Since her death, Maya Angelou has been greatly celebrated around the world and that is an appropriate response in my mind. Maya was a poet, a prophet, a celebrity, and a grand dame. She was also a lifelong follower of Jesus. Raised in Stamps, Arkansas, by her grandmother, Maya spent much of her childhood within the warm embrace of a small African Methodist Episcopal Church — at least six hours each Sunday according to her own writing. In the last half of her life, she lived in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and was a steadfast member of a black Baptist Church. And yet despite this religious pedigree, Angelou could be very critical of the church. In one of her books, she wrote a rather biting poem titled “Savior,” where the poet laments the petulance of priests and the boredom of ritual. She also stresses our need for Jesus to visit us again.
Maya drew a distinction between Jesus and the church. Though we as the church are called to be the resurrected Body of Christ on earth, all too often we substitute institution for incarnation. We have turned Christ’s organic body into the static structure of organization. As the established Protestant churches in America continue to diminish and decline, perhaps we can sympathize with Angelou’s despair about the vapid tedium of too many of our rituals. And like the poet, we yearn for a fresh visitation from Jesus and a re-acquaintance with his holy name.
A few years ago, Leonard Sweet wrote a book called The Gospel According to Starbucks. Lifting up Starbucks as one of the capitalist wonders of the modern world, he insists that the church has much to learn from our local coffee hangout. The philosophy of the founder of Starbucks is simple. For him, selling coffee is his Grand Passion, except that it is not about coffee. Starbucks is not a coffee shop — it is a lifestyle. It is what Sweet calls “a third place” — a place that every human being needs — a place of comfort and community and connection. It is a place beyond home and work. Church used to be that third place for most Americans, but no more. Instead the music, the techy comfort, the quiet neighborhood hubbub of the local coffee shop has become a place where strangers become friends. And, Sweet suggests, if Jesus showed up tomorrow, he would be more comfortable in Starbucks than in most of our churches.
Riffing off this Starbucks image, I want to agree with Maya Angelou that we need Jesus to visit us again, and we need to recover the radical, rich, and real power that the living Christ offers us inside the church and out. Rather than a bland buddy or pious preacher, the Jesus we meet in scripture is more of a bold barista preparing the unique jolt of spiritual caffeine each of us needs to live our lives fully. And what the church at its best can offer us is not comfort and complacency, but commitment, connection, and conviction. And this is the kind of Jesus we meet in Luke’s gospel story for today.
The more I read Luke’s account of the calling of the disciples, the more astonished I am at the chutzpah Jesus acts out this morning. Here he is, a restless wandering preacher, bored with his father’s carpentry shop, and freshly kicked out of town by the neighbors he grew up with. He was kicked out because he proclaimed himself the Messiah — not a Messiah for the chosen few, but a Messiah for all the messy masses. This morning we find him walking by the sea, fending off adoring crowds, looking for a few good people to help him turn the world upside down.
It is important to remember that Simon Peter, James, and John are professional fishermen. They are good at what they do, and they know all the tricks of the trade. Any decent fisherman knows that you never fish close to shore because the only fish stupid enough to flirt with the rocky shore are guppies and tadpoles. Because of the fluid movement of muscle needed to haul in a big catch, the nets are always thrown from one particular side of the boat. When Jesus sees these three brawny, frustrated men coming into shore after a night of nothing, he calls out to them. He tells them to do everything their fishing experience has taught them is wrong — toss their nets into the shallow water from the wrong side of the boat. And according to the text, Peter, John, and James trust Jesus. They obey Jesus. They do what years of training and custom have forbidden them ever to do before.
This electric interaction with Jesus is the only officer training these disciples ever had. They trust and obey. They take a risk. From that moment on they follow Jesus on his Don Quixote quest to catch people for God. Most everything they learn to do while wandering by his side turns conventional wisdom on its ear. Love your enemies, don’t hurt them. Focus on the poor, and let the rich fend for themselves. Touch lepers, don’t shun them. Invite women into the community of discipleship — don’t keep them barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Let the little children come, and bless them with all their noise and energy and interruptions. Honor the authority of Caesar, but only give your true allegiance to God. Suffer willingly in order to bring healing to others. And don’t be scared of death, for it is only when a seed dies that healthy grain can grow. Not only does Jesus turn fishing wisdom on its ear, he turns living wisdom on its ear. If we want to be disciples of this bold barista of rich, hot, caffeinated faith, then we need to turn the wisdom of our contemporary world on its ear too.
