We Believe In The Church John M, Buchanan

Matthew 16:13-19 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
November 14, 1976 Columbus, Ghio

Text: ",,.Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it," Matthew 16:18 K,J.V,

Did He mean it or did Ha not? Did Jesus, the humble Nazareth Carpenter,
really intend to establish an organization called a church,,.on Peter,,,? Or is the
church a prime example of humanity's inclination to bury its best ideas in institu-
tions which become self-perpetuating, seif-justifying and ultimately self-seeking?
The question is a good one, debated up and down across the centuries,

The arguments against the institutional church are familiar, as familiar, in
fact, as your neighbor who maintains a benevolent attitude toward Christianity, lives
a reasonably decent life, honest, kind and generous, regards himself a Christian but
sees absolutely no relationship between that and "Old St John's by the Gas Station",
Jesus was a simple man - the argument goes. His intent was to put people right with
God, He taught them to be forgiving and accepting and loving. In His brief public
ministry He was in constant trouble with the representatives of institutional religion:
He was a gadfly of sorts, puncturing their hypocrisy and institutional formality with
His relentless integrity, It is ludicrous, the critics say, to begin with the simplic-
ity of Jesus and end up at the Vatican, or 475 Riverside Drive with its new computers,
and Management By Objectives seminars and ecclesiastical bureaucrats writing manuals
on how to have more meaningful meetings of the Women's Association, Besides, the
word "Church" appears only three times in the Gospels: twice in this passage, once
elsewhere in Matthew, and in that the Author of the Gospél according to Matthew. was
obviously a partisan of St, Peter, he probably included these references in order to
support his friend's leadership position in the early church.,.So also the argument
goes, ad nauseum,

Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters are not much interested in the debate,
however, Questioning the existence of the church for a Roman Catholic makes as much
sense as debating the existence of the sun, It is there, Jesus intended it: He
appointed Peter - the Rock - as its earthly founder, He gave Peter the authority to
run it on His behalf and that authority has been carefully passed down across the
centuries in an Apostolic succession of Bishops known as Popes, "Church'' means that
Church - until very recently, and our Roman friends have an understandable aversion to
questioning whether or not Jesus really intended what they have constructed over the
centuries,

Protestants, on the other hand, don't know what to do with this passage. The
typical method of dealing with it is to conclude that Jesus really meant that His
Church would be built on faith and courage and strength like Peter's, The "Rock",
that is to say,isn't Peter but Peter's faith, The trouble is, that isn't what He
said, The man's name was Simon: everybody knew that, The Greek word for rock is
"Petros": "You have a new name now Simon," is what He was saying, "The Rock": and
on your shoulders I'm going to build a church, Now Peter, in many ways is one of the
most compelling and intriguing personalities of the New Testament, If his faith was
rock-like, it certainly wasn't granite, But the fact remains that if one individual
must be singled out as the primary force in the early church it most certainly turned
out to be Peter, That is how I interpret. Jesus meant what He said, He intended a
church built on this fisherman - his faith - halting at times; his courage which came
and went; his leadership and strength, The conclusion that the Roman Papacy is what
He meant is one I do not believe the evidence warrants, That, however, is not our
concern,

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al is our concern is the church, and as an_institutjon it always seems to be
in trouble, Elton Trueblood reminds us that "the popular religion of ancient Greete

succeeded in maintaining its shrines after the real vitality had departed, Representa-
tives of Greek religion provided services long after what went on at the shrines had
ceased to have any relevance in the life of business, education or government,"

(The Company of the Committed p.4).

Karl Heim is even more disturbing by observing that: "The Church is like a.
ship on whose deck festivities are still kept up and glorious music is heard, while
deep below the waterline a leak has been sprung and masses of water are pouring in,
so that the vessel is settling hourly though the pumps are manned day and night."
(In Trueblood, ibid, p.5).

