Why Do We Need Church?

Colossians 3:5-11

^NRS Colossians 3:5 ¶ Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). ⁶ On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. ⁷ These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. ⁸ But now you must get rid of all such things– anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. ⁹ Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰ and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹ In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

My mentor was in church several weeks ago and he said, “Sam, your sermon was good, but I’ll have to come back some time to find out what you have to say about the apocalypse.” My title didn’t go with my sermon, and that happens all the time. I mention it because today I need to re-title it so you know where we’re going from the start. The title of this sermon is “Why do we need church?” I mean, what’s the point really?

It’s one of those sermons where I’m trying to muse on a question that a friend might ask you someday. “Why do we need church?”

You remember my friend Eric who always has something pithy to say. He tells me about the difference between a conservative and a liberal. You know the problem with conservatives is that they don’t want change. . . . Liberals, on the other hand, want change, . . . but not now. Do any of us?

It’s very unsettling, this whole business of change, it’s very unsettling. We’d like to hold it off these days, it’s getting a little out of hand; the pace of change is extraordinary. My son does his homework with friends online, and I don’t get it. Barbara and I are thinking of buying a new car this year. My car has 123,000 miles right now – and we’re talking about the possibility of a hybrid, but why buy a hybrid now when hybrid technology will be so much better two years from now? We were thinking about solar panels last year and decided it was too expensive. I read in Scientific American that they’re half the price now – what are they going to be next year? The pace of change is extraordinary. We’d like to slow it down or control it, manage it somehow or find ways to forget it.

The economics of our world change drastically; when I was a kid we talked about multi-national companies, but nobody really had any idea what they were. Now everything is integral – what goes on in this country is very much a part of what goes on in other countries around the world. Change has implications for our health, how fast disease spreads. The truth is it’s been happening for 14 billion years, this business of change. That was the meta-narrative of our all-church retreat in October – the one Kay and Barbara taught. We are part of a narrative that’s lasted for 14 billion years. And the way that creative narrative operates, the way it evolves, the way it shifts, is that somehow – and we don’t know how – novelty emerges.

We have stars that form into star systems that end up with planetary systems attached. There’s nothing about the explosion that would suggest that that’s what would emerge. Novelty emerges, and the other thing that happens is that the organization of things becomes more and more complex. Very simple animals become very complicated animals.

Finally the human story – at some point there was an animal that developed some sense of self-consciousness. He was aware of the possibility of the end of its life, and so that raised questions for that animal which was then operating in these little family herds. So they began to develop symbols or a sense of magic that would help them feel comfortable, help them understand what was going on in this ever-changing and evolving world. “It’s ruled by spirits, a world overwhelmed with spirits.” Who’d of thought they’ would come up with that? If you looked into the chaos of all the possibilities, who would have thought that such a thing would emerge? Novelty.

They were hunter/gatherers. And for four million years, or thereabouts, they wandered this planet as hunter/gatherers with their magic approach. Until finally about forty thousand years ago, for what reason I don’t know (maybe the shrinkage of territory), they decided not to be hunter/gatherers, but rather to stay in one place and begin to farm. And that change was enormous.

They were in one place, they had to communicate to each other more, so language began to develop, the ability to write began to develop, so one generation could teach more to the next, and the little groups had to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. They were self-conscious about the purpose of their own group instead of just their own little life. So they began to tell stories, they changed the outlook on their magic set of symbols, and religion took on an entirely new purpose.

So they told these stories that gave them identity: the 12 tribes of Israel, that had one progenitor, Abraham, and this Abraham was to begin a nation that was to be a blessing to all peoples of the earth. That’s the identity, and the myth that they told that gave them that identity. But things grow towards increasing complexity, and the nation of Israel began bumping elbows with other nations and empires until finally that myth, that story, wasn’t serving all the people that were there. And along came a man named Jesus, and his followers discerned a different kind of message, a different myth, that would give identity to people in a larger, broader empire, and so the Christian religion came to be.

Ok, now if you think I’ve just gone off the Presbyterian Reservation on this, let me read you something from our Book of Confessions. Now I tease around this – remember this is the book we can change with a 2/3 vote of presbyteries – take something out of the Bible . . . But that does mean that 2/3 of the Presbyteries agree on this that I’m about to read: “God’s revelation in Israel expressed within Semitic culture gave rise to the religion of the Hebrew people. God’s revelation in Jesus Christ called forth the response of Jews and Greeks, and came to expression within Judaism and Hellenism, as the Christian religion.” It’s the way things work. It’s the way religion was developed. It had the purpose of giving people an identity and a sense of their purpose in this ever changing, evolving, and growing world.

Then 400 years ago, maybe more than that – have you go the scope on this? We’ve been around for four million year, for forty thousand years we’ve been sitting in once place, talking to one another, and now just a few hundred years ago we became rationalists. We developed our rational minds, and it became very important that we were able to prove everything – that we have verifiable truth that we could count on and not just some story, some belief that we could hang our hats on. That verifiable truth had to give us our purpose.

