Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

“Doing Church Differently” Conference Worship

The Feast of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, April 21, 2007

May God be with us in every footstep, Christ be known when we break the bread and the Spirit touch our hearts in gentleness. Amen.

Some famous comedian was once asked what a good sermon should be about? His response was “about God…and about five minutes.” Given the time constraints we have in our schedule, I’m adapting that suggestion and, rather than preaching a typical Sunday length sermon this morning, my homily will make a few points about how use the sermon to do church differently.

Religion does great harm when it fosters closed-minded beliefs and restrictive ways of belonging. But it can also function like a love affair when it opens up the world and extends the boundaries of belonging and believing. We observe today the memory of Anselm, a twelfth century Archbishop of Canterbury, whose spirituality can be summarized in the phrase, “faith seeking understanding.”

What kind of understanding of our faith and our religion do we offer the seeker? Religion can easily degenerate into a mechanism for excluding the stranger or nonconformist from the community. Sadly, people often see the worst of religion in the world today. Dean Allan Jones of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco says that “Religion-as-all-the-answers seems to have the upper hand. But when we see the best of religion as a quest for meaning and community – which includes everyone – we’ll find life and energy that heal rather than wound, love rather than hate, embrace differences rather then violently seek to eradicate them.”

Preaching here is always inviting and compelling, assuring listeners of God’s radical welcome and unconditional love, and proclaiming the good news that God meets us where we are without any hesitation. In the words of today’s Gospel, our message is “come, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, you who have been hurt in the name of religion or in whose way anyone may have put obstacles that have kept you from knowing and experiencing fully God’s radical love; come, sit with us, let us feed your hungry spirits, heal your broken hearts, and offer you a safe place where you will find rest for your souls.”

The Gospels lend themselves to that great gift God has given us called imagination and in our preaching we can best tap into that gift. Last Sunday’s text, for example, gave us the opportunity to talk all about locked places and bolted doors which can be invisible as well as tangible. People have locked themselves in the invisible closet for all sorts of reasons as their coping mechanism to avoid the intolerance and bigotry so prevalent in society.

Are we aware of how even the church has operated behind closed doors, excluding people from its life and ministry out of some irrational fear or lack of understanding, and in that process actually keeping Jesus from getting in and living among its members? What can each of us do in the little “churches” where we preside – our home, office, school, business, neighborhood, and right here in this community – to remove the bolts, the obstacles, the deadlocks that may be keeping someone from experiencing the Shalom of God, the peace of the Lord, the radical welcome of the Risen Jesus taking them from fear to faith?

In all that we are sharing with you about our experience of doing church differently, we humbly acknowledge that we are not a church with all the answers. Most of us, at one time or another, continue to struggle with any of a number of anguished questions. But we also recognize that the best of religion is a search for meaning and community – a community which invites and includes everyone, no matter who they are or where they may be on their faith exploration. It is in that experience where we find life and energy, healing rather than wounding, love rather than hate, the embracing of one another’s differences rather than an attempt to exclude those who differ from us.

In her first official sermon as our Presiding Bishop Katherine framed it this way: “In Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost said that ‘home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.’ We all ache for a community that will take us in, with all our warts and quirks and petty meannesses - and yet they still celebrate when they see us coming! That vision of homegoing and homecoming that underlies our deepest spiritual yearnings is also the job assignment each one of us gets in baptism – go home, and while you’re at it, help to build a home for everyone else on earth. For none of us can truly find our rest in God until all of our brothers and sisters have also been welcomed home like the prodigal.”

And in our own “faith seeking understanding” here in this community, we have come to believe with distinguished preacher, Fred Craddock, that “wherever and whenever, for whatever reason, anyone is not welcome to sit at table with you, to eat with you, then you do not have church.”