One of the most difficult questions I face as a priest seems like it should be one of the simplest. How do I join the church?
I can give a technical answer. But the question of membership is a trickier than paperwork isn’t it?
Let me explain with a story: When I was in the tenth grade, I asked a girl to the homecoming dance. Yes, this was when I was still asking girls out on dates. What made this ask more complicated was that she was a baptist preacher’s daughter. And we had been studying world religions in social studies, and I was really engaging the lessons about Buddhism and Hinduism. When I asked her to the dance, she turned to me and said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure you’re a Christian.”
My immediate internal response was “but I’m baptized!” Thankfully I didn’t say that out loud, because being baptized as an infant probably wouldn’t have flown with a Baptist preacher’s daughter.
The conflict was an early lesson in how complicated this question of belonging can be for Christians.
Believers?
I find it frustrating that we call Christian’s “believers.” We act as if an intellectual decision to agree with certain church teachings is what makes one a Christian. And then in the church we fight about which teachings are the correct teachings, which ones we have to believe
But belief is only one dimension, and dare I say, belief is often one of the least interesting dimensions, when it comes to faith. Still a lot of us carry angst about what we have to believe. A lot of us show up here wanting to belong, and nervous that at some point the clergy are going to announce that we have to believe something we don’t, or we can’t, and we’ll be disappointed.
Behind that worry isn’t just trauma from the church. Behind that worry is a fundamental human hunger for belonging. We long to belong. Psychologists and social scientists from Maslow to Brene Brown have written about the fundamental human need to belong. Belonging is more fundamental than belief.
Weak vs. True Belonging
In today’s Gospel story, Jesus doesn’t talk about belief. He talks about belonging. I know the word doesn’t appear on the page, but belonging is there in the background. Jesus today is making a distinction between weak belonging and true belonging.
Weak belonging comes in the way Jesus describes Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets.” Jesus is not just talking about a city, but way of conceiving of yourself as a member of a society. Today’s story gives us a preview of what is to come. Exactly four Sundays from today we will celebrate Palm Sunday. We will experience the wide swing from shouting “Hosanna” to calling out “crucify him.” Every year that we do that liturgy, I feel the power of the crowd. I feel the mob mentality. Anytime you’re a part of a mob, you’re experiencing weak belonging.
Weak belonging is everywhere. Weak belonging is the sense of satisfaction when I shout the same slogans you shout. Weak belonging operates as a sort of facsimile of what our heart truly needs. We long for true belonging, and it is often difficult to find. The less we know our neighbors, the busier our lives become, the more difficult it is to find true belonging. And our world is ready to sell us substitutes.
I loved the moment last week in her sermon when Simone said, “You’re probably now thinking of your five least favorite Christians.” I’m sure we can all imagine the people, the churches, the media companies that encourage this weak sort of belonging. Fox News, Fox News, the network that kills the prophets.
But weak belonging doesn’t pertain only to one side of a political equation. When we bought our Subaru, a friend asked whether the Subaru came with the NPR sticker already attached. Guilty.
Jesus points us today to a true belonging deeper than party, or sports team, a true belonging that would never fit on a bumper sticker. Jesus says, “how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” The belonging Jesus imagines is not about surface identity. To belong in this way, you have to be willing to be vulnerable.
I’m borrowing the phrase “true belonging” from Brene Brown. She writes that “true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world.” To truly belong, we have to admit we need shelter, we have to admit we need those loving protective wings. We have to be vulnerable.
God’s Vulnerability
A word about vulnerability and God. You may have thought to yourself as we read Genesis, “a firepot passing between animals cut in half is a strange strange image.” Indeed. The ritual described here is an ancient way of marking a covenant. When one tribe or family group swore a covenant, the Hebrew word is “cut a covenant,” with another, they would sacrifice animals cutting them in two and then walk between halves. The implicit message in the ritual: “if I break this covenant, let happen to me what happened to these turtledoves, pigeons, rams.” And what is fascinating about the Genesis story, is that it is God who passes through the sacrificed animals. God makes Godself vulnerable.
God chooses to belong to Abram, and to all those descendants that number like the stars. God chooses to belong to us, that we might belong to God. It’s big stuff in Genesis.
