I've given many tours to people who come to St. Andrew's. I'm proud of our building, so I show people around. Folks come for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they come looking for a church home, sometimes they are just curious, sometimes I'm just unabashedly Episcopalian, so I'll take a visitor by the hand and make them follow me around. People have one of two observations. Either they also think we have a warm and beautiful sanctuary and they tell me so, or they keep quiet and I know they prefer a more traditional structure.
But you all know as well as I do that church is not about the building. We may be unabashedly proud of our building, but we know at the same time that church is something else. Church is God's work in the world, church is people who profess God's love for them and for all, church is body and bread, blood and wine, church is forgiveness and reconciliation, church is people who agree and disagree with each other, church is messy and beautiful. Church is all of the above.
And it is these things that we hear about in Luke and in Isaiah today. Luke writes, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." And from Isaiah, "For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth, the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind." Church without a building. Who are we then?
We need to remember that this good news was told after the events of Jesus' life and death. The events are already known to the author, they tell of what happened, not of what will happen. The temple in Jerusalem which was the place where God lived, was destroyed. Not one stone was left upon another. So in the story, the people are asking Jesus, what does this mean? What does it mean to not have a place for God to live and a place in which to worship God? The destruction of the temple was life changing for the Jews, but Jesus in this story, is reassuring them that all will be well, do not be afraid. As it is written in Isaiah, which Jesus knows well, something new is happening, and it is happening in the person of Jesus.
We live in that place as well. Here is our church building, and we love it and take care of it and it is beautiful. Humans do this over and over. We erect a beautiful building, and eventually it is the building that becomes important, and we become afraid of losing it. And our focus shifts from doing the work of reconciliation and healing that God calls us to, to keeping the institution alive, we become afraid of dieing.
But God calls us to live, God calls us to love, God calls us as agents of resurrection. The new heavens and the new earth are being created right now, and we are agents of that new creation. We have a part to play. Our job is to bring the love that wins to the world so that the world will know God's love and be transformed. As we do that, the world turns, the world turns toward love and away from hate, the world turns toward wholeness and away from fracture and fragment.
It's messy though, it's not this or that, one or the other, black or white, good or bad. Just like it's not only about heaven or hell at the end of time. It's about living fully and completely as God's new creation right here, today. And that is not clear or certain. God reveals Godself on the path we are on, and it is our job to pay attention, and to help the one who is walking next to us, to give them our coat if they need it, to share our food. We will fall down, every one of us. Whether it's because we turn our ankle, wear ourselves out, or goof around too much, we will fall down. It is those who accompany us on the journey, our church, who help raise us up again, and show us the way forward. How we are with one another on the road matters. How we respond to the challenge and joy of the journey matters. That we share the challenge and joy of the journey matters.
God is at work with us. God is already about healing and reconciliation that changes the world. We respond to that work by giving of ourselves. We give our love, our forgiveness, our mercy and our compassion. When we are members of a church, we give of our treasure as well, because that is what we must do, not because of what we get out of it. Giving because of what we get out of it makes it a transaction, not a relationship. Our relationship with God, with one another, and with this church is not about the exchange of a commodity, it is not transactional. Giving, being a steward of God's creation and all of God's abundance, is who we are and what we do. Giving our love, our care, and some or even all of what we have is what we must do in response to God's amazing and abundant love for us. We don't give because we have to pay the heat, paying for the heat is good but it is not the reason. The reason is love, God's love for us and our love for others.
Yesterday, Amber, David, Curtis, and I, helped by Tim, Kaitlyn and Kiara, with food provided by the Donhisers, and a financial donation from another wonderful family, had a group of eleven children at Sonshine Saturday. We listened to the story of Noah's Ark, and God's dream for us, we did some great crafts that helped us remember those stories, we worshipped God and had communion together, we sang songs and we even got to play the bells under Curtis' instruction, and we had lunch. Together, we did the work that God calls us to do, and we are changed in the doing.
We are living the reality of the new heavens and the new earth. We are living the reality that God loves us and all of creation so much, God walks with us in this life making us new, transforming our sadness into joy, our pain into hope, our death into life. Amen.
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