Sermon for September 25, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

Is the Lord among us, or not? This is the question the Israelites are asking in the wilderness in the Old Testament lesson today. And perhaps this was the question Mark Gwin was asking himself as he battled wildfires in Central Texas last week. He is the publisher of the local paper, Bastrop Advertiser, a member of Calvary Episcopal Church, and a volunteer firefighter.

He wrote: “My family and I fled from our home on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 4, while a gentle dusting of ash fell and the sun glowed red overhead in the thick plume of smoke that covered the sky….I've been a volunteer fire fighter for five years now, and I've never felt as helpless as I did Sunday night watching as the fire, whipped by a vengeful wind, had its way across the Lost Pines…. I was the first firefighter with Heart of the Pines to lose his home….By the end of that day, there were only a few firefighters left who still had a place to call home. Here's the crazy, heart-wrenching thing – they were demobilized, released from duty because operations realized what kind of loss our department was experiencing. But not a single one of them stopped…. They're fighting the fire still.”

It’s the kind of wilderness experience that makes humans ask: where is God? Is the Lord among us, or not?

The Israelites in today’s Old Testament reading are experiencing a sort of symbolic moment, a sojourn in the wilderness, where they learn to question God, ask for what they need, and search for God’s providence in difficult times. You and I may never have wandered through a desert in search of water. And we may never have battled wild fires or lost a home to them. But each of us has probably had a wilderness experience at some point – an illness, the loss of a relationship, an addiction, a spiritual crisis. And almost all of us have asked some form of that question: is the Lord among us, or not?

We see a version of this same question in our gospel story today: when the temple officials ask, by whose authority are you doing these things? They are asking, quite simply, is the Lord among us in this Jesus who is getting all this attention, or does his power come from somewhere else? They are asking the same question differently than the people of Israel in the Old Testament lesson, whom God answers graciously with water to preserve their lives. The temple officials are pretty sure they are acting under God’s authority, for after all they are in charge of God’s temple and they obey its rules. But they are pretty angry about this Jesus fellow, because just before this in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus swept through the temple, overturning the tables of the money changers and chasing them out, calling temple a “den of robbers.” Understandably upset at being called robbers, the temple officials come to Jesus and demand to know what right he has to do such things.

And they don’t know it, but they’re in a wilderness experience of their own – a test of whether they are able to see God’s hand at work in their world, or whether they will be so attached to their own positions, that they won’t be able to recognize the Son of God when he stands before them.

Jesus answers them pointedly with the parable of the two sons: one who says “yes” to his father but doesn’t do what his father says, and one who says “no” but does it anyway – and clearly he is speaking to religious officials who pretend to do God’s will but are really in it for themselves, and letting them know that tax collectors and sinners will go into heaven ahead of them.

God is standing before them in this wilderness of anger, this spiritual crisis they find themselves in, he tells them – and can they recognize God’s work? Or are they going to say “yes” to God but refuse to join in God’s ministry? This, by the way, is the kind of pointed question that will get him killed, not too long from now.

And we can sit and watch this, and understand exactly what Jesus is doing, and exactly why he attacks the temple officials who pay lip service to God, obeying all the rules and rituals, yet getting rich off the backs of the people and ignoring God’s call to act justly, to help the poor, to follow God’s teachings with their hearts and not just their lips. And yet, watching how Jesus criticizes these other folks from long ago, perhaps it doesn’t take long for us to realize how these things apply to us too.

Back in Chapter 7 of Matthew, Jesus had said, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven” – similar to today’s parable of the two sons. Well, we’re here in church because we are saying to Jesus, Lord, Lord. And we have been assured that our faith in Jesus is what brings us to the kingdom of heaven, and not anything we could do to earn it. We truly believe that in the wilderness experiences of our lives, God will be with us, bringing water from the rock, manna in the wilderness, filling our spiritual needs – giving comfort in times of sorrow, promising life in world of death.