Why would you think that out of the chaos and the sea of possibilities that human beings would come to that point? And the changes that took place! The chaos that ensued… The remarkable things that have occurred, the pace of change just kept speeding up and speeding up. But, when we got to that rational place, we lost our need for religion, at least some of it. Rationalists do not need the Bible to explain to them how the world was created; they just don’t. They don’t need to rely on spirits to make the moon rise. Rationalists understand that it has more to do with gravity. We just don’t need church like we used to, and we certainly don’t need it to create an identity because that Christian story in a global world doesn’t give the whole world an identity.

Instead we end up in these competing kind of wars where you’re hanging on to one identity or another. Rationalists have a hard time with that. They’re looking for a verifiable truth to give us identity. And the trouble is that then the postmodernists came along and burst that bubble by saying, “Well you can look all you want, but you’re never going to find it. There’s no possibility of finding truth because truth really only comes to you from a particular perspective.” I mean even in the sciences, it depends how and when you’re looking at an experiment, that determines the outcome of an experiment. Verifiable truth? Religion loses its reason for being; that’s why I say the church is dying. We need to face that question: what are we doing here? Why do we need church?

I go away on study leave. I work on my sermons. I go to a retreat center, and I’ve been doing this for about eight years. The thing about this retreat center is it’s vegetarian. So by Wednesday I’ve had enough and I go into town to a bar where I get a steak and scotch. For eight years, Suzie, who is the owner of the place, has been serving me the steak and the scotch. From time to time she sees me reading the Bible and making notes while I’m there. So we have conversation, but just this last week, Suzie said to me, “I don’t need church. I really don’t think we need church. I’m much closer to God,” she said, “when I’m in nature.”

I’ve heard this before. That’s actually an indictment of our churches, if our churches can’t produce worship that draws people into the center of God’s presence, no wonder we’re having a hard time. But she said “we don’t need it.” So, I thought to myself, “Well my whole vocation is being questioned here by Suzie, who serves me scotch and steak. What am I going to say?” I don’t even remember what I said, but it wasn’t very good. Because when it comes down to it, you have to wonder what church is doing.

If we don’t need it for scientific explanations for how the world was created, we don’t need it to give us identity. Some people say we need it to give us community. Have you heard of Facebook? We can find community in other places. Some people think maybe it’s here to teach morality, but they do a pretty good job of teaching morals in our schools. They teach kids how to deal with conflict resolution, understand differences of opinions. They’re not doing a bad job of teaching morals in our schools, so what to do we need church for? What are we doing here?

Ok, maybe it’s our personal spiritual development; we feel better when we come to church because spiritually we can open up. I don’t know if we really need church for that. You know, we join a gym and we go in and get a personal trainer, and that trainer says “six more reps and you’re going to be doing fine.” Why not just add a room and it can be quiet, and you can sit there and instead of a personal trainer you have a director who says, “Ok, breath, very quiet. Don’t think. No no, shh… Just breathe.” You’d get your spiritual development, so what are we doing here? Why do we need church?

But we do need it. We need it the moment we confront the reality that it’s not about us, that this fourteen billion year story isn’t about us. This effort of creation, this evolving story is not, primarily, about us. And so we face this chasm, this chaos of possibilities. We see that our lives are at risk and we don’t understand how to see our way through what we’re a part of. That’s when we need to be a church. To be connected to whatever that thing is that drives this novelty forward, that allows for this self-organization and makes things beautiful. That’s when we need to be connected, at the moment when we face the chaos of change.

Physicist David Bohn, talks about strange attractors. Strange attractors. One way that can be looked at is if you program an equation into a computer that’s intended to generate random, chaotic numbers which you translate to points on the screen. If you do that, what ends up emerging is these attractors that begin to make the thing beautiful. Instead of chaos and ridiculousness, what emerges eventually is patterns that are beautiful and lovely.

No, this is the things that pushes forward – that novelty that’s able to emerge is the midst of creation’s chaos. It’s that, that we connect to when we come to church, the thing that brings the something out of nothing, the thing that brings the surprise into being. It makes us part of something whole.

I never thought I’d quote Nietzsche in a sermon, but that just proves that everybody is partly right. He said that chaos trusted becomes a dancing star. Chaos trusted becomes a dancing star. When we’re confronted with the end, when we’re confronted with the change, when we’re confronted with the possibility that things are not going to be what we think they are going to be, well that chaos, if we trust it, will move us into a place where we are a dancing star.

That’s what Paul was talking about when he said in this letter that all things cohere in the Christ. It’s that that Paul was looking for, that thing that drives creation, and when he looked upon the life of Jesus the Christ, he saw that strange attractor, that thing that carries creation forward, and called upon the people to identify with that, to trust that, so that we may become dancing stars.

So why do we need church? Next time you know what I’m going to say, a few months from now? “I don’t know, you may not need church, but WE do. Humanity does need church. And the reason we need church is because the pace of change is extraordinary. The potential chaos and destruction lays before our lives. We’re staring into the brink. What are the possibilities? What will emerge? If we can be connected to the Christ, to that which brings the next moment of novelty and beauty out of us, well then instead of being exploding stars, we will be dancing stars. That’s why we need church.”