2 Corinthians 5:17 -
6:2
So if anyone
is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away;
see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us
to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of
reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the
message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since
God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no
sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. As we work
together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in
vain. For he says, ‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and
on a day of salvation I have helped you.’ See, now is the acceptable
time; see, now is the day of salvation!
SERMON
OLD
CHURCH, NEW CHURCH
We need to be close to God. We
were made to be close to God. Our
permanent happiness depends on our being close to God.
And this is what God wants, too.
God makes it possible for us to be close to him through the life
and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
He makes it possible for us to be close to him, by simply opening
our hands, our minds, and our hearts; and receiving his reality.
Now, it the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.
It’s a funny thing about the word “now”.
Whenever we use it, it instantly moves into the past.
Just think about it for a minute, when I say “now”, when I
say “now is the time to do this, or that, or the other”, when I
speak of any moment as “now” I’m saying something real; but it’s
real only as long as it’s still in the present, before it’s moved on
to a past experience, when it becomes then.
It lasts for an amount of time that is probably not measurable;
it might not even be quantifiable in principle.
The present is there for an instant only, until it moves into the
past.
If “now” is the time of our salvation, it’s a different
“now” than the one I said just a few seconds ago.
And I have to say it again and again and again to keep on having
it be “now” but each time I do I’m making a new “now”.
The present immediately becomes the past; as soon as it’s
happened. Since the
future is unknown, and since the present immediately becomes a part of
the past, that means that the reality of our lives is always necessarily
connected to the past; because that’s what it is to be human.
We live in the sequence of past, present and future, but the
future hasn’t happened yet and is still open-ended.
The present lasts for an immeasurable amount of time, a fleeting
moment, if you could even call it that; and the past stretches out for
eons and eons. And yet, and
yet, that present moment that can’t be measured, is where the really
crucial things take place. Such
as the moment of realizing that Jesus is God Incarnate, offering to us
the gift of closeness to God, that we so desperately need to have.
That “now” is a very important “now” in our lives, even
though we can only grasp it by realizing that it is part of the past.
The past is important; the past is basic to what it means to be
human. The past takes
those crucial moments of our lives and makes them available to us;
because as long as we’re thinking about the now, the moment it’s
happening, well, it’s over before we’ve actually gotten our minds to
think about it. So, it would
have to be in the past before we can do anything with it.
That “now” is when the crucial thing has happened, but doing
something with that crucial thing, like the moment of our salvation,
requires the past.
I know all this is very abstract, that I’m trying to set up a
reality that is very much a concrete part of who we are.
In my talking about the abstract difference between past,
present, and future, I’m saying that every church, if it’s doing
what it has to do to serve us as human beings, to make it possible for
us to do something with the salvation God offers us, in our minds, and
in our hearts and with our wills; every church, whether it’s a new
church or an old church, is a past church; a church that is connected
with the past. The
difference between new churches and old churches is only a difference in
degree; it’s not a difference in kind.
Tell that to the leaders of my denomination; who want us to make
all of our old churches into new churches.
As if those are two totally different ways of relating to God.
I’m not going to beat up on new churches today.
I have several critical things to say about them, and they may be
the kinds of things that come up meaningfully in other sermons; but
generally I don’t like to give sermons in which I am speaking to an
audience that isn’t here; or criticizing someone that isn’t in the
same situation that I, myself am in.
So, I think there are plenty of things to say about new churches,
to the effect that they are fooling themselves, to the effect that they
are creating a kind of shadow of the present, that it’s conveniently
moving into the past, that after another 25 years that new church is
going to be just like all the other old churches.
I could say all that, but I’m not today, because I want to talk
about the needs of this church.
We are not a new church. That’s
frankly in front of us. This
building has been here since the 1850’s, in existence since the
1830’s; that’s not very new. It
has a history that goes on back to Horatio Gates Spafford who wrote
“It Is Well with My Soul”; and it includes Frederick Douglass making
an address here; a history that includes all these figures that you
study about in history class, that’s a part of who this living
congregation is. It’s got
an historical connection with this community; and when you go to the
library and look at old photographs of Skaneateles and the lake, and
when you look at other
Finger Lakes
photographs, like Otisco
which should always be mentioned, like Skaneateles is.
When you look at all these historical society kinds of artifacts,
you’re looking at a large part of who we are as a church.
And when you just consider the fact that none of our charter
members are still living you’re dealing with the fact that we are an
old church. And I think
that’s perfectly fine.
I do think however, that while we’re an old church, we need to
keep in mind that it all begins with a “now”; that is the newest
thing that you can possibly imagine; the “now” of the acceptable
time; the “now” the day of salvation; the “now” of that moment
when something in our hearts clicks and we receive Jesus Christ.
I’m leaving aside the question of whether we receive Jesus
Christ continually, or repeatedly, or whether we receive Jesus Christ
only once. I tend to go
toward the continual and repeated model; we’ll be talking about
receiving Jesus Christ only once. It
makes it further and further removed from us the longer we live.
I think either kind of reception of Jesus Christ is meaningful to
talk about, and I prefer to use the continual and repeated model we’re
talking about.
That model is calling for a “now” event to be encapsulated in
an organization which is old; which is deeply connected with the more
distant past. The
person who went to
England
or other parts of
Europe
, or the
Middle East
, or parts of
Ethiopia
, and even down into
South America
you would find churches
that have been there since 1500’s.
So we don’t look like an old church to them, but to almost all
of our culture around us, we do look like an old church.
