Today we celebrate the birthday of the church. I want to offer some reflections on what church is and what it is not. Many churches fall into the “what it is not” category. I want to speak of a church alive as the beloved community and truly alive to the Spirit. Most churches are not alive but promote unhealthy notions around Jesus and ministry.

One example was the Arizona Congressman who maintained last week there is no obligation to the poor stated in the bible. He was criticizing Francis I for his care for the poor. He quotes 2 Thessalonians 3:10:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Paul here is not saying that if you are poor, you need to work. Nothing should be given to you.

Here exactly is the misuse of scripture to support a heartless political policy that would deny food stamps to families and their children, healthcare, and social benefits while the 1% in our country become richer and greedier with deeper tax cuts. In the US, the Bible is used by fundamentalist to preserve and justify the status quo of not caring for the poor or other unpopular issues.

Paul is criticizing those who are not working but who have actively become busybodies in the community. These people are capable of work, but use their time to create trouble and gossip in the community. This verses from Paul have nothing to do with whether social welfare—such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and social services and helping the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, and the vulnerable–should be available in our society. The political agenda to cut social benefits for the poor and the burdened middle class for the extremely wealthy 1% stands against the interpretation of this verse and most of the bible where God exercises a preferential option for the poor and the marginal.

I nearly gagged on this statement from this Arizona congressman. There are nearly 2000 times the word “the poor” is used in the scriptures. He deliberately distorts the Bible to justify his political ideology of greed and lack of compassionate care for the poor. This is not Christianity, and those churches that promote such position for not caring for the poor and vulnerable are not what churches are or should be. Many churches, I am sad to say, have become servants of corporate America and the wealthy and the fail to listen to the gospels.

I want to share God does not reject you video. It has been banned on tv in several states. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcv9u9x3z8

I want to say what I believe in my heart that Christ’s church should be place where God’s fools come together. Where are fools for Christ who follow the path of God’s kindom today? Where is the beloved community to be found? I often had been labeled a “troublemaker” by folks and more recently the MCC hierarchy. I took the criticism as a badge of doing something correct in following Jesus in discipleship and integrity.

Many church leaders promote the beatitudes as I read one UCC pastor Robin Meyers characterized as type of “cereal box” Christianity. He argues that the beloved community is an “embodied force opposed, a beloved community of defiance, a joyful but resilient colony of dissenters from the forces of death—both physical and spiritual—that destroy and marginalize creation.” (Meyers)

Meyers speaks of the beloved community, a church who promotes a “resistance as for of direct or indirect action opposing anything in the dominant culture that brings death and indignity to any of the human family, or to creations itself.” Both definitions include the poor and creation, harmed directly by human actions, apathy, and callous actions. Are you surprised at the oil spill of a hundred thousand barrows into the ocean coast hurting the environment and ocean life when the company has been cited for over a 100 safety violations in the last decade?

God’s call to us, individually and as community, is right here this morning. This is a place of grace where the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to a joy in sharing his ministry in a world that is broken and hungry for grace.

Many churches like individuals fill the empty space of our lives and communal lives with lots of things, but fail to hear the real message to fill the empty spaces of church and our lives with God’s grace.

Here is wonderful quotation from Rev. Peter Gomes, an American Baptist minister, and African-American clergy who grew up in Plymouth MA where the Pilgrims first landed, and became chaplain at Harvard University:

Good news to some will almost inevitably be bad news to others. In order that the gospel in the New Testament might be made palatable as possible, its rough edges have been shorn off and the radical edge of Jesus’ preaching has been replaced by a respectable middle, of which niceness is now God. When Jesus came preaching, it was to proclaim the end of things as they are and the breaking in of things that are to be: the status quo is not to be criticized; it is to be destroyed. (Peter Gomes)

The Christianity that I see promoted on the television, radio, and internet sickens me. It is anything but the gospel of Jesus. It proclaims a Christ that is distant from the poor, immersed in the mall and in the latest war, or in fearful responses to change and inclusion such LGBT folks, peoples of color, or undocumented migrants. Or a Christianity takes the scriptures literally to advocate environmental exploitation or radical exclusion justifying the exclusion of those that fall victim to the social circumstances of losing a job, becoming addicted, or just being different.