Yet here is Jesus saying something more is required that simply believing this, accepting God’s love, worshiping Christ – God wants to see actions as well as words. So what is he saying to us?

First, we need to understand that Jesus is not saying that our actions earn our way to heaven; he is saying that our actions indicate where our heart truly is. If we are truly following Jesus; if our hearts have been converted to him, then we will live kingdom lives; our actions will show where our hearts are.

Second, we should realize Jesus’ parable doesn’t exhaust all possibilities. You can say “yes” to God but then not do what God says – like the temple priests. You can say “no” to God but then do God’s will anyway – like sinners who come out of their wilderness of sin to follow Jesus. You could also say “no” to God and not do it – like too many people today who are lost in their own spiritual wildernesses. Or you could say “yes” to God and do what God says – and this is the category we hope we are in.

So, for those of us who have decided to follow Jesus, who have said “yes” to him – how do we make sure our hearts and actions are in line with what our lips have said?

I think it comes back to the question: is the Lord among us, or not? I believe the Lord is among us when we ask God to be there. In the wilderness experiences of our lives, when we are wandering lost, ill, grief-stricken, worried about tomorrow and about how we are going to find what we need to survive, like the Israelites searching for water in the desert – when we reach out to God, God is there. Not judging us for questioning, not requiring us to prove ourselves to him, but caring for us as a loving parent. Giving us not necessarily what we want, but what we need, like water in the desert – God’s own presence and care, that we can count on.

There are other times in our lives, other wilderness experiences, when we don’t even know that we are wandering lost. When Jesus unsettles us, calls us to account, and we stand in front of God and question him, like the temple priests, requiring him to prove who he is. It’s times like this that Jesus turns our question back around on us. The question is not, is Jesus acting under God’s authority. The question is, are WE acting under God’s authority? Are we doing the things God has called us to do, are we living the law of love, are we caring for our neighbor as ourselves? Are we saying Yes to God with our lips, and with our lives? Because if we are, it will show in our relationships with the world around us.

Back in Central Texas, firefighter Mark Gwin talked about where he saw God – and it was in the love of the people of the community who have banded together to help. “As a personal recipient of more kindness and generosity than I can comprehend or am even comfortable with…the love is staggering and helps more than I know how to say….I can never give back even the half of all that has been given me, but I suppose that is the truth and the beauty of the human condition. Human kindness is grace made flesh.’

And he wrote a prayer: “I loved my home…. I built it with my own hands…. So much is gone….But so much is left. In the Lord's Prayer, the only material thing we ask for is our daily bread. My family has been given that and so much more. So I offer thanks. Thanks that so many found safety in the face of such a ferocious and fast-moving fire. Thanks for the women and men who fought the fire and all the other responders. Thanks for the abundant generosity of the community. We are good people, backing up our good intentions with diligent work. I pray that we grow in kindness, wisdom and generosity. And that, having seen what we are capable of, we nurture it and develop it over the years as we rebuild our community. Rain and time will restore the earth. Love and work will restore our community.”

That’s the prayer that I pray for each one of us today. I pray that we may grow in kindness, wisdom and generosity. I pray that each one of us finds the grace to act as this community acted. To reach out to those in need, to live out love in our actions as well as our words, to be the incarnated presence of Christ in our church and our world. Because it is in being the presence of Christ, acting as Christ would act, that we find that the Lord is truly among us.

Sermon for Sept. 18, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about the phenomenon of Canadian hockey: at all levels of play, from grade school through NHL, Canadian hockey is a strict meritocracy. You get what you deserve; you can’t buy your way onto top teams or into the best training facilities; it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you went to school. The top opportunities in Canadian hockey leagues go to the best players.

Or so everyone thought, until a psychologist named Roger Barnsley noticed a very strange fact: an overwhelming number of players on championship teams were born in January, February or March – if you were born in January, you were 5 times more likely to be on a championship team than if you were born in November. This effect was true for all levels of hockey, from grade school to the NHL.

