Called to be .  .  .  Saints?

Sermon by James W.  Crawford

January 24, 1999

I Corinthians 1:1-9

The City of Corinth proved one of Caesar's most crucial colonies.  It stood on a Greek Isthmus separating the Adriatic and the Aegean seas.  The city served as a bustling commercial center; it thrived as a major seaport town, drawing sailors and entrepreneurs; it provided a stopover as well as a dwelling place for immigrants traveling from Asia and Africa to Europe, and vice versa.  Over time Corinth gained a reputation as a churning, cosmopolitan, anything-goes melting pot, and became known as the worst of cultural hell holes; the sewer of the Roman Empire.

In about the year 50, Paul founded a church there.  Some 20 years after Jesus died, coming home from his trip to what we now call Kosovo, Paul stopped in Corinth.  He began preaching his message of Jesus as Messiah in the synagogue until he got kicked out and compelled to meet with his Jesus movement friends in one of their houses.  In any case, what we see in secular Corinth—the class warfare, the factionalism, the religious quarrels, the political bitterness, the sexual license—all of this divisiveness crept into the culture of the Corinthian Church, and Paul, writing from Ephesus some five or six years later, tries desperately to relieve the centrifugal forces blowing the congregation to smithereens, and to set his beloved congregation on a solid footing so they might testify as a body to their unity amid diversity in Jesus Christ.

I love Paul's letters to his churches.  They are not religious treatises—with the exception of his letter to the Romans.  They are letters written to churches in jeopardy; they are first aid; they are emergency handbooks.   And every urban church—indeed, every church, like that congregation in Corinth—finds itself at risk as the myriad influences from its social setting, as well as the hodgepodge congregation of divergent prejudices, interests, perceptions, needs, expectations, slants, experience and vanity, gather for worship and mission.  No church can avoid dissonances and challenges, and as churches around the world join today in reading this striking greeting and thanksgiving from Paul's letter to the church in Corinth, each will no doubt recognize what genius Paul brings to the diversity, pluralism and variety inherent in a Christian congregation.  We find out, you see, he is writing to us, and that millennial Boston and its churches bear marks resonating with first century Corinth.

I

Do you remember how Paul begins? He considers himself called by God.  He understands himself part of a congregation sanctified in Christ, called to be .  .  .  guess what? .  .  called to be Saints.  Yes, Saints! The English word we use for saints comes not from a religious expression, but from a Greek secular expression meaning essentially to be separated out, to be defined in a special way, to be set aside, as in our case, an association gathered by the grace of God.

You see, the wonderful thing about our coming together this morning for worship and mission hinges on our unity as a body bound together by the initiative of Jesus Christ.  In this place, among this people, we confess, first of all, to our grounding in the patience and of God in Christ.  Paul says that is why we are here. 

I do not know if you or I would put it that way.  There are lots of reasons we come to church.  One commentator suggests some of us come because we believe the church sustains values we treasure.  As we engage the snarl of claims to what is right and what is wrong, as we witness the widespread physical abuse of women and torture of children in their own homes, as we awaken this very morning to the wild genocidal strife in central Africa and the Balkans, as we harbor amid what Richard Sennett calls "The New Capitalism" the sense of our disposability in the workplace—in all of this we eagerly seek some bedrock; we yearn for values we can hang onto, something grounding us and our children amid the flux, the change, the increasing cacophony of authorities, the variable moral compasses and spiritual options crashing through our front doors.

I am intrigued that in every talk show dealing with this current Senate trial we hear at least one call from a mother or father wondering what Presidential mendacity means for the developing moral core of children.  It is legitimate.  When Linda and I heard such a concern the other evening she reminded me our son Robert, now some 30 years old, and a bastion of personal integrity and honor, our son Robert, at age 4 way back in 1973, got caught in some childhood whopper and with innocence laced with shrewdness weakened our knees by asking if President Nixon could do it, why couldn't he.   Values: sure, certain, rock bottom moral values dealing with how we treat with others can urge us to go to church, where we hope we can find some solid ground in a world sometimes drowning in moral mush.

Or again, others of us understand the church as a helpful service organization.  We see the local church as a community organization marshaling resources and volunteers to tend the wounds tearing our social fabric.  I often describe this church, when I talk with prospective members, as a cloverleaf—a switchboard—enabling people to reach their highest aspirations as they seek to serve the need for food, education or housing across this beloved city of ours.  And look at our bulletin.  We can be a service organization.

