Make the Church Together

I enjoy keeping up with the latest news, but I completely understand my wife’s desire to avoid it. All too often the news – whether international, national or local – overflows with accounts of darkness, death and despair. Just last Friday, for instance, came word of yet another school shooting – this one in the state of Washington.  Three teens, including the shooter, died. Two others were hospitalized. Another community would be haunted by questions that had no easy answers.

Flipping through some of my father’s sermons last night, I came upon one that reminded me that we're hardly the first generation to deal with horrible events like these. In 1985, a 25 year-old woman suffering from mental illness went on a shooting rampage at a shopping mall in Springfield, Delaware County, PA – less than 15 miles from my father’s church.  The shooting left three dead – including a two year-old boy – and seven wounded. As my dad stood in the pulpit a few weeks later, he passed along a story that he heard in the wake of the tragic events of that day at the Springfield Mall. It’s a story about the very nature of Christ’s Church – a story of how we all make the Church together. Here’s what he said:

“Bruce Hazelwood, the pastor of Covenant United Methodist Church in Springfield, told a small group of us pastors the other day of a powerful event that grew out of the aftermath of the tragic shooting several weeks ago at the Springfield Mall. Dr. Trout, who was critically wounded in that shooting, is a member of Bruce’s congregation. [A]s his pastor, Bruce was at the hospital soon after Dr. Trout and the other victims were brought in. Killed in that sad event, you remember, was Recife Cosman – a little boy from Chester who with his family are from one of our United Methodist Churches in Chester. The Cosmans’ pastor was also there at the hospital, of course, attempting to bring support and comfort to this family in this time of the sudden, senseless, and overwhelming loss of their little son.

After things settled down a bit and all the emergency medical needs had been attended to, the hospital provided the families and pastors with a room in which to gather. Many hospital staff members also were there, for they too had been deeply affected by this terrible event.

As the pastor from Chester read words of comfort, Bruce said he looked around and realized what an amazing sight he was privy to. The room in which these people had crowded to seek comfort from God and each other was the lounge of the maternity unit; all of its decorations and appointments spoke of new life. There was a white nurse holding a black baby, and persons of every age, professional people, laborers, and the unemployed. Black and white from Chester and from Springfield, holding one another, acknowledging in that moment their need of one another, and their need of God. The diversity and the unity in the setting of that maternity lounge was a powerful witness.

Bruce said that in that moment there was etched in his mind this model of what the Church really is – a gathering of diverse persons from every age and station and walk in life, persons bound to one another in mutual love and support, bound together by the Lord in whom they find their common ground, while the earth trembles beneath their feet, and all of this taking place within the context of a promise of new life and hope for those who will continue to make the Church together.”

From "Make the Church Together"

Acts 6:1-7; Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16