It turns out that training for Canadian hockey begins at the very youngest age: when kids first start to school – and the cutoff birthdate for joining a league is Jan. 1. At very early ages, a few months’ difference in age makes a big difference in ability. But coaches, not recognizing that, started pegging the bigger, stronger, faster players early on, and lined them up for more specialized training and higher-ability leagues – and the effect snowballed from there, so that even in professional hockey, birth months are noticeably skewed toward the beginning of the year. In fact, even at the professional level, this matrix holds true: 40% of players are born in the first quarter of the year, 30% in the second quarter, 20% in the third quarter, and only 10% in the fourth quarter. A sport that is rigorously arranged to reward people based strictly on merit turns out to give strong preference to people based on a mere accident of birth.

Which is interesting, because so many of us credit ourselves for our achievements – and rightly so, because we have worked hard. But think about that hard-working, 6-year old hockey player born in January, looking at his November teammate and thinking, he works hard, but he just doesn’t have what it takes – I deserve these higher honors. Yet it’s partly based on an accident of birth, a 10-month difference in birthdates.

I think back on my academic achievements and wonder, how much of my good grades in school could be traced back to the accident of being born to a mother who loved to read, and who started teaching me to read and write at a very young age, so that for me, reading was not something that meant schoolwork and testing and sitting in hard uncomfortable chairs. It meant sitting on my mother’s lap, with her arms around me, and her voice reading me the perfect cadences of Dr. Seuss – and she and Dr. Seuss made reading inextricably associated with love and happiness for me. And how much of my achievements were made possible by a father who believed that his girls could do anything any boy could do, and by being born in a time and place where our culture had more or less arrived at the same conclusion?

So often we fail to recognize how the things we receive, and achieve, are partly due to the care of other people, the accidents of birth, the circumstances we find selves in – even, by God, the grace and generosity of God. We’re like Bart Simpson at Thanksgiving, praying: “Dear Lord, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing. Amen.” Yet we’re surrounded by things that have come to us through what we call “grace”: the free gift of circumstances we did not deserve or work for.

Living in the kingdom of God means recognizing God’s grace in our lives. The miracle of the manna in the wilderness is an illustration: God leads the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into freedom, yet they find themselves in a wilderness, desolate and uncertain, and begin to yearn for the familiar certainty of being slaves, where at least Pharaoh gives them food, as a subsistence investment in the labor he can get in return. Newly arrived in the kingdom of God, they yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead.

Yet God, having birthed this new people, shows them what the kingdom of God is: God gives them each day just enough manna to feed them for one day. If they hoard it, it will spoil. So the newly birthed people of Israel must learn to live according to the discipline of grace: living in certainty that God will provide for their daily needs, but not looking beyond, not hoarding, not taking more than needed, not taking more for one person than the next – everyone has enough, none of it is deserved.

We Americans who were raised on Aesop’s Fable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the ant is rewarded for working hard and storing up food for the winter, while the grasshopper is on his own after having fun all summer, have trouble with this kingdom of God – and like the Israelites, we may yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead. But somehow this story tells us what God wants to give us – undeserved grace.

I read that if you go to the Sinai desert, you can see manna to this day. There is a certain insect there that secretes a white flaky substance which is pure sugar and carbohydrate – it is secreted as liquid overnight, and dries by morning in a flaky white crust over all the ground – perfectly edible to humans. On one level, you might say, well that’s not a miracle, that’s a natural phenomenon.

On another level, you could look at that manna in the wilderness and see God’s hand in it – God who led the people of Israel to the place that provided what they needed. And God who creates the world–why would it not be a miracle? After all, everything we eat, everything we wear, everything we build, comes from the earth; even our own lives; it is God who makes the whole natural world available to us. There is a Jewish prayer: “Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” We live among miracles, and give credit to ourselves.

