Transformation in Church – How and Why?

The Reverend Susan Mann Flanders, Adjunct Clergy

Some weeks ago, in another Episcopal church, I heard this startling beginning of a sermon:  “The parish church is the hope of the world!” (repeat) What?!  Isn’t that a bit grandiose in these days when so many parish churches are in decline, where attendance is down, when none of Bill’s or my adult children go to church, when so many other religions jostle for position and press their own truth claims?  How possibly could this parish church, or any, be the hope of the world?

That other preacher’s answer was this – that a parish church should be a community of transformation, where people are changed by being there, changed into people who help to change the world – for the better.  Of course she didn’t mean that only parish churches can be this hope, just that when churches generate this kind of change in people, they are indeed beacons of hope for the world.

What does such transformation entail; how does it happen, and why is it cause for such hope? I’ll start with this morning’s readings.  Each is about transformation, but they are quite different.

Isaiah’s prophesy is wildly optimistic – a glorious transformation from his time of exile and oppression to the peaceable kingdom, the lion and the lamb and all that.  Isaiah points to a future of love and justice, long life and health, no children born to be sacrificed on the altar of war.  He seems to suggest that God will bring this all off, that God will respond to our needs no matter what.  It is an idyllic dream, a way of looking to the future that certainly has its appeal.  When the world looks threatening, it is tempting for religious folks to turn to such dreams and to such a God.

But to do so is silly and irresponsible.  To do so actually demeans God.  It makes God a potentate, doling out blessings on poor pitiful subjects; it makes God like a political candidate, promising peace and prosperity with no sacrifice.  The dream is lovely, but it doesn’t spur change in us – in fact, there is no role for us in this dream at all, except to reap its promised benefits. And here we are, some 2500 years later, and we still haven’t seen much fulfillment of the prophet’s dream.  Looking at the future through Isaiah’s rosy lens is just another way of burying our heads in the sand.

The gospel passage has Jesus looking into the future in a completely different way.  He presents a future that looks like our present day reality, and it isn’t pretty.  The temple, that age’s sign of institutional religion, will be demolished, and all kinds of rivals will argue, the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians, the atheists and the fundamentalists and all the new age sects – each will say they have the Truth, that their way is the right way.

Jesus goes on to speak of wars and insurrections, of earthquakes, famines and plagues – sounding so much like the nightly news; it’s like a scarily accurate prediction!  He moves on to persecution and betrayal on account of following him and ends with a promise of safety through endurance.  In short – you’re going to have to go through a lot of terrible stuff, but if you endure, you just might make it.  Transformation here comes at a very high cost, but I’m not quite sure what Jesus means by endurance.

I included the reading from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” as a more contemporary and haunting way of evoking an uncertain future, but consistent, I think, with the gospel passage.  The poet implies destruction and decay, a whole sequence of rising, falling, ashes and tatters – but also new growth and building.  But you have to live it; you have to endure and go through all the unknown ways.  “In my beginning is my end” writes Eliot.  “In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not … where you are is where you are not”.

I do not pretend to fully understand these verses, and Eliot doesn’t help us much with what endurance looks like either. But it’s something about going through the unknown, facing what you don’t know, but trusting in a future worth unfolding, even if it is quite different. For me, and perhaps for you, as we look to the future, whether for our church or for our country, this poetry offers another kind of hope.  It is a stern, challenging hope, but a hope that makes endurance worth while.

And perhaps it is this kind of hope that is warranted for our churches. I don’t think church will ever look again the way it did in my childhood – pews full, Sunday School over-flowing, clergy highly revered in the community (too bad – that last part sounds great!) I think church as we know it is dying. Here’s a blog entry from a cool priest, Mark Bozzuti-Jones, up at Trinity Church in New York:  “I suspect that our efforts to find better ways of doing the same-old same old will fail.  We all might have to find new ways of being church.  I bet nobody knows what that will look like.  One thing is sure; we cannot sustain this way of being church (nor should we). Or should we?  Is this the end or the beginning? To me, his words echo the T. S. Eliot passage.

We do not know what the future of Christianity will look like, and perhaps a lot of devastation and much more decline are in store before anything truly new emerges.  And relatively large, healthy churches such as the one I served in Chevy Chase and this beloved community of St. Mark’s, can shield us from the wider church’s uncertain future, just because they seem to be holding up well.  This church is not broke, (at least it won’t be if we make our pledges – there, that’s my pitch), and this church is not broken.  But many churches are, in this diocese and around the country. In Europe, churches are empty, obsolete, irrelevant.  Christianity thrives in much of the third world, but it looks really different from our comfortable cerebral Anglicanism.

How can our churches become places of transformation, the hope of the world that my colleague so boldly declared?  How can our parish church change us when we come here and change the way we live when we go out? I believe this kind of change can and does happen; I know it happens at St. Mark’s.