When I emerged from Seminary I was convinced, as every recent graduate seems
to be convinced, that the institutional church was dying, or at least very critically
ill, But after a decade of hand wringing over the state of the church I made a
rather monumental discovery - people have been feeling that way for 2,000 years, [n-
stead of waiting for its demise I have come to an appreciation of the remarkable
durability of this institution which somehow outlived the Roman Empire and the Dark
Ages and the Crusades and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and Karl
Marx and Adolf Hitler, We've been around for 2,000 years, That's the most important
fact about us, ee oe to the words of the Apostles' Creed - "I believe in

the Church," adc Nady ~ foe

But first, let! s not —— guilty of overlooking a crisis simply because we've
had a_few before, All tHe institutions in our culture find themselves in very
choppy seas, For instance, for decades we have assumed that education is the instru-
mentality for ushering in the bright new age, and the agent for accomplishing it was
that peculiarly American invention known as the Public School, But today we are
having trouble persuading people to pay for it. The shock waves in the Educational
Establishment are immense, For better or for worse something is changing, So also
the Church as institution is trying to catch up with a culture in transition, Issues
which were unheard of just two decades ago are suddenly pressing in on us: poverty,
racism, sexism, hunger, ecology. The only really fatal error the church may be making
is to pretend that they aren't critical and if ignored will go away,

As is the case with every institution in our culture we are trying to keep
apace with our environment, It is not easy, In Ernest Campbell's memorable metaphor,
it isn't as easy for a tractor-trailer to execute a U-Turn as a motorcycle, But it
will - and over the long haul it will deliver the goods,

The Apostles' Creed includes it as an item of faith, "I believe in the Holy,
Catholic .'' Church = From a Hebrew word which means “assembly, congregation ~
Bathered to listen for a word from the Lord"; and a Greek word with a very interesting
list of credencials, "Ekklesia" was the whole city, all the people, Several times a
year the body politic met to make decisions, Someone blew a trumpet - those who heard
came to the meeting. They were the Ekklesia as they met, Thus church ~- "the assembly
of those who have heard something and have been called out to do something about what
they have heard."" A Holy Church: apart, different, belonging to God, made Holy not
because only Holy people are in it but because of Him, He's Holy and some of His
Holiness rubs off on the people who are His Church, Holy, Catholic Church: general as
opposed to particular, universal as opposed to local, Not Roman Catholic: I've been
arguing for years with Presbyterians who can't bring themselves to say the word and

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treat it like a quarter rest, or else say "Holy Christian" which just isn't what the
Creed wants us to believe, Of course it's Christian: but if it's Christian, the
Creed maintains, it's Catholic which is to say, inclusive with its arms open as
widely as the whole creation, The dramatic Creedal assertion is neither "Holy" nor
"Catholic", but what precedes it - "I believe in it," That is to say, I believe in
the Church as I believe in God the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ, His only
Son our Lord, Early on in this series we distinguished between believing that God
exists and believing in Him: we saw that we are Christians not on the basis of the
ideas about Jesus Christ we comprehend and endorse but by committing to Him, trusting
Him, following Him, So we are not talking here about appreciating the historic sig-
nif{cance of the church in the evolution of Western civilization, nor are we dealing
with loyalty, enthusiasm and love for the Church, We _are saying, frankly, we believe
in it, we commit ourselyes to it, we will behave as if it matters in some ultimate
sense: we trust in it because it is part of God's economy for His whole creation.
In fact, at any particular time we may not be very enthusiastic about it; we may
disagree vehemently with it, What the Apostles’ Creed maintains is that Christian
Faith includes believing in it: that faith is not Christian rary ee purtl..
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God and His Church:_to believe in one is to include the other,
story which begins on the very edge of recorded histery, Yahweh, as He —known ,
called Abraham and promised Abraham a family as numerous as the sands of the sea,
Centuries later a pathetic band of Semitic slaves broke out of Egypt and found them-
selves camped around a mountain in the wilderness called Sinai, When they remembered
that experience later the real miracle, they understood, was that they became a nation,
God entered into a Covenant with them corporately. He would be faithful: they would
be His people, And the Covenant bound them to one another in a way so deeply that
they were Jews, the people of God, only because they were born into that nation,

When we include the Holy Catholic Church in our affirmation of faith we are
testifying to the fact that Almighty God has always been in the business of choosing
people: melting individual people into a community which He then regards as a single
living organism, We are, that is to say, saying something about the very nature of
God in this Creedal phrase,

We are saying that Jesus fully intended a new community of God's people to
be the continuing vehicle through which God would address His creation, We are
acknowledging that He left no solitary, unattached believers in His wake, To believe
in Him was to join up with the Company: they were and are one and the same, We are
saying that the church is not an arbitrary organization to which we belong because
we like the preacher, choir, architecture or whatever, It is rather the way God
| has given us to say "yes" to His Son, Jesus Christ, We are saying, firmly, unequivo-
| cally that what makes us Christians - as has always been the case ~- is not the ortho-~
\doxy of our theology, the moral purity of our lives, but our es to itd co 4 -
munity of Sax: ‘ise s people, the Holy Catholic Church, Am. j / pre