If we start believing, like Bart Simpson, that we have done it all for ourselves, we become like the laborers in the gospel parable today, measuring the grace we think God, or the world, owes us, and grudging the grace given to others; living in a world of resentment, the kingdom of Pharaoh, hoarding what we think we deserve, instead of in a world of gratitude, the kingdom of God.

Today’s gospel is one of Jesus’ parables – and a parable is not like Aesop’s fables – we’re not supposed to get a tidy little moral for how to live like “Slow and steady wins the race” or whatever the moral was in the ant and the grasshopper story – "I got mine, you’re on your own," or something like that. What a parable does is surprises us – it opens our eyes to a new way of seeing. To understand a parable, you have to look first at how Jesus uses it. This is another in a long string of parables that begins: “the kingdom of heaven is like….” In this one, Jesus draws a picture from ordinary life that is familiar then and now – day laborers waiting on a corner for a job, a landowner who comes by in a pickup truck to hire a few laborers, five different times in one day. These are day laborers who start the day in uncertainty, not knowing if they will have food to feed their families at end of day, or if their children will go to bed hungry. Being hired is a moment of grace for them, manna in the wilderness of unemployment. This landowner who hires them makes sure that everyone has enough.

And we are surprised, as Jesus always surprises us in parables, because the landowner’s generosity takes into account not what the workers deserve, but what the owner wants to give: enough for everyone, manna for that day. The kingdom of heaven is like a God who gives grace to everyone – a beautiful lesson for us to learn.

But Jesus is realistic about human nature, so he tells us: the kingdom of heaven is also like a group of folks who begrudge that grace to others they think don’t deserve it - who would rather hold onto God’s blessings for selves. Having received everything they need, they would prefer to deny it to others.

I think in a parable, we can learn a lot by asking: where do we see ourselves? Do we see ourselves as the laborers hired early in the day? Late in the day? The landowner? Maybe some of us would identify with the laborers hired late in the day – we are conscious of giving little and receiving much grace from God in return. But most of us would probably identify with the laborers hired early in the day. Here we’ve been faithful Christians, gone to church, gone to school, held a job, taken our obligations seriously, supported our families, given and worked for the kingdom of God. We’re like Canadian hockey players born early in the year. We've worked for what we have achieved.

But what if Jesus sees us differently? What if we’re the late hires, the ones who didn’t deserve what we were given, but God gave it to us anyway? One of the truths of God’s kingdom is that we are all the late hires – no one deserves the amazing grace of God’s kingdom – nothing we could ever do could earn the gifts God gives us – but we receive them nonetheless. And like laborers in vineyard, we’re asked to share them willingly with others.

In the kingdom of heaven, things don’t work like they do in the kingdom of Pharaoh. In the kingdom of Pharaoh, we get what we deserve, punishments and rewards both – but we are also slaves. In the kingdom of God, all grace comes undeserved, along with freedom. We have to choose which kingdom to live in.

If we are going to live in the kingdom of God, Jesus asks two things of us: to understand what God has shared with us, and to share that grace with others. We can live with resentment, we can live with grace, but we can’t have both.

So here’s what I think Jesus calls us to do today and this week: ask ourselves two questions. What has God given you in abundance? It could be comfort, enough for each day, family, money, love, a difficult past that we learned from, and we are grateful for what we’ve learned; it could be eternal salvation and a place in kingdom of heaven. Take a moment and think about it – what are your greatest blessings?

Now, here’s the second question to think about today and the rest of this week: how is God calling you, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, to share those blessings with others?

Sermon for Sept. 11, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

Human memory is a very strange thing. You may not remember what you wore yesterday or where you left your keys, but probably everyone here could tell detailed memories of where you were and what you were doing 10 years ago today. I was getting my children ready for school when Tom called and told me to turn on the TV. He told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and I asked if it was an accident, and he said no.

