Every once in a while I spend some time in our church’s sanctuary alone. Sometimes it’s late afternoon after the office is closed. Sometimes it’s at night after meetings are over. But my favorite times are in the early morning. I like to just sit there and feel the light. The light has a golden glow as it comes through the stained glass windows and reflects off the aged cherry wood of the pews and the wainscoting. It is a beautiful room. Most of you know that it was first built when George Washington was still the president. The people of this community lavished love and attention on the building and have continued to do that down through the years.
It is amazing to think about how it was built. Dozens of people gave hundreds of hours of incredibly hard work to the project. There were no professional builders then, just local farmers, after a week of hard physical labor around their own farmsteads, coming here and hewing and shaping the gigantic beams by hand. Everyone was involved; even the local physician was here hoisting beams in his spare time (we know this, of course, because when part of the structure of the church tower collapsed during construction, the local doctor was one of the two people killed).
They went through all of this work and attendant expense to meet what they thought was an important need. They wanted to create a space that would have the effect of lifting their thoughts from their everyday concerns to something more sublime, more meaningful, more important, more eternal. They wanted to be inspired. And so they didn’t just build a utilitarian building—they aimed for beauty. They went for a ceiling high enough to contain their dreams and their grandest thoughts. They wanted this golden light that lifts the heart. They wanted a place that would touch something in them that was hungry for touch. More important to them than getting their own houses fixed up, more important than just spending time with their families, more important than any of the pressing tasks of their own private concerns, was this communal act of faith: building a place that would sustain the meaning of their lives.
This is a beautiful thing and a human thing. When people on the edge of what seemed like a hostile wilderness were trying to carve out a life for themselves, one of the first things they did was build a church and call a minister. They banded together in a community and expressed their spiritual hopes or their dearest beliefs in a building that was nearly monumental in this place at that time. And, of course, almost every New England town can tell a similar story. Peoples all over the world can point to the same things in every different religion, we have only to think of Chartres Cathedral rising up in the midst of medieval hovels, or the Blue Mosque being labored on by people too poor to buy enough food. There is something in this that is absolutely essential to what it means to be fully human. There is this spiritual longing in most people. There is a need to look toward some higher loyalty, some deeper truth, some grander meaning than what we find evident in the everyday round of our living. That, at heart, is the religious impulse. We look for something behind or above or within the mundane realities of our days that makes sense of our stories or gives significance to our strivings or explains our sufferings.
The trouble is the life of our little community of faith also, so often, just gets bogged down in the mundane. Our time together can become dominated by budgets and building maintenance and committee structures and schedules. Our household of faith becomes just another household, trying to balance income and expenses and minimize the time it requires from our busy lives. It is easy to forget the transcendent nature of what we are about here.
Our Christian faith has a mixed record. Churches have often been on the wrong side of history, have been institutions of repression, have fostered intolerance, and have occasioned warfare. Maybe even worse, our churches have often just been dull, lifeless, bastions for the status quo. That’s why it is so important to remember what this whole enterprise is about.
Our tradition is also filled with beauty. There are stories of people making great sacrifices in the name of love. There are great works of art and some of our most extraordinary pieces of music. There are generations of charitable work and whole communities made better by the outreach of people of faith. There are beautiful moral aspirations and profound yet subtle ideas. Our life together is lifted out of the mundane if we truly believe that our best hope for changing our world’s injustices and evils lies within the power of our religious ideals to change hearts and minds. People worshipping a God of love must be able to live out that love in acts of kindness and grace. People worshipping a God whose love extends to all of humanity must be able to fight for justice and equality. People whose God is beyond all human borders and limitations must be able to transcend the lure of wars of nationalism. The stakes are high, the needs are great, and the task is positively majestic.
When you next sit in our sanctuary, take a moment to think about how extraordinary it is that people should create such a grand thing for us to pray in. Think about how deep and profound is the need and the mission that inspired the beauty, the grandeur and the sacrifices that made it possible. Allow yourself to be reawakened to the power and the promise of what we are about, the heritage that we have been given and the awe-filled purpose to which we have been called.
