Marked Out:Catholic

What’s in a Name?

I want to start out today’s sermon with a little thought experiment for us all. I want you all to close your eyes for a moment. Then, I want you to picture in your mind what the perfect church would look like. And I don’t mean the building…I mean the people…what would the perfect church look like in terms of the people who were there...

Do you have your image? And now, I want to ask you an even tougher question…who was NOT there in your picture of the perfect church? What types of people weren’t pictured in the ideal that you came up with? For some of us, maybe it was folks who commit certain types of sin. For others, maybe it was people who dress a certain way. For others, it might be people who vote a certain way...

I don’t give us this thought experiment to play “gotcha” and tell us that we are all bad people for almost naturally excluding some folks from our ideal version of church. Rather, what I’m trying to do is to form a baseline diagnosis of our own introversion and predilections so that we can all, myself included, expand our vision of what Christ’s church SHOULD look like.

And immediately, in the very name of this week’s sermon, we run into trouble, don’t we. We run into the “C Word.” It’s a word so uncomfortable to many that they don’t even say it. Well, today I’m going to say it a lot. And that word is Catholic. “Catholic,” there I said it again!

So, let’s talk about the seven ton elephant in the room. When the creeds of the church talk about the church being Catholic, what do they mean?

The obvious confusion comes about because one denomination of Christians has used this title to the exclusion of many other Christians. Of course I am speaking about the Roman Catholic Church. In using this title, the church whose center is found in Rome at the Vatican claims to be the true church, claims to be the place that Christ intended people to worship.

This is a mark of exclusivity on the part of the Roman Church. To claim that it is the Catholic church to the exclusion of the millions of Protestants and Eastern Orthodox faithful throughout the world is problematic at the least. And, over the years, the Roman Church has relaxed her stance on this issue finally acknowledging that we Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox are fellow Christians…a stance that at one point was denied in many circles.

But does the Roman Church’s use of the term “Catholic” mean we should forgo using it? No, may it never be! The term Catholic is just too important to cede away like that.

But if the term is so important, why don’t we use it more often…and more importantly, just what does it mean anyway?

Well, we don’t use it lest we be confused with the Roman Church. I believe the United Methodist Church is part of the Catholic Church. And that statement might confuse some. When I said that, I didn’t mean it was part of the Roman Church. Rather, I meant that the United Methodist Church is a part of the ONE UNIVERSAL Church.

And that is why many of our documents contain both of these words, catholic and universal. It is to avoid misunderstanding.

So let’s define what Universal means in terms of the church. The church is universal in that it is made up of all Christians who ever confess Jesus as Lord....past, present and future.....Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox…White, Black, and all other races....people of all races, all classes, and any other terms we use to define (and divide) humanity. There is only One Church and that Church is the Catholic Church…not the Roman Catholic Church…she is merely part of the ONE HOLY CATHOLIC church.

One Confession

So now that we have defined the Catholic Church as the Universal Church made up of all believers in all places at all times we need to talk about what makes one a member of the One Holy Catholic Church.

To this question we need to turn to our last Scripture reading of the morning, to Matthew’s Gospel and to Peter’s confession.

In this passage, Jesus asks the disciples about just who people were saying Jesus was. Some people thought he was John the Baptist reborn. Others thought he was the prophet Elijah come from the dead or Jeremiah come from the dead. And still others thought that Jesus was a new prophet come to speak the words of the Lord.

But Jesus isn’t satisfied with just hearing what others have to say; no, he wants to know what the disciples think. He asks Peter, “who do YOU say I am?”

To this Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” And then Jesus gives Peter a change of name. He says that Simon, that was Peter’s name before…Simon you are Peter (which means rock) and on this rock I will build my church.

Now our Roman brothers and sisters take this passage to mean that Peter was the first Pope and that each successive Pope was a descendant of Peter and thus built on the Rock of Peter in Apostolic Succession.

But I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. Peter is important and he was the undisputed leader of the 12 Apostles after Jesus’ death and resurrection. But I think the “Rock” that Jesus was going to build the church upon was rather the confession that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel.

Jesus was the person of which the entire Old Testament spoke of as the coming one, the one who would release Israel from bondage to sin and exile and the person that would open the door for not just Jews but for all people to enter God’s household of faith, the Church.

