June 6 – Luke 7:11-17
“The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them.” I am willing to bet that the man who has just been raised from the dead was a but more disoriented and confused than the crowds that saw it happen. Death is a part of the human condition, a painful part of our life and world on this side of the last judgment. Yet, as painful as it is, we are usually good at dealing with it. Nations, civilization and popular movements and even parts of the physical Church are born and then die. We sit back and try and understand what happened. What we often forget is that Christ has trampled down death – it still exists in this world, yet it has no hold over us eternally. That triumph affects this fragile church we are a part of. Because it is a divine body that is made up of mere mortals, it sometimes dies on the surface, yet that divine substance of it all resurrects, bursts back into life, although sometimes in different forms. Like the man raised from the dead we find ourselves back in this world after we thought it was all over, yet here we are back on earth…and it looks different. Simply put, this church that we are a part of will die...but that death only affect the externals that lay on the surface. 100 years from now the church will still be here, but it probably won’t look like this.
Last week I spent a few days at a convent on a pre ordination retreat. When I stepped onto the grounds there, I could feel death, and see the ghosts of the convents glorious past behind every corner. The grounds were literally falling apart around me. This convent has been a part of the Anglo-Catholic movement of the early 20th century, and had all the accoutrements of a medieval convent. There were statues and altars everywhere. Yet at each of these, where children, nuns and clergy had gathered to glorify God 100 years ago, all that was left was some crumbling limestone and granite. Bits and pieces of statues littered the grass.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this a judgment on me? These were my people. Many of you have seen me bow, genuflect, cross myself and do all sorts of things that may make it look like I am having a fit during service. Believe it or not, there are actually other people who participate in worship the way I do. I am one of the exotic Episcopalians..an Anglo Catholic. The monastic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a hallmark of the Anglo Catholic movement. Yet here I was, in a place built by people who worship like me and it was falling apart.
So I did what came naturally, I felt sorry for myself. I moped around and mourned the loss of a great movement, Anglican monasticism. You see, most of the orders of monks and nuns of that came together a 100 years ago are no longer with us.
I refused to step back and think about what this meant. It took me going to the retreat leader and telling him about how I was feeling for me to get out of my place of self pity. He told me, “if you don’t like what you are seeing, FIX IT! Inspire people to serve God as monastics. Inspire people to build up the church, and learn something from this place, don’t just mourn it!”
Well after this verbal kick in the pants, I started to do some thinking. Why is this place no longer vibrant? The truth is that in many ways, these orders succeeded in what they were trying to teach the world, so the world no longer needs the teacher. These orders opened schools, showing the world that women deserved education too. They opened hospitals in the most impoverished parts of the world, showing the world that every one deserves the touch of a healer in the name of the Christ the physician. They opened communities to take care of the elderly and the handicapped, showing the world that all deserve love and care.
These don’t sound like radical ideas to us today, but they where a hundred years ago. You have these monks and nuns, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian to thank for these things.
So if the orders are dwindling, what went wrong? Perhaps, we, the rest of the church failed them.
You see, we the people of the church are often great at taking something from the church, but we don’t often give back in return. For all the good these monks and nuns did, we the church did a bad job of encouraging vocations to monasticism. We didn’t raise up a culture in the church that thought of being a monk or a nun as a great vocation that our sons and daughters, or even we ourselves might be called too.
However, before we declare the death of monasticism in Anglicanism all together, we must remember that we forgot it once. King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries 500 years ago and by 450 years ago there where no monastics left in our church. Yet when the people of our church began to finally be able to see past the prejudices that clung to us from the reformation, we realized once again that taking vows to live as a monk or a nun was a true Christian calling and was something that we the church needed in order to be healed.
This cycle has been repeated over and over again in the church. The church had its first death on the surface 1,000 years after Christ’s resurrection. The church, East and West, split off, with the heads of each church consigning each other to Hell. Then the church began to walk hand and hand with the secular governments of the world, and started confusing what God wanted with what men wanted. It took a new kind of monasticism to emerge to call the church to task for its failures and for things to turn around in the Western church. Again, during the reformation, the church had become far to comfortable with the secular world, and started basing church practices around what made things easy for some, what made others rich and what was easy to sell. In many ways, the church at that time was being called upon to do some deep thinking and make some honest decisions that would have gone against the way the church was working at the time…and it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into those decisions, weathering the death of some of the externals of the church.
You see, the cycle that I described about the Anglican monks and nuns is simply a microcosm of the larger church. God inspired the church to go one way, the church embraced that way, then we the people of the church took from the church without giving back, asked it to make us comfortable, not to challenge us, and then became shocked when it fell apart on the surface. Many a Christian over the past 2,000 years has stood at the ruins of a convent or a church, read the banishment of a leader, country or whole type or worship and scratched their heads. What went wrong?
Lucky for us, the church is bigger than us, is more than us. It is a divine being, the Body of Christ on earth, and therefore can’t die in whole. The surface parts are born and then die, yet through the power of God those surface parts are resurrected, in a new form, in order to show forth physically and tangibly the Body of Christ.
We stand at another one of these moments. We find ourselves in the situation where we the church has spent too much time thinking about what the secular world thinks of us only to find out that the secular doesn’t even think of us at all. We have been written off as an outdated idea.
The good news is that it doesn’t make a difference what the outside world thinks of us. We are here to serve and to be transformed by God.
Now I know this isn’t what you want to hear this morning, but things are going to change. The church the way we know it is not working. People are sleeping in on Sunday mornings, wondering why we don’t stop suing each other and just go send a check off to Amnesty International and sleep sound, knowing that we have done some good.
We, the church, need to think long and hard, but most importantly pray about what God asks of us. How we can bring the light of Christ to those who walk in darkness. How can we invite people to be transformed, made new beings in Christ? How can we get ourselves to a point where we can admit that what Christ has to say about us and what the world has to say about us have never been and never will be the same thing?
The comforting conclusion I have for all this is a two edged sword. The comforting news is this: God will not let the church die. He will let us stare in bewilderment at the externals of the church, that we foolishly call the entire church, as they die out or change beyond recognition, but the Body of Christ, the thing that we who profess Christ are part of, will not die because it already beat death. Here then is the uncomfortable part of the comfortable news, you won’t be let off the hook. Failure is not an option. You cannot write the church of as dead. If you do, you are simply labeling the externals and missing the forest for the trees. The Church will always be there, yet we the people of the church have the task of making the externals work better so that the Truth of God can be clearly shown to the world, and most importantly, it can have a better shot at reaching people who think they don’t want to be reached. The very fact that this church has raised up countless lay leaders and three people for ordination is proof that this church knows that it can’t and won’t just lay down and die like so many others have, even though that may be the comfortable thing to do.
When we emerge from all this in resurrected externals we will probably be bewildered just like the man in today’s Gospel. But as soon as we do, we can get on with glorifying God and stop pitying ourselves. I pray that in my lifetime I will see a church that looks completely different because it has listened to God and is doing a better job of bringing Christ’s saving Gospel to the Ends of the Earth and in between. May we all be blessed to see that new, transformed, and indeed resurrected church.
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