Elaine Pagels is a distinguished professor at Princeton University. She is not a seminary professor. She is a humanities scholar who studies and knows a lot about the human phenomenon of religion. Her specialty is early Christianity, and she is widely respected for her scholarly research and books. She is not particularly a church person. In fact, she had pretty much given up on the church as an institution worthy of her time and attention, not unlike a lot of thoughtful people.

But she begins her new book, Beyond Belief, with an unusual—for her—anecdote and a very powerful witness.

On a bright, cold Sunday morning in New York, she interrupted her daily run by stopping in the vestibule of an Episcopal church to get warm. Two days earlier, her two-and-a-half-year-old son had been diagnosed with an invariably fatal lung disease. I cannot even begin to imagine how devastating that experience must be. She writes:

Since I had not been in church for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress—the soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation; and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that knows how to face death. . . .

The day after we heard Mark’s diagnosis—and that he had a few months to live, maybe a few years—a team of doctors urged us to authorize a lung biopsy, a painful and invasive procedure. How could this help? It couldn’t, they explained; but the procedure would let them see how far the disease had progressed. Mark was already exhausted by the previous day’s ordeal. Holding him, I felt that if more masked strangers poked needles into him in an operating room, he might lose heart—literally—and die. We refused the biopsy, gathered Mark’s blanket, clothes, and Peter Rabbit, and carried him home.

Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. (pp. 3–4)

Our topic this morning is the church. Some of you—hopefully all of you—know that this is a very important day in the life of this church. We are today launching a major capital funds campaign to do some major things: to build 60,000 new square feet of education and fellowship space and to build a community center for mission in the emerging new neighborhood west of here. Our goal is to raise, ultimately, $30 million, and that is, by anybody’s criteria, a major amount of money. You are forgiven if knowing that—or if you wandered in here innocently this morning and just heard it for the first time, you are forgiven for concluding—“Uh oh, here comes a major stewardship sermon. I better hold on to my checkbook!” Well, relax. As a matter of fact, I hope all of us, myself included, will be so compelled by this project that we will find ourselves doing something that perhaps we never did before, namely go home and think and pray to God to help us do something bold and brave and loving and courageous and generous, to step up and commit ourselves sacrificially to this wonderful project, which will expand and strengthen this church for years to come.

This morning, however, I want to push back behind all the dreams and hopes, all the blueprints and space design, all the long process of strategic planning, all the literally thousands of hours that have already been invested, and ask the simple question, why? Why would we want to do this? Why would we ask one another to invest so much, to give so much? Is it, finally, all that important? And I have chosen the picture of Elaine Pagels standing in the back of that church, trying to cope with the death of her child, to lead us into that simple question. Our text, which also deals with the question, is one of the most familiar incidents in the New Testament.
Jesus and his disciples are walking along the road one day near the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi, and out of the blue he asks them, “Who are people saying I am?’ They answer, “some say a prophet, Elijah, John the Baptist.” “But you,” he asks, “who do you say that I am?” Peter—always impetuous, bold—blurts out, “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” It was a stunning moment. No one had ever said that about him before. It was a defining moment, and that question, “Who do you say that I am,” rings all the way down across the centuries and confronts us. The passage, however, goes on in a surprising direction. “You are Petros—the Rock,” Jesus says, “and on this rock I will build my church,” and it’s the first time that word church is used. And then he goes on to the heart of the matter: “And the gates of Hades, the gates of hell, literally the gates of death, the power of death, will not prevail against it, my church.”

We’ve been arguing about what that means for all of our history. Our Roman Catholic friends believe that it’s about the papacy, that Peter’s status and authority, given by Jesus himself, are passed down to his successors, the popes. Protestants generally have believed that the rock upon which Jesus would build a church was Peter’s confession, and that it’s a major over-translation to go from his encounter with Jesus to the papacy. That’s not my concern this morning.

