Cathy Tamsberg

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

May 27, 2007 – Pentecost Sunday

Text: Acts 2:1-21

What I Believe About the Church

This morning in churches all over the world, Christians are celebrating Pentecost. It is Pentecost Sunday in white clapboard churches in rural North Carolina, in the great cathedrals of Europe, and in Cathedral Baptist Church in the city of Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia. Jack and Nancy are leading in worship there with more incense than they have ever seen. This day we mark as the birthday of the Church celebrates the coming of a Spirit so powerful that people were able to speak in languages they did not know and everyone could hear the Apostle Peter’s message in a language they could understand. From that miraculous beginning grew this institution we call the Church.

Today the Christian Church includes more than two billion people world-wide, claiming about one-third of the world’s population. With its complex two thousand-year history, the Church has been and continues to be a powerful institution. At this very hour, millions of people in this country alone are doing what we are doing – sitting in a church, singing hymns, reading scripture, and hearing sermons…and some of the worshipers are wondering why they are there. Like some of you here, many Christians have a love-hate relationship with the Church, and for good reason. There is much to love and much to dislike about the Church.

Recently I saw a wonderful cartoon showing what happened when the pastor ordered letters for the sign in front of the church that were too large. What he had planned to do was install the words “Morning Message” and “Evening Message” followed by the titles of his morning and evening sermons. (This must have been a Baptist church.) But the letters were too big. So when the custodian who installed the sign called him to come and look at it, what he found were the words “Morning Mess” and “Evening Mess.” That sounds to me like an all-too-accurate description of the Church.

Throughout its history, this organization we call the Church has had tremendous potential for good or evil, and it has perpetrated both. It has shared God’s compassion through healing ministries like hospitals; followed Jesus’ example by feeding countless hungry people; educated millions around the world in one-room huts and leading universities; and nurtured untold numbers of grieving families who have lost loved ones. When my father died two years ago, we experienced Church at its best as we were supported, fed, and loved by neighbors and friends in my hometown in South Carolina. The Church and the Christian people who are its heart have worked to end slavery, to end apartheid, and American Baptists are currently working to end exploitation of women in the sex trade in Asia. Today at Pullen we will conclude a collection of coins for a project in Nicaragua, where two cents can provide a critical dose of de-worming medicine that insures better health for a poor child in that country. I could go on and on listing the loving, compassionate, just ministries in which the Christian Church has been engaged over the centuries.

But we also know that the Church has done enormous harm in the last two thousand years. The crusades against the Muslims come to mind. Use of the Bible to oppress African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians comes to mind. I’ll always remember the greetings brought by John Thomas, now President and General Minister of the United Church of Christ, at an Alliance of Baptists Convocation some years ago. After listing some of the finest accomplishments of the UCC and its constituent groups, he admitted, “We are also the people who brought you the Salem witch trials.” In some times and places, Christians have personally killed bodies and spirits “for God.” Elsewhere, they have encouraged others to commit acts of violence. Under the guise of doing God’s work, some branches of the Church continue to justify the proliferation of assault weapons, destruction of the environment, and war. No doubt Jesus and the apostles would be both proud and ashamed of what this institutions has been and done through the years. Someone has quipped that Jesus came to bring the kingdom of God and what he got was the Church.

One thing we have learned from the checkered history of the Church is that it is a very human institution. We know that human beings are capable of great good and great evil, and the Church is no different. One can point to the good and use it as a reason to join and support a congregation. Or one can point to the bad and use it as a reason to criticize the church and walk away from it. Moral, thoughtful people do both, and some of us here have done both in a single lifetime—some in a single year.

In spite of this paradox, one of the things I have come to know about myself is that I love the church—pure and simple, and at a very deep place in my soul. Except for a few years of limited involvement during college and graduate school, I have spent my life as an active participant in a congregation. I’ve been getting up on Sunday morning and going to church for so long, I think it’s in my genes. It’s what my family did when I was a child, when many of our family rituals related to and reinforced being part of a church. One of my sweetest childhood memories is that of my dad polishing my very-scuffed white Sunday shoes on Saturday nights during the summer. While he did that, my mother curled my hair and often ironed a dress so I could look my best in Sunday school. But as an adult, I’ve had to examine why I keep doing this. Why has there never been more than a brief period in my life when I didn’t find myself in a worship service most Sunday mornings? Why do I love the Church?

There are several reasons that feel very important. First, being in the company of other people who are wrestling with what it means to be a Christian—a follower of Jesus—is good for me, especially when I can do it in a place like Pullen. In this congregation, I am surrounded by loving, generous, creative, forgiving, passionate, faithful people who are willing to sacrifice personal comfort and pleasure for the good of others. Because I am the staff person for both adult education and community outreach, I attend lots of meetings of Pullen groups and committees. Given how much time I spend in meetings, I appreciate the suggestion that “God so loved the world that God did not send a committee.”

