Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Ephesians 3:16 - 4:6

January 20, 2008

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, who is above all and through all and in all.

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There was once a little boy playing by himself with a set of blocks. His father came by and asked him, "Hey son, what are you building?" "Shhhh…," said the boy, "I'm building a church and we must be very quiet." His father whispered back, "That's great, you're building a church, but why do we have to be quiet." The boy replied, "Because, the people are asleep."

Good story. That kid wasn't so far off. There's something of a running gag about how people sleep in church sometimes. A few years back, during our vacation on Martha's Vineyard Island, we went to worship at a little church in West Tisbury. For awhile, there was an older woman who regularly came to the service. She was confined to a wheelchair, and the only place it would fit in the little sanctuary was right down front, just below the pulpit and off to the right. It never failed, just about the time the service reached the scripture and sermon, she'd start drifting off, and right in the middle of the sermon start snoring to beat the bands. I felt so sorry for Jim, the Pastor. That was one of those no win situations that come up in churches from time to time.

To be honest, I've put my share of people to sleep over the years. I try not to, but the truth is, sometimes I'm half asleep myself. It's not all that easy to be up for worship week after week. I have a great old cartoon of a minister, right in the middle of his own sermon, laid out across the pulpit sound asleep. It's pretty bad when what you have to say doesn't even keep yourself awake.

Sometimes though, people get the idea that's what's supposed to happen. Three years ago, one of the members of this our fair congregation, who shall remain nameless, greeted me at the back of the sanctuary after worship. I'd been talking about the importance of church. "You're so right," he said. "Church really is important. Sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping I think about being here in church and I just drop right off." When I laughed out loud, he said defensively, "No really, it works!" I know what he was trying to say; that church was, for him, a place that gave him a sense of peace and tranquility, which is wonderful. It just came out in a funny way.

Whenever we start talking about church and sleeping though, it isn't long before someone's going to take it beyond a couple of boring sermons and say that's just the nature of church. Like all the other mainline denominations, we've been called "God's frozen chosen" on many occasions. The implication is that we're not just occasionally dropping off during a sermon. We're performing our whole ministry in a way that reminds some people of sleepwalking.

Now, obviously, we don't want to do that. We don't want to just go through the motions here. If our worship, and our larger ministry, isn't lively, interesting and occasionally different than we expected, it won't be long before we all start losing interest. I'll give you that. At the same time, I'm not at all sure we want all our focus to be on whether or not we're entertaining people. Now, you might think that's obvious, but in some places that is the focus. People have started talking about the "entertainment values" of churches. I've heard people say that the worst thing we can do on Sunday morning is be boring. And I don't disagree. Why would you bother getting here on one of your few days off in a given week, only to sit through a service that puts you right back to sleep?

Entertainment is fun. It breaks up the monotony. It gets our juices flowing. But I like to think that what we're doing here is something a little deeper. Diana Bass, after laying out her 10 signposts for renewal, finishes her book with three chapters on transformation. If you had to come up with one word to describe the mission of the church, transformation, is about as good as any I can think of. We are here for the sake of transformation. We are here to be a place that helps people move towards God. Wherever we might happen to be along the path of our spiritual journey, the church is here to help us move further. It is here to help us change in healthy and positive ways that deepen our own lives and the lives of others through us. Every once in awhile someone will ask me what makes us different from any other social club. Well, that's pretty much it. We're not here just to be entertained. We're here to be open to those changes that move us closer to what God wants us to be.

But any time we begin talking about change here at church, it isn't long before we run into some considerable resistance. There are always people who like things the way they are and are afraid we're going to tear the whole house down. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I used to love to spend time at the beach. One of my favorite things to do there was build sandcastles. My brothers and I would spend hours digging in the sand, creating walls, turrets, moats and tunnels. But there was always a problem. We could never get too far from the water because the sand has to be wet to build a good castle. But that also meant we were always in danger of a big wave coming along and washing the whole thing away.

In all our conversations about change here at church, one thing I want everyone to understand is that we're not talking about sandcastles here. No one is trying to say that what we really need is to tear the whole thing apart and build it up again from scratch. We have a long and proud history here, with well loved traditions. We have a congregation full of "living treasures" that we cherish, and we are involved in very significant ministries both here and out in the world. The last thing anyone wants to do is burn the whole house down.

But that doesn't mean we don't need to change. We may not be interested in wholesale changes that wash away all the things we love about our church, but we do need to be in touch, in an ongoing way, with whatever we can do that will move us in the direction of more faithful ministry. What are the needs God is calling us to address? What are the shifts in our thinking that will help us see and respond to the world more faithfully? Who are the people we're called to reach out to? It might not always be so "entertaining" to ask questions like these, but it is our calling.

The whole notion of transformation is a bit of a hard sell here. Mostly, we think, things are going pretty well. We were losing some members a while back, but that seems to have stopped. We were having some challenges with our stewardship, but this year's campaign has gone pretty well. We've got some good programs in the works. We've got a good reputation in the community. We're even making some progress on becoming more friendly and hospitable. So, why mess with success?

Why indeed? When Diana Bass talks about the vital churches in her study, she says something very interesting. "In many cases," she writes, "change was made inevitable by numerical decline, financial crisis, or neighborhood transition. Spiritual anxiety gripped the community, pushing the congregation to realize that it needed to be different. Whether threatened by spiritual boredom or facing church closure, each congregation had asked two questions that sparked deep change: Who are we? What is God calling us to do? They discovered a renewed sense of identity and a clear purpose in serving the world. They experienced a change of heart that transformed their communal understanding of who God had made them to be."

Now, I see two parts to what Bass is saying here. In the first place, change in the churches she visited was sparked by a crisis of some kind. In the second, crisis moved each of these churches toward a renewed sense of calling. For us, in this whole process we've been going through together, the key underlying question has been, "how do we move toward a renewed sense of calling?" But, in our case, there is a problem. We're not in crisis, so where is our motivation? What pushes us to realize that we need to be different? Why change if nothing's wrong?

Well, part of it is that, though we're not in crisis right now, some of us have been looking down the road and see the possibility of a crisis looming on the not too distant horizon. Many of our most faithful, and most generous, members are reaching the age where they simply won't be able to carry the ball anymore. We do have some younger families coming lately, for which we are very grateful, but whether we can draw enough of these younger families in to continue our ministry here is a very real question we need to face. We're always trying to read the tea leaves of what's coming so that we can respond as we need to, and that's part of what we've been trying to do in these last few months.

But for me, there's a more important issue. Does it make sense for us to allow the vitality of our ministry to wait for some crisis to come along? Whether or not we are in crisis, shouldn't we always be asking the question, "What is God calling us to do?" The truth is, whenever we start taking for granted that we know the answer to this question, that's when the vitality of our ministry starts slipping away from us.

Transformation needs to be going on all the time. If we are going to be a faithful congregation, part of our fundamental self understanding needs to be that we are striving to be a place of vital transformation. We need to be a place where people become more committed to the Christian life, and move intentionally in the direction of greater love, greater health and wholeness. We need to be a place where people can come because they are on a spiritual journey, moving in the direction of a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God. That's our purpose, to be that place.

As Paul said, "We are one body, and we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God." We are not here simply for our entertainment. We "are being rooted and grounded in love." We are being rooted and grounded in the transformations that lead to humility, gentleness, patience, peace and joy. That is our calling. And if I may echo Paul's passionate request, "I … beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called."

Amen.