Learning to Fall

            What does it mean to be church in this time and place?  We remember that the church was the center of life for many Americans in the 1950s.  Every Sunday the pews were filled, the CE classrooms were bursting with children and there were plenty of resources to keep the church going.  Growing a church was easy because all a church had to do to get new members was open its doors.  In many towns and cities at that time, the only way a person could connect to the community was through the church.  In many circles the only way to legitimize a relationship was marriage in the church and later on legitimizing families through baptizing children in the church. 

            The times have changed since the churches hey day of the 1950s.  Now, we are doing more funerals than baptisms.  A majority of mainline churches have experienced extreme declines in membership and shrinking financial resources.  In our anxiety we think that if we just change the music, or add a contemporary evening service, that will bring the people who will save our church.  However these small changes aren’t turning things around for many of our churches because our culture is shifting away from the church.

            As a community of faith we feel very much like the exiles to which the Prophet Jeremiah preached to in this mornings reading.  In the aftermath of the Babylonian invasion of Judah the Israelites wondered where did God go?   Their temple was destroyed and their king had been taken off in chains.  These were the two things that God had promised them, God’s presence in the temple and political power.   Prior to the invasion Jeremiah had warned the people that if they kept doing what they were doing:  worshiping other Gods, not caring for the poor and ignoring God’s commandments, that calamity would fall upon them.  Perhaps it was the people alone broke the covenant but I wonder if maybe God didn’t keep up the divine end of the covenant.  I am sure there were many in Judah who did lived faithfully according to the covenant and yet their way of life had died in the ashes of their destroyed temple.   So it would seem for the mainline church.  Didn’t God promise to protect those who kept the covenant??

In the gospel reading, when Greeks came to the festival because they wished to see Jesus, they were not looking for the real Jesus, but their version of Jesus.  They were seeking a savior, a miracle worker, a protector, someone so full of power that he will keep them from catastrophe.  Instead of a superhero, they found an ordinary man resigned to his fate of death, “Very truly I tell you unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  (John 12:24-25)  These are hard words to hear because our human instinct for survival gets in the way.  It is as preacher Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in her sermon on this same scripture “hard to preach the gospel to people who are scared of death of dying.”[i]  Because Jesus keeps telling us that we have to follow God’s will even it takes us to the cross and “It’s hard to preach self preservation in the presence of the cross”[ii] 

You see when individuals and organizations get anxious about its survival they become inwardly focused.  Rather than continuing to seek the common good, we who are anxious about our survival only seek what is good for us, hanging on to our resources with tight fists only to have it fall through our fingers anyways.  What the great recession of 2008 has taught many of us is that as much as we try to seek security with jobs, nest eggs and real estate, we can lose it all in a heart beat.  We fall as we get the pink slip, we fall as our retirement savings dwindle, we fall as our mortgages go upside down.  However it is only after we’ve fallen we begin realize that “There are worse things than falling to the ground that could happen to a grain of wheat.”[iii]  Since the market fell, I had suffered two lay offs, one by the church that I was serving as associate pastor and one by a church media center where I was serving as director.  Beloved and I had to bring $11,000 to the table to sell our home in Big City because our mortgage went underwater and we were the lucky ones because at least we were able to sell our home.  It was only while I was falling that I learned the power of letting go and trusting that God will provide.   

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” 

What the gospels tell us is that death needs to happen before resurrection.  Naturally we are more interested in learning to rise than in learning to fall.  But in the season of Lent, we are called to empty ourselves to make room for the resurrection that Easter brings.  In dying to the world’s ways of consumerism, survival by any means necessary and domination we become open to God’s new life in us in ways we’ve never imagined. 

Today the church does not look like it did sixty years ago.  In sixty years the church will not look like the church of today.  That is because God is continually doing a new thing.  “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant…I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:31, 33)  God constantly changes the church by breaking down that which is causing the church to die so that something new will take its place.  This is all to the glory of God in building God’s kingdom here on earth.

In the short time that I’ve been your pastor, I’ve witnessed actions in your community that reflect a desire to build God’s kingdom here in Tiny Town.  At the faith forum last week I heard conversations about where the needs are in the city of Tiny Town and how we can use the resources that God has blessed us with to bring new life to our town.  The world may think us foolish for making programs that aren’t about contributing to our bottom line, which is about membership and money.  But in turning away from our anxiety over our institutional survival and turning towards Gods way of building God’s kingdom here on earth we open ourselves to becoming church in ways we’ve never imagined before.   

God calls all churches to be God’s hands, feet and voice in the world to sustain God’s creation.  Let go and have faith that God will provide us what we need to do God’s work in the world.  May it be so.  Amen

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[i] Barbara Brown Taylor “Learning to Fall” Sermon Delivered at Festival of Homiletics May 2011.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.