“Seventy Times Seven: A Celebration and
Commission of Valley Christian Church,” Week One
To this day, when I pull up to a school, I think of church, because as a child I was raised in a Disciples of Christ church plant which met in a series of three different public elementary schools while undergoing the painstaking work of purchasing a plot of land, retaining a team of architects, obtaining financing to build their facility, and then actually doing the construction.
For me, sanctuary still means a school gymnasium, or a cafeteria, or a playground, because that was where I worshiped for so many of my most formative years, where associations are forged in powerful emotional and spiritual bonds. Even though I’ve now been almost twelve years working in established Disciples and Presbyterian congregations with elegant, decades-old sanctuaries, I still catch myself in moments of awe, even disbelief, that this is what church can look like, and be like.
I thought about those childhood memories a lot these past several weeks as I prepared this sermon in particular to begin this new sermon series, because those memories hearken back to when Valley worshiped in two ultimately temporary worship facilities en route to our current Gothic revival sanctuary that turns sixty years old this autumn. I thought a lot about the life of having your spiritual home be temporary, fleeting, rather than the sort of permanent edifice we have right now, and what that must be like. It is easy to think of the universal church as enduring, even eternal, but it can be harder to connect to that longevity when your own spiritual home fits in the bed of a pickup truck.
But that is the genesis of a great many churches—not just here, but all over. We are profoundly fortunate to have the sanctuary we do, even as we have missed it this past year. But the story of Valley predates the story of our sanctuary by a full decade, so it is that decade where we will begin.
This is a new sermon series to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the planting of Valley Christian Church by Birmingham First Christian Church, and especially as a new minister, having been in Birmingham for scarcely eight months, I am especially grateful to follow the words of Valley’s longest-tenured minister, Rev. Dr. Jim Clifford.
In April 1951, seventy to eighty members of Birmingham First were, with the congregation’s blessing in the form of seed money and a sterling silver communion set, sent forth to establish Valley as the latest Disciples of Christ congregation in the Birmingham area. Valley’s charter membership would swell to over one hundred twenty, and the records of the congregation’s founding have been meticulously kept in our archives.
Not long after I began as Valley’s seventh minister, I planted myself in the church library, where a shelf full of our archives are kept, to commence a crash course on Valley’s history—many years of cramming for exams in college and God School prepared me well for such an exercise—and among the usual preserved sample bulletins and original bylaws were photos of the first two ultimately temporary homes for Valley—the American Legion hut in Homewood, and the church building that had previously belonged to Shades Valley Presbyterian Church.
When saw the latter photograph, it made complete sense how the Holy Spirit had brought us together. I had most recently served in a Presbyterian congregation, and Valley has a documented inclination for helping itself to the Presbyterians’ things!
But the need for a home, not just a house but a home, a place to hang the proverbial hat and feel a sense of sanctuary, that is deeply ingrained within us. We heard the opening words of the Gospel of John—the evangelist’s paean to the Logos, the Word, and as John goes on to say in his hymn, even the Word itself “made its home among us.”
So lets talk about that for a minute, why this Word that was there at the beginning, through whom all things came to be created, why the Word needs a home as well.
It helps, I think, to imagine John 1 as another creation story, to complement the creation stories found in Genesis 1 and 2. There are real thematic and theological overlaps, namely that in both Genesis 1 and John 1, the creative force is the divine Word. In Genesis 1, God speaks creation into being, and in John 1, the Word creates of its own volition. In both stories, words are the common creative denominator, without which creation simply cannot, and would not, happen. In both Genesis and in John, the Words not only do the talking, the Words do the creating.
If we imagine John 1 as a creation story, then we should recall how the creation story in Genesis concludes: with God resting on the seventh day. And while there are many places for us to rest after working, the most intuitive for us is, I think, our home. We come home to rest from our labors.
So in Genesis 1, God seeks rest after creating the entirety of existence. In John 1, the Word creates its home among us; it creates a place to rest. In both creation narratives, God moves from creation to home, or to what we would ordinarily do at home: rest. And so it tends to be for churches: we are created or planted, and only later, after we have labored and saved and planned, do we have a permanent home—if ever. Many churches do not even reach that point, especially now. Being able to access that stage of being church—of having a permanent home—cannot be taken for granted.
A number of people did that labor and planning to launch Valley, to see us through our genesis, and as I sat in the church library going through its archives, one name that kept coming up was that of Fred Sington, who had played in the Rose Bowl for Wallace Wade at Alabama, but then played professional baseball before serving in World War II.
After the war, among many his other pursuits he was not only instrumental in planting Valley, he became an advocate for the inclusion of disabled athletes in sport through the Lakeshore Foundation, which is just down 280 from us. When I moved here, I saw the signs on 280 for the Lakeshore Foundation and its Paralympic training facilities, and I thought, wow, that’s so cool that this is there. It turns out that Fred Sington had been an ally of theirs decades ago, before the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar laws to secure a measure of inclusion for people of differing physical abilities.
I was more touched than I expected to be learning that. I’m not certain why, but I think it has to do with the reality that while we churches can talk a good game about being inclusive, of saying that everyone is welcome, we do not actually walk the walk after talking the talk. On the contrary, we’ve all sorts of ways, both subtle and overt, to communicate to someone that they are not so welcome.
And I cannot imagine that this would ever be how God would
want us to steward the sanctuaries and church buildings we claim as God’s
house. If God is our parent, then a home for a parent must be a home for their
children as well. A home for God must be a home for God’s children. I think I heard that in Pastor Jim's reflection on Valley making its space ADA-compliant--that is not something all churches do, or can afford to do. But it is so important to make God's house a house for all God's children.
As we continue through this sermon series, our worship will increasingly focus upon that. For this series was designed to not just be a celebration of Valley, but also a commissioning, or a re-commissioning, of Valley, to its ministries of worshiping God, facilitating spiritual growth, providing for the poor, engaging in interfaith and ecumenical relationships, and dismantling racism by building with great care our relationships with historically Black and Latinx Disciples congregations.
All of these, and much more, in their totality represent the building of the kingdom of God, a kingdom that is, at its core, a home. And the spiritual meaning of that cannot be underestimated.
We create that because we serve a God who was first a creator. When we create something—a new relationship, a spiritual connection, a chance for someone to live housed and clothed and fed—and we see that it is good, we are reflecting our own divine creator creating everything that is seen and unseen out of nothing but divine words, and then proclaiming it to be good. And then, on the seventh day, we come here to our spiritual home to be renewed for another week’s worth of labor.
In the span of seventy years, one week from the next may seem a trifling matter, a grain of sand on the beach or a single thread of an entire tapestry, and yet that is the measure of our lives that we have that has been given to us by God and the story of God’s speaking creation into being. Those seven days represent the totality of creation, and is a big part of why I chose the "seventy times seven" theme for this series--it really is about Valley's totality as well as our week-to-week spirituality. We live each week in tiny reflection of our majestic and creative God, yet it is what also tethers us, connects us to so great a God. We may be so tiny in the sea of time and space, but our God is so great that we are led across the sea, by our God, to a home like Valley, because God so navigated the Disciples of Christ to plant Valley Christian Church in the first place, in the hopes that it might be good.
What we are doing here, what we hope for, pray for, yearn for, is that what we create from our faith God will see and proclaim to be good as well. We should be living our faith, ministering the Gospel, so that God sees Valley Christian Church, in all its history and splendor, and says that we have done good, that we have chosen salvation, that we have chosen right relationship with our God.
In the beginning was the Word. In the present is us. In the future, may the Word be what saves us.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
April 18, 2021