And I still remember odd little moments from that day. The crossing guard at school who was helping kids cross the street with tears streaming down her face; the smell of candles in a church service that night; my 5-year-old daughter Julia asking me, “Mommy, why do you keep watching TV and crying?” The feeling of shock and utter disbelief that everyone shared.

And if I asked you, most everyone here could tell me the same kinds of memories. Somehow our memories of significant events exist for us in a whole package of facts, details, sensory images, faces, emotions. This is how our memories as human beings work: not linear reconstructions of facts, like computers that store strings of data, ones and zeros of equal weight, but bundles of human memories that are charged with emotional significance, which is why people never forget where they were and what they were doing when a tragic event happened: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, 9/11.

Because human memories work this way: factual details tied up together with our senses and our emotions and our interpretations of their meaning, we humans can move beyond mere memory to something more important: remembrance. Remembrance is a word which means to re-member – to put all the members back together, to bring something together in a new way. When we re-member something, Episcopal author Diana Butler Bass says, we “rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire … Remembering is the hard work of seeing, understanding, making sense of, and learning from the past.”

Forgiveness, it seems, is a type of re-membrance – a way of understanding, making sense of, and learning from our memories, a way of re-imagining the past in order to bring ourselves to a place of wholeness and healing. We hear challenging words from Matthew’s gospel today: Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” This number could also be translated seventy times seven times, 490 times, basically over and over and over.

Jesus brings his point home with the parable of a slave whose master forgives him an unimaginable amount of money – 10,000 talents was something like 150,000 years of wages for an Israelite wage-earner, or the entire Gross Domestic Product of Israel for ten years – but the same slave is unable to forgive another slave 100 denarii, basically 4 months’ living wages.

Clearly, Jesus wants us to understand that God has forgiven us everything, has made it possible for us to live healed lives, reconciled to God and others, has even offered us eternal salvation. Yet he says we often turn around and refuse to offer even a small portion of that same grace to others. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we express something similar, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

It’s not so much that our receiving forgiveness is contingent on our giving it. It’s more of a recognition that our ability to live reconciled lives is dependent on our willingness to both receive forgiveness for ourselves and offer it to others. Jesus is asking us to move beyond our simple memories of sins past, into a new realm of re-membrance – putting back together a new self, and a world we can imagine of reconciliation and wholeness, a world of God’s love.

Now I am completely aware of how difficult a lectionary text this is to hear on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, a day when our memories of a sin done against people like us are so strong and overwhelming. And by the way, I didn’t choose this gospel for this day, no one did – the lectionary texts are set in stone decades in advance, and all over the world, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches are struggling with this same text today. And the question of forgiving others over and over, as God does, brings all kinds of difficult problems to our human minds.

I think it is helpful to start by talking about what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not forgetting – our humanity does not allow us to simply forget memories of events that carry emotional significance. Forgiveness is not saying it was all right – some things will never be all right – sin and evil are real, and forgiveness does not change this fact. Forgiveness does not mean we allow the same thing to happen again – our responsibility to forgive is not an obligation to accept abuse. Forgiveness does not mean that we just let it go – there may be significant work to do to bring a relationship to healing and wholeness. Forgiveness does not mean that every relationship can be salvaged – sometimes as a last resort a relationship has to come to an end. Forgiveness does not mean that there are no consequences to sinful or evil actions – in a world that is short of the kingdom of heaven, a world where sin still reigns, justice must happen.

So that’s what forgiveness is not – let’s talk about what forgiveness is. I think that forgiveness is this: it is allowing God’s grace to move through us so that we can begin to release the sins that are keeping us separate from God and from our neighbor.

Forgiveness includes our own sins that we can’t forget, and our tendency to clutch tightly to the memories of other people’s sins against us. Many of us have trouble with both ends of this spectrum. We have trouble accepting forgiveness for ourselves, we hang onto our memories of our own failures, the whole package of facts and feelings, shame and guilt, and we have trouble letting them go. What we need to understand is that when God offers us forgiveness, God doesn’t so much forget our sins, as God re-members who we are. God imagines us whole and complete and reconciled, the children of God we were created to be – in re-membering us, God makes us whole. This is the great truth of reconciliation – in God’s love, God restores us to who we were created to be. Forgiveness is God’s self- giving act of love for us.

