A week ago today Helen and I found ourselves not in the Ranch of Holy Faith here in California, but in the City of Holy Faith in New Mexico, Santa Fe. For the first time in nearly two decades I got to visit my home state in the fall and we enjoyed not only the wonderful scenery and cuisine, but also some of the early mission churches begun by Spanish settlers nearly 500 years ago up and down the Rio Grande River. It was 50 years ago that this congregation was founded here in what was then the outskirts of the greater San Diego area, but that history seems to pale a bit by comparison with the 5 centuries of history of Christian churches in the Southwest. Also nearly 5 centuries ago, in Western Europe, momentous things were happening as people like Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Knox were working hard not to start new churches, but to reform the church that already had a 1500 year history. It was on October 31, 1517, that the Roman Catholic priest Luther, in his continuing attempt to heal the church of its many problems, posted a list of 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, a single act among many that has come to represent the Protestant Reformation from which this congregation is a direct result. Today we celebrate this history and as we do so, the Lord seems to be calling us to step back a bit from the day-to-day life we share in this church in order to ponder together the life and nature of the church itself. Who are we as a church? What purpose do we serve? Are we all that God wants us to be? Do we come close to what Jesus had in mind when he set this whole enterprise in motion 20 centuries ago? Are we the best we can be, or is there more for us in the days ahead?

One of the great affirmations made 500 years ago by the Reformers is captured in the Latin phrase, “sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura.” It means, “grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone.” It is by our faith in God’s grace, not our works, that we are saved. And it is by the authority and witness of scripture, not a single leader or a tradition or anything else, that we know God. We are people who trust the witness of the Holy Spirit in scripture to tell us what we need to know about God, and so today we turn to that scripture, via a letter that Paul wrote to the Corinthians, to put us in touch again with the fundamental things we need to know about the church.

When you and I think of the word “church,” we probably call to mind some version of the highly developed and thoroughly institutionalized church of today. We think of buildings, of programs, of ministers, of denominations. In the beginning, of course, none of those things existed. If we erase most of what we think we know about “church,” we can come closer to understanding the context in which the first Christians came to understand themselves. Paul affirmed the most important thing we can say about the church, and that is that we are a group of people in whom the Living God chooses to live and move and reveal himself to the rest of the world. The church is not an institution or a building or a set of doctrines. It is people claimed by God to be in relationship with him and with each other. On this last little trip, Helen and I visited church buildings, but we also visited churches, people in Albuquerque and Tucson who are part of the body of Jesus Christ, people whose lives have been claimed by the Living God. We visited with John and Marcie, Brad and Debbie, and Bob and Betty Lou, who by scripture’s definition are saints in Jesus Christ, brothers and sisters of Jesus and of you and me. The church exists where there are people who have surrendered their lives to God through Christ.

Paul affirmed another important truth that the church is a very separate and distinct body of people, unlike anything else that exists in human society. In Paul’s day, the church was fighting for its very survival, of course. It was a tiny, insignificant, hardly noticeable blip on the cultural screen. The people who became followers of Jesus Christ were choosing to follow a way of life that was often not welcomed or supported by the dominant culture. They sometimes risked their jobs, their social standing, and even their family relationships because of their new-found faith in Christ. To be Christian was to be very different from everyone else, and Paul stated this reality in strong terms: “For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship is there between light and darkness?” Fast forward to today, and things appear to be very different. Christians are everywhere, and some even still call our nation a “Christian” nation. There are places in the world where following Christ is very risky business indeed, but in this country, Christianity seems to be very safe and sensible. But perhaps we are fooling ourselves. It may be easier to follow Christ when the culture clearly is against you, and it may be harder to follow him when the culture seems to be with you but is, in fact, not Christian at all. Our culture would have us believe that Christians are just nice, decent, hard-working folks who don’t make waves. No, Christians should be so committed to love, to truth, to justice, to righteousness, that they make a difference in the world, sometimes challenging the way the world thinks and operates, and always calling the world to be better than it is. Our culture would have us believe that the church is just a great social club or a service league or a place to get married or buried. No, the church should be so thoroughly infused with the presence of God that it is a place and a people where the reality of the divine breaks into our mundane lives and confronts us with God’s grace, God’s justice, God’s truth, and God’s way of doing things in the world.

Since late August, you and I have been thinking together on Sundays about the real relationships that inhabit our lives and what those relationships mean in the light of our faith in Christ. This congregation, and the larger Christian church of which we are a part, is a real part of your life and of mine. The relationships we have with Christ and with each other because of Christ are some of the most important relationships we have. As with all the relationships in our lives, we want our relationships in and through the church to be as good as they can possibly be. Who among us doesn’t want to be a great parent, a great spouse, a great person? And who among us doesn’t want our church to be the very best that it can be? The best church is a church that understands who it is: a people called out of the world and into a special relationship with God, a people whose separate lives and whose life together is an earthly expression of the life of God himself, a people who are in the world but not of the world as they embody more and more the holiness of God.

