October 24, 2019

Oct.19: “The Blessings of Demands”

Reaction to this idea has been quite positive! You can share ideas for a month-long practice in the comments feature, if you like.

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Luke 6:27-38

“Here’s something I want us to do as a church; I talked about it two weeks ago. We should eat less meat. We know this is right for the environment, for animals, and for our health. So I want you to go without meat for three days out of every week for one month.”

Actually, the preceding has been an experiment. How did what I just said make you feel? Did you find yourself thinking, “Who are you pastor, to tell me what to do? What I eat is my business. You’re just supposed to preach the gospel; and tell us about Jesus.”

Now, I don’t know if you’ve been reading your Bible recently, but at least in today’s reading, Jesus refuses to stay out of our business. And in our first reading from Jeremiah, when God says, “I will write my law on their hearts,” God does not mean: “Now you can just do whatever you think is right.” I can’t preach from this book and not hear demands being made on us, demands to change our life. You see, demands come with our Bible.

So why might you have found yourself reacting, “What I do is my business, preacher!” It’s not because you are a miserable sinner who resists the will of God. If a preacher told me I need to spend three hours a week volunteering in a shelter, I would bristle at the demand too. (Although, come to think of it, I am a miserable sinner who resists the will of God.) I’m sure I would say: “Hey, preacher, it’s my decision how I practice my faith! And I don’t have three hours to spend in a shelter.”

We’re really attached to personal preference—to having my own say, and control over what I do. So much so that we don’t like it when people challenge us to do something different. What if I said: “I want you to reconcile with someone you are estranged from, and I’m going to take a count of how many of you did that next Sunday.” That last part really gets you, doesn’t it? I as a pastor have been very hesitant to issue anything more than vague suggestions: “Why don’t you try reconciling with someone this week!” Or to quote from my Oct. 6 sermon: “Why not eat less meat? And then pay a little more for meat raised …with proper care…?” I guess I’m allowed to make suggestions so long as there is a question mark at the end of it—why not? But how many of you actually tried eating less meat? Or took any information? (Please, no show of hands. It’s your business.) But wouldn’t it be nice to know, for me and for all of us, whether our faith is actually changing us (question mark)?

Now, we have some good reason for reacting against a pastor standing up here and telling us to change our behavior, and saying, “Show me proof that you did it!” We are all aware that somewhere in the dim past priests and preachers guilted and shamed people into changing behavior, and some still do this. Some of you have had to listen to preachers tell you that your loving, sacred marriage is a sin because it’s a same-sex marriage. We have rightly reacted against authoritarian preachers judging us. It seems safe to say: let’s just have sermons that say something positive and inoffensive. I’ve heard the phrase, “warm fuzzies.”

Well, again, warm fuzzies were not what Jesus dispensed. He made serious demands, but with a promise of blessing in the demand: “The measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

But let’s forget about Jesus for a sec. Let me be pragmatic, because we are also “wise as serpents,” so we worry about things like budget deficits. Is it good for the church as an organization if you are spared all challenges and demands inside these doors, and indeed left completely free to your personal preferences (question mark)? “Wherever you are on your own groovy journey, hey, that’s cool. I’m ok, you’re ok.” Does that make for a strong church? The pragmatic social scientists who wrote this book have answered no. In fact, they think the lack of challenge and demand is an important reason why this congregation and many like it have lost members. “The strength of organizations…depends on the extent to which they can mobilize their members’ resources, including their enthusiasm, energy, time, money, and influence, for the attainment of shared objectives [so by demand, they don’t mean: “Nice to see you again. Can you serve on the Trustees?”]. The strongest organizations are able to define goals that take precedence in their members’ lives over any other interests they might have [in other words, personal preferences].” Think about a winning sports team or really successful business; we expect such organizations to drive us toward a goal. But “the weakest organizations…rank low on their members’ lists of personal priorities and can command only small amounts of their time, energy and other resources.” The data they collected shows that Christians in mainline churches (like ours) tend to be “uncomfortable with any religion that makes high demands on its members.” But those high-demand organizations and churches are often the ones that hold on to members and inspire them to do great things.

So I’m no fool, and I could talk at great length about the dubious assumptions and faulty arguments made by these authors. But they have a point. Can you imagine a soccer coach saying, “So you guys practice if you want; just do whatever you’re in the mood to do. I’ll be here if you want any help.” We would fire that coach. But isn’t that how I often sound, as your pastor? “I’m here, if you want help. Take this spiritual self-ventory with you, but of course what you do with it is your business.” Do we believe more in winning ball games than in being a community full of God’s grace and power?

So maybe if we want to be a stronger and healthier church, we should find a way to make demands on each other, like a good coach does, and like Jesus did of his disciples. But, contrary to what [gesture to the book] they say, we can make demands on each other in a way consistent with our congregational values and our rejection of authoritarianism. Take me out of it. I’m not Jesus or Jeremiah. I shouldn’t be the one who commands for God; but we together are the body of Christ—so can we call each other collectively to account as Jesus did in person (question mark)? What if we had a system like this: anyone could propose action goals for us to pursue. We would trust our deacons to discuss and evaluate these proposals (giving them a fresh way to fulfill the duty of “discipline” assigned to them in our Bylaws~). Maybe eat less meat, or read Scripture daily, or avoid biased news (remember that one?), or use less energy, or cut back on social media. Once approved, we would all try to practice that virtue for a month. People able to meet the goal could celebrate anonymously by displaying a token, maybe a candle, right in front of the sanctuary, as an offering to God. This would be a positive and freely-given way to really make ourselves accountable to changing our lives out of shared commitment to our faith. I wouldn’t be the barking coach, which is not me, but the cheerleader.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts on the response card in the bulletin. Is this a way to make our faith more real, to show ourselves and our community that we really stand for something, that we are “playing to win” and we “mean business?” Or is that something only sports teams and businesses can do? Well, I’m only allowed to ask questions, remember? It’s not for me to tell you what to do.

October 22, 2018

“Our Legacy from the 50s Heyday” (Oct. 21–in the “Future of the Church” series)

I often wish that my sermons prompted more discussion, at least discussion that I know about and can participate in. But this sermon generated lots of interesting discussion! What a treat. I heard interesting thoughts about the politics of patriotism, the strengths and weaknesses of the silence of WWII vets, and concerns about attracting youth to the church today–much harder than in the 50s! I’m grateful this hit home and welcome comments posted below (hit “comments”).

I only wish I had a written copy of Bob and Marion Mason’s reflections on who we are as a church and where our future lies. It was inspiring. Bob talked about all the things this church does, its expressions of love for each other and for our community. Marion talked about learning about God way back in Sunday school, a process that never stops, even on into maturity.

Exodus 20:1-6 ; Mark 10:35-45

I want to take the story in Mark about the two sons of Zebedee as a parable of the two generations that continue to shape who we are as a church: take the so-called Silent Generation who came of age in the 1950s and early 60s as the elder James, and the Baby Boomers who came of age in the later 60s and early 70s as the younger John. Those of you in these two generations are the James and John of this church, who, whether you asked for it or not, in fact sit at the right and left hand of Jesus, in charge of much that goes on here. And you both have left a decisive stamp on who we are, our culture. I want to take two weeks to learn more about each of you, starting with our most venerable generation today. I will draw on my historical research about the general shape of these eras, but I’ll rely on those who were here to share your impressions and to judge whether what I say fits you. For I will also be reminding you of Jesus’ challenge: that whoever wants to be great must be a servant.

So this is not a history lesson; this is about understanding ourselves and each other better. I want us all to close our eyes for a minute. Think about everything that has made you who you are. Good, bad and indifferent. You didn’t wake up one day and decide to be Millie, or George, or Katya. So much has influenced who we are, but there’s so much of it that we are hardly even aware of, or that happened before we were born. Let us prayerfully ask God to illuminate our dimly understood roots and to discern what in our roots can continue to feed the new growth that lies ahead of us. For First Corinthians reminds us that “if anyone builds on the foundation which is Christ Jesus with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day [of the Lord] will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done.” Let us pray to God to cling to the gold into the future, and to release the straw to the past.

