I lack the patience and the
commitment to read any newspaper or magazine cover to cover, but I do
scan headlines and read what looks interesting.  Two weeks ago there
was an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled, “The Art of
Choosing What to Do With Your Life” which caught my attention.  It
was a plea for liberal arts education to include in their curriculum
“initiating students into a culture of rational reflection on how
to live”.¹
I found myself both emphatically agreeing with their ideas about
helping people make conscious decisions about how they wanted to live
their lives, and also getting a little bit offended at the idea that
this is particularly the role of education and not faith.  But, once
I became aware of my sense of being offended, I realized that I’m
actually all for sharing and not being possessive over meaning
making.  Phew.

Also,
as I continued to read, I found myself laughing that the ways they
are teaching their students about building a meaningful life is by
using one of the greatest teachers of the Christian tradition.  This
really isn’t a competition!  They said:

Aquinas
usefully suggests that the ultimate objects of human longing can be
sorted into only eight enduring categories. If we want to understand
where we’re headed, we should ask ourselves these questions: Am I
interested in this opportunity because it leads to wealth? Or am I
aiming at praise and admiration? Do I want enduring glory? Or power —
to “make an impact”? Is my goal to maximize my pleasures? Do I
seek health? Do I seek some “good of the soul,” such as knowledge
or virtue? Or is my ultimate longing to come face-to-face with the
divine?²

The
authors point out that some of those first options (wealth, praise)
don’t work out to bring a satisfying life.  Now, having started
reading that article with both interest and caution, I came around to
thinking that it was a useful article for church too!

Because,
it occurred to me, those are valid questions for us too.  Both
individually and collectively, but today I’m talking about
collectively.

“The
Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life as a Church”

Thinking
that way,  we can eliminate some of the options.  We are not a church
so we can build wealth, be praised, gain glory, or simply maximize
pleasure.  Occasionally I think we do want some power so we can make
an impact, but that isn’t an end goal in itself, and I think we know
that.  I sometimes note that being part of a community is good for
one’s health, and community connections are good for community
health, but that too is an aside and not a primary goal.  

Which
is to say, that I think only the last two questions are likely to
have significant resonance:  Do we seek some ‘good of the soul’ such
as knowledge or virtue?  Or, do we primarily seek to connect people
to the Divine?  I’d love to hear your answers and reflections on
this.  I’m going to offer my best guess as to this community’s
answer, but please note I’m ALSO wanting to hear what you think!

The
thing is, that I don’t think every church has the same reason for
existing.  And I suspect our reasons may be quite different from the
norm.  That is, I think many churches exist to make more Christians –
as an end goal in itself, which for them is related to keeping people
out of hell.  This may be simply about saying a proscribed set of
words, or may be about living a particular set of rules, but avoiding
hell is the end game.  Other churches exist, I think, to praise God.
This strikes me as a far more worthy use of time and energy, but, if
I’m honest, not the one that resonates here.  (OK, I do think it is
better, but I also am not convinced it is a sufficient end it
itself.)

Around
here we most often talk about our goal as “building the kindom of
God,” and I suspect that falls most directly under seeking good of
the soul, with an awareness that connecting to the Divine is quite
important for building up the desire and capacity to build the
kindom.  

Lee
Tupper wrote convincingly that the point of the church is to
“optimize prime values.”  I’d take that to be another way of
saying the thing about good for the soul.  Lee put it this way:

A
desirable function for the church is to aid in shaping personal value
systems so that they are consistent with prime values.  The ultimate
objective of this process is maximizing the degree to which the human
system evolves to ever-higher levels. … The function of the church
here is a crucial one.  It
involves three major facets – the first is that of the promotion of
the idea that a concern with this subject is important,  the second
is to help in the continued educational process necessary to
understand its implication and the third is to aid people in carrying
out the activities necessary to achieve these objectives.”³

Lee
was humble about naming the prime values themselves, but took as
examples, love and justice which I’m entirely convinced are prime
values as well.  Love and justice, and I’m pretty sure compassion
too, are means toward the kindom.  

It
turns out that this wondering about why we exist as a church and what
we think we are aiming to do matters… say, rather a lot.  It
impacts everything about what we do and how we make decisions, who we
are and who we seek to become.  It impacts what we are trying to do
when we worship, what I am trying to do when I preach, how we related
to our communities and neighbors, what we prioritize, and how we
decide what to let go of.   I think it also relates to how we
experience and understand God and God’s wishes for us and our
communities and society.  

