Sermon

Make yourself at home

Scripture Text:

Acts 2:42-47

Sermon:

“I wish I could LIVE at church,” I said to two classmates over dinner one night, during my first stab at seminary back in 2001. The woman, in her late thirties, lit up and said, “Me, too!”  But our male companion, in his fifties, looked at us like we were crazy.  We probably sounded like romantic crazies who were going to burn out in our first year of ministry.

Some of my most vivid memories of church are moments when I felt like I lived there: potluck dinners on Lenten Wednesdays when I was a kid, prayer circles with my friends on the floor of our college chapel, retreats where I’ve shared meals and bunkrooms with other people for a whole weekend.

When I started my first paid position in ministry, as a lay pastor for a tiny UCC church in western Massachusetts, which some of you have heard me talk about before, I found my head crowded with some images that I hadn’t anticipated.  I found that I kept thinking about bringing couches into the church – maybe just into the fellowship hall, but maybe also into the sanctuary, and planting a vegetable garden on our property.  Looking back, I think I was seeing ways to make that little church feel more like a house.   But when I told the church moderator (which is the same as a warden) about these ideas, she looked at me quizzically, not unlike that guy at seminary.  So, I let the couches and veggies idea go and we did more conventional things like replace pew cushions and repaint the basement fellowship room.

Eventually I left the UCC and I left seminary, and then I went back to seminary and became an Episcopal priest, and now here I am at St. Benedict.  We have couches, but not in the sanctuary, and this church actually hosted a vegetable garden years ago… but the passionate volunteer with the Rototiller has long since moved on.

You’ve may have heard of “emergent” churches – churches founded in urban areas, usually by young adults, where they tend to worship sitting around on couches and coffee tables, drinking coffee or tea.  It’s sort of a Seattle, grunge-type approach to church.  Church that feels more like being at home.

And of course, over the centuries, many Christians have literally made a home together: sharing living space, expenses, regular meals, a worship life, and sometimes a mission to the poor and maybe even a garden or a farm.  Maybe they founded a monastery, or a Christian version of a hippie commune, or you could even say the Amish live in this way.  There’s been a recent movement to found “house churches,” where a small group of folks gather in a home for worship and usually a meal of some sort, often separate from any organized church.

What’s this business of making a church feel more like home?  In medieval Europe, churches were towering, Gothic masterpieces of stone and stained glass – they looked nothing like home.  They were supposed to transport people to a place that seemed like heaven, another world; a place that showcased God’s beauty and power – a place that reminded you that God is totally beyond our understanding.  Colonial clapboard churches like the one I pastured in Massachusetts were smaller, but they were built with steeples, tall windows, and grand front doors – this was not like home, but something different.  Something beautiful and inspiring, a place that reminded you that God is great.  And in the 20^th century, megachurches were built to look and feel more like malls than churches, but still they’re big, grand, and sort of spectacular with auditorium seating, giant projector screens, and fancy lighting and sound systems.

Even the two geodesic domes that used to be here are pretty different from a home – as cozy as they were, they were also meant to tell people that they were entering another kind of place.  One of you once told me you worried this building looked more like a medical office building than a church.  I guess that’s sort of true, although I’ve always thought our sanctuary was more like a big, round barn.  We’ve slowly been making this brand new church feel more home-y:  adding couches, painting rooms in welcoming colors, adding art on the walls.

What does making a church feel like home mean?   In the passage we heard from Acts 2, it can sound like creating some kind of utopia:  All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need … they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And we hear the words we hear every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. In other words, they kept learning and spending time together, they ate together and shared the Eucharist, and they said prayers together.

Things probably didn’t stay that way… this kind of community isn’t mentioned again in Acts or the letters of Paul.  And over the centuries, the Church has changed and split into many different expressions of that original community.  But I wonder if the lesson is less that church should be a utopia and more that the church should be a place that helps us find God in our lives outside the church.

What do couches have to do with that?  What making a church feel home-y have to do with finding God out in the world?

We live in a society where things that are big and grand and amazing are pretty common.  Bass Pro Shop is just about the size and intricacy of some of the smaller medieval cathedrals!  Then there’s IKEA, multiplex movie theaters, Soldier Field, even Meijer is bigger and taller than most buildings people would see in their whole lifetimes until about 100 years ago.

What we need today aren’t amazing spaces that take our breath away.  That’s not the face of God we’re longing for anymore.  I think we long for a presence of God that feels like we’re home, a home where we’re accepted, where we can laugh, and where we’re invited to know God better.  A place where we can feel close to God.

But we need to be careful about the kind of home we’re talking about here.  There are two ways this “home” feeling can go:

(1) The first is a kind of home the Church shouldn’t be: a clubhouse, a vacation home, or a couch that makes you want to keep sitting down and burying yourself in pillows and afghans.

(2) The second kind of home is the kind where you feel welcome and comfortable, but where the windows look out on the world and the front door opens and closes to let visitors come in and you venture out.  Or a couch where you can stop and rest, but where you can focus and re-center yourself so you can get up again and go face the world.

When church feels more like home, the point shouldn’t be that church feels only like “my” home, exactly – but that it can feel like home to anyone who comes in.  Something I’ve found myself saying to newcomers and guests here has turned out to be, “Make yourself at home.”  Finally, a church should be a home that we feel belongs to God, first, and not to us.  A home where we put God’s desires first, instead of our own.

I hope this church feels like home to you:  a place you can rest, a place you feel accepted, a place you feel you can sit down with God, a place that helps you gather yourself so that you want to go back out of those doors and be a better person out in the world.  A place that you feel belongs to you, but also to God.

Amen.

Uploaded on May 15, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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