September 12, 2004
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 19:13-20

It's nothing less than a minor miracle that we are all in this room this morning to behold the beauty of this place.

Last week at this moment, the entire sanctuary was a dust factory! The chancel had nothing on it to speak of-except a couple of paint cans tucked away in the corner. The floors have been washed, the carpets and pews cleaned, choir risers have been raised, the curtains re-hung and all the furniture restored to their positions on the chancel-even the hymnals have been dusted. This morning we return to worship God in our beautiful sanctuary-this place of light and shadows, memory and expectation, celebration and prayer filled hope.

Today when we say Welcome Home to each other...we mean it!

It was just about eighty years ago to the day that our sanctuary was first dedicated. It's funny and politically incorrect, but I want to say, and "she has served us well." Better to say "she" than "it"! And there is something "womanly" about our sanctuary. Tony Robinson describes the sanctuary, the place of Christian worship in our UCC churches as a "womb." I have often thought of this room as something like a womb. We come to be nurtured and to remember that there is love and that we are loved. We enter this place as beloved children of God and our worship acknowledges our kinship with God our Beloved. There is a womb like quality to worship; it's almost as if we are held in the beauty and grace of the body for a time, so that we can return to the world again, renewed in our own bodies, with renewed strength and conviction.

The church has many critics in our time. A frequent criticism is that the sanctuary has become a place to hide from the difficulties of modern life.

It is a place of retreat, a reactionary institution that no longer leads the culture by its vision or judges it by its prophetic traditions. It seems indulgent, even to some in this congregation. We are in the process of sending two plus million dollars on ourselves. How can we justify this in a world where a majority is poor, more than a billion people living on less that one dollar a day?

I have some sympathy with this criticism, but I think it misses the essence of what worship and sanctuary are supposed to be. A sanctuary is a place of holy retreat; a time and space outside ordinary time a space. It is a place where we can listen to the still small voice of god that gets drowned out in the push and pull of the economic and political life of our time. It is a place to hear about the sacred gift of life and the divine demand to work for justice. It is a place to get a glimpse of an ideal life of a community of compassion. It is a place of refreshment and inspiration, not an enclave of the satisfied and sanctified.

Having retreated to the sacred beauty of the sanctuary, we are impelled by the life of faith to advance into the world with a little bit of the fierceness of onward Christian — peacemakers — ready to do battle with the evils and carelessness of our day, ready to speak truth to power, and power to the powerless. We come to church, not only to be grateful to God for all that God has done for us, we come so that we can go-go out again into the world that needs to know in its despair that God is tender and just.

Some have talked about church as a rehearsal-in our worship we rehearse or practice who we are and how we are called to live in the rest of our lives. To keep Sabbath is to keep time to reflect, to rest and to rehearse for the rest of our living.

To return to this sanctuary for Sabbath week after week is a kind of subversive act, a form of sacred resistance-it is a radical act, especially in a world that values money, the mall and the endless manipulation of our desires. We set aside a time and place for the celebration of the sacred and we dance with the divine.

The Gospel reminds us that we are the ones upon who the church is built. Rather than the church being made for us and our desires, we make the church what it is. God works in the church through us in a very earthy, visible human way. This place is a hollow and meaningless shell without us, a venue for music and a lecture hall. But with us, it becomes something of the Body of Christ, something, not of our own making, something beyond what you and I are on our own. Like Peter, we get to be used in a way that we wouldn't dare to imagine. We can find the courage to stand up against the powers and principalities of the world when an injustice is being done. We can be empowered to greet others as friends and neighbors, who would only be strangers. We can learn how to be sources of comfort and challenge, instruments of healing, speakers of truth, lovers of justice, caregivers of the earth and each other, by allowing the divine to work in our human community. That is what a church is for-we would be sadly wrong and selfish if we congratulated ourselves on a beautiful sanctuary and then forgot that what we are called to do as the Body of Christ in the world.

We return one day after the three year anniversary of 9-11 and a week after terrorists seized the school in Beslan, Russia, forcing some of their hostages, mostly children to help place explosives and build barricades that cut them off from rescue. Some even carried bombs on their own bodies and blew themselves up, taking children with them as they died.

The Hebrew meaning of sanctuary is that you entered into a sacred place and worshipped there. Then, instead of leaving it at that, you brought the sense of sanctuary with you out into the world. We must take the hope we know here and move it into the hurts of the world.

I sat in this sanctuary alone in the silence this morning and simply prayed for this place and all who enter-and leave from it; that we will be able to respond to God's love rather than the world's terror, that we will fully grasp the joy and cost of our discipleship; that we will show forth our faith, not only in words, but in acts of lovingkindness and works of compassionate justice; that we will comprehend what is life giving and stand up to all that is deadly, no matter the form that death takes.

The Sabbath is a day of rest and I am all for it. But I believe that there is inherent work involved in the making of Sabbath in all our faiths, whether we are Muslim, Buddhist, Jew or Christian. We must strive to work of justice and love and a peaceful planet-whether we worship God here in Berkeley or in Iraq. Let us pledge on this day of return and renewal our conscientious resistance to the evils we deplore and our willingness to practice peace whether it is in the Middle East or in Middle America.

The Spirit of God is brooding over this creation-moving us toward the primacy of love, swirling into the eddies of our deepest held convictions, creating hope and gratitude as we embrace our call to be God's people in this time and place.

May we advance refreshed, and go forth to serve.