SERMON SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER YEAR B THE CHURCH GETS A BAD RAP IN RAP ACTS 1:15-17, / MAY 13, 2018

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1 SERMON SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER YEAR B THE CHURCH GETS A BAD RAP IN RAP ACTS 1:15-17, / MAY 13, 2018 Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. A few years ago, a slickly produced video made by a 22-year-old rap artist went super-viral on YouTube 14 million hits in eight days. The young rapper s name is Jeff Bethke. His hit video was entitled, Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus. It s a long, rhyming poem in a type of rap style. The poem is deeply faithful in its devotion to Jesus Christ; it s also a scathing assault on institutional Christianity. Bethke gives the church a bad rap in rap. Let me share with you a few snippets to give you a taste. Don t worry I m not going to attempt to rap! Here are the snippets: What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion... I mean, if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars... They can t fix their problems, and so they mask it / not realizing religion s like spraying perfume on a casket. It s like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey. Fourteen million hits in a week is huge. Like it or not, Jeff Bethke and Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus hit home with a lot of people. Its popularity bears witness to the virulent strain of anti-institutionalism in our culture. 1

2 A whole lot of people these days don t like institutions. They don t trust government institutions; they don t like corporate institutions; they don t trust church institutions. The story from the book of Acts that Laurie read earlier quite possibly marks the very moment the church became an institution. It s a few weeks after Easter. The eleven disciples minus Judas the betrayer had gone to Galilee right after Jesus resurrection. Now they re back in Jerusalem and ready to do whatever comes next. But there s a problem, an institutional problem. There should be twelve disciples. There had been twelve tribes of Israel; Jesus had chosen twelve disciples symbolizing the reconstitution of Israel through him as the Messiah. Twelve is the number. Without Judas, they re one short. So, they hold the very first church committee meeting to select a replacement for Judas. No voting in this era of church life; they cast lots. Those competing for the position are: Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. The lot falls to Matthias. Good thing as someone with three names would make the church secretary go crazy preparing minutes! Incidentally, this is the first and the last time we ever hear of Matthias and it is the first time and the last time we ever hear of Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus. The committee meeting was the first step in a 2,000-year process by which a little band of Jesus followers, loosely organized if organized at all, became the diverse, global, holy and sometimes unholy institution called the church. The institutional church ultimately acquired all the 2

3 trappings of any institution: offices and officers, committees and councils, rules, politics, and real estate the whole nine yards that so angered 22- year-old Christian rapper, Jeff Bethke. It s not hard to guess where I m going to come down in this debate. I m a part of the institution Augustine United Church within the United Church of Canada. As a minister, I ve totally bought into it. I work for it. It pays my salary. I spend hours in its meetings. I fuss with the rules. Unlike Jeff Bethke, I love it - well, mostly, most of the time, I love it. Like anything made up of actual human beings, the church has its blemishes. Sometimes it frustrates me mightily. Sometimes I get angry at it. But I would defend the institutional church with all my being. My defense of the church, what Bethke calls religion is simple enough. I am going to offer you three reasons why the institutional church matters. They re all related, but I ll offer them one at a time: My first and rather obvious point in defense of the church is to remember we are created for relationship; indeed our full humanity is formed in relationship. We who would follow Jesus Christ do not do so in some sort of splendid isolation; we do so in that network of relationships called church. Human relationships aren t necessarily institutions of course. But here s the inescapable reality networks of human relationships inevitably become institutions whenever they grow and succeed. Jesus handful of followers began to become an institution sometime in the first century simply because their number had grown so spectacularly. With twelve members, 3

4 you don t need much in the way of institution. With thousands of members spread across the Roman Empire, you need to get organized. So, these two things are true about church. First, we who would follow Jesus Christ do it best and most happily when we do it together, in relationships that nurture and discipline each other. We need each other to become all that Christ calls us to be. We re not isolated islands of faith, to paraphrase the poet John Donne, but pieces of the continent of faith that is the church. Second, as soon as any continent of relationships grows to more than two or three gathered together, it needs structures of leadership and organization, rules and standards all the accoutrements of institution. As frustrating as this can be at times, they are mostly a blessing. And now I turn to the third thing in my defense of the institutional church. You ve heard the children s poem: the church is not a building; the church is not a steeple; the church is not a resting place; the church is a people. People make up the church. And what kind of people make up the church? Well, I think this story of the first church committee meeting says something about that. We hear nothing more of Matthias after he was chosen to replace Judas as the twelfth disciple. And we don t hear anything more of Justus. We know they must have been well respected and well known to have been chosen to be considered for this important position in the early church. But what about afterward? Does the silence about these two signify that they didn t do anything of value in the life and work of the church later on? I don t think it does. 4

