Celebrating 200 Years: Remembering the Past - Anticipating the Future
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
The First Presbyterian Church of Wooster, Ohio Bicentennial
October 11, 2015
What a wonderful phenomenon church is. I've spent most of my life in churches and every time I walk into a new one I think about what an amazing institution it is: all the joy and laughter that has happened here: all the heartache and grief: all the faith and passion generated here: all the babies baptized and couples married: all the lives celebrated in Memorial Services: all the people who went out from here taking part of this place with them. A 200-year-old church is particularly wonderful. So the first thing I want to say to you this morning is thank you for allowing me to share in this good and appropriate celebration. In addition, Sue and I are glad for the opportunity to be In Wooster again. Our oldest, Diane and our youngest, Brian both attended the College of Wooster and it was a perfect match for both of them. We continue to be grateful for their education and experience here. Duane married a fellow Wooster graduate, Rick Andrew, whose family has deep connections to both the town and college. And years before that I had the privilege of working with the Rev. Arthur Romig, a Wooster graduate. Art's parents were missionary parents, as was he. He was born and raised in China and he used to regal me with stories about the "Incubator" at Wooster, a school. Created to help children of missionaries complete their secondary education and in the process become acclimated to American culture. Art was always grateful for his Wooster years.
So the first thing I want to say is thank you. And the second thing is Happy Birthday. I would sing Happy Birthday to you, but the last time I sang alone in public was in second grade on Children's Day - do you remember Children's Day? - the annual occasion, usually in June, when the congregation got to see all the children in the Sunday School, who otherwise were hidden away somewhere in the basement, and who dutifully stood up in church and recited scripture or sang a song. I sang and it didn’t go at all well and I haven't done it since. But the occasion must not pass without someone singing it - so - shall we sing it together?.....
In our home I always did, and still do, two things at the birthday celebration of one of our children in addition to the traditional cake and candles and singing. I always make a point of wishing Happy Birthday to the mother of the child we are celebrating. After all, she did all the work. All the child did was show up. She did the heavy lifting. So - Happy Birthday to all the mothers - and fathers, all the Saints of the First Presbyterian Church of Wooster, all of them done through the years, all the way back to 1815.
The second thing I do is tell the story of the birth...where we were at the time, how happy we we to be having a baby, how we waited and waited, what it was like the day she or he came into the world, how I was so excited I dropped the milk bottles and the crashed on the porch at 6:00 a.m. - back in the day when milk in glass bottles was delivered to your front porch - and now, later that day, I was so distracted I somehow lost the engagement ring that was entrusted to my care while she was doing the real work, and how happy we all were, including grandparents, on the day he or she came home from the hospital. It's a day to look back and remember - and you have quite a birth story yourselves.
The year was 1815. The War of 1812 had recently ended. King Charles 11 had earlier granted huge swaths of land of what is now northeast Ohio to Connecticut. Connecticut sold off parcels of the land to developers to pay its Revolutionary War debt. Where we are today was near several Native American settlements and the convergence of several Native American trails in the dense forest, a perfect place for courageous homesteaders. In 1815 several Scots and Irish settlers, 15 in all, met in a home on East Liberty Street to form a Presbyterian Church. In reading through your history I made a delightful discovery. The new congregation in 1815 elected two Ruling Elders: Alexander McBride and one Walter Buchannon. (That's how it was spelled) So I have a lovely family connection he as well.
The Church gave birth to the College - an important part of your heritage that I hope will always be remembered and celebrated. It's what Presbyterians did wherever they went, all over North America. It is no exaggeration to say that the story of higher education in the United States is impossible to tell without Presbyterians. In that, and in your worship and witness and education and mission you have been a faithful outpost of Presbyterian Christianity for 200 years.
So - Thanks be to God for the First Presbyterian Church of Wooster and a very Happy Birthday.
