Committed to Being Opened Up

David W. Lloyd

October 20, 2024

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Dearly beloved, I am speaking today to those of you who are going to make a commitment to Seekers Church for the first time. I hope the rest of you listen because everything I’ll say also pertains to you! Almost everyone who has worshipped here has commented that Seekers Church is different from other churches in which they’ve worshipped. Yes, and Recommitment Sunday is one such difference. Recommitment Sunday is a tradition from the Church of the Saviour that Seekers Church has faithfully kept since our founding fifty years ago as one of the Church of the Saviour sister communities. Of the Sundays that require each Seeker to prepare for, Recommitment Sunday has always been third, behind Easter and Christmas. It is always observed on the third Sunday of October, the day on which the Church of the Saviour was founded in 1947.

Recommitment is one of four parts to the fundamental concept of the Church of the Saviour: integrity of membership, which we have carried forward into Seekers. Integrity of membership has four components:

being called by God to Christian servanthood,
committing to Christ Jesus and a local expression of the Body of Christ,
being held accountable for living out that commitment, and
re-examining our commitment and deciding whether to recommit or not annually.

First, “being called to Christian servanthood.” In Mission Groups in Seekers Church, a document on our website, we state:

At Seekers Church, we believe God calls each of us to an active partnership, to be co-creators of God’s realm here on Earth. This call comes through a sense of awe and mystery as we live into a growing relationship with Christ. It is a persistent, costly commitment to give ourselves to the task of bringing peace and justice to those in need. At the same time, once we accept God’s call, God’s gift to us is that this call leads to a life of love in service. Concretely, God’s call is a deep, inescapable desire to transform the world and the church. It is a desire placed by God in the heart of each of us to be servants to others and stewards of God’s creation.

This is the first place where we are opened. Christ’s call isn’t about “following my bliss” in our culture’s usual understanding. It may be to a mission I don’t believe that I am equipped to do. It may not be a vocational call, but it is always about humbling myself to serve others in the manner that Christ exemplified.

As I have read and meditated on Mark’s gospel these last few weeks, I’ve seen myself as the thirteenth disciple. Jesus called them and me to follow him, to preach, and to drive out demons. (Hmm, I am still thinking about that one.) We’ve seen Jesus in conflict with those who are so focused on following the rules to be righteous that they’ve forgotten how to love and to forgive. He’s warned the other disciples and me three times that living the Jesus Way will get him killed and that we too must be willing to give up our lives for his sake. He’s given us a vision of God treating him as equals with Moses and Elijah, the greatest men in Israel’s history, and he’s told us that he would rise from the dead. (I’m still trying to understand this.) He overheard us arguing about who among us was the greatest, and he chided us by saying that whoever wants to be greatest must be the last and servant of all. In this week’s excerpt, James and John asked him to authorize them to sit at his right hand after his resurrection and they had the nerve to claim that they could face the death he will face. When the rest of us heard about it we were livid, so he reminded us once again that whoever would be great must become servant of the others, and whoever would be first must be slave to all.

After nearly fifty years of annually re-examining my commitment, I find I still have to give long and careful thought about saying, “Yes, God, use me,” on Recommitment Sunday. The call to servanthood is un-American: we believe we are created equal, with the right to pursue our own happiness. To willingly subjugate myself to another’s control is counter-cultural. But every year I find myself opened to saying, “Yes, God, use me as your servant.”

Second, “committing to Christ Jesus and a local expression of the Body of Christ.” Seekers is not a creedal church. We don’t ask you to make specific professions of belief that Jesus is God, that Jesus was resurrected, that Christ will come again, or as we’ve recently discussed in the School of Christian Growth class that Marjory Bankson and John Morris taught, that heaven awaits you after your death. Each of us may believe these things differently. What we ask you to commit to is to be opened to living the Jesus Way: loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, AND loving your neighbor as yourself.

