Sermon: The Miracle of the Church

On this third week after Pentecost at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, we talked about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. For confession, we did a confession involving building a wall out of some of the sins the church has struggled with throughout its history.

Later, during the prayers, we heard about God’s forgiveness and shaped the blocks of the wall into a cross. (Here’s the resource from the World Council of Churches where that idea came from.)

Today’s sermon focused on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 and Matthew 4:12-23.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

When I was a college student, I worked at a summer camp in Wisconsin, very similar to Ewalu and Riverside, and I absolutely loved it. Working at camp is the best summer job I can imagine. Great community, living in nature, getting to talk about Jesus, even free food!

I remember one weekend, though, after the campers went home, the staff were relaxing in the lounge, and someone said, “Camp is so much easier when the campers aren’t here.”

And you know what? They were right! Camp is such a beautiful, peaceful place without all the kids running around. It’s a lot easier when you don’t have to keep track of campers. But obviously, that’s missing the point! The reason camps exist is to serve the campers.

I confess, there have been times I’ve had similar thoughts about the church. Church would be a lot easier without all the people in it. No one would make a mess, no one would disagree, no one would fight. If we just got rid of all the sinners, church would be great, right?

Well, no. Without the sinners, there wouldn’t be a church, because we’re all sinners.

A church of perfect people might sound great, but there would be no people. A church of perfect people simply doesn’t exist. The problem with a church full of sinners is that sin divides people. That’s what sin does. Sin breaks relationships.

In the church Paul is writing to in the city of Corinth, it seems they’ve been having some problems with divisions. Some of them have been fighting among themselves, and it’s divided the church into various factions.

In this particular case, it seems people were dividing themselves up based on who had baptized them. Some of them called themselves followers of Paul, some followers of Apollos, and some followers of Cephas.

I love this reading because you can hear Paul’s frustration. “I thank God I baptized none of you except Crisps and Gaius, so no one can say you were baptized in my name. Oh, and Stephanas’s family. I baptized them too. And maybe I’m forgetting someone. But still, that’s not the point.”

If you’re focusing on who baptized you, you’re missing the point of baptism! As a baptized child of God, you belong to Christ, not to any particular pastor or preacher.

I’m grateful we have Paul’s letter as part of the Bible, because it reminds us divisions in the church are nothing new. There are no good old days when the church used to have it all figured out, even in Bible times.

That’s important to remember, because these divisions are still a problem. There’s a reason this week of prayer for Christian unity exists. I looked it up this week, and there are an estimated 45,000 denominations of Christians in the world.

Not 45,000 churches, 45,000 denominations – groups of churches. The church that started as one body of Christ has split over every issue you can possibly imagine, and lots of stuff you can’t imagine.

If the point of Paul’s letter was to reunite a splitting church, it’s been a miserable failure.

We Lutherans are certainly guilty of this as well. Martin Luther hated the idea of a church named after him, because he didn’t want people worshipping him. He wanted this to be the evangelical church, a church re-focused around the good news of Jesus Christ.

As we celebrate Luther and everything God has done through the Reformation these last 500 years, we have to acknowledge the Reformation also led to an awful lot of those 45,000 denominations.

When I think about our faith, there are a few things that amaze me, a few miracles I think are at the heart of what we believe.

First, there’s the miracle of creation, God shaping and forming the world out of nothing. That’s pretty amazing.

Second is the idea of incarnation, the Christmas story. It’s hard to comprehend that God loved the world—this messed up, broken reality full of sinful people like us—enough to come live in it. Incarnation blows my mind.

The third one is the miracle of the church. Not that the church exists, or is so old or divided, but the miracle that God works through the church. And of course, the church is the people, not the building or the institution, so the miracle is that God works through us, through me and you.

This week, the audit committee met to go through the books and financial records from 2016. They might be the most under-appreciated committee in the church, and yet, for us to do the work we’re called to do and spread the gospel, we need the audit committee.

I spent part of a morning this week trying to figure out the bureaucratic church rules on whether someone who marries a Catholic and moves away is still a member of this congregation since as a Lutheran, she can’t join officially join a Catholic congregation.

Yesterday, Gale and I spent four hours at a seminary learning about how to properly withhold employee taxes so the IRS doesn’t get upset at our congregation.

Somehow, I trust God is at work in our broken, divided institutions as well. In the details of budget proposals and annual reports and membership records, God is at work.

Do you ever wonder if there’s a better way? Or at least an easier way for God to work?

So often, I fear the church gets in the way of God. I have friends who have been deeply wounded by people in the church. People who have been told they’re not welcome to be part of Christ’s body because they have tattoos, or they don’t give enough, or because of a fight their parents had, or because they got here the wrong way, or because they don’t believe quite the right way.

All too often, the church, the very body of Christ, is what builds walls and separates people from each other and from God.

Wouldn’t God’s work be easier if it weren’t for all the people? And yet, God chooses to work through the church. Instead of giving up on the church, or on any of us, God chooses to work through people.

In the Gospel reading, we hear Jesus choosing the disciples. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we read John’s telling of this same story last week. This week, we hear Matthew’s version, and Matthew gives us a little more detail.

All John told us about the first two disciples is they had been following John the Baptist. Matthew tells us a little more, writing that Simon, his brother Andrew, James, and John were all fishermen, with at least James and John working in the family business.

These weren’t great religious scholars or public leaders. They weren’t billionaires, or even really middle class. These are fishermen, day laborers, common people Jesus is choosing.

As we move forward in the story, we’ll hear how Jesus’ own disciples miss the point again and again, and even eventually abandon and deny him.

Again, that’s good news for us, because it tells us God doesn’t need perfect people; God needs broken people who are willing to participate in the work, willing to leave behind their own agendas and plans, willing to drop their nets and follow Jesus.

The reality is that we are divided, both in the church and in the world. It’s part of the reality of living in a sinful world.

Some Christians are Lutherans, some are Catholics. Some are Methodist, some are Presbyterian. Some of you in this room are Democrats, some are Republicans. Some of us are Packers fans, maybe some of you are Falcons fans. (They can leave now. Just kidding. God loves them too.)

What unites us, Paul writes, is the message about the cross of Jesus Christ. Not our race, our country, or even what church we go to. We’re united by God’s love. God looks past our differences, and sees us as precious children, people worth dying for.

The problem with the church is the people, but solution is God. Paul ends this reading by saying that God did not send him to do anything except proclaim the gospel. His job is to tell people about God’s love. That’s our job too.

If sin builds up walls and separates us from God and each other, the cross bridges the gaps sin creates. God’s mission is reconciliation, bring people together, restoring the world to the Creator.

And the miracle is God does it through people like you and me.
Amen.