we should sell the building

Sermon Reflection || Year C: Transfiguration Sunday

Welcome back to another sermon reflection. This one didn’t even start out as a sermon, but I realized it had potential after the response from a friend. Let’s talk about it.

Sermon—March 2, 2025 || Year C: Transfiguration Sunday

Sermon Text

Video

Reflection

I intended my delivery of this sermon to be a bit more radical than it actually was. I think it would have been had I not given the disclaimer at the start of the sermon, but due to the presence of several guests, I thought it wasn’t prudent to deliver the sermon as originally intended.

The main point I wanted to get across in the third section of this sermon is that we need to check our priorities. Can the modern church justify having such lavish buildings when so many people around us suffer, go hungry, or have no home? If we do decide to keep our church buildings, how can we maximize this space we spent so much money and time on?

If we put more money and time into our buildings than we do serving others or sharing the gospel, are our priorities all messed up?

Creative Process

If you read the sermon linked above, you’ll see it has very little in common with the message in the video. While I used a few points from the sermon text, the key message of the sermon shifted as the week progressed. Honestly, though, “shifted” sounds like it was a slow change, but it was actually quite sudden.

On Thursday night of last week, I was going for a run and listening to a Rainn Willson’s podcast Soul Boom. Specifically, I was listening to an episode a friend sent me earlier that day. The episode was with Brian McLaren, author of Faith After Doubt and A New Kind of Christian. Brian is special to me because of his friendship and mentorship over the last seven (!!!!) years. In fact, next month I will be serving as a track leader at Discovering Renewal, which is a retreat he leads every year just after Easter.

Here’s the episode. Fair warning: Rainn uses strong language throughout the episode. Be sure to use earbuds, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. They talk about religious trauma, faith and doubt, climate change, how to read the Bible, eschatology, and a few other subjects.

Anyway, while I was listening to the podcast, I was thinking about my sermon for Sunday. I don’t have the text memorized, but I’m familiar enough with the story of the transfiguration to run through it in my head. As Brian and Rainn talked about truth and justice, my mind came to Peter’s statement that they ought to build tabernacles to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.

In Wednesday, one of the teenager’s versions said “shelters” instead of tabernacles.

Tabernacles, shelters…build shelters…build tabernacles…build…

BUILDINGS!

That got me thinking about our church buildings and wondering what the Voice in the cloud would say about them.

Who are we building our buildings to? Are they to Jesus? Are they built to our idea of what Christianity should be? Are they built to our egos?

Then I landed on a question that our congregation has actually asked a few times over the lat four years, but I reworded it as a statement: we should sell our building.

The idea is…

If the money and time we spend on our building outweighs what we do for the “least of these,” we should sell our building.

If we care more about the appearance of our building than the image of God in our lives, we should sell our building.

If we have more conversations about keeping up the building than we do reaching our community with the very good news of Jesus, then we should sell our building.

What would Jesus do?

This isn’t a call to disband the community of faith or anything like that. It’s a call to radically rethink how we spend our time and money as a community of Jesus.

If the church is to stop outsourcing its work to the government and other human organizations, then what would that look like?