Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
The Episcopal Church Welcomes You
Sermon at Convention 2000, Diocese of Bethlehem
Bishop Paul V. Marshall[When Martin Luther King called Sunday morning at 11:00 The most segregated hour in America, he was speaking of Much more than race. He was speaking of class.]
In the story in Acts 9 and 10, just before our lesson begins, Peter has had a hard day raising the dead; so he hits the recliner while the women folk are making dinner for him, and he has a wish-fulfillment dream. In it, a tablecloth appears from heaven, and it has pork loin, a variety of marsupials, and 26 kinds of shellfish. The headwaiter says, "Have some!"
Peter replies that he has never eaten any of this unkosher stuff, not even in Chinese restaurants. He's smiling over the cleverness of that line when the voice comes telling him not to consider unclean what God has made clean.
He's puzzling over this paradigm shift when the message comes for him to visit Cornelius' house; even then Cornelius was not a big Jewish name, so the lights begin to come on. When he arrives at the home of the pious Centurion he says he now understands that God has no favorites.
He preaches to them for a while, but the Spirit knew that he wasn't entirely converted; so these unbaptized Gentiles, possessed by the Holy Spirit, begin to shout and behave in other non-Anglican ways, and even speak in tongues!
Peter finally gets it, and admits that there is no way to keep from baptizing these Gentiles. If you know the rest of the story, you know that Peter had some 'splainin' to do back in Jerusalem; but the Church was getting the point that the gospel was for everyone.
Why tell this story?
Well, there is, in studies of congregational behavior, something called "screening." Every congregation knows (silently) what kind of members it wants, and gives subtle signals of nonacceptance to others. I don't want to illustrate the point further, but if you doubt me, we can have a private talk in the sacristy.
The problem is that the kind of members a parish wants may not be the kind of members God is sending. When Martin Luther King called Sunday morning at 11:00 the most segregated hour in America, he was speaking of much more than race. He was speaking of class.
We had next-door neighbors in the old days who always accepted our invitation to church by saying that they would send the children, but that they couldn't make it themselves. As we got to know them better, it became clear that they didn't go to church in their childhood denomination or to our church because they could not afford Sunday clothes.
That was not the real problem in this story. The real problem was those of us who expected that they would "of course" know that it didn't matter how you were dressed; all are welcome.
We discovered that we were expecting them, before they had any real experience of the gospel, to know ahead of time that it doesn't matter how one dresses to attend the Christian assembly. We discovered that we were expecting them to make all the mental adjustments, to feel confident, and meanwhile there we all were, dressed like the cover of The Living Church: carefully but expensively understated.
This small parish was comprised mainly of professionals - you would recognize some of their names - and decided to go to a tie-less, nonthreatening Sunday uniform for a year to see if it made a difference. There wasn't much we could do about all the Volvos in the street, at least until the leases ran out, but we were determined to make feel at home anybody who came in.
After that decision, the meeting got interesting, We started to worry about the liturgy.
No liturgy - Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran or ours - was made to be immediately understood by strangers, no more than sport, opera, or the last episode of Seinfeld can be fully understood without some background.
We realized that if you announce every part of the liturgy as you go along that you might as well not do the liturgy, because a liturgy that cannot flow, that is chopped up with announcements, is just a series of religious exercises. We accepted the fact that whether people went to a Roman Mass, a Byzantine Liturgy, or a service out of the Book of Common Prayer, they would encounter what was unfamiliar.
We started to talk about our own re-entries into the church - for some after many years, and for some from other traditions. We realized that we didn't come back knowing what the service would be like, but we had come back to church hoping to feel connected to God or at least be in a place where some people were connected to God and to a few others who were in the building.
We knew that, just like going to a football game for the first time, there would be things we would have to learn, as there are things to learn about how to behave in a big stadium, but we wanted to be there for the experience.
So we got on board with a simple plan. We were going to remove as many obstacles as we could in terms of style of dress and amount of jewelry. We would have greeters in enough numbers so that new people could actually have non-intrusive guides to what was going on, and we would do the liturgy well enough that it had its own drawing power, even if every little bit was not self-explanatory. The big picture we wanted to give was that here were God's people, glad to be together and doing the Christian thing of hearing the word and sharing the meal, and hoping that more would join us.
Well, we got some surprises. We didn't need so many liturgical guides, because most of the people who came were brought by friends or acquaintances, or were happy enough following the service folder. The biggie was that by taking all the helpful announcements about what came next out the liturgy, we were enjoying its rhythms more and became more enthusiastic about it.
The other surprise was that we had to learn how to talk at coffee hour. It's not that people wouldn't say hello to new folks; it's just that, after doing so, they formed the usual little circles to have those important conversations that really could have waited, conversations held in tight two-to-four-person groups that nobody could penetrate (I've encountered a few of them as bishop). So we began to practice the art of listening, of discovering people for who they were, for the gifts they are.
Well the kingdom of God did not come overnight, and the church has in fact merged with a similarly-mind parish, but we did grow, in numbers and in the realization of the treasures we had to share and the treasures we are given as the Spirit brings new people toward Christian discipleship.
What any of this means for our parishes in northeastern Pennsylvania, is for us to struggle with. The question remains for us as parishes and as a diocese to ask how fully do we act out the words on those signs that say, The Episcopal Church Welcomes You. The task is harder than we think, but it is also where we find the Holy Spirit's power to shout and dance, as it were.
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