Building a Spiritual House
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
April 20, 2008

1 Peter 2:2-10
Psalm 31:1-5
John 14:1-14

Throughout my life in church, both as a pew-sitting church member and then later as a minister, I’ve seen all kinds of church buildings. At my home church in Dallas before I was in ministry, the sanctuary was the church’s most noticeable structure: a spare and sleek mid-century modern interpretation inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Chicago’s Oak Park.

Once I was preparing for ministry, I headed to St. Louis for my internship and there the church was housed in an old historic 19th century building. Back in Texas, the first church I served as minister, the church that ordained me, was a little church that leased space in a shopping center in the suburbs of Fort Worth. The building was hardly a spectacular example of church architecture, but I learned in that little church that the spirit of God could be quite present in a little bland boxy room which we called the sanctuary, with no windows, bad fluorescent lighting and chairs purchased from a used office supply house. I arrived at my next church out in Brookfield to another late mid-century physical plant. And here today I am doing ministry amid the gleaming white columns and towering New England steeple of this beautiful colonial church.

So churches can come housed in all kinds of structures, from a storefront in a shopping center to a grand New England structure with a magnificent steeple lifting one’s vision to the heavens.

Well, the communities that Peter was writing to in our New Testament lesson didn’t have big brick buildings with a commanding steeple. They didn’t even have a storefront address for their church. They most likely met in homes and they met privately, for being a community gathered around Christ was not a popular thing in those days and in that land. They were people who perhaps had once been a part of the social and cultural life of their communities but after converting to Christianity had become marginalized and even abused. They were unwelcome in their society and even considered dangerous.

So the person writing in Peter’s name in this letter sent to various communities undergoing persecution speaks of building a spiritual house. He is not concerned, of course, with the literal house or the architecture that the communities are worshiping in; he is concerned with the spiritual quality of the people and the community, especially that it remain built around the cornerstone of Christ.

He uses poetic imagery, describing Jesus as the stone that the builders rejected, and yet in the New Creation, in this new age following the resurrection, this stone that was rejected is now the cornerstone. And, reflecting that reality, the gathered, those believers who are creating a community out of the shared experience of the resurrected Christ, are themselves stones that society has rejected but who are “chosen and precious in God’s sight” and now comprise a new spiritual household.

In the latter part of the letter the writer shifts to a stunning image of the community (and remember, this is a marginalized community) as a “royal priesthood and holy nation.” We can only imagine how that must have sounded to these suffering under persecution. But amid that persecution, Peter exclaims (quoting Hosea), ‘Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people…’”

It’s difficult for us to really understand that, perhaps. While the ancient church was a radical and marginalized community, the church in the modern era has enjoyed approval, even status and privilege. We, most of us, are mainstream folk, not a class of folk who are marginalized from the currents of society.

And yet all too often if we are honest with ourselves we find that all sorts of conditions—illness, loss, all the things that life itself throws at us—can instantly marginalize us. And when that happens (and I know a number of you have discovered this for yourselves) one begins to realize the value of a spiritual community.

But sometimes church is not a place where people are comfortable showing their true selves. Sometimes we come to church showing only our best selves, our Sunday best, even if that hides what’s really going on in our lives. I think that too many churches of our time and our community tend in that direction because they take their cues not so much from the Good News of Christ come into the world to embrace the sufferings of the world, but churches take their cues from the culture at large that worships success, that honors privilege, that encourages merely being a good person or a good citizen.

The early church was a distinctive institution. It was distinctive because it expressed an alternate reality to the culture at large. It was not merely an institution of voluntary association, it was not merely a place of social gathering, but it was a distinctive community set apart from the rest of society.

The community of John’s gospel was likewise a distinctive community. In today’s passage, John also speaks of the community being a household of God. Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is sometimes quoted to underscore the exclusiveness of Christianity, that Christianity is true while other faiths are false. But maybe the real issue is not whether people outside the church are saved, but whether people inside the church have any sense of their distinctiveness. Maybe the real issue is whether people inside the church have any sense of their community as a community that mediates the living presence of a living God. As far as we Christians are concerned, none of us comes to the Creator God except through the Christ, so those of other faiths have their own ways of reaching God.

John’s community was a distinctive community and it was a community active in ministry. Jesus says “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.” So Jesus uses domestic imagery to illustrate our shared life with God through Jesus. Through Christ we are in God’s spiritual house. This spiritual house is not a passive place where we merely go to commune with each other and God. It has an active quality. Toward the end of today’s lesson Jesus tells us that we can do greater works than him. So in Christly community, we will do Christ’s works. In Christ, we might, in Matthew’s description (10:8): “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” Now, that’s a good mission statement for a church!

When Jesus answers Philip by saying “whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” this continues one of John’s great themes that Jesus is the Word made flesh. When we say that Jesus is the Word made flesh, (says scholar John Shea), this is to say that heaven permeates earth, that the spiritual and the physical interpenetrate each other. This is to suggest, I would add, that the community of Christ, in becoming the Body of Christ and thus becoming Christ for the world, is another way the Word becomes flesh. It is the community’s mission, perhaps, to enflesh the Word, to enflesh God, to make manifest the works of God.

This further suggests that we do not have to die to know heaven. The Christly community continues to manifest, to incarnate, this Word into flesh; this spiritual reality into the physical, fleshly structure of church. This elevates church to a place where we might encounter each other as we are and in that encounter, meet the living God. Or as another minister puts it so simply (Rob Weber of our Beginnings curriculum), that church is a place were we “create a body that God can live through.”

Now, we in this church don’t have to create or build the physical structure that houses our church. Our meetinghouse was built a long time ago. Here and there of course we are always making improvements, but it’s not likely we’ll need to add on a wing or build a new structure anytime soon. And yet we are building the a body that God can live through. We continue to build our spiritual house by putting Christ as the cornerstone and remembering that this can be a place where we might more truly welcome each other as we are and those outside the church as they are.

In today’s lessons both Peter and John have been concerned about the community as God’s household, as a place where we mediate the mysteries of the divine. In a way this spiritual house extends beyond the community of Christ. In a way, our whole world is a spiritual house, a reflection of God’s care and beneficence.

In his commentary on today’s Gospel lesson, John Shea says, “God’s immanence suffuses all creation and yet divine transcendence stretches beyond it.” So let’s take this idea of God’s household and think of it for a moment as in all creation; that everything God has created is a part of God’s household. This week we celebrate Earth Day on Tuesday, and it is appropriate that we see how God is expressed in creation and we see our role in caring for creation, of being stewards of what is ultimately God’s, not ours.

In the news recently is the discovery that some plastics contain a chemical toxin that is dangerous particularly to babies as this plastic is used in making baby bottles. Global warming is a continuing concern and controversy among us. These concerns certainly have political and economic angles, and they have theological and spiritual angles as well. Ultimately, all of creation is the household of God, though the church is the most distinct and intentional expression of God’s household in the Christian tradition. As Christians we participate in God’s household in our day-to-day lives, so this week on Tuesday I would invite your prayers that we learn to be better stewards of the great gift of creation, that we are given the wisdom to help care for God’s creation and that we are given the wisdom to participate in God’s ongoing creation, for we do co-create with God. For our God is a mighty God, one who created everything out of nothing and continues to spin the whirling planets, even this fragile blue ball floating in space that is our home.

As for us in the church, we are known as Wauwatosa’s oldest church and our heritage is something of which we may be justifiably proud. But creation continues; God’s spiritual house is not yet finished. Amid our heritage, we yet are forever new, alive and awake to the ever-evolving understanding of God in our midst, ever mindful of our mission to be Christ for the world.

Amen.