What Comes Out

I visited with a man at my last church who wasn’t happy with where the church was headed. He was a longtime member. He considered himself a friend and in the “inner circle” of the last pastor who had died of pancreatic cancer. He used to be very involved, but he was distancing himself from the church.

I sat and listened to him as he spoke about how unhappy he was. I didn’t comment or correct. I listened, and I asked follow up questions. It was on the third visit when he was questioning why I would advocate for something that caused such a stir in church. I made the bold declaration that we should feed people. A farm bill had just passed, and I gave a sermon on it saying how the farm bills previous had traditionally had two parts: the farm part and the feeding part. The trend was changing so that the farm part was getting more and more money while the feeding part was getting less and less. I also commented how the senator who sponsored the latest bill was a big farmer himself and would greatly benefit from this bill. I called it immoral. I asked if this is what Jesus would have us do when he said, “Feed my sheep” to Peter in John 21. Or when he commanded us to feed people in Matthew 25.

The man said, “I don’t like it. It’s why I’m staying away from church. On whose authority can you say that?”

I said, “I thought I was pretty clear about my source; the gospel of Matt and John.”

“Well, people might leave,” He said.

“They might. But we’re not a club, we’re not here for customer satisfaction. Christianity has always and forever been a movement to include the outcast, to welcome the stranger, to cross gender, racial, and national boundary lines, and to feed, clothe, and heal people.” I was getting a little heated. My patience wearing thin.

“Well, who decided that?!” the man countered.

“Jesus Christ!” I said.

“Well you don’t have to get mad, Luke.”

I paused and laughed. “No man, I’m not mad. I’m giving you an answer to your question. Jesus Christ decided that the church should be his body and that body should be in motion calling out immorality and seeking the best for our neighbors.”

I remember that conversation because sometimes you stumble upon your convictions. Sometimes we sit down and really think things through. Other times we are taught doctrine and read other’s thoughts and adopt them for ourselves. But sometimes… sometimes we just stumble upon them.

The church was never meant to be a place with great power and prestige. It was always meant to be a humble servant. It’s not a social club. It’s not a place to network. Granted, being friends, being social and networking comes with it… but if that’s all we find here, we’re missing what church is.

The church is the body of Christ. It’s not the structure or the program, it sure isn’t a brash and bald pastor, or any of the clergy alone. It’s not the building. It’s not the denominational headquarters. The church is always the people. It’s people who make up the body of Christ. We are baptized into it and we are each members of the body.

We miss this point. We miss it here in the church. We miss it outside of the church. It’s even missed by those of us who have been in church our whole lives. The man I was talking with missed it. I missed it until I stumbled on it and had to write a 20-page paper for a doctoral class.

In the lectionary text today, Jesus is taking on the concept of religion as a club. The Pharisees… now before we continue… It’s easy to pick on the Pharisees. They are always the bad guys. Let’s change the name to fit our context. Now “when the religious and some theologians who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed how his disciples weren’t keeping with various traditions.”

Jesus says, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Jesus is saying this to religious people who had all these rules as to what you can and can’t eat. They had an idea of what made someone pure and what made someone impure. The world was divided up into clean and unclean.

We still do this. We still have these categories. One of my favorite TV shows is The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. Kimmy is an idealistic woman who was locked in a bunker since the 1990s. The show is about how she encounters modern life after being freed. One of my favorite lines is when Kimmy is fed up and exclaims, “I just want to be a normal person, and I can’t. I don’t know anything. I can’t tell phones from cameras. Even policemen have tattoos.”

Growing up, only bikers, sailors, and convicts had tattoos and now it’s countercultural NOT to have one. After learning how bad smoking is for you, many of us don’t do it. I find myself judging those who continue to smoke. Yet it’s not what you eat that makes you clean or unclean… it’s what comes out.

If that’s true, then how is it with the body of Christ? What’s coming out of the church?

A grand jury in Pennsylvania was tasked with investigating six diocese in the Catholic church for sex abuse. Their opening line of the report reads “We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.”

When the Boston Globe broke the case in 2001, I was happy I wasn’t in the Catholic church anymore, but now I’m clergy. Much to my surprise, I’m back in the church. It would be easy to just beat up on the Catholics, but look… this matters. For people who have no background in church and can’t tell the difference between a Catholic and a Lutheran, it matters. This is the body of Christ we’re talking about. These are our fellow Christians. In our baptisms, we are connected with them. When we take communion, we are connected to them. If it can happen in PA, it can happen in Ohio. It can happen everywhere.

It matters because what happens there, we get saddled with; whether we earned it or not. For it’s what comes out of the body that makes it clean or unclean.

What comes out is child sex abuse and molestation. That’s unclean and impure. It’s what happens when we value the honor of clergy and religious experts over the sanctity of children. It’s what happens when we value institutions over human lives. It’s what happens when we’d rather live in the shadows than in the light of truth.

The church is never those things, it’s never the structure, the hierarchy, the clergy, it’s not the buildings or the denominational headquarters. It was and has always been the people. The church is always the people.