And we ask you to commit to be part of this local expression of the Body of Christ. Saint Paul used the human body as a metaphor for the Body of Christ, and, like the human body, each organ and each part of an organ – every member — plays a necessary role in the Body of Christ. If you don’t know which organ or part of an organ you are, we ask you to pray to be opened to functioning in a new way. Now, we expect you to try to live out that role, but it’s okay not to do it perfectly. At Seekers we know that our local expression of the Body of Christ isn’t perfect — every week we confess aloud in unison the ways we have failed God, the other members of this community of Christians, and many others and then we confess our individual failings aloud or silently. We have passionate disagreements in Seekers, and we sometimes say and do things that hurt each other. We know that through God’s grace we are forgiven, so we ask for forgiveness from each other and try to live lovingly the next week.

Third, “being accountable for living out that commitment.” Accountability is often described negatively, as if it is giving a periodic account of only our shortcomings. No, accountability means that we give a progress report, the good news along with the bad news. We have spiritual disciplines to help us live out our commitments: daily prayer, daily reading and meditation on the Scriptures, weekly worship, regular reports of our spiritual journey to our spiritual director in a mission group or to a spiritual companion, and regular financial giving. I think of our spiritual disciplines as like having daily practices on a sports team – we both develop our spiritual muscles and learn to use them correctly. They are not ends in themselves but only ways to help us grow spiritually.

That is what our mission groups are about: a place where we are given the opportunity to present the travelogue of our spiritual pilgrimage through a weekly written spiritual report and in speaking within the group. Sometimes our accounts are joyous as we describe the places in our lives where God has given us grace this week, and sometimes they are sobering as we relate the challenges to our commitment we’ve faced and the times we haven’t lived up to our commitment.

But there’s another value to being in a mission group: because every member of the mission group is committed to the mission, each of us has the absolute right to ask the other members of the mission group for support, for help, and for forgiveness as we seek to co-create one little aspect of God’s Kingdom. I am as responsible for helping Marjory, John, Jacqie Wallen, Michele Frome, Kolya Braun-Greiner, and Mary Mehala on their spiritual journeys as they are for helping me on mine, for sharing their joys and sharing their sorrows as they share in my joys and sorrows. My mission group has helped open me up and that is a blessing.

Fourth, “re-examining our commitment and recommitting annually” (we hope). We don’t shame anyone who, after such re-examination, decides not to recommit. Every year the Celebration Circle mission group sends us material to help us in that re-examination. Our recommitment preparation guidance theme this year is “Be opened” and included part of a sermon by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber:

If I’m honest, if I pictured Jesus’ Holy and unwashed fingers in my own ears – if He touched me, sighed, looked to heaven and said Be Opened, I’m pretty sure I’d said “oh. no thanks”. Because, let’s be honest, it’s usually easier to not change and it’s painful to be open and healing can hurt…. It can be more comfortable to allow parts of ourselves to die than to feel them have new life….[i]

and the recommitment preparation guidance asked three questions:

Where is the Spirit encouraging me to be opened?
How might being opened change my relationship to Seekers Church?
How am I helping Seekers be opened to the future?

During this recommitment season, various Seekers have related during the gathering time, in sermons, and in post-sermon reflections how the Holy Spirit has encouraged them to be opened. But there hasn’t been much said about how being opened might change or is changing our relationships to Seekers Church. Nor have we said much about how being opened is helping Seekers be opened to the future. So, dearly beloved, here are some of my reflections about those second and third questions.

It is no secret that we are an aged congregation. Our average age is well over sixty. In the mid-1970s as Seekers was being formed, the theologian John Westerhoff told Fred Taylor, Sonia Dyer, and me that,

a healthy congregation has three generations: the young generation that has dreams for the congregation’s future, the middle generation that has the means and practicality to keep the congregation going, and the older generation of memory and wisdom that helps guide the congregation on its spiritual journey.