And, yes, still others as least stay on our rolls because they may see the church as an insurance policy.  They hedge their bets; they are not too sure there exists any transcendent Divinity making any difference: they have seen too much trouble, witnessed too many lies, suffered too many disappointments, experienced too many tragedies—chaos, cancer, AIDS, war—to rest their confidence in a God of love.  But just in case .  .  .  just maybe .  .  .  if perhaps .  .  .  Oh, they will marry, bury, baptize, maybe even contribute to the nearest local church.   A safety net—just in case .  .  .

I want you to know in the first place, I am never cynical about why people come to church, why you may be here.  I know motives are mixed, and as soon as I or any minister begins to peer behind motives you have every right to indulge in the same practice: "Hey Jim? How come you're here on this rainy, dark, rotten weekend? We know.  You're paid to be here."  Well, yes and no. 

The motives behind church-going are as varied as the people in this congregation.  And those motives are not mean or tawdry, neither shabby nor cynical.  Really, it is Paul who in greeting his Corinthian congregation reminds us the real initiative for our gathering together—and this includes me, too—the real initiative comes from the grace of Christ Jesus whose all-embracing arms envelope us where we are, receiving who we are, uniting us as we are in a single body; grace accepting our individuality, our own suffering, loneliness, insecurity, grief, recognizing our eagerness for firm moral ground, our readiness for service, our spiritual anxiety, binding, connecting us for no other reason than that we are loved, and that our coming together as saints—our chosenness as saints—our Sabbath gathering as saints reflects what God wants for all of us: community with the barriers down, the resistances demolished, the fear dissolved: Saints called, invited, beckoned, first of all by the eagerness and decision of a God who desires us for her own.

II

Paul makes clear we gather not only because the grace of God takes the initiative, Paul makes clear that just as he addresses the Church of God in Corinth, so we are the church of God in Boston.  Got that? The Church of God in Boston.  What is Paul telling us? What is he saying here? He is saying we are not just a piece of a Christian church.  We are the church of God as it is in Boston.  We are not a fragment of the Christian church identified through some specific name, or place, or denomination.  He is telling us we are the church—not Old South Church, not a United Church of Christ, not the gang at Boylston and Dartmouth, not simply one of the churches in the Back Bay—take your choice: Trinity Episcopal, First Baptist, First Lutheran, St.  Cecelia's, Old South.  He is saying you—we—are the Church of God: all of it, complete, unbounded, all the means of grace residing right here, right now, just as those means exist in each of our sibling congregations: Trinity Episcopal, First Baptist, First Lutheran, St.  Cecelia's. 

The other evening Suze Campbell, our Church Historian, brought a little piece of ecclesial history to our Church Council meeting.  Among other things she wished to show us what was going on among us during another Presidential impeachment and trial, in this case Andrew Johnson's a hundred and thirty years ago.  The documents she brought included details of the initial steps to our moving from the Old South Meeting House to this site—steps taking place in 1869.  The resistance to our congregation's moving from the Meeting House to this Back Bay mud bowl of a suburb 127 years ago, as many of you know, embroiled us in a messy and brutally litigious course.  How could this congregation leave a citadel of Congregationalism? More important, how could it leave a historic and civil monument, an icon of our nation's history? Our minister at the time, Jacob Manning, would not be trapped by these powerful myths.  Speaking from that Meeting House pulpit he said, "The fact that Franklin was baptized here, the great orators of the Revolution were born here, that the British soldiery quartered here, events like these, having no heavenly savor to them, are what we are tempted to memorialize, and let bring us into bondage.  .  .  The public at large is interested in us more on account of our political associations than because we are a church of Christ.  .  ."

When we finally moved to this building some six years later in 1875, Dr.  Manning caught the true meaning of church.  Listen as he consecrated this building.  "Take this building, O great head of the church, to whom we bring it.  Make it thine own temple, and make us thy living temples.  Use it for the glory of Thy Holy Kingdom, and keep us the loyal subjects of that Kingdom.  Spare it only so long as it shall serve Thy loving purpose and spare and bless us only as we may declare Thy name.  When its noble walls must crumble, teach Thy people to bow in faith of something better to come; and when our spirits must be unclothed of their earthly house, may they rise to be clothed upon the house which is in heaven."

