“Goodnight, Baby Jesus. Goodnight, mommy. Goodnight, daddy,” Sprout said to his nativity, addressing Mary and Joseph. While his theology wasn’t quite right, I love how he personally identifies with the story. That intimacy with the characters is something I’m actually learning from him this Advent season.
As I wrote about back in November, my church is going through a significant transition. While I seriously thought we wouldn’t continue on, a few members have really kept things afloat. During the time we’ve been looking for a pastor, we’ve had a series of guest speakers. Because our usual organizer, Jan, was going to be at her husband’s high school reunion last Sunday, she asked me to organize the service. Here’s the sermon I gave, based on the passages Acts 4:32-35 and Romans 12:14-16.
Finding true community is rare. Finding true Christian community is even rarer.
I found true Christian community in college, when I broke bread in the cafeteria with my friends and my hall mates of different denominations gathered on Sunday evening fouir prayers.
I found it in rural Maine, when Chris and I lived on a cooperative farm. We gathered each morning for bagels and to recite St. Francis’ prayer before serving those who suffer most.
But those were unusual circumstances. Those supposedly aren’t situations that you can find in ordinary “adult” life.
In fact, an otherwise wise person – a priest – told me I wasn’t going to find a church like those places.
And yet I have – here.
This Sunday, I felt – and cried – as if I was losing a family member. But it wasn’t a person Chris and I are losing – it’s a community. A community that has inspired thought and action, provided comfort even when they didn’t know it, and loved us and Sprout so very much. We’re in the process of losing our church.
Our church started in 1938 as Bethesda First Baptist, part of the American Baptists, who are much more liberal than the Southern variety. About eight years ago, the congregation decided to relaunch, complete with a new pastor and focus. About a year later, with the congregation down to a handful of people, they brought in our current pastor, Todd. Under Todd’s leadership, the church became “multi-denominational,” embracing Christian traditions from a variety of times and places. From discussions of the saints to contemporary worship songs, the church embodied a unique mix of theology and ritual.
Chris and I came into this story long before we even knew about the church itself. After experiencing spiritual community in college and volunteering at Homeworkers Organized for More Employment (HOME) in Maine, I knew I wanted a church that deeply connected people together. While evangelical churches had previously been my go-to, I abandoned that branch as unfruitful after Chris found only disrespect for being Catholic. Not long after, I read Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, which is about finding wisdom and depth in a broad array of Christian traditions. After we finally decided to get married in a Catholic church, I told the priest that I wanted a church that combined a strong sense of community with the theological diversity. In response, he not unkindly laughed and said, “Shannon, you’re simply not going to find that.”
And yet, we found exactly what I was looking for in the Church in Bethesda. The longer we were there, the more both we and the church matured. I led theological discussions and attended studies on ancient spiritual practices. Chris and I joined the leadership team, called the Servant’s Group, where we discussed the church’s vision and struggled with budget issues.
As part of the leadership, we realized that our community’s main strength was our focus on radical welcome. Our valuing of theological diversity expanded to include diversity of socio-economic levels, race, and sexual orientation. Beyond simple acceptance, we started emphasizing peacemaking, social justice, and reconciliation with groups often left out of Christian hegemony. We took pride in welcoming everyone without strings attached, from a Muslim family who stopped by to a Jewish woman who never comes to service but always shows up afterwards for snacks.
But just as it felt like we as a church had found our purpose – a very needed purpose – everything was falling apart.
All at once, we had a huge departure of young families. The year Sprout was born, there were 9 other kids born; now none of their families attend our church. While most were military – we have a large medical military school nearby – others couldn’t afford to raise a family in the D.C. area. At the same time, we didn’t have a new influx of people to replace them. Where we regularly had 70 people on Sunday mornings, we had dropped down to 40 on the very best of days.
To pile on the problems, our building was literally falling apart. While we always had problems, the first real emergency was the belltower shedding stones during the 2011 D.C. earthquake. After that, we had a major new repair every few months. The culmination was our boiler completely breaking down and flooding the entire basement last winter. When the repair crew drained the water, they found a natural gas leak. Then a water leak in a previously-frozen pipe and another and another. We didn’t have heat in our sanctuary for the entire winter. (Fortunately, we could meet in a smaller room.) While insurance covered the boiler, the building has continued to disintegrate. Only a couple of weeks ago, the radiator in the front hallway broke, leaving a huge puddle on the carpet in the back of the sanctuary.
Between the loss of members and the continuing bills, we simply couldn’t keep up financially. Our pastor took on a second job as a customer service person for the local Apple store. Members of the leadership group took over maintenance tasks, like mowing the lawn.
I stepped up by doing what I do best – communications. We organized events, increased our social media, improved our website, posted online ads. Our Easter Egg hunt attracted many more families than anticipated, nearly overwhelming our resources. But even though we made sure every kid walked away with a special treat, none of the families returned. The Earth Day event was even more of a bust, with no one outside of the volunteers showing up to hear the speaker from Interfaith Power and Light.
