Sermon for Sunday,  February 12, 2006

I CAN TAKE JESUS BUT NOT ORGANIZED RELIGION!

6^th in a series on Questions from the Street

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 Scripture:  Amos 5:10-15; 21-24

¹⁰ You people hate anyone who challenges injustice and speaks the whole truth in court. ¹¹You have oppressed the poor and robbed them of their grain. And so you will not live in the fine stone houses you build or drink wine from the beautiful vineyards you plant. ¹²I know how terrible your sins are and how many crimes you have committed. You persecute good people, take bribes, and prevent the poor from getting justice in the courts. ¹³And so, keeping quiet in such evil times is the smart thing to do! ¹⁴ Make it your aim to do what is right, not what is evil, so that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty really will be with you, as you claim he is. ¹⁵ Hate what is evil, love what is right, and see that justice prevails in the courts. Perhaps the Lord will be merciful to the people of this nation who are still left alive.

²¹ The Lord says, "I hate your religious festivals; I cannot stand them!²² When you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; I will not accept the animals you have fattened to bring me as offerings. ²³ Stop your noisy songs; I do not want to listen to your harps. ²⁴ Instead, let justice flow like a stream, and righteousness like a river that never goes dry.

The White House Prayer Breakfast was a few days ago now and it had an unusual speaker, one who was prophetic in his call for justice and compassion for those who are poor and ill.

Bono, the lead singer for U2, spoke, and some of his remarks are worth repeating. He acknowledged that he was an unexpected prayer breakfast speaker and then he told about his religious upbringing. He said that his father was Protestant and his mother Catholic in Ireland where the line between the two religions was often a battle line.

The way this speaks to today’s sermon topic about the dangers of organized religion is what he said about religion: Bono said that what he picked up from both his mother and father is the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. It got in the way for Bono. He said, “Seeing what religious people, in the name of God did to his native land—and in America, seeing what he called God’s second hand car salesmen on TV, offering indulgences for cash-and seeing all over the world the self righteousness roll down like a mighty stream almost turned him off to religion and to God.”

What helped him, he went on to say, was a couple of religious leaders who revived the idea in the Bible of Jubilee—the cancellation of debts for the poorest people, leaders who began to recover something many churches have not yet recovered: the enormous compassion in the Bible for the poor and the weak and the vulnerable.

I will say more about that at the end of the sermon. I just wanted you to know that if you have ever been disappointed by the institutional church, that many other people have felt that as well—including the leader of the band who won the Grammy Wednesday night for best album of the year.

It is not hard to find other reasons to be wary and skeptical of organized religion. In last week’s papers there is an article about Fred Phelps’ church in Kansas who have been so radically opposed to civil rights for gay and lesbian citizens that now they have started demonstrating and picketing at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq—and their signs say that these Americans deserve to die because our country is too tolerant of gay people—we are not judgmental and condemning enough, he believes, and so we are punished.

It is a difficult connection for me to see but if you are obsessed about something—as many literalists are about homosexuality—then you see everything through those lenses.

What must people think if they have had little connection with healthy religion and they read this kind of article? I have some confidence in people with healthy church background being able to see that Fred Phelps is off the charts, but I cringe for folks who don’t know much and read those articles and think: this is what church folk are like.

It is easy to find many reasons to be skeptical and even cynical about religion. I have read that more wars have been fought over religion than about anything else. I have been reading a bit of church history in preparation for our time in Israel next month and it is discouraging to see the abuses that have occurred over the centuries among leaders who are supposed to be Christian. People have been executed because they held to the “wrong” doctrine. The crusades, from 1095 to 1187 were one of the worst examples of violence being performed in the name of religion. Not only were many thousands of Muslims slaughtered in the name of Christ—thousands of Jews were as well. When the crusaders set out from Europe to the Holy Land, they killed many people who seemed different from them.

We can look at our own personal experience to add other examples of disappointment in religious institutions or organized religion, and we church folk and church leaders can probably share more stories of disappointment than most others.

Yeah, those Christians! Here is the impression that many folks have: Those are the people who want to block any form of stem cell research or who want to criminalize all abortions or keep gay persons as second class citizens. They talk like they are very religious but their words and deeds just don’t match.

The same thing was true in the people of the Bible. The prophet Amos is speaking to God’s chosen people 2700 years ago and making the same painful point. He sees hypocrisy in people who should be faithful to God. He sees folks who are in the temple on the Sabbath bringing their offerings and then cheating people or tramping on people during the week. And in this famous passage that was so important in the civil rights movement in the past fifty years, the prophet speaking for God, says God is tired of our songs and our music and our empty worship celebrations. God is not looking for any more hymns or praise songs. God is looking for acts of justice and righteousness so plentiful that they will be like a roaring river.

Jesus had the same troubles with the self-righteousness of his time. The book of James in the New Testament called people out because they said they were religious but they did not care for the poor and they reveled in gossip and they talked more faith then they walked.

