By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Tomorrow, as you all know, I begin my vacation and for the next four weeks, you will enjoy three weeks of sermons by some of our lay people and gather for the traditional prayer brunch at the Ribers. Because of the dedication of these members of our congregation, the Elders had a fairly easy time filling the pulpit for those weeks when I will be gone, but anyone who has ever been on the Board of Elders can attest to the fact that finding pulpit supply has not always been quite that easy. Many years we invited area clergy to be guest preachers but since our area has a greater density of trees and foxes than churches and ministers, there wasn’t an abundant supply of extra clergy out there to choose from. Many were already otherwise occupied on Sunday preaching to their own congregations and often the two Seventh Day Baptist ministers in Alfred and Alfred Station had the audacity to schedule their vacations out of town for the same weeks I was gone! Faced with such a scant supply of surplus ordained preachers, the Elders tried other creative solutions: one year Pete Finlay read “The Devil and Daniel Webster” as the sermon; another year I chose several sermons by famous American preachers – Charles Spurgeon, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Martin Luther King, Jr. – to be read from the pulpit by the lay leader. We have invited representatives of some of our Benevolence programs to come and share information about their work. We have invited speakers of other faiths to give talks on their religious traditions. We have done away with the sermon time altogether and held hymn sings or prayer services. But always, no matter how creative they had to get, the Elders always came up with something to bring the congregation together on the Sunday mornings I was away.

Well, almost always. I was going through some old notes recently and came across some files from the summer of 1993 and I was reminded that that summer, the Board of Elders tried an experiment: instead of finding pulpit supply, they just cancelled church for three weeks. For three weeks the congregation did not assemble, no hymns were sung, no congregational prayers were offered, and there was no one to speak aloud the scripture before the congregation. When the Elders reconvened in the Fall to discuss the results of this experiment, they first reviewed the advantages. It had been very nice to be freed from the worry of lining up guest preachers and there was no hassle over having to reschedule lay leaders or greeters because their assigned Sunday fell on a date they would be out of town. The Board of Christian Ed was able to leave three slots empty on their teaching schedule, and the Trustees saved money on bulletins, pulpit supply, and accompanists. Everyone admitted that it was kind of nice sleeping in for three Sundays in a row and enjoying those mornings puttering in the garden. Nevertheless, in spite of the long list of advantages, the Board was unanimous in its conclusion: never again. It just didn’t feel right to deliberately close the church doors for three weeks. Even if only a handful of people show up, something important happens when the church opens its doors week after week inviting the faithful to gather and observing the command to hold this day as a holy day dedicated to God in worship and prayer.

Why? What is it we do here every week that is so important? We know God is everywhere and that we can pray any place at any time, so why not just shut down on occasion and let people commune with God at their convenience? Why did God include the command to keep one day in particular – the Sabbath day – holy?

Exodus 20 tells us to labor for six days but on the seventh day cease all labor and rest. The concept of the day of rest didn’t actually originate with the Israelites; many cultures in the ancient world designated one day of the week as a day in which no work could be done but there was no sense of reverence underlying the cessation of work. In those ancient days, the day of rest was a day grounded in fear. People stepped softly through the seventh day so that they would not raise the ire of the gods and goddesses of misfortune who ruled that day. While the other six days belonged to the benevolent gods, the seventh belonged to the gods and goddesses of misfortune and anyone daring to work on that day risked bringing that bad luck upon themselves. Farmers might find the scythe suddenly twisting dangerously in their hands. Bread that baked to a golden brown on other days would scorch in the oven on the seventh day. Oxen might stumble and go lame; pots would slip mysteriously from a person’s hands to smash upon the floor. Like our superstition about Friday the thirteenth, the ancient people believed the seventh day was an ill-fated one and so they ceased all activity in order to avoid misfortune.

