Where You Go

Ruth 1:1-18, Mark 14:3-9

Stewardship Sunday, November 12, 2006

Church of the Redeemer

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

What are you all doing here this morning? No, I really mean that question as one for you to think about; what are you doing here? Don’t you know that most people don’t go to church anymore? The most optimistic of current surveys indicate that about 47% of Americans attend church on an average weekend (Barna), while others are less optimistic about that. The numbers get smaller as the polled segment gets younger, with less than 33% of those under age 25. In fact I heard a UCC national staff person last year quote a poll figure that 80% of those under age 20 in this country had never been to a Sunday worship service. Even if that’s exaggerated, it’s significant. Clearly in American culture, despite the big press about the Religious Right and the mega-churches, those who are committed to a congregation in this country are in the minority. That doesn’t mean people don’t have some kind of faith or spiritual life, it just means they have given up on the church.

Why have they given up? I read a whole set of surveys online this week that listed reasons ranging from the practical (have to work on Sunday morning), to theological (don’t believe in God or the other dogmas of a given church), to political (don’t like the social stances of a church), to aesthetic (it’s boring and irrelevant to my life), to interpersonal (those church members are hypocrites), to historic (I had a bad experience of church in my youth). Many, many people believe in God and pray and read the Bible but think the institution of the church is no longer relevant to our society.

I am guessing that for the most part these things do not apply to you, because you are here, and many of you are here Sunday after Sunday. Many of you also give many hours of time and creativity and money to this congregation, this archaic institution. You come together on Sunday to sing mostly old songs, to hear mostly old stories, with people you may not hang out with the rest of the week and people with whom you may not have much in common, indeed people that other sectors of society say you ought to be at odds with because you are of different races, ages, politics, professions or social or intellectual classes. What you are doing here is totally impractical, unnecessary, foolish even in the eyes of over half of your fellow Americans who think you are crazy to make any kind of commitment here!

And I want to stand here today and encourage with all the passion I can muster just that kind of insanity, because I don’t think this is an archaic institution; in fact, I believe our witness is crucial. Two women help me understand why we still need to do what we do here. First, I have been listening to my sister, Ruth. Talk about crazy, in a time when a woman’s economic security depended totally on her husband, brother or father, she decides to hitch her wagon to her mother-in-law, another woman without a man! A woman of Moab, Ruth decides to go with Naomi, a woman of a different nationality and religion, to Israel, a country that had been Moab’s enemy for generations, a country in which she would be subject to prejudice because of her ethnic and religious background, a country in which Naomi couldn’t guarantee her own economic security let alone Ruth’s. In a time when most people spent their whole lives living with their extended family, Ruth decides to leave her whole family behind, not knowing if she would ever see or speak to them again! She does this because she believes that she and Naomi, despite their differences in age and nationality, are stronger together than apart. What is she, nuts? Reminds me of a great line by Gimli in the third Lord of the Rings film, “Odds stacked against us; small chance of success; what are we waiting for?”

What are we waiting for, indeed. This big old building, in need of a paint job, these people with some radical vision that they can change the world by acts of love, justice and charity, not enough money or people to do everything that vision entails, these people who make mistakes in their personal lives, mistakes here at church, and we forgive and welcome each other back again and again, people who believe God actually exists and actually desires joy and good and life for all people everywhere. A lot of you people have lots of letters after your names and are supposed to be smart, and those of you who may not have those letters have lots of life wisdom. So what are you, nuts like Ruth to commit to what seems to the world to be a foolish endeavor?

Oh, I do hope so!

And I hope you are even more foolish, foolish like the woman we read about in Mark who bathed Jesus with that expensive ointment, worth an entire year’s pay for a laborer. How you gonna change the world if you keep taking money and spending it on impractical things? But she loved him so much. I don’t know why, any more than I know clearly why most of you love Jesus enough to come here week after week and teach your children to love him. Luke’s gospel tells us she was a woman Jesus had healed; in John’s gospel she is identified as Mary of Bethany, whose brother Lazarus Jesus raised from the dead, so maybe this gift was an act of gratitude. Her gift was so uncalculated, so beyond common sense, so extravagant that others questioned her commitment and her sanity. But she loved Jesus so much.

We don’t have Jesus in the flesh before us to love like that today. Or do we? We understand the church to be the “body of Christ” on earth today. Not just the building, which is simply our tool, our base of operations, but the congregation, the gathered community of those trying to love and serve God as Jesus did and taught. We have each other upon whom to lavish extravagant love. And we have the poor still with us, the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoners, the homeless, the sick, all those Jesus told us were his body awaiting our gifts of extravagant love. Again and again in my life I have experienced the extravagant love of God forgiving me when I have really messed up, believing in me when I have stopped believing in me, making this barren woman the happy mother of children, leading me to places where I can work, using my gifts and finding such joy in doing so that I cannot believe how lucky I am. So I love Jesus beyond common sense and practicality, because that is how I experience Jesus has loved me. It is because of the church that I have recognized Jesus acting in my life and in service with the church that I have found the deepest relevance for my life.

So, I want to be like my sisters Ruth and this woman whose name I wish I knew. I don’t always get there as I allow the world to break in with its busy-ness and practicality and logic, but I keep holding them up before me to give me permission to love beyond common sense, and to do so here, with you.

So what are you doing here? What is your capacity beyond common sense in commitment and love for this community of Ruths and Naomi’s, this battered body of Jesus? What you write on that financial pledge card you will bring forward in a few moments is not full the measure of that commitment and love by any means, but it is one way to symbolize it, one measure, if you like, of your wild, foolish, outrageous journey of faith here at Redeemer, and of your belief that Redeemer and what we do here is of value to the world. As we recommit to this church this year, no matter what the pollsters say, can we look at one another, and at Jesus, today and say “Where you go, I will go. Where you dwell, I will dwell, your people shall be my people; your God shall be my God?” Amen.