If I am ever with anyone who says they have been turned off to organized religion because of all its faults, I just say that I know exactly what they mean and that I can probably share more horror stories than they can!

That is not an excuse. It is just an acknowledgment that the church is still made up of imperfect and fallible human beings who in John Wesley’s words, are still moving toward perfection but have not yet got there. AND...that same comment about imperfection is true of the human beings who are outside the organized church as well. It is true that for those of us here, our words and our deeds are still not a perfect match—and it is also true for others. I know very few people who have a total match between our ideals and how we live them out. Most of us still have some rough edges and some inconsistencies.

That is what the old Andy Capp cartoon said a while back. Andy Capp and Mrs. Capp are walking by the church on Sunday and Andy says he would never go there because it is just full of hypocrites. Mrs. Capp takes him by the ear and is pulling him into the church telling him, “There is always room for one more hypocrite.”

I like the statement on the front of your bulletin that says when the community of faith is at its best we are not a museum for saints but a hospital for any who have been wounded by life and a classroom for people who want to learn about God. And someone else says, the best argument for Christian faith is a faithful Christian—or a community of Christians who are not near perfect yet but are working to do what our benediction says each Sunday—to let Christ’s light shine through us and beyond us in our attitudes and deeds each week.

Let me tell you a couple of stories about some folks who are doing just that and let us see if that doesn’t give us a little inspiration to counter the bad feelings we get when we see the disappointing behavior of some church folks.

This past week 85 evangelical Christian leaders sponsored a full-page ad in the New York Times taking a stand that asks our country and other countries to be more responsible stewards of the environment and to take new measures to counter global warming before it is too late. This was a very biblical act because we are enjoined in Genesis to take care of the earth and to replenish the earth. It was a courageous act because many of these leaders have been identified with the right wing of one major political party and are now taking a different direction. This is an impressive list. It includes Pastor Rick Warren and I hope and pray that others will join this group and that those in power will take heed.

Here is one more example of people reading scriptures and then putting their faith in action: most of you are familiar with the Disciple Bible study curriculum which has changed our Methodist faith in the past 25 years and has made us more literate about the Bible and deepened our faith and created many new friendships. In our own congregation we have had over 1500 people involved in Disciple in the past 10 years (1.2 million worldwide) and it is the backbone of our spiritual formation and adult education program and I hope that each person at St Andrew Church will be in a group in the next couple of years.

There is a new thrust in the Disciple Bible study series that is now taking this group study to people in prison and forming groups that are led by United Methodist lay persons doing what Jesus tells us to do—visiting those in prison. Remember Matthew 25 where Jesus says, if you have visited people in prison, you have visited me. Remember what John Wesley did in 18^th century England when people were imprisoned for being in debt—he and other Methodists went to the prisons to pray and study with people.

We are recovering that ministry of outreach. In the past six years in North Carolina many Methodist churches have begun to send Disciple leaders to prisons and juvenile justice centers to lead the 34-week Disciple Bible study in those prison settings. In one church, pastor Melinda Penry announced one Sunday she had signed up for the special training that would equip her to be a leader for prison groups and invited others from her church to attend a meeting in a few days if they were interested as well and 17 people showed up to become part of that prison ministry.

Now every Sunday night Rev. Penry and several other church members from her congregation in Reidsville, North Carolina go to the prison unit in nearby McLeansville to lead a Disciple Bible study for 12 persons. They always bring with them homemade desserts from women in the church. Rev. Penry says, “You have never truly experienced Disciple Bible study until you have taken it with people who are living brokenness, disease, homelessness, addiction, loneliness, fear and rejection. And yet, she says, some of them have read their Bibles more than ten times and they are teaching us. We are often the ones who leave the group changed and overblessed and never to be the same again.”

We could share story after story like that from our own congregation where people are responding to opportunities for service, people are doing the words from Genesis 12 that we see when we leave each Sunday—God has blessed us so that we can be a blessing, so we bring our extra coats and move toward our goal of 1000 coats this week in our coat drive. Or we involve our caring volunteers last month in our newest group of 28 children who are grieving the loss of a parent and feeling some very painful loss, and your church through the Rainbows program is here for those children each week right now—offering hope and healing for wounded persons.

The inspiration for me is that the same thing is happening in our midst that was happening in the original group of Jesus followers and friends: God was working with an imperfect, unfinished band of twelve common people, people who quarreled among themselves and let their egos get in the way and argued about which of them was most important, and with that group of unfinished, rough edged people, God was able to change people’s hearts and turn the world upside down.

Here is the invitation for you. God is inviting you to join this movement and invest yourself in this life-changing, world-changing process as well. Here is the way Bono states it at the end of his Prayer Breakfast speech last week He said that he has learned to stop asking God to bless the things that he is concerned about—his family, a new song, a new idea—and has learned now to get involved in what God is already doing in our world—because what God is doing has already been blessed by God.

That is God’s invitation to us as well this morning—even if it involves this unfinished, imperfect, rough edged group of people we call the institutional church!

Study Guide

  Sermon Library