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Rev. Hannah Lovaglio’s Sermon: May 24, 2026
We Are the Church
I wonder, where would you be this morning, if not here?
Rachel Held Evans, a gifted writer on faith and its expression even in doubt, and my future BFF, wrote one the most memorable reflections on church I’ve read. It’s entitled Sunday Morning, and was originally published in 2012 but republished posthumously in her latest book, Braving the Truth. I want to read the whole reflection to you, if you’ll allow me. Let’s listen:
In the summertime, the light darts through the slits in the blinds all gold and sudden—no gentle fade through purple and blue and gray to get you used to the idea of another day. I wake and listen to Dan breathe next to me. We stopped setting an alarm a long time ago.
Somewhere between 8 and 9, when the songbirds have settled down, I formulate my excuse:
Too far to the Orthodox Church.
Too late for the Episcopal Church.
Too liberal for the Baptist Church.
Too conservative for the Mainline Church.
Too protestant for the Catholic Church.
Too catholic for the Bible Church.
No one asks anymore, but I was raised to be ready with an answer. So the excuses are part of the routine now—like finally kicking off the covers, like my dark roast coffee with cream, like checking email, like morning prayer:
“Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought me in safety to the beginning of this day. Preserve me with your mighty power, that I may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity; and in all I do, direct me to the fulfilling of your purposes; through Jesus Christ my Lord.” -The Book of Common Prayer (Seabury, 1979)
Have I fallen into sin?
Who will bring casseroles when I have a baby?
What I feel these days is not guilt, but something far more nefarious: dull resignation. There are nearly two hundred churches near my small, Southern town, and hundreds more if we make the long drive to Chattanooga, so the fact that I can’t seem to make it through a single service without questioning the existence of God says a lot more about me than it does about church, now doesn’t it?
Do I want a church that fits me, or a me that fits the church? God makes sense to me under the trees, and God makes sense to me in poetry and prayer, and God makes sense to me in Eucharist and Baptism and community and even creeds . . . but not in the offering plate, not in the building campaign, not in the pastor-who-shall-not-be-questioned, not in the politics, not in the assumptions about what a good Christian girl ought to be.
Gentle, quiet.
Am I selfish for wanting more?
And who will bring casseroles when I have a baby?
I don’t know how to explain it—to my family, to my readers, to myself—that, despite the fact that I know these good people would love me unconditionally, I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be the change. I don’t want to try anymore.
It’s 10:30 a.m., and I’m still tired—
still tired from our failed church plant,
still tired from the local gossip,
still tired of being seen as a project and a prayer request because I believe the earth is more than six thousand years old and that Anne Frank didn’t go to hell,
still tired of patriarchy,
still tired of feeling farther away from myself when I am in church than when I am anywhere else in the world.
I don’t know how to explain it—to my family, to my readers, to myself—how, when my gay friends aren’t welcome at the Table and my sisters aren’t welcome at the pulpit, somehow I’m not welcome there either. I feel at once pride and guilt.
But who will bring casseroles when I have a baby?
The sun has now lit the whole house, and I pray regardless of whether the prayer feels right.
And hope that someday the same spirit will carry me back to church.
It’s Pentecost.
We’re celebrating the birth of the church and the gift of the Spirit and the day of delight and wonder and awe and understanding. A celebration of ALL: all people are God’s people. All people are given gifts. All people are granted voice. All people are made to belong.
It’s Pentecost and you and I, we’re here. We’re at church or back at church, depending on the path we’ve taken.
But, if I’m honest, part of me is asking, why?
It’s Sunday morning, and here I am, again, but… why?
Rachel Held Evans is not wrong. Church can be beautiful. And church can be exhausting.
Church can be the place where you first hear that you are beloved by God. And church can also be the place where someone makes you feel small for the very things God delights in.
Church can feed people and baptize babies and organize meal trains and show up in the middle of the night when tragedy strikes.