This remembrance of who we truly are is what God asks us to extend to others too – God asks us to imagine the other as God does, to see them as God’s beloved children, to work toward reconciliation, to realize that our hard and challenging call as Christians is to love even those who have hurt us. After all, Jesus forgave his killers as they nailed him to the cross. It’s a hard thing to ask humans to do, and I think most of us will never completely succeed, because we’re not Jesus – yet it’s our work, our calling as followers of Christ. Not because what others have done to us is all right, or excusable. But because forgiveness is the ultimate act of love, love in action.

And we should realize that forgiving others, allowing ourselves to become reconciled to them, becomes a path to healing for us too. If we hold onto toxic memories, if we treasure them and nurture them and allow them to grow into smoldering resentment or hurtful action, then we are the ones who will suffer. You may have heard the old saying: resentment is like taking poison yourself and expecting the other person to die.

One of the great spiritual truths that Jesus understood, that he asks us to understand too, is that forgiving others is the first step to healing for ourselves – if we can’t forgive, if we hold onto wrongs so tightly we can’t let them heal, then we become prisoners of our own memories, condemned to continue living in the world of sin. Letting go of a toxic bundle of memories means letting God transform them into holy re-membrance of God’s world as it should be, God’s children as they were created to live; it becomes our path to healing and to a transformed world.

We followers of Christ will not, by ourselves, be able to transform this world into a place of healing and forgiveness, where senseless acts of violence do not occur. Someday God’s kingdom will come in its fullness, and God will make this happen. What we can do is model an alternate way of living within the Christian community – a way of reconciliation that becomes a beacon for the world to see. We can choose how we respond to the sins of others, we can live a life of active love, we can transform our memories of past to different kind of remembrance.

Which is the kind of transformation that happened at St. Paul’s Chapel, a ministry of Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street, one block from the site of the World Trade Center. The little chapel built in 1766, where George Washington once owned a pew, became a headquarters for feeding recovery workers, offering them medical care, toiletries, eyewash, foot care, massage, a pew or cot to sleep on, and prayer. Firefighter John Misha, one of the recovery workers served by St. Paul’s, told a reporter: "'Every day, I spend most of my time on my hands and knees’ [at the site]…. he went on to describe [the work], in all the vivid language of somebody … who knew hell. Then, like he was rising out of hell, he stood up as straight as he could, threw out his chest, sucked in air, threw his arms into the air, and with a huge grin on his face and tears running down his cheeks, he said to her, 'And then I get to come here…When I walk in the front door of this place… they hug me, they kiss me, they bring me in and treat me like I'm a member of the family. I have never known such respect anywhere ... And I sit and cry and weep, and I am born again." In loving action, the compassionate witness of the Christian community, a new way of life becomes possible – where love transcends evil and violence.

Another worker at St. Paul’s, Courtney Cowart, in her book An American Awakening described the daily Eucharist that happened at a side altar in St. Paul’s while the ministry to recovery workers went on: on one side of the chapel, weary backs are being massaged; in pews and cots, firefighters are sleeping after 24-hour shifts, with teddy bears donated from all over country tucked under their arms; some people unwrap the cellophane on sandwiches, while others sit and stare blankly; an ironworker gives the sermon while a bishop mops the floor.

Into this holy space, a priest speaks the ancient words: Take, eat; this is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

As the Eucharist is shared, at St. Paul’s Chapel, and here every Sunday at Nativity, and in Christian churches all over the world, Jesus is more than a memory. Jesus is re-membered; Jesus is truly present – his love, his forgiveness, his healing. Jesus is re-membered, and Jesus re-members us – calling us into wholeness and healing, and promising us eternal life.

