Searching for Sunday, Part 3: Holy Orders

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

March 7, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Dear God,

It’s been a long week. We need you now more than ever. We ask that you would direct our hearts and minds towards you, and fill us with your Spirit, bringing refreshing, renewal, peace, and joy. You remind us in your word that you are faithful to carry our burdens. You tell us that you will renew our strength, and you promise to give us rest as we come to you.

Forgive us for the times we have worked so hard to be self-sufficient, forgetting our need for you, living independently of your Spirit. Forgive us for letting fear and worry control our minds and for allowing pride and selfishness to wreak havoc over our lives. Forgive us for not following your ways and for living distanced from your presence.

Thank you that your ways are far greater than our ways and your thoughts far deeper than our thoughts. Thank you that you had a plan to redeem. Thank you that you make all things new. Thank you that your face is towards the righteous, you are close to the brokenhearted, you hear our prayers, and know our hearts. Thank you for your daily, powerful presence in our lives, that we can be assured, no matter what we’re facing, your heart is towards us, your eyes are over us, and your ears are open to our prayers. Thank you that you surround us with favor as with a shield, and we are safe in your care.

We give you praise and honor for your ways are righteous and true. We give you worship for you are holy and just. We will declare that your love stands firm forever, for your lovingkindness endures forever. Amen.

 

John 2: 13-22

Jesus Clears the Temple Courts

13When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” 17His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

18The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

19Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

20They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” 21But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

 

A Message

Searching for Sunday, Part 3: Holy Orders

 

We’re up to part 3 of this sermon series about Rachel Held Evans’ book Searching for Sunday, and this section is inspired by what our Roman Catholic friends call “Holy Orders”. This may sound a bit high-church or out of touch for some of us, but it’s really not. You can certainly conjure up mental images of priests, nuns, and monks when you think of Holy Orders, and not be wrong. You can also think of people like me who are called to a set-apart, ordained ministry. But you can also just look in the mirror and see what God has given to you. You might not be inclined to think this way, but you have a calling. So does every person you know. You, just by being here, are a tremendous gift to the world, and especially to the Church. You have strengths that other people lack. You have skills that other people have yet to master. You have passions that other people haven’t discovered. This all means that you can put yourself to work building the Kingdom of God on this earth in a unique, sacred way. So what is your calling? What are your Holy Orders?

 

Your Holy Orders might have something to do with your profession. Your teaching, your music, your mechanical know-how, your knowledge of medicine, or television, or marketing, or economics—all of these things might be bricks in the Kingdom waiting to be placed. But most of all, the Kingdom needs YOU. Your love, your servanthood, your friendship. What is God asking you to bring to the Table that no one else has brought? I invite you to spend some time in prayer thinking about that.

 

Evans was a woman with a rather strong sense of self, and even when she struggled with big faith questions she always seemed to sense that she had a role to play in knitting the fabric of a stronger, more Christ-like Church. In this section, she discusses how she put that calling to use in the launching of a church plant called The Mission. Her plant was run by a small, core group that met in an empty apartment. The Mission had dynamic worship services that felt incredibly intimate and real because they weren’t hindered by a traditional church building. They went out in service of the community and did real good. They helped people discover Jesus. In Methodist lingo, The Mission was a vital New Faith Community that made disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. And Evans’ poured her soul into it. Yet, despite all that promise, The Mission didn’t last. After a short burst of activity, it fizzled out, and those who participated in its work went their separate ways.

 

There was a very strong theme in this section of the book that I find it paramount to highlight. It’s not a comfortable theme at all, despite how familiar we all are with it. This theme is failure. Failure is the literal Blood of the Church. As Christians we love our happy ending narrative, and we want to get there as fast as possible. We pack our sanctuaries on Easter Sunday and (in non COVID times) belt out “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”, but hardly observe Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Those services are never well attended, but we wouldn’t have the victory and triumph of Sunday without the death on Friday, the grief on Saturday, and the emptiness at sunrise on Sunday. We as Jesus’ followers have nothing at all to rejoice in without death and loss. But despite Jesus’ promise that we will rise again every time we fall, still we want to live in a world without stumbling.

 

Failure is a driving force throughout Jesus’ story, and it’s a painful reality Jesus confronts head on in this morning’s Gospel passage. Jesus, as always, models what we should do. Jesus sees a multi-level systemic failure taking place in his beloved Temple in this morning’s reading. Faithful Jews have flocked to Jerusalem for the Passover Festival, and are making Pilgrimage from all over to the Temple. Folx of the Faith from every corner of the world are right at the front door of the Temple, and it’s a beautiful thing. But rather than rejoicing with pure hearts, and rather than helping the outsiders in their midst, the locals have cooked up a scheme to milk this sudden influx of out of towners for everything they’re worth. The migrants want to offer sacrifices in the Temple, but couldn’t travel with doves and livestock. No problem, out of town buddy, you can buy animals here…for way more than they’re worth. Don’t worry about it, just fork over the money and go worship. Oh, you don’t have local currency? Say no more, friend, we’ll take all of your money and give you a little of ours. Is it a fair exchange rate? Eh, we ditched math class in school and we’re literally banking on the probability that you did, too. You get a place in the Temple during one of the holiest seasons of the Jewish calendar year, and we cash in on your vulnerability. Cha-ching, baby.

