5/12/20
I grew up about five miles from my first cousins, my father’s brother’s family; and we were very close, we spent a lot of time together. When I was 15, my oldest cousin married a young woman who, over time, became a mild irritation to everyone in the family: it seemed like she never really listened to what anyone else was saying, and she usually didn’t have much to say that anyone else was interested in. I was no different than anyone else in the family, but I think now we just made her so self-conscious she could never relax and be herself. Eventually they divorced; but, years later, my father told me that he had been sitting next to her at one Christmas dinner (a duty that everyone dreaded annually, but you knew your turn was going to come up sooner or later) and, completely out of the blue, a propos of nothing, she had said, Uncle Kay, why do you go to church?
My father was a lifelong churchgoer, and told me this story as just one more example of what an oddball she was, but of course it’s not an oddball question at all, it’s one that we should make a point of asking ourselves every now and then: Why do I go to church? And in these times, when we’re not meeting together in our church building, what is church? What is it that we do here?
Well, of course, there are many specific answers to these questions. We worship God, in many different ways; we give thanks; we pray for others, and for ourselves; we confess our sins, we try to be honest with God about what’s really going on with us; and so on.. But there are also broad, overarching ways to answer the question; and one of them occurred to me to talk about today because a couple of things. The first is something in one of the Scripture readings we just heard, which I’ll get back to.
The second is something I read in a book a while back, called Flash Boys, by a financial journalist named Michael Lewis. It’s about a discovery that was made several years ago by a small team of people, at a bank in New York City. It’s complicated, but just very briefly to summarize, they found that traders at an investment firm were using high-speed computers and complex software to steal money from trades being made on the stock market. They had found a way to get an advance peek (just a second) at trading orders and shaving off for themselves just a penny or two, so nobody noticed, but it was from billions of transactions, so it added up to a lot of money.
And the team that was investigating this also discovered that, over a couple of years, people at a few other financial institutions had stumbled onto this racket; but rather than blow the whistle on these people, they joined them, they started doing the same thing.
The point of the story (at least for me) was contained in two sentences, buried in the middle: Lewis wrote: “The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became.” Now, it’s certainly not a startling revelation that there’s greed in the financial world, and that people will do dishonest things to make money. But there’s something about this situation that I think the phrase “moral inertia” captures pretty well: it describes the mindset that holds, If I’m smart enough to understand something and you’re not, that’s not my problem. It’s your problem. You could call that survival of the fittest; but it’s also moral inertia – moral paralysis – and as Christians, we call it sinful. It’s willful ignorance of the communion in which God intends us all to be.
This is what can happen when we allow ourselves to be defined by the boundaries of whatever small world we choose to inhabit; and we each do inhabit a particular world, our family, our job, the path each of us chooses in life. The danger is when, on that path, we abandon our awareness of God’s creation, the wholeness that each of our particular worlds is rooted in, and gets its life from, and thereby is joined to all the others. So when someone else is being hurt, we’re all being hurt; and when someone else is feeling joy, we all share in that joy. It’s the way God created us; and it’s the root of the second Great Commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t, you’re not living in the real world: you’re perpetuating a false world.
The story Lewis tells is a specific example of that disconnect. It’s an extreme example, but we all experience it. We show it in our anger, in our impatience, in our selfishness; say, for instance, if we have an in-law who we think is a bore, and we don’t want to have to sit next to her at Christmas dinner; because we’re ignoring who she really is, her real life, and our chance to learn something new from her: like when she asks us why we go to church.
Sometimes it takes work to see all that. And there’s a verse in today’s reading from the first letter of Peter which points us that way. The author of this letter is writing to a very young church, in the first century, a group of people who have felt called to Jesus Christ, just like us; and what the letter tells these people to do is this:
“Come to him, a living stone, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”
“A living stone.” Both Old and New Testaments frequently use “stone” as an image of the presence of God. It represents permanence, absolute reliability, something you can stand on, that will always support you. Today’s passage from 1 Peter follows this invitation (“Come to him, a living stone”) with several quotations from Scripture, which have to do with stones, two of which speak specifically of a cornerstone, seen in this letter as a prophecy of Jesus Christ: from Isaiah: “See, I am laying in Zion…a cornerstone chosen and precious…”; and from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.”
Now, back then, when you built a building, the cornerstone was the very first stone put into place. So every other stone was set in reference to that first one. So the cornerstone determined the building’s orientation, the solidity of its foundation: everything that followed in the construction of the building was determined that first step.
This verse from 1 Peter asked those people then, and asks us now, to make Christ our cornerstone: that first stone of the spiritual house which each of us builds. Every single human being, in church or not, builds a house in life, one way or another. The question is, are we paying attention, when we build our house? Are we recognizing the life that is real? Do we build it for the life lived in communion, the life of love and peace and joy; the life God wants for all of us? Do we build our house on a living stone, from which life eternally opens out in front of us? That’s what we’re doing here. That’s why we come to church: wherever church is: where two or three of us are gathered together. Thanks be to God.