Yet people are such a mixed bag. We are capable of saving people from burning buildings, pushing people out of the way of oncoming cars or bullets, saving their lives while sacrificing our own. Yet evil intentions can lurk. Ideas that we’re better than others. Evil intentions like fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, envy, slander, pride, and folly. All of these come from within and defile a person.

Well, what of the body of Christ?
Televangelists asking for their 4th private jet. Greed.
A creation museum in Kentucky. Deceit.
Denying the basic humanity of and rights of LGBTQIA+ people? Slander.
Believing we’re heading to heaven without trying to get heaven here for the poor, marginalized, hungry, and outcast? Pride.
Aligning ourselves to one political party or another to gain power and prestige? Envy.
Pointing these things out like they are problems only others have and don’t live within me? Folly.

As theologian Brennen Manning stated, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today Is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”[1]
We’re not looking so good. So why bother?

Because grace covers all. Christ is not just a teacher, he can learn too. The body of Christ can learn. The body of Christ can change. Jesus models this for us today. He was raised with the ritual washing before prayers and meals. This isn’t what we think of when we wash our hands before eating or after the bathroom, this is a very specific ritual handed down in the Jewish tradition.

I believe the church is the people who are baptized into the movement to bring heaven closer to earth. I believe that we should be the people who are safe to be around. We honor the humanity of children and the elderly. We resist dehumanizing others in racism, sexism, and homophobia. We boldly say, “Everyone is a child of God” even if we can’t see it immediately. We are still called to look for it.

I believe the church is the best place to enact local change. That once we know better, we do better. The church is one of the few places in our culture where Democrats, Republicans, apathetic, libertarian, and green party, rich and poor folk, different generations of folk hang out and study the Bible and pray together. We may disagree in the how we should feed and clothe people and look after them, but we can’t disagree that Jesus was about those ministries.

What comes out of the church? We feed people. The hunger team looked at the response of feeding our seven families… well it turns out we can now keep the same program going but spread that food out to feed 14 families. Same process, double the return. We need volunteers to pick up food and to help inventory food from Sandridge corporate. Brooke Davis and Jackie met with that company and they are giving us WHOLE lot of food. We need volunteers to sit at the donation tables on Sunday. We need drivers to deliver food on Thursday afternoons. See Brooke, Linda, Darlene or Jackie to volunteer or stop by the hunger team’s table on your way out.

What comes out of the church? Young people with a global perspective. Youth who’ve been on mission trips and see the need in the world and have a willingness to work and heal the hurt. Youth who have been mentored, given the space to become themselves, develop their God-given gifts, and who are unleashed onto an unsuspecting world.

What comes out of the church? Justice! The UCC has taken on so many issues before they became popular. I learned from a mentor how just after the merger in the early 1960s, the UCC went after any clergy who was suspected of child abuse. Many of those clergy are still in jail who were guilty. There’s a UCC national response team, of which Pam Branscome was trained by. It’s why we’re looking at our safe church policies. It’s why you’ll never see me driving a child alone in my car that’s not my own. It’s why I attend boundary training each and every year for the association. The UCC with its congregation-first structure means we have no hierarchy that will hide bad deeds, we have no bishops that will move someone around. I love that we’re structured like this, it makes more sense that the top-down papacy of the denomination of my youth. I mentioned this view and my passion to hold clergy accountable to our association minister Nayiri and now I am going to join the association’s committee on ministry to make sure our clergy and churches are behaving above board.

What comes out of the church? People struggling with mental health or folk who have been kicked out of their families finding a new sense of self-worth and a new family here. We open our doors to addiction programs in the hopes that our space can be used by others to find a way out and support to fight their addictions.

What comes out of the church? Wisdom. We have a whole host of sacred stories that are over 2,000 years old that show how others faced the same problems we do. Problems living together. Problems with having unjust rulers and corrupt judges. There is nothing new under the sun. If we remember, we can find our way forward. These stories didn’t get passed down and poured over by our ancestors in faith by accident. No. These stories hold wisdom and purpose and a word from God. But we’re not the only ones who have that wisdom. If you’ve noticed our liturgy today in the bulletin comes from a bunch of pop songs. God is still speaking. Many of these artists came out of the church. And we have plenty still that will be known. God is still speaking if one is willing to listen.

I have hope and it is my hope that we continue trying to give more beauty and peace to the world. My hope is that we all will work to feed and clothe and house and love on our neighbors and treat them as we’d treat ourselves. Not call them dogs or treat them like an interruption. This is what should come out of the church. Not cover ups, not abuses of power, and not denial of facts.

And if anyone asks who told you all of this. Just say, “Jesus Christ!”

Works Cited

“Report on Pennsylvania Church Sex Abuse.” The Washington Post. Accessed August 27, 2018. http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/report-on-pennsylvania-church-sex-abuse/2319/.

[1] D.C. Talk. “What If I Stumble” Jesus Freak: 10th Anniversary. ForeFront Records, 2006, CD.

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