We are the church, the body of our Lord. We are all God’s children, and we have been restored.
The church is not a building where people go to pray. It’s not made out of sticks and stones, and it’s not made out of clay.
You can go to worship, but you cannot go to church. You can’t find a building that’s alive no matter how you search.
The church is not a business, a committee, or a board. It’s not a corporation for the business of the Lord.
The church, it is the people living out their lives, called, enlightened, sanctified for the work of Jesus Christ!
— “The Church Song,” Jay Beech, 1988
When I was a child, my family took a lot of road trips. As we would wind our way through small towns throughout the Midwest, we would happen upon a church that would look interesting to my father, a pastor. He’d stop the car and say, “Let’s go look at it!” Surprisingly, to me now, the churches were almost always unlocked, and we would slip into sanctuaries of stone, wood, cushioned pews, communion rails, stained glass windows, and a particular smell shared by, I swear, every church in the Midwest. We would wander behind altars, stand at lecterns and pulpits, skip down long aisles, and investigate pew pockets for hymnals and the church’s marketing materials. This was going on vacation with my family: road trips with random church stops.
Because of these church stops — and my personal and our family’s engagement in the church, even as a young person, I thought I knew “church” because I knew the buildings and the symbols and the smell, because I knew the word “stewardship” caused conflict at my house, because the word “council” seemed really serious, because when the phone rang in the middle of the night, it meant someone had died. While all these things can be a part of church, they are not the totality or even the essence of church. As Jay Beech reminds us in “The Church Song,” the church is not a building where people go to pray or a business of the Lord. The church is the people living out their lives!
The church is us forgiving others, us serving others, us loving people, all people, us building community, us working for justice, us showing compassion. When we come to worship, we hear the Word of God which orients and grounds us. We receive Christ’s body and blood through which we receive God’s grace and forgiveness. We build Christian community by supporting and being supported by one another and welcoming strangers who become part of us. In worship, we sink keep into the grace of God and the way of Jesus — so that, when we walk out the doors of church later that day, we can be the church everywhere we go.
With temperatures rising in Phoenix, I know many of us will be heading for the hills, literally, to find cool reprieve. Even if you are far from the Esperanza community, I invite you to join us for worship via live stream or to worship with a Christian community geographically closer to wherever you are — so that you might be oriented and grounded by God’s Word. And whether or not you are able to go to worship, God invites us through the Holy Spirit to be the church — wherever we go.
Truly, we are the church, the body of our Lord!
Pastor Sarah