Broken church

Saints Peter and Paul/San Pedro y San Pablo 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/HolyDays/PetPaul.html


("Lord of the broken church, whose chosen foundations are marked by fault lines: we thank you for the grace that took the denier and the persecutor and made them witness to your liberating gifts; through Jesus Christ, who sets the prisoners free. Amen")

“Lord of the broken church…” prays today’s Collect, not the BCP version, but from Prayers For An Inclusive Church.

We usually do not celebrate broken churches. We have anxious meetings about broken churches. We hire consultants to address broken churches. Some make money publishing books that give ideas and propose plans for broken churches.

We try to fix broken churches.

Today we celebrate broken churches .

It’s our patronal Sunday, Saints Peter and Paul. We celebrate two men of the New Testament—Peter the impulsive denier, and Paul the persecutor whose first career as a Jewish version of the Taliban was rudely interrupted by Jesus.

Our lovely traditional ikon shows them embracing. If you read between the lines in the NT, you know that this probably never happened. Peter and Paul were at best what the young people today might call “frenemies”, uneasy partners who rarely saw each other and who fought in public when they did.

They fought over inclusion. Do the Gentiles, the non-Jews, get to join the party meant for faithful Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah? In my opinion this is the key question of the New Testament—who gets to belong? Fully observant Jews? Or Gentiles who observe part of the Law? Peter was shocked into thinking this by his own vision where God told him to eat pig meat and vulture meat and snakes.
Or all the Gentiles, as thought Paul?

It took two personally broken people, unresolved and conflicted, to open the door for a broken church and a church of the broken.

In a community of the perfect and the put-together, there is no room for the broken. There are no cracks through which can slip the wounded, the unresolved, the doubter, the rebel, the opinionated, the painfully shy, the poor, the chronically ill, the depressed, the anxious, the excluded, the shamed.

There is no room for Jesus. Jesus is the excluded, the shamed.

A broken church is a good church. A broken church knows its Lord, the tragicomic failed Messiah whom God alone raised on high. A broken church knows its need for God and for grace.

We’re a broken church. We’re a church of many names. First Saint Peter’s, then Saints Peter and Paul, now we add San Pedro y San Pablo. How many more names shall we have? We’re in the midst of dying and rising, of a re-birth that includes smallness and vulnerability and perhaps some pain and a little blood before we’re done. (If we’re ever done.) Our questions here have been questions of inclusion. Are we a community of only the resolved and the consistent, the acceptable according to mid-20th century standards? Or are we also a community that fully affirms women in all ways, that welcomes and affirms LBGTQ members in all ways? Are we a community of classical hymn-singing English-speakers? Or are we also a community of guitar-accompanied Spanish-speakers?

Over and over, just like the early Church, the question—if we welcome, if we seek out and affirm and include the ones that are different, who speak differently, who act differently, who bring a different experience and a different culture into our midst—are we still recognizable? Far more important, are we the community of Jesus?

We have Peter and Paul, the broken patrons of a broken church, to advise us. We have Jesus, the excluded and wounded who is raised on high, to show us and to gather us.

Through the years, I have wondered at the mystery of my own call to this community. In the past few years I have wondered at the mystery of why I am still here.

I think part of the answer lies in gifts—I am comfortable with urban environments, I have a deep Catholic instinct regarding spirituality and prayer. I like a mix of cultures, I speak a useful second language, I have clinical training that helps me deal positively with deeply wounded people.

The deeper answer is—I myself am a broken man.

I left the Roman Catholic Church and incurred a sense of exclusion as a result. My parents bore a deep sense of racial and cultural and familial shame as well as anxiety as a result of poverty, and they passed that story on to me. I think that my own wounds resonated with the wounds of this community back in the mid-‘90’s and we recognized each other. We still do. We have a gift here of openness to deeply wounded people.

“Lord of the broken church…” At times we stumble over one another’s wounds here, but here there is space for grace and for light and for God.

Today’s Ezekiel reading is for us, the people of the broken church---

“I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them... I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.”

According to the prophet, it is a good thing to be in need of healing, for we have a healer. It is a good thing to be lost, for someone will find us. The shepherd promises to gather us, to heal us, to feed us.

The prophet says it is not a good thing to be among the fat and the strong, among the self-sufficient and the complacent and the over-confident.

We are the broken church. That is our hope and our gift. We are the community that has been broken time and time again, wrestling with this question—who is welcome? We are the people of the denier and the persecutor whose argument with one another was never really resolved. But in the spaces left in the fault lines, there is room for light and for hope and for Christ and for those who have been excluded. There is room for you and for me.

We are San Pedro y San Pablo, Saints Peter and Paul.