In a couple of months, several of my colleagues and I are going to have lunch with Brian McLaren, the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Burtonsville, a rather successful independent church, one that he started in his living room and has grown over the years into a large, innovative enterprise, known far beyond our local area. In fact, this pastor has quite a large following, as he has published several provocative books, designed to reach out to skeptics and people of no faith at all. And while his roots are in the evangelical and conservative wing of Christianity, a lot of his ideas sound awfully progressive, and social-justice oriented, and his model for “doing church” is so fresh, and effective at bringing in the younger generations, that I thought, “We can learn a lot from this man, and could use him in our church.” And so I am determined to ask him why he’s not in the UCC!
When I spoke of this plan to one of my colleagues, who knows him, she replied that she would be very interested in his answer, but warned, “he may well ask why you are in the UCC, and what benefit you get from being in a denomination.”
This sermon is my way of preparing to give him an answer.
The short answer is, “This is the church I was raised in.”
But there is a longer, sermon-length answer. Because I wasn’t born into this church; in fact I was baptized a Methodist, by one of the first women ministers in the Methodist Church. The ceremony took place when I was six months old, in my parent’s living room, because they apparently did not trust me to behave in church – a fear that has been proven well-founded over the years!
I don’t remember much about being a Methodist, because I was four years old when I had a powerful conversion experience: my parents took me by the hand and said, “We’re going to the Congregational Church now!” We were briefly members of the First Congregational Church of Phoenix, the “Church of the White Spire”, the only UCC church in Arizona that actually looks like a Congregational Church, with its steeply pitched roof designed to easily shed the heavy snows of the New England winters but which created steep air conditioning bills in the Southwest summers.
About the time the United Church of Christ was formed, in 1957, we joined a new congregation, just a couple of miles from our home, originally known as “North Congregational Church” but which soon came to be called “Church of the Beatitudes.” Under the leadership of its founding pastor, Bill Nelson, it rapidly grew into one of the largest churches of the denomination, having about 2,000 members while I was there, and eventually topping out at 3,000. Now, some 14 years after Bill Nelson’s retirement, and in an area undergoing great demographic change, it has about a thousand members. It was there that I went to Sunday School, still have the Bible I received as a fourth-grader, became an acolyte as a fifth-grader, was confirmed with about 80 other eighth-graders, and took my first paying job in the retirement home that the church built, working as a busboy and a dishwasher after school and on weekends.
Three things really stood out and characterized the church for me. One was the highly intellectual and learned approach of the pastor, the progressive theology, the way in which you didn’t have to check your brains at the door of the church. In fact if you did, you’d be left behind. Bill Nelson was extremely well read, could talk in an informed manner about anything and always had a provocative take on every issue. In retirement he became a very active member of the Jesus Seminar, but he’d been sharing those kinds of ideas with the congregation for years. Second was the church’s focus on service. The church was highly involved in the community, much like Westmoreland is, and was always out there trying to make it a better place. Not only could the minister call up the mayor or the governor and get his calls answered, all the members were encouraged to do something in the service of the larger world, in activities that went well beyond the retirement home. And third, the church was a pioneer in the ecumenical movement. Early on, in the days after Vatican II, the church drew together three other Protestant churches, two Jewish Synagogues, and a Roman Catholic Cathedral in an effort called the “North Phoenix Corporate Ministry.” It was a way of saying, “Our way is a good way, but it’s not the only way. We can do so much more if we cooperate instead of compete.” And so the congregations worked together in adult education, service efforts, pulpit exchanges and so on, and each Friday the clergy got together for lunch and theological discourse. When I was in seminary and happened to be in town, I was invited, and it was always a feast for the mind and spirit, as well as the stomach.
It was a combination of all three of these traits – the free and open and questing mind, the call to service, the ecumenical spirit – that led me to the involvement that really changed my life, and set it on the course that eventually brought me here. As you know, I took up the guitar at age 14, and after a year playing in a rock band, I switched to folk music, partly because I got tired of hauling around all that equipment, but mostly because I was drawn to exploring the questions that folk musicians of the sixties were asking. Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel – they were singing about things that mattered, about war and peace, and love and hate, and human brother and sisterhood, civil rights, why were are here, connections with each other and with the eternal. Combine that with the fact that our church offered a number of service opportunities for youth, one being the operation of an ecumenical coffee house, known as “The Back Door”, in an old house located behind a Methodist Church, the walls held up, they said, by “the grace of God and the hands of the termites.” I said to myself: If I get more active with the Youth Group, I can work at the Coffee House, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll let me sing there.
Be careful what you wish for, they say, because you just might get it. My partner and I sang there nearly every weekend for two years, until it was time to depart for college (Thanks to John Newman’s technical expertise, I now have a cassette tape of our last performance!) But by that time I was thoroughly immersed in the youth group and the church itself, and it was clear to me that I was being called to a life of ministry in the United Church of Christ.
Now, to be fair, I had a little more incentive, in that our church had a deal. They would loan the tuition for any of its young adults who enrolled in seminary – and if you were ordained and served in the United Church of Christ for seven years, you wouldn’t have to pay it back! So while I was tempted by the Episcopal Church while in college – I loved the liturgy and the music, the total sensory experience of worship, the “bells and smells” – I was committed to my first love, and by the time seven years of ministry had passed, I was thoroughly a creature of the UCC, a “company man”, perhaps, but it had become not just the church of my childhood, or the church of my employment, but the church of my heart, one that I hope I would have chosen had I not been raised in it.