While we are looking back through your history we really ought to keep on going, on back through the centuries to the very beginning, to one particular day in the life of Jesus. He and his friends were walking between two villages in Galilee in the north of the Roman province of Palestine- Israel, when pretty much out of the blue he asked - "What are people saying about me? Who do people say I am?" They tell him that some think he's John the Baptist. Others think he is one of the ancient prophets of Israel come back to life. And then he turns the question to them."Who do you say that I am?" It was Simon Peter who spoke first: ""You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." And then he said the most surprising thing: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." That's quite a lot to say about the church, isn't it?
Those of us on the inside of the modern church know first hand about that gates of hell business. Presbyterian minister and distinguished author, Frederick Buechner wrote:
"Jesus made his church out of human beings with more or less the same mixture in them of cowardice and guts, intelligence and stupidity, of selfishness and generosity, of openness of heart and sheer cussedness as you would be apt to find in any one of us...The reason he made his church out of human beings" Buechner observed, "was that human beings were all there was to make it out of. In fact, as far as I know, human beings are all there is to make it out of still. It's a point worth remembering." (Secrets in the Dark, p 147)
So let's think for a few moments about this wonderful, sometimes exasperating, heroic and sometimes cowardly, profound and sometimes trivial, holy but also wholly human institution called Church.
Some of you, in your travels, may have visited the excavated ruins of the Ancient Greek port city of Corinth. Corinth was an important commercial hub in the Roman Empire, with ships bringing goods from all over the world, and a steady stream of hungry, thirsty sailors looking for so,we terrain net while their ship was being loaded and re-provisioned. There was a famous Greek Temple in Corinth with 1,000 sacred prostitutes who know doubt did a brisk business. You can walk on ancient excavated street and see the worn grooves of the wagon wheels. You can see the ancient foundations of the shops where spices and oil and candles and food and clothing were bought and sold. You can see the site of the Synagogue where the first Christians had their meetings, and building directly next door where they met when the wore out their welcome in the Synagogue. And you can see the Bema in the marketplace where speakers and visiting philosophers and orators presented their ideas. A visiting Jewish scholar by the name of Paul, from Tarsus, probably spoke there, telling the story of the Palestinian Kew, Jesus, how Jesus was God's son, God's self-revelation, and now to know him and believe in him and give your life to him and his way of loving and sharing and healing and giving was deeply joyful and it was to become a new person. Wherever Paul went, and he pretty much tea sled the known world, he told the story and people slices and gathered together in a new community. The met on the Jewish Sabbath at first, and then in one of their homes on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day Jesus has risen from the dead. They read Hebrew scripture and sometimes a letter Paul had written back to them, they prayed and sang a hymn and always ate a meal together. They remembered, as Paul told them to, how Jesus broke bread and passed a cup of wine to his friends and said, "This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me."
When the authorities became concerned about them and what they were up to they began to meet secretly, after dark. They depended on one another, literally, for their lives. They began to take care of needy members of their community, to look out for one another, particularly the most vulnerable, the widows and orphaned children. They made sure everyone was all right, that nobody was hungry or homeless. We know about these little communities because Paul wrote letters to them and the church has lovingly kept those letters for 2,000 years. In those letters, written between 50 and 60 C.E. Paul starts to call the little communities he established with the agreed word "ecclesia" - meaning "Called out", and which we translate "Church."
It was to the Ecclesia in Corinth that Paul wrote: "To the church of God that is in Corinth - Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you."
Paul understands what a remarkable phenomenon a church is, this church particular
Y. There they were, a little group of men and women and children whose belief in Jesus Christ was the only thing they had in common, in a big, bustling city that, for the most part, didn't even know they were there, until later when the Roman authorities began to suspect that were a threat to the Empire and the terrible persecution began. But now Paul knows what a remarkable thing, what a miracle this little church is - and the other churches - in Ephesus, and Philippi. And Galatia.

