Reverend Ian Doescher

The Second Sunday of Lent

I reserve the right for my sermons occasionally to have nothing to do with my sermon title.  I wrote my sermon title for this week about a month ago, and I promise my sermon today is going to have nothing to do with it.  (Although as my dad pointed out to me this week after driving by and seeing our sign, this week’s title might have attracted people out of sheer curiosity.)

Let me tell you a story, and you see if it sounds familiar.  There is a church in northeast Portland that took a leap not so long ago and hired a new pastor to try and turn the church’s decline around.  The church, which for decades had a high membership, was struggling to see the future as the membership grew older and fewer of their children or their children’s children remained.  Although the church had the feeling of being a strong, well-connected family, they were also aware that they had come to be out of step with the surrounding neighborhood and the cultural changes that affected Christianity in the last twenty years.  They hoped their new pastor might provide some direction.

Eastminster Presbyterian Church out on 126th and Halsey has been through three years of redevelopment, three years of studying their neighborhood’s demographics, changing their worship style, hiring a new music director and purchasing a bright street sign that has become well-known to anyone who drives down Halsey regularly.  For three years they studied the changes taking place in mainline Christianity, how the old model of church is starting to fail and a new but undefined model is starting to take its place.  They made changes in hopes of attracting new life into the congregation, and found after a year of doing so that their numbers had not grown significantly, even with a full-time pastor.  In November, Eastminster entered three months of prayerful discernment about what to do next—would the church close, would it become something new, would it go on with businesses as usual?  Intentional conversations were held with each member of the congregation, so everyone could have their say about what should happen next at the church.  Two Sundays ago, February 14, the three months of discernment came to an end, and the church’s session and their pastor Brian Heron presented their findings to the church.

What does it mean to be in covenant relationship?  In today’s Old Testament reading, which Darlene read for us, God makes a covenant with Abraham.  The covenant is a promise: a promise that although Abraham and his wife Sarah are currently childless, they will reproduce and Abraham’s offspring will one day be more numerous than the sand on the beach or the stars in the sky: “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.”  Then God said to Abram, “So shall your offspring be.”  And then “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”  God gives Abraham a promise, and Abraham believes God.  The covenant is as simple as that, even though the evidence of the promise is still in short supply.  Sarah and Abraham remain childless, an attempt to extend Abraham’s line through their servant Hagar will end in jealousy and exile, and once the couple is finally granted a son of their own, God will order Abraham to sacrifice the child to test Abraham’s obedience to the divine promise.  The covenant made in Genesis 15 turns out to be a fragile thing, but also an enduring thing.  It endures the Israelites’ oppression in Egypt and their escape to Canaan, it survives a monarchy established by the people but rejected by God, it survives exile and abandonment, it survives one historical tragedy after another that befalls the ancestors of Abraham.  And still today, those ancestors look to this covenant with God and understand themselves to be God’s chosen people, people of the covenant.

At the congregational meeting Eastminster held on February 14, their pastor Brian and the session presented the congregation with a three-page list of findings based on the years of self-study and progress they had made together, and the three months of intentional discernment about the future the church had engaged in.  The first page or so is a list of twelve observations Brian and the session made from listening to the people.  The first observation is this: “The strongest and clearest message from the congregation was, ‘We don’t want to close!’”  The observations go on from there to talk about how currently about a dozen people are carrying the weight of the congregation’s responsibility, while at the same time the church has limited energy because everyone has given so much to the church and feels worn out.  There is willingness among church members to merge with another church, but only if the other church agrees to meet on Eastminster’s property.  Finally, the observations also analyze how the church’s efforts at redevelopment have gone: two of these observations say “lack of intergenerational representation in the church makes it extremely difficult to attract people 30 to 40 years younger,” and “the level of change required may eventually break the spirit of Eastminster.”  In other words, there is a realization that the surrounding community and particularly its younger people aren’t attracted to the church, and a complementary realization that the church can’t change enough to make itself attractive.  These observations are all sober realizations that the congregation of Eastminster has made about its future, and it paints a picture that, while not hopeless, certainly presents a challenge.

