The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
“Walking the Walk”
April 23, 2023
Text: Luke 24:13-35
Living out our faith through our actions rather than our words is sometimes called “walking the walk.” It might sound a little hackneyed, but if you think about how much of the ministry of Jesus was conducted on the road, while he was walking from place to place, maybe that will help breathe new life into the phrase. What we all hope for in our faith lives, after all, is transformational experiences like what happened to the disciples on the road to Emmaus; we long for those moments when our walk leads us to a sense of new life and new communion with God and one another.
In a few minutes, we’re going to be talking about our budget, which might sound like the least spiritually enlightening conversation of all time. But of course, you all know that a budget is a big window into seeing how we are walking the walk—not the only window, but an important one. I’d like us to frame this conversation by stepping back and thinking about the purpose of the church—after all, money is only a reflection of our values, and we certainly hope that our values and our purpose are in alignment here at St. Martin’s.
The best overarching explanation of the purpose of a congregation that I’ve ever heard can be summed up in three simple words: gather, transform, and send.
When it comes to connecting with our purpose, each of these words can be understood on multiple levels. We gather people together for worship on Sundays and, we hope, for other events and activities throughout the week or on special occasions. During COVID we learned that gathering can even be done virtually, or in places we don’t always think of as church, such as a park or even a parking lot!
Gathering is also a part of the liturgy itself—the first few actions during a Sunday Eucharist focus on drawing us all together, whether it’s through an opening hymn or a time of shared prayer or even some well-placed moments of silence. Research shows that when a group of people engage in the same behaviors together—standing, sitting, and kneeling at the same time in a service, for instance, or singing the same song, or reciting the same prayer—they come away feeling more connected and more charitably oriented to each other than if they would have if they had spent the same amount of time in the same space all doing their own thing. So “gathering” is about more than physically showing up in a certain place at a certain time. It’s about coming together with a shared sense of identity and joining in a common mission or purpose.
If gathering is what happens at the beginning of a worship service, then transformation is the heart of the matter. In a Eucharist, we tend to focus on the transformation that occurs at Communion, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. As critical as this is, it is equalled by the parallel transformation that occurs in us, as we too become the body of Christ. We gather in order to be transformed, and we are transformed because we gather. The great fourth-century theologian St. Augustine, used to remind people of this when he gave them Communion with the words, “Receive what you are, become what you receive: The Body of Christ.”
Of course, transformation isn’t only something that happens in the Eucharist, though—ideally, it will be the whole of our lives together as Christians that will transform us. One way of framing this goal is that we are seeking a “transformation of our hearts, minds, and actions so that we will live out our baptismal identity and purpose.” This sounds like a lofty goal, but in reality, it happens all the time. It happens in coffee hour, and when we work on a shared task like the Project (Re)Start bins, and when we learn from one another in a Bible study. It happens when we’re surprised by a kind gesture from someone at church we hardly know, or when we find ourselves praying for someone to find their way to St. Martin’s as a spiritual home. Any of these moments and so many more have the potential to be transformational. Truly, if we don’t want to be transformed, and that is to say if we don’t want to be changed, we should rethink why we come to church at all.
And then, at the end of the service, we are encouraged to go in peace, to love and serve the Lord, or even to go forth, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. In other words, we are sent. We are sent into the world as bearers of God’s light, to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the wounds of a hurting world, to advocate for justice and peace, and to respect the dignity of every human being. We do not leave here and go into hostile territory. God loves the world God made, and so should we. But we do go into a world where conflict and division and selfishness often reign supreme, and we go with news of a different way of being, a different way of interacting and loving one another. So, we are being sent not as strangers but as friends, not as an army but as members of the Jesus movement, empowered by love, compassion, and the power of forgiveness.
The best thing about using this lens of “gather, transform, send” to understand church is that it is a cycle. It is not a linear progression, something with a single beginning, middle, and end, but instead an ongoing and evolving process. When you go out into the world rejoicing in the Spirit today, you are still being invited to gather back together as one Body next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. We are never done with this process of transformation. While we never know exactly where it will lead us, we know we need to walk this path together.
Which brings us back to the part of walking the walk that has to do with money. As we all know at some level, even if we don’t talk about it a lot, we need financial resources in order to have a place to gather, and people to help do the work of gathering. Our programs cost money, as does much of what we do together in church, especially on Sunday mornings. The spaces we offer to our many community partners, from Davis Community Meals to multiple recovery groups, need to be heated and cooled, painted and cleaned. They need lighting that works, functional seating, and on and on. None of that is free, and we are not being spiritually or financially transparent when we don’t talk about that reality.
Our wonderful treasurer Jessie Ann Owens will be giving us the nuts and bolts of all this in just a minute, so I won’t go into more detail now. But I do want to be clear that this is an ongoing conversation, one that simply needs to be integrated into our common life. Money can be such a source of anxiety, or guilt, or shame, or all kinds of other difficult emotions. But talking about it openly and honestly is a skill, something we can get better at with practice.
There’s one more thing about the lens of “gather, transform, send” that I want to leave you with this morning. It has to do with our Gospel story, and what a perfect illustration of this principle it is. Two disciples were together on the road to Emmaus. When a stranger joined them, it was a gathering of three. And then, at the breaking of the bread, a transformation occurred. They saw that the stranger who had walked with them and talked with them was indeed Jesus himself. In response to that transformation, they get up and return to Jerusalem—in other words, the Spirit sends them out to share the good news that has changed everything for them. And so it goes.
When we walk this walk of faith together, we will find Jesus on the road with us. We might see him most clearly in the breaking of the bread, but our friend and savior is there wherever we invite him to join us, in our budget discussions and our care for our buildings, in our prayer and study, in our times of fellowship and gatherings. When the eyes of our faith are opened, we can see him in all his redeeming work, and give thanks. Amen.
