Two or three weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, I noticed several of you staring straight up here, right into the notch of this arch. I too looked up there, and what we all saw was a sizable piece of paint and plaster hanging there by a mere thread. It looked as though it was poised and ready just in case the Almighty might want to send us a special message in the middle of a service.
A quick calculation told me that if it were to fall, it would probably land on a sleeping choir member and wake her up. No matter how bad something may be, you see, it’ s not all bad!
Now a few days later one of our members scrambled up a long ladder and repaired the spot, and all is well. You can look back over this way now ... it’s all right!
But it set me to thinking – as have many things about this building set me to thinking –what do you do about a broken-down church building? What’s the remedy when plaster starts falling and paint starts chipping? What do you do when electrical circuits fail and air conditioning units don’t operate? How do you handle it when keys will no longer turn in locks and you can’t find the short circuit that prevents the chimes from operating?
Well, the answer to all of that is obvious. What do you do about a broken-down church building? You start a process of renovation, that’s what. You do just as we are doing: you engage an architect, you think through plans for improvement and expansion, you begin to dream a dream of asking the people of the church for as much as a million dollars worth of improvement (and yes, that’s a dream, that’s not a nightmare!). What do you do about a broken-down church building? The answer is very clear: you work toward repairing it, renovating it, and making it useful and beautiful.
But the real question is, "What do you do about a broken-down church?" That’s not precisely the same question as, "What do you do about a broken-down church building?" Do you catch the difference? This in which you sit is not the church; it’s a church building. These among whom you sit – these are the church. The church is the people of God gathered for worship and scattered for mission. It’s not the building.
Now, try my question again. ’’What do you do about a broken-down church?" It’s not as easy as patching plaster or drawing schematics or running new wiring. It’s a far deeper problem.
In the latter part of the sixth century before Christ, the nation of Judah … God’s people … found themselves in unspeakably distressing circumstances. The Babylonian emperor had completely overrun the nation; his armies had routed and slaughtered the army of Judah. The King had been deposed, and the best and the brightest of the people had been carried away into exile into Babylon. And left in the streets of Jerusalem were nothing but a skeleton crew of desolate, lonely, hungry, worn-out people, whose daily lot it was to look at the burned out ruins of the city’s once grand buildings and to pick their way through the rubble of the house which had been called by the name of the Lord: the Temple.
I can tell you that these were a terribly demoralized people. The depth of their sorrow and the anguish of their desperation is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the little Book of Lamentations. Their nation, their city, their Temple, their everything -- it was all broken down.
Listen to the bitterness in their voices:
Lamentations 1: 1-4; 2: 1-2a -- broken down
I
You see, nothing is more disconcerting, nothing is more distressing than discovering that something on which you’ve depended has fallen apart. If some institution or some person you’ve always depended on is taken away, you don’t know what to do. I know of a lady whose husband died, and she was utterly at sea, because she had never learned to drive a car, she had never learned even how to write a check or pay a bill! She was a mess because suddenly someone on whom she had always depended had been snatched away.
Now God’s people in the Sixth Century had lost their nation, their city, their Temple. It was all broken down. How would they get along? How would they survive? Worst of all, they saw that God Himself had done it; God who had built their nation had now broken it down. What do you do with that? What do you do when something you have always depended on breaks down, and you believe that God did it to you!?
You and I know something about what that feels like. We’ve seen some things we thought were dependable begin to erode. It makes us feel uneasy. How do you plan for your financial future when every week you read of banks failing? How do you secure our freedom when time and again our leaders prove to be defective in character? How do you trust the institution of family life when even the most stable of homes seem shaky?
Several years ago a young woman who was a fellow member of our church in Silver Spring knocked on our door. She came in all breathless and said, "I just have to ask you a question. As you know," she said, "several of the marriages in our church have broken up. And now there’s a rumor going around that you and Margaret are going to be the next ones." Before I could get my jaw up off the floor and assure her there was absolutely no truth to that rumor, she went on to explain why she had to know: "Because", she said, "I’ve been counting on you two, and if you can’t make it, I’m not even going to try."
We come to depend on stability, don’t we? But nothing is more depressing, more disturbing than watching the failure of some person or some institution on which you have depended. Nothing would be more disturbing and depressing to your spiritual life, I am sure, than to see your church spiritually defeated and broken down. And if you had come to believe that God Himself had caused its breakdown, you would probably echo the lament: "How lonely ... once full of people! ... No one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate ... the Lord has destroyed without mercy, in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of Judah."
II
But fortunately for us, the writer of the Book of Lamentations has some clues as to how all of this happened. He has an understanding of how the nation came to be a broken-down nation and why the anger of God was spilled out on Judah. He can help us understand what it would mean if our church should break down.
Lamentations teaches us that, indeed, God will break down a nation, God will break down a church, if it loses its compassion. Lamentations, the prophets, all the Scripture agrees: God’s church is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The church is a means to accomplish the purpose of redeeming people. And when it loses that vision, when it loses its compassion, then you can be sure that God will indeed break down that church.
Hear again the lament:
Lamentations 2:11-12, 21a; 3:34-36
Did you hear it? When children are neglected; when people are destroyed in the very streets; when the needs and the rights of people are trampled.. does not the Lord Himself see this? Is not our God angry at the misery and the sin of our city?