The 1950s were the heyday of this congregation—and not ours alone. Starting right after the War, people started flocking to churches, but also synagogues, Lion’s Clubs, Masons, and all kinds of civic organizations. It was an era of joiners. In retrospect, the joiner spirit of that era looks admirable for its genuine commitment to civic participation and engagement, inspired by the unifying spirit of the war, no doubt; on the other hand, the joinerism can also look like mere conformism that often went hand-in-hand with excluding those who were different or “dangerous.”

Why did joinerism become hip (or “keen”)? Well, the healthy economy, population growth, and spread of the automobile all led to the growth of the suburbs, and people newly relocated to these new housing zones longed for some connection. (There was a huge boom in suburban church construction.) Also, as birth rates soared, people sought moral education for their children. Those are the more practical reasons for the joiner-ism. But there were also real anxieties of the age in the air: the threat of communism and nuclear war being the most obvious. And there were also a lot of people carrying hidden scars from the war.

I’m not sure that what people heard in the churches during those years grappled very seriously with these big and also very personal issues—the secret fears and wounds. I know that good resources were available. The scholars and theologians of this period, granted, mostly all white men, were really outstanding. Serious and fresh thinkers like the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr showed that the Christian faith offered a unique and powerful perspective on life and even politics; they were read by laity and statesmen alike. These theologians had no time for biblical literalism or for rejecting science—Reinhold Niebuhr actually refused to meet with Billy Graham. But they traced a distinctly Christian path to truth that drew on the best of the Bible and Christian tradition. Their books still make for great reading. Our own United Church of Christ was founded in 1957, and the documents of that founding are likewise impressive works of theology. Indeed, the Niebuhrs became part of the UCC (through the Evangelical and Reformed tradition rather than the Congregationalist line).

We had good ideas from our theologians; and because ecumenical Protestants were more unified than in the past, we formed a large chunk of the American public capable of exerting a shaping force on both personal and public life on behalf of love, justice and peace. Certainly, we could have had more influence than the Religious Right has in recent decades. They have “leveraged” their power to effectively shape society—sadly, in ways I think are often a betrayal of the Gospel. But I don’t think the mainline Protestants in their heyday of the 50s achieved anything like that. Many good things were done, to be sure; but I also see missed potential.

Why did the church of the 50s not make more of a mark? And why did it so quickly lose ground in the decades to come? Well, while the theology of the 50s was profound and richly biblical, the view of historians is that all that did not all filter down to the laity. There were of course many individuals who lived out a deep life of faith. But among the laity, some simply continued in the old time religion, well represented in our hymnals, which centered on personal sin and salvation made possible by Jesus’ paying the penalty for sin. But the faith that stuck with many of the masses flowing into the churches was something kind of vague. In his classic 1958 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Will Herberg noted that even as America seemed to be getting so very religious, it remained a very secular culture. For instance, among the vast majority of Americans who in 1948 said religion is very important to them, 59% percent said their religion had no real effect on their ideas or conduct in business and politics. A big slice of life—business and politics—remained secular, rather than guided by religion.

Herberg sees much of the boom in religious faith to have taken two directions, apart from traditional and earnest faith in God. One was “faith in faith”—it doesn’t matter what you believe, you just have to believe in something. Often that faith is a kind of confidence in yourself and your activities; or a confidence that the future will work out fine, and everything will be ok—but note this confidence is made without reference to God. (I’ve heard that here.) The second direction was a faith in the American Way of Life. Whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, one thing we could all agree on was the fundamental values of being an American.

President Eisenhower was the great spokesman here. “Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.” Now some continue to hold this as a truism; my non-religious friends find it offensive and simply incorrect. But Ike went on: “Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first—and most basic—expression of Americanism.” Now it starts to look like the whole point of believing in God is to support Americanism—the American way of life. Herberg puzzles over this reversal of prorities, in which “Christian and Jewish faiths tend to be prized because they help promote ideals and standards that all Americans are expected to share…” Faith in God is not its own good and goal and delight, it is primarily good for something else: promoting unity, especially national unity. And it follows that the vaguer and less traditional the faith, the better it does the job of unifying.

Recall that the 50s were the golden era of Civic Religion. “God Bless America,” a stirring song, was penned in 1940 by Irving Berlin (who was Jewish). The words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. In 1956, the official US motto was changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “In God we trust.” Now, Communism was a real international threat, even if it wasn’t the lurking domestic peril Joe McCarthy believed. Not without reason, then, did we really want to find unity among all our many religious heritages, and it was so very tempting to enlist God as symbol of unity against the godless communists.

But doing so poses a danger to genuine faith. In the 50s God and Country perhaps became fused in an unhealthy way, and that is part of the continuing legacy of those years. Our faithfulness to God should exist at a different level from our loyalty to nation. Indeed, we all have a variety of worldly allegiances: to ourselves, our family, our neighborhood, our town, to Massachusetts, to our nation, and to NATO and the UN for that matter. Any one of these local or global worldly allegiances can become what Exodus calls an “idol,” something to which we give ultimacy over our allegiance to God. Now, it is not as if serving God has to come at the expense of our other allegiances. The last five commandments work in support of family and society. That is to say, God’s creative power is continually upholding the goodness of all human community and directing that community to justice; that was doubtless true in the 50s for America as also for the Soviet Union (godless though it was). God never stops working as the Creator. So Christians can and should support their society and government, or really, various governments and covenants. But the first two commandments that we read today make clear that nothing comes before God; and it is this point that the 10 Commandments sees as critical to our link and legacy to future generations—“God will show steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love God and keep God’s commandments.” We who are baptized into the name of Jesus Christ as our Lord especially take it upon ourselves to love the Lord and keep God’s holy name above all else.

Let me sum up my take on this era, and then I hope to hear your take. The 20 years, really, from 1945 until 1965 saw a tremendous energy in this church—a strong commitment to attending and participating, countless drives and fundraisers, a burgeoning Sunday School. Community and social ties were truly valued, and God was at the center of it all. We have held on to that spirit here, and if anything we need to rekindle it for our future.

But that center in God was left very fuzzy. Being Protestant was pretty much the same as being a good citizen. After Nazi horrors, we were anxious to include our Jewish neighbors; so we sought a Judeo-Christian America. And after JFK was elected, we got more comfortable including Catholics in an ever-more vague, American spirituality. Somewhere along the way, we lost the sense that coming to know this distinct God of the Bible, as received by our sacraments according to our particular tradition, is the highest joy, a unique joy we can obtain, one that is distinct from fulfilling our other allegiances. And if coming to church is just about being a good American as well as Granbyite, why continue to come here? You can experience and learn about that stuff, better, elsewhere. And especially when joinerism becomes passé, what is to prevent the next generation from saying to itself, “Why do I need to go to church?” And that missing meaty spiritual center is something they will try to fill, maybe from somewhere else.

September 3, 2018

Series on the Lord’s Prayer: Prayer in the Secret Chamber

This is the first in a September series on the Lord’s Prayer. My hope is that this series gives us all a chance to lay our heart before God in prayer. I’ll attach the Sermon Guide which has questions and a spiritual exercise for the week.

Matt 6:6-15; Luke 11:1-4

You may think my title sounds vaguely familiar. It might have something to do with all the Harry Potter I’ve been reading to Silas. Remember Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? But the “secret chamber” I will talk about contains not some horrible, frightening beast; it is an alternative translation of the place where Jesus teaches his disciples to pray: “Go into your room”—could be chamber, the Greek word is vague, and anyway just who back then had a private room all to himself?—“and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” or maybe, “in the secret place.”

So what does Jesus mean, praying in your secret chamber? Is what we are doing this very hour—praying in public, praying in front of each other—a mistake? Should we stay home and pray in our bedrooms? Is Jesus saying we should join the great throngs today who declare, “I’m spiritual but not religious?” Are we who pray together in church being like the hypocrites, who “love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others?”

