"The Church is the People" | Shana McCauley | March 3, 2024

Before coming to Trinity, I served a very small parish. Um, I would have fainted if I had come out and there had been this many people in the pews. In a small church, people are important in a different kind of way, and everybody– everybody has a job. It's the reason that a lot of priests retire into big congregations, because we all understand that in a small congregation, everyone– everyone has a job. There were people who printed the bulletins, there was– oh man– this long, long, long-serving woman who did the altar every Sunday for years– years! Do y'all– there are a bunch of people in Catechesis– do y'all know what the eighth Sacrament is? No, nobody? Coffee Hour. So there was a lovely woman who every Sunday would arrive for church a little bit early she would make the coffee because, as it turns out, I am a terrible terrible coffee maker, and anytime I would head towards the coffee machine, people would oh no no no, it's okay, we'll do it. So, um, this lovely woman would come in and make sure that there was coffee, and if there was no one signed up for coffee hour, she would run down to Safeway and get some cookies so that we had something to eat while we spent time to together after church. As I rolled into my fifth year and then my sixth year at my church, I realized that I really really needed a sabbatical, and my folks also really needed me to take a sabbatical. I was tired. And so as I prepared and prepared our vestry for my sabbatical and knowing– knowing that I was the paid person, which means that I had, appropriately, the lion's share of the work, I started to think, oh my gosh, who is going to do the work that I do? And I prayed and I prayed, because I knew I needed to go. I knew that, I knew that for sure. And also I thought, oh my gosh, is– are they going to do morning prayer every Sunday for three months? And in what I can only describe as a Holy Spirit moment, there was this time when I was praying, and this idea came to me. And it was so wacky and crazy that I thought there is no way– there is no way that the Senior Warden is going to go for this, but I feel like I should say it. And I said it to her, and she smiled and she said, "Let's try it." And I was like okay, so– so we went to the vestry. I thought for sure the vestry would shut it down, and the vestry also said that they were in. And so in 2016, at the end of May, we closed the church. We changed the locks, we locked everyone out except AA, and we gave ourselves the summer. And so for the first month, my folks went and worshiped with other churches in town. For the second month, they went and worshiped with other Episcopal Churches. A group made it up to Trinity. And then for the third month, they worshiped with people of other faiths. Um, we actually made a really lovely connection with the Baháʼís. And it was this time when– my dad was a priest as well, and his church eventually was closed, and what happened is that those folks, some of them made it to another church, but a lot of them just stopped going to church. And um I was heartbroken for those folks, who I loved very dearly, and was really worried that my folks were also going to disperse if we closed. And so for me, I really wanted to adhere them as a group. Go and do these things in other places as a church, and then if we end up closing– and we were painfully close, we had been living off our endowment for many many years, and we– we knew that our endowment was going to be spent, we thought by the end of 2016. It ended up making it through 2017, but we knew that things were getting slimmer and slimmer. And I thought, "there's a good chance that this church is going to close." And so this was part of my internal thinking that I did not share with people; I was hoping to put them together as a group so that they could stay a worshiping Community when they moved on. So these folks went to other churches in that first month, they went to other churches in town. So one group went to the megachurch, which in a small town, I– I don't know how many people were there, but I think it's probably very liberal to call them the megachurch. But they went to the megachurch in town, and then one group went to the ELCA, a very small ELCA church in town– there were two of them and this was the smaller one. And for years we had talked about going in together on with this ELCA church, and so it made sense that we would send a group there. And the third group went to a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church that they had some kind of family connection with. So these folks went out into the world, and then once a month, they would meet together in someone's backyard, and they would bring in a supply priest and they would do church the way that we do church, and they would talk about where they had been. And that first month, the group that went to the megachurch took somebody who is one of those Episcopal unicorns– he was a raging extrovert– and so they took him and they went to this church, and this church gave him like a See's chocolate, like a fancy chocolate, but a big bar of chocolate, as a like welcome. And he thought that was the bee's knees and his wife was like "get in the car." So– and then one group went to this church, this ELCA church that we thought about