Hilton Head Island, SC – September 27, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
I Kings 8:12-21; I Kings 8:22-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built?” – I Kings 8:27 (RSV)
The Chapel Without Walls is a Christian congregation in which there is no formal membership. People become affiliated with The Chapel simply by showing up and staying. There is no requirement other than that, and of course even that is not “required” as such.
So why would I entitle a sermon, “Is Church Membership a Necessity for Salvation?”? For the past several weeks, and for the next month-plus, I have preached and shall be preaching several sermons that are, shall we say, homiletically unusual. Maybe the pandemic or the upcoming election have me a little unstrung. I have read many books on many different subjects in the lockdown, and that may also have had a bearing on the diversity of these sermons. But months ago I came up with these topics, and I shall carry through with them, hoping that they may somehow be helpful for all of us in our life’s pilgrimage.
One of the most influential of the so-called Early Church Fathers was a man named Origen. He was born to Christian parents in Alexandria, Egypt in 185 CE or so. The Christian Church in his time was a very pale copy of what it would be two hundred or nearly two thousand years later. Nonetheless he had sufficient confidence in what then constituted the Church to say, “Without the Church no one is saved.” That is an unusually strong and even provocative claim. I will never forget our seminary professor of church history, Tom Shafer, also quoting Origen in a similar statement: “Those who would have God for their father must have the Church for their mother.”
I also will never forget one of our professors (though I don’t remember which one) telling us about another seminary professor, by then long a member of the Church Eternal, who was confronted by a street-corner evangelist just outside the seminary. This well-intended soul with religious tracts in his hands stopped the professor, and asked him, in a half-accusatory, half-pleading tone, “Are you saved?” Without hesitating for a moment the professor said, “I was saved, I am saved, and I shall be saved!” I can only imagine that the enthusiastic evangelist must have shaken his head and muttered to himself, “This guy must be some kind of a nut from inside those gates!” Then he probably went away and stopped another passerby.
Is church membership a necessity for salvation? Origen certainly thought so. I suspect that evangelist thought so. I don’t know what the professor would have thought about that. For the first few years of ministry, I also thought so. I was an “originalist Origenist” for perhaps ten or more years.
But by then I began to encounter some people who came to church almost every Sunday who were not members, and who refused for their own reasons to become members. Some were single people, and others were the spouses of active members. These were such faithful, exemplary folks that I couldn’t imagine God would ever reject them because they had never formally joined our church or any other.
Within a decade of being ordained I had come to believe in universal salvation. That means believing that everyone ever born is saved, however one defines salvation, which I am not going to attempt to do this morning. Universal salvation is the conviction that all humans who ever lived are redeemed by God by virtue of having been born as a human. Regardless of what they did or did not do, or what they believed or did not believe, they will live forever with God, wherever “forever” or eternity or heaven are. The essence of God is love and grace, and His love and grace are such that He wants us to be with Him in eternity.
This week’s New Yorker happened to have its humor page devoted to some fictional low ratings given to heaven by new arrivals who had been recently admitted. It is called “One Star Yelp Reviews of Heaven,” and it was written by Jay Martel. A woman who had just entered heaven said this: “What a farce! I’m a churchgoing Christian who prayed every day of her adult life, then I get here and find the place overrun with seemingly everyone who didn’t kill a million people. Sorry, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot – you’re not welcome here. But apparently for everyone else it’s ‘Come on in!’ Yesterday I saw Al Goldstein. Ugh.” (I don’t know who Al Goldstein is, but I guess because he’s Jewish, this woman is not pleased that he is a fellow resident of the eternal Pearly Gated Community where everyone is welcomed in.)
Then there was also this one-star summary of the celestial check-in process. “Could use a lot more sensitivity with the intake procedures. Everyone’s like, ‘We’re all so happy, we’re bathed in God’s grace for eternity, tra-la-la.’ I just died, man. Have a little compassion.”
All of the above leads us, believe it or not, to religion. Every religion inevitably creates and acquires an institutional form. Unless it does that, it cannot survive. An institution consists of the physical, social, and spiritual building blocks necessary to perpetuate itself through the passage of time. Thus every religious institution must have a visible and an invisible structure in order to keep going through time.
In all of the large historical religions, buildings became an indispensable component. Thus there were temples, synagogues, churches, mosques and the like in which people gathered to worship their gods or God.
For the Israelites, the first temple was constructed in Jerusalem during the reign of King Solomon. This project is described in the First Book of Kings. Part of its story was related in our two readings for today. A detailed account is written about many of the features in the architecture and the furnishings of the temple. When it was finished, it was one of the most impressive buildings anywhere in the ancient world.
At the temple’s dedication, Solomon addressed the people, and then he prayed a long prayer. In it Solomon said, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain Thee; how much less this house which I have built!”
Implicit in that prayer are two important elements. First, institutional religion requires physical places in which God is worshipped. That is true for all major religions. One of the primary reasons religion exists is to praise God. But secondly, religion also exists to provide a vehicle for people to be brought into the presence of God, to the degree that is spiritually or physically possible. In other words, religion builds particular structures in particular locations to bring God and people together for worship.
Nevertheless, we should not deceive ourselves. God is not restricted to any of the structures we create for His worship. Solomon recognized that in his prayer.
In the Jarvis Creek Park on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, God is not more present in the first pavilion you see when you drive into the park than He is in the other pavilions. Furthermore, to some people who are outside this pavilion on Sunday mornings, God may be perceived more completely in the large by the expansive lawn and by the lake, or the trees and the birds and feral cats, or in the playground behind me, than He is under this roof.