So his letter starts out like a grateful love letter...."I thank my God for you"...But Jesus had said something about the gates of hell and sure enough they had. Shun to show up right there in Corinth. Believe it or not, the people in that little church, surrounded by a sea of indifferent paganism that would soon turn hostile, were doing something Christian people have been doing for 2,000 years. They were arguing, fighting among themselves about everything: about some people who were drinking too much communion wine and eating more than their share of the common meal. They were arguing about hairstyles and, of course, about beliefs, who was right and who was all wrong.

No one knows more about that than Presbyterians. In the fifty plus years of my ministry we have been arguing and fighting pretty much non-stop: about race, poverty, economics, war and peace, gender and sex - what would we do if we didn't have sex to argue about? We have fought about scripture interpretation and theology and American foreign policy. And in the midst of it all someone should stand up and read Matthew 16: "I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

There is a unity, not unanimity, but a unity that holds us close to one another and close to the heart of God in the love of Jesus Christ and his promise about the church. I am certain that the First Presbyterian Church of Wooster has had ups and downs that there have been arguments and fights and people have walked away in anger. In fact, I read that a number of people quit the church in the 1860s when the minister preached a sermon during the Civil War supporting the Union cause and criticizing the Confederacy.

The love of Jesus Christ and his promise holds us together, holds us and will never let us go, no matter what is happening to us.

You know, three is a lot of hand wringing about the church and what is to become of us. Our numbers are down and church closings are up. The fastest growing segment of the religious population is the "Nones," the people who check "none" in public opinion questionnaire on religious preference. The culture has long since stopped deferring to us. There are more kids playing soccer this morning than there are in Sunday School. All the Mainline denominations: Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Episcopalian, and Methodist are losing members, watching revenues shrink, cutting mission commitments and consolidating staffs. Every day, it seems, someone comes up with something negative to say about us and everyone has an opinion about why it is happening. Surely we're doing something wrong. Someone must be to blame. Conservative Evangelicals blame the progressive liberals, progressive blame the conservatives. Maybe it's our music, our liturgy, our pipe organ, our architecture. Maybe we're not friendly or too friendly, maybe we're too zealous or not zealous enough.

There is a whole cottage industry devoted to fixing what's wrong with the church: replacing the old with the new, tradition with innovation, old music with light rock, the pipe organ is out and praise music is in, the pulpit is out - replaced by a stool or hand held mike, it's "songs" now, no longer hymns, theater seats instead of pews, and the smell of freshly brewed Macchiatos and Lattes wafting in from the lobby replaces the aroma of the altar flowers. It doesn't always work. Rachel Held Evans wrote an essay for the Washington Post, Stop Trying to Make Church Cool, that takes a different tack. She quotes a friend: "I want a service that is not sensational, flashy or particularly relevant. I can be entertained anywhere. At church I do not want to be entertained. I do not want to be the target of anyone's marketing. I want to be asked to participate in the life of am ancient-future community."

Another Millennial wrote: "When a church tells me now I should feel (clap of you're excited about Jesus) it smacks of inauthenticity. Sometimes I don't feel like clapping. Sometimes I need to worship in the midst of my brokenness and confusion - not in spite of it and certainly not in denial of it."
Harvard's Robert Putman and his academic partner Richard Campbell who teaches at Notre Dame have carefully analyzed public opinion polls and identified one of the main reasons young adults are dropping out of the church. Young people, the age grouping most conspicuously absent from the church are virtually unanimous in criticizing the church and Christian Faith in general for judgementalism, narrow mindedness, hostility toward science and an obsession with sexual behavior, I.e. the religion that they see in the media. That means, at the very least, that churches like this one should keep doing what you've been doing for 200 years.

Another authority, Phyllis Tickle, who died recently, in her book, The Great Emergence, says that every five hundred years the church holds a rummage sale. Old, worn out, obsolete stuff is disc awarded. From Jesus to Christian Rome - 500 years; the rise of the pap y and the split between the Eastern Church and the western church - another 500 years. The Protestant Reformation - another 500 years. And now, she says, we are in the midst of another great rummage sale. Some things are being discarded. New things are emerging and no one knows exactly how it will turn out. Churches like this one, and the one I was privileged to serve in Chicago, and to abruptly change metaphors, like ships in a storm, should tighten everything up, and head into the wind, steady as she goes.

There is plenty of evidence that interest in religion, spirituality, prayer, meditation, compassionate service to others, is not onus not declining but increasing and deepening. One of our best thinkers, Diana Butler Bass, wrote recently, "In this time of cultural anxiety, economic near collapse, terrorist fear, political violence, environmental crisis and partisan anger, I. Ellie the United States is in the throes of a spiritual awakening , a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves and expressing faith are being, to borrow a phrase, "born again". (See Hardy Kim, Sunday's Coming, The Christian Century, 10/11/15).

A 200 year old church is wonderful, a miracle. Thanks be to God for it, for two centuries of faithful witness here, for all the faithful saints who lived and worshipped and worked and prayed and died and gave this church to you.

Thanks be to God for all the infants baptized here in 200 years, all the young people confirmed, all the couples married, all the lives celebrated in Memorial Services, all the thousands upon thousands of people who found their faith deepened, their love for God strengthened, their
R commitment to Jesus Christ conformed, and then went out from here to love out the rest of their lives in hopefulness and kindness and love.

Thanks be to God for the church - which one of our modern prophets, Walter Brueggemann recently described as "the only entity in play that offers an alternative to the dominant ideology of greed, accumulate, consume as the abundant life rather than the good life."

Thanks be to God for you and your living out in your day the promise of Jesus Christ that it is his church and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Thanks be to God for all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be.

Thanks be to God - and a very Happy Birthday.

Amen