Last Saturday evening here in Boston at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Bernard Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, offered in behalf of his congregation a series of intercessory prayers-prayers “seeking,” said an explanatory note in The Globe,-“seeking forgiveness for the Archdiocese of Boston’s ‘sins and shortcomings.’” Cardinal Law touched on a dozen areas of brokenness, beginning with Christians and Jews, expressing “sorrow for the history of prejudice, hostility, and evil committed against the children of Israel, God’s chosen people . . . and that the Lord may enlighten us to respect the profound spiritual heritage that is theirs, a heritage which enriches our own tradition . . .” In addition, he included, as he said, “sorrow for the way in which we have not sought reconciliation with our separated brothers and sisters [that’s us], and that the holy spirit will impel us to pray and work constantly to realize the fullness of unity to which Christ has called us . . .”

He asked the forgiveness of those who might be alienated from the Roman Catholic Church. He expressed sorrow for the failure to recognize the full dignity of women; sorrow for racial and ethnic discrimination, for slavery, for prejudice aimed at immigrants; sorrow for ignoring or marginalizing those, as he said, with “psychological or physical disabilities; sorrow for strife within the church itself; sorrow for sexual misconduct and abuse by members of the priesthood and other religious toward minors and women, for failure to protect life from conception to death; sorrow for failure to identify with the thirst for justice of the poor and the oppressed.” To be sure, as he articulated each of these particular confessions, he prayed for an alleviation of the crisis and a reconciliation with those who feel aggrieved. Cardinal Law offered, I believe, a sincere and generously motivated apology.

Of course, the next day, last Sunday, Pope John Paul, II pursued a similar liturgical exercise, calling it a “purification of memory,” touching on a catalog of church failings similar to that of Cardinal Law. Surely another high minded and spiritually sincere effort to heal the wounds of centuries.

Their roster of sins drew respectful criticism from different quarters of the church. The failure to include the psychic and spiritual injuries inflicted on gays and lesbians, the asking of forgiveness but failing to move toward the welcoming of women into the official church hierarchy, the regret for what Christians did and do to Jews, yet omitting reference to the 20th century’s shameful holocaust as illustration of both overt anti-Semitic activity and passive anti-Semitic acceptance. These omissions triggered some frustration and cynicism from inside and outside the Catholic church, but most people believe significant initial steps were taken in recognizing inhumane policy and cruel practice exercised through many events and occasions by those of us in the churches in the name of Jesus Christ for the last 2000 years.

Now why start with this mea culpa? Why begin with a reflection on the weakness and sin of the church? And believe me, we dare not exclude ourselves from the moral crises the Cardinal and the Pope delineate. For all of our significantly different structures of authority and spiritual disciplines, they are our brothers and sisters in Christ. The murder of Jews, the trading in slaves, the demeaning of women, the dehumanizing of homosexuals, the clerical abuse of church members do not reside alone in the Catholic Church. All of our Christian history and practice- Catholic, Protestant, Pentecost al-share in this hypocrisy and betrayal of our savior. Mea culpa, to be sure.

But again, why begin here? Why this critical mood and style? Because for all their headlines, editorial and op-ed recognition this last week, Cardinal Law and Pope John Paul, II, are not the first to tackle the weakness of the church in light of the promises and vision of Christ. Those excerpts from Revelation, we read this morning, written by that seer John of Patmos in exile on a prison island in the Agean for his sharp and bitter resistance to Roman polity and power, those excerpts are cut from cloth predating John Paul, II, and Cardinal Law by about 1900 years.

Remember? John tells us while he is at worship one Sunday morning, he is grasped by a divine revelation, compelling him to write a letter of hope to the troubled and persecuted churches he cherishes in the major cities of Western Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamem, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea-seven cities, seven churches, all addressed in this visionary communication. He seems to single them out-here, Ephesus, there Smyrna, over here Philadelphia-but his strategy in writing this letter lies in including all of them. Seven churches to John means “seven times seven,” “ seven times seventy.” He touches base with all the churches within, if you will, his own beloved diocese.

So John, isolated in his Agean detention camp, writes to his churches threatened with ruin and extinction by the hostile powers that be. And he sends them not only a message of indomitable hope, he reminds them of their shortcomings, their failures, their betrayals of their high calling. He begs them to persevere, “to conquer,” he admonishes, the fierce resistance they face, to resolve the serious failures of discipleship they suffer, to listen, to absorb, to clasp, to press into their bones the spur and the vision granted by the Spirit.