Now, all of this is very high-sounding theological talk unless and until it becomes a reality in the way you and I live. H. L. Mencken said that church is “a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.” Not a very flattering view, is it? Victor Hugo said a church is “God between four walls.” That sounds more like the kind of church of which you and I want to be a part, doesn’t it? What does a church look like, when God is in it? There are all kinds of lists of qualities that make for great churches. All of them highlight the need for good leadership, ministry that involves all the people in using their spiritual gifts, inspiring worship, welcoming new people into faith and fellowship, involvement of individuals in small groups, pastoral care for spiritual needs, functional structures and governance, and commitment to mission outside the life of the particular congregation. For me, the best “list” of the qualifications for a great church is one that was adopted a century ago by the Presbyterian Church as a fitting summary of what was then called the “Great Ends” of the church.

The first “great end” or great purpose of the church is “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind. In global terms, what that means is that we should be about the business of communicating about Jesus with people who don’t yet know about him. In more personal terms, that means that you and I need to be hearing and sharing the gospel every day. People don’t need to hear the message about God’s love just once in their lives. They need it every day. When you find yourself bored or tired with life, you need to reconnect with the God who loves you. When you find yourself challenged or overwhelmed with life, you need to feel God’s care for you. When you find yourself feeling guilty, or lonely, or afraid, you need to get the gospel in you, and find the grace of God that transforms and redeems all things.

The next great purpose of the church is “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.” Life is hard. Following Jesus can be hard. Not following Jesus is even harder! We need help to get through life and we need help to relearn how to live life in the ways that Jesus has taught. How many of you can point to a spiritual mentor and friend who has encouraged and taught and supported you in your life? And how many of you can say that you have been that kind of person for someone else? The giving and taking of spiritual knowledge and power is part of what it means to follow Jesus, and you and I need continually to do both.

The next great purpose of the church is “the maintenance of divine worship.” Sometimes I think that the biggest problem you and I have is the problem of thinking that the world revolves around us. I have news: it doesn’t. Developmental psychologists say that infants believe that the world is designed to meet their needs, to feed them, to clothe them, to change their diapers, to take care of all their needs. The process of growing up is a process of learning that just the opposite is true. Existence and creation and life and pretty much everything is not about you or about me, but about God. Worship is the only thing that reminds us of that truth. When we worship, we remember the way things are in the world, and we remember God, and that is the most important thing to know. Worship, therefore, is crucial to our spiritual health, and is, therefore, crucial to every other aspect of our lives. Without worship, we live according to a lie.

The next great purpose of the church is “the preservation of the truth.” Truth is a much-disputed thing these days. Some people claim to have all the truth, others claim that truth cannot be known, and we even argue about how we can know if something is true or not. You and I follow Jesus, who said that he was the truth. And that is the primary truth that the church seeks to preserve. In Jesus, we have met someone whose quality of life, whose wisdom about life, and whose conquering death by coming back to life, is most true and most real. We believe that in Jesus we have learned truth about God and about ourselves that the whole world needs to know, and we seek to share it with everyone, in love and humility, and also in quiet faith and confidence. We are the people—the church—who keeps telling the world the truth about Jesus.

The next great purpose of the church is “the promotion of social righteousness.” What we believe about God’s love and about his desire that the human race would share in that love must necessarily move outside the walls of the church and into the world. Social righteousness has to do with things like equality of opportunity for all people, with caring for the hurting and the outcast of society, with protecting individual human rights, with battling poverty, slavery, oppression, disease, and anything that would keep any of God’s people from enjoying life on this earth as God meant it to be enjoyed. If the church is not involved in the social sphere, then we leave the world to find its own way toward human betterment without the benefit of the wisdom or power of the Creator who made the world in the first place.

The final great purpose of the church is “the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world.” I don’t know if any of us think of this church as an actual expression of heaven, but that is part of what God wants us to be! Heaven is the place where God is fully present, so the church is meant to be that community of people in which God is completely transparent and apparent and real. God wants this church to be so filled with his power, his mercy, his grace, his truth, his love, and his abundance, that other people will see the quality of life we share here and conclude only one thing: that God is real and available to them as well. If people cannot look at us and see God here, then where are they going to find him?

We are entering that season of church life during which you and I think deeply about the quality of our church, about our own personal participation in it, and about the ways that God may be calling us to be further involved in his work here. Part of that means our financial participation, but there is so much more. I believe that God invites us to continue the work that Jesus himself began on earth, and that through the ministry of the people of this church, God is continuing to work out his plan for the salvation of the world. I believe that God wants us to be a church that is internally strong and externally focused, inviting other people to follow Jesus as we learn more about following him ourselves. I pray every day that God will live among us with such power and truth that we will be an unmistakable sign of his presence in the world. I believe that our best days are ahead of us. You and I need to be called out of ourselves into something larger and more lasting than our own little lives, and so God calls us into fellowship with him through the church. I pray every day that you will find the same compelling inspiration as I do, to serve God through serving this church, and so to live a life that is worthy in God’s eyes and worth something to other people, so that one day, when people look back on us and our little slice of history, they will say that we were the best we could be, to the glory of God.

Amen.