Christ Church is well-known as being a public church.
Sometimes it’s called the Nation’s Church, because of its role in the amazing work going on over at Independence Hall some 235 years ago. It’s sometimes called the Mother Church of the Episcopal Church, since it was here that the Episcopal Church was first formally created and given its basic structure, in part by the guy lying in the floor down there, Bishop William White.
And we’ve been called a public church in different ways ever since, being part of public debate and dialogue and also being totally accessible to anyone who wants to wander through, marvel at the architecture, or just pause for a minute and pray.
And of course, being any kind of church – whether being public, being Episcopal, being urban, whatever – means we’re always finding out over and over again what those things mean. All the great people of our past, some of whom we know and most of whom we’ll never know, knew they had to figure out what all these things meant on the edge of their own day. And they’d be the first ones to say that we have to do the same.
And we have. Especially in recent years, there are many ways as a community of faith that we’ve gone deeper and further and gotten into risky territory finding out what it means to be public, and accessible (just check out what’s going on across the street), and to be open to debate, and asking more questions than we have answers to. Because that means our windows are clear, so to speak, and our doors are open.
And what’s so exciting about this is that it takes us in unexpected directions, if we’re really doing it right.
For instance, we continue to have forums for discussion and debate, like our current enactment of Sarah’s Story, telling the story of the history of slavery at Christ Church, or as we’ve told the stories of women here, or even as we’ve told the off-beat stories of some of our most hallowed forefathers.
We’ve got all that stuff going.
But something else is happening too, in our being a public church, and I’m wondering if this is about being public in yet another and newer and maybe even a more challenging way. Not that this hasn’t already been going on, but to my ears, there’s now more heightened awareness, more vivid language around it.
And that way of being public church is this – it’s about seeing our lives, our whole lives, as the real altar, and then bringing that altar into this time and space together to this shared altar here, in order to find and to hope for and to celebrate the holiness that’s already in our lives.
Let’s hang with that for a moment: the sacredness that’s already right there in our own lives.
Because I think it’s a lot of what the Gospel reading is about today. We get one of the real iconic stories of Jesus, the feeding of the thousands. He basically asks a kid, “Hey kid, can I borrow your lunchbox for a minute.” And from there he takes the bread, he gives thanks for it, and he breaks it into pieces and shares it all around. And somehow, what had been normal and insufficient at best becomes holy and more than enough.
Now, however you think that happened – whether it’s a miracle, or whether the disciples had a few loaves up their sleeves – isn’t really the point here. The Gospel of John always wants to vault us up onto a whole other level entirely. Not worrying about counting loaves and whether somebody pulled a sleight of hand, but rather, to John, what’s important is the sheer transformative presence of Jesus – period. In a way that defies description, in a way that goes beyond words and counting how many fish there are – and in a way that happens squarely in the middle of regular life stuff.
A lunchbox that becomes a miracle.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not suddenly wanting what I pack for my kid for camp every day to suddenly come back to me as some kind of biblical story. I’m really happy to just wash out the leftover spaghetti-O’s and not end up with enough for five thousand. Instead, John is telling the story in a particular way to get us to look at our own lives in a particular way. This is prime rhetoric, folks.
It goes back to what Jesus did to get from an ordinary lunchbox or bag or whatever, to something sacred and holy and plentiful. He took the bread, he blessed it and gave thanks, and then he gave it out in pieces that become really satisfying to people.
Taken, blessed, broken, given –
Which bring us back around to the point – that if we are indeed a public church, that’s probably what we’re supposed to be doing in our lives, too. Not leaving the story and the sacrament here at this particular altar, or in the Bible, but letting it flow out into our stories and the altars of our lives. Flowing out through clear windows and open doors so that there is no division between this gathering and our full and normal and everyday experiences.
Meaning, yes, we’re a church here in this space and in the work we do together beyond these walls. But it doesn’t suddenly stop there, when we go home, put on a pair of sweats, turn on some music, pour a glass of beer, or do the laundry and clean out the cat box and deal with the kids’ arguments or an ornery neighbor or whatever it is in your life.
That’s just it – that stuff is fair game, too. If we’re public church, then it means there are no boundaries. Public, private – it’s all good. And in all those everyday moments I’ve just described, just as examples of the kinds of moments I hope are coming to your mind, in all those places we’re still church.
Now, you may be thinking, “oh my gosh, if I have to be the church while arguing with my spouse, forget it, I’m outta here!”
But please don’t check out yet. Being church, being a public church, doesn’t mean not putting on the sweatpants or arguing with somebody, or enjoying intimacy to the absolute fullest, or watching some really bad TV. Please, yes, go right ahead and do those things, and more.
Still being church isn’t about doing things that seem churchy. Instead, it goes the opposite direction. We do bring the language and ideas of spirituality to help us understand our lives, sure. But we also bring the language and situations of our lives to help us understand spirituality and God. We start with our own lives as where we’re going to find the sacred ways and holy moments.
