The dateline was Rancho San Diego. The staff reporter, under whose name the article ran in The Wall Street Journal, was R. Gustav Niebuhr...surely some relation to another R. Niebuhr of this century who wrote, "Preaching the gospel involves practical difficulties, particularly in a day like ours and in a nation such as ours, with all of its power and wealth." Gustav, on the front page of a newspaper written for the powerful and the wealthy, reported on a few of those "practical difficulties" in Rancho San Diego: "When Presbyterians unveiled plans to build a new church in this sun-baked, white-collar suburb," the article began, "they looked forward to a warm reception, if not hymns of praise. The church would be the quintessential good neighbor offering day care, a pre-school, maybe some elder-care....But locals were aghast at the prospect of a church in their neighborhood. Crowds of Sunday churchgoers would interrupt peaceful weekends by the barbeque. Car exhaust fumes would bring pollution. The church would be an eyesore in a tidy development of beige stucco houses on streets named 'Teton Pass Street' and 'Monaco Court.'"Marzalie Craig didn't like the proposed location of the church, which she would see from an upstairs window. 'I was sick for months about this,' she says. 'The first thing you see in the morning [will be] this church [?]. Right now, [the view] is breathtaking.' Sandy Arrington...complains that people will use it alot. 'There's weddings, there's funerals, there's early morning [worship].' Robert and Elizabeth Wilbur decided to move to another part of town rather than have their weekends by the backyard pool ruined...'You want quality time,'" Mrs. Wilber explained.
The community of Rancho San Diego reached a compromise with these Presbyterians. What was to be a dramatic, wedge-shaped building, with walls sweeping skyward and topped by a cross, will now be a building which looks like a house: "Beige and boxy and two stories high. There will be no dramatic steeple; a small cross will be placed discreetly over the front door. And the Presbyterians pledged never, ever to open a day-care center."
It is, of course, a metaphor for the place of the church in our society today. Whereas the church used to set the parameters for the "good life," ethically speaking, now the zoning board calls the shots, lowers the steeple, says lights out--literally--at 10 p.m. for organized Christians in Rancho San Diego, lest the "good life," economically speaking, be compromised by the church's life. Yet we need not blame the culture out there for the church's diminished place in our society: my friends, we are that culture. In the vast majority of communities, the church itself is content to be a beige and boxy two-story house with a small cross placed discreetly over the front door. God impinge upon the social or economic or political order? Heavens no! We are our own zoning board, making sure the gospel is in compliance with our lives as we have ordered them; picking up and moving our membership from here to there if the pulpit or the session gets in the way of our world view; using our pledge to hold the witness of the church hostage to our unassailable set of beliefs about how things ought to be done, who deserves to be included. Before anybody realizes what is at stake, whole congregations can cease understanding themselves as disciples from whom much is required, and rather begin acting as consumers of the church's programs to whom much is owed.
And how easy then, especially in places of power and wealth, for the church's place to be indistinguishable from all the other places where the good life is upheld. As a parent once said to me incredulously, "Confess our faith in Jesus Christ and join the church? Oh, no. To be honest, we think of our participation in the church like our involvement in the Y or the Rotary or things like that. We're not really interested in the religion."
What, for Christ's sake, is the place of the church in this place, in this society, in this world? "The Body of Christ," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "takes up space on earth....the Incarnation [involves] a claim to a space of its own on earth." And by that he meant not merely a building nestled tastefully in an affluent neighborhood, but he meant a presence, a witness, a costly discipleship, impinging upon our pleasures and requiring of us our very souls. "This is how the Church invades the life of the world and conquers territory for Christ," Bonhoeffer instructs. "...the realm of Christian love is subject to Christ, not the world. The Church can never tolerate any limits set to the love and service of the brother. For where the brother is, there is the Body of Christ, and there is the Church. And there we also must be."
The church "invades" the life of the world, "conquers" territory for Christ, "can never tolerate limits." The verbs are aggressive ones, antithetical to a two-story beige stucco house with a small cross placed disceetly over the front door. The problem, of course, is not architectural but adversarial. How can mainline Protestants in particular, who would silence most stands taken on social issues lest they disturb a statistic in the pew, how can we bear witness to the gospel of a God whose purposes in history, revealed in Jesus Christ, surely run counter to the consequences of our wealth and our power? How can we presume to be followers of Jesus Christ, we who are afraid to set foot in our city's slums or who will not venture an opinion on the stench of racism in polite society over cocktails or who believe the church ought just to care for its own or support only mission it can control? How can we, who set such limits on our witness, bear witness to Him whose love knows no end? Such are the "practical difficulties" Niebuhr had in mind when he said that "preaching the gospel, particularly in a day like ours and in a nation such as ours, with all of its power and wealth," was not easy.
