Tucked away in my library you will find a little book entitled "If this Be Religion." The author, Frederick Keller Stamm, at mid-century served a number of Congregational Churches across the country, some of them in our largest cities. After forty years in the ministry he decided to compose what turns out to be a polemic, disillusioned and disparaging. He lambastes his churches for blatant hypocrisy. He assails what he calls class warfare dividing his congregations. He charges his pastoral colleagues with piteous self deception. He attacks money wasted on religious paraphernalia by churches blind to personal needs of individuals or communities and their struggles for peace and justice. Finally, he looks out in our world and sees the serious clashes among Christian traditions and offers that time-honored lament: "Perhaps if we were all atheists we might be able to live together as Christians."

I

Sound familiar? Feel familiar? It should. Dr. Stamm puts his finger on an age-old problem: the failure of churches and church people, of preachers and Deacons, of elders and pew holders to walk the walk we love to talk. And our lesson this morning throws that issue right into our faces. You see, Mark's little Christian community, trying to cut it sometime around 70 AD, finds itself in a position not too different from that described by Dr. Stamm. Mark describes a situation besetting his own Church. He makes it sound like a problem in the synagogue-and no doubt the synagogue suffers from similar problems. But Mark finds himself upset-angry over the deportment of his church friends and colleagues. He is shocked by hypocrisy and the deceitful use of religious overtones to justify venal practices. In response, Mark sets Jesus right in the middle of his own rotten church and draws this fiery picture illustrating severe judgments on us religious types. Indeed, the passage we read a moment ago might be Mark's concentrated laser-like vignette surfacing his own frustration and indignation, his own cry in a wilderness of phony religiosity and sanctimonious deceit. We see here Mark's broadside: "If this be religion . . ."

II

Now, far from denying these harsh, yet all too discerning insights into our institutional and personal religious failure and shortfalls, I want first of all to remind us again, that what we stand for and who we stand with continues to be the most important part of our church life. To be sure, we often bury our high purpose with institutional garbage and failed priorities, but through it all, I want to insist that Dr. Stamm's church, Mark's church and our church more than anything else want to mediate, broadcast, serve, express, live, demonstrate transmit to another generation -we want to witness to this city and world the news inherent in the presence among us of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is what we are here for. That is our calling. That is our vocation. That is our first and most important priority.

What does it mean? What do we try to demonstrate? What lies behind the volunteer hours we spend, the money we receive and allocate, the imagination and creativity we invite, the patience we invest? I'll tell you. We are here because we believe in face of everything denying it, that behind the frequent chaos of urban life, the horrible tragedies numbing us -Nicole Reinhart, a world class cyclist, losing control of her bike crashing into a tree last week in Arlington, killing herself; or the death of an infant, forgotten, left in the auto-safety seat, expiring from heat prostration in the rear of a distracted father's car; or the lump under a woman's armpit, or rampant, virulent cells in a neighbor's prostate- behind, beneath these random, natural and grievous circumstances there rests One who holds us all in the palm of a hand that through it all never lets us go.

And where does that promise come from? Where do we see it revealed to us? Friends, we gather in this room with a Cross confronting us. How come? What does it mean? Why place it in the center of our worship life? Because the Cross challenges us to faith-to trust, to trust-that human events bearing the likes of cruelty, meanness, the worst we can do to one another are not something beyond or outside the experience of the God whom we worship. Ours is a God who suffers with us; who knows what it is like to be us, who shares our condition, wounded, vulnerable as we are, and exercises compassion amid our incomplete and all too bloody world.

But more. This Cross, symbol of injustice, an instrument of colonial oppression, religious pride, a promiscuous death penalty, an illustration of the egregious institutional errors and juggernauts that religious, political and economic institutions perpetrate protecting their own turf or surrendering to skewed popular opinion-this Cross proclaims that through all of these loveless, cold-hearted and cynical circumstances- some of them resulting in wrongful death-that finally, finally, against all evidence to the contrary, Love has the last word. This instrument representing the most excruciating, brutal way to dispose of human life turns out, through a mystery we cannot explain but can only confess, this Cross turns out to be the instrument that in trust we believe proclaims the indefatigable seeking, searching, reaching, "capital P" Person offering us pardon and release.

