Sermon for August 22, 2010

Brothers and Sisters, I stand before you today to proclaim, I have been to the mountaintop!

Well...technically we only went halfway up the mountain, and then down into the batcave, where we shimmied along a ledge and then squeezed through a crevice named "Fat Man's Misery" and then back outside again and over "Tadpole Rock," before we finally came all the way back down to the Jones/Finley/Espy cookshed for dinner.

But brothers and sisters, I do stand before you today to proclaim, I have been...to campmeeting!

You see, I grew up hearing about campmeeting from my best friend John Wahrmund. Remember the scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest's friend Bubba is describing all the different ways to cook shrimp, and he goes on and on through several scenes and late into the night? Well it was kind of like that every August when John got back from campmeeting: "And then at campmeeting we did this, and at campmeeting we did that, and campmeeting is soooo amazing, and there was this girl at campmeeting, and oh yeah, you would have loved the part of campmeeting when we...Sometimes we wanted to tell John to put a sock in it, but inside we were all secretly jealous of this apparently wonderful, harmonious, and spirit-filled place John went to once a year in the middle of nowhere-ville, Texas. It wasn't just when he came back -- John went to camp meeting for just one week every year, but talked about it that way year-round. And it wasn't just John, either. Chances are, if you've known someone who's been to camp-meeting on a regular basis, you've heard the same story. So what is this place, this gathering of people, this...campmeeting?

According to the centennial history of the Bloys Cowboy Campmeeting published a decade ago, a Presbyterian minister by the name of William Benjamin Bloys was sent to West Texas in 1878 by the home missions board of the Presbyterian church. It didn't take Brother Bloys too long to figure out what most of you already know about West Texas: It's pretty big. And pretty empty. Still. And if your ranch is a three-day trip away from the nearest church, you probably won't be a very regular attender. And if you're a cowboy with little formal education, the polished sermons of seminary-educated minister, looking down at you from an ornately carved pulpit, in a big stained glass box, probably wouldn't have much to say that you could relate to anyhow.

So at the suggestion of a Mrs. John Z. Means, Reverend Bloys organized the first of what would become an annual get-together in a grove of oak, pine, and cedar trees nestled among the Davis mountains--Skillman's Grove, it was called. In the early years, ranchers, their families, and even most of the ranch-hands would make the journey to Skillman's grove in covered wagons and would pitch their tents around campfires. Brother Bloys would preach three services a day standing on an Arbuckle's coffee box underneath a giant oak tree. The people worshiped God in a wide-open sanctuary fashioned by the creator of the universe. And for at least one week out of the long, hard working year -- it was their Sabbath. It was church.

Or was it? Bloys Cowboy Campmeeting was one of several campmeetings that sprung up all across America in the nineteenth century. According to Winthrop Hudson's History of Religion in America, the campmeetings were part of the larger movement known as the Second Great awakening. They were especially associated with the Methodist church, although (like the Bloys campmeeting) the very first campmeeting in the US was started by a Presbyterian minister, James McGready, in June of 1800 in Red River Kentucky. However, according to Hudson, "many Presbyterians were disturbed by the camp-meeting extravagances they had helped foster." Decently and in Order has long been a motto of Presbyterians, and campmeetings didn't look, sound, or seem like...church. They didn't follow the rules. Hudson notes that "within a few years, camp meetings had become almost a Methodist preserve."

I am pleased to report that Reverend Bloys, from the beginning welcomed all Christian traditions to his campmeeting, and that tradition still carries today, with families (and ministers) from Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Disciples of Christ traditions forming the majority of participants. Just for the record, and in the ecumenical spirit of Campmeeting, I have invited some Baptists and some Methodists to join us in worship today!

But I want to go back to this idea of what is or isn't "church." I'm told that the same accusation has from time to time been leveled against the Bloys Cowboy Campmeeting as well: "You don't meet every Sunday? You can't call that church." You don't share a common belief on how a person ought to be baptized? That's not church. You hold your prayer meetings under a tree? No way can that be considered church."

This is nothing new. In fact, it's the same issue at the heart of today's scripture reading: Jesus sees a woman in need, he heals her, and the Pharisees respond? That's not church! We know what church is; we know what's allowed and what isn't allowed.