We began July with a sincere question: “is organized religion really the best we can do?” We asked ourselves this because so many of us have experienced some level of disappointment with the Church, or with those who are part of it. We observed that in the Church, people ought not have their pain overlooked; that in a healthy church, in any church, everyone should be looking after one another – should reach out when a brother or sister is in danger of falling away. The next week, we reflected on the challenge of moving past the hurt inflicted, intentionally or no, by those within the Church. We heard a call to pray for the person who has caused us offense, and we proposed that to do so opens a path for the Holy Spirit to work.

And last Sunday, we reflected on what may be for many the deepest of holy disappointments: when we feel the need God’s care and protection, and God seems AWOL – nowhere to be found. We puzzled over the mystery that Jesus does not always rush to rescue whatever we value the most. That ultimately, it is because God truly loves us that we must be rescued - from counting upon anything (whether our health, our economic well-being, or even our family), anything for our salvation but the grace offered in the person of Jesus Christ.

I gone back over the messages shared the past three Sundays, and I thought: you know, we as the Church have our moments when the community of the Holy Spirit is really shining, really showing that God is involved in and pleased with what we are doing. I think of the way our community has this past week prayed for, then begun to grieve, but also celebrated and gave thanks for the life of our brother Earl Croy. Many of us would say this is what Church is really about. We’d say we saw grace at work last week.

But I also think a reasonable person could still say, “OK, but I can’t help but think that this, the institutional Church, the Sunday morning club – surely this not what God imagined? With its bake sales and pledge drives and padded pews, it’s awfully far from perfect. Isn’t it?”

It is awfully far from perfect. I think we can all agree on that. Paul would have been the first to agree. Writing to the Corinthian church, where freshly-baptized Christians were busy using up oxygen to bicker about who was most important among them, Paul opened the letter called 1st Corinthians by reminding them of their humble roots. “If I’m not mistaken, not many of y’all were PhDs when you were called,” he says. “I don’t recall seeing CEOs among you, and I’m pretty sure no senators were there, either. But then, that’s the funny thing about how God works: God loves to use the little things, the overlooked-in-the-dustbin things, to do wonderful things.” Paul reminds these quarreling, strife-ridden Christians, teetering on the brink of losing their way altogether, that Jesus of Nazareth was despised for being from a nowhere town, for having nobody-parents, and for associating with no-count people. When he died, in the worst, most humiliating way imaginable at the time, most people said: “Good. That’s just what he deserved. And they had the nerve to say he was like God!”

But Jesus was not like God, Jesus was God, is God. And so if the world sees the Church as an unworthy successor to an unworthy Savior, well, that’s what they’ve always made of us. We don’t claim to be better than the wise or the influential or those of noble birth. Like Bill Wilson, the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous, we’re just sinners who realized we needed to be with other sinners more than we needed the next opportunity to sin. We don’t claim to be self-sufficient. We need the Church to welcome people like us, and offer hope that God still gets involved with the little and the easily overlooked.

I could leave it there. But somehow, I think there’s still someone here who feels the Church just hasn’t hit the mark. So I have struggled for an image that can express this sometimes painful reality: that Church offers us a glimpse of how things ought to be, but delivers something that somehow falls short of the shining vision – of the Kingdom of Heaven, you might say. Here’s what I came up with.

One of my favorite pieces of music is a little ditty called Jupiter: Number 41 in G Major. OK, it’s not a little ditty at all. It’s a soaring, triumphant symphony by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest composers in the history of the West – and his last orchestral work. No. 41 is unique, even among masterpieces: a truly revolutionary musical accomplishment, weaving five different melodies together with impossible grace. It’s Wolfgang at his best, which by the way is just barely beyond the reach of being human – the sound of a divine gift, a message from a place where all is beauty and perfect symmetry. I’ve never understood how anyone can listen to Jupiter and be an atheist – just because the sound is transcendent. It has to come from somewhere. You hear it and you want to be there.

At least, if you hear it played by professional musicians. But if you should hear it played by the Tunstall High School Orchestra of Pittsylvania County VA, as I have – it’s not exactly transcendent. The word you might be looking for, if ever you do hear them play it, is survivable. There you sit in a squeaky, flip-bottom chair, willing yourself not to visibly cringe as the violins shriek like the wheels on a coal train, slumping in your seat and surreptitiously checking your watch as a JV defensive tackle beats his tympani with obvious arrhythmic abandon and no regard for the conductor – who must be on the verge of a nervous breakdown…friends, you make it through the high-school version of Jupiter.

At least, that’s what I thought. All I could hear was the musical equivalent of a high-speed, multi-car accident. I almost left during the intermission – I could, after all, say quite credibly on a Friday night that I had to go work on Sunday’s sermon. But two of my Youth were playing, and I felt I had to stay. I am glad I did. Because soon my wandering attention was drawn to an elderly, little woman in a forty-year old, pink polyester coat. She was nodding her head in unison with every movement, often smiling in delight when her grandson or granddaughter had a bright moment. For all I know, she was related to that tympani player. As I watched her, it dawned on me that many were enjoying the performance, some with cameras rolling, hoping to capture this moment in the way that proud parents often attempt, as their kids leap pell-mell into the future.

I came to understand something that night: when you love the performers, the music takes on a beauty all its own. I have come to believe that that is what God is like – like a parent who rejoices in our attempt to recreate the music we’ve heard somewhere, deep within the universe, deep within us. Of course God could do it better – God could show us what this symphony is really supposed to sound like. And one day, God will show us! That’s what we ask for, when we pray “Thy Kingdom come.” But as C.S. Lewis once said, in the meantime God chooses to “do nothing…Himself which He cannot possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye” (Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” article, January 1959). This is how God has chosen to make the music heard in our world, it seems.

We might ask why. We might wish the Church could be made up only of virtuosos, who never make noises that hurt or offend, who always hit the right note and bring the world to its feet in applause. That would be marvelous. But if the Church were a symphony like that, I wouldn’t be playing in it. Would you? And I doubt such a Church could really remember the One who first taught us to attempt this tune, who encourages us to keep on trying, and who’s never given up on us since. I believe that somehow he must love the sound of trying. Perhaps he wants us to learn the same. Amen.