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Sermon for Epiphany 4A                                                               February 3, 2002

How do you measure religious success?

I know that may seem like an odd question. We don’t usually phrase that question that way to ourselves. “Religion” and “success” aren’t always words we’re really accustomed to putting together in that way.

But think about it: being a “religious success” is something that is set before our parish family in a particular way right now, at this particular time of year. Two weeks ago we had our annual meeting, where we looked back over the year that is past and we looked forward to the year that is coming, and we took account together of what we can be doing to serve God faithfully, how we can join with God in the mission and ministry God is doing in our midst. Just yesterday the Vestry had its annual retreat, and as part of its work to start the new year we reviewed goals we’d set for ourselves last year and we set new goals for ourselves for 2002. Various committees and working groups in our parish are setting their calendars and planning their events for the weeks and months to come, arranging the opportunities for service and celebration and fellowship and ministry that all of us can have a share in. We’re looking at our whole youth ministry again, and making plans for how we will help our young people do their ministry, in the wake of Amy’s departure. In all of these things we strive to be responsive to God’s call, God’s leading; and we strive to be responsible, good stewards of the gifts God has given us; in a word, we want our parish life together to be a success. But what does it mean for us to be “successful” in the eyes and in the heart of God. How do we measure religious success?

Our Scripture lessons today give us some pointers on measuring religious success, and they point out to us that it isn’t always measured by the standards we might expect. There can be quite a difference between what seems important in our scale of values, and what is truly important in the heart of God.

We hear that note in the first lesson, from the prophet Micah. The prophet hears God calling the people to account for their turning away from God; the prophet hears God contending with the people for their failure to trust in God’s guidance and God’s protection. And on behalf of the people, Micah wants to return to God, Micah wants to express the penitence and the repentance and the turning of the heart that will bring the people back to God. And Micah asks what gesture, what sacrifice would be enough to convince God to take the people back—what offering would be big enough and important enough and significant enough to be successful in coming back to God? Burnt offerings? Year-old calves? Thousands of rams? Rivers of oil? Sacrificing his own firstborn child? What is big enough to be a religious success?

The answer the prophet gets is surprising: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Religious success, the prophet discovers, is not measured in the size of the sacrifice or the importance of the offering; religious success is measured in doing the immediate, concrete, down-to-earth things God gives us to do: making right relationships, acting with compassion and mercy, following in the way that God leads without pride or arrogance or putting ourselves ahead of where we need to be. Religious success, Micah discovers, is not in the grandiose gesture, but in the faithful act.

That same kind of standard for religious success is what Jesus is teaching his disciples in the Beatitudes, the opening summary of the Sermon on the Mount that we read from Matthew’s Gospel today. I think sometimes that we’ve become so familiar with the Beatitudes, we know them so well, that we don’t always recognize how surprising, how topsy-turvy, how countercultural they really are. The people that Jesus names as blessed, as happy, are not the sorts of folks that we would generally consider happy as the world measures happiness. In this respect I don’t think our culture today is so very different from the culture of first-century Palestine that Jesus addressed. We know what makes people happy: wealth, power, prestige, comfort, eating well and often, enjoying the use of our own possessions, acquiring our hearts’ desires, getting our own way whenever we want it, winning against all opposition and against all odds. Those are the things that make someone successful; those are the things that make for happiness as the world measures happiness; and often enough we assume those are signs of divine fortune and favor and success as well.

But Jesus holds up a different standard: Happy are the poor, he says; happy are the meek; happy are the hungry and thirsty; happy are the merciful; happy are the peacemakers; happy are the persecuted. Happy are those whose happiness does not reside in themselves, Jesus says, but whose happiness comes from the faithfulness and the grace and the love that is given to them by God. And that happiness, that blessing, can never fail; because it doesn’t depend on anything we do, or fail to do, but depends entirely on what God does. And that happiness, that blessing, is available to us always, so long as we are available to God. Religious success, as Jesus teaches it, isn’t measured in the standards of worldly happiness, but measured by trust in the blessings of God. Here again, religious success is not in the grandiose gesture, but in the faithful act.

And Paul carries forth that same teaching in his words to the church in Corinth in our Epistle lesson today. Now the Christians in Corinth were fascinated with the gifts of the Spirit, they were very much caught up with demonstrations of divine power in their midst. They seemed to spend a lot of their time and energy experiencing—and arguing about—things like speaking in tongues, and ecstatic visions, and hearing angelic voices, and performing miraculous healings, and gaining esoteric hidden wisdom. Those signs of divine power are good and wonderful things; but Paul was beginning to worry that they were so caught up with signs of God’s power that they were forgetting the heart of the Gospel, the most important thing of all, the sign of God’s love that is given in the powerlessness, the self-emptying of the cross. Paul is worried that they are measuring their religious success by the standard of power, and not by the standard of love. “Consider your own calling,” he says to them: “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” What makes the church in Corinth successful, Paul says, is not their wisdom or power or prestige, but that God has chosen them, that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God has chosen was is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are. What makes the church in Corinth a success before God, Paul reminds them, is the wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and life that comes to them from Christ. For the Corinthian Christians, too, religious success is not in the grandiose gesture, but in the faithful act.

And that’s the meaning of religious success for us at St George’s, as well. Whether we’re taking stock in an Annual Meeting, or setting goals for the Vestry’s work for the year; whether we’re counting our membership or planning for church growth; whether we’re assessing the importance of youth ministry or designing programs for Sunday School and adult education; whatever we as a parish are doing, in all the ways we try to be responsive and responsible to God’s call to us, the measure of our success is our faithfulness to God, and not necessarily the standards that the world would apply. What makes us successful as a church is not the number of people in our pews, or the glitz and glamour of our youth and children’s ministry, or the size and beauty of our church building, or our publicity and appearance in the public eye, or the ambition of our goals and our success rate in reaching them—although all these things are gifts and can be celebrated in their place—but what really makes us successful as a church is deeper than that, more fundamental than that, and, in the end, more real than that: what makes us successful as a church is God’s presence with us and our openness to God. For us, too,  religious success is not in the grandiose gesture, but in the faithful act.

How do you measure religious success? I think our psalm today puts it best: Put your trust in the Lord, and do good. Trust, and do; that’s religious success. Let us trust in God, and let us do God’s good, and let us be successful in that—and everything else will follow in its place.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.