And church can gossip. And exclude. And wound. And cling too tightly to its own control.
From this day of Pentecost the earliest church formed, with clear purpose: share everything, pray, listen to the Apostles’ teachings, and care for the widows and orphans.
We try to do the same, here.
I hope you’ve heard that clearly in this service, and I hope you will continue to hear it.
But it’s hard.
Because you and I, we’re only human. And loving each other costs something.
Being in relationship with each other means we’ll also disappoint each other eventually. We’ll show up carrying all of the limitations of these bodies and minds and imaginations.
We’ll have sleepless nights wondering if we should say something, then show up and say the wrong thing anyway.
We’ll say things that ought not to be in our vocabulary, like, “Don’t take it personally…” then lay right into the most personal and vulnerable parts of each other’s lives.
We’ll let the polity do the work of exclusion for us, claiming, “Well, that’s just the process, we can’t help it, that’s how we’re structured”; forgetting that the polity is supposed to strengthen the care we provide, not weaken it.
We’ll confuse the slow work of institutional change with faithfulness, as though delay itself was a fruit of the Spirit.
We’ll draw lines in the sand with words like “That’s not done here” and threaten to leave if the line gets crossed.
All the while forgetting it was a boundary crossing spirit that created this whole thing in the first place!
And that nearly every deep, abiding, loving, transformative thing the church has ever done began as something someone insisted shouldn’t be done.
And we’ll grow weary.
And in our exhaustion, we’ll take the hard conversations to the wrong places, the parking lots and text chains and coffee hour corners, places where transformation rarely happens but bitterness and resentment can certainly grow.
I promise, I intended today to be far more celebratory than this laid plain litany of church failures.
But the best laid sermon plans eventually run into reality.
And this week, reality reminded me: being church is hard.
Not because the church is failing, but because the church is made of people.
And people are complicated. The disciples certainly were.
They too argued and misunderstood each other and got defensive and struggled with power and belonging and fear and ego.
The spirit descended upon all gathered, and almost immediately the community started launching false accusations.
None of this hard is new.
And yet.
And yet God trusted the church anyway.
And that might be the real miracle of Pentecost.
Not merely wind and flame and miraculous speech but that God looked at this fragile, frightened, inconsistent group of human beings and said: you will carry the gospel now.
You, sons and daughters, you men and women, you old and young, you free and enslaved.
You will share, everything.
You will feed each other and forgive each other and bury each other and baptize each other and tell the truth to each other. You will care for the vulnerable above the rest and cross boundaries to do so. You will make room at the table, and then more room at the table.
And you will fail sometimes. And the Spirit will keep moving anyway, through imperfect people.
That’s Pentecost.
So yes, maybe there are some things we don’t do here.
But let them be worthy things.
We don’t coerce belonging here.
We don’t confuse tradition with the will of God.
We don’t protect the comfort of some at the expense of another.
We don’t pretend to be perfect.
We don’t let the need to be right supersede the need to be kind.
We don’t hoard for ourselves what was given to be shared.
We don’t let fear get the final word.
We don’t forget that the Spirit has a long history of crossing the lines humans so carefully drew.
Pentecost is what happens when God’s love spills past our human imperfections, past the borders we preferred.
And so today we celebrate.
We celebrate the Spirit still moving. Still calling. Still disrupting. Still comforting. Still gathering people together who otherwise might not belong to one another.
And here we are.
Imperfect people.
Complicated people.
Not always well-intended people.
Tired people.
Hopeful people.
Trying, with the help of the Spirit, to become something closer to the church God dreams us to be. To move the needle closer to that which is good, loving, pleasing.
A people of deeper kindness.
More casseroles.
Wider tables.
Truer welcome.
Greater courage.
Further mission.
Loving each other sincerely enough that the world God so loves might catch glimpses of Christ among us.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Hannah Lovaglio (she/her/hers)
Minister, Central Presbyterian Church