But periodically on the way home from a routine meeting on a weekday evening, I step back and realize that something extraordinary has just happened: half a dozen or even a dozen competent and creative people who lead very busy lives have just given up an evening, leaving their homes, families, and often the dinner table, to come to Pullen to plan some activity or to otherwise do the church’s business. In a culture which teaches us that life is all about getting what I want for me, that is truly amazing.

Now you can find some of this in other settings. Many community groups, neighborhoods, and civic clubs support each other and engage in unselfish acts of kindness and generosity. But there is something special, something powerful about church people—about you. Something special happens when people are coming together and doing just, loving things because they believe that’s what God wants them to do; because that’s what the Spirit is calling them to do; because deep in that sacred place in their souls they know it’s the right thing for them to do. And they do it not for a reward later, but because it’s the moral, loving, necessary action to take right now.

A few weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens, a British-born atheist, was in the Triangle promoting his latest book, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” After he spoke at the Unitarian Fellowship, the News and Observer reported his view that because of all of the truly awful things religion has done through the years, it cannot make us better, more moral people. If Hitchens includes the Church in his definition of religion—especially Pullen church, I think he’s dead wrong. In fact, my experience is just the opposite.

When I was growing up, my parents taught me that we are known by the company we keep. My life journey has taught me that we are profoundly influenced by the people with whom we choose to spend our lives whether they are spouses, partners, friends, or other companions on the journey. They can make us better people—or not. You should know that I am proud to be known by this company, to be known as your friend and companion, to be a member of the Pullen family. Because I hang out with you, I am more loving, more caring, more forgiving, more compassionate, more truthful, more just. I am a better human being, I am more Christ-like, I come closer to living out of my identity as a person created in the image of God, because of the time I spend with you. Being with Jesus transformed his disciples, both the twelve and the many others who were his followers. If we let it, our togetherness in this corner of the Church can transform us all.

Another reason I love the Church is its messiness. Many people criticize the Church as being full of hypocrites. They are right. Christian communities are full of people who are inconsistent; who say one thing and do another; who don’t live fully from their deepest values all the time. And I am one of those. Like Paul, in spite of my best intentions, I am often not as loving or patient or forgiving as I want to be, as I long to be. So I am also drawn to the Church because it isn’t perfect—because I am not perfect.

Do I get frustrated with our imperfections? Absolutely. Perfectionism is also in my genes. I want nothing more than for us to meet all of the needs of our Pullen family and the many needs in our community and in our world. I wish we could raise all the money we need for the new building, and send more money beyond our walls, and volunteer more with outreach ministries, and pray more often, and engage people who come just to worship more fully in the life of this congregation. But I know we are working at all of those things as the limited, broken, wondrous people we are. If the Church were perfect, I couldn’t be here.

There are many other reasons that I love this messy institution. I love it because we can do things together that we can’t do alone. I am here because it exposes me to diversity in perspectives about God and about life that challenge me to think hard about what I really believe and value. I am here because the Church, even in its troubling forms, reminds me that God is still speaking, that God is still working to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

And finally, I am here because I believe that God hasn’t given up on the Church. I am convinced that God still has work for this broken institution to do. I think about it the same way I think about how the Spirit works in my own life. As a child growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I was taught that God had a plan for my life and I learned that lesson well. In my early years, I understood that to mean there was one career out there that was God’s plan. My task was to discover what it was and prepare myself for it. Four decades and three careers later, I still believe God has some things that I am uniquely called to do. That’s true for each of us. But my understanding of how that works is much more fluid these days. Sometimes I probably get it right by making good choices. Other times I don’t. So I imagine God, like a loving parent, watching me and thinking, “Mmmm…that’s not exactly what I had in mind for Cathy right now. But…well…it’s OK. I can work with this. Yep. I can work with this. Given where she is right now, let’s see what we can do next.”

I believe it’s the same for the Church. In the same way God doesn’t give up on people, I believe God hasn’t given up on the Church. As we celebrate its birthday in 2007, I have no doubt that our extravagantly loving Creator is often terribly disappointed in what passes for Christian behavior and in words that come out of the mouths of supposedly Christian people, especially some who have been in the news recently. But there is a Divine spark in each of us with incredible potential for good—that God-image we read about in the Creation story. I believe God sees that in us as individuals and also when we gather as the Church.

So that’s what I believe about this messy institution. I love it and I believe in it. I grieve for it and I’m embarrassed by it. But I also have hope for it. The Church provides a framework for our life with the Spirit and with each other. My spiritual director says that the central question in organizing groups of people of faith is this: “How does God want to be with us?” Then as we try to discover the answer to that question, we need to figure out what kind of container will hold God’s “being with us” the best. Like it or not, the Church is the container we have inherited, and it’s been a very mixed blessing. But it is only a container for the communion we have with God and with each other. As long as it holds that communion, I believe the Church still has the power to transform the world.