This weekend marks the feast day of St. Francis, who died 799 years ago! When he lit his brilliant fire under a sleepy-headed church, he devised a charter for his movement. No ingenious strategy, just a list of Bible verses, pretty much “the stuff Jesus said and did.” And, he began repairing church buildings by hand.

In my sermon on August 24, I spoke of Petula Clark’s great hit from 1965, “I Know a Place.” She sings of “when the work is behind you… where your worries won’t find you… I know a place where we can go… Where the music is fine… All around there are girls and boys… It’s got an atmosphere of its own somehow.”

St. Francis understood. We need a place with its own atmosphere – a place where mercy, hope, God, and belonging are in the air. It’s the very air we breathe in church. It’s not about productivity, or how much you have or don’t have, whether you’re thought of as good-looking or not. A place of belonging – to others, and to God. A place where you’re enough. There’s just no other place like it.

We need a place. Some think not, of course. I encounter people all the time who explain what’s wrong with organized religion. I assure them I know more on this topic than they do! And then I joke that the only thing worse than organized religion is un-organized religion.

I can’t prove we need a place and the company of others to connect with God and transcend the mundane. But I’m pretty sure that without the place, the people, the habits, your spirituality just drifts, gets thin, or shrinks into not much more than your own private pet thoughts about life, the world and yourself. People tell me they are spiritual but not religious. I’m not sure what “religious” even means… but I am sure we need to be stretched, to get out of the spiritual echo chamber, to be challenged and comforted by words from God and sacred music and laboring together for the good of the world in order to be whole, to be hopeful, to discover healing.

I for one am impressed by what Church gets done despite our missteps and just plain dumb stuff we stumble into. If you go to church once, you might like it or get something out of it, or you might not. But go again, and again, and again, over months, years, a lifetime. You become something lovely, somebody you wouldn’t have become without it. And think of what we get done together. Sure, on your own you can donate a little money somewhere or drop off your unwanted clothes at some agency. But together? We build a neighborhood of houses. We mentor and invest in the lives of orphans on another continent and they start businesses and raise their families for success. We rebuild damaged homes after a flood. We provide shelter for homeless families. Can you do that if you’re spiritual but not religious, and without being part of organized religion?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the Church’s task is to make space for God in the world. We have a place with that atmosphere. And we fashion other places outside our place where God’s love is palpable. We even discover that our houses have become like little church spaces for God. And there’s space in my life, my time and my wallet where God is real. I know a place. I know places.