Two of my favorite literary characters are George and Martha—not the squabbling leads in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but the two lovable hippos from James Marshall’s children’s books. My wife Kathy is a children’s librarian—the priest and the librarian: hey, what a power couple!-- and she introduced me to these lovable hippos when we were first going together in the 1970s. George and Martha are best friends, and they have pretty tame adventures—taking dance classes, going to the beach, and playing practical jokes on each other. They often argue, but they always make up. They would be good role models for present-day Washington.
My favorite of all James Marshall’s wonderful George and Martha illustrations portrays these two enormous hippos sitting at their kitchen table. The wall behind them displays a needlework sampler that reads, “We love our friends”. It’s kind of surreal seeing two hippos at a kitchen table, one of them wearing a blue gingham dress. And their motto—“We love our friends”—seems at once sweet, funny, and obvious. Of course we love our friends. They’re our friends! Why wouldn’t we love them?
I’ve often thought that George and Martha’s motto might easily serve as the mission statement of most Episcopal parish churches: “We love our friends.” Church is the place where we make deep, lifelong connections, and that is a wonderful thing. Church people support each other in times of crisis, joy, and everyday life. Singing, praying, and working together builds community. But because our parishes are so good at doing these things, they often have a hard time seeing the world beyond themselves. When Mariann Budde, the Bishop of Washington who started there around the time I began at the cathedral, finished her initial visit of all the congregations in the diocese, I asked her what she had learned. She replied, “Most parishes know a lot more about their history than they do about their neighborhood.”
Today’s Gospel tells us of Jesus commissioning the twelve disciples—later apostles. He doesn’t do this out of the blue. He sets aside these apostolic coworkers because, as Matthew tells it, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” He instructs his new colleagues, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” The twelve are first called, then sent, because Jesus looks around him and sees a world in trouble. He empowers the twelve, and by extension us, to proclaim and heal as he did. It’s kind of a daunting task.
Every church I have served—even those ostensibly committed to social justice— has found itself caught in the tension between “We love our friends” on the one hand and “proclaiming the good news” on the other. As a result, these parishes have struggled with what seems, at least to me, like an impossible contradiction. We want the church to grow. And we want it to stay the same.
When I joined the staff at All Saints, Pasadena in 1990, George Regas put me to work to learn everything I could about church growth. I went to Fuller Seminary, Saddleback Church, even (God help me!) the Crystal Cathedral to see how those places were doing it. Here’s what I learned: growing a church is easy. Getting permission to do the things you need to do to make it grow is often impossible. In my Michigan years I did church growth workshops around the Detroit area, visiting struggling churches to show them the easy steps to growing your congregation: build and project an identity, invite people in, welcome newcomers, put them to work, engage their ideas about worship, music, and service projects. At the end of almost every visit, a parishioner would ask me, “Father, is it possible for us to grow without changing?” Churches that grow are focused on the people they’re trying to reach. Churches that shrink are pretty much centered on themselves.
Matthew’s account of the call and sending of the twelve reminds us that Jesus’s message was always focused on serving others, not on celebrating himself. The crowds coming toward him are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus’s response to seeing the crowds is to take action by building what may well have been the world’s first social service organization. Yes, he wanted to bring people in, but he also wanted to serve their basic human needs.
We are not the first generation of Christians to become confused about the nature and purpose of the church. The Roman Catholic Church built a monolithic world structure that needed to be reformed. Each of our other denominations, in turn, has had to examine itself and reclaim the reasons for its founding. As Emerson said, “Love of the hero corrupts into the worship of his statue.” [“The American Scholar”] We become deluded into thinking that the mission of the church is the perpetuation of the status quo.
It is a natural thing to think of the church as a gathering of friends, a warm community of the like-minded. But the church isn’t here to serve us. It is here to serve the harassed and helpless crowds who were of such concern to Jesus. The great William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, once said, “The Church is the only organization that does not exist for itself, but for the benefit of those who live outside of it.” We are a missional community, called into being by Jesus to extend the healing and love of God not only to each other but to the world.
You and I are only here together in this church this morning because the twelve whom Jesus appointed responded to his call and reached out to bring in others, who then reached out and so on in an endless chain of expansive invitation. Once here, it’s easy to think we have some proprietary claim on this place, that we are the guardians of the traditions handed down to us. But the only Christian tradition that really matters is the missional command that we bring what Pope Francis called the “joy of the Gospel” to those on the outside so that they, with us, may experience what you and I find so valuable here.
My old boss George Regas used to say, “You can’t sell from an empty wagon”. What he meant by that was that the preacher needed to have a rich interior life in order to climb into the pulpit and presume to advise others how to live. In the same way, a congregation cannot serve the world if its community is not open, loving, and engaged. Our love for each other is precious and it matters.
I love the George and Martha quality of All Saints. We do love our friends. And I also know that churches are primarily in the business of serving those who live outside us. The more we seek to serve and know those people, the more they will love us and the God we serve. But we will never come to know, love, and serve them if we always try to keep things the way we are. We cannot grow if we do not change.
It is possible to love both ourselves and the world. So here’s the good news: we have already got George and Martha’s motto down. We do love our friends. Here’s the better news: it is time for us to bring the affection and support we experience here to those we do not yet even know. Amen.
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