going in with. You know this– we talked about it actually for many, many years. And their last Sunday there was– it just happened to be their last Sunday there– it wasn't– they didn't leave because of this, but their very last Sunday, the pastor who had been there quit. Fantastically. I mean, he just let them have it. And so there's this group of people from St Edwards who are just there for church and boy this guy is talking about what a brood of vipers this congregation is, and how awful they've been, and they have just worked him, and you know my folks are like, oh my gosh how do we get out of here? So they spent the summer away and I thought– I thought that when we came back together we would start to talk about the end of our time as a church. So when I asked the question when we were all back in the same room, I wasn't sure what the answer would be, but I asked them "do you want to keep on?" And the answer was heartwarming and wonderful, and they said yes, yes we want to keep on. It also in this subtle way– in a way that I don't think we realized right away– but it also separated, for them, the church from the building. So there was this sense that we want to stay a church, and we know that the building is a big deal in what we do, but it's not THE deal in what we do. And they're still in that building, they still worship there, it's still a sacred ground and all of that, but it was sort of lifechanging for the congregation to realize that the church was the people. They realized that 2,000 years after Jesus told us so. So Jesus goes into the temple, and the temple is full of a marketplace, and the places where people might pray and to meet God are full of sheep and cattle and doves and money changers, and Jesus is really mad, and he recognizes that this is a place where people would go to pray, and it does make sense this is part of their faith that this would be the place where the marketplace would be, but he's frustrated that so much of the temple has been taken up by the marketplace. And so Jesus goes in, and he turns over tables, and he casts the sheep out and the cattle out, and he– he's really, like, yelling at people. And the people have experience with prophets, and they know that this is prophetic behavior, and so they challenge him: who are you? Who are you to come in here and turn over our tables? And Jesus says– Level this temple, and I will raise it up in three days. And the people say, what? What, that doesn't make any sense. We have been building this temple for 46 years. 46 years it's taken us to get to this point, and you're saying that if we level it today, that in three days you will raise it up again? And Jesus leaves it there, and it doesn't make any sense. So it is quite a while later that finally the disciples get it– that what he meant was that he was the temple, and that in three days, he would be raised again after he was leveled. The people were literal, Jesus was not. And it took the people a while to understand that that's what was happening, but it had been forever that the people had come to the temple to meet God, and what Jesus was saying was that he was the temple, and through Jesus, we (they) would meet God. That no longer did we need to go to a temple to talk to God. He changed everything. And pretty soon, we'll celebrate Eucharist, where we will talk about the sacrifice that Jesus makes for us, right? But I won't preach that 'cause we're going to get to Maundy Thursday in a bit. Jesus tells us that it is through Jesus, through his fleshy body, mortal body, that we will encounter God. And so, Jesus levels everything. He does level the temple, in that he tells us that we no longer need to go anywhere, that Jesus is in us, and that that's where we can go. Now, before you go running out the door, I still need my job, I'm not trying to talk myself out of one– because we can find Jesus wherever we are, but the act of Christian-ing is a group activity. It is through our experience and our time and our love with one another and our struggle with one another that we actually learn and do Christianity. The things that we do here Monday through Saturday to feed the neighborhood, that is doing Christianity. The times when you are able to come here and just cry because life is too much, that is the sacredness and the holy of this space. This is a place where we are able to be together to be Jesus for one another, and that sounds really hokey but it's true, and it's what we do, and that's what it is to follow Jesus and to be the way. We mold ourselves after Jesus's life, and sometimes it means that we leave with a giant chocolate bar, and sometimes it means means an arm around your shoulders when you have lost everything. This is Lent. This is is the middle of Lent, actually. Stephen Colbert said that this week. It's the middle of Lent, and this is the halfway mark in the season where we recommit. Where we refind our way to God. How you doing? How's it going? Has giving up chocolate given– has giving up chocolate done it? Maybe. But this is the season when we spend intentional effort doing an oil change for our faith and our relationship with God. Take a moment, take some time today and this week and in the weeks to come, and see how your faith changes when you find Jesus in yourself. When you employ that landline to God through Jesus. Amen.