October 26, 2008 - "The House That Love Is Building"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 23
October 26, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism

THE HOUSE THAT LOVE IS BUILDING

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

In a recently published parable of the church, [1] the chairperson of a church council received a letter which read:

Dear Tim,

I have been observing you and your season of leadership at [the church] for many years and thought it important to write to you at this time. I’ve watched your hard work in guiding [the church] out of a period of turmoil and challenge. You have endured a great deal and persevered with energy in creating a level of excitement and activity within the church. For all this I commend you and the other leaders who have worked with you.

I’m writing you to bring something important to your attention. You have lost your first love. You and [the church] have drifted away from the love of God and one another as your first priority . . . If this serious situation is not turned around, it will destroy the church’s credibility.

Fear not, Tim. All is not lost. I am writing to encourage you to lead a change that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, can be accomplished. If you accept the challenge to restore love into the life of the church by reviving . . . passion and humility . . . you and [the church] will receive blessings beyond your imagination. The way back must start with you.

This letter is sent in love as always, with faith that what is required can be done.

(Signed) Your Truest Friend

Immediately, Tim thought it sounded just like the letter Jesus had written to the church at Ephesus in the Book of Revelation telling them that they too had lost their first love. But he also didn’t think too highly of anonymous letters, and so he tossed it in the wastebasket.

The letter was followed by a phone call by a fairly new member of the congregation, informing Tim that she had decided to look for another church. When he asked why she said it was several things really. She was known in the community for possessing incredible gifts that seem to be ignored at the church. She felt as if she had fallen through the cracks and did not sense the warm inclusion she did with the initial welcome to the congregation. She said, “I really want my church to feel like a place where I’m welcome and where people are genuinely glad to see me.” She said, “The bottom line is that this church isn’t exactly the most loving place in town. It doesn’t make me feel closer to God. Sometimes I go away feeling farther away from God than I did before I arrived.”

Tim apologized on behalf of the church and promised he would look very carefully into what she had said and would do everything he could to create a church where she would feel more welcome. He invited her to give them another chance. She said she would think about it and thanked him for how kind he had been to her.

As they hung up, Tim went to the wastebasket and retrieved the letter. He sat back in his chair. Wow! In one day, to read that his church had drifted away from the love of God and one another, and to hear that his church was not exactly the most loving place in town stabbed him right in the heart. Because he knew in his gut it was true. That amidst all the good things about his church they had lost the love that unites and defines them.

That letter could be sent and that phone call could be made to churches all over the world.

At the heart of the letter and phone call is the church’s failure to focus on the heart of the matter, what Jesus called the greatest commandment: to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

As I read that story I wondered how true it is of us. Have we lost our first love? Have we drifted away from the love of God and neighbor as the heart of our life together? Amidst all the changes this congregation has endured, what is it that holds us together?

I truly cannot think of another congregation that has been faced with the number of changes and the significant scope of such changes as has this congregation. It is truly astounding. The whole identity of the church rooted in its relationship to the seminary, then watching the seminary change so drastically, and over 40 families with connection to the seminary moving on from this congregation to other places, not to mention the hundreds of students each year who found a church home here. Then a period of significant transition where we have been seeking to live into a new way of doing ministry. And then in February 2007, the gift of over 150 Karen Christians from the other side of the world come and seek to make their home with us. All of these things and more, the impact of which is hard to actually put into words - it’s enough to spin your head around a few times.

And yet, we’re still here. What is it that is holding us together? I’m not sure exactly, but I think there is something to be learned from that modern parable of the church with which I began. For within that parable lies the truth about every church including our own. Whether in a time of struggle or great success, the integrity of a congregation, what holds it together, is compromised if the uniting cord is not woven together by the love of God and the love of neighbor. The great commandment of Jesus must always and forever be the center of our life together.

And you know, there’s freedom and joy in that truth. Because it means you don’t have to be the biggest and the best at everything to be a successful congregation. The most important thing is to do everything possible to be the most loving place in town.

As all baseball fans know, this year brought to a close baseball’s most hallowed sanctuary, Yankee Stadium. As a beloved Red Sox fan, I cannot but acknowledge that Yankee Stadium (even more than Fenway Park and Wrigley Field) has been home to more baseball greats than any other place in the history of the game: Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson, and the list could go on. But one player stands out above them all. Thanks to the unforgivable stupidity of Red Sox ownership in 1918, for $100,000 the Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, and did not win another World Series for 86 years. In those 86 years, the Yankees won 26 World Series, and Yankee Stadium became known as “The House That Ruth Built.”

In fact, until Boston won the World Series in 2004, it was believed they lived under “The Curse” for having traded the Babe to the Yankees. But “The House That Ruth Built” is closed now, and the Yankees are moving into the 1.3 billion dollar “House That Steinbrenner (the longtime Yankee owner) Built.”

The church is always “The House That Love is Building.” If anybody or anything else tries to build a church, it will never be what it was meant to be.

In First Corinthians chapter 13 we are told that without love all noble efforts are basically pointless and useless. However, with love, even the smallest of things can be great and profoundly useful. The point is that love must guide the lives and relationships of the church community. It must be love that unifies the church, love on the inside as members love one another, love on the outside as we make the love of Jesus known to the world, all of which is bound together by our love for God and God’s love for us.

