Easter 4
Acts 2:42-47
4/17/05
“A Flub-a-Dub Community”
I’m going to do something
a bit different today. I know
this is “Good Shepherd Sunday” and that the lessons are all about sheep and
shepherds, but I’m going to suggest a alternate image that I think might
better fit the needs of today’s church. I
think from now on we should call this “Flub-a-Dub Sunday” and celebrate our
lives together in community as a “Flub-a-Dub” church.
I realize that most of you
are too young to remember the glory days of early television and the number one
children’s program, “Howdy Doody”, so let me briefly fill you in on what
you missed. Howdy Doody was a
puppet, a boy dressed in a cowboy outfit. He
was a happy little fellow surrounded by a number of both human and puppet
characters. The humans included
Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle the clown.
Clarabelle, by the way, was played by Bob Keeshan who later went on to be
Capt. Kangaroo. The puppets
included, among others, Mr. Bluster, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, and the
Flub-a-dub. There was also a
peanut gallery peopled by young children. Buffalo
Bob acted as host of the show and spent most of his time talking to Howdy,
teaching through his interaction with the various characters valuable lessons
for children. Clarabelle who used squeeze horns to communicate spent most of his
time getting in trouble, particularly with a selzer bottle.
The puppets acted out various story lines.
My favorite character was
the Flub-a-Dub which was a puppet made up of the parts of eight animals.
Flub-a-Dub had the head of a duck, cat’s whiskers, a giraffe’s neck,
a cocker spaniel’s ears, a seal’s flippers (for feet), a raccoon’s tail, a
dachshund’s body and the memory of an elephant.
(I know sounds too weird to work, but it all fit together somehow)
Originally, the Flub-a-Dub’s
diet consisted of the flowers on its hat, but as children identified with the
character and started in on mommy’s flower garden, it’s hat and diet were
changed to spaghetti.
All of these strange
elements that went together to make up the Flub-a-Dub are why I feel we should
adopt it as the new symbol for a congregation at its best.
Even in the early church the members were hardly like sheep and today
members are even less so.
Sheep are rather uniform.
They are, for the most part, white and woolly.
They behave pretty much alike. They
may wander off and get into trouble, but only by accident, never because of
being ornery, rebellious or bull-headed. Sheep
are also easily herded. In fact, in
our Gospel lesson we learn that they follow the shepherd and come at the sound
of his voice. No, I haven’t known
any congregations that are like sheep.
I considered for a while
comparing a congregation to a duck, but that was mostly so I could bring my
AFLAC duck back again.
No, congregations at their
best are most like Flub-a-dubs, and gloriously so.
They are made up of
individuals. Today, as in no time in
the past, we realize that diversity is to be celebrated.
We are told by church development experts that the best way to grow a
church is to discover the individual gifts members have and what they are
passionate about, then build ministry on that.
This makes sense when you think about it.
Don’t we work hardest and best when we work on something we are good at
and enjoy doing?
God designed us to be unique
both as people and as congregations. He
doesn’t intend that we copy the mega-church out west or the mega-wannabe up
the road, nor should we try to be like the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians,
Episcopalians or RC’s. Just as we are most attractive individually when we are
authentically who we are, we also as a church will more likely attract people
when we are authentically our own kind of church.
God also designed us to be
dynamic and changing. That means
that at times we need to reach beyond the old and familiar, think creatively and
try new ideas, and not be afraid to fail. We
are not called to be successful after all, we are called to be faithful and fear
not, God blesses the faithful.
The early church went
through changes even during the writing of the New Testament.
Christians started out worshipping out of doors, then in synagogues, then
in homes and finally in catacombs and graveyards once persecution set in.
Organizationally the church changed too.
It went from a few people gathered around Jesus, to mission outposts
started and governed by the Apostles to an organization with bishops,
pastor/presbyters and deacons. This
just in the church’s first one hundred or so years.
Society and the world around
us seem to be changing ever more rapidly. What
even those who are middle aged needed from a church twenty years ago is totally
different from what many younger adults now need.
To give just two examples:
In the past young people grew up in a certain denomination and nearly
always stayed in that denomination for life.
Today, many people in their twenties and thirties have never belonged to
a church or if they did they rarely have denominational loyalty.
They will go to whatever church meets their needs.
Also, in the past, the
church could count on a solid core of women to do much of the church’s
ministry because most women did not work and had time to get involved in church
activities. Today, most women work
and when they are not working they are involved in running their kids all over
the county to activities they are part of.
The church desperately needs
people who can think outside the box, to develop ministries that will meet the
needs of today’s younger families. It
needs to find ways to bring the church to people who are too busy to come to
church. And it needs to create a
faith community for people who basically have no faith so that they can develop
a relationship with God. In other
words, the church today needs to be ever ready to adapt to changing conditions
and we must learn to seek God’s guidance for the direction we are to go next.
We mainly need to seek His
guidance in how to use the gifts He gives us.
When this works well all the parts of our Flub-a-Dub church interface to
form a joyous, attractive whole. This
is difficult though. There is
security in the tried and true, and God rarely lets us know His will by writing
it on the wall. Panic can set in
when we step into the unknown, but if we do good preliminary work we will have
the necessary trust to carry us through.
By following the basic
pattern of the early church we can come to know God so well that His will will
become clear for us. We receive that
divine guidance as community in much the same way as the
And we need to be
very clear about this. The church
belongs to God and exists to do the ministry He feels is needed.
Just like the Flub-a-Dub that came into being to serve a specific purpose
(give the human star a story line when he took a vacation – he went seeking
this rare animal), so too must the church serve the purpose for which God
intended and by which God equipped it.
God calls all these
wonderful, unique people together to use their varied gifts according to a
divine plan. He sends leaders with
specific gifts at times when those gifts are needed rather than the gifts
leaders of the past had. He joins
them under word and Sacrament so that all parts can work together for good.
And if we let Him lead us, even rather strange Flub-a-Dub churches can do
works that inspire awe and wonder.
So, whatever part of the
Flub-a-Dub you may be, do you part, and may you find joy in this lovely
“Flub-a-Dub Sunday.” Amen.