And then we bring all that back into these beautiful walls that do not block out the world, and loosen up all those boundaries in our minds to realize that our lives are an altar, and there’s always something going on on that altar.
In other words, we look for the “being taken, giving thanks, being broken, being given” thing in our own lives. It doesn’t mean we have to work to put the spirituality into life. This is a key point here. This isn’t another tiring task that we have to build into the day. It’s about letting our lives put some real flesh on the idea of spirituality.
That’s what’s at the heart of a sacrament anyway. Sacrament always holds a story, it’s always wrapped around some earthy, gritty story. Think about the sacrament of Eucharist, of baptism, the sacraments of marriage and of burial, the sacrament of confession – you all know so well how each of those has real life stories underneath it.
So looking at our lives like an altar – out there, not just in here – lets us see those stories in our lives as sacramental. And then I’ll bet that makes it all the more meaningful when we gather here at this altar, or gather around a baptism family, or a family who’s grieving at a funeral or who is joyous at a wedding. Because we know that what we’re gathering around is the sacrament of a rich and very human story.
Maybe what it’s coming to mean to be a public church, in addition to all we already do, is just that: being taken by the world, blessed by God, broken by life, and being given away by our very selves. Maybe being a public church is about claiming the spirituality that’s already in our lives. As if through clear windows and open doors.
When I marry couples, one thing I sometimes say in the wedding homily is that I don’t give their relationship its holiness, and neither does the church. God gave it to them a long time ago. The wedding, the marriage, is about a public claiming of that, and an intentionality to explore it more deeply, and to ask for blessing on that.
And as with a wedding, the space in here only works, it only becomes meaningful, when we bring in our whole lives to it, when we bring all the places we think of as more or less important, as more or less consequential, into worship as a community – not just to coffee hour, but the worship that’s the bull’s-eye of everything that we do. When we bring our whole selves in here, for awhile we let the altar of our lives merge with the holiness of this altar here.
Which is probably not something we get much time to do during our regular weekdays.
To bring the altar of our lives into this space, and then in our minds and our hearts to put it here with this altar lets us use this holy time and this holy space, not to make ourselves feel like it’s segregated from our lives, but to help us embody and feel and hear and see that the altar of our own lives is holy, too.
Like in the feeding of the thousands today in the Gospel – when Jesus hunkers down, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. It’s more than the ordinary becoming enough – it’s the ordinary becoming beyond enough. Beyond abundant.
There’s something to this. This is the only miracle story that we find in all four gospels, so evidently those who were around not long after Jesus knew that we were going to need this example. Not so much to be big and impressive. But to cue us in over and over – like, if you didn’t get it in Matthew, try Mark, Luke, or John – to show us that what God is trying to work out in our lives is always going to exceed our expectations. And to look for that. And more often than not, it will be where we are least likely to look.
And how do we know where that is?
Let’s go back to what Jesus did in the Gospel, let’s get Eucharistic – meaning, let’s look at the places in our lives we’ve been taken, perhaps by the world, perhaps by another person; where we’ve given thanks, or maybe someone has given thanks for us; the places we’ve been broken, maybe in sharing ourselves, maybe in being broken in ways that we feel are never going to be fixed; and then the ways in which somehow that thanksgiving and that brokenness has been given back to the world. Maybe in ways we know. Maybe in ways we don’t.
These are the things to look for in our lives, the places to open up deeper. Where we’ve been taken, given thanks for, broken, shared.
It’s like the prayer that makes up this whole passage from Ephesians; it points us to those places in our lives. This is the coolest prayer, and I have it underlined in my battered little go-everywhere Bible, because it’s about the deepest part of each one of us, and of all of us. It’s about the places of blessing and brokenness and the fact that, like with the loaves of bread, God has a way of making those places more than enough.
Paul is praying it, and I think that the fact that Paul is so ornery and such a pain and so imperfect is probably all the more reason God pays attention to him. Paul prays that God will give you strength in your inner being – in other words, that God give you capacity, and meaning, and ability deep inside of your truest self. Oh yeah.
And we all know our inner beings are very intimate places, the most painful and private places, and joyous places, we have. Joy can be as intimate and private as pain.
So in talking about inner places, he’s talking to us as individuals, very private individuals. But that’s not all.
The Greek is very clear – he uses a plural “you.” That God strengthen you – all of you here – in your inner being.
The most intimate places. The most communal experience.
Which brings us to the closing line, one of the greatest and one that we often try to quote – that God will do abundantly more for us, in us, than we ask or imagine. Beyond abundance, beyond our asking or our imagination.
It’s the fishes and loaves, folks. Not just enough. But beyond enough
And beyond enough in the ordinary places on the altar of our real lives.
And saying that, right there – no less, no more – is the radical, radical act of a most public church.