 

A lot of us who were raised by churchy people picked up this lesson at some point that God prefers gentle behavior. In many circumstances that’s probably true. But when you see injustice right before your eyes, Jesus teaches you to let your neighbor know that noise won’t go down on your watch. There’s a place for righteous anger, and even righteous destruction—flipping over tables, throwing money on the floor, and even getting a whip involved. Jesus isn’t taking any crap today. And neither should we. Jesus commands us to stop oppression dead in its tracks. And he does. He also reminds all who care to listen that the demise of one thing which gives way for the life of another in integral to this faith journey—this Temple, which the locals will gladly remind Jesus took decades to construct in its current form, will be dust soon. Jesus, our butt-kicking hero, will be dead soon. Our disciples, who today are brave witnesses of justice served, will soon be on the run. But all of this will pave the way for the Kingdom—a Savior at the Right Hand of God, a resurrection witnessed by a deeply faithful woman, a Church built upon the Rock of a man who makes a bunch of mistakes but eventually does the right thing. In this life of faith we fall hard, but we rise gloriously, every time.

 

Were it not for epic failure I wouldn’t even be a minister. I shared a small part of this story two weeks ago, but I want to relate to you a painful story of my beloved childhood church. My parents joined my childhood church, a large suburban UMC just outside of Chicago, in 1982. At that time a wise and deeply respected man named Russ was just beginning his pastoral tenure. Russ was the kind of guy you’d fall in love with immediately. He had a soothing, gentle voice. He frequently related adorable stories about his kids and grandkids. His loving wife was always at his side, and actively involved in the life of the church. Theologically, personally, and politically, Russ was pretty conservative. That made a lot of people in the church happy and kept them feeling safe and content. Russ followed the rules to a T, rarely surprised people, and wasn’t fond of pushing buttons. Our church was the last he served before he retired, and he was happy to watch it grow and blossom without facing too many challenges. It also really helped Russ that he looked “the part”: and old white guy in a suit and tie.

 

When Russ retired in 1997 the Bishop sent a predecessor who was pretty different. Far from Russ’s mild-mannered, gentle demeanor, Phil was twenty years younger and full of energy. He believed the Church needed to change or die, and he let our congregation know it…even if we didn’t want to hear it. Phil was much more progressive than Russ, and had a lower-church approach to worship. One time he rode a bicycle into the sanctuary. I no longer remember why. He threatened to smash an egg over his head once, just to prove a point. He believed getting to you in your time of need was much more important than formality and decorum, and would visit you in the hospital in a tee shirt and jeans so he could pray with you right away. And sometimes in the summer he even wore…*gasp*…sandals.

 

The curmudgeons decided after five years that they could take no more. Understand, Methodist friends reading this, that if you ever feel this way about a pastor, that’s okay. There’s a whole process for asking for a change. If my church had just gone with that process I doubt it would have hurt Phil. He would have moved to a new church on July 1 and gone on with his life. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The wealthiest of the complainers got together and declared that they wouldn’t tithe any money to the church until Phil was gone. The church was quickly brought to its knees. The finance committee panicked. They debated firing multiple staff people or cutting programming to make ends meet. Ultimately the Bishop stepped in and moved Phil in April, three months before the natural end of his appointment. We had an interim for three months, and then a very conservative pastor. We had a mass exodus of heartbroken members. When families left they took their children, too, and we suffered huge losses in our children’s ministries. The church hemorrhaged money. And they’ve had a bumpy time ever since.

 

Now that probably sounds like the most depressing story you’ve read this morning, but there’s a glimmer of Good News rising out from under it, I promise. Failure forces change. Failure shakes us out of complacency. Failure wakes us up. If you destroy this church it will only take Jesus three days to build it back up. It just won’t happen the way you expect.

 

After this crisis went down two different people in my congregation discovered their callings to the ordained ministry. One was my friend Glenna, who went to seminary and became a second career clergy in the Northern Illinois Conference. The other was me. I learned the hard way that the grown ups around me didn’t always have the right answers. I learned they were stuck in their ways, driven by their egos, and ruled by their wallets. If my beloved Church was going to live again it needed someone very different changing it from within. It needed me.

 

As we look around at the state of the Church, we’re overwhelmed by images of death and loss. Sometimes it just becomes unbearable. How long, O Lord, how long? Very few of our churches are having “glory days” right now, especially in the midst of a pandemic. Membership is dwindling. I do ten funerals for every one baptism. The windows are getting dusty, the cobwebs are setting in, and a lot of our neighbors feel like they can find God elsewhere (and research proves it). It’s easy for us, in our limited human vision, to think our faith is dying along with these buildings and congregations. But the thing is that all of those are human-made. They hardly capture the scope of the work of God. While we’re staring at our dilapidated steeples and sighing in grief, God is planting the seeds for a whole new thing. Can we see it? Maybe not. But while we’re busy over here in the center, God has captivated the attention of someone on the fringe who loves Jesus and wants to do good in his name. And the energy and time that used to fuel a ministry we loved that died will now bring a new way of worship to life. Taste and see that the Lord is Good. Destroy this Temple, flip over the tables and chase everybody out with a whip, and God will turn this into something completely new over the weekend. What is God calling you to stir into life? What are your Holy Orders? They’re springing out of the ground right now. Go and water them.

 

Amen.

 

I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all of God’s people we say together: Amen.