We are the church of God in Boston—not simply a fragment of the wider church, not a church identified by our denomination, our building, our address, our civil history, the catalog of ministers on that side wall, that memorial to super patriots on the back wall—we, without condition, without constraint, meet as the whole, undivided, church of God in Boston.

III

So we discover ourselves here at the initiative and invitation of the grace of God; we find ourselves a body where all the gifts of the spirit and the marks of the church reside; and lastly, Paul asserts we are called into the koinonia—the fellowship—the tight, mutual, interdependent, sharing and servant community of his son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Our community, he insists, is cut from cloth different from any others where we participate. 

And what a calling that is.  My soul! We know the stress afflicting us from outside makes its way inside.  We know if short tempers beset us elsewhere, they can get out of hand in here too.  We know if something flattens us out there, we will be looking for something to flatten us in here too, or by golly, we will be ready to flatten the first person or proposal that comes along.  We know that for all our ideals and claims and emphases on grace and love, peace and trust, we need bylaws to protect us against the overreaching tendencies of human nature, as we have learned from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 65 these last two weeks on the floor of the U.S.  Senate.   We need protection against what Hamilton observed as "the difficulty of prevailing upon the conceited projector (of one opinion) to renounce his infallible criterion for the fallible criterion of his more conceited neighbor." Uncanny, these so-called founding fathers as they surfaced our tendency to what they called factions enlisting animosities, partialities, influence and interest—or as Senator Bumpers said the other day, "wanting to win too much"— attributing these human inclinations to the risks of secular democratic polities.  But those of us in churches know these dangers can plague us no less.  Koinonia, fellowship, church community is always in danger of collapsing as a consequence of what Hamilton shrewdly inferred as the marriage of conceit to fallibility.

Can we beat it? Can we dissolve even for a moment the things separating us, dividing us, insulating and cutting us off from one another? For God's sake and ours I hope so.  Do you know why we practice that little Rite of Unity and Reconciliation at the beginning of our service? It is to reach out to one another, strangers, acquaintances, new faces and old, believers, seekers, religious refugees, faithful, agnostic—whatever—to reach out, not primarily to wish "Good Morning" to one another, but to affirm and attest through action, almost in sacramental fashion, the fact of our gathering as disparate and disconnected individuals drawn and joined into a new, recreated, and reconciled body united by nothing other than God's grace and our hope.

And yes, do you know why that note pad rests at the end of your pew? Lord knows some of you want to remain anonymous while you are here and absorb the music, or contemplate the radiance of the windows, or seek shelter from the drone of CNN, or the hurly-burly exploding in and around the asphalt, glass and concrete of the city.  I cannot blame you, and we want to protect that freedom.  But we want to provide the opportunity for each of us to know who the other is, just fleetingly perhaps, just for this moment together—we know we will be off to our own worlds anon—but here, a united, mutual koinonia in Jesus Christ.

Do you know why greeters at the front door? Hospitality to the stranger.  Hospitality to the new guard, the old guard.  A welcome in a city where doors are locked, phones are unlisted, conversations functional, friendship fleeting, acquaintances in and out.  You know the anxious questions: "Is there anyone who cares I'm around? Does anyone give a damn?"

Oh friends, that we could for just a moment, once a week, in a world running us ragged realize our sainthood in mutuality, affection and thanksgiving.

And yes, please bear with me: for those of you who may be seeking a church home, let me insist you will find here a wonderful congregation—oh, not without its failures, oversights, errors of judgment, gossip and mean ambition—a human, sinful congregation desperately in need of forgiveness.  But if you are put off by churches with sinners in the pews let me assure, in the wise words of George Buttrick, there is always room for one more.  We want you, we need you; Christ wants you, Christ needs you.  And though we may look large to some of you, size has little to do with warmth.  Heaven knows we have all been in large churches where their common life sparkles with enthusiasm and joy, and we have been in small churches, where, as Harold Bosley remarks, we feel "like a bottle of champagne in a bucket ice cubes."  You will be welcome, I promise, for, by God, we are called into this fellowship of God's son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Saints! That's who we are.  Not religious paragons—yet I assure you now of a few I could name in this room cut from the cloth of Mother Theresa or Francis of Assisi—but not all of us.  Hardly! Yet, saints, men and women, called out—called out—and joined by the grace, peace, and power of Jesus Christ.  What a calling! What a privilege! May grace beckon and bless you always.