That There May Be a Church

A sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7, 18-21, preached Sunday, September 1, 2024, at Burnt Hills UMC
View the livestream of the sermon here.

Good morning, everyone. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jo Schonewolf and Pastor Ian is my partner. Those are my plants you see in his office. I’ve actually been spending enough time in his office as I search for jobs and do my remote work that I’m starting to consider it my office. Maybe one day we’ll both get our MDiv diplomas framed and we’ll put them up on the wall as a kind of his and theirs pair. Anyway, I’m glad to be here with you today. I’d like to thank Pastors Amy and Ian for being out of town and too busy to write a sermon this week, thereby giving me this opportunity.

Jokes aside, will you pray with me?

God of all time and space, you have brought us together into this time and this space. Thank you for being with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know, I’ve never understood worship.

That’s a great way to start a sermon. Inspires a lot of confidence, I’m sure. I could be talking about Labor Day or community or starting a new school year, and instead I’m preaching on something I don’t know anything about.

But I’ve never understood exactly what it is we do here.

I mean, I showed for two worship services every Sunday for eighteen years (my mom was in charge of childcare at my home church) and I ran worship for three and a half years during seminary and my time in parish ministry and the whole time, I was eaten up by this question: what is worship? And why do we do it here?

There’s a quote, often attributed to Scottish-born American naturalist and early advocate for nature preservation, John Muir,* which goes, “I'd rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.” We all have a sense of the sacred, I think, whether we find it in the mountains or in a church building. And honestly, I think more of us find it in the mountains.

So that’s what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about what worship is, what it means for something to be sacred, and how we find the sacred in this space.

But not in that order.

See, there is a whole history built into this space, a structure that would be familiar to Christians reaching back to the Disciples. But over time, we’ve forgotten how to read it. We’ve forgotten how to connect with those who came before us, the great cloud of witnesses and all the saints who we call to us during communion. So that’s where I want to start.

In my years-long quest to understand what we do in worship, I’ve done some research into Christian sacred spaces, and I’d like to share what I know, in the hope that this will help you connect to the sacred in this space, as well as the sacred up in the mountains.

[I wish I could tell you what I said this moment, but I went on an off-the-cuff sanctuary tour that covered the narthex, the east-west orientation of early Christian churches, ambulatories and the role of stained glass in historic churches, the liturgical colors, the font, the chancel, the communion table, the paten and chalice, the altar, and the altar curtain. If I had time, I also had a quick digression prepared about those praying hands you see everywhere.]

All of this, every aspect of this space, is meant to point us to the sacred. The structure of the sanctuary and the sacred furniture together draw our eyes up and up and up to that which is beyond us, that which is more than us. Sacred itself means set apart. So often that is where we think God is. Up. Above. Away. Separate.

But then we follow the path up to the ceiling of the nave. Nave, of course, for those who know their Latin or have ever served in the navy, nave comes from the Latin for ship. There’s a story, an old story, that churches are built with these vaulted ceilings to depict the hull of a boat. When you enter into this place, you are gathered here in the same place the savoir took refuge on that storm night on the sea—a boat.

When we follow the path of this building up to the ceiling of the nave, up to this boat we’re all in together, we must deal with the knowledge that we are not alone. God is not away up there. God has declared that God is with us, each and every time we gather together here. God has declared that a church may meet here in this place,** and in this place, no one stands alone.

Because while sacred means set apart, holy shares an origin with the word “whole.”

You remember earlier, at the beginning of the sermon, when I said that I’ve never really understood worship? Well, that was a bit of a fib. A dramatic fib, a fib for sermon illustrating purposes. Because just this past week, I read something that made it all click for me. I realized the connection between what God does in our lives and what worship is. I understood that what God offers us in redemption is wholeness. And when we are whole, when we are holy, all that we do is praise.

Now, saying it like that, it sounds fake to me. I’m very, very suspicious when people tell me what worship is, like when preachers go, “It’s worth-ship. It’s calling something worthy and surely God is worthy!” or when they say that atonement means “at-one-ment.” This word play doesn’t do it for me. You’re not explaining anything to me, you’re just adding a lisp or changing your emphasis. And as someone who had to raise their hand in class every day of third grade to ask if they could go to speech class with Miss Smith, I don’t appreciate it.

So let me explain what I mean when I say that praise is all we do when we are whole.

