You might remember a church incident a number of years ago in New Sweden, Maine. A number of people were poisoned by arsenic that someone put into the coffee during coffee hour. What motivated the crime was never made completely clear, but investigators eventually came to the conclusion that it all might have had to do with the passions of church politics. I remember how shocked and bemused most commentators seemed at the time, that the little issues of church life could provoke such murderous rage. After having spent my life around churches, oddly enough, the whole case did not seem all that surprising to me. It seems it may have been some group angry at the church council or one member of the council angry at the others. It is, at least, not hard to identify with a certain amount of frustration with a church council from time to time. But it continues to amaze, how heated the passions become and how badly some people in churches sometimes behave. I have, occasionally, been on the receiving end of the anger of a group of church people behaving badly, and even though there has never been any arsenic involved, they were still pretty devastating times. But come to think of it, most of those times, I was probably behaving pretty badly myself.
Church is that place in most of our lives where we try our best to be good, polite, respectful, moral people. In church, we are asked to reflect on what kind of people we feel called to be, and so we become more conscious of trying to “be good,” at least on the surface. We don’t use bad language in church, we speak more politely, we think about the church’s life in more “moral” terms, we try to hold ourselves and the whole church community to a higher standard. But amazingly, the result is so often just the opposite. In our eagerness to display our best behavior, we tend to become more judgmental and more self-righteous. As we struggle to suppress our own little foibles we become less tolerant of the foibles of others. As we strain to control our little irritations with others, we find deeper and uglier angers leaking out around the edges. And so, often church communities get torn asunder by passions that seem all out of proportion to what is actually at stake. Jesus knew about this. He told his followers about how religious people in his day were likely to be trying to remove a speck from someone else’s eye while having a log in their own eye (another, similar, joke was about straining out a flea only to swallow a camel). Feuds and schisms are as much a part of local church life as pot-luck dinners and bake sales.
This is not just true of our local churches. One of the members of our Confirmation class a few years ago wrote eloquently in explaining her decision not to be confirmed, that she felt that religions had caused more wars, more cruelty and more inhumanity over the course of history than almost anything else. It’s hard to argue with that. Most of the time, those of us on the inside of religious faiths tend to close our eyes to the grandly destructive results that our religious fervors have had on others on the outside. It’s hard not to be embarrassed by the history of Christianity. Whether we are thinking of religious wars, inquisitions, anti-Semitism, treatment of native peoples, colonialism, bigotry or any of the other horrors directly or indirectly attributable to the forbearers of our faith, it is hard to look at the truths of history honestly and square them with a faith meant to promote peace and teach love. Given the terrorism currently growing out of the fundamentalist version of one of our sister faiths, Christianity is not alone in this. Yes, there are many stories of generosity, courage and redemption that we can think of as well, but the balance sheet is still not clearly on our side.
If we have the courage and the boldness to face this issue honestly, how do we continue to feel good about the importance and the value of what we are doing in our churches? Is our confirmation class skeptic right in rejecting the whole religious enterprise?
Obviously, given what I am doing with my life, I don’t think so (but I don’t take the problem lightly). I continue to believe in the value of what we stand for, even if we don’t stand for it all that effectively. We continue to congregate in churches (even if our moral track record is mixed) because most of us need periodic (even weekly) reminders of what’s important in life. We need to reflect on why we do what we do and whether the deeper meaning of our life is consistent with how we are spending our days. Left to our own devices, most of us would skim along the surface of our routines in life and miss the bigger picture and the deeper meaning all together. We gather each week so that one of us can say “stop, reflect, listen to your life, hear the call of your spirit, touch the sacredness around you, wake up to the beauty, feel the pains of the world, know the urgency of justice, and live the depth of the meaning of life.” We all need the reminder. And we all need that reminder delivered to us in new and challenging ways if it is going to be able to get through our defenses and our complacency.
We also need the support. In the midst of the problems and tensions that are endemic to church communities, there are also great gifts. When the difficult or tragic circumstances of life push us unwillingly and terrifyingly into the depths, we need each other desperately. We need people to hang onto, to care, to listen to us, to love us, even sometimes to lecture us and shake us out of our nonsense. No, friends and family are not always enough. We need a community, a place where we belong, a group that would miss us if we were gone. Faith is too hard to hang onto alone during the dark times, we need to know that there are others who are on this hard road with us.
We also need, in our spiritual hunger, to find the face of God. Maybe we can find God on some mountaintop, or in the spectacle of a sunset, or in the music of a sky lark, but for most of us, the presence of God touches us in the touch of other lives. The quest for God is not a solo act. God comes to us in one another. God’s love comes in the love of a friend. God’s mercy comes in the forgiveness of someone that we’ve hurt. God’s humor comes in the comments of a child. God’s grace comes in the tears of someone sitting next to us in the pew. God’s face is somewhere there in every face around us. We need to gather in these broken and heart breaking little, desperately flawed, communities of faith because God comes to us in the lives of those others who are also longing and aching for that presence of God. And to ache and long for God’s presence is what it means to be truly and deeply alive.
Whatever the abuses, the failures, the pitfalls of our churches and our blemished faith history, we continue to try because our very lives are at stake. But we must do that trying with the careful humility of those who know how likely it is that we will fail and fall short and behave badly. So let us try and remember how much we need each other, how much we care for each other, but also how much we need to forgive each other and forgive the whole church. We are not very good at being good or virtuous or perfect, but that’s not what this is about. Let’s try instead to simply embrace one another for who we are and recognize our own needs and our own flaws. If we can do that we might even be able to trust the coffee.
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