A recent New Yorker has a great cartoon. Two grizzled-looking crusaders bedecked in helmets, swords, boots, gloves, and mail, riding their steeds side by side, leaving a swath of pillage and burning destruction behind them. One says to the other, “why did you become a crusader? You don’t even go to church.” As we rally this Rally Day Sunday I’d like to rally us around three simple principles of why we come to church. Not like those crusaders to learn to pillage and burn rather first, to discover who God is; second to discover who I am; and third to discover who my neighbor is. Those are not the only questions in life – but they are at least among the top ten if not the top five. Answering them is a life-long process. Not something that can be exhausted in a fifteen-minute sermon. In fact, I would wager that if you kept a little journal each Sunday – or better each day – and recorded what insights you gained, what answers you found in response to those questions, you would find your journey of faith deepening, your sense of being an instrument of God increasing.

First, we go to church to discover who God is. Actually, we can discover God anywhere. But learning about God, as I say, is a life-long process. We discover God in the context of our relationship with God. We do not discover God like an abstract truth, as we might a mathematical formula, say. Rather we encounter God as a loving parent, a passionate advocate, a righteous judge, a patient lover. And because as long as human creation has been around God has been working with and through communities of people – not just individuals – we learn about God as we participate in such a community and experience God’s dealings with it. Therefore, we, the church, are seekers. People yearning to know and experience God in our personal lives and in our life together.

One of my favorite authors I encountered this summer is Anne Lamott. She is a Presbyterian layperson, a gifted writer and teacher of writing. I’d love to bring her to Westminster some day. We could learn a lot from Annie Lamott about these three questions: who is God, who am I, who is my neighbor. Lamott talks about when she discovered God for the first time. She always suspected God existed, probably could have expounded intelligently about God. But she did not have much of a personal relationship with God and so what ever she might have said about God would have been largely speculation. But one day all that changed. She was sitting in a college seminar. They were actually discussing that difficult, horrific story of God demanding of Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Which Abraham agrees to do. The class was considering Soren Kierkegaard’s version of the story. It contains his famous definition of faith as a leap. He tells it in the little book Fear and Trembling.

What happened to Anne Lamott sitting there under the fluorescent lights of that classroom in Bennington, Vermont is that she “crossed over” she says. “I held my breath for as long as I could then I crossed over. I don’t know how else to put it or how and why I actively made, if not a leap of faith, then a lurch of faith. “But I left class believing – accepting – that there is a God. I did not understand how this could have happened. It made no sense. It made no sense that what brought me to this conviction was the story of a God who would ask his beloved Abraham to sacrifice the child he loved more than life itself….It made no sense that Abraham could head for that sacrificial altar believing in the goodness of such a God…” It made no sense at all. But Lamott found herself crossing over. Lurching forward in her faith. That’s about as good an explanation as I have found to describe what discovering God is like. Not always graceful, and reasoned. Often clumsy, heart-felt, unexpected

The first reason we come to church is to discover who God is or that God is and so we are the fellowship of those who have crossed over concerning God. Or you could say we are the fellowship – some of us – of those preparing to cross over, or who would desperately like to cross over but for some reason we are able or not to identify are still resisting. Discovering who God is is like crossing over some deep divide and church with its hymns and prayers and soup kitchens and politics and stories about Jesus is,  for better or worse, as far as I know, the only place explicitly in the business of helping people to get from one side to the other.

Secondly, we come to church to discover who we are. Lamott says that after she crossed over, she felt changed and a little crazy. “I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing,” she says, “but now there were at least a few border pieces in place.” Some would say it is not until we have those few border pieces in place – knowing, believing, accepting there is a God – some would say not until then do we begin to get the big picture of who we are. There are so many conflicting definitions of who the world wants us to be that it is easy to be confused about who we are. One astute female observer told me after perusing the fall fashion catalogues that there are no trends or themes. Anything goes, she said, short, mid-length, long. Or in education some critics say the reason character education – teaching values and virtues as well as the three Rs – has gained such support is because the moral center of society has disappeared. We lost our bearings.

I love the story one black preacher tells about why the worship services in his congregation last so long. “It takes me about forty five minutes,” he says “before I can even get my congregation to the point where they can hear good news. They are out there in the world Monday through Friday – being told they are this, they are that. Often times rejected, beaten down. Forty-five minutes to just clear their heads. Decompress. Then we can start talking about who they really are – children of God, made in God’s image.”
I wonder if all people of faith are not at the point in our society today where we have to come to church to clear our heads, to decompress, to get away from the world so we can find out who we really are and then go back into the world.