I don’t think these are the conclusions we should draw. It’s true: a little hypocrisy inevitably comes along with any public, religious community. But I don’t know any really prideful and showy pray-ers among you all. (I hope you are not offended.) That was more of a problem in Jesus’ day, when a religious elite made a show of its piety to justify their authority and set themselves apart from the unlettered, impious masses. It was probably more of a problem in our past too, when anybody who was somebody in our town wanted to be seen in the Church of Christ. Those days are mostly past; and in this regard that’s a good thing.

Moreover, I’m pretty sure that Jesus did not mean we should be spiritual but not religious—that faith, in other words, is a purely private, personal, individual thing that must float free of any institution like a church. He preached the Kingdom of God, right? He gathered twelve disciples to symbolize the new Israel, with its twelve tribes. And most crucially, Jesus teaches them to pray: “Our Father in heaven.” Not “my father.” You can’t say “our” in a purely private prayer. Nor can you say, “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts…” This prayer Jesus taught his disciples, who passed it down to us, was meant to be a liturgical prayer, a prayer said in shared, public worship. We can and should also pray this Lord’s Prayer in private, but whenever we do, we are still invoking the church, and by the prayer’s “ours” and “uses,” we are marking our sisterhood and brotherhood in the body of Christ. For even when you pray in the privacy of your own room, you are not just an I but a we.

So what then is Jesus’ point about praying in your chamber of secrets, your secret chamber? Well, prayer shouldn’t be merely public. It shouldn’t be just for show. Prayer definitely shouldn’t be just “going through the motions.” Like I said, there is a risk of that happening, whenever a religious community gathers. And sometimes, by the way, going through the motions is ok—not if you are using religion to look good and curry favor. That’s hypocrisy; it’s no good and is tantamount to using the Lord’s name in vain. But we are not always ready and able to say the prayers and sing the songs and listen to the sermon with heart-felt sincerity. Sometimes it will all seem like just words. It’s true for me too. (Even my own sermons—isn’ t that a trip? You never considered that I also have to listen to my own sermons.) But I believe, I have faith that these words or worship are good and true, even when my mood and frame of mind happen to not be in it today. I believe there is a truth that abides in the faith we share, even while my own fickle faith may come and go. You know, one of the things I love about corporate worship, what we are doing now, is that yes, I can participate and add my voice, but I can also listen to the words of the Lord’s prayer on your lips. It’s beautiful to hear. (And another good reason that you all shouldn’t sit way in the back, where we can’t hear each other, and I can’t hear you! Not to keep beating a dead horse.) You see, we can carry each other along, when we individually may not be feeling it. And often I start to feel it when I hear the words coming from your lips, and see the faith on your faces. That’s the good use of public prayer.

But just making a show of prayer is altogether different. Just think about how wrong that is. Jesus makes it clear that hypocritical prayer (which is different from going through the motions because you’re not feeling it) is wrong. Notice, though, he doesn’t say “and God’s going to throw them in hell for doing that.” Jesus says of the hypocrites: “They have received their reward.” If all you want out of religion and faith is admiration, status, recognition by others—that’s all you’re going to get. What you will miss is God, being united with God, and missing that seems to be punishment enough for the hypocrites, at least in this passage. In fact, if God is of infinite value, and someone by praying hypocritically deprives himself of God, that person is infinitely in the hole—without any talk of a literal “hell” hole. Because what is so wrong about using prayer just for show is that prayer, among all the religious acts, is the one that has to be absolutely honest. What could be more irrational, more nonsensical, than dishonest prayer? If you have any faith that there is a God, surely you must believe that you can’t fool God. (Like Jesus says, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” In other words, prayer isn’t telling something to God that God doesn’t know; it’s more for us to lay bare what is on our hearts before God.) Imagine saying to yourself, in your secret chamber, “Well, I’ll just fake a prayer, you know, to appease God, to keep God happy.” No. Prayer makes absolutely no sense unless it is completely, brutally honest, and that includes honesty about whatever lack of faith we may be feeling at the moment. One of the greatest prayers in the Bible is: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!” So hypocritical prayer gets you nothing more than what you have right now. But sincere prayer, even just confessing of an empty heart, brings you into the very presence of God.

So while what we do here together in public, corporate worship is absolutely critical—indeed, way more important than you might realize—it can never become a substitute for sincere, heart-felt personal faith. Again, some of us don’t yet or don’t always feel that heartfelt faith, and that’s ok. But heartfelt faith is the goal. I’m not going to let you give up on that goal. And I’m going to spend this month on the Lord’s Prayer, trying to open it up as a vehicle for all of us to rediscover sincere, heartfelt faith.

I’ve long been sensing that we need a sermon series that would, on the personal level, open up our hearts to God and to each other. Not that our hearts are not already open, but in the journey of Christian faith there are always new avenues of growth to explore, and old, close-hearted habits to resist with the help of God. God’s touch opens us up to infinite possibilities of growth and transformation, and also makes us aware of the infinite importance of our faults, even when they look very small in the eyes of the world.

So this series will take the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time—at last I hit upon sermon series in which I won’t have too much Scripture to cover! (I am aware that Jesus’ warning about “heaping up empty phrases as the Gentiles do,” thinking that “they will be heard because of their many words” could be directed at us preachers just as well.) As we consider just one line or phrase of the Lord’s Prayer each week, I’ll keep asking: “What does it mean to pray this from the heart? What would help us do that?”

Your job will be, first, to open your mind to receive new insights and consider new questions about a prayer you’ve recited, maybe 1000s of times. The Lord’s prayer is without a doubt the most familiar passage in Scripture to just about all of us. What I want you to do is be willing to see the familiar as strange, as unknown—at least temporarily. Then it might appear that the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t say what you think it says. For example, look at our readings today: Luke’s version of the prayer is significantly different from Matthew’s; and neither of theme corresponds to the version we use in worship (they both lack “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, etc.”). We’ll see why. So be ready to see the familiar as strange, as new. And second, don’t just listen to me talk about the Lord’s prayer; pray it yourself. You understand a joke by laughing. Explaining a joke gets you nowhere (except maybe, “heh heh”). Understanding a prayer means praying it from the heart, and placing yourself in the presence of God thereby. Every week in the sermon guide I include a devotional, and this month those devotionals will involve praying the Lord’s Prayer. I know you love to recycle, amen! but take that guide home with you. And let this month be an opportunity for deepening your prayer life.

Now, why is this series about opening our hearts to God in prayer needed now? Well, for some churches and some ministers, maybe some evangelical Christians, that’s all there is to church. It’s all about opening your heart to God. Not so for me. I’m probably guilty of speaking too little about seeking God in your heart, just because some Christians talk too much about it. But no, church is about so much more than just having God in your heart, or your heart in God. Church is about being God’s people, God’s kingdom. God has always called not individuals, but a people—first Israel, and then the disciples and followers of Jesus as the new Israel alongside the old. I’ve been preaching for months now about everything we could be doing to become a mightier people of God. I talked after Easter about the ripples of the resurrection, and both in those sermons and with the Adult Confirmation class, I discussed all the many dimensions of who Jesus is for us—because I think we need a richer and more informed sense of why it is we worship this Jesus the Christ. I can provide that for you. But you won’t want it unless your heart is open and hungry for it. Yes, faith should give us hungry hearts, not hearts that are simply peaceful and contented, and happy. Being filled with God is not like feeling stuffed after a four-course meal. The funny thing about God is that the more God fills you the emptier you realize you are, and the stronger your desire grows. The more God loves you, the humbler you become. We need to turn our hearts individually to God so God can make us humble and hungry; and then we collectively, we the church, will be ready to learn together and find a common core of belief together. My July series on the decline of the mainline church pointed in much the same direction. One thing we’ll need to remain vibrant, while so many churches like ours are declining and dying, is a shared, intense sense of purpose that goes back to Jesus. We have to ease up on our own opinions—remember that?—and open ourselves to growing together into a shared faith.

But we will never become a mighty, faithful, vibrant church community unless we individually connect with the same divine source that alone makes us a church. If we aren’t each individually converted to God in our hearts, everything we try to do will be frustrated.

In order to accomplish these great purposes of the church, and before we wrap up our church year with another stewardship campaign and our pledges of financial fidelity and of time and service, let us set aside this month learning once again, anew, to find God in our hearts through prayer, the Lord’s prayer that binds us to God even as it binds us to each other and to every Christian who ever was.