Now we have to love John’s vision, it seems to me, because before he lays out the church’s shortfalls, he insists on showing us first the presence and promise of Jesus Christ moving in and amid the church and churches. Do you remember? In this morning’s lesson John refers to One who walks amid seven golden lampstands. John refers to the churches as “lampstands”-“lampstands”-that is not a description of the churches in the ancient world alone; that is how John describes the churches of any time, our own included. He sees us in our churches as a light to the world, as “lampstands,” and among us. John sees Jesus Christ, the very light of the world, moving, encouraging, succoring, supporting, undergirding, inviting, coaxing, leading us into a world where the love of God shapes and directs us. John believes we can find Jesus Christ in the Churches. He begins there. He believes the Gospel draws us together, makes a tribe, a family a nation, a community. Any reality with love, compassion, reconciliation, justice at the heart of its identity assumes other people, a community. When John describes what he calls “the Son of Man” walking among lampstands, he pictures a believing community as the context for a vital life of faith. “Christ,” as one commentator writes, “is not seen apart from the gathered, listening, praying, believing, worshipping people who recognize him as Lord and Savior. It is not possible to have Christ apart from the church. We try,” he writes, “to have Christ apart from the contradictions and distractions of other persons who believe in him, or say that they do. We want a Christ who is pure goodness, beauty and truth. We prefer to worship Christ under the caress of a stunning sunset, or with the inspiring tonalities of a soaring symphony, or by means of penetrating poetry. Many of us would like to put as much distance as possible between our worship of Christ and the indifferent hymn-singing and fussy moralism which somehow always gets into church. We are ardent after God, but cool toward the church. It is not irreligion or indifference that keep many away from church, but just the opposite; the church is perceived and experienced as a carcinogenic pollutant in the pure air of religion. Many people wanting to nurture faith in God, instead of entering the company of saints who still look and act a lot more like sinners, take a long walk on the ocean beach, or hike a high mountain, or immerse themselves in Dostoevsky or Stravinsky, or Georgia O’Keefe. . . ”

Not for our John of Patmos. He will not go directly from incarceration to ecstasy to a direct connection with whatever the heavenly halls may offer. No way! The church, with all of our sloppiness, our dead ends, our false starts, our gossip, our politics, our failure of nerve, our snail’s pace, our stupidity-all of this we tangle with amid the lampstands, says our prophet, for here, in church-amazing!-the living Christ still makes a home. John illuminates his hope with light and lampstands, with Christ and the church.

But John knows even more specifically the things eating us up, getting us down, tiring us out. On the one hand, he congratulates churches for hanging in there during some very tough times and rugged challenges. But he knows we harbor spiritual illness, ethical myopia, mission failure. Take that church in Ephesus, for instance. They clearly persevere against obstacles inside and outside threatening to wreck their fellowship. They stand strong as an organization but, as John indicates, they forget amid all their strenuous organizational effort, their first love, their first loyalty, their primary purpose. Somehow amid all their meetings, the business of the church, the intricacies of the organization, the need for money, the planning for program, the building of process, the meshing of the calendar, the adjustment of staff, amid all of this the One bringing them together in the first place gets lost. The joy and service of the living Christ gets scattered, dissipated, hidden, covered up.

Oh, my friends, do we see the risks of Ephesus here? I will bet some of us do. Church work can burn us out, beat us down, exhaust us. The variety of institutional challenges facing a church like ours, with all these bricks and mortar, with matters of endowment, personnel, policy, adequate funding, by-law reviews, communal communication, space allocation, parking, sustaining a membership base-huge challenges and opportunities to be sure-but amid them, maybe even buried by them, a hunger and thirst for first things, for the illuminating vision of the One who calls us lampstands and walks among us as light. My soul! We dare not forget that our purpose in all of our programming and ordering, investing and gathering falls under our shared discovery that while our city and world find themselves lost in market mania, driven by competition and necessity to be number one, we do not fall for that mania ourselves, but keep in front of us always the banner of the One who joins us amid this troubled humanity of ours, whose Cross is more indicative of the kind of world we live in, often brutal, bloody and barbarous, yet for whose churches-even ours!-John strikes an invincible hope: the One who was dead is alive! The One with power to change the dereliction and brutality of death on a Cross into an affirmation that even in that kind of situation we will not find ourselves abandoned-there sings our high purpose. Under that transfiguring sign we are reminded the seeming Mickey Mouse and pusillanimous institutional tasks in this or any church, find their deepest source, their highest purpose. We fail one another and Jesus Christ if we fail to keep that sign visible, and surrender ourselves to it. “I was dead and am alive again!” I beg you, my friends, as we plow our way through institutional housekeeping, we never forget that. I beg you, do not let me forget that.