I read a book this week by a twentieth century lawyer and theologian William Stringfellow called The Politics of Spirituality.*** Stringfellow has a fascinating life, and he wrote this book at the end of it. His purpose in writing it, which was part of a series by several theologians on spirituality, was to talk about what he calls “biblical spirituality,” by which he means living as someone redeemed by Christ. Stringfellow says that biblical spirituality starts with “the establishment or restoral by the Word of God of that person’s identity in the Word of God in a way in which the query Who am I? merges with the question Where is God?”

See, Stringfellow’s whole thing is that in the Fall, everything in creation got jumbled up somehow. Now, you might not go for the whole Adam and Eve original sin piece of Christian theology—I struggle with it myself—but I think that Stringfellow names something we all experience in this world. Something isn’t right. We doubt ourselves. We’re not always sure what the right call is. We don’t know what to do in the face of pain and death and injustice. In this good and glorious creation, from the mountain tops to the fertile valleys, from the stars to the sidewalks, there is something out of place. There is something that we feel we need refuge from. There is something that causes us to struggle.

And that struggle goes deep into our core. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do? we might have asked ourselves at some point in our lives. What do I do with this life? What am I meant to be?

For Stringfellow, the answer to all of these questions is simple: You are a creation of Love itself, made to love and be loved. You do not have to make yourself. You do not have to bend yourself this way and that in order to fit into a world that is not shaped for you. All you have to do is be what you are: a creation, beloved, made for relationship with all of creation and the Creator. Spirituality begins, the connection to holiness begins when you ask Who am I? and Where is God? and the answer to both questions is, “Here.”

You are here. God is here. All you have to do is be. Don’t let the love within you, the gift we have all been given, be bent out of shape by this world, conformed to this world that is trying so hard to make itself something it’s not. Don’t let the compassion, the joy, the hope, the persistence that lives within you be hidden away under a bushel. Do not bury your talents. Instead, claim your inheritance. Allow yourself to be beloved. Believe it. Let it restore you to who you were always meant to be. And then, worship.

Stringfellow writes, the “occasion for praising the Word of God, in every way, in all things, is already with us. There is actually nothing else that needs to be done.”

You are saved. You are redeemed. You are restored. You are already everything you need to be. You have already taken your place in the grand act of redemption that God began in Jesus, “and so,” Stringfellow writes, “whatever we do is transfigured into a sacrament of that praise.” Or, as the late, great Andre Braugher says, as his fantastic character, Captain Holt in Brooklyn 99 says, “Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place.” When you are yourself, your whole and redeemed self, everything you do is an act of worship, because you, whole as you are, redeemed as you are, do it.

That is dense, I know. I’ll make sure that y’all can read all this later, if that will help. But I’d like to close with a poem that I think takes that density and makes it beauty. It’s by Mary Oliver, and it’s called “Wild Geese.” [Listen to Oliver read the poem herself here.]

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

My friends, take your place in the family of things. Understand that when you enter this space, you become part of a family reaches back to the feet of Jesus. More than that, you are inescapably tied to all of creation, reaching back to its first days and forward to the end of all our days. Rest in those connections, my friends. Understand that salvation is already here. The redemption of all that ails you is waiting for your acceptance. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

Understand that when you come here, Sunday after Sunday, you live into salvation. You enter into the sacred. Understand that when you are out there, in the world, you live into salvation. Each kind act, each act of justice, every moment when you free yourself and others from the separation that holds us fast, you enter into the sacred. God is here with us, all around us, always, only a breath away. And you are welcomed into of God’s great act of salvation, the redemption of all things, simply by becoming yourself, human as you are, with no apology. That is your labor, friends. That is the birth of community and the beginning of learning. The glory of God, as St. Irenaeus teaches us, is humanity fully alive. Be fully alive, friends. Go and worship.

Amen.

*I confidently and apparently incorrectly attributed this quote to Muir when preaching, but as I was prepping this post for publication, I wasn’t able to find it in a quick search of his writings. (But I didn’t find it in compilations of misattributions either.) I don’t think it’s out of line with Muir’s thinking, and it’s a resonant quote, but as far as I know, he didn’t say it. Let me know if you have a source for it!
**This is a line from a groundbreaking/dedication service for a new church in the UMC’s Book of Worship that I thought I’d use a lot more in the sermon when I picked the title a week ago.
***You can read my notes from my read-through of the book here and I’ll link our podcast episode about it here when it comes out.