It was the unique contribution of Judaism to take the pagan day of rest, the accepted cultural practice, and make it a day not to be feared but to be cherished; a day not just of inactivity but of contemplation, a day of gathering together in fellowship and prayer instead of work, a holy day. This day is a day not to cower in hiding from the gods and the goddesses, the Jewish people said, but it is a day to step out and encounter the one God who is Lord of our lives. By using the day of rest as a day to worship; by designating one day as a day wholly devoted to the feeding of our spiritual selves, the Jewish people forged a unique identity: they became known as the people of the Sabbath.

And so, when I return to my original question – why is it so important that we gather for church every Sunday, even if only a few people show up? – we find that the answer is that we are forging an identity. Just as the Jewish people claimed the Sabbath as their identity, early Christians adapted the Sabbath practice to their own identity, moving it to Sunday in recognition of the day of resurrection. On Sundays, we are take time every week to remind ourselves and to declare to the world that no matter what goes on in our lives on Monday through Saturday, we are bond together by our common faith in the God who can create life out of death and who sanctifies our lives and gives us meaning. You may drive a truck for Dunkin’ Donuts on Monday through Saturday but when you come here, you sit in this congregation not as a trucker but as a redeemed child of God. You may teach wiggling little kindergartners on Monday through Friday, but when you come here, you sit in this congregation not as a teacher but as a child of God. You may be the CEO of an aeronautics industry or a toll booth collector or a full time mother or a student or between jobs the rest of your week but when you come here, you sit in this congregation not because of who employs you but because of who loves you and can make you and all things new – you come as a child of God. And to insist that the doors of this church be open every week no matter who comes or how many come is to say to the world, “It is not we who determine the shape of this community but God.”

Last week as the rains poured down on the Midwest and water flooded over homes and villages, a newscaster interviewed on man who had been working on the sand bag line trying to reinforce the levees. The man admitted that, in spite of the dire circumstances that had brought him there that day, he had discovered that he was actually enjoying the work. “There is such a sense of community here. I mean, look at all of these different people, all of these different ages working side-by-side. It’s wonderful." In the secular world, it is sadly often only tragedies that strip away our carefully constructed self-absorbed veneers and allow us to see one another as fellow human beings, but the church is called to re-create that community every week. Here we attest to the sovereignty of God and to our common bond as God’s children. We are a community of the single person and the grandmother with seven grandchildren. We are Hannah Tormey who rearranges her entire family’s schedule so that she can be here to light the altar candles for us. We are Linda and Greg who found Alfred last year on the Internet and we are the Stearns whose family spans 4 generations in the church. We are people who can stroll quickly down the aisle to receive communion and we are Jennifer Lobdell who will wait patiently in her pew until the Elders can bring her the bread and cup. We are young and old, rich and poor, witty and dimwitted, skilled and clutzy, quiet and chatterbox, happy and hurt -- a strange conglomeration of people who have in common this one foundational fact – we are all children of God, made new in by Christ’s love. To keep this day holy is to remind ourselves and the world that everything that matters starts in this fact and must come back again and again and again to this fact: we are all children of God.

A pastor of a small church in Rhode Island told of how he encountered a woman from his village at the store one day. At the time, the church was beset by financial problems and struggling to remain open. The woman had never been in the church, or any church for that matter, but she stopped the pastor in the store and pressed a twenty dollar bill into his hand. "Take this," she said. "I'll probably never go to your services but I've always felt better somehow just knowing your church is there."

The secular world, for all of its neglect and protests stills needs to know that there is a place where people still believe in one another, where people uphold the sacredness of creation, where hope is preached and love for all people is practiced. For some, it is enough to know that such a place exists somewhere out there even if they never touch it or engage it, but for me and I suspect for most of you, we need to stand in that holy place and drink in that holy time. And we need to know that even when we go away from this place to travel with family or vacation with friends, that we can trust that our community will find a way to keep these doors open, that praise will still be sung, prayers will still be rising, and love will still be finding a way back out of those doors and into the hearts of the world.