What I am trying to get at here is that God doesn’t need a human-constructed building for us properly to worship Him, but many although not all humans do seem to need such a structure. Institutional religion historically seems to have needed that, and for the time being Jarvis Creek Park is providing that building for us. Where we go next only God knows at this point.
But it is not only buildings that institutional religion needs. It also needs the Torah (the religious law, either the first five books of the Bible or the parchment scroll in the synagogues) plus the Mishnah and Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita and the New Testament and the Quran, and so on. It needs a worldwide Church and an Umma (the worldwide community of Islam), plus a Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, Mecca, Medina, Wittenberg, Geneva, Canterbury, Kyoto, and Salt Lake City.
Is church membership a necessity for salvation? For the sake of billions of people living and dead, I hope not. I think not. I trust not. When I was young and more certain about many things than I am now, I thought so, but no longer. However, you and I seem to need religion and “the Church,” or we wouldn’t be here. The Church, which includes a small chapel without walls which temporarily is literally without walls, is the institutional means by which we are drawn regularly into the presence of God. We can pray alone, but we can’t really worship alone.
In former years I organized about two dozen tour groups to go either to Israel or to places in Europe and Britain. Because these were church groups, I dragged everybody into many magnificent churches and cathedrals hither and yon. God is no more inside than outside those or any other buildings, but we may sense His nearness there more than in most other places.
To enter the beautiful Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth with its inspiring mosaics, or to be in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is to be on the sites where, traditionally, Jesus was born and where he was crucified and buried. From the latter location he presumably was raised from the dead, and that can make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up. To be in St. Peter’s in Rome and to see the huge altar with the stupendous Bernini pillars rising above it; to be in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the holiest church in Eastern Orthodoxy; to enter into Notre Dame in Paris, before or after the fire, and to ponder what that church has meant to that city for so long; to be in Westminster Abbey in London where kings and queens have been crowned for nearly a thousand years and where some of the greatest luminaries of the English-speaking world are buried; to step into St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, where John Knox thundered his fiery sermons: to be in any of those places is to be where institutional religion has provided incomparable spaces for the worship of almighty God. But God also is experienced in the Hilton Head Middle School, and the Quality Inn, and the Main Street Theater, and Temple Beth Yam, and The Cypress, and, for one week, the Island Recreation Center, and now, for an unknown number of other weeks, an open pavilion in Jarvis Creek Park.
Institutional religion imagines and then creates holy sites, and many of us need some kind of institution, however rudimentary, to contact God in those places in a unique manner. However, God does not require that of anyone, despite what Origen proclaimed. No one needs the Church in order to be saved, if everyone is going to be saved by God’s grace anyway. But the Church is one of the manifestations of institutional religion which might manage to convince many of us that we were saved, that we are being saved, and that we shall be saved. If that happens, it seems to me it is all for the good of everyone who associates with any church.
If a high percentage of human beings need identifiable religious structures for worshipping God, both physically and spiritually, does God need to be worshipped? Does He also need religion? One could readily support the notion that God inspired humanity to establish religion. If that is true though, surely He did it for our benefit, and not for His. If God is God, He doesn’t need anything, including our worship of Him. Nevertheless, we need religion --- not all of us, obviously, but many of us, also just as obviously. Many people are deliberately disconnected from religion, and many others have deliberately allied themselves to it.
This is what might be called a “stream of consciousness sermon.” That is, I am stringing together several thoughts about whether being an official member of a Christian congregation is the ticket fully to knowing God in temporality and to living with God in eternity. As a young minister, I honestly believed such a connection was a necessity. I studied enough luminaries in the early and later centuries of Christianity who insisted that was true that I accepted it as truth.
As I got older, however, I eventually concluded that Origen and Company were mistaken. They were not perversely wrong by any means, but they were mistaken, or so it seemed to me. The Church has been vitally important to countless numbers of people for two millennia, but God can never be completely encapsulated or adequately enshrined by Christianity or any other religion. It is prideful parochialism to think that could be true. Eventually affirming the notion of universal salvation also punctured my youthful enthusiasm for the concept of the primacy of the Church of Jesus Christ.
The Chapel Without Walls has existed for almost seventeen years. During that time, my internal attachment to the universal Church has somewhat waned. Up until January of 2004, when The Chapel began, I had always been a Presbyterian, first as a lay person, and then as an ordained minister. I continued to think of myself as a Presbyterian pastor, but now I see myself more as simply a nondenominational pastor, and an increasingly unorthodox one at that. There is no presbytery to rein me in anymore. That may be somewhat good for me but somewhat bad for you. I still maintain a firm allegiance to “The Church,” as I hope you do too, but institutionally The Chapel Without Walls is so minimalist that we are the epitome of institutional paucity. Perhaps we are more pensive or progressive than most congregations, but because we have bounced around so much in our locations, it may be hard for us to have a strong institutional identification.
For the past two months or so, and for the next month and a half, my sermons have been and will be more peculiar than usual. Underlying this lack of continuity may be growing misgivings about the upcoming election. I probably am too anxious about its outcome. I go up and down like a yoyo every day, depending on who said what about what. I just read about an informal poll of ten ministers taken by another minister. Four of the ten had considered suicide, but the poll-taker didn’t say if the election was a factor in that dark thought. He did say that clergy are having a uniquely difficult time adjusting to the plague. I have not contemplated doing myself in, yet, but I have pondered moving to Canada, depending on what happens on Nov. 3, 4, 5, or well beyond.
I trust that however the election turns out, all of us will survive. So in the meantime, I hope you’ll stick with me, as we explore the following odd sermon titles: Evolution, Devolution, and Human Behavior; Judging and Being Judged; Why “Thy?”; God Is Not Male; and, on November 1, Be of Good Cheer. Regarding that last title, however the election turns out, we’ll all need it.