Borrowing a Buddhist Frame for Belonging
When we get outside of Western Christianity, this understanding that belonging is bigger and more vulnerable than believing, it’s a natural part of the faith. We could speculate that modern Christianity inherited its anxiety about belief from the enlightenment, and that other faiths simply didn’t buy into the worry.
In Buddhism, belief hardly comes up. The goal isn’t to get your mind to believe, but to get your mind out of the way.
In Buddhism, you don’t become a member of the faith by believing, but by taking refuge. A Buddhist is invited to take refuge in the Buddha, in the dharma (the teaching), and in the sangha (the community of practice).
This morning, to tackle the question of how do I belong, I want to consider, what would it mean for a Christian to re-think belonging through the Buddhist language of “taking refuge.” That language Jesus echoes with his surprising words about the mother hen.
Taking refuge with God, taking refuge with Jesus, the mother hen, requires a willingness to admit we need help and to turn our lives over to a power greater than ourselves. Refuge means getting out of the game of believing it is our job to have the right answers. Taking refuge with God means trusting that God loves even the parts of ourselves we find difficult to love. The God you are seeking is also seeking after you.
If I think about my most profound moments of encounter with God, none of them involve contemplating the philosophical truth of the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. All of my most profound encounters with God have been moments of accompaniment: in deep sorrow or wonder and awe. Relationship with God is all about a feeling of closeness and companionship through the ups and downs of life, a sense that we aren’t alone, that the fundamental power behind the universe is good, and loving, and intentional, and with us. That God can be trusted, that God is a place of refuge is the first place of belonging.
Which leads to the second: Taking refuge in the teaching, it’s different than simply believing isn’t it? Taking refuge is saying, within this teaching I find wisdom, I find a helpful way to engage the world around me. In Jesus’ life, and preaching, and loving I find a pattern on which I can base my own life. It’s a subtle shift of perspective.
Verna Dozier, the Episcopal lay theologian and educator used to say, “don’t tell me what you belief. Show me how the world is different because of what you believe.” That’s the sort of shift that is possible when we emphasize taking refuge in teaching.
The final place of refuge for Buddhists is the sangha, the community of practice. For Christians it brings us back to my original question: How do I become a member?
Membership has a lot of levels. There are formal dimensions, you could transfer a letter of membership from another Episcopal parish. You could join the newcomers’ class. You can make a financial pledge to support the church. You could get baptized, confirmed, or received. You can join a ministry, volunteer with us, join the choir.
Maybe it is through the choir that I can talk about what it means to join by taking refuge. I grew up singing in church choirs. I’m not a great musician. I can pick out a melody on a piano, strum a few chords on a guitar and ukulele. In choir, I am a perfectly serviceable baritone and I can fake second tenor.
But my measure choirs at church really doesn’t have much to do with musicianship. What matters in a church choir is community. I’m glad to say choir members at St. Michael’s visit one another if someone is in the hospital. They bring food when someone is sick; they share prayers and hugs. They’re a place of belonging.
The same is true of our food pantry volunteers, our Education for Ministry Group. The same is true of the parents and caregivers of young kids and many other ministry communities at this church. We show up for one another, because showing up for one another is about the most Christian thing we can imagine.
One of the ways you know that you’ve become a member of a church is when you come to members of the church looking for practical help, when you can’t solve something on your own. Or when you just need a prayer and a hug, when you stop pretending you have your life all together, because none of us has our life all together. That’s when you know you belong, when you can show up as you, in all your messiness. And you know you really belong when someone has disappointed you, and you show up again anyway, because you know that sometimes we let one another down, but on balance this community is still a place where you can be seen, and valued, and loved. You know you belong when have taken refuge with these people.
Taking refuge, that’s my slightly Buddhist read on Jesus today. I guess in some ways I’ve not come very far from the tenth grade. I still find the dialogue between my faith and other faiths fascinating. This Buddhist frame for belonging has something even for us Christians.
Because true belonging is about more than believing. It’s about taking refuge with God, with Jesus’ teaching, and with the imperfect people who seek to follow this way together. If you try to find your identity on a bumper sticker or a news channel, you’re going to be disappointed. To find refuge with God, to find wisdom in Jesus’ teaching, to choose community with one another while seeking to serve the world in Christ’s name, that’s what it takes to truly belong.
Mike Angell 