Writer Ann Lamott, pens, “You can safely assume you created God in your image when it turns out that God hates the same people you do.” Isn’t that statement very true? God does not hate anyone, neither should we.

I can look past at my life and see multiple threads of embodied non-compliance or perhaps better framed in language I use, “embodied mischief.” It is embodied mischief to institutional Christianity, its orthodoxies, and misrepresentation or perversion of God’s grace. I have witnessed this in the Roman Catholic Church, the MCC, and numerous other churches where we find justification for so many positions but forgetting the basic gospel message of compassion and care for the poor and the vulnerable. I am not a good game player when it comes to integrity or ego-centeredness of leadership, the institutional church, or even myself.

Peter Gomes is correct that Jesus preached the gospel not to just criticize the status quo but to destroy the status quo that disenfranchises people from God’s grace and the necessities to live, flourish, and the well-being that God intends for all of us. That is the rough edges of the gospel, and it produces reactions how God disturbs our world. Do we forget that we are commanded to love our God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourselves.

When the Holy Spirit descended on the men and women that day hidden in the upper room on Pentecost, people heard a babbling in other languages and perceived an intoxication of emotional feeling and joy. But they witnessed an intoxicated of foolishness for Christ. They became like Christ “holy fools of God.” They came out with courage and stepped out of their roles to witness to an event that disrupts their whole lives since the death of Jesus and his resurrection. You see God’s resurrection of Christ created a faith born of wonder, loosing fear, hope, unconditional love, and radical amazement and absolutely fabulous “foolishness” for God.

The beloved community is resistant not only to the practice of Christianity as lived by many Churches and Christians but also resistant to the dominant cultural threads of consumerism, gospels of prosperity, corporate greed, and separation of yourselves from others. Christianity is not a set of beliefs but a relationship with Jesus Christ. God does not save or reward those with correct beliefs or orthodox practices; God saves those who dare to love beyond the boundaries and barriers that culture, religion, and society set up to exclude.

I read about the board of a church in Massachusetts that warned its newly hired pastor, “no politics from the pulpit.” It reminds me the story in Luke when Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, he upsets the neighbors and residents of his hometown so much that they attempt to murder him by throwing over the cliff.

We have spiritualize and sanitized Jesus to make acceptable to the widest audience; our message is condensed to correct beliefs and salvation while we ignore the dangerous message of the gospel of concrete care and relationship to a kindom of nobodies. Jesus’ message is dangerous, and the grace of that message becomes real to us a beloved community when a preacher unleashes the powerful memories of grace and liberation. The gospel creates resistance, if not outright rebellion, to currents of softening the message of unconditional grace that frees us to become a community of resisters or mischief-makers. Jesus addressed hunger and poverty and oppression within his society. The voice of Jesus, along with the voice of the preacher, must coincide to represent the dangerous memories of Jesus’ resistance and rebellion of the good news.

The shortest verse in the gospel is “Jesus wept.” He wept not because of wrong beliefs, but wept and continues to weep for heartless religion that fails to promote compassion, encouraged a fundamentalism that builds walls of exclusion, emboldens leaders to become prelates and not servants, and makes unconditional love a commodity for sale, and denying people accessibility to grace. And he wept and still weeps for uncaring institutions whose sole purpose becomes greed and exploitation, pushing violence and war over precious resources, and will treat people as throw-away and disposable.

The vision of Pentecost is to follow the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit does not differ in her actions than Jesus. If Jesus was a rule breaker for the sake of compassion and God’s radical inclusive love, She breaks also boundaries for compassion, she breaks religious rules as Jesus did on a daily basis. She colors outside the lines, creating holy mischief not for the sake of creating foolishness but a foolishness for humanity but a profound wisdom of God’s nature. A person seized by the Holy Spirit knows what it means to be a holy fool, living the good news of Jesus Christ and fighting for a just kindom and a compassionate society of care, forgiveness, and unconditional love. ‘

My prayer for you this morning is that you allow the Holy Spirit, allow the Spirit to to make you a holy fool, to live the message of compassionate care for the poor, and to break rules in your discipleship to follow Jesus—God’s Christ.