And as we re-member him, Jesus calls us into a way of life. In this holy space, we come together in his name, to remember the one who has loved us so much, has forgiven us everything, has called us to share his love with the world. In his name, we remember. We remember the world as it was created to be. We remember to Love.

Sermon for September 4, 2011

Scriptures for today are Here

UCC pastor Lillian Daniels wrote an article in the Christian Century this week called “You can’t make this up.” She said:

A man recently told me about his faith life, as people are wont to do with ministers. He said, "I'm spiritual but not religious. I want to give you my testimony about why I do not attend church."

Now when I meet a math teacher, I don't feel the need to say I always hated math. When I meet a chef, I don't need to let it be known that I can't cook. When I meet a clown, I don't admit that I think clowns are scary. I keep that stuff to myself. But everybody loves to tell a minister what's wrong with the church—and it's usually some church that bears no relation to the one I serve.

I sometimes appear in public wearing a collar, and the reactions range from a puzzled stare, like “That woman almost looks like a priest, but everyone knows that women can’t be priests!” to averted eyes from people who seem affronted by seeing evidence of Christian faith, to people who want to give me their testimony about why they don’t attend church – for me as for Lillian Daniels, it happens all the time. And most of the time, it’s not because they don’t believe in God. Generally, it’s because, oh, they were involved in a church but they got turned off by conflict; or they work really hard all week and can’t get up that early Sunday mornings; or they worship God on the golf course or in the beauty of the sunset.

In other words, they are spiritual but not religious, a religious stance that’s getting more and more popular these days. People genuinely feel that worshiping God is perfectly possible without being surrounded by a church community – they can pray on their own, they can think about God on their own, they can admire God’s handiwork in nature on their own – and all of this is true.

So here’s the question for all of us: why are we here? What is the reason for church community? What is the vocation of the church – a word that in its most ancient roots means God’s calling? Because Jesus makes it clear in today’s gospel, he’s not just here to establish personal relationships with lots of individuals who then can say that they are saved. He is here to build a church, a community.

Today’s gospel comes right after he has told Peter, “upon this rock I will build my church.” And it comes right before Jesus starts down the road from Galilee to Jerusalem, where he knows he is going to die. This happens at a pivotal point in Jesus’ ministry – he is looking ahead and planning for what will happen to the community of disciples he has created. And he wants to be clear – he is not just establishing personal relationships with a bunch of separate individuals who will admire God’s handiwork on the golf course – it’s not just me and my personal Jesus, spiritual but not religious. His interest at this vital moment is in building a church community, and he seems to have big things in mind for us, here in the church. So, what’s the vocation of the church?

The fact that God has big things in mind for us in the church may not be immediately apparent from today’s Gospel: it seems to be a fairly straightforward piece of advice about how to get along with other people in church – and on one level, it is. Jesus, the good advice-giver, tells us – if you’re having a disagreement with someone in church, the first thing you do is, you go talk to them directly. Good advice! No gossip, no backbiting or game-playing, no choosing up sides – just go and let them know what is bothering you.

And Jesus doesn’t say it, but surely he intends for us, when we are directly confronting someone we disagree with, to obey good human-relations rules. Use “I” statements – talk about how I feel, not about what you are. So, don’t say, “You’re so irresponsible!” Say “When you missed the meeting, I felt that you didn’t respect my time.” Don’t yell, don’t withdraw, just state the simple facts in a calm way.

And most of all, don’t just talk but listen too. If you value your relationship with another person, then it is worth it not just to insist that they hear you, but try to hear them too. Because in the end, the conflict wasn’t worth having unless both of you walk away from it having learned something. So learn how to be quiet long enough to hear what the other person is saying, listen underneath what they’re saying and try to understand how they feel. Don’t impose your preferred solution to the problem but invite them into problem-solving with you, so that you’re on the same team.