And more. Faith. Love. Hope. We see here a Cross: empty. We see here a vehicle meant to end life, to crush it, to humiliate, to drain it of vigor and viability, to slam the door on human existence and leave us to believe that violence, meaninglessness, death, nothingness constitute the end of human life.

"No way", asserts the Cross. It radiates a radical hope arising where there is no hope, shining where darkness shrouds everything, granting confidence that dead-ends. Slammed doors, brick walls, the things that constrain, imprison and finally do us in are subject to power bursting doors, smashing barriers, revealing light at the end of the tunnel.

Faith! Love! Hope! And yes, a way of life for each of us, a vocation for you, for me rooted in gratitude, thanksgiving, overwhelming gratefulness for what our God through Jesus Christ has made of our human life. Love and hope come to us as gifts. Grace! The one who in love risks everything, death itself, forging hope and new lives for old can be thanked only by our life offered in similar style. We love because God first loves us. We serve because we have been served first. We give of ourselves because everything has been given for us. The Christian life, in every way, is an act of gratitude.

That is our top priority in this church, and I would suspect in any church seeking to celebrate and follow Jesus as the Christ. If that be religion, then what a noble, glorious, endeavor we embrace.

III

Yet heaven knows we find ourselves tangled in all kinds of things distorting, obscuring this glorious Divine gift. Mark draws a vivid picture of our failure. He pictures Jesus condemning religious types in searing phrases. And be assured, though Mark populates his story with officers of Jewish religious institutions, he is not castigating synagogues, temples and Jewish liturgists when he scorches the scribes prancing about in their long robes and gathering salutations in the market place. He blisters his own church leaders, us in the churches, my type, the ones who call ourselves "The Rev.," or "The Rev. Dr.;" or "Very Reverend," or "Most Reverend," or "Your grace." He tackles Monsignors, Cardinals, Popes. He settles on our academic pretensions. I'm professor of New Testament, you know. A Ph.D. I authored a treatise on Systematic Theology. See my Th.D.? Dr. Stamm in that little book we mentioned a moment ago, "If this Be Religion", Dr. Stamm captures this mentality beautifully. He mentions an opportunity to introduce one of Congregationalism's best known pastors to a church in the mid-western hinterlands. Dr. Stamm writes, ". . . when I asked him if there was anything in particular I should say, he replied, 'Just say I happen to be the minister of the largest Congregational Church in the Country.' And it was, too," says Stamm. "It was a huge amphitheater, with corrugated sheet iron inside and outside, and old back-breaking pews. It seated 1800 people, and ushers in morning-dress showed people to their pew. Standing room was at a premium. The best pews were auctioned off to the highest bidder. . ." Heaven forbid! The highest bidder? And you can transfer Mark's raised eyebrows toward those who ensconce themselves in clubs, or titles or zip codes or offices or preferential lists of whatever category.

Now some of you know I am one of the worst offenders of this preferential treatment syndrome. Before I confess my privileged status, let me insist, first of all, that I will never join any club or organization that every member of this congregation cannot join. That is a rule of thumb I maintain. But I do protect one fantastic perk that even yet comes with the title "The Reverend" attached to my address here at the Old South Church in Boston. (Oh, I can barely share the shame of it with you.) It is a season clergy pass for two to Fenway Park: "The Rev. James W. Crawford and One." Oh, no special treatment, just standing room only. I pray Mark doesn't find out!

And Mark sees something else making his blood boil. He sees the same privileged people devouring widows' houses. What's that? It turns out to be the equivalent of making promises of justice and failing to follow through, misappropriating scarce funds for religious ostentation that should be going to basic human welfare, all the while pretending to pray for the down and out. And yes, even more, Mark witnesses those good church people, dressed "to the nines," obviously successful, loaded, putting into the church coffers a ton of money. But he bridles at the casual affordability of it all, the fact those contributions do not come off the top, that they make little or no impact on the core budgets and life style of the donor. I have to tell you I think there is something important at stake here. One of my mentors always insisted that writing his check to the church first-one of significant proportion to his income-that writing that check compelled him to take account of that gift with every other expenditure he made. What he gave to Jesus, if you will, shaped the scale, the priorities, the scope of everything else; it came first and he felt it for the rest of the month.

