As many of you know February is Black History Month, and since the Edwards are headed to the islands next month, I want to get everyone into that island spirit, break out your drinks with little umbrellas in them, and share with you a popular song that perfectly summarizes today’s gospel

 (play 30 seconds of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”).

We could have fun in adult education talking about the four antecedents of Fletcher’s situational ethics, explaining how the end point of this song’s philosophy is in fact tragedy, but Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and two millennia of philosophers, poets, priests, and prophets have insisted that an intermediate step is required for happiness. That step is the polar opposite of worry and it is in short supply today: It is JUSTICE.

Martin Luther King, Jr. in his address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967 brought together the themes from Christian teaching in all of their harmonies and tensions. Talking about power, justice, and love, King said:

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive,
and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,
and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Yesterday your new vestry and I spent the day in a spiritual retreat addressing what God is calling us to do at Grace Church this year. We are fortunate. We have a great deal of clarity in the tasks before us. Your vestry has a great deal of energy and enthusiasm to accomplish these goals. We have three major goals for the year. They are:

Renew these buildings
Renew the community of Grace Episcopal Church
Renew the connection between Grace Church and the Muskogee community

Now it is time to talk about WHY we are doing these things. When we have completed these tasks, will we make a difference for anybody? For whom? Why not just go play golf instead? Why not just let the big churches with their new buildings do all the work? Does anything we do as a community of faith matter? What is our purpose in doing what we do?

Before we dive into that question, let me weave a few more threads into this tapestry: Declining church attendance, the search for meaning, and why people love Jesus but hate the church. These things are related to our purpose as a church and to King’s teachings about power, justice and love. Let’s see –

Somewhere along the line between the end of the 19th century and let’s say the year 2000 (some would call this the “modern era”), the church, from Roman Catholicism to the little bitty evangelical churches that crop up like dandelions in an April yard; this “Church” lost its bearings. We reversed the incentives for church leaders so that building humongous buildings, having your own network TV channel, and hobnobbing with world leaders became the ultimate quest for church leaders. The Episcopal Church fell into this same trap along with everybody else. At the parish level this meant that clergy sought after bigger churches, bigger paychecks, and bigger retirements. Political squabbles over hot button issues split the churches and provided entertainment for the media.

It would be unfair to say that all churches local and national fell into this. A few were doing the work of the Gospel, but I think as Jesus surveyed his church during these years, he must have wept.

Yes, we are called to be a community of love. But to paraphrase King, “Love without … justice is sentimental and anemic.” We cannot be a true community of love. We cannot be a Christian community WITHOUT also being a community of justice.

If you interviewed the people out there who do not attend church, you would find that many believe in Jesus. They admire him. They see him as a man whose compassion compelled him to teach us to do works of mercy and justice. But if you asked them about the church, they would say things about organized religion that I cannot quote in here. In essence, they would say that organized religion has abandoned the justice and mercy of Jesus – and to a large extent they are correct.

Church attendance declines when the public sees the disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the actions of the local church. Church attendance increases when the public sees a local congregation vigorously engaged in works of justice and mercy. The two keys are that:

The local church must be engaged in reaching out to the local community

The local church must be visible and seen by the community in doing such things (this requires a lot of organized promotion)

We will renew these buildings. We will have more fun and build a stronger community of faith. We will plug into a lot of Muskogee activities and events. But we do these things because Jesus calls us to serve others as a community of justice and mercy.

We have two active meals ministries. What would happen if we tripled the size of those? What if we addressed the needs of the Muskogee community in terms of housing, education, nutrition, the families of prisoners, victims of violence, and adult education? We could start a community garden across the street from this church; we own the property. We could resurrect the GED program that we ran for 29 years. We could start an ESL program. The opportunities are unlimited right here on this corner.

It starts with each person making a choice. We bow our heads in prayer and supplication. We ask Jesus, “Yes Lord, I want to have your compassionate heart. I want to help other people.” When you travel down that road, your worries will ALL be about other people. And then you will be happy.