A Sermon by the Reverend Matthew B. Reeves
Parkville Presbyterian Church, Parkville, Missouri
The Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 19, 2004

Texts: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

Every so often, as we pass through the places of our world, we come upon space we know is sacred. There are the obvious places—a soaring cathedral with cavernous silence proclaims God’s mystery; an ornate basilica with intricate handiwork declaring God’s beauty; a little country church with simplicity bearing witness to God’s presence in the daily-ness of life. But then there are sacred spaces that aren’t explicitly religious—a visitor to Ground Zero falls into silent reverie by what seemingly cries from the ground; flowers and pictures and notes are stuck into the fence of a high school, and the chatter of the students stops when they draw near; a room is perfectly preserved with the trappings of a 5-year-old girl, and once a year a grieving mother opens the door to view a neatly made pink bed with a well-worn teddy bear propped up on a pillow, all of it perfectly preserved from 10 years ago.

You don’t have to be a religious person to have an idea of "sacred" space. Pastors are reminded of this all the time, as when a non-churchgoer shows up in the building, and through logic that escapes me surmises that his life is more visible to God in a church, and says something like, "Better watch out for the lightning bolts." There’s a way of thinking that says the world is divided into the sacred and the secular, that God is more present in some places than others, that a title or a garment or a function somehow make a person or place more holy. But every so often, we get surprised. We find holiness in unexpected people, sacredness in shocking places. We see that God breaks into the world, handles seemingly unreligious lives, and again claims this world as God’s own. The question isn’t whether there is such a thing as sacred space. Rather, it’s whether there isn’t.

Timothy was the pastor of a church figuring out what it meant to live sacred lives in a place called Ephesus. The challenge for these Ephesian Christians wasn’t rampant secularism as much as excessive religiosity. More than one writer has noted the pick and choose, worship-the-god-of-your-choice attitude of the first century Roman world is awfully similar to 21^st century America. Have your own beliefs, visit your own shrine, create a fulfilling spirituality. Don’t step on anyone’s toes, don’t do anything illegal and you’ll be fine. Pastor Timothy faced the double problem of keeping the church’s doctrine pure, while making sure this new religious movement didn’t offend the wrong people and get squashed. Hence Paul’s instruction to Timothy: strive for "a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity." Live as is fitting for followers of Jesus, but don’t make any waves. We might expect a church in such conditions to keep to itself—to withdraw into a "holy huddle" of worship and prayer and community, to avoid the temptations of religious syncretism or worry about ruffling feathers.

But that’s precisely what they didn’t do. Paul made it clear that the place for the church is in the world. To be the church is to gather in worship and join in prayer, but all the while keeping eyes open to the world that surrounds. Paul’s strong urging couldn’t have been easy for Timothy: "I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions." You can imagine young pastor Timothy overwhelmed by the tasks of ministry—finding suitable leaders, creating Christian education programs, getting Christian morals into his recently pagan congregation. The remainder of Paul’s letter has mostly to do with all these things. Timothy had a lot on his plate, so it couldn’t have been easy for him to hear Paul’s first instruction was a call to prayer. Not prayer for his congregation. Prayer for the world. "Supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings." Paul thumbs through his thesaurus and puts down all the prayer synonyms. We’re not talking about one or two prayers, as you think of it, but the whole diet of prayer with all the bases covered. Make supplication for everyone, whether in the church or not. Intercede for kings, good policies or bad. Pray for those in high positions, it makes no difference whether they’re friendly to you. Prayer for the world is Paul’s first priority for Timothy’s ministry. A new congregation sought to learn a life that blesses God, and Paul’s first urging is to look at world and lift that world up to God.