At every transition point in every congregation, it is time to renew our own call to discipleship. No matter how long we have been a good Christian, it may be that Jesus is about to ask us to move beyond our comfort zone. Jesus is about to ask us to “do church” in ways that turn upside down “the way we have always done it.” Yes, Jesus is walking along the edge of this community and is calling out to you: “Trust. Trust me. Obey. Obey the radical demands of the gospel. Risk. Risk doing new things in new ways. Cast your nets on the other side of the boat — trusting that fresh grace and abundance will come tumbling into this place.”
In trying to infuse the church with the best learning from the Starbucks strategy, Len Sweet has come up with the anagram E-P-I-C. EPIC. He suggests that vital churches in the twenty-first century must be EPIC churches.
E stands for experiential. Peter and James and John did not understand discipleship until they did it. We Presbyterians think too much and experience too little. Instead of thinking about prayer, why don’t we just pray? Instead of wishing that we had more children in our pews or more people of color in our congregation, why not go out, find them, invite them, and welcome them? Any educator will tell you that children learn by doing, not by listening. Friends let us experience our faith first and then we will discover what we really believe.
P stands for participatory. There is no way that Peter could have hauled in all those fish by himself. He needed the other men in his boat to help him — and even then with all of them pulling with all their might — they barely managed to capture all that abundance.
One good trend in Presbyterian worship is the rise in participation of all the people in the pews. As Kierkegaard so aptly suggested in Christian worship the “audience” is God — and we — you and I — are the actors. We are all playing the various parts in acting out the drama of scripture. Rather than listening to a concert, we are all called to make music — to sing, to clap occasionally, and to feel the gospel in our bones and our blood. More and more of our churches are encouraging weekly communion and often by intinction. People actually getting up and walking forward encourages offering ourselves to God as we are fed with the Bread of Life and the Cup of Blessing. And in growing family congregations, children are more and more an active part of worship participating in the liturgy, and not just restlessly waiting to be released for Sunday school.
Recently, I was at the Beacon Church for worship. Seven years ago, they had almost no children. Today, they have dozens, and twenty of them were in worship in the middle of August — in a congregation of 125 adult members. Some of the children wandered around during the scripture and the hymns. As a group they led The Lord’s Prayer, they poured water into the Baptismal font during the Assurance of Pardon, and they played raucous instruments during the Doxology. Despite occasional noise and motion, not one older member seemed to mind. Friends, if we participate — if each one of has a chance to act out the various parts of worship — then it becomes part of our bodies and our souls and not just passive entertainment for our minds.
I stands for image rich. Images, metaphors, stories, visual art, banners, colors, water, bread, wine, instruments, dance, poetry, video clips are welcome. More and more worship and education is becoming a goldmine for the senses and the imagination. After all, God cannot be fully captured by words or doctrines. Jesus is a person, not an idea and the more we play with images, the more the Spirit can fertilize our hearts.
Finally, C is for connection. This is not just the “friendly” connections at coffee hour but the more intimate connections of heart-to-heart relationships and of taking off our masks. This is the connection of trusting that our brothers and sisters in Christ want to really know us and that we can trust both our joys and our sorrow, our successes and our failures into each other’s keeping. In addition, a truly connected church is one who is not just bound together with those inside these walls but also bound together with the people outside these walls — our neighbors, those who are different, and those who are in need.
One of the enduring images for me from the tumultuous week in Ferguson, Missouri, was the picture of 100 volunteers from five local churches who banded together to reach out to their community. The morning after the first night of rioting, they arrived outside the looted stores to clean up the glass, to reach out to the protestors, and to get to know their neighbors. They made a connection with strangers in order to become friends.
So, there you have it. EPIC — experiential, participatory, image-rich, and connected — a caffeinated, committed, community of disciples — trusting, obeying, risking — all to the glory of God. Dear friends, this is my dream for you, my prayer for you, as you move forward on your journey as Christ’s people. To paraphrase a blessing I received on my wedding day almost forty years ago: May your life together be as comfortable as an old shoe, and as mysterious as a Chinese puzzle.
May it be so. Amen.