DAY 162: Your Church

DAY 162

Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic    

A series of daily reflections for people of faith

by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor

Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland

pastorrobert@paxpres.org

Week Twenty-four Sunday 23 August 2020

Your Church

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.  - The Book of Common Prayer: Prayer for the Sunday closest to 24 August

“Tell us about your church.” In 48 years of pastoral ministry I’ve been asked that question too many times to count. In the early days following my ordination and in my first parish I would sometimes respond with something like “It’s not really my church, you know. It belongs to Jesus.” But I began to feel uncomfortable with what felt akin to something too pious. I also realized my inquirers knew that as well and that my response tended to shut down the easy conversation they were seeking. They just wanted to know about the church in which I was serving. That’s all.   

Today’s prayer reminds us whose church it is, lest in our immersion in the busyness of programs and platitudes we forget it. We try to hold it together with everything from duct tape to doctrine, but it remains that its continuing presence after 2,000 years is due not to our ingenuity, cleverness or determination,  but to its being His Body through the seamless working of the Holy Spirit since its inception on the Day of Pentecost in the midst of a whirlwind of tongues and truth. 

So I like this prayer or Collect, as it is called, for it not only reminds us whose the church is, but that we are ‘gathered together or constituted by the Holy Spirit,’ that our purpose is to ‘show forth God’s power among all peoples’ not just those we like or who are like us, and that we do it not for our own vainglory but for ‘the glory of His Name.’

Reflective question: How would you explain the nature of the church to a non-Christian?

Reflective Scripture: Ephesians 5:25 – “…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

Reflective hymn:

“The Church’s One Foundation” – Samuel Stone (1839-1900)

1. The church’s one foundation, is Jesus Christ, her Lord;

She is his new creation by water and the Word:

From heav’n he came and sought her, to be His holy bride;

With His own blood He bought her, and for her life He died.

2. Elect from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth,

Her charter of salvation: one Lord, one faith, one birth;

One holy name she blesses, partakes one holy food;

And to one hope she presses, with every grace endued.