Rebecca Sheridan
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Galatians 6:1-10

Christians worship God in community. As I serve our synod in the capacity of a Synod Evangelist, this is one of the phrases I repeat over and over as one of the top reasons I feel it is important to go to church and belong to a church. Not only is this honoring the third commandment to honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, being a part of a church community is practicing being the body of Christ in the world, as our readings urge us to do this evening. As we worship together this Lent, I am grateful that we are able to focus on this topic of being Church Together and grateful for the reminder that we at Bethel are not alone in enduring the grim trends in our society away from being Church Together…low worship attendance, aging membership, and society’s overall distrust of institutions like any club, organization, church or government. In my work as a pastor trying to connect and connect others to the unchurched and dechurched, I’ve had to rethink why I am a part of a church, too. Because for a lot of us, we just grew up going to church, it was what you did – like going to school and to work. “I go to church just because I always have,” is not really a way to explain or convince non-churchgoers why it’s important.
Sharing joys and burdens, however, I think is a better way to talk about why we’re a part of a church family, and why that is important to us. The author of our Synod materials for tonight quoted a Swedish proverb that I’d never heard before, which says, “A joy shared is a double joy. A sorrow shared is half a sorrow.” Why are we Church Together? Because you can read the Bible alone, pray alone, worship God on a hike in the woods or on a boat on a lake, but your joy won’t be doubled, and your sorrow won’t be halved like it is when we worship God in community –when you are a part of a family of faith.
Sometimes sharing our joys and sorrows isn’t easy, even with our church family. It can be easy to sit in your favorite pew, be inspired by the music and the message, maybe shake a few hands, even stay for coffee and fellowship to catch up on March Madness or talk about how terrible this winter was…and slip out without sharing how you’re really doing; what God has placed on your heart that you might want other Christians to know about and pray about with you. We’re trying to be better about this at Bethel to create spaces for people to share meaningfully about what’s going on in their lives through discipleship groups, sharing God sightings, and a long prayer request/prayer chain list to take praying for one another seriously. As a pastor in my first congregation, I tried to have it all together most of the time. I had learned from a mentor that it’s OK to show our scars but not our wounds to our congregation – we are supposed to be pastoring the people, not having people pastor us. But then I suffered a miscarriage, and I felt that it was too big of a thing to happen to me to not tell people what I was going through. It was one of the most horrible losses of my life, and I would be OK, but I needed my sorrow to be halved. Growing up in the church I had experienced the church community being there for me in so many ways through ups and downs – my grandpa and grandma’s deaths, my moves to college and seminary and my year abroad in Slovakia, being there at my wedding and at my ordination. And after my miscarriage, people pastored me by showing up with hot food, lots of desserts, lots of cards, flowers, and prayer. It was a humbling time for me to let the church really be the church for me, to share my burden as much as I was striving to share theirs. It was a relief to discover I didn’t break them by sharing this burden, and I didn’t stop being their pastor. In fact, I think this vulnerability helped us trust each other more to really be church together. I was human after all, just like them. I needed daily reminders of Jesus’ love, forgiveness, and presence, just like them.
After this experience, when people at church ask me how I’m doing, I try to respond honestly. As Americans, this is often an automatic “fine” response because the question is more of a greeting than one that is waiting for an honest answer, but if you asked it…I’m going to tell you! For me in my journey, I’ve found that sharing joys and burdens as a church family is a way for us to authentically be the body of Christ, the church, in the world. It’s something we can do as a community of faith that other relationships and friendships can also provide, but we as the church do it in a unique way – through confession of our sins, through forgiving one another, through praying for one another and sharing the peace of Christ, through the intergenerational coming together of all kinds of people I honestly would not otherwise be friends with.
When we talk about why we are a part of a church, hopefully it’s not just about preserving a beautiful building, or “because that’s what I’ve always done,” but we can share how God has been there for us through other people truly being Christ for us – rejoicing with us at the births and baptisms of our children and grandchildren, celebrating an anniversary or birthday, being there for us at family funerals, when we’ve lost a job or gone through a divorce or struggled with addiction and mental illness, you name it. It’s so important that when we talk about church we don’t just talk about a place or a time on Sunday morning, but a way of life that is tied to community. This being together in community you ALL know is not always easy, just like being a part of a family. There are people who really get on our nerves sometimes as we get to know them, people we disagree with politically or disagree with in terms of church politics. But there are also people who truly love us with a love that can only come from God, because at church there are people who love us in spite of ourselves and just because we’re ourselves. Here in this place with these people, we are held together by a common love for and by One who took all our burdens to the cross, was buried with them, and then rose victorious over all our shame and pain to give us true joy and hope, as we work together for God’s kingdom that has no end. When we gather together with other Christians, it doesn’t take long, no matter where you are, to know that common bond of faith that unites us and allows us to share in our own joys and burdens. The love of Christ holds us together in a bond that is deeper than anything else I know or can describe. As Paul reminds us in the letter of Galatians, we remember tonight, “So then (since we are the church together), whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” Amen.