The Church With A Thousand Doors

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams 01.13.13

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 3:15-22; Acts 8:14-17

How many ways are there to get into this church?  It’s not a particularly hard question to answer, on the surface of it.  This old building is a sweet little historic brick breadbox, the doors out front giving the church the “mouth” on it’s face, with that Celtic cross as the nose, and those two windows to either side giving it a big set of eyes.  There’s just the one way in, right in and out of that mouth.  This is something we pay attention to during Christmas Eve candlelight services or if there’s a brigade of Confederate calvary massed outside.

The last church building I served in was different.  It a great faceless warehouse of a place, a bizarre mess of a structure that had apparently been designed to confuse and befuddle visitors, possibly by the same architect who designed that building in the first Ghostbusters movie.

But Lord have mercy, did it have doors.  The sanctuary was literally ringed with doors, doors at every corner, doors behind the pulpit, and one entire wall that was nothing but glass doors leading to the main entrance hall, perfect for sneaking in late or disappearing quietly when the sermon got too boring.  You could enter or leave it from pretty much any which way you chose.  The building itself was exactly the same.  There were doors absolutely everywhere.  There were thirteen different ways to enter and exit the building, something that may have had something to do with the unlucky feng shui of that peculiar structure.

Pretty much every room that had a connection to the outside had a door leading outside, something we tried in vain to explain to the County when they demanded an emergency exit plan.

“What will the preschool children do if there’s a fire,” they’d ask.  “Well, the teachers will open the door that’s in every single classroom, and out they’ll go, and then they’ll muster in the parking lot.”  But somehow that wasn’t enough.  It didn’t fit with the established protocols for departure.  Instead, there had to be a plan that involved lines.  Kids had to be lined up, and marched through those smoke filled burning hallways in an orderly fashion.

“What will the congregants do if there’s a fire,” they’d ask.  “Well, they’ll walk through one of the eight glass doors that lead outside,” we’d say.  But somehow, we needed to put illuminated “Exit” signs on one of those doors, even though it’s glow wasn’t visible by the light that would pour into the building through the doors even on the cloudiest of days.

Even though there were doors aplenty, and there were more ways in and out of that building than you could shake a stick at, somehow there was still only one right way to do it.  

The entryway to Christian faith has always been baptism, since even before the beginning.  It’s the way you begin your journey of participation in this fellowship.  It’s the point of access, the way we claim one another as part of this blessed journey.

Baptism itself predates Christian practice.  It’s rooted in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing that was used, you know, when women were, you know, um, how to put this, having that time of the month that male pastors get awkward about when trying to describe them from the pulpit.   Or something like that.

That practice...the desire to be ritually and personally clean so that you could be part of the sacred community...had spread and changed by the time of Jesus.  Baptism had become a way to symbolically mark the renewal of a commitment to the foundational covenant of Judaism.  With the temple now fundamentally corrupt, the people wanted some way to affirm that connection.

And so the ritual of baptism evolved into a way to recommit yourself to faith, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.   In Christianity, that evolved into something different.  It became the gateway into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by sin and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.

Of course, being human and all, we’ve turned that into something else, something we always seem to need.  It has, historically, become one of those things we feel obligated to argue about.  

Some Christians baptize both adults and infants.  It’s a way of saying that what matters most is God’s love for all of us, and that coming to understand the depth of our connection to God requires us to be in relationship with a caring, Spirit-led community.  When we baptize our little ones, that’s what we’re saying.

Some Christians baptize only those who make that decision on their own, as a way of honoring that moment when you realize you’ve made that choice to live a life governed by the love of God.  When Baptists and others baptize, they’re honoring that commitment.

Two good things, each springing from a yearning for God’s love, so of course we’ve felt the need to fight about it.  Oy. 

But what both of these are are entryways, that place where we cross the threshold into being part of community.  And what is most striking about the way we hear about baptism in the passage from Luke and the later passage in Acts today is the way that it is woven up with the presence and gift of the Spirit.   Luke and Acts are all parts of the same carefully woven story, and what they have to say about baptism is...well...strange.

The usually detail-oriented historian Luke gives us almost no details about the baptism of Jesus, blazing through the event with only the barest minimum of information.  Though it would become the way in which every Christian would enter into fellowship, most of what we hear is about the arrival of the Spirit.  Part of that is likely Luke’s desire to de-emphasize the baptism of John, which called Judeans to restore their relationship with their faith.  Instead, he wanted to focus more on the transformed life that Jesus brought, which was a much bigger door, one that included and valued that covenant but went beyond it.  That’s part of it.  But it’s probably not all.

As Luke continues on beyond the Gospel and into the story of the early church in Acts, we hear the strange balancing between being “baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” which is apparently the bit that involves the water, and the “baptism by the Holy Spirit,” which was something very different.   Luke rather pointedly does not tell us what that distinction means.  They’d been baptized...but they weren’t baptized.  They’d entered the church, but only sort of.

Perhaps that vagueness about baptism in Luke is there because where God’s Spirit does work in and through the church, it does so in ways that are always a bit difficult to nail down to a precise place or a precise moment.  How to you nail down fire?  Where does that start?  With water running down the sleeping face of a child?  Or with the love and care of the one that holds them?  Does that start with that moment the cool of the water runs down your face, or in that peculiar and ineffable moment when you decided to give church a try again?  The Spirit is at work in all of those moments, some subtle, some as vast and knee-buckling as the yawning sky. 

So the question remains, how many doors does a church have?  The answer to that question is that it has as many doors as it has faces.  It has as many doors as the Spirit gives connection.  The Spirit of God is God’s love, and we find it expressed in the gifts and potential in each of us.  Those doors are in the relationships we each have in the world around us, and in the ways we find to use our Spirit-given gifts within this fellowship.

This church, though it might seem only to have that one little entrance, has many.  In each of the ways we express ourselves into the world, there is a sign of welcome, a place of entry.

This worship?  Our music and and our singing together?  That’s a way in.  Our service the community, as we put hands and hearts into remaking homes through Rebuilding Together?  That’s a way in.  When we feed the hungry among us through WUMCO on the Lord’s Table?  That’s a way in.  When we take joy in teaching and guiding our kids, showing them how to live a grace filled, Gospel guided life?  That’s a way in.  

When we together learn and explore and deepen our faith?  When we try new things, like the Connection Cafe or the budding Community Garden, that’s a way in.  

There are as many doors to this church, as many opportunities for welcome, as there are joys and gifts among us.  What remains is for us to know that joy, to live that joy out, and to remind ourselves to invite others to share it.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.