Sermon guide

August 2, 2018

Notes from the July 29 Sermon Discussion

There was a little confusion about this, since we had never done it before. I broke up everyone in the pews into seven groups, and gave each group a pad of paper to record thoughts. Discussion seemed to go well from where I was; I had to break it up after five minutes.

I want to emphasize that this kind of discussion, if we do it again, should be fun and refreshing. It must be nice to hear from each other, rather than having to listen only to me all the time! But it is also part of our sacred duty. We are all ministers, and as a Congregational church, we are all called to listen to God in each other’s voices to lead the church together–not as the “Gentiles” do, lording it over each other, but with everyone serving each other. I hope it felt that way.

From the Notes

The jotted-down notes aren’t all easy to decipher, and they represent more thoughts than conclusions. Here’s some interesting things:

One group talked a lot about politics. Some people really agreed with my July 22 sermon, and my emphasis on keeping our focus on local issues more than national issues, and avoid pushing activism. (This was a Granby group; not sure if Center Church people feel the same way.) A nice reminder from the group: “With any issue, approach it with a Christian perspective.” I’m glad those messages resonated, and that I could be very honest about this issue. I realize I am criticizing my colleagues in ministry, even while I very much respect their work and personally agree with much of the activism going on in the UCC and elsewhere. I do urge the laity to remember the other part of my message (see July 15): we should be willing to trust our leadership and listen to them, including about our political opinions.

Another group suggested that we need to “learn about our Christian life.” And that we “need to do activities with our groups in church.” Is this shepherding groups at Granby? I think that’s a great idea, to move toward a “small group” model.

Another group wondered about how everyone is in a different stage of journey, or people hear messages or sermons differently depending on their background and current state of mind. People also have different needs. We need to respect where people are, but how do you address different mindsets or different needs?

Several groups talked about my call to “loosen our grasp” on our opinions, so that we can hear each other, and hear God afresh. Some thought we stick with “we always have done it this way” and so we fail to think of other options. Perhaps younger people can usher in change. One group talked about “opinions” vs. “values,” and maybe we could hold our values firmly but be more flexible about our opinions.

There were a few great comments on the 8 proposals. One view was that #4 on Jesus Christ and #5 on the Christian Life should be the main emphasis for the church. (I’m not sure if that means we should work hardest on rethinking these areas together, or if those topics should be central to our message, or both.)

One person related well to my proposal #1 to recapture something of the transcendence and even judgement of God. But it was also helpfully noted that in our culture and media, the dominant perception is that the church teaches too much about a judgmental God. I wonder if this perception has any basis, however. Some conservative churches still maintain a strong sense of God judging “sinners” who are mostly “out there,” those people. But the overriding message I get from evangelical churches is, like ours, that God is love. My own view is that judging “those sinners out there” is simply hatred of others. But to imitate and follow Jesus is to take the judgment of sin upon yourself.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts! You can also comment below.

August 2, 2018

Mainline Ills and Cures: Finally! Some (Proposed) Cures (July 29)

“The Spirit of Truth”

Ephesians 3:14-21 ; John 16:12-15

This sermons concludes a month of looking at the decline of mainline churches and denominations and what we can do about it. Your thoughts and comments would be most helpful to me as I continue to work on my research and book. Even (especially!) if you disagree! Just tell me why as best as you can. Use the “comments” link at the bottom.

What you need to understand this sermon is the Sermon Guide, which you can click on here: Sermon guide It gives you my 8 theses for adjusting the church’s message.

We experimented with a five-minute pew discussion in groups after the sermon. It sounded great! Look for my next post discussing the notes from this session. Thanks to all who participated; please continue the conversation using “comments” below!

We’ve spent four weeks looking at the decline of mainline Christian denominations, including our own United Church of Christ, over the last 50 years. We looked at it from three very different angles, each of them biblical. The first angle offered a strong and clear response: we are doing some good ministry and work as a church and should persevere in it, and if anything, we should confront more assertively the outside forces that have been chipping away at us. The second angle was also clear and strong, but exactly the opposite: we have failed to be a faithful church; instead we have become a clubby, conformist church that has little compelling to say to newcomers or our own youth. We should repent our lukewarm commitment and embrace a serious faith that is worth coming to church for.

Now, although there is truth in both of these first two pictures, I tend to think that I had it most right last week. Many of our problems, so I said, originate in the good things about our way of being mainline Christian churches: our intellectual openness, our progressivism, and our pluralism. But because of our weakness in the face of the great challenges to being faithful in our day, these good qualities end up working against us. The response is not to continue just as we are, nor become a different church. Instead, we need to live into being mainline Christians in a revised, more nimble way. I have some fairly straightforward proposals about how to do this, but I’ll save those for the end.

Because the real and total cause of the problems from last week—our problems with authority, with politics, and with asserting our faith—runs very deep. The factors that make us turn a right and good way of being Christian into something kind of lame and, O, namby-pamby, are deeply engrained in us and not easily changed, although I do think we need to try. What I think needs to happen in the long run is fundamental change in the way we think, and the way we pursue truth for ourselves. In fact, I tried to make this whole month-long series into an example of a better way to pursue the truth than our normal way. Let me explain.

When we hear talk about problems and solutions today, we usually either get some TED-talk guru who thinks he has all the answers: he’ll confidently tell you the one cause of the problem and the one solution. That makes it all seem so clear and easy, and we feel like with just a minimum of effort, we can understand something and fix it. Or: we watch the pairs of pundits on one of the many crossfire TV shows who very colorfully lay out what are supposed to be “both sides of the issue.” As if every single matter of importance just happens to have the same number of “sides” as we have political parties. And of course most of us already know which side we are going to agree with. So we’re not really getting a broader perspective on the truth from our “fair and balanced” TV pundits.

Whether it’s the TED-talk guru or the left/right pundits, the appeal is the same: laziness of mind. Our media culture is playing on our natural tendency to settle for the simplest solution. We want something easy to grasp that doesn’t challenge us, but makes us feel like ‘we really get it. Now we know the score.’ Well, for most things, we don’t. The world is increasingly complicated. Truth is rarely easy and simple. But the easiest way for the media to make money is serve up click bate, and we like this intellectual fast food.

Why are we hungry for cheap fare? I think we are frightened by all the diversity out there. No truth seems self-evident and reliable, because there’s always someone or some group who believes something very different. And there’s no authority that everyone recognizes and can agree upon. It makes sense that we hunger for the taste of cheap calories that make us feel satisfied, make us feel like we are grasping something reliable and useful, something that gives us power. So we didn’t exactly choose to have lazy minds. We were seduced into it by those who stand to make money or acquire power. Our fate was sealed once we made truth into a commodity, a consumer good./ This whole mess is typical for the way sin works. No one chooses all by himself to be a sinner. But we are still responsible for it, because we can acknowledge and resist it. (For instance: Remember that chart on media bias? It’s posted in the fellowship hall. You don’t have to watch badly biased news. But we like how it tastes.)

I’ve tried to give you a different way to approach the truth in this series on mainline decline. I didn’t play the TED talk guru, boiling everything down to one cause and one cure. Nor did I pretend that there are two familiar sides: a liberal view and a conservative view. Instead, drawing on many different studies, we looked at three different ways to tell the story of mainline decline; each one was biblical, and each called for a distinct response. And I hope it has been a richer and truer presentation of our problem than the kind of stuff you get on TV or Facebook.

Because of all this information fast food, we have lost patience for profound but difficult truths. That’s a problem, because the great truths of Christianity are profound but difficult. Take the Trinity, or the traditional doctrine of Jesus: fully human, fully divine. If we can’t get these truths in five minutes, we’re done and conclude there mustn’t be anything there worthwhile anyway. We like having our right to an opinion, and things that we can’t easily grasp annoy us.

How do we break this cycle? Actually, this one is pretty simple. For at the center of our life as a church is God, and we all should realize that we can’t grasp God. God is never click bate. We never fully understand God. Belief in God should teach us to be humble about the truth, not so that we give up on the truth, but so that we are always searching and hungry for what is higher and better.