 Here’s a story about that from long ago, when I was here as the Associate Rector.  I casually asked someone to read one of the scriptures on a Sunday.  It was about God’s call to Isaiah to be a prophet, and it ends, famously, with God asking “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” The prophet answers, “Here am I; send me!”  The man who read that was Collie Agle, and it changed his life. From then on he began to understand his and Betsy’s ministry to Honduras as a true calling.  He saw it as connected with his relationship with God, and that ministry has continued ever since as one of the key missions of this church, and it has touched thousands of lives both here and in Honduras.  It may sound corny – but a reading from the Bible, coming at the right time, can change your life.

Another path of transformation has been central to St. Mark’s for over half a century, and that is functional education.  It has certainly evolved, and continues to, and I look forward to being part of the teaching team for the spring LCF class.  These classes have the power to transform us – to upset us, to provoke us, to get us to connect faith with real life. They are not meant to be encounter groups searching for feel-good moments. In one class, where we had focused on sin, a young man came up to me after the class, kind of glowing.  He was so excited, he said, about a new way of thinking about sin. Instead of bad things we do, little black marks in God’s book, he was grappling with the notion of missing the mark, of being less than fully human and present to our lives. He exclaimed to me “I feel like I’ve just delivered a baby!”  This was especially thrilling, as functional education founder Charles Penniman spoke of the teaching process as being similar to the role of a mid-wife!  I saw this as one small episode, among many, of the kind of transformation that can happen with functional education, as long as it continues to meet us where we are today. 

But worship is the main arena – this gathering of the community in which our hunger for spiritual depth and meaning can meet our hunger to make a difference in the world. If we don’t look to feed these hungers; if we don’t look for transformation here, we could well ask the question, why come?  

Many do find transformation in worship, regularly or occasionally, here and elsewhere – but I think not enough. Worship is meant to be drama, but too often it is routine and dead, a celebration of the past.  Through music, silence, words read or preached or prayed, worship must go beyond the barrage of informational blah-blah-blah that surrounds us all week.  Worship can grasp our souls – sometimes with its beauty and majesty, sometimes with utter simplicity – a small child offering a can of soup at the altar. Readings and preaching can provoke our thoughts and stir our feelings, and prayers, when they come from the heart instead of formulas in a book, can heighten our compassion and draw our community close. 

 And every week, at the heart of the liturgy, is the profound symbolic transformation of the Eucharist. Grain and grape, through the work of our hands, become bread and wine, and then are transformed again at the altar into the symbols of the very life of God – Jesus’ body and blood. It can be a powerful ritual, but how easily the long prayers of consecration become empty and dry – how seldom they seem to work on us or in us! 

 And I don’t think our rituals will work for us unless two things happen, week in and week out. Those who plan worship need to keep reaching for the power and mystery and drama that make for good liturgy.  But then, those of us who come need to open ourselves, pay attention, spiritual attention. We need to bring who we are and the stuff of our lives to this possibility of change that worship can offer.  We should come here hungry, hoping, looking to be changed.  We need to sing and pray and strain the ears of our hearts as if our lives depended on this – and maybe they do. 

Because after we leave here, we confront this world in its beauty and promise, but in all its need and brokenness as well.  Where are the places, even if they’re tiny, where we can be healers or fixers?  Whether it be Honduras, or the poorest people in our own city, our schools, our prisons, our Congress – how can we transform and shape a better future?  How does the work we do all week shape this future?  Are we about the business of transformation, or are we just holding our own, leaving change to others and feeling helpless. 

People!  We are not helpless!  We are the only agents of transformation there are!  It is in and through us and the whole creation that God works – not apart from us, not as a separate entity, answering our prayers, or not, but God working through us.  And this theology, often called panentheism, is not just the preserve of contemporary Christian intellectuals.  Annie Dillard quotes a 1992 sermon by an Evangelical Holiness minister in Georgia who said, “God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere.  He’s a spirit…He’s a spirit.  He ain’t got no body. The only body he’s got is us.  Amen.  Thank God.”

 It’s cozy standing up around the altar, but it should be shaking us as well, bringing us fully alive to all that we can be.  I’ve known times of being shaken at that altar, and I hope you have too, and times of tears and joy and intellectual challenge and uproarious laughter – all here, all in worship in this room and the other worship places that have been precious to me. I’m not saying there aren’t people who are out there redeeming the world without benefit of worship – I’m just saying that I long for and need worship to help me.

We need our churches to change us, and we need to change our churches. We need churches to help us be more effective in serving the world. We need churches to help us be God’s presence in the world. If Christianity is to flourish and survive, we need our churches to be communities of transformation.  When they are, along with all other such communities, they are indeed the hope of the world.  Amen.