How is love building this house?

I thought about you yesterday as my family and I paid a visit to a llama farm owned by the doctor who diagnosed my son Ryan’s heart condition when he was less than an hour old, and quite literally saved his life, riding in the ambulance with him from Baptist East to Kosair Hospital. To see her again, along with two other doctors who kept him alive through his first weeks of life, was yet another reminder to me of how you kept us (my family and I) alive during those days - feeding us, praying for us, loving us. And the way you continue to do so, rejoicing with us in his wonderful health and hyperactivity and high decibel vocal cords. Love was and is building a house for our life together.

And stories like that of how you have loved and cared for one another in times of crisis could be told countless times over.

There are the stories lived weekly of Bob Hieb and Tom Scott Jr. here at the church almost every Saturday repairing and renovating and building this house with great love.

And then every Sunday morning and afternoon, Allen Bartlett and Andy Bates and Glen Bellou and David Graves and Lewis Miller and Brent Williams picking up and taking home those who want to come to church with us but are in need of transportation. They are laying bricks of love.

And every week, Judy Johnson is sending a card or baking a cake to someone who is celebrating or someone is need of a helping hand. Bricks of love.

And Karen Scott organizing our exploding nursery every week, making sure children, from the first weeks of life, know that there is place for them in this House of Love.

And Nar K’Paw, spending almost every waking hour translating English and Karen for somebody all over this city, seeking to make life better for his people, and showing us all what it means to love. Brick by brick.

And Moneai Schnur who writes 5-10 notes every Wednesday night to those who are sick and grieving. Laying bricks of love.

And Steve Clark and Annette Ellard who inspire me every week with their tireless brick laying on behalf of refugees, pushing landlords to do the right thing, working with school boards, accompanying people to the hospital and sitting them through the middle of the night.

And like the hundreds of people who helped Ruth build Yankee Stadium, there are many others around here who go unnoticed, but who, brick by brick, are building this house of love.

In the giving of yourself and your resources, you provide space and opportunity for loving God through worship and spiritual formation. You provide space and opportunity to love our neighbors through a growing ESL ministry on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And for tutoring young people in the youth room on Wednesday afternoons (work that local school teachers and administrators have noticed).

In your giving you help build Habitat houses throughout this city.

In your giving you support mission work all over the world and in our own community, feeding the hungry, providing heat for the poor and rent for the needy.

In giving you support a ministerial staff seeking to guide and serve this congregation to be the church God is calling us to be.

I am so pleased (and I know many of you are also, because I have heard you say so) that Jason Crosby and Andrea Woolley have joined our ministerial staff. They are doing wonderful work. I appreciate your willingness to call them, and I pray we will all give generously to support them and the work they are doing as part of our mission together.

When you give of yourself in love and service, this House of God grows larger in ways that cannot be measured.

And when you give your money to the ministry of this congregation you are doing much more than meeting a line item on a budget. You are building a house of love that is changing lives in ways we may never know.

As I ask you to give and pledge generously and sacrificially to the ministry of this congregation, I ask you to do so out of love for God and neighbor and world. Let this church continue to be “The House That Love is Building.” Even more so than it has in the past.

In a return to the modern parable with which I began the sermon, Tim decided that once the pastor returned from his sabbatical he would go public with the letter. He did and together they committed themselves a congregation to become the most loving place in town.

I wonder if we would make that same commitment. Continuing to do the wonderful things that are being done. But being extra careful that every word we say, ever look we give, every thing we do will be motivated by the desire to love God and one another.

Abbot Bernard, a Benedictine monk himself, is noted for using a metaphor that describes a community built by love. He calls us to see our lives more like a reservoir than a canal. Because the canal simultaneously pours out what it receives while the reservoir retains the water until it is filled and then overflows without loss to itself. Bernard was telling us to reservoirs, all of us receiving the love of God, holding on to it, letting it flow into every area of one’s life, and all the while letting it overflow into our family and community and church and all we meet! [2]

The church as reservoir. With a water reservoir just down the road from us, it might be helpful every time we drive by to think of our lives and our church and who we are called to be: a place where God’s love overflows into the community, and where we truly live as The House That Love is Building.

But it all begins in the reservoir behind me. The waters of baptism. In those waters we hear the words we cannot live without - that we are God’s beloved. And there we are bathed in the waters of God’s love. From there as we rise to walk in newness of life, dripping wet, we carry the water of God’s love with us, overflowing from our lives into the lives of others.

In this house of God, much love as been shared and expressed as our church family has been transformed in recent months with the addition of our Karen brothers and sisters. One Sunday a few months ago, David Cook was teaching in the Karen Sunday School Class and the idea came to him to create a prayer tapestry which you are about to see. (If you want to ahead and bring that up.) The names included on this tapestry are the names of Karen family members who are still in the refugee camps or in Burma or in other parts of the world. They are our neighbors too. And they are a part of the house God’s love is building. And as we enter into prayer this day we include these names that are before us.

The reservoir continues to overflow. Thanks be to God.
_______________________

1. Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges, The Most Loving Place in Town: A Modern Day Parable For the Church, Thomas Nelson, 2008
2. Linus Mundy, A Retreat with Benedict and Bernard: Seeking God Alone - Together, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1998, 50