Jesus told his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” It’s not as though his disciples knew nothing. But when God is revealed to us, we are given an identity and a purpose and a way forward, but we are not satisfied or filled. We are filled only with a desire for more and more. The revelation we have received will continue to unfold. So Jesus tells us, You must wait for the Spirit to “guide you into all the truth; …he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

Jesus is telling his disciples to humble their minds, be patient, and count on the Spirit to lead us. But if we are content in our opinions, then we will never learn and grow together, and there will be nothing higher that we are striving toward together. In one poll, 81% of Americans agreed with this statement: “One should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of a church or synagogue.” That’s stunning, and maddening to me. It makes no sense. “One should diagnose oneself before arriving at the doctor’s office; just sign the prescription for me, doc.” If we aren’t here to learn anything together, how then are we supposed to grow together in the faith, to strive toward a common accord?

I can’t see God. I can’t comprehend God. The more I come to understand God, the more I see that God is beyond my understanding. But that doesn’t leave me thinking, ‘No one can know anything about God,’ or ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ The problem isn’t that there is too little to understand about God; it’s that there is too much. So what I rely on and humble myself before are these wonderful repositories of wisdom about God that we share at the center of our worship. Scripture is one. You never understand all of Scripture at once; there’s too much. You have to attend to each little part, sometimes just a single word, knowing that there is much more for another day. Our great creeds are like this; they give us the whole scope of who God is, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, without explaining how all of that goes together. But my current favorite is our liturgical church year, and that’s what the rest of my book is about. Our liturgical year presents us an orderly series of different portraits about who God is and who we are before God: humble witnesses to the incarnate baby, confused disciples called by a commanding Jesus, sorry penitents before the merciful judge, wondering and awestruck witnesses to the resurrection of the crucified, a new family gathered seeking guidance by the Spirit of truth. You never comprehend all that in one glance. You dwell in the fullness of each present season, knowing that there is much more for another day. We can trust ourselves to the inexhaustible riches of our liturgical year, more than we can trust our own opinion about this and that, or anybody else’s for that matter, mine included. Trusting ourselves to the cycle of the church year means having faith. But for many people, “you have to have faith” means trusting only my own experience of God. Well try something bigger. Try trusting in this encompassing wholeness of the liturgical year as a better mediator of God for us.

If you can trust yourself to the rhythms of the liturgical year, and to the ever new interpretation of Scripture that we do together, you can start weaning yourself off of the junk food diet of instant gratification with easy truths. That’s the long-term strategy I offer to all of us for the healing of our mainline problems with truth and authority.

But in the short term there are specific changes we can make that go to the problems we discussed last week, namely, the lack of balance in our mainline identity. I’ve set out eight proposals or thesis statements—far fewer than the famous 95 theses of Luther, and hopefully more manageable. They are a work in progress, so I look forward to your thoughts. I’ve put a brief version of them on your sermon guide. I want to comment on a few in closing.

Starting with the first. I’ve talked about God’s holiness and beyondness (or transcendence) already, both today and on July 15. I have come to think that, even though our affirmation that God is love is the highest truth, even love can lose its revelatory power if it becomes one-dimensional and unbalanced.

Second, I think mainline Christians sometimes don’t see a real reason to gather in public worship of God. We get good works, we get fellowship; because these are also secular goods that anyone can appreciate. /We don’t get why worship is necessary. But orienting ourselves in worship toward God as our sole truth and ultimate reality, while not easy, is absolutely vital to our future as a church.

Third, recovering sin and grace. I maintain that sin is an indispensible biblical word for naming everything wrong with ourselves and the world that calls out for God’s salvation. Now, all of these terms—sin and salvation—have been very poorly employed by many Christians, and that is why we are often uncomfortable with them. You will hear me use them very differently, but I would argue, even more biblically than supposedly old-time religion Christians. We need to recover the drama of sin and salvation, with great sensitivity. But if the world needs no salvation, and we aren’t offering any, then I’m not sure we have a compelling reason to be here.

I mentioned the fourth proposal last week: many of us have trouble articulating how Jesus is divine, but this belief is deeply imbedded in our sacraments, our liturgy, and our hymns. We had an adult confirmation series here that took Jesus the Christ as its theme. The participants were patient and enthusiastic, but I’m not sure if we got very far, and I’m not sure why, but I am committed to keep working on it, because I believe this is critical.

The fifth proposal asks: what is the point of being a Christian? What is the goal? Is it to be a better person, or to get closer to God? Does the goal concern me as an individual, or us as a community? Is the goal found in this life, or in a life beyond? We have differing views about this. Mostly I want to include all of these into a rich, multi-dimensional sense of the purpose of being a Christian, and our liturgical seasons help us bring out the different ideas mentioned.

The sixth proposal may sound dense, but it speaks to our need to serve a role in supporting both our community, our families, and our personal needs, while also creating a distinct way of being God’s own people, set apart from the world. It’s a balance that requires great care.

I preached about politics, number 7, in June, and talked about authority, number 8, today.

I’ve already given you a lot of my ideas. I have more than probably anybody needs—plenty of putative answers to at least the questions that I have posed. But my answers are largely untested and unproven. I believe that we can craft and put into practice a mainline message that is different in some important ways from what we’ve been saying, but still recognizably mainline—true to our best commitments. It’s a message that will be more biblical, but not agreeing with everything in the Bible; more classical or in keeping with the long tradition of the church, but in some ways very modern and new. It draws on the work of many of my colleagues in theology, but for the time being is claimed by no one but me. I want it to be ours, because we need a shared way forward. And that of course means, you will change it. You already have changed me. May the Spirit of truth guide us into all truth, and declare to us what are the things to come.

July 23, 2018

Mainline Ills and Cures: “The Mainline Tragic Hero” (July 22)

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-25 ; Romans 7:4-6 & 8:1-2

After I inadvertently guilted some of you into sitting at the Sermon Discussion Table last week, we actually had a great talk. A member from Center Church responded that God is really important for her, but she’s not comfortable with or adept at talking about her spiritual life. Why is this hard for us, sometimes? We at the table thought this: among other reasons, we don’t want to impose our faith on others; we don’t want to make others feel excluded. That is a good and right impulse, but we can go so far with it that our faith and beliefs end up locked away and silent within us.

That’s a perfect example of the kind of challenge faced by the mainline church that I want to explore today: our strengths and good qualities, when misapplied, can become our weaknesses. What we need to do is stop making our distinct way of being mainline Christians into a rigid law, and instead learn to move with the Spirit. We can be true to our mainline way of being Christians—open, tolerant, inclusive, self-critical—while recognizing that sometimes we may have to say no, we may have to really call out someone who is lost or just wrong, we may have to own the truth that God has given us, and we may well have to preach the Gospel.

This month we are taking a hard look at the decline of the mainline denominations. Each week, we are trying out a different way to tell the story of this decline. The first went like this: we are being faithful and true to the gospel, but we are up against external threats and forces, like evangelicalism and secularism, that are undermining our success. The second story was very different: we have failed to be faithful to God’s claim on our world, opting instead to make the church into a useful service provider that complements our town identity and middle class lifestyle. Our decline is the fruit of that failure. We need to repent.

Two very different stories of decline and how to respond. Both stories follow biblical patterns. And I think that both of them are true, at least partly. Interesting! It suggests is that this decline problem might not have one simple cause nor one simple solution. Maybe getting a handle on the whole thing will require more flexibility and nuance.

That’s where we are going today. We do need to persevere in our strengths while repenting our weaknesses. But let’s nuance the problem: what if the source of our strengths is also the source of our weaknesses? In that case these weaknesses are not exactly a ‘repentable’ failure or sin, but represent a kind of tragic fall. The classic tragic hero—many of us read Oedipus Rex or Antigone in school—is one whose greatness is bound up with her or his failure. And so when the tragic hero fails, we aren’t inclined to self-righteously declare: “Well, that’s what you get!” Instead we feel pity, and we are moved to consider how our story may be similar.