IV

And then Mark shows us that widow standing in the line, handkerchief in hand, quietly proceeding to the collection box, opening her hanky, and dropping in not one but two copper coins-her livelihood-apparently all her means. Who knows what impact it makes on her rent, her menu, her clothes. The point Mark makes is that her gift represents a chunk of herself. It is a piece of herself. It costs. It cannot possibly touch the size of the contributions made by the others pouring their sheckels into the church coffers, but in terms of its value, in its expression of her priorities, her sense of who really owns her and shapes her choices, we see a profound abyss between her and those others dabbling around with their so-called discretionary income. If hers be religion. . . my soul!

Now friends, I have to tell you I love this Church. I want it to be a witness second to none in all of Christendom trusting in the love and hope of the Gospel, second to none in its ebullient, radiant gratitude for the grace pressed down and running over in the Gospel. But this passage makes me nervous. It sets my teeth on edge. I wonder how we stack up with that widow. I brood about the depth and the dimensions of our loyalty.

Look at this fantastic building, for instance. It is not an end in itself. It is a tool; it is a vehicle for mission and ministry. We meet in this room regularly for what we call worship, but the rest of the building, harboring a preschool, sheltering twelve step programs, providing space for telling young people the story of Jesus-a story that if one generation misses, the story dies-this building houses the Poor People's United Fund; it provides access in a city where space is dear to social service and action agencies eager to meet, plan and make this city a little more like the realm of God. It welcomes the drama program of Snowden High School next door, one of the magnet schools drawing young people from every neighborhood in Boston, blessed with the colors and cultures of the globe. Its walls reverberate to music and drama in one way or another demonstrating the creativity and vision of our bothers and sisters in this city. This building, with the brilliance of this room and the symbols of the Gospel story surrounding us, serves as a vast outreach; it becomes a ministry of stewardship to a population of diverse needs, interests, foci. We do well, but we can do better. But doing better takes sextons, oil, electricity, cleaning supplies, bathroom towels. Nothing inspirational there. Who can get excited about floor wax and paper cups? Nobody. But in the context of using this site, this versatile setting, for God's sake, the components of sustaining this tool for outreach, service and worship are part of an integrated whole, a witness in a desert of granite and glass.

Or take another aspect of outreach-the aspect which in our church purpose begins with worshipping God, preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ and celebrating the sacraments-a purpose supporting the nurturing of fellowship among this body here, reaching out to our sister religious agencies in the city, a purpose closing by declaring that along with worship our mission is "to render loving service toward humankind and to strive for righteousness justice and peace."

" . . .to strive for righteousness justice and peace. . ." We touch a lot of bases here with volunteers in various educational, health and housing settings. We provide grants to hunger agencies, shelters, associations fighting AIDS and cancer, enhancing children's reading skills, providing affordable housing. But we can do better. We need remember that we live in provisional times, that the church is a transient agency. The goal of the Gospel is the so-called Kingdom of God in this world. It seeks a city, it envisions an environment, it posits a hope for a human community where the church withers away and where globalizaton becomes not a matter of fair trade or free trade, nor of balances of power and the blurring of borders by the movement of trillions of dollars by digital and electronic means. Hardly. It means for us the dissolving of racial separation, the resolution of the yawning abyss between rich and poor; the dispersion of rancor and hatred among ethnic cousins and national neighbors; it means the collapse of exclusive creeds, and the blossoming of collaboration, teamwork, cooperation. It means, in the name of Jesus Christ recognizing what James Carroll called in last Tuesday's Globe-I like it-"an ecumenical God," not rooted so much in doctrine and metaphysics but seen through the One who became one of us, and who, embodying the richest wellsprings flowing from Judaism, shows us that what finally counts in our religious life lies is how we treat each other. Ethics grounded in love issuing in forgiveness, assuring dignity of every human being, opening possibilities not only for equal opportunity but for a fair share. Ethics determines our religious integrity.

If that be religion, then we reorient ourselves toward the Christ's high and gracious ends. It will take the most we have with the best we have to express with word and deed the One to whom we pledge our ultimate loyalty. I ask you this morning, as we enter this new season with hope and excitement, to brood again over Mark's vivid passage: just who are those religious types, you me, folk we know? Who, that crowd at the treasury, easily writing checks, throwing cash into the plate, easy come, easy go; who that widow, investing not simply her wherewithal, but herself. . . modeling the basic claim of our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ on all that we have and all that we are. Now friends, if that be religion. . . Wow!

SCRIPTURE READING