This is really good relationship advice, and when I am counseling couples for marriage I go through this advice with them in detail. Because the fact is, learning to resolve disagreements in a peaceful way that will result in two people growing in love, instead of destroying the love they have together, is one of the most important life lessons anyone could learn.

In fact, you could say that learning how to love, in marriage, in church, in families, in any relationship at all, is the most important task in all of our lives. And one important reason that I think Jesus brings us together in church communities is to give us a laboratory for learning to love. Love the person who sings a little off-key, love the person from a different political outlook, love the person who disagrees on the way the church should go, love the person who is completely different from us in every possible way except one: Jesus loves them, and they love Jesus, and that makes them part of the Body of Christ.

Jesus goes on from there to talk about what to do if facing a disagreement directly doesn’t work – only after talking it out personally do you involve other people – and only as a very last resort do you end the relationship. It’s all more really good relationship advice from the Lord of love.

But there’s more going on here than good advice: and you can tell this by more than just the fact that Jesus is speaking at this pivotal point, before he goes off to die. Because he goes through his good relationship and church management advice, seeming fairly straightforward, then suddenly launches into some other statements of cosmic significance. If two of us agree about something, God will do it for us. Wherever two or three are gathered in his name, Jesus will be in the midst of them. And whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Which is a bit of a scary thought: whatever we do here as part of our church community could have eternal consequences – and I’m not sure I trust us to give God the right instructions on that.

But I don’t think Jesus intends us to take these statements quite so literally. Throughout Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has one message that he repeats over and over, in different ways: the kingdom of heaven is here – the presence of Jesus has brought it to us. He does not say, the kingdom of heaven is a promise after you die. He says, the kingdom of heaven lasts beyond death, but it starts now, with Jesus.

And when, in Matthew’s gospel, he talks about building the church, he is really talking about creating a piece of the kingdom of heaven right here. We in the church are imperfect, yes; conflicted, sometimes. But despite all that, we are also the kingdom of heaven right here and now. You may say “it’s a nice church, but it isn’t heaven!” – but listen to what Jesus is saying. When Jesus says, “when two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them,” he is naming the fact that a community of believers can accomplish something that individuals worshiping alone cannot – a community can be the Body of Christ.

Jesus has appointed this imperfect church to be Body of Christ, and to do what he did: heal the sick, proclaim good news to the poor, be the presence of God to a lonely, suffering world, live out the lessons of self-giving love with each other.

What’s the vocation of the church? This is, to love. To love is our vocation. And loving is something you can’t do alone. That’s why we need the church.

On Friday, I spoke with Angie Emerson, a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. I hadn’t heard from her since Hurricane Irene hit, so I called to find out how she was doing. Turns out, she has been doing flood relief work full-time since Irene hit. In southern Vermont, where she lives, homes are still cut off by floodwaters, people are stranded without food, water and medicine, almost all stores and small business were destroyed by flooding, and only a few stores are open. With the flooding of those stores and businesses, many people are out of work and have lost their homes and livelihoods with no flood insurance. Angie and all the other church people in Vermont are working full-time just to save lives in the short term, and will be doing relief work for a long time. And Angie said she is physically and emotionally overwhelmed, working without stopping – but she is doing it because that’s what the church does. When people are in need, the church stops what it is doing and helps out.

If you’ve ever found yourself asking, what’s the vocation of the church? Why am I a part of it? Why don’t I just be like so many other people who say, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” and who claim to worship God in sunsets and on the golf course and while reading the New York Times and sipping coffee on Sunday morning, well, I think just maybe we can look at what the church in Vermont is doing, how the church brings comfort in many places, and get one answer: the church is love in action.

But it’s not just that the church does massive relief and outreach work all over the world (something that just admiring the sunset doesn’t accomplish). It’s more than that: the church community is the physical presence of Christ’s Body in this world, the outward and visible sign that God is present with us. The church is the place where we learn to do for others what Christ did for us. The church is a place where we can learn how to love. That’s the vocation of the church.