Essential Ligaments

Preached at Emmanuel United Church - 2 August, 2009

Have you ever been through a stretch where it feels like you go from one celebration to another with hardly a moment to catch your breath in between. Summer is packed with graduations, weddings, anniversaries, reunions. And we love to be together with people we care about. But if we were to be completely honest, even the best reunions have their tensions.

Just consider all the movies you have seen about family gatherings. Everyone comes home for the occasion and there are great hugs and kisses in the welcome home scene. But after the enthusiastic welcome, it’s a guarantee that a subplot is going to emerge, an unresolved parent-child issue, a sibling rivalry, a simmering resentment with a good friend.

Last year I finally saw the stage production of the musical Mama Mia. The advertisements trumpet “a guaranteed get-happy hit” The movie billboard shows a laughing beaming bride. But every comedy is actually a resolved tragedy, and before we get to the wedding, there is confusion, anger, regret, tears. Mama Mia does feel good. Nothing wrong there. But this is clearly a Hollywood ending.

Scratch under the surface and even family reunions don’t bring everyone together. You can get them all into one big picture, but you can’t get everyone to be friends.

The story is told about a man who was shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island. Years later he was discovered and when the rescuers arrived, they were impressed by all the buildings he had constructed. He had made a house, a store, a library, even a church. But as they walked around they came to a second church that the man had made. They asked him why there were two churches if he was the only person there. The man replied, “Oh, that other church, that’s the one I used to attend.”

In a church in Saline County, Arkansas, the congregation were constantly embroiled in fights. The minister responded by setting the church building on fire. When the minister was arrested, he told the police that he set fire to the church because the congregation needed a project to unify them. Don’t read too much into this story.

What’s true about our families, and our culture is also true about the church. We disagree, we argue, we break apart, we create new churches. We may call ourselves the United Church but we’re certainly not all united in our politics, our philosophies or our understanding of faith.

We are not so different from the little churches scattered around the Mediterranean in the first century. They are in constant need of support and encouragement in the Christian life. We have the letters to prove it.

In the letter to the Ephesians, one of the fundamental questions being addressed is, what are we meant to be doing as a church? What is a church good for?

On one level, church is a gathering of individuals. You can come here on your own, shake a hand, take a bulletin and not have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. You can keep contact to a minimum if you so choose.

For some of us this is a place we gather to strengthen ourselves as individuals. Its about me and my relationship with God. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a crucial aspect in our spiritual growth. A spiritual journey is an intensely personal thing: learning to strand on your own two feet, discovering your own gifts, finding your own questions rather than copying the questions of those around you, finding your own voice. This is all part of coming to a personal faith so that you can say for yourself, “I am a child of God.”

But there is another dimension to our spiritual journey and that is our life together as a community of faith.

The writer to the Ephesians uses three metaphors to help his readers think about the church as a community.

First all, he says the church is like a building - built on the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures and the apostles of the newer testament. They form the foundation with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone, the foundational slab on which the building sits. And you and I are the living stones that make the church a living temple, a dwelling place for God.

This metaphor reminds us of our connection to our tradition, to the best wisdom that lies in our past. In our present interfaith situation, we can broaden that and say today we are even more enriched by being the heirs of the wisdom of many religious traditions. We are living stones in a far larger building than we ever realized.

This letter also tells us that the church is like a bride. Our relationship with God is a love relationship. Therefore it requires the attention and sacrifice and communication required in a human love relationship. This bride has not yet been united with the bridegroom which is Christ. So while the building looks back to the church’s foundation, the bride looks ahead to an ongoing relationship.

And the final metaphor for the church and the one that we find in this morning’s reading, is the church as the body of Christ. Like the human body, this spiritual body is meant to grow and mature. The community gains strength as each part shares its gift. A common purpose develops. The writer mentions the ligaments which knit the whole body together. If you have ever damaged ligaments, then you know how essential these are. Without ligaments, the muscles cannot function.

So what are the ligaments in the body of Christ, the church. You could say that the ligaments are the love which keeps us together. You can have tremendous leaders and hard workers in a church or any group and if you don’t have acceptance, and forgiveness and people who genuinely care about each other, then it’s going to pull apart and self- destruct. So the pastoral care and outreach, the hospitality toward newcomers and the nurturing of the long-timers - these constitute the ligaments of the body, the demonstration of love which makes this faith community work.

In Anne Lamotte’s amazingly honest and insightful book Travelling Mercies she tells how she first came to church. After years of depression and anxiety, one Sunday she heard the sounds of gospel music coming from a little church across the street. The building was nondescript, not much to look at, with an insignificant little cross on top.

But the music forced her to stop and listen. She heard words of gospel songs she remembered from childhood. Week after week she would come back, stand outside the doors and listen. After many weeks she got up the courage to move to the doorway and then inside. The choir of five black women and one white man were making glorious music. The congregation of about 30 seemed to radiate kindness and warmth. She began to go back about once a month, slipping back out the door before the sermon.

She grew to love many things about that church, their care for one another, their community mission program, the way they welcomed strangers. But she writes, “It was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open. The music was breath and food. “ As she writes,

“Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would feel soft and tender. Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated. Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over. I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.”

You can never be best friends with everybody in a family or a church, but through the life together, maybe the music, or the work we do together, the Spirit is able to draw us into a deeper place in our lives and lead us in the same direction. And essentially that means growing up in love.

Eugene Peterson paraphrases the 4th chapter of Ephesians like this.

“In light of all this, here’s what I want you to do. While I’m locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want you to get out there and walk - better yet, run! - on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere....You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly ... no prolonged infancies among us please...God wants us to grow up... We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other, nourishing us so that we will grow up - healthy in God - robust in love.”

May it be so for us.

with thanks to: Ann Lamott, Eugene Peterson

Posted on: 08/03/2009 14:59

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To be a celebrity and have

Posted on: 08/03/2009 15:07

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