This third story of decline is also biblical, although we don’t often think of tragedy in the Bible. But the story of human creation and failure in Genesis reads in many ways like a tragic tale. There is something so essential noble and god-like about humanity. Adam (Hebrew for “the human,” Adam) was brought to life with God’s own breath or Spirit. Genesis 1 makes a similar point that Adam was created in God’s image. Yet our created task was a humble one: till and keep the garden. And we were given a clear limit: eat any fruit in the garden, but not of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So many interesting questions here for another time. But notice that Adam apparently has no trouble obeying thus far.

Then God gives a further gift: “It is not good for Adam to be alone,” so God made all the animals as our companions, and finally a fellow human being. The tragic mix of gifts is now in place. You see, our relationship with other creatures, like the serpent, and especially each other, is fulfilling and rewarding, but it can easily lead us to listen to these others instead of God. Companionship, along with language and curiosity, are genuinely great but can also be our undoing.

So let’s consider us mainline Christians. What are our specific gifts that make us what we are, but which have so easily turned tragic and caused our decline? I want to highlight three: our intellectual openness, our progressivism, and our pluralism. Each of these is a strength that also easily slides into a weakness.

Our intellectual openness goes back about 200 years ago, when German scholars started realizing that however inspired we consider it to be, the Bible is also a human book. It was written by a great variety of people (including perhaps some women), who were about as different as colonial and contemporary Americans. These very human authors commit inaccuracies and show their limited perspective. It simply won’t do to read the Bible as if it is one long, perfect speech by God. Meanwhile, geology and evolution were upending traditional knowledge about the earth and our own human species. All this forced a choice on Christians: do we accept this scholarship, or reject it? The mainline was born by accepting this scholarship and science; Fundamentalism was born by rejecting it.

Now, we’ve always lampooned the Fundies for burying their head in the sand. But what is really at stake for them is authority. And that’s interesting. They believe that the church needs a source of truth that is absolute and reliable. So the Bible needs to be infallible and inerrant, even if that means rejecting science.

By contrast, we mainliners, at our boldest, have had to conclude that there is no absolute authority, no reliable source of absolute truth. That’s really hard to accept. I think we’ve skirted the issue by half-thinking of the Bible as reliable, and half-relying on our own experience as our personal, infallible guide. It’s scary to confess that just about everything we know is fallible or unsure. The irony is, it’s very biblical. Genesis tells us that God never intended us to possess the knowledge of good and evil, which is precisely where our knowledge tends to claim to be absolute. Moreover, the Bible is full of commandments and warnings against claiming too much knowledge of God. In this crucial regard, the mainline church is in fact more biblical than the Fundamentalists.

But this very biblical and right respect for the limitations on knowledge has easily passed over into a weakness: we have no trust in any authority at all, and we have lost our confidence in the Bible. We so easily come to believe that the only thing we can rely on is private opinion, based on my personal experience with God. We don’t think of God as subject that can be learned from human authority. We have made faith something purely subjective. And it’s hard for something subjective to make much of a claim on anybody or foster a shared way of life.

Our second gift has been our progressive activism. I celebrated this two weeks ago, with some caution. The mainline church traces its progressive roots to the abolition movement, and from there to the social gospel fight against poverty and exploitative labor. Then in the 60s we embraced the expansive Civil Rights movement, fighting against racism, sexism, homophobia, and abuse of the environment. / Now, the world needs our progressive witness, because so many assume the Christian Right is synonymous with Christianity. To give up our progressive witness would be to hand over Christianity to the narrow agenda of the Christian Right.

But the tragedy is that it is not really our progressive witness. The sixties saw a growing divide between the clergy and leadership, who embraced progressive ideas, and the mainline laity, which remains evenly politically divided between liberals and conservatives—actually tilting conservative. And how can we narrow this gap, since we don’t recognize authority, especially on social matters, and we think of religion as a private affair? There’s no obvious way forward. But clergy and leadership have charged ahead anyway, acting as if we speak for a united church when we don’t. So it is that we often abuse the power of the pulpit by sneaking in political messages where we can, which only worsens the crisis of authority. And in this time of ever-greater polarization, mainline churches are more and more identifying themselves by progressive ideology rather than theology, leaving politically conservative members alienated and resentful.

Our third strength is our pluralism. Pluralism is just a fancy but useful way to say that we believe there are many paths to the truth, or even that there are many truths, not one. You see this in the mainline Christian attitude toward other religions. Mainline Protestants are about the most likely group (about tied with Catholics) to believe that other religions can lead to salvation. We are deeply troubled by and want to make up for how the church has historically supported violence against native Americans, colonialized peoples, witches, and others by teaching that they’re going to hell anyway.

So we are the most wary about saying that there is one, universally true path for all. But like our discussion table found, this can become a weakness for us. We don’t know how to live into and confidently celebrate our particular way of knowing God through Christ. Many mainline Christians have a hard time imagining that Jesus could be anything more than one among many wise teachers. And we are quick to draw on spiritual insights from other religions in an eclectic way, a little from here and there, thinking this a victory for tolerance.

The great weakness and problem that results, especially in conjunction with our low view of authority, is that our congregations end up being populated with a bunch of different, eclectic spiritualities, which might work individually but do not cohere well collectively at all. We hardly share in a religion anymore. And worse, we don’t understand our own worship. Unless we go all Unitarian/Universalist, we still use the Bible, and Trinitarian formulas like the Doxology, and the rites of Baptism and Communion—all of which are strongly Christ-centered. And almost none of you knows how to make sense of all that. That’s a catastrophe. No wonder our worship lacks power, and conviction, and importance. But let me be even bolder: I do know how to make sense of all that. That’s one part of my job that I do really well. But I feel like many in the mainline church aren’t really open to instruction on these matters. We just rigidly assume that if you are going to be tolerant and pluralistic, you can’t believe that Jesus the Christ is God.

Well, it sure isn’t easy to believe that; you’re right to that extent. I’ve had to work really hard at it, and I’ve had to take issue with the ideas of many of my colleagues who either fall too much to the traditionalist side, or to the anti-traditionalist side. Don’t get me wrong; our mainline theologians have done so much good and creative work, but it’s a terrible challenge to find the right path for the mainline church today. Maybe I have, but I’ll have to wait to see what they think of my book when I finish it.

These three strengths (but also weaknesses) of the mainline church—intellectual openness, progressivism, and pluralism—can all be summarized into one trait: we are the anti-evangelical church. 500 years ago our ancestors started out as the anti-Catholic church. But for the past 100 years mainline Protestants and evangelicals have been defining themselves in opposition to each other, so that evangelicals today are also the anti-Mainline church. To some extent, this is inevitable. You have to choose: Catholic or Protestant; mainline or evangelical. But the tragedy of it is, that whenever we reject another path, we lose what is good in that path. I wish evangelicals could benefit from our strengths. But I also wish we knew how to really put our faith in Jesus, how to take the Bible seriously, how to confess our faith, and how to rally around public stances like our evangelical cousins.

Paul says in Romans 7 that the law of God is “holy and just and good.” The problem is that people used the Law in a rigid and self-serving way; so it was that the Law was used to build up walls between the Jews and Gentiles. In a similar way our three mainline strengths are good—truly ordained by God. But we have clutched at them in an inflexible, rigid way, and tragically, have used them to build up walls between us and our more traditional kin—both evangelicals and Catholics. So if this week’s story is right, then our tragic ailment is that we mainliners are too rigid in our identity—that’s ironic, considering that we think of ourselves as so open minded and welcoming! What we need to do is be true to the strengths that make us mainline Christians with our own distinctive, much-needed witness to the Christian faith—but we must do so in the “new life of the Spirit,” as Paul puts it, not being slaves to the “old, written code.” We need to be healed of the flat-footed and inflexible thinking by which we turn those strengths into weaknesses. By God’s grace I will attempt to explain how to find that healing next week.

