Loving When it Ain't Easy, by Dean J. Seal

A New Commandment.
You may or may not know this, but I am a fan of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s remembered as a social activist, the mouthpiece for the movement that ended legalized segregation in the United States. But sometimes people forget that the first title in his name was Reverend. He was a Minister of Jesus, and in that light he did not preach to conquer the enemy; he preached that “The most powerful force it the universe is love, because it is the only thing that turn an enemy into a friend.”
He had a few great little quips, one of which I’d like to share with you.“Jesus told us we must love our enemies. Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t say we have to like them. Because some of those folks are pretty unlikeable.” For Dr. King, this meant loving the racist. That’s pretty hard, harder than anything I have to do. But his point was that Jesus doesn’t ask us to do things that are easy. He’s asking us to love people we don’t like. At the same time, Jesus is not asking the impossible.
Here’s another thing you may not know: Dr. King’s original name was Michael; but he and his father decided to change their names to honor Martin Luther. Luther is seen by many as the founder of the Baptist Church, because of his emphasis on the freedom of the personal conscience. So Dr. King did that to honor the founder of the Lutheran Church; it would not hurt us to do something that honors Dr. King.
Northeast Community Lutheran Church is a church on the move. Like it or not. If you are a visitor today, or new to the congregation, I’ll give you a thumbnail sketch where we are. Three congregations could not make it on their own, and decided to merge. One minister retired, and we still have two. One building was sold, and we still have two. The congregation also decided to move into one building, on 13th St. Some work was evidently needed, with walls warping and chunks falling off. In doing a responsible overview of the entire building, it was discovered the main trusses, made of wood, had cracks in them. They might have been there for 20 years, and they might stay there for another 20. But no one in their right mind would use the space for gathering people under those trusses for Sunday, or any other day.
I firmly believe no one can predict the future; in fact, Jesus backs me up on this in Matthew 24: 35 “But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. ” All my experience says you don’t find out till you get there. So once we got there, we found out we could not stay.
Now we are faced with a great question: Where are we to build our church? What kind of building do we want to build it in? What exactly is the kind of congregation we want to be? That last question has to be answered first.
I’ve been in a similar situation before. When I was an intern, I worked for 9 months at a congregation that was made up of two merged congregations. They sold one building and used the income as an endowment to subsidize their new congregation. However, the minister in charge made a point of preaching only from the Bible. He had no interest in engaging the new world of information, in connecting with the youthful population in the neighborhood, in connecting to modern problems or new thinking or innovative theology. His hypothesis was that the church was the only place to teach the Bible, so the Bible should be the only thing the church would teach.
We don’t have ministers here who think that way, and thank God for that. But this failure to envision the future of the church, should be a lesson to any congregation looking to survive in a tough environment like we have today.
That congregation had no shortage of new visitors, but no one came back. The endowment shrank every year. Prospects faded, and last month they filed to close the church. Their deficit was never resolved, their vision of a church of the future never attempted.
I spoke about this with another minister of a successful Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis. His congregation had enough money to plant aa new congregation about 30 blocks east. He said it was controversial because the new spot was near three other Lutheran Churches that were all dying. Some of them thought he was poaching on their turf. But the new congregation was about being in a storefront church, no stained glass, no organ, blue jeans welcomed and relaxed atmosphere evident. The minister who sponsored the new church said “Those other congregations are committed to preserving the church they grew up in, and they would rather die than change.” Consequently, those congregations are all dying.
The struggle of every church, everywhere, is the tension between saving what we think is important, and changing what we believe is unnecessary. Every church, every denomination struggles with this. Twenty years ago, in the Presbyterian Church, USA, there was a movement to ordain women as ministers. Several dozen congregations broke off and became the Presbyterian Church of America. Now some congregations want to have the right to ordain gay people, and there is a movement of others to move out again. These struggles are not unusual. They are in every church, in every congregation. Only the details change.
This congregation has to make some decisions this month, and some of us aren’t ready for it. We’d like more time, we’d like more information, we’d like a chance to discuss it more thoroughly. I was not around here for the initial process of merging the three congregations, but I can empathize with you about being in this long drawn-out process that we all wish was over.