Each Sunday morning, I sat in the back with Sprout playing on the floor and counted the number of people. There were never more, never enough. Even though I had done the best I could, it felt like failure.
What finally brought everything to a head was the decision from our pastor to leave at the end of this year. I can’t blame him – while it was exhausting for the leadership group, it was far worse for him. He was spending too much time just trying to keep the church above water with little time for his spiritual / vocational development and no financial stability. As his friend, I completely understood.
But as a parishioner, I was angry and frustrated. Not at him personally, but the entire situation. We don’t have enough money to keep up our failing building. We don’t have enough money to pay a new pastor. We don’t have enough volunteer time or energy to run a regular service. More than half of the Servants’ Group were too burnt out to start from scratch. The future was a big blank.
So at last week’s congregational meeting, we took the first step in figuring out what to do come January – we gave up control of our building.
While it wasn’t the end-all, be-all, it felt like the first step towards complete dissolution. We had put so much in for what felt like so little. I had envisioned bringing my son up in this community and that simply couldn’t happen now.
Which is why I was sobbing in the pews. All of the community, all of the values that we stood for are needed, now as much as ever. They’re needed in a world with terror, hunger, racism, and violence. We as a society and individuals need to hear and embrace them.
But maybe, our society doesn’t need those values wrapped up in a traditional church structure. Maybe they’re needed in service, art, music, and something completely different from what’s come before. Maybe we can rebuild.
But for now, I’m still sad for the fact that what the future holds will never be the same as the past. I’m still in mourning for what had been and uncertain of what is to come. I already miss my faith family.
Knowing I’m the mother of a small child, multiple people this morning asked me how my Mother’s Day went. I could definitively say that it was wonderful. For breakfast – not in bed, too many crumbs – Chris made french toast with farmers’ market strawberries. At church, my friend Teresa took Sprout to kids’ class for the first time and said he behaved fantastically. The little bit of marker on his shirt was very much worth it for the hand-made card. In the afternoon, we hiked the Rock Creek Trail, a paved path that runs 20 miles from the suburbs into the heart of D.C. We saw a thick black water snake, ducks, three white-tailed deer, fish, and plenty of squirrels. Sprout loved his perch up in the baby backpack. Instead of a hotel or restaurant brunch, we went to Taiwanese dim sum for dinner, where we got a ton of food for $30, including as many noodles as Sprout could shove into his mouth. It was a Mother’s Day very much suited for this particular mommy, without any of the commercial trappings but with all of the love I could imagine.
But as lovely as my day was, I know Mother’s Day can be incredibly painful for many women. Whether because they wanted to be mothers and could not; have lost children to physical illness, accidents, or broken relationships; or have no contact with their own mothers, this particular celebration can feel very exclusionary. That’s why I loved the Litany for Mother’s Day that we printed in our church bulletin yesterday. My friend Rev. Deb Vaughn, was guest preaching, and I thought it was incredibly sensitive of her to include it.
Even if you aren’t familiar with the particular stories of these Biblical figures, I think their experiences ring true to many people:
We remember Sarai who was taunted by others in the household because of her inability to have children.
All-encompassing God, we pray for those who feel excluded when we emphasis one kind of family as normal.
We remember Esther, who was adopted and raised by her cousin.
God who embraces us all, we pray for those who cannot be raised by their parents, for a short time or permanently.
We remember Jochebed, the mother of Moses, who placed him into a raft on the river.
Saving God, we pray for parents who struggle to raise their children in oppressive circumstances.
We remember Hannah, who loved her child so much she handed him over to another to raise.
Loving God, we pray for parents who have placed their child in another family.
We remember Naomi, who grieved the death of her sons.
God, who grieves with us, we pray for parents who mourn the death of a child.
We remember Ruth, who gave up her family to be family to another.
Inclusive God, we pray for those who choose to be family to those isolated by culture or language or distance.
We remember Elizabeth, who had a child in old age and we remember Mary, who had a child as a teenager.
Ageless God, we pray that as a community we accept people of varying life stages and responsibilities and relationships.
We remember Rachel, crying for her children.
God of justice and hope, we pray for those whose children are killed, and look to a time when children can live safely in their communities.
We remember Lois and Eunice, who taught Timothy faith by example.
Faithful God we pray for those who teach us faith by their lives, may we remember that we also teach about you in the way we live.
We remember other people, not named in the Scriptures, like the mother of the prodigal son.
Companion God, we pray for those who wait for a phone call or a visit, cut off from family and friends by distance and disagreement.
Nurturing God, we give thanks for those
who enrich our lives by their presence
who teach us about your abundant love
who encourage us to journey in faith.
I hope that no matter your circumstance in life, no matter if you are a parent or not, that you have or are able to find a family – whether biological or not – who loves you as mine does. That is my Mother’s Day hope and prayer for all people.