Discovering who we are. With one budding teenage golfer and one befuddled middle-aged golfer in our house we picked up the “Tiger Woods Story” from Blockbuster the other day. There is a poignant and wonderful scene from Tiger’s first day of school. Already he was a golf celebrity – but amazingly not a braggy, show-offy kid. Pretty mild-mannered and normal. Anyway, during recess little Tiger was lured to a remote corner of the schoolyard by some of the older white boys in the school, tied to a tree and pummeled with rocks. We don’t hear a lot about it but racism has followed Tiger throughout his middle-class upbringing, junior USGA participation, Stanford career and, of course, on the PGA tour today as well. When Earl Woods came home from work that day his wife was in tears. She told him what happened. Earl then went into the little guy’s bedroom, wrapped his arms around him, plunked down on the bed and told the boy no matter what names anyone called him or mean things they did to him, he was Tiger Woods and could be and do anything he strove for.

That is the second reason we come to church. Sometimes we get banged-up and bruised by the world either because that’s the way the world is, or because frankly that’s the way we are, bringing it on ourselves like that profligate, prodigal son. And church is like coming home. God wraps his arms around us like a loving parent and tells us that no matter what anyone else says or does to us and no matter what stupid things we may say or do, we are not to forget that we are God’s children, made in God’s image. Abundant life and wholeness await us. That’s who we are and we come to church to find out.

The third reason we come to church is to discover who our neighbor is. The stories today from James and Mark put it clearly – God (and finally in today’s reading) Jesus do not play favorites, neither should we. Our neighbor is the one different from and unlike us – the one who is the object of God’s love and, therefore, our concern. This is not to say that fellow Republicans or Democrats, ethnic brothers and sisters, Sabres fans, golf pals and bridge partners are not your neighbors. It does mean though that you cannot ignore anyone; especially those who make you want to leave the room or in your mind punch them in the nose. The ones, for example, who haven’t washed in a few days, or who will vote for Pat Buchanan in the coming election.

There is radical democracy here. No class or race or category of people is to be favored by the church. All are loved by God – from KKK members to Rush Limbaugh listeners to anti-abortion or pro-choice – depending on your position – demonstrators. This is radical stuff. The essence of liberation theology. It explodes any group’s attempt to use spiritual favoritism and or pecking-orders. Martin Luther mistakingly called James the epistle of straw. Far from it. When he is talking about the issue of diversity and inclusion James is dressed in combat fatigues, grenade in hand, waiting to pull the pin to take down the infrastructure of old-boy networks, bigotry, and racism – all the things that narrow our understanding of who our neighbor is.

But sometimes learning who our neighbor is and reaching out to him or her is not all that hard. Sometimes, if you think cooperation instead of competition, friend instead of enemy, seeing and serving our neighbor outside our cozy coffee clutches and cocktail circles is quite possible and even fun. I heard a story recently about the father of a boy who suffers from a physical disability. The boy is enrolled in a special school in Brooklyn and the father was speaking at a dinner thanking the school staff and teachers for their ministry. “I believe,” the father said, “that everything God does is done with perfection. I believe that when God brings a child such as my son into the world, the perfection God seeks is the way people react to this child.”

He then told how one recent Saturday he and his son were walking through a park where a softball game was being played. The little boy asked his father, “do you think they will let me play?” The father knew his son was not athletic, had very little ability to play any sport but that if he was welcomed into that game it would give him a sense of belonging. The father asked one of the boys in the field if his son could play. He looked to his teammates for guidance. One of them said, “we’re losing by six runs and it’s bottom of the 8th sure, he can play.” The little guy was given a glove, put in the outfield, then came in to bat with his team for the last inning. The baseball gods stepped in. The little boy’s team filled the bases. When he came to the plate with two outs he was the winning run. The pitcher stepped closer. Lobbed a few pitches. The boy was hopeless. So one of his teammates stepped behind him, held the bat with him. Together they hit the next pitch. An easy grounder back to the pitcher. But the pitcher, who could have ended the game then, saw his opportunity. He threw the ball past the first baseman. The crowd yelled. The little boy ran to first, then second. The throw to second was accidentally on purpose wild. The little guy was rounding the bases heading home. Boys from both teams were yelling, “Run, Sasha, run!” When he crossed home all 18 kids from both teams were there to lift him like a hero on their shoulders. “That,” said Sasha’s father, “is God’s perfection.”

The third reason we come to church is to discover who our neighbor is. I wonder how many Sasha’s there are in this community whom God is hoping – like that father – we will invite to play with us. Because of their skin color or income bracket or sexual orientation there are lots of places I our society they aren’t welcome. So God expects us to invite them to join the game then to play in such a way that no one is left out. Who is God? Who am I? Who is my neighbor? We come to church to ask those questions then to let God transform us to live the answers and put the scattered jigsaw pieces of our lives back together.

Amen.