One of the church’s greatest temptations is to exist simply for it’s own sake. For a lot of good reasons, churches strive for worship that’s meaningful, create programs to meet people’s needs, tend to the sick and the broken in their midst. It’s well and good that the church should be a sanctuary of sorts, a community where people can retreat from the rough and tumble world to find comfort, peace and spiritual nourishment. But when the church starts caring more about the life within its walls than it does the lives outside, it’s lost touch with the God it worships. The church of every time and place discovers what it means to be church by fixing it’s eyes at once upon the God that called them and a world that’s calling.

We can’t get past the first sentence of scripture without learning what’s most fundamental to God—that God chooses not to be God without the world. And we don’t get further than the first chapter before hearing the heart of the gospel—that God chooses not to be God without us. We see this unchanging decision of God on scripture’s every page—as God bears with sinful humanity, chooses Israel to bless the nations, raises up Jeremiah to call his people back, as God sends a "mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all."

Ephesian society was awash in ways to be religious and Paul’s counsel was not to reduce the God of heaven and earth to a piddley god, just another option on the spiritual smorgasbord. Paul won’t let the Ephesians think for a moment that the God revealed in Jesus Christ can be confined to a shrine or be the God of just one nation or the God of a few gathered worshippers. For Jesus was mediator between God and humanity, the one who assumed flesh. The flesh Jesus took on wasn’t only that of believers within the church. Jesus took on the flesh of humanity. To the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, to the President of the United States and the untouchable in India, God’s fleshy word is the same: I want you saved. Jesus Christ is God’s decision not to turn a blind eye to a world gone wrong, but to delve into it, submerge himself in its brokenness and heal it through the death of the Son. Jesus got his hands dirty among the beggars, his feet torn up on the roads, his body broken on the cross. Jesus suffered the world’s worst, and offered the world God’s best.

In Jesus God entered our messy world and called all of it sacred. A letter comes to Timothy and it says, if you’re going to be the church of Jesus Christ, you can’t do it without the world. The church can’t pray selectively. The church can’t love some and not others. For the world we live in God desires to save, the whole world with every person in it.

Recently an article caught my eye—partly because the author was Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw. But mostly because of the humorous yet theologically astute subtitle, "There is no place in all of creation that is outside the scope of God’s mercies—not even Burger King." The article is prompted by Mouw’s habit of praying in public, a practice that caused a Christian friend to ask, "Isn’t it a bit artificial to do that kind of thing? I mean, sitting in a booth at Burger King, with noisy kids running around—can you really get yourself into a praying mood?"

Mouw responds that he doesn’t often find himself in a praying mood at a restaurant, be he doesn’t pray only when he’s feeling "spiritual" He goes on to explain that if he’s in a crowded mall and runs into someone he knows, he still greets the person even though he hasn’t had time to get into a friendly mood. The person is there and her presence needs to be acknowledged. "It is even more important," he says, "to acknowledge God’s presence in a Burger King."

Wherever we are, God is there. God isn’t present more at church and less at work. As God sees it, there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular, public and private. Jesus hallowed the earth, the Holy Spirit moves among us, all the world is God’s domain, sacred space. Children at the bus stop are in God’s image. Grocery stores overflowing with produce belong to a world where thousands will die of hunger today. God sees this world, is in love with this world, and calls the church to love it too. So the church offers prayers for President Bush and Kim Jong Il; intercedes for media moguls and African children dying of AIDS; offers thanksgiving for our blessings and the blessing of some unknown person half a world away because we’re all of the Savior’s flesh, people desired by God, humanity united in the need to be saved.

The stillness of Ground Zero. The high school fence with flowers. The room of a girl who didn’t reach her sixth birthday. We ascribe to death a kind of sacredness; we need to memorialize a life cut short. God has seen fit to memorialize the death of the Savior, but not at a place—with a meal. With bread and cup. The church partakes of bread and takes into its heart the Savior’s body, given for the world. The cup of salvation is held up, and from the pews the congregation can see its reflection in polished silver. When the pastor is there at Table before the church, there holding the cup, I can’t help but wonder if God doesn’t think, "Preacher, hold the cup a little higher, so the church can see the reflection of the world." Amen.