Instead, I’m asking, did Jesus intend to build a church, and did he mean it when he said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church? The sermon title, by the way, comes from novelist, poet and professor, Reynolds Price, who has a lifelong love affair with Jesus but, like Elaine Pagels, not much time for church. In a new book about the morality of Jesus—which Price believes the church notoriously ignores—he introduced a new thought for me. He points out that “Jesus seems to have spent his youth working with his brothers in Joseph’s construction business. The Greek word so famously translated “carpenter” can mean, more broadly, a builder” (A Serious Way of Wandering, p. 13).

What a nice new thought. Maybe what Jesus actually did for thirty years was not only make tables and stools and bowls and spoons in a tidy carpentry shop, as I was taught in Sunday school. Maybe he and Joseph built houses, dug the forms for the footing, and built the frame for the walls and the supporting beams for the ceiling. Maybe Jesus built homes in which people lived. Maybe he and Joseph traveled to Sepphoris each day and worked on the Roman amphitheater. Maybe he built synagogues.

I believe he meant to build a church. I do not believe he knew how it would all pan out—all this amazing diversity and complexity deeply embedded in human history: the papacy, the monasteries and missionaries, the Reformation, the schools and hospitals, the magnificence of it all, and also the tragedy and the silliness. I think he took the great risk of leaving the task of being the church up to us, but I do believe deeply that he intended to leave behind followers, a movement, a company of men and women and children, united by nothing much more than a conviction that he was God’s man, he was God’s revelation, united by the conviction that what he taught and the way he lived are nothing less than the truth, the one singular truth for which it is appropriate to live and die; a people united by the conviction that the truth was not defeated by his own tragic death but continues to live in history in the hopeful and loving and courageous and generous things his people do in the world. He called it his kingdom on earth, and he said it was present when his followers acted like he wanted them to act. And so, yes, he most certainly intended to build a church. And he wanted it to remind people of him every time they saw it, and he also wanted it to take a stand against death and the power of death on a regular basis.

He wanted his church to remember and remind the world that he was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead, and so death did not defeat him. Death is not what we thought. Death itself was defeated.

But first, let’s acknowledge that it’s a long way from perfect in here. Let’s acknowledge the tragedy, the sorry things that have happened, the fallibility and humanity of the church, including our own church’s obsession with the issue of whom to ordain and whom to refuse to ordain, squandering its energy and love and passion for justice and kindness in the world over an issue that most of the world has long since resolved. It’s not perfect in here. Sometimes it’s so imperfect, it’s funny.

I was reading through Arthur Herman’s book How the Scots Invented the Modern World—a book, rumor has it, that Calum MacLeod carries with him all the time and places next to the Bible on his bookshelf—and found this about our own particular ancestors:

The Presbyterian Ulster Scots also brought [to the New World] their burning hatred of Episcopalians (especially since as British subjects, they had to pay taxes for the established Anglican church in America). When one Anglican missionary tried to preach in the Carolinas—the locals (Presbyterians) disrupted his services, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and drink, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation. [I have to say that most of the Episcopalians I know would have welcomed that. Later, having escaped and returned to civilization, the missionary wrote about his Presbyterian adversaries:] “They delight in their present low, loutish, heathenish, hellish life and seem not desirous of changing it.” (p. 237)

It’s not perfect in here, and sometimes it is so imperfect, it is funny. Church people know that better than anybody on the outside. But sometimes it is beautiful and brave and hopeful. Regularly, in fact, good and compassionate and redeeming things happen in the world in the name of Jesus Christ and because of his church. Regularly, quietly, people are fed and clothed and sheltered and nurtured and educated. Regularly, mostly quietly, people are lifted up and given new sight, new vision, new life because of the church Jesus built. Regularly, quietly, for 132 years this church has done its best to be the kind of church Jesus would want it to be, the church Jesus the builder needs on this remarkable urban intersection.

