Why Are We Here?

I want to start my sermon this morning with a question: Why are you here? What reason do you have for being here in church today? What motivates you to pray, and to sing, and to give, and to worship, and simply to be here, doing this church stuff, on this Sunday morning? I mean, there are a lot of other things you could be doing. You could be heading up to the mountains. You could be getting out on the bike trail. You could be home in bed, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. You could be working in your garden. You could be watching a far more famous preacher than me on the television. You could be packing a picnic for a day of leisure. There are a lot of other things you could be doing. So why are you here?

There are a lot of different ways of answering that question. Some of you may be here because you’re visiting Staunton and you’re curious about this Trinity Church you’ve heard about, with all its Tiffany windows and historical beauty. Some of you may be here because there’s something going on in your life and you feel a need for prayer and spiritual grounding to deal with it. Some of you may be here because your parents made you come. Some of you may be here because—well, because you’re always here, because being in church on Sundays is just one of the things you do, because the weekly gathering of the faithful people is an important part of your life, your spiritual life, your moral life, your practical life—because church matters to you. There are a lot of reasons why we are all here today.

Our Epistle reading tells us there is another reason why we’re here today: We’re here today because God called us here, because God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love,” because God “destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of God’s will, to the praise of God’s glorious grace that God freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” We are here today because our participation in the life and worship and mission of the church is part of God’s work to reconcile the world and transform creation and gather all things up into their perfection in Christ. That’s why we’re in church today.

That may seem like quite a grandiose claim, a pretty over-the-top statement. I mean, who are we to be part of God’s mission to perfect the world? We’re hardly important enough to qualify for that!

I suspect the Christians in Ephesus must have felt much the same way when they first heard these words read out to them. Ephesus was an important Christian center in Paul’s day, by the middle of the first century. But even so, the Christian presence in the city was not the most influential game in town. There was a major temple of Artemis in Ephesus, and that temple attracted pilgrims and supplicants and tourists from all over that part of the Empire. The cult of Artemis was an important economic engine in Ephesus: there was a whole guild of silversmiths who made their living, and contributed to the tax base, from sales of silver statues and artifacts at the temple, since silver metal was sacred to Artemis. And it wasn’t just the cult of Artemis; Ephesus was a bustling, cosmopolitan city, and Hellenistic cosmopolitan cities boasted a very eclectic religious scene. There were temples to all sorts of Greek and Roman gods. There were synagogues. There likely would have been a temple to Mithras, a religion that was particularly popular among Roman soldiers. If you knew the right people to talk to and the right doors to knock on, you could probably find a gathering of one of the mystery religions, like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Cult of Isis that had spread from Egypt. And of course everyone—well, almost everyone, except for Jews and Christians—almost everyone participated in the official Roman imperial religion, offering their pinch of incense and their drop of wine to the Genius of the Emperor on official state days. In Paul’s time in Ephesus the Christian Church really did not seem very significant or influential or important.

And the Christian people in Ephesus didn’t seem all that significant or influential or important, either. We know from Paul’s letters, and from other early Christian documents, that the earliest Christian communities were eclectic and diverse and hardly homogeneous. First-century Greco-Roman society had some fairly rigid class distinctions, and one of the really remarkable things about early Christianity was the way it cut across those class lines and brought together people who ordinarily would not be together at all. Because the Gospel taught about redemption and freedom, it became very popular with slaves and the underclass of Roman society. Because the Gospel had a mystical dimension, it attracted poets and philosophers and seekers of wisdom. Because the Gospel called them to love their neighbors as they loved themselves, it gave a sense of purpose to wealthy people who wanted to use their wealth to do good in their community. A Christian gathering in Ephesus would bring together people who ordinarily would have nothing to do with each other—and that made them sort of out-of-step with the prevailing culture, that made them kind of a rag-tag bunch in a rigidly stratified world.

And yet, the Epistle to the Ephesians tells them, this rag-tag bunch of Christians, out of step with the mainstream, meeting in the shadow of Artemis’s temple, are God’s chosen ones to be holy and blameless, to be redeemed and forgiven, to be the agents of God’s mission to gather all things into Christ. And, the Epistle tells them, because they have been chosen, they have also been empowered. God has not just given them a task and then sat back to see how well they can do it on their own; but God has also given them the strength and the courage and the resources they need to do the mission God gives them to do. God has given them wisdom and insight so that they may know and understand what things they ought to do; and God has given them purpose and hope faithfully to accomplish them. God has given them each other, with all their strange and unexpected diversity, so that the love and unity they share in Christ can be a sort of “seed crystal,” an outward and visible sign, around which love and unity in the world, love and unity in the cosmos itself, can take form. God has given them the Holy Spirit, who enables them to act out the greatest divine ideals in their most ordinary human lives. As preposterous as it may seem, given all the other religious options in Ephesus, it is this rag-tag bunch of Christians through whom God will work to change the world. And we, looking back now with the perspective of nearly two thousand years, we can see the truth of it: Artemis and her temple are long gone, but the letters and liturgies of the church in Ephesus are still read and recited today. And that’s not because the Ephesian Christians were anything particularly special or remarkable in themselves, but because God called them; and because God called them, God empowered them, God gave them wisdom and insight and courage and strength to participate in God’s mission to gather all things into communion in Christ. That was why the Ephesian Christians were there.

And that is why we are here, too. We are here in church today—we are here as members of Trinity Parish—we are here as Christians in Staunton—we are here as faithful people in the commonwealth and the country and the cosmos—we are here because God has called us here, because God is calling us here, calling us in every moment of experience, calling us in every nanosecond of time. And because God is calling us, God is also empowering us, God is giving us wisdom and insight, God is giving us purpose and hope, God is giving us to know and understand what things we ought to do, and giving us grace and power to go out and accomplish them. God is giving us each other, with our differences of opinions and our diversity of perspectives—God is giving us the Episcopal Church, whose General Convention meeting in Anaheim right now is one of the most amazing gathering of diversities you’re ever likely to see; at General Convention worship you can hear the familiar Episcopal liturgy prayed in English and Spanish and Creole and French and Ojibwe and Inuit and German and Polish, as people in congregations from South Dakota and Alaska and Honduras and Haiti and Europe, all members of the same Episcopal Church, come together for communion; at General Convention you can find people representing all sorts of political positions and affectional orientations and spiritual practices and social commitments; at General Convention you can find people who know they’re not there because they’re so much alike, but because God has called them in their diversities to gather together in Christ—and God is giving us this diverse Episcopal Church, this diverse Trinity Parish, so that the love and unity we find here in Christ can be a sort of “seed crystal,” an outward and visible sign, around which love and unity in our world can take form. God is giving us this beautiful church, these amazing windows, built and maintained by the generosity and stewardship of generations before us, so that we can use them in a ministry of beauty, so that tourists and townspeople and worshipers of all sorts can come here and feel themselves gathered up into the beauty of Christ that is larger than just our own. God is giving us Noon Lunch, and SACRA, and the Honduras mission, and possibly a Haiti mission too, so that we may never forget that we are connected to people’s lives and people’s needs beyond our own. And God is giving us this Eucharist, this sacrament, that calls forth from us the best we have to offer, that nourishes us with food for our journey, that gives us a glimpse of the heavenly banquet, and that sends us forth to love and serve the Lord, sends us forth to be agents of God’s mission from the foundation of the world to gather all things into communion in Christ in the fullness of time. And God gives us all these things, not because we’re so special, but because God has called us and God empowers us and God sends us, out of God’s own good will and God’s own infinite love.

That is why we’re here today. And that is God’s gift to us every day. Amen.