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I believe a the Church, not because it is perpetually a perfect reflection
of the Kingdom of God on earth, God forbid! Ministers particularly know that isn't
true, Don't tell a good churchman that the Church is full of hypocrites, Of course
it is, because it's full of people, We are, in fact, the only organization I know of
that asks applicants for membership to acknowledge something less than perfection,

We are perhaps best described as a group of sinners who know themselves to be for-
given and are discovering that state to be liberating and very happy. We are not
perfect:. we have never claimed to be,

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J,H,Oldham, a churchman, once said to Paul Tillich, philosopher, "You know,
Tillich, Christianity has no meaning for me whatsoever apart from the Church, but I
sometimes feel as if the Church as it actually exists is the source of all my doubts
and difficulties," I know that feeling, and if you've spent much time in and about
the Church ‘you do to,

I fancy myself, in fact - in Robert Forst's phrase - enjoying a long lover's
quarrel with the church,

I'm impatient with it because I know that it could be so much more than it is,
I will never make peace with the fact that people join it, "give their whole lives to
the cause of Christ here and throughout the world" and then follow through on that
by worshipping three times a year and giving less - far less - than the tab for one
modest dinner party, I'1l never make peace with an institution that claims to follow
Jesus Christ, Sovereign Lord of all, and then once a year has to get on its knees to
beg for money on His behalf. I'1l never make peace with a church that gets on its
knees for anything.,.except prayer,

I'm ashamed of the church when it doesn't love and forgive and turns its
back on the world God loves so much,

I get angry with the church when it forgets that its Lord died to set people
free to be more than they are, not to make them comfortable with the status quo,

I get impatient with the church when it demonstrates more enthusiasm about
its own furnishings than hungry children,

And yet, I love the church and believe in the church, because I have seen
Jesus Christ in it, I have seen the healing, redeeming love of God take human form
here - the only form it can take, I believe in and love the church because of the
Incarnation, the enfleshment of God's love: it happens here,I would submit, I have
seen it and known it,

I believe in the Holy Catholic Church ~- not in the abstract, but here, in
this confusing collage of committees, bazaars, choir rehearsals, coffee drinking
friends and strangers who constitute Broad Street Presbyterian Church, I dare to
believe that this on occasion becomes the very body of Christ, the vehicle through
which Almighty God intends to redeem a portion of His whole creation,

| Let me make that very plain, in conclusion, Wednesday was an average day,
but you - Broad Street Presbyterian Church - were in the business of redeeming
creation by providing God's love something through which to become real,

A dozen gathered here for Bible Study at 7:30, Children were arriving for
the Head Start :ou are providing next door in your building. By 9:00 the people you
pay to help you be an effective church were in a meeting talking about the week's
strategy, Outside our door some very special children were playing in the gym -
because you provide a place for the Franklin County Retarded Pre-School, After the
meeting you provided a “witness to the resurrection" at a funeral and a word of cheer
and concern in half a dozen hospitals and nursing homes, In the meantime you gave
emergency food to some very hungry neighbors, a warm coat and gloves and undershirts
and house dresses to some others, You got one of your furnaces repaired Wednesday,
so that you could continue to provide space for a Health Clinic on your property
north of here,

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At dinner time your Nominating Committee met to talk about the leaders we
need to keep all these tops spinning smoothly, And as that meeting progressed the
local“ basketbal] players came to use your gymnasium, After them came the members
of "A.A," to talk, and support and hold hands while praying the Lord's Prayer,

At 7:30 your Deacons arrived to talk about one thing, God bless them -
“how can we reflect more of God's love to one another and to our neighbors?"

A not unusual day for you - the Church, Holy and Catholic in this place, I
believe in the Church because I see the Incarnation happening on occasion right in
front of my eyes, The very love of God takes shape and I am moved to gratitude for
the privilege of being part of it,

Before we leave today, we will present and dedicate financial pledges for
the program of this congregation in 1977, It is tempting to regard this exercise as
the raising of funds necessary for operation, It is that, of course, But this
morning, may it be more than that for you, May it be the occasion for an expansive
new insight into your role in God's company of faith. May it be no less than a new
and strong affirmation of faith: "We believe in the Church,"

Amen,

Father, we give thanks for Your Church and for this congregation, We are
grateful for Your gentle leading and loving judgment, We are grateful for all
those who have gone before us and for the challenges of faith You place in front
of us in our time, 0 God, bless this congregation: we would be Your Church, Holy

and Catholic, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,