What Does Iona Have to Say to Scarborough?

Back I want you to put yourself back in time to 1938, you are a pastor in Glasgow, and the depression in Scotland is bad. You were "to the manor born," raised in a baronet's family, educated at Winchester and Oxford. At 22, true to your heritage, you were a captain of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a regiment fighting in France. You earned the Military Cross of Great Britain and the Croix de Guerre of France for your heroism. You had come home to Scotland and become a rebel, going to Divinity Hall at Edinburgh, turning away from possible careers in the Army, Diplomacy or Politics. The first parish you take is middle to upper class in Edinburgh, the capital, the place you're used to. After 4 years, you decide to go to a parish in industrial Glasgow, full of unemployment, your own class background making you wildly out of place. For eight years you labor among the laborers of Glasgow, building up the church, becoming more of a socialist-your father was a Conservative Member of Parliament-though never a Marxist. You see Hitler coming amid the poor unemployed masses in Germany, but you're also becoming more of a pacifist. Above all, you are a dynamic man, bored with routine, wanting to do something new as you see your country heading back into another preventable war.



The people you're working with do not have a lot of excess cash. Your country is entering a crisis. Your church is a highly domesticated, established church, taken for granted and ignored. The culture and the church are going into a slow motion train wreck. What do you do?



You decide to start raising money and volunteers to rebuild a monastery on a tiny island off Scotland. No one else gives two hoots about Celtic Christianity or how the Irish monks saved any part of civilization, partly by converting Scotland. St. Columba and his men, descendents of St. Patrick, came ashore on Iona in 563-- but over the next several hundred years, the Vikings practically wiped out the monastic holy islands. Then the Benedictine Abbey fell into ruin in the 1300's, and was totally scorned after the Reformation in the 1500's.When Samuel Johnson and Boswell visited in the late 1700's, the Abbey was not even very picturesque. It continued to be largely forgotten. There is so much mission work to be done in a depressed Scotland-this is the country my mother's parents left in the thirties to come to America. Why would you do such a thing as rebuild the Abbey and its ancient cloister on a depopulated, sheep-farming island?



Its about roots and vision. George MacLeod had them. His beloved church could not prevent the Second World War-and it may be that ours can not stop some kind of attack on Iraq. (We can not even stop our friends in Israel from brutalizing millions of Palestinians and already sowing seeds of hatred for centuries to come.) MacLeod also knew that his beloved church could not turn the economic situation around, however good an example of caring for people it did. Our churches have not done much to help the one in nine Americans in poverty before this apparently double-dip recession, though we've prayed for the one in six children in poverty especially. They have been fat years for us, and now the lean years are upon us.



So how can we think about raising money to re-build the carriage house and actually improve these grounds? How can our generous lead donors hang in place, much less the rest of us step up to the plate? My essay in the Newsletter addresses some of our inner resistance, our Puritanism when it comes to giving. But this is about more than comparing what we spend on our own houses with what we spend on God's house. (How does what we spend on God's house help God's cause in this world?) It is important not to be too grandiose about what we are doing, but yet we need to keep the big Christian vision as our goal.



MacLeod was starting a movement and creating a symbol. What were the key elements?

1. He was linking congregations to a project to restore a spiritual foundation for a whole society.

2. He was looking for international impact. (An abbey on an island to show the church is not an island)-- he wanted to show the enduring place of contemplation in the modern world of action.

3. He was looking to the long range. He was also concerned about the environment, back 60 years ago, when coal smoke still filled Glasgow's air.

4. He was looking to the past, back before the split between Catholics and Protestants. Though under the Church of Scotland's jurisdiction, the Iona Community was to be ecumenical.

5. He was willing to tax his own wealth severely, and at that time he had no children.

6. He knew that the church needed not just to create symbols, but to be a creative symbol of God's love. This is the theological core (One Way Left is a book of his I used for this sermon)



What does all this say to our congregation? MacLeod loved congregations, he believed that the whole congregation had to step up to offices that Jesus Christ held, the three-fold office of prophet, priest and king. (He hated a mealy mouthed, second-rate church.) But his message is that we are not just an individual congregation, we are part of the Christian movement in the world.



Next week, this coming Saturday night, we are having our somewhat belated kick-off for the Capital Campaign. Our campaign has very pragmatic components-better drainage for the property, better parking, better wiring for this building, fixing the flooring and maybe even bringing out more of the power of this room, highlighting the ceiling more, linking that symbolic heaven with this level, and depending less on gold and yellow for color. Our styles of worship have changed in 107 years and this room should reflect that.



But can we justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build new offices not only for our own staff, but for Bridges to Community, and/or other mission agencies? (Not all of this preached: By God's grace, we had enough to buy that little house and subsidize Bridges and all the good work it has done-real global impact out of that little real estate shack. But yes, I want that house for housing, to offset staff salary costs, maybe bring in some money. I differ with parts of the master plan, because I believe we already have a youth center in the Parish House in what will be my old office and Fellowship Hall. I would like us to have an on-site sexton again, cleaning and watching over the church in exchange for housing. In lean years, housing is a great asset.)



Can we justify the cloister idea, which is the third phase of our plan? Here is where we fail one part of the scriptural test. The book of Revelation gives a picture of the heavenly Jerusalem which is as jewel-encrusted as you can imagine, full of color and light. Our cloister does not match that picture in a key way-a cloister, like the heavenly city, and like mandalas of all kinds-is usually square, evenly facing the four winds. But there are gates and walls because the whole heavenly city is a Temple, and it is a place designed to lure people in by its beauty and joyfulness.



There is another part of the scriptural test. John 10 talks about robbers and thieves who would steal the sheep, and certainly you may wonder, sheepishly, are they out simply to shear me? (Modified in preaching: The Gospel's words are hard, though; "robbers and thieves...(who come) to steal and kill and destroy" (John 10:10a). Are we building a sheepfold here? No. But Jesus switches over to give those great words of promise: "I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly." Think of that monastery on Iona-an impoverished island, but a circle of buildings for all the functions of life. A place for spiritual centering, sheltered from storms-or for us, Route 9. If it is the congregation's will here, and you come to name the cloister, please think of Iona and that dynamic balance of church in the world but not of it.)



Now George MacLeod raised money for Iona without going into debt and welcomed volunteer contributions, especially of those who could not contribute financially. In 1986 I met Rev. MacLeod. I had two small children, Caleb 2 and Jake, 3 months. Lord MacLeod was 92, his somewhat younger wife had died two years before and here he was in New York on a fund-raising trip. He was working hard to meet people at a conference at Riverside Church, perhaps knowing it would be his last US trip. We were introduced by mutual friend and I hoped for great wisdom.



Do you know what he said to me? "Can you give some money to the new youth center?" He also had some other words, and he did invite me to Iona, and I did get a book of prayers signed by him, and I did go to Iona 12 years later, after I had become pastor here. At the time I think I gave $150 and I thought it was a lot.



Can we justify building up this physical plant? Will it help us build up the spiritual life, the mystical life of Christ in this congregation and region? Will this place be able to balance contemplation and the world of action? Will a place of peace contribute to the cause of peacemaking? If nothing else, George MacLeod would have us remember, we must always link God's house to God's greater cause.

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