because of its strong stand against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was a center for support of growing gay and lesbian activism and culture. We learned that the impulse to inclusiveness and being in ministry with diverse groups of people is a thread that connects us with many of the churches in our lineage back to 1797, when First Wesleyan Chapel was established as a multiracial congregation. 

Since at least 2017, the Church of the Village has been referring to itself as “a progressive, radically inclusive, anti-racist community.” There has been some contention over that sometimes – with some questioning whether we can really make those claims, saying, “Wouldn’t it be better if we said ‘We seek to be… or ‘We aspire to be…’ those things?” I understand the sentiment. Our tagline is, necessarily, a shorthand version of the fullness of what we mean by it. Like the early churches – and all of the churches that followed them – we, too, engaged our dreams of social and spiritual transformation, forgiveness, humility, and love, imperfectly. Being church has always been messy. 

The vision of the church we aspire to be – inadequately captured in our tagline – is very important. It demonstrates our desire and our intention, in spite of our imperfect implementation. We are called to dream together and to learn to live and love together. 

We are dreamers in the very positive sense that I think the prophet Joel and the apostle Peter meant it: We dream of the church and the world God desires and then work to be a sign of that new creation we believe God envisions. Of course, that dream is not static. It is always evolving along with the world and with our own understanding and capabilities.

Friends, we can and must always strive to do better. In the last two years, we have intentionally tried to clarify what having a progressive theology means to us – especially, but not limited to, our exploration of Process theology. The ecological crisis has helped us to realize we cannot focus our love only on human beings. God calls us, lures us, to count animals, trees, fungi, air, water, and soil as members of our “community” and worthy of our love, care, and compassion. 

Also, with humility and hope, we must admit that we have not yet fully lived into our aspiration to be either radically inclusive or anti-racist. That is why our leadership has been engaging in an extended process of reflection, definition, clarification, and learning about what it means for us to not simply claim, but to be anti-racist. We will take another step in that process at the Vision & Ministry Council meeting this afternoon. 

Of course, we must follow the example of the early churches. As 1 Corinthians 13 reminds us, we may speaking many languages, possess the gift of prophesy, have great faith, we may embody progressive theology, claim to be inclusive and anti-racist, but if we do not have love, we are nothing and we gain nothing. Our dreams and our actions must always be grounded in an abundance of grace, humility, forgiveness, building deep relationships, and most of all, love. 

So, friends, let us listen deeply for God’s luring and let’s dream together of the church that we can be while journeying together as the messy, imperfect, loving and forgiving chosen family that we are. Amen. 

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