“Here is the Church”

Revelation 7:9-17

As a child I did not attend church very much.  I remember going to Sunday School in a United Church in Victoria for awhile.  I went to a church service at least once or twice too.  Sadly, it didn’t seem to make much of an impression of me back then.  What I remember most about church was the fact that I had to wear a pair of dress pants that felt itchy on my legs.  What I remember most about Sunday School was a poem and finger play that I must have learned in one of our classes.  It went like this: “Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people!”  That was in the 1960’s when there were still quite a few people in the church building when you opened the doors.  Today that is not a given. 

 What is the church like today?  Well, it has many looks.  The people we see in the congregations of our parish, like those of many other churches in North America, are mostly getting on in years.  Young people are unfortunately in the minority.  There are many reasons for that.  Some children, though baptized, do not carry on living out the faith they were given in the sacrament as they move into the teenage years.  Often they have simply been following the example of their parents whose lives have become burdened with so much work and so many other activities that they have lost sight of the centrality of their relationship with God and the church.  Church services are seen as just one more activity in an already busy life.  Attendance at worship is considered optional.  Sunday is protected as a day to sleep in and catch up on chores. 

The god of our society is Self, and we Christians are constantly tempted to turn from our devotion to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to pay attention to what we like, what we need, and what we want as if this is all that really matters in the world.  Ours is a world of choices.  We can choose from hundreds of satellite TV stations, thousands of websites on computers, and millions of products in stores.  From all of this, it really seems like life is all about Me.  Then we come into this nave, and everything seems turned upside down.  Here the focus is not upon us, but upon God.  We don’t pick the music and sometimes we don’t like what has been chosen for us to sing.  We don’t get to talk here as much as we do at the coffee shop; we have to listen to Bible readings that sometimes seem hard to understand, and then we have to listen to the pastor preach for quite awhile without breaks for snacks or trips to the washroom.  The hymnal racks don’t come equipped with remote control units, so we can’t surf from one thing to another to find what we want to hear or see.  We have to pay attention to the words of the liturgy, and we are encouraged to join in and participate with each other.  These days Christian worship seems strange to many people; it shouldn’t surprise us then that some churches have taken steps to try make things more “user-friendly” and personally relevant. 

Nor however, should we give in to the pressure to shift the focus in church from God to Self.  All people, including you and me, are sinners, not consumers.  Salvation, repentance, faith, and holy living are gifts that God gives and works in us through His Word and Sacraments that deliver to us the forgiveness of sins won for us by Jesus on the cross.    It is sad that when we open the doors to our churches today, we see so few people, but God forbid that in order to bring more into our church we forget that the goal of our ministry is not Self-confidence or Self-love, but faith in Jesus and love for all people.    Success is a poor substitute for salvation.

Things have never been easy for the people of God living in this sinful world.  It was not easy for the first Christians to stay true to their calling as disciples either.  They too suffered from the effects of false teachings that threatened to turn their eyes away from their Risen Savior.  They also suffered something that rarely threatens us in Canada today: they were cruelly persecuted because they believed and confessed Jesus to be the world’s Savior.  People of the world self-confidently thought that they had no need for a savior, so the preaching of the Christians often angered them (by facing them with the reality of their sin), and they attacked the church with words and deeds.  The problems Christians faced in those days were just as exasperating as the ones we experience now, and they too were tempted to try something new.  They could recant their beliefs or accept the false ones being foisted upon them, but then they would have ceased to be Christ’s church.  Survival would not have served them as well as their salvation in Jesus.

How can we be sure of this?  How can we know that our faith isn’t just a pipe dream or “pie-in-the-sky in the sweet bye and bye”?  We can turn to Jesus and take to heart His Word.  We can give our attention to the revelation Jesus gave to His dearly-loved apostle, John.   John was a pastor to seven churches (and I think that five is a lot!) in what is now Turkey.  All of his congregations were under pressure and in danger of falling into one temptation or another, and poor John was kept from visiting with them because he had been exiled to a distant Mediterranean island because of His Christian ministry.  In today’s second reading, John describes what Jesus allowed him to see when the Lord opened the doors of heaven to show him what the church looks like there. 

John saw a church of innumerable people.  He saw a global church made up of people from every nation, tribe, people and language on earth.  He saw a worshipping church gathered in the presence of God the King and of His Son Jesus, the Lamb who took away all of the world’s sin.  He saw a glorious church dressed neither in their Sunday best nor their everyday street clothes, but in robes, white robes, robes made white by the blood of the Lamb shed for them.   Jesus showed John a victorious church, no longer struggling with temptation to succeed or survive, but rejoicing in the Savior who gave them His great salvation.   

The church John saw includes you and me.  We haven’t made it there yet, but we are on the road.  We’ve been baptized, and in that sacrament, God lovingly removed all the dirty garments of our sin and fitted us with one of those beautiful robes made white by the blood that Jesus the Lamb shed on the cross for our sins.  We’ve been set apart by God for a special life lived not for ourselves, but for Him who sits on the throne of our lives.  We gather regularly for worship as a witness to the world that God is our King.  We meet here to worship God together, and from Him we receive precious gifts.  As we listen to His Word, we are offered the Holy Spirit as our Teacher.  He guides us to honestly face our sins, to confess them and to listen in faith to the promises of forgiveness and help Christ has given us that we may live our lives with God as our King.  As we kneel at the altar, we receive the holy meal that strengthens us to keep on moving on the journey to heaven.  The body and blood of our Risen Lord are ours to eat and drink along the way: they remind us of the sacrifice by which Christ has saved us, and they encourage us to identify ourselves completely with Him. 

 God gives us all of this grace to help us to endure the pressure of this world’s temptations.  God’s grace enables us to say ‘no’ to sin and to live godly lives, lives of strong faith and generous love.  God’s grace also shines from us to the people who live around us, inviting them to wonder, to ask, to come, and to join us in believing in the salvation that belongs to our God and to Lamb forever.  God’s grace will have its way in our lives, for in the end it will bring us safely to the great assembly that John saw.  “Here is the church!” cries John to us today.  And we, because we believe in Jesus, will continue to live our lives in preparation for the eternal day when we will sing, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!  Amen.”