Now it occurs to me that I have mostly been speaking about the UCC from the perspective of being in a local church, which is after all how most of us first experience the church, and that someone in a non-denominational church like Cedar Ridge could tell much the same story. Because the church is always local and personal. And in many ways my home church was larger than the denomination, had the resources to do things that the denomination couldn’t. It didn’t rely on the national office to start new churches; instead it bought land in a growing area and sent an Associate Minister and a core group of people and founded one – more than once! It ran its own mission trips to Mexico, and invented its own Sunday School curriculum. It was only after I served in small churches that I really began to understand the value of being connected to something larger. Out there in Tombstone, with 90 members and a shoestring budget, we had to band together with others. And it was there that I really became aware of the UCC as a denomination with a distinct identity and a calling. I became much more aware of our “firsts” – the first church to ordain a woman to the ministry; the first to ordain a black man in a denomination that wasn’t predominately black; the first to ordain an openly gay man; a leader in calling for and working for abolition, women’s suffrage, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and recently full marriage equality for all. I haven’t always agreed with everything the church has done, and think for instance that we have been woefully lax in getting new churches started and responding to the population shifts away from our strongholds of New England and the Upper Midwest to the West and Southwest. We have given lip service to the needs of Young Adults and then pulled out funding for resourcing Campus Ministries, allowing a whole generation to escape. I think we’re becoming more centralized and rule-happy. Sometimes we try to do things too decently and in order, find ourselves in danger of actually becoming “organized religion”.
But on the whole, we are still the church of my heart, and I cannot imagine serving a church that’s not UCC. I love the freedom; I love the connections; I love the polity that makes each local church both free and responsible, and each individual as well. I love the boldness that leads us to stick our necks out and exercise prophetic leadership. I love being part of a church that is less concerned with getting people to believe in Jesus than with actually doing the work OF Jesus, where Good News is what we do for others, not simply what we preach.
I think in many respects this parable that was our scripture lesson this morning is a good image of the UCC. Well, maybe not the parable as Matthew reports it, which he has once again turned into an allegory about Israel and the Church, but the spirit of the parable as Jesus may have originally told it. As Matthew has reworked it, a king (that is, God) prepares a feast for his son (Jesus)and invites his subjects (Israel) to the banquet. They treat the invitations lightly and even kill the king’s servants (the prophets). So the king destroys them and their city (Jerusalem) and invites others (Gentiles) to the feast. There are even some who then show up improperly dressed (people who joined the church but turn out not to be fit) and get escorted out by bouncers. As in last week’s parable, Matthew takes something Jesus probably said and makes it fit his own reality.
Fortunately, we have Luke’s version of the parable, and Thomas’ as well, which appear to be closer to Jesus, and fortunately, in the UCC we don’t have to take everything in the Bible literally, and can explore and ask the questions that help us to understand how God is Still Speaking....There is still more light and truth to break forth from God’s Word, and every parable of Jesus’ ends with a comma, not a period!
As best as scholars can tell, the original parable was probably the story of an anonymous host who gave a diner party. He sent invitations to three potential guests who may have had some social standing in the community. They refused for what may have been legitimate reasons, but were still given a second chance just before dinner. They still refused, and so the host dispatches the servant to collect the more socially marginal, who are urged to come and fill the hall. And these guests are as surprised to be included as the listeners were surprised that those first invited rejected the invitation. And that, says Jesus, is what God’s realm is like! It’s like big party full of all kinds of people you never expected to see there.
This parable reminds me of what’s been happening with our UCC “God is Still Speaking” identity campaign. You’ve seen the “Bouncer” Ad, with diverse folks being excluded from an unnamed church, followed by a collage of all these folks standing together, and the message, “No matter who you are or where you find yourself on life’s journey, you are welcome here. The United Church of Christ.”
We are the church that is going out into the streets in search of the marginalized and the rejected, and inviting everybody in. And it’s been working! Since the ads came out, the number of hits on the UCC website has increased exponentially. Giving as a whole is up. Many churches are reporting 20 and 30 percent growth rates, which begins with an increase in visitors. (We haven’t really seen that, but the potential is there, and our webmaster tells me that our own website has seen a great increase in visits recently, many coming as referrals from the UCC website.) Marketing studies revealed that there are a lot of people out there who just don’t feel “good enough” to go to church, and the UCC is welcoming them. As a new member of a church in Iowa, one of those diverse souls this parable invites in, wrote, "What has the UCC done for me? It has restored hope to my soul. . . . The UCC has provided a way for me to worship, and integrate the sacred into my everyday life. They've encouraged me to continue the spiritual practice of questioning. . . . Most importantly, they have showed me that God and Jesus Christ are alive, real…there for me. "
And, in the end, that’s why I’m in the UCC. It is the place where I have seen that God is alive, and where I myself come alive as I am called to community, and to works of compassion and justice and celebration. And it’s where God creates one amazing dinner party, where just about anybody, even people like you and me, can get in.
And the question is, Why are YOU here?