That’s not Seekers today. In the last few years before the pandemic, we had less than 10 children in the congregation and Judy Lantz had struggled to find Seekers willing to teach Sunday School. Post-pandemic, we have hybrid worship combining in-person and virtual worship. Hybrid worship has had a positive aspect: it’s kept our congregation functioning when people can’t attend in person due to illness or age, but it’s also had a negative aspect: it’s made it easier for our families with children to worship remotely. Judy tried to do Sunday School remotely and to have one in-person gathering a month — it was challenging. Nor has it been easy to give a word to children who are all on Zoom, and I struggled to find people willing to do it. Judy and I have laid down the children’s team, with mixed feelings – we knew we did the best we could, but was it good enough?

We haven’t made a congregation-wide effort to evangelize younger people but have relied on welcoming people who found their way to us. We’re glad you’re part of us now, but most of you newcomers are older and in Marjory’ words, “spiritually mature.” How do children become spiritually mature if they aren’t guided in the process? Why haven’t we made that congregation-wide effort?

I suspect that it’s the word “evangelizing” that makes many of us uncomfortable. We associate the word with evangelicals: the spiritually (and frequently politically) conservative people who want to know if we have accepted Jesus as our personal savior and then ask us to take the spiritual tract they’re handing out. In our front window we proclaim ourselves to be welcoming and inclusive, which we interpret to mean those in the LGBTQ+ community. We use gender inclusive and non-hierarchical language in our worship and publications. Our Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team is trying to lead us into being more inclusive racially and ethnically. Do we need to continue to be opened to exploring broader meanings of “welcoming” and “inclusive” that include those with different religious and political views than ours? What changes might that bring to Seekers?

Do we fear that younger newcomers will change our worship to become like many televised evangelical services? Replace our lack of dogma with doctrine and creeds? Change our mission groups drastically or even end them? We frequently talk a lot about our Seekers community and give thanks for it. But do we risk becoming smug about Seekers that it becomes an idol? It is not our community, but God’s. We are merely one local expression of the Body of Christ, made up of fallible and sinful people. Do we need to be opened to changes in our worship? In our non-dogmatic faith? In our mission groups?

Evangelism is not a dirty word. The word “evangel” comes from the Greek word euangelos (in Latin evangelium) meaning “bringer of good news,” combining eu (good news) and angelos (messenger). In old English the word was Godspell, the “good tale,” the gospel. The writers of the Four Gospels are called The Evangelists. The disciples and other apostles, especially St. Paul, were evangelists, sharing how the Holy Spirit opened them up. How do we share the good news? Can we pray to be opened to become evangelists?

And so we invite you to commit to membership in Seekers Church. All we require is that you commit to “all Seekers all the time.” I’m just kidding. All we require is that you commit to putting yourself into this local expression of the Body of Christ, and praying, really praying, that God will open you, open me, open all of us, up.

In the song “Plowshare Prayer,” Spencer LaJoye sings

I pray that this prayer is a plowshare of sorts

That it might break you open

It might help you grow

I have been unable to hear that song without beginning to weep. In an interview Spencer describes how the line and the song title came about:

There’s a well-known Bible verse in the book of Isaiah that talks about nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. It’s this gorgeous image – this dream – of a future in which things that were once used for harm are made into tools used for growth and flourishing.[ii]

We live in a time of swords and spears but long for peace. May our prayers be plowshares that break us open and help us grow and flourish in the Jesus Way: loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. May it be so.

[i] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Oh good, now we know who the REAL problem is: a sermon on healing for inside a women’s prison” on her substack blog The Corners for August 18, 2024, https://thecorners.substack.com/p/oh-good-now-we-know-who-the-real-problem-is

[ii] “Rachel Cholst: Spencer LaJoye Turns Prayers Into Plowshares On Their New Song,” interview by Rachel Cholst, Adobe & Teardrops blog, March 1, 2022, https://adobeandteardrops.com/2022/03/spencer-lajoye-turns-prayers-into-plowshares-on-their-new-song.html