What do we do with that? One
thing, I think, is that we acknowledge that there’s been a lot of
“now” in this church. There
have been many meaningful moments in people’s lives.
And I think God has a way; because to God I think, all moments
are “now”; God has a way of making those past “now” moments,
those past moments when other people encountered Him meaningfully in
Jesus Christ, God makes those moments a part of our current experience.
They are somehow mixed with the present here in this room; they
are in the air; in the words we speak the musty smells when you walk in
if the windows haven’t been opened up yet.
In the memories that are contained here: in the Bible school
experience; in the Christmas pageants and programs, and just the way we
felt on Maundy Thursday, when we’re thinking about the death of
Christ, and they way we felt on Easter Sunday when we’re realizing the
resurrection is something that strikes our hearts; all those things
which are past events, and other past events repeated in this church,
all those things are a part of who we are.
They are present, “the past isn’t over it isn’t even
past”, said one great novelist, William Faulkner.
And I think that’s actually a profound and Biblical and
Christian truth. The past is
not past; the past is a part of who we are now, even while every
“now” moment is a part of the past.
So, one thing is we shouldn’t be ashamed of being an old
church; we shouldn’t be apologetic about being an old church.
We are a church that has seen a whole lot of human living and
that’s what the world now needs; people who are experienced with human
living, people who some answers to the problems and puzzles and
conundrums that are causing so much heartache, so much pain and
suffering in the psyches of people in our world today.
They need people who have lived and gone through the temptations,
the failures, the struggles, the occasional triumphs, the moments of at
least keeping our heads above water as we paddle as fast as we could.
Those moments that are a part of who we are because we are an old
church, are moments the rest of the world needs to tap into; that means
that we need to be aware that we offer a treasury of experience and
wisdom and help to anybody who needs it, to anybody who sees it and
wants it. And then the other thing I
would to say in addition to this fact that we should not think poorly of
ourselves because we’re an old church; by the way I’m not speaking
of the age of the congregation, because I acknowledge plenty of people
who are new as well as folks who are not so new in the congregation
today. So the first thing is
not to feel like we don’t have much to offer just because we’re an
old church. The second thing
is to be sure that we are ready for all the newcomers.
Sometimes newcomers are people who are taking a new direction,
they’re a newcomer in that sense, maybe they already know Jesus
Christ, maybe they already encountered Jesus Christ, maybe they’ve
grown up all their lives in a certain Christian context and now they
want to make a fresh beginning in this congregation.
Whether God considers them to be truly newcomers or not is not up
to us to decide; but we need to be sure that these newcomers in our
midst are honored, that these newcomers are welcome, that these
newcomers are made to feel that they are who we are here for.
We are here to affirm the moments of “now” that are occurring
in people’s lives.
But another type of newcomer is one that churches always want to
have, and we are blessed enough to have them.
The other kind of newcomer I mean – children.
They are newcomers, they are persons who if they have experienced
profound moments of closeness to God, they are still needing to find
ways of putting that into words and ideas and they still have plenty of
other experiences, other awakenings, ahead of them.
And we need to be an environment that makes sure that that
happens. Therefore, one of
the most important things we can do is be sure that we don’t just
expect the parents to take care of teaching Sunday School and taking
care of kids in the nursery. We
need to make sure that we don’t just expect the parents to handle all
the kid stuff while we go about doing things that are more interesting
to us. We need to be sure
that we are ready to stand forward and take responsibility for being
with kids even if we are older than that age that you think of as the
ideal age for working with children.
We need to be ready to move beyond those preconceptions and those
limitations we put on ourselves and be prepared to make the newcomer
feel so welcome, and so affirmed and so embraced that they realize that
the old church part of us is the asset we have to offer, and that it is
an asset because we are still connected with the “now” even while we
are a church that has been around for a long time
In the older churches I’ve served the besetting tendency, the
temptation to sin, if you want to call it that, is for people of the
older churches to start to feel entitled. To start to feel as if they
deserve to have only the hymns they want to sing, only the form of
worship they want to worship with, only the kind of sermon that
they’ve heard in the past, only the kind of church experience that has
been meaningful to them in the past.
This is not only selfish toward people who have different
perspectives and different wishes and needs and hopes; but it’s also a
limiting thing to put around ourselves because the “nows” that
we’ve experienced in the past need to be renewed, as I was saying
earlier, need to be continually brought into present experience.
And that means that we need to be ready for new things to touch
us; even those of us who first answered an altar call, or gave our lives
to Christ, or had our first communion.
Whichever meaningful experience first connected you to Jesus
Christ, even for those of us who did that 60 or 70 or 80 years ago; we
still need to be ready for fresh and new experiences.
And being open to the newcomer; to the child that’s the
newcomer, they are newcomers into the world, and to the adult who is a
newcomer, and to everyone in between or beyond those limits.
We need to be open to them. That’s
the way of opening ourselves, opening our hearts to what God is wishing
to do the best right here and right now.
Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation, and the
minute you say that it becomes a part of the past, but in becoming a
part of the past it gathers up to itself all those profound and deep
experiences of two millennia of Christians living in relation to Jesus
Christ. It gathers up
all of those experiences into the present and empowers us to be ready to
share those experiences with anybody who hasn’t heard this message
before or needs to hear it in a new way, right here and right now.
Even the “now” that I just said, and that other “now”
that I’m just saying, and on and on.
The past is with us and yet, and yet,
the “now” is the most important thing, and it is with us too.
Amen.
^ top of page