July 23, 2018

Mainline Ills and Cures: “Plumbing the Depths of Our Responsibility” (July 15)

Proverbs 3:1-12 ; Amos 7:7-15

Call to worship: Ephesians 1:3-14

The Letter to the Ephesians, heard in our call to worship, tells us that God has blessed us in Christ. But as we read on, it becomes clear, and has become clearer to me in recent years, that this blessing does not mean we get a pass. (In the same sense as God’s words to Amos, “I will never again pass them by.”) Again from Ephesians: “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God in love.” God’s election of us in Christ doesn’t mean that we get nothing but God’s love and grace, while those sinners out there get all of God’s wrath, if we still even believe in wrath. Instead, our election means that holiness is particularly on us. We receive the fullness of all God has: grace and judgment, love and wrath. That is how it was with God’s messiah, when according to the deepest mystery of faith, Jesus the beloved took upon himself judgment for the sins of the world. And that’s how it has always been with God’s people. Those whom God chooses, beginning with Israel, God also judges. We heard from Proverbs: “Do not despise the Lord’s discipline, or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves (or reprimands) the one he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” Love and judgment or correction, aren’t opposites, they must go together, as every parent knows. Have we forgotten this? Have we repeated so often that God loves us the way a spoiling parent loves us that we have forgotten, God is also our judge?

We don’t like thinking of ourselves as “the elect.” It sounds so exclusive and presumptuous. But if we are elected by God to both judgment and grace, election makes more sense. Yes, God has chosen us and the church is blessed and special, but with that election comes enormous responsibility and humility. When Israel lost that humility and came to think of God as their cheerleader, God sent prophets like Amos to drop a plumb line in the midst of God’s people, and make them see just how crooked their walls are. And perhaps it took a devastation for Israel to again learn humility. We seem to be on the way to that. Let us not wait until our sanctuaries are laid waste. Let us open ourselves to God’s judgment today.

We are considering this month various ways of telling the story of the decline of mainline churches across the country. Last week the story went like this: we have been in many ways a faithful and true church, but the world has lost interest in us; or maybe we are even under attack by conservative evangelicals, or by forces of secularism that no longer have any respect for what we do. And so we have lost members and influence. If this is the story, then what we should do in response is be true to the good work we are doing, challenge our detractors as best as we are able, and trust in God whether we succeed or fail.

By opening ourselves to God’s judgment this week, the story is going to look very different. As with last week, we have to try it on and see if it fits. As I mentioned last week, the story doesn’t begin with a slow decline starting in the 1960s, but with a remarkable boom in the mainline immediately following World War II. Some of you remember that time, and it is easy to become sentimental about this rather brief golden age of the mainline church. I’ve heard stories about the packed balconies and crowded Sunday school rooms. Some people are naturally inclined to think, if only we could go back to that.

But was the church really so faithful back then? Why did so many people suddenly want to come to church? How much of it was just that church was the thing to do? Wasn’t it what young families, and especially white and middle class young families did if they wanted to look respectable and feel connected? Historians tell us it was a time when Americans wanted to feel good after a terrible War. A booming economy with all kinds of new consumer goods made them feel good, and so did the church. Remember Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking? It was also an age of paranoia about communism; the church could stand for everything upright and American. It was an age obsessed with fitting in, and the church not only became a way to fit in—the church itself did its best to fit in to prosperous but paranoid middle America, rather than asking tough questions about what we should be doing with our newfound wealth and power.

Now some wonderful Christians came out of our churches in that period, but how seriously did the church of the 40s and 50s take advantage of its opportunity to really form people into a faithfulness to God? How much did we really try to reshape American culture? How much did we trust the Lord with all our heart, and not rely on our own insight—on whatever counted for wisdom in small town, middle class, 1950s America? I’ve heard stories about parents just dropping kids off for Sunday school, and people in the church making people feel unwelcomed for being divorced, or having racially mixed families, or whatever. How much did the church do to address the serious racism in our community back then? (Not to mention now.) Only those of you who were there can rightly judge, how blameless we were before God. My point is that we don’t need to hold up our pre-decline days as the model for the church we should hope and strive to be.

We had a modest impact back then, and we had the wealth and influence to be a major impact—at least as big an impact as the evangelical churches are making today. But we became a conformist church. And when the kids of the 50s grew up and, for better or worse, found conformity stifling, they ditched the church. Now there’s a lot of debate about what caused the upheaval of the 60s. But dare we imagine God seeing our failures precisely in our time of success and plenty and saying to us, Behold I am taking away your full balconies and your scampering hordes of children and will bring you desolation, for you have made my holy temple into a place of pettiness, gossip, and display.

I know it takes a lot of nerve for me to say all this, and I’ll be accused of being negative. Scripture does talk like this. It’s not how I talked last week, when I talked about persevering in our strengths, nor how I’ll talk next week. But we should be able to accept our own responsibility for the failures of the church, and to receive that with all the gravity that comes with failing before God. We clergy and denominational leaders bear our share of the responsibility; I’ll be talking about us more next week.

But much of this responsibility falls on the laity. I’m not pointing the finger of blame at you individually, whether you were alive in the 50s or not. The problem is the culture and situation of the mainline church, all across the country, and we are all the inheritors of that culture. None of us created it. But we are all still affected by it, and so we need to take responsibility for it. That culture by and large wanted a church that would complement our middle class lifestyle. It wanted a church that would provide the services we were in the market for: values education for our children, comfort and consolation for those parts of life that weren’t in our control, and a place for socializing that was more polite than honest, more pleasant that demanding. In supporting this culture, did the church trust in the Lord with all her heart, not relying on her own insight? Did she despise the Lord’s discipline? Those of you who were around then can provide your perspective, and I would love to hear it, but we all must answer for the continuing legacy that was formed in those years.

That legacy has left us with a problem. I can’t determine if it came from the 50s, or 60s, or 70s, or if it goes all the way back to the 4^th century when Emperor Constantine made Christianity into the “official religion.” But today we have this problem: we don’t view religion as very important. When asked in 2015, somewhere between just 40 and 50 percent of Mainline Christians said that their religion was “very important.” By contrast, 74% of Southern Baptists and over 80% of Pentecostals replied, “Very important.” Guess which mainline denomination came in at the bottom? Only about 39% of members of the United Church of Christ said religion is “very important.” That represents nothing short of a failure of our church to take God seriously. And that is a grave failure whether we are growing or shrinking.

But many theories suggest that the lack of a powerful faith commitment in the mainline churches is a significant cause of our decline. Why join and, just as important, actively participate in an organization that does not seem to take itself very seriously, that makes no claim on you? Our churches are “lukewarm” places, as John Cobb puts it in his book on mainline decline, with little room for reflection and controversy. Yes, we are welcoming, wherever you are on life’s journey. But why commit your heart to a group that isn’t going to take you beyond where you already are? This appears to be a question that especially young people in their 20s and 30s are asking, because they are dropping out of mainline churches in rates never seen before.

And I think it’s no coincidence that the conservative evangelical churches, despite all their problems and hang-ups, have either lost fewer members or have even grown while we were shrinking. When people go to evangelical churches, they know that something is at stake, that church really matters, that our relationship with God is of utmost importance. I don’t want to and could not be an evangelical. But imagine if we had the gravitas of those churches, without all their parochialism and narrowness? Don’t you think we’d be outgrowing them? Imagine if like evangelicals, we liked talking about our faith, reading books about it, holding discussion groups. I shouldn’t have to preside at an empty sermon discussion table, like I did last week. I’m not going to try to guilt you into going. That won’t work. You can’t fake an interest if it isn’t there.

Please understand, once again, that I’m not trying to shame you as individuals; I’m saying to us as a church, this is our culture. We are all stuck in it, whether it suits us or not. What’s wrong with mainline culture that it can’t generate that passion and commitment that makes people really want to be shaped, heart, soul, and mind, by their faith? How are we going to change it? I think that’s crucial, not only for stemming our decline, but making us a real people of God who do not rely on our own insights but allow the Lord to make our paths straight.

This is the week for you to take responsibility for our mainline culture. What we can do about it is repent. Each of us can this day renounce our lukewarm commitment, our tendency to see the church as my service provider, rather than seeing my service to God as the only thing that ultimately matters. We can renounce that and commit ourselves to a renewed faith in God, by which we shall be remade in the image of Christ.