I read somewhere recently that the Bible says 365 times some version of the words “Be not afraid”—one for every day of the year.  It is one of the central messages of our religion, and perhaps the phrase that repeats more often than any other in the Bible.  Be not afraid.  Psalm 27, which we read together a few minutes ago, is a classic example of such texts.  “The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?... Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” Jennifer and I were talking this past week about what a simple, yet totally radical and profound message this is: “Be not afraid.”  What would it be like to live by the words “be not afraid”?  How would your existence be different if you could trust that you never had a reason to be afraid?  To not fear sadness, or pain, or even death?  Be not afraid—the Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?

On Sunday the 14th, Eastminster decided to be not afraid.  In the words of poet Dylan Thomas, they have decided not to go gentle into that goodnight, but rather to rage, rage against the dying of the light.  Eastminster has made a decision about its future, a decision not to close, but also a decision to let go and not keep trying to redevelop their church as they have been for the last three years.  Instead of redevelopment, Eastminster is looking at the prospects for a new church development.  They had a choice to make: they could keep their pastor on at half-time for another four years or so, and make it just that long before they folded.  But to the people at Eastminster, that felt like failure, like a slow and painful demise.  Instead, they decided to keep Brian on full-time, maybe only for another two years, but to let him spend half of his time in those two years developing a new church on the Eastminster grounds, a new church that will be the existing congregation’s legacy.  A new church that will continue carrying the gospel to Eastminster’s corner of Parkrose.  A new church that may look nothing like the current congregation, but that will serve the neighborhood and the surrounding city in a freshly relevant way.  In the end, Eastminster is choosing to trust God’s covenant with all of God’s followers, and to be not afraid.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus has a run-in with the Pharisees as he often does, and this one gets nasty.  “At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, ‘Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.’  He replied, ‘Go tell that fox, “I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.” In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!’”  And then Jesus laments for Jerusalem, both proclaiming its faults and expressing a deep wish for it: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Look, your house is left to you desolate.  I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”  Jesus mourns for the city that, particularly in the gospel of Luke, represents his destiny.  One of the overarching themes of the gospel of Luke is Jesus’ journey into Jerusalem—the action is all about Jesus coming into Jerusalem.  Then, in the book of Acts, written by the same author, the story of the early church starts in Jerusalem and moves outward, beyond Jerusalem to the edges of the known world.  So when Jesus mourns over Jerusalem in today’s passage, he is expressing his desire to see this city that means so much to him and his people become a place where his message can be heard, even though he recognizes that Jerusalem is a place that “kill[s] the prophets.”

A few weeks ago, on its impressive reader board, Eastminster’s sermon title for the week was “A Vision for East Portland.”  Through Brian’s vision and the session’s leadership, Eastminster has become very concerned about how it can be a force for Christian good not just in general, but within its city as well.  One of the ideas for Eastminster’s new church development is to build something that might be called Eastminster Village, a combination community center, worship space and maybe even local eatery where people can come and be together.  If you know Parkrose, you know that nothing like that exists out there.  Eastminster is looking for ways to serve its community, to make Portland part of its story as surely as Jerusalem is part of Jesus’.

So why am I talking about Eastminster so much today?  Though I think our situation at Calvary is remarkably similar to Eastminster’s, I also think each church is its own place and has its own story to tell.  In other words, Eastminster’s path won’t necessarily be Calvary’s.  But any time a Presbyterian church in northeast Portland goes through something like what Eastminster has been through, it behooves us to stand up, take notice, and honor the thought and faithfulness and hope and loss that has gone into their decisions.

What do we believe here at Calvary?  Do we believe that God has made a covenant with us, that God’s covenant extends to this congregation?  Is this is a place where we can hear the words “Be not afraid,” understand their importance and try to live as though we believe them?  Do we, like Jesus, call out, “Portland, Portland, how often we have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings…”  What does Eastminster’s story have to tell us about our own?  First and foremost, it tells us that church is about more than a particular congregation and its future.  Fundamentally, church is about serving God and worshiping God in our community, not so much about whether this church reclaims what it had in the past or whether its legacy gets passed to a new generation.  Church is about trusting God’s covenant enough to say that we will serve this city and live out the gospel and if people come, they come.  And if they don’t, still we have lived by the words “Be not afraid.”  Eastminster has given us—and by “us” I mean every church in northeast Portland—given us a gift to see what it means to be a church and be faithful to a church’s calling.  May we, like that faithful community in Parkrose, prayerfully consider our future and make of it what God wills it to be.  Amen.