But keep in mind that when the congregations merged, not everyone came along. In the merging of churches, a friend of mine said, “50 plus 50 never equals 100.” In other words, it’s never the case that everyone agrees and moves in together.
And this is not a great time to be working over these ideas. It’s a hard ecomomic time, and the margin for error is thin. We are faced with a pair of hard problems too- we have a deficit, and we have to pick a building. Each building has good points and bad points, but they have to be seen in the light of the future.
Northeast Community Lutheran Church does not have to survive. It could vote to dissolve, like the church I interned at. There is no shortage of Lutheran Churches in Minneapolis, and no shortage of alternatives in Nordeast. If we are to survive as a congregation, it is because we have something special that gives us a reason to be.
I submit that we do have something special. I think this congregation has a special vibe. It has a mission to the neighborhood. For example, the food shelf came in when people were having trouble feeding their families even when they had jobs. Things have only gotten worse since then. And our commitment to the food shelf has only strengthened. The community meal is a part of that vision too. The original symbol for the church was not the cross- that came in with Constantine. Before that it was the fish, and that was because we met over meals, and we shared our food. It’s at the core of our tradition, and part of our mission: To serve.
I also am a fan of, and a participant in, the arts ministry outreach of this church. This neighborhood is crawling with artists; actors, sculptors, painters, musicians, writers. Low prices in housing makes life possible for artists, and artists can be a powerful force in strengthening and rehabilitating neighborhoods. If we are to connect people to our congregation, I believe art is an important and powerful means to make that connection. That’s why the church hired Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Bach to make beauty part of the life of the church,and they made stained glass windows to tell the story. It’s part of our mission: To Tell.
Finally, I feel a great vibe when I come in here to teach my one or two or four students in confirmation, and I see a dozen kids being taught to sing together and to do Bible stuff together. Bishop Hanson of the Minneapolis synod said, “Children aren’t the future of the church- they Are the church.” So kids like we have aren’t just something we have to take care of- they are the reason we are here. All religious traditions begin with this question: What are the things I want to pass on to my kids before I die?
So the future of this congregation will be forged by facing two questions. First, how can we make this a place where people with kids are going to come? We also have seniors to serve, and adults to educate, but that’s about the present. Our future is in building a home for families. A place where the kids are getting a feeling of a church community, while parents can have a quiet hour to think about their spirituality, before they have to go back to diapers and laundry and work. A place where kids get trained in on the ethical core of the faith, where the story of the Jews and the story of Jesus, our Messiah, are taught carefully and completely. A place where kids get the idea that the love of Jesus is something that fills us with joy. Again, part of our mission : to Tell.
The other determinate is in how well we work together in finishing this process. There are always going to be differences of opinion. There are probably going to be some people who decide that they don’t want to go along with whatever decision is made, and they decide to go elsewhere. 50 plus 50 never equals 100. No matter what the decision is, there are going to be people on the other side of the question. They’ll have to ask, should I stay or should I go?
The question that will determine the life or death of this congregation will be this: Will we love one another? Will we speak respectfully to people we disagree with? Will we approach the questions and answers with kindness, politeness and courtesy? When the vote is taken, and if we are on the side that does not prevail, are we going to try to carry through the commitment of this new congregation, to love, to serve and to tell? And if sme of us must part, can we do it respectfully and graciously?
Jesus does not ask us to like one another. Sometimes that is too hard. But we are to love one another, and that is not a request. It is a commandment. We are to love our enemy, even if we are enemies only in the process of deciding the future of this church. We are to love one another, even and especially when we don’t like one another. Jesus calls us to rise above our natural instincts, to put aside being mad with people we disagree with. If we cannot do that, what does that say about our faith? We are known by our fruit, says Jesus. Let us be faithful to that, so that we have a church we want to be a part of, no matter what building we are in. This congregation has a mission, to Love, to Serve and to Tell. In the conversations we have, in the decisions we make, let us first follow the New Commandment, to love each other, as Jesus loves us.
Amen.