But it has never been easy. And because that is so, we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, beginning with Paul and Silas in Philippi, whose story is recorded for such a place as this. Philippi was one of the wealthiest towns in Macedonia, a stop on the main road between East and West in the Roman Empire. Given its financial position and its love of Paul, the Philippian church was the only church, in the beginning, to support Paul's mission financially. But the story of Paul's time in Philippi is not entirely a happy tale.
One day, Paul and Silas were "going to the place of prayer," Luke tells us--going to the church's place--when they came across a slave girl, owned by some Philippians, who made money for her owners by telling fortunes. The particulars are hard to hold in our modern minds, but consider her general plight: a person in the society who was used by those in power to turn a profit. The effect of Paul's exorcism of this slave girl, of his invading the life of the world on the streets of Philippi with the gospel, was not simply theological: now she would worship the Most High God. The effect, more significantly, was economic and so social and finally political. "When her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone," Luke records, "they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities saying, 'These men are disturbing our city.'"
Mind you, it was not that they set out to disturb the city. It was that the consequences of the gospel's public proclamation, the demands of discipleship in the world, by definition, disturbed the economic and social and political order of this comfortable community. It claimed a space on earth other than the space assigned. It was the Church not tolerating any limits set to love and service. In one sense, Paul and Silas never made it to the church's place that day--the synogogue where prayers were said and rituals performed. But in another sense, they made every place they were the church's place--the streets of Philippi, the marketplace, the prison. Who they were in every place were those who claimed that place, that space for Jesus Christ.
For too long, my friends, we have been silent followers of Him in this place of wealth and power. Recipients of social privilege, we have ceased to disturb the city or the nation or the world or ourselves with the claim of the gospel to every place on earth. In fact, unless begin to be more intentionally involved in the renovation of the society and, more specifically, this city, for love's limitless sake, the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill will be increasingly indistinguishable from the Philadelphia Cricket Club, say, or the friends of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Presybterian Church of Chestnut Hill? Oh, that's the nice congregation, isn't it, in the brown boxy accomodating building, with a cross descreetly placed on the top of that peeling steeple?
What, then, of the spaces we ought occupy as Christians in the last few years of the 20th century? In the first place, more and more, you and I must begin, for Christ's sake, to enter those spaces which we deem to be God-forsaken: the spaces of poverty and crime, the spaces of drugs dealt and hope abandoned, the spaces where we may fear for our lives, but I promise you: there we will find our life. Like Paul and Silas, on our way to the place of prayer, we must be disciples who are stopped in our tracks by the increasing chasm between the top of the hill and the bottom, between children whose public education lands them on the streets and our children whose privilege propels them into promising futures, between the accumulated wealth of a few and the accumulated woes of those whose lives we can barely imagine. For unless we come to this place of prayer by way of the places where people are abused and refused and used by the likes of our class, our prayers will be but platitudes to a god of our own making.
But more. For as we are stopped in our tracks, and join our lives to the cries of the city--mentoring a child in public school or mentoring a former NPIHN guest who is, for the first time, occupying a home...hammering a nail for Habitat or helping the elderly poor hold on to independence...serving a meal at Gateway Men's Shelter or saving a family from homelessness through the Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry--then, I do believe, an exorcism will more and more seem in order! Then, the story goes, the questions we will know to raise about the reason behind the hunger and homelessness, the anger and hopelessness, the questions necessitated by a gospel which knows no limits, will cause that nice church on the avenue, to be known as that disturbing bunch of Presbyterians, upsetting the good life with the gospel's demands.
Though there is a strange twist to the story in this day and age. For the Niebuhr who advised that "preaching the gospel involves practical difficulties," is the same theologian who, nevertheless, counsels that the "most important ministry of reconciliation on the part of the church must be to the privileged classes...because the privileged classes are most tempted to identify their particular interests with the eternal sanctities and with the peace and order of society. When privileged groups, fighting for their rights," he goes on, "claim to be fighting for God and all the angels, they become truly demonic, and nothing will exorcise these demons but the worship of the true God." The exorcism, in other words, is on us, even in our highest intentions! And the true God, of course, is Him whose love was revealed on a cross: not a discreet cross hung above the door of an indistinguishable house, but Christ's cross which will never cease to disturb the world.
May God have mercy on us, and exorcise us of our privileged perspective, that we may become those who, on the way to the place of prayer, may be stopped in our tracks by every place where God's children cry out, that they might know their place of pain and oppression and injustice and suffering is also the church's place. Thanks be to God!