5 Oh, there are legends about Matthias, legends written much later. They say that he preached the gospel in Judea and then Ethiopia, where he was crucified; or that he was stoned and beheaded at Jerusalem; or that he went to minister to a city of cannibals somewhere, was cast into prison, and was rescued by his fellow apostle Andrew. Scholars tell us that none of these legends have any historical basis, and that all we know for sure is what we have just read from Acts. So, let s review what we do know: Matthias gave up a large portion of his life to follow Jesus. He was with Jesus in his ministry and encountered the risen Christ. He was chosen by the early church to replace Judas and would have been among those who received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. That, in itself, sounds like a pretty remarkable life. We don t need to fill in any more details than that. So what relevance does all of this have for us today? We remember the names and deeds of folks like Peter, John, Paul, Martin Luther, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Bishop Tutu. These are famous Christians. But the institution we call church is not just these people. The church is not made up of famous Christians. The church is millions upon millions of individuals, known in most cases only to their families and friends and, of course, God. If all we have are the big names, then we are in big trouble. The church needs to be made up of ordinary people, and that means followers as well as leaders. I think that Matthias, and Justus for that matter, can serve as a representative figure for all of the people that make up the church, in every 5

6 age, about whom we know almost nothing. They lived their lives their own way, doing their own thing. Like Matthias and Justus, these people were found, by their peers and by their God, to be good and true followers of Christ. Their words and deeds are forgotten now. But in their own way, most of them made their corner of the world a bit better. The largest part of the church is made up of people like this. In fact, if you look around right now go ahead; look around we ll notice that we are surrounded by people like that. Not many of us will become another Peter, or another Paul, or another Luther, or another Mother Teresa. But there is nothing wrong with that! The famous Christians are not the only ones God has called; there is a call for each one of us. We may be called to enter the ministry. We may be called to teach Sunday school, to serve on a committee or task group, to be a leader, to sing in the choir, type and prepare Sunday bulletins, keep the congregation s financial records, organize a fundraiser. We may be called to drive someone to worship, or to the doctor s, or to the store. We may be called to phone or visit a sick member, or drop in to see a shut-in. God s call may not lead to fame or fortune. God s call may not take us anywhere special. God s call may be telling us to do something that seems very unimportant. But we are the church, all of us, and it takes a lot of people, called to do a lot of things, including building, maintaining and being an institution, to make up the church. 6

7 I believe that the life of Matthias was a fairly normal Christian life; a human life changed by contact with Jesus; a life lived as a witness to the life and way of Jesus; a life lived in response to God s call. Matthias story is very much like our own story. Oh, I know, we haven t had a chance to meet Jesus face-to-face as he did, but, like Matthias, we are called to live a life in Christ s service. When we are gone, people may or may not remember what we did or what we said, but the evidence of what we did and what we said will still be here, in a world that is a little bit brighter than it was when we arrived. Jeff Bethke, not too long after his rap-like tirade against the church, seems to have experienced a change of heart. Several months later, in a couple of on-line magazine interviews, he said, God has been working with me on loving Jesus and loving his church... It s really cool for my generation to say, I love Jesus but hate the church. But that s not honouring God, because the church is God s number one. The church is plan A ; there is no plan B. Then he added, The church is messy, the church fails, but we are all covered with grace... We are not perfect, but we know a perfect God. Thanks be to God for the gift of the church, the gift of one another for one another and for the gift of the Spirit, as we strive faithfully, by God s grace, to be the church of Jesus Christ in, and for, the world. Amen. Major Sources: Jesus Without Church? by Michael L. Lindvall Presbyterian Church in the City of New York. May 20,

8 And the Lot Fell on Matthias by The Rev. W. Alex Bisset in Preaching Word & Witness, Vol. 09:3 (Year B), pp Editor: Paul Scott Wilson. Liturgical Publications Inc. New Berlin WI

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