So today, everyone who calls Jesus the Messiah and Lord is part of the One Holy Catholic Church. That means that the UCC Church down the Road, LCBC in town, Lebanon Community Church, the Amish and Mennonites, and everywhere in between that calls Jesus the Lord, the Divine Son of God…they are all part of the Catholic Church, and that includes us.

One Body, Many Parts

But that leads me to our next Scripture, 1 Corinthians 12. Why is it that there are so many different churches out there. Why not just pick the first church closest to your house and go there? That’s what people did in the old days, anyway.

Well, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that there is one body but many parts. Now, in the context of the passage he is reminding the Corinthians that just because some people have flashier spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues or speaking words of prophecy that doesn’t mean they are more important than people who have less obvious gifts like gifts of hospitality or prayer—things that are often exercised quietly or even in secret.

But this concept of one body with many parts all of which are important applies equally well in the situation we find ourselves in today.

It used to be that people had what I call “brand loyalty” to a church if they moved from one place to another. They grew up Methodist for instance and when they grew up, got a job, and moved away from home, they simply looked for the local Methodist church in that town or city and made their way there.

That doesn’t happen that frequently today unless you are really die-hard about your faith. Part of it is our consumer culture in which our preferences drive everything. (…) But part of it is also I think a positive development in which we are beginning to recognize the universal nature of the church. We recognize that there really is one body and that many churches make it up. This is a wonderful thing and should be celebrated.

The Temple of God

And that brings us now to a startling realization that Paul let’s us know in Ephesians. Paul tells us that not only are we one body in Christ regardless of what local congregation we happen to worship in but that this one body is nothing short of the very Temple of our God.

So, what is a temple? Well, a temple is a building purpose-built to house the presence of the Deity itself. Israel’s temple was commanded to be built by God as a place for God to dwell among humans, much like the tabernacle that preceded it. The Ark of the Covenant was the throne of God whose very presence dwelt between the Cherubim on its top.

In the same way, in the power of the Holy Spirit, you and I and all other believers throughout the world make up a living temple…a temple of flesh, blood, and bone in which God’s very presence dwells. Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul tells the church that each individual member is a temple to God in their bodies and so we should be careful about how we treat our bodies and what we do with them. But here Paul is making a slightly different point—those individual bodies come together to make up one bigger temple (Voltron).

The Church Universal

In our final Scripture passage, which opened us this morning, Paul makes it clear that our thought experiment this morning at the opening of my message might be a little problematic for us. Remember when I asked you to think of what the ideal church looked like. Then I asked you to think about who Was there and who was NOT?

Well, in Galatians chapter 3, Paul tells us that we simply do not get to pick and choose who gets in to the church. We do not—ever—get to turn people away from our doors merely because of some defining characteristic about them.

Notice the characteristics that Paul marks out here. Jew and Gentile. That means no ethnicity is barred from the church. There is no white church, Hispanic church, Asian Church, or Black Church—just Christ’s church.

The next characteristic is slave or free. In Christ, all are one regardless of social status. That means no financial or class tests are permissible. There is no rich church, no poor church, no middle class church—just Christ’s church. And finally, there is not male and female. There is no gender distinction in the church. That means that anything else Paul says about men and women has to be filtered through this passage and taken in context. There are not men’s role in the church and women’s roles in the church (or the home for that matter) but in Christ the distinction between male and female is done away with when it comes to exercising spiritual gifts and having access to God.

But today we need to go further than Paul’s words in Galatians. We need to add another I think. We need to say something like “There is no sinner or saint in Christ for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

Let’s face it folks, we all have a internal canon of Scripture in which we rank sins—mostly the sins of other people higher than our own if we’re honest—but we all pick and choose. In our cultural moment today it seems that sexual sins are at the height of the list. That’s why talk about promiscuity, sexual deviance, adultery, and homosexuality fill the pages of church sermons and denominational infighting.

I have heard people that they would refuse to worship with someone who committed these sins.

But I have to ask at that point…where do we draw the line. Why is sexual sin an excluding criteria but gluttony isn’t? Why is sexual sin the be all and end all and greed is not, lying is not, hoarding wealth is not?

Friends, it cannot be that way. Remember, as Augustine said, the church is not a museum for the saints but a hospital for the sick.

I pray that this room would be full of people who have sin. I pray that this room overflow with people who acknowledge their own pain and brokenness. Then we would truly have the Catholic Church in our midst, the one holy catholic church made up of all people who desire to flee from the wrath to come, to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and turn their lives toward God in Christ. Amen.