The
Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life as a Church matters quite a
lot.

I
think this is obvious, but just to be sure, let’s look at an example.
If the primary goal of a church is to save people from going to hell
by having them profess a faith in Jesus, it would make sense that
they’d put a lot of energy into evangelism, and teaching effective
evangelism, and that worship would be both focused on emphasizing how
good it is to believe in Jesus and how bad it is in afterlife if one
doesn’t.  Right?  It all follows.

However,
“building the kindom of God” is a really multifaceted thing.  It
is not as well defined as a goal as getting people to speak some
particular phrase.  Even as we get clearer that building the kindom
is related to optimizing prime values, and that that means “the
first is that of the promotion of the idea that a concern with this
subject is important,  the second is to help in the continued
educational process necessary to to understand its implication and
the third is to aid people in carrying out the activities necessary
to achieve these objectives,”
and even if we took as the three prime values love, justice, and
compassion – we are still dealing with multifaceted ways forward.  

How
does one build up love?  Is it best to start with one’s self and
build up self compassion?  Is it best to deepen relationships with
loved ones, and build up skills in good listening and communication?
Is it best to seek out new relationships particularly with people who
are different -and if so, people who are different HERE, or people
who are different in another part of the country or world?  Or, do we
best build up love by savoring the love of God and letting it
infiltrate our lives?  

You
see how it isn’t entirely clear?  

This
has been a struggle for this church for decades at least, a desire
for better clarity of purpose and a reality that it is really
complicated.  But, I’d like to point something out that maybe hasn’t
been a sufficient part of this conversation.  

What
this church has been doing for these decades has WORKED.  How do I
know?  Because this church is full of people of mature, thoughtful,
careful, LOVING, JUSTICE-SEEKING, COMPASSIONATE faith.  Both those of
you who have been here all along and those of you who arrived here
and discovered it fit who you are are living proof that something
here is working.  People are becoming more loving, more
justice-oriented, more compassionate in their time  here.  These are
shared values.  These are lived values.  When we, as a church, make
decisions, these are inherently in the conversations, and we end up
discussing how to best live them out.

I
have seen very few other faith communities that so effectively build
up people of faith in these ways.  I admit to being a little confused
as to how it happens, because we definitely don’t have a linear
educational paradigm to develop it, but something here WORKS.  

The
kindom of God is being built by this community and by the people of
this community in the places they go.  We’re doing the stuff we want
to do!  

We’re
living our values!  We’re working with God!  We’re existing in a way
we care about!

THIS
IS AWESOME – and we should probably celebrate it more.

Those
dry cisterns of Jeremiah – those aren’t ours! We’re in the fountain
of living water.  Those exclusivist banquets that poor people can’t
attend because they can’t reciprocate?  Those aren’t ours.  We are
intentionally offering banquets for those who aren’t going to invite
us back.  

A
commentator on Luke said, “Exclusive fellowship required an
exclusive table, while inclusive fellowship required an inclusive
one.⁴”
That was beautifully said, and seems to name another prime value
around here: inclusion.  We often ask ourselves about what inclusion
looks like and how to create intersectional inclusion.  

Dear
ones, there are a lot of leaking, empty cisterns out there.  I’d lump
all of the competitive values of the world into those.   But God is
faithful.  There are a lot of ways to be church, and I’m not sure
ours is the easiest, but it is a really great one, and it is WORKING.
We’re transforming each other into more loving, more just, more
compassionate, more inclusive beings and taking those values and
skills into the world.  Or maybe we’re just making space together for
God to do the changing – I really don’t know how it happens.  

We
are people of an inclusive fellowship, of taking the bottom seat, of
inviting everyone to the banquet.  And it matters.  And it is going
to keep mattering.  And maybe, just maybe, the fact that it isn’t
always clear is part of how we have developed some skills at it –
we’ve had to struggle and that’s helped us grow.  Thanks be to God.
Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

August 28, 2022

1  Benjamin
Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, “The Art of Choosing What to Do
With Your Life” in the New York Times, August 15, 2022.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/opinion/college-students-happiness-liberal-arts.html,
accessed again 8/25/2022

2  Ibid.

3  L.C.
Tupper “Eschatology and Related Matters” Nov. 20, 1976.

4  Bruce
J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the
Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Meals”.