Lifesaving Skills

“Come, let me show you my parish church.” My friend with whom we were spending several days is a devout Roman Catholic and I knew how important it was for him to show me his spiritual home. “I’ll show you the Episcopal church as well. It’s lovely. Really beautiful.” He went on to tell me that his church building had been dedicated on the day of his birth fifty some years ago. I was eager to see this place that functions so prominently in his life.

We pulled up in the parking lot of Sacred Heart Church at dusk. He mentioned that it used to be open all the time but he thought it was probably closed now. He spun around and headed down the street a block or two. There it was. A typical stone Gothic revival structure, a touch of an English village in this New Jersey town on the banks of the Delaware River: Christ Episcopal Church. I appreciated his gesture of taking me to see “my” church’s presence in the town. And frankly I was pleased that he thought it beautiful.

Christ Episcopal Church, Riverton, NJ

And that is what church is to many of us. A building. A symbol. A place. An anchor. Where life is knit together, its multifarious threads washed in a font, woven into coherence around an altar, their meaning articulated from a pulpit. I learned as a little boy in Sunday school that the church was not a building but a people. Then I learned as a priest that people can’t do without a building, say what you will. Not only must there be a building, but at least in the United States it must have pews, or at least chairs arranged in rows. If you ask them why, they’ll say something about how it’s necessary to seat people in a fashion that will highlight the entrance of the bride at a wedding. Even when people get outside a building called a church to have a funeral or a wedding or even an ordinary service of worship, they will arrange chairs in rows. It might be the natural thing to do, but it is contrary to what builds community, which is not the experience of looking at the backs of people’s heads but at their faces, generally speaking.

King David’s desire to build a temple and the Prophet Nathan’s intervention to dissuade him from doing so is a very interesting story because it captures the tension between institution and spirit.[1] It is not my bias that institutions are all bad or inferior to some other arrangement of human beings. It is my experience that institutions settle on an agenda for survival and thus frequently lose sight of any purpose beyond survival itself. It is as if simply existing and doing what they habitually do is the point of it all.

There is an old but telling metaphor that describes what I’m talking about.

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little lifesaving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for those who were lost. Some of those who were saved and various others in the surrounding area wanted to become associated with the station and gave of their time, money, and effort to support its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.

Some of the members of the lifesaving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building.

Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in the club’s decorations, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club’s initiations were held. About this time a large ship wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside.

At the next meeting, there was a split among the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station. So they did.

As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.[2]

The parable needs no explaining for anyone familiar with the contemporary church, either inside or outside it. What is not so plain, however, is what might be done about it short of cutting loose from whatever establishment you’re a part of and starting once more something that purports to be in line with the authentic and original purpose of the church.

That is where we might find Ephesians a useful resource.[3] At first glance, it is only about the relationship of Jewish and Gentile Christians in Paul’s time. But it is more than that. It is about the creation of a new humanity, a humanity that obliterates the dividing walls and hostilities that separate us into camps of “rescuers” and “victims” for example. In plain terms, the church is not a place but a community, formed in Christ Jesus who has reconciled all the different factions among people in his one body through the cross. There is a sort of “building” that can be called “church.” But it is not built of bricks and mortar, glass and wood.  It is indeed a
“house:” the household of God, the dwelling place of the holy.  Its foundation is the  apostles and prophets.  Its  cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself.  There is a structure, one that is joined together and grows into a holy temple. The church is that temple. You are that temple.  We are that temple. And that temple is the dwelling place of God.

Think about that. We are the dwelling place of God. Bishop Tutu once said that we should be genuflecting to one another because each of us is a tabernacle in which the Body of Christ lives. C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity memorably said that it was the vocation of each Christian to be a “little Christ.”[4] An old hymn that I knew as a Methodist teen ended with the words, “Fill with thy spirit till all shall see Christ only, always, living in me.” Sometimes I can hardly get through the words of the old Prayer of Consecration in Rite One so moved am I by the words, “…made one body with him, that he may dwell is us, and we in him.”

We cannot be the Body of Christ and not act like Jesus. We cannot let ourselves off the hook by saying that he is an impossible model. He is not. Nor need we beat ourselves up because we aren’t perfect, or berate ourselves for being real, or feel like phonies because we have shadow sides that rise up to twice the size of our conscious will to be nice and good. No, to be like Jesus requires a daily practice of turning to him just as we are, owning every piece of ourselves, and setting an intention to be as accepting and loving of everything human as much as we possibly can, beginning with our very own selves. Someone once marveled to Mother Teresa how she loved the poor so lavishly and asked what she would recommend to someone who wanted to change the world. She is said to have replied, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” Anyone that has any experience living in a family realizes two things. One is that loving one’s family is about the hardest job there is in the world sometimes. The other is that that job can be done with plenty of grace and a good sense of humor.

That is what being the church is all about. It is not making a pretty building in which God can be trapped for our own purposes. Being the church is embodying in ourselves the new humanity. It is to do what Christ did by breaking down the dividing walls of hostility and manifesting a reconciling love in his body.

When we begin taking seriously our vocation to be the dwelling place of God, as was and is Jesus, we won’t even need a course in lifesaving skills. All we will need to do is simply to be present, responding to each situation that arises. Do that, and you will see before your very eyes the church change from obsessing about its own survival to bringing life and healing right and left, just as the Master himself did.

That’s a promise.

A sermon preached on July 22, 2018, on Proper 11, Year B: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

---

[1] 2 Samuel 7:1-14a.

[2] Dr. Theodore O. Wedel wrote the original version of this parable in 1953. This slightly altered version is on the internet at http://www.ecfvp.org/vestry-papers/article/272/parable-of-the-lifesaving-station, accessed July 21, 2018. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1930, Theodore Wedel was Canon Chancellor of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and from 1943 until 1960 was Warden of The College of Preachers. He served in the 1950’s as president of the Episcopal Church's House of Deputies.

[3] Ephesians 2:11-22.

[4] The entire quotation from Mere Christianity, runs thus: “Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call "good infection." Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”