Or take that church at Sardis we heard about a few moments ago, the one John suggests carries a reputation of being alive, but reeks of death. Astounding! How does John know these fragile points of a church’s common life? James Steward crystallizes John’s message to Sardis: “Beware of nominal Christianity.” You have a name of being alive but you are dead. Look at yourself, with all the paraphernalia of religion, but it deserves a coffin. It hides behind a foul mask of self deception. As Richard Jeske puts it directly, and perhaps as anyone of us could write, at Sardis “we find the perfect model for inoffensive Christianity.” The Sardis Church possesses a glittering reputation in its community for being an alive, active church, but behind the facade this church is dead. That Sardis “congregation is a pathetic charade, a church going through the motions but with little substance to its witness. It fools everyone, including itself, for it cannot distinguish any longer between real Christian witness and useless religiosity.”

Oh Sardis. Here on Copley Square? Look at our bulletin every Sunday morning. All these events, these gatherings, these opportunities for study, worship, service, education. Are they authentic? Life giving? And our worship? Our music? Our prayers? Our hymnody? Our preaching? This beautiful room? My goodness! Surely to the unaided eye and ear these are signs of something religious going on. Alive? Dead?

Or perhaps as John puts it to that church at Laodicea, “you are neither hot nor cold, you are luke-warm.” Your religious commitments look indifferent in a world demanding the best from you, requiring the most authentic, alive, vigorous, creative, redemptive participation in the life of humankind.

Oh friends, I believe that what goes on in here in this hour together is perfectly legitimate so long as it extends to all of life as expressive of worship, as an extension through different means of what we say and do here.

Years ago John Haynes Holmes, the prophetic minister of the Community Church in New York, wrote a dazzling essay entitled, “The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church.” We have heard it in this room before. But I want to paraphrase it for you this morning. It is about the death and life of the church. Listen: He says that the Church must care equally for the rites of baptism and for public parks and playgrounds; it must care no more for the service of Holy Communion at the altar than for that wider communion at every hearthstone which shall give bread to all who hunger and drink to all who thirst. The church must care not so much for clerical robes and choir vestments as for clothing all who are naked. It must express at least as much concern for decent, comfortable, affordable homes for all men, women and children as it does for its own towering edifices. It must care no more for the atmosphere of prayer and worship in its churches than for fresh air, clean water and a healthy environment for those living in its inner cities; as much for teaching the Gospel to men and women as for advocating the means whereby they can live securely; to care no more for the quality and depth of the Sunday liturgy than for keeping every day inviolate from dishonest stock transactions, corrupt political campaigns, unethical real estate deals, every day inviolate from child labor wherever it exists in our world, workers’ wages sustaining poverty, preventable disease, every day inviolate from sanctified greed, pyramiding wealth on one side of the divide and stagnant poverty on the other. We must care equally as much for announcing the good news releasing us from sin as for tackling the means and procedures that may release others from terrible conditions that exacerbate the tendency to sin, understanding that the saving of souls may be cut from similar cloth to that of saving the society that shapes, molds, and forms the souls for ill or good.

It is John of Patmos holding our feet to the fire: holding against us Christian types the facade of religious activity, the claim to life while for Christ’s sake we may truly be dead, reminding us that while we claim the spirit, creative, compassion of Jesus Christ, we may turn out to be neither hot nor cold-lukewarm!-indifferent to the high calling we claim.

And just once more, of the seven churches John addresses, Philadelphia is one of two he fails to admonish. Instead, he tells that church at Philadelphia, that city of filial, family, sibling love, that “before them he sets an open door which no one is able to shut.” Don’t you love that? When you come to this church, there John’s promise rests chiseled into our portico’s Roxbury Puddingstone, announcing to the tens of thousands who pass our portico each week-announcing to you-two different and vital messages. First: Welcome. This door, this house, this people, this congregation, is an open house, a spiritual refuge, a hospital for worn out and sick souls, a boot camp for soldiers of the Cross, a community of sinners of whatever race, nation, creed, sexual orientation-sinners surrounded by the grace of Christ. “An open door that will not shut.”

But secondly, it is an open door of hope that will not slam in your face, an open door promising that whatever obstacle of resistance, terror of nature or of history, dead-end or stone wall we face, that the one who faced the worst life could dish out on Calvary-a door shut, slammed tight if you will-became through the power of the God, who never lets us go, an open door set before us which will never close, will always be open to new opportunities, new possibilities, new life whatever our current condition. That is John’s promise! It blesses us here, not just on Sundays, but every day of every year.

And so we finish. I suppose, if I were Cardinal Law or Pope John Paul, II, I would join in their sorrow for the injustices, the sufferings, the exclusions, the vicious sanctions the church purveyed over the centuries. And taking a clue from John of Patmos, I might add as well, the sins of clerical and institutional self-deception, the confusion of busyness with spiritual health, the mistaking of religious overtones for Gospel integrity, the risk, if not the reality, of complacency and indifference in a world God wants desperately to save, a world yearning for compassion, justice and a universal prosperity. . . a world starving for hope.

If we did follow such a path, would we consider ourselves great? Indeed, can a church be great? No. No! By John’s criteria we are called-called-only to be faithful.