But I think it would be naïve and a little heartless to leave it at that. You don’t usually change a whole culture by a call to repent. And not just because the flesh is weak. It’s because that there are important reasons why that culture got to be that way in the first place. So without taking anything away from the call to repent, which is completely legitimate and necessary, I want us in conclusion to have some compassion on ourselves and on each other. Singular devotion to God is hard, harder than ever. There have always been distractions away from true worship, always been other gods. Today our gods may take the form of hitherto unknown wealth and military power, mind-numbing technology that continually outpaces us, or the glitz and glamor of expertly manipulated media that is always persuading me to just look out for me and mine. All of this distracts us from God and love of neighbor. But God himself comes to us with so many question marks attached. We have so many questions about God that arise from science, or from our awareness of all the other religions in our world, many of them just down the street from us. And so many people just don’t seem to need God in any real way; why should we? Living with these questions and feeling nonetheless confident about our belief in God is really hard, and it probably weighs on us more than we care to admit.

It is particularly hard to be faithful to God in the good and right way that we mainline Christians try to be faithful: we don’t belittle other religions, we celebrate and respect them. We don’t think our way alone is right. We are very careful about judging others or enforcing rules or wielding authority over others. We recognize that ambiguity touches all things, including religion; it’s not all black and white, rather, there’s so much gray. That is the right and honest way to be faithful, in our day and age—so I believe. But it leaves us wondering exactly what is it that we are faithful to and what difference it makes.

We have indeed failed in many ways to be the church God would have us to be, and we must take responsibility for that. But we are up against challenges that we did not invent, and trials that we did not ask for. Next week we will shift terrain again, finding ourselves somewhere between last week’s holy pride and this week’s call to repent. We will consider how the very things that make mainline Christianity what it is, things that are in one sense our strengths, also give rise to our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Our response to this challenge can’t be just to persevere in our good works, nor to repent of who we are. Instead, we might need to learn balance and nuance, so that we can sustainably live into the richness that is ours by virtue of being mainline Christians. May God preserve us. Amen.

July 11, 2018

“Mainline Ills and Cures: Hometown Anti-Heroes” (July 8)

Ezekiel 2:1-5; Mark 6:1-13

I’ve been reading about the recent church history that some of you have lived through: how the mainline churches, including churches like Granby and Center, grew exponentially in the late 40s and 1950s, but then began shrinking in the mid 1960s. I’ve heard some stories about the full balconies and crowded Sunday school classes of yore. I’d love to hear more of your first-hand accounts of this dramatic 70 years we’ve come through.

I can tell you about the big picture. The UCC went from 2.2 million members in 1960 to 1.1 million in 2010—cut in half. The only worse showing is in my denomination, The Disciples of Christ: from 1.8 million in 1960 to 700,000 in 2010—a loss of more than half. All together, mainline churches in 1958 accounted for over 50% of the population; by 2008, we accounted for less than 13%. By comparison, the conservative Southern Baptists just about doubled from 1960 to 2010, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of God went from 500,000 members to almost three million.

Now, these numbers can be read more than way. Some scholars have rightly pointed out that the shrinkage of the mainline is largely due to our lower birth rate. Mainline Christians don’t have big families. It is true in this room. You will find bigger families in some more conservative churches. One scholar suggested that pastors could encourage their congregations to do something about this. I say, Not me! You probably think I intrude enough on your personal decisions already. How about I not weigh in on how many children you should have. Besides, we’d have to do Abraham and Sarah one better to increase the fertility rate in this church.

Now, one scholar I know notes that the big mid-century growth was an aberration; mainline denominations have simply returned to their ‘natural’ membership levels before the freak boom in mid 20^th century. These scholars are trying to tell us not to panic, that we should be ok if we stay the course.

Well, that’s our theme for today. We’re going to try it on for size and see if it fits. The basic problem is this: we have lost members more members than we have gained. Is it because we are doing something wrong? Should we be doing something different, something really different? Some people say, no. We are being a good and faithful church. We should just keep being that, and if anything, just work harder to get our message out. Now let me be honest: I don’t completely agree. I think we’ve been doing some things wrong. And we’ll look at that next week. But this week I want to celebrate what we are doing right and urge us to continue in those things. It doesn’t have to be either one or the other.

So suppose we are doing things right, we are being faithful to God, we are being the church God wants us to be. Why then are we in decline? Well, God’s faithful people don’t always prosper. The problem must be out there. God sent Ezekiel to prophesy to a rebellious people. Maybe that’s our boat. Something about our culture is no longer as hospitable to our church as it used to be.

And what might that be? Here again people have different suggestions. The most optimistic say that the church has been so successful at changing our society’s values that our work is no longer needed. 100 years ago Congregationalists were fighting to end child labor and for fair wages and working conditions. We led the way to ordaining women; we joined the civil rights marchers and fought against racism; we welcomed gays and lesbians as equal members in our community. At its recent meeting the Massachusetts Conference declared itself “immigrant friendly.” These were and are cutting edge values that our forebearers, including some of you, advocated for based on what you found in the Bible. But partly because of our witness, these values have been embraced by many outside the church. They have become progressive values for secular folks. Many no longer need faith to stand by our values of justice and inclusion; they find the Bible and church practices to be at best inconvenient sources for articulating these values, especially since other Christians embrace the opposite values. So looking at the last 100 years, some people say that the problem is that we were successful, so much so that our work is mostly done. There’s little for us to do now but add our voice to those seeking justice and inclusion. (Full disclosure: This is not my view, at least not exactly.)

So at least some in our secular culture are friendly to our values. Those mainline leaders who are looking for a fight will say our enemies are especially those whose Christian values are in many ways the opposite of ours, those opposing gay rights, equal opportunity for women, and believing in a manifest destiny of the United States over all others. And Christians with these values come from those churches that have been gaining hugely in members and political influence, at our expense. Maybe we should be standing up to the conservative evangelical churches that have been poaching our members and stealing influence. (Actually not as many mainliners have moved into evangelical churches as most people think.)

It is indeed disturbing to me and should be troubling to us all that Christians espousing the same faith have come to such strongly divided conclusions about social values. But this problem is not just out there, with the conservative evangelical churches. The problem is also right in here. A fair 30% of mainline Christians are evangelical in their faith values, theology, view of the Bible, and often in their social values. So if mainline leaders celebrate progressive social values, we will also divide our own house further, and alienate a significant proportion of our own members in our denomination, if not our own congregations. Still, we should do something about this serious division of values within our own house.

We’ve often looked down on evangelicals. We tended to be more friendly toward the secular segment of our culture. Some mainline preachers and leaders are quick to find a friendly and sympathetic message in the latest movies, social movements, or the newest pop songs, and enlist these as allies in conveying our Christian message. (In the case of Granby, more like some really old pop songs. But that’s more to my taste, to be honest.) For a long time, mainline Protestantism was deeply entwined with mainstream American culture, and since our message is one of being inclusive, it is understandable that we have been slow to be critical of the secular culture that is part of mainstream America. We became used to being the pillar of our home town, thinking ourselves to be respected and valued. So we have expected to be warmly received in our hometown.

But other mainline leaders are beginning to take a harder look at secularism. The stories in those movies and pop songs, even at their best, are often opposed to the values of Christian community. And at their worst—good heavens, pop culture is a morass of cruelty, egotism, greed, and often sexism and racism to boot. Have you noticed that the plot line of most movies leads to an inevitably violent resolution, very different from our Gospel. So some mainliners are concluding that the problem “out there” that is working against us is secular culture. People are being led away from the church by secular values and enticements that any good Christian would have to conclude are ultimately bankrupt. That home town environment we thought would respect us instead takes offense at us, like Jesus’ hometown folk. We, for instance, have for some time been running up against the intrusiveness of sports activities for our youth, which now often take place right on Sunday morning. Now, playing sports is fun and mostly healthy (I won’t comment on watching it on TV); but do we want our cultural values to be dominated by sports, where what our youth (and our adults) is learning is that competition is the sole, ultimate value? How does this square with a Gospel of love, of grace, of cooperation and mutual support? Between sports and