You see, all you have to do is to read the cries of the prophets of Judah who were at work before the Babylonians came, and you will see that the sins of the nation were many and that they were sins against the poor, sins against the weak, sins against the needy, and particularly, sins against the young. Read the prophets, hear the Lament, and you will discover that God breaks down a people, God even breaks down a church, when compassion for the weak is gone and concern for the young is bottled up. God will break down a people who lose their vision of compassion.
The old First Baptist Church of Lexington, Kentucky, was founded about 1783. It became one of the Bluegrass region’s most prestigious churches. They spent a million dollars in 1913 on a magnificent building, seating some 1700 worshipers. It seemed to prosper.
But by the 1960’s things looked very different. I visited there one Sunday morning and found about 35 people rattling around among the 1700 seats. A few days later I sat down with the pastor to offer the help I thought my energetic young University of Kentucky students could bring. Our idea was to open a children’s program there on weekday afternoons and serve the children of the community.
The pastor replied, "Well, No. We don’t want any help. We aren’t a mission, we are a church, a proud church. And if you bring in young people, well, they would probably trash the building. And if you really open up the church to the neighborhood, well, they just aren’t our kind of people."
What had I found? I had found a broken-down church. And why had it broken down? Because it had lost its compassion, it had lost its concern for people; and specifically, it had lost its interest in young people. The last I heard those thirty were gathering around one little heater in their parlor; they could no longer even pay to heat their 1700 seats.
Broken down? I believe that in the last analysis it was God Himself who broken down that church.
Let’s be clear this morning. Our God is not committed to maintaining this church just because it’s here. Our God is not going to promise to keep us going through thick and thin, just because we have seventy-some years of history. Our God is not pledged to protect our investment or to keep us comfortable. Our God is committed, in fact, to judging us if we let our compassion dry up. Our God is going to promise to tear us down if we ignore people dying on our streets and children hungry at our gates. And our God is pledged to tear stone from stone and brick from brick if we do not respond to those who are lost!
Great God, I do not want to risk it, do you? I do not want to risk having it said of us, "The Lord in his anger has humiliated his daughter ... he has destroyed without mercy ... he has broken down to the ground ... because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city, their life is poured out ... they are crushed under foot" I do not want to risk a just God deciding to break down this church!
III
What, then, must we do about a broken-down church? Where do we begin to become a faithful people whose compassion is alive and whose church is being built, not broken down?
Again the Book of Lamentations gives us the clue. Again the lament speaks for us:
Lamentations 3:40-42
What do you do about a broken-down church? You repent. You examine your heart and your ways, and you repent. You look for the mixed motives and the hidden agendas, and you come clean before God. You confess both personal sin and corporate sin; you confess the sin of the whole church, and you beg God’s forgiveness. You start with repentance.
Friends, there is nothing this morning that I will say to you that I will not say to myself and to every leader in this church. As I read the Book of Lamentations, I notice that there is a very special word given to the spiritual leaders of ancient Judah. The Lament says that it is the priests and the leaders of the people who have given up their mission and have distorted their calling, and that it is they, it is they, who have the greater blame for the broken-down church.
I speak now therefore to myself, and also to every deacon, to every minister, to every Sunday School teacher, to every leader in this church. We need to examine ourselves. We need to test our ways. We need to determine whether we are doing what we are doing for the church because we want credit, we want recognition, we want the glory … or whether we are doing it because we have compassion.
It’s dangerously easy to lose sight of our motives and to let self get involved. But to do that is to court disaster. To do that is to invite God to decide to break us down.
"Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts as well as our hands to God in heaven. We have transgressed and rebelled, and you have not forgiven.”
The coming weeks and months will test our church as no other period in recent history. We are going to test ourselves and examine our ways before God on at least three different levels. We are going to test whether we care enough about the work of the Kingdom and believe in its future enough to pledge to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in our facilities, believing that that will represent good stewardship and a more useful building.
Second, we are going to test whether we care enough about some of God’s special children that we will find ways to make some or all of our church-owned properties available for ministry. That will likely cost us some money. And that may be the acid test of our motives. Are we here as a church to collect rents or are we here to serve people?
And finally, we are going to test whether we have compassion and zeal and determination enough to get involved in some specific ministries with the children and the youth of our community. Whether that will cost a lot of money I do not know. Exactly what that will look like I cannot say. But I know it will cost time and energy, it will cost effort and emotion. And it will drive us to repent that we could ever have allowed drugs and alcohol and guns and materialism and so many other things to take over our city! We will test and examine our ways and return to the Lord, if we expect to do anything about a broken-down church. We will lift up our hearts as well as our hands to God in heaven and confess our transgressions and our rebellion, if we expect our God to do anything about our broken-down church.
And if we pass those tests, if we get through that examination, then Lamentations has a promise for us. There is good news for us:
Lamentations 3:21-23
Despite all that I’ve said about how God is not committed to this church if we are faithless - despite that, I do know that a faithful God is committed to us as long as we are open to Him. I do know that a God whose mercies are new every morning expects the best from us and stands ready to respond. I do know that a merciful God is ready to take what He has broken down and to build it up again. I do know that, and I do have hope.
What do you do about a broken-down church? You start over with a God whose mercies never come to an end and are new every morning. You look for the loneliest, the weakest, the suffering, and you share His love. And at the end of the day you look at the church He is building and your very heart sings, "Great is thy faithfulness."