Popular author Anne Lamott, who returned to the church recently after a long absence and a very difficult life, recently wrote in Salon that she insists her fourteen-year-old go to church even if he hates it. Her revelation stimulated a lot of response, much of it negative. People accused her of oppressing her child, abusing him even by making him go to church on Sunday. Her response was delightful. “Left to their own,” she said, “teenagers would opt out of many important things like flossing their teeth and homework. It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.” And then she went deeper: “Teens who don’t go to church miss opportunities to see people loving God back. Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alone” (Christian Century, 23 August 2003).

He meant to build a church, to leave behind a company, a people, because it is very difficult to follow him alone. You need traveling companions on this journey to follow him: people to talk to, and argue with, people to love and care for, people who will believe and sing and pray on the days you can’t believe and sing and pray, people with whom to be signs of God’s kingdom, light in the city, the church of Jesus Christ.

And I believe, with everything in me, that he was perfectly serious when he left us that vivid, powerful image of the church standing against the gates of hell, the power of death itself. I think the stakes are that high.

To be blunt about it, death’s what we have to contend with, is it not? Death is the shadow that falls into every life. The gates of Hades, Tom Long says, “is a symbol for everything that opposes God’s will: the powers of death and destruction that ravage human life” (Westminster Bible Companion: Matthew, p. 186).

The church’s job—because Jesus gave it to us—is to be a reminder that we all need, which is that death does not have the last word about us: our institutions, our hopes and most precious dreams, our dearest ones, our deepest loves. Death does not have the last word. He does; Jesus Christ does. It is our job never to forget that, to hold on to the promise for dear life, to remind one another on those days when life causes us to forget it, or doubt it, or disbelieve it, that the gates of hell will not prevail: Jesus Christ will.

“Here is a family that knows how to face death,” Elaine Pagels wrote, shivering in the narthex of the church, trying to cope with the worst thing that can happen to a parent.

I thought about my friend Al Ward’s memorial service two weeks ago. Al, a vital, generous, joyful man, a great Christian and churchman, was killed in a bicycle accident. And the church ecumenical gathered in a Lutheran sanctuary. Al’s friends from all over Chicago and the suburbs, with whom he had worked and volunteered and served over the years—Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, African Americans, Asian Americans, Americans who looked like me with blue suits and white shirts—we sang the great hymns and heard the words of promise and lined up to take communion and went back to work on a warm September morning, deeply grateful that Jesus built a church to remind Al’s wife and family and all of us that death does not have the final word about us. Jesus does.

I thought about an incident that happened here just this week. An elderly gentleman appeared at the reception desk and asked if he might see the John Timothy Stone Chapel. One of our wonderful support staff persons happened to be there as well and offered to take him through the building and show him the chapel. When they arrived he looked around and said it was exactly how he remembered it, and she asked him why he had visited Fourth Church. He was from Florida. “My wife and I were married here 50 years ago. We lived in Chicago and came to this church and were married in this chapel. She died last month and I just thought I’d drive up to Chicago and see where we lived and where we were married. I thought I’d come home.”

And I thought about September 11, 2001, and the millions of people who crowded into churches all over the world that day for the reminder we all so desperately needed that day, that the gates of Hell will not prevail, that death does not have the last word, God does.
I thought about Joan and Bob Volkert, faithful church members living in Florida, who jumped in their car that day and drove all the way back to Chicago to be in their church, to be home on that Sunday.

Yes, Jesus meant to build a church. And yes, I believe, in the mystery of God’s will and God’s economy. God means for there to be a church here on Michigan Avenue, between Chestnut and Delaware. And, yes, I think one of the reasons you and I are here is to help Jesus build this church and to pass it along to another generation of people who will come through its doors and sit in its pews and marvel at its beauty and be nurtured and comforted by its message.

“Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a lifetime,” the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said. “Therefore we must be saved by hope.”

So it is our turn now to put ourselves to the task of building the church.

“I will build my church,” Jesus said, “And the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

With grateful hearts we gather here this morning, O God,
grateful for your church throughout the world
for the churches that have taught, nurtured,
comforted, and inspired us along the way
and, today, for this church
and for the great adventure that lies ahead.
Bless us, O God
Bless us to be your bold and faithful people.
In Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.