The Christian Church surfaced in the headlines frequently these last few weeks. The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston seems to open a new and tragic chapter in a sad saga of infidelity and betrayal each day. The Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania virtually defrocked a so-called "traditionalist Priest" because the priest barred the bishop from his church's pulpit and altar, as the Philadelphia Inquirer has it, in furious reaction to the Bishop's so-called "liberal theology as well as his ordaining women and actively gay priests." And last week the North American Conference of the World Council of Churches gathered here in Boston, meeting in our church, contention over Palestinians and Israelis finding its way into the papers. News about the church is mixed, and however we find it portrayed in the media, I for one believe the church needs all the friends it can get. Beyond our gathering here this morning we know of those who, pursuing all our doctrinal spats, institutional cover-ups, and controversial public witness, see only hypocrites or dupes. Others consider churches at worst to be ineffective, irrelevant or timid; at best just a bunch of "do-gooders." Perhaps. But as an old mentor of mine remarks, there are three types of people in this world, "do-gooders, do-badders and do-nothingers." On balance, I'd just as soon we church people fall into the first category.

Now the reason we look at the church this morning arises from that trenchant little parable we read this morning. Remember? It is the last of three short parables following the images of a treasure in a field and a pearl of great price. We know the last one as the "Parable of the Dragnet." It sits there, a stick of spiritual dynamite, ending with threats of burning in a furnace or finding ourselves banished somewhere to weep and gnash our teeth. My soul! So unfriendly! Why those ominous threats? What is the point? It just does not sound like Jesus. Well, as Matthew says, the image of the dragnet attempts to illustrate the Kingdom of Heaven. It seeks to describe an agency in this world—an agency like an enormous dragnet, corks on top holding it up, lead weights on the bottom bearing it down, dragging through the river, the lake, the sea, sweeping up everything in its path, the flotsam and jetsam, flora and fauna, a wide variety of difference, a catholicity of diversity.

Now, I have to tell you, I love that dragnet image: the kingdom of heaven a fisherman's net. When the net sinks beneath the waves we know not what it will drag up—pan fish, game fish, food fish, minnows—and along with some crabs, mollusks, and dog fish, we will find some cracked army boots, rotten tires, a rusted Prince Albert tobacco can, booze bottles, and miscellaneous seaweed. What an image! You see, I believe what that net drags up belongs in the realm of heaven, the domain of God, and just as with the realm of heaven, so with the church: a catch-all, a truly inclusive assembly. A dragnet! Like a church, a Boston church I know, facing a major urban thoroughfare, emblazoning on its portico: "Behold we set before thee an open door," including in its bulletin every week:

. . . Following the one who we believe is Sovereign and Savior, we affirm each individual is a child of God, and recognize that we are called to be like one reconciled body with many members, seeking with others of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, gender, physical or mental ability, and sexual identity to journey together toward the promised realm of God. . .

The realm of heaven: A dragnet: welcoming, inclusive, embracing. A blueprint for a church.

But, then, what is this? A fantastic, inclusive, wide-open dragnet, and then . . . threat of burning in a furnace; banishment to the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth? Those images—severe, drastic, fierce—those images signal the crucial nature of the choices we make regarding the kingdom of heaven. They tell us, after we are swept up in the dragnet, the decisions we make about the realm of God and our participation in it, our readiness to build it, our eagerness to join with Christ in making this a better world signify life and death choices. The Kingdom of Heaven confronts us with matters of supreme urgency. When the fishermen in the parable make it with their dragnet to the beach and begin making selections among the catch, their choices do not distinguish between those who do evil and those who do good; those who do wrong and those who do right. What they keep, what they throw out distinguishes between the sluggish and the committed; the apathetic and the earnest, as the recently deceased founder of Common Cause, and the Urban Coalition, John Gardner said, between "Those who give a damn" and those who don't.

This parable of the dragnet, with its embrace of everything and everyone, provides what seems to me to be an authentic clue to true evangelism: God's dominion embraces us all. But more. It insists the claim of God's realm and the choices we make represent the most vital, urgent, imperative decisions we face.

Now heaven knows we face a ton of tough decisions. The claims on our time, our incomes, our imaginations can nearly overwhelm us. Ask someone how they're doing these days and in most cases they will give you a C minus, describe the stress they're under at the moment and apologetically comment they are at least "surviving." Matters of cash flow, job security, personal relationships or the lack of them drain our energy and batter our spirits. Nonetheless, the Christian Church remains a body believing the most important thing we do in this world resides in infusing it with the mind of Christ. The shaping of boys and girls, men and women who carry the common life of a community of character bearing the spirit of Christ, praying and working for fairness, decency and integrity, men and women who, wherever they find themselves, bend over backwards, for God's sake, to make kindness, encouragement and empathy a centerpiece in their approach to others. This, the church's task, cries for implementation. And as the Parable of the Dragnet reveals, we church folk, invited by the Gospel from North and South, East and West, can be claimed by no higher commitment.

Have you been following this brouhaha during the last week over the place of News and entertainment on ABC television? Will late night be given to Ted Koppell and his reflections on the crisis of the day or, as one observer remarked, to David Letterman and his lists? Well, I love Koppel's news reviews but this morning I want to offer a Lettermanesque list for you. It comes from a similar list I saw somewhere else cataloging the ten things a pastor most wants to hear from members of the flock. I recast it for a church which shall remain nameless and a pastor who speaks only under condition of anonymity. Here they are, the ten things a pastor most wants to hear:

Number 10: You simply couldn't keep me home from church in a downpour.

Number 9: I just can't wait to get those 12 year old boys in church school.

Number 8: Fifteen, twenty-five, forty dollars—I'd pay any price for parking just to hear Lael Murphy preach.

Number 7: We've decided to rent our boat for the summer so we can usher during July and August.

Number 6: That Sunday afternoon at Symphony Hall with Yo Yo Ma can't touch the excitement, challenge and joy of Annual Meeting.

Number 5: We were offered tickets to the Olympics this year, but really preferred to follow through on our commitment to lead our Bible Study Group.

Number 4: I chair the capital campaign at Yale and just received the proceeds of a million dollar estate, and have decided to give this legacy to Old South.

Number 3: I was named to chair the Board of Overseers at my law school but turned them down because Old South's Administrative Committee needed me more.

Number 2: No Sunday golf game could pry me away from a service of Holy Communion.

Number 1: I found the movie, "The Lord of the Rings" much less compelling and exciting than Old South's by-laws.

Dumb! But you get the point. In any case, for all our differences in that fabulously, broad, vast, capacious dragnet, for all of our failures, our stumbling, halting, miserable, pathetic, hypocritical witness in this world, the mission of the Christian Church as a place where grace is offered to one another, where we catch a glimpse among ourselves of the kind of world God wants for everyone, there can be no more vital claim on anyone, no more radiant witness to the high purpose and meaning of human life.

II

Now, the kind of world God wants for everyone lies behind the Divine invitation to each of us; it represents the purpose of our calling and our mission. It is why we are caught in the dragnet. You see, the New Testament's goal for us is not church membership; nor is it the building of big congregations; it is not the gathering of mega-churches. The last thing God wants is the whole world in one great church. Our true goal is a world where the barriers of race and sex, the lines dividing us by clan, tribe, nation and creed finally crumble. Our mission here is a public mission. Our calling is not to be a spiritual ghetto, a Congregational club, a sectarian guild. The Gospel of John doesn't say, "God so loved the Church that he sent his only begotten son." It says, "God so loved the world" . . . "God so loved the world . . ." The Realm of Heaven, the Kingdom of God is the divine plan for the world.

I suppose any number of you are familiar with Walter Rauschenbush. Rauschenbush flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. He lived his early years and took his theological training in my hometown of Rochester, New York. My mother served for years on the Board of Trustees of the Rochester Theological Seminary, now Colgate Rochester, where both Walter Rauschenbush and his father taught theology and church history and my early Sunday School classes were just around the corner from his house. We identify Walter Rauschenbush with what we call the "Social Gospel." Reading him today continues to provide a challenging and inspiring encounter. In one of his autobiographical reflections Walter Rauschenbush describes the Christianity of his childhood, a highly personal and intense faith, he says, whose tenets consisted of "Christ died for the sinner, the sinner was saved by grace, the sinner can find new life, know the joy of Christ and finally go to heaven." Rauschenbush stands grateful for that faith. He does not deny it. He cherishes it. But after spending his first pastorate in New York's Hell's Kitchen he found his childhood faith somehow inadequate. What about the world, he asked? What about social, communal suffering? The question before him, as he writes, was how to find a place in the Christian faith "for this great task of changing the world and making it righteous, making it habitable, making it merciful, making it neighborly." "Somehow," he writes, "Somehow I knew in my soul that was God's work."

And so for Walter Rauschenbush, the vision of the Kingdom of God in this world offered itself as a revelation and vocation. In one of his landmark books, "A Theology of the Social Gospel," he writes of his vision as follows:

The Kingdom of God is humanity organized according to the will of God. . . . the conscience of Jesus values the life of every single person, seeking the restoration of even the least among us, guaranteeing our freest and highest development. . . This involves the redemption of social life from the cramping influence of religious bigotry, from the repression of self assertion in the relation of upper and lower classes and from all forms of slavery in which human beings are treated as mere means to serve the ends of others.

And, yes,

Since love is the supreme law of Christ, the Kingdom of God implies a progressive reign of love in human affairs. We can see its advance wherever the free will of love supersedes the use of force and legal coercion as a regulative of the social order. This involves the redemption of society from political autocracies and economic oligarchies, the substitution of redemptive for vindictive penology; the abolition of constraint through hunger as part of the industrial system and the abolition of war as the supreme expression of hate and the completest cessation of freedom. . .

He closes with a polemic against social groups or organizations draining others for their own ease, from conditions in industry making monopoly profits possible, and pleading for the progressive unity of humankind with "individual liberty and the opportunity of nations to work out their own national peculiarities and ideals."

The kingdom of God is humanity organized according to the will of God. Got it? The Divine net sweeps us up, plants us in a peculiar community, like this one, sends us out as servants of a new creation, the realm of Heaven.

III

And lastly, we hardly need be reminded in light of the life and death of the One who calls us and whom we serve, that our discipleship can be a constant challenge and perhaps get us into some trouble. The Christian enterprise is a difficult, arduous and expensive proposition. The dragnet does not sweep us into paradise. This is not a safe place. It is base camp. Church is not simply a place for us to come and hide from the challenges and difficulties of God's world. It is a place to get ourselves into spiritual shape to go meet the most troublesome and intractable challenges of our time.

And yet let me say this to those of you who come to this church as our visitors, to those of you who may come to this place occasionally to rest, to worship, to catch your breath, to meditate, to savor the music, to heal your wounds, to join in the hymns, to get your life in order: "Welcome!" Most of you know I consider this church a spiritual halfway house and I am delighted you find this a place and a people where you can get your spiritual house in order. But let me tell you, just as I am jealous for your welcome here, just as I am eager to guard at every point your anonymity, just as I want you to be able to come and go without getting buttonholed, glommed onto, your arm twisted or in any way having your spiritual space invaded, I want you to know Jesus Christ needs you to share in the saving of this world and we need you here. We need you standing with us in our worship and in our mission. God needs your gifts, we need your gifts. We want your stumbling, incoherent, irresolute faith and wobbly discipleship to join ours with every confidence that makes this place and people far greater than the sum of all its parts. We want you to come and help heal us; we want you to join us in being claimed by a high commitment. We need you to join others in this house as we seek to model and to build the Dominion of God in this world. We pray you enlist with us in a daring, dangerous and world- changing enterprise. Oh friends, last week I heard Konrad Raiser, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, plead for American churches to be heard as this so-called war on terror proliferates to what end only the devil knows. And as the fear, hatred and hopelessness ignite an inferno engulfing the Israelis and Palestinians, Raiser's plea reminded me of Albert Camus's urgent summons to Christians sixty years ago amid the twentieth century's bloody catastrophes, no more lethal than today's, "What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest person. That they should get away from abstractions and confront the bloodstained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally."

And that means you, and you, and you, and you, Jim Crawford.

Swept into Christ's vast net, each of us, and as the closing words of our earlier hymn begged,

On us let now the healing
of your great Spirit fall,
and make us brave and full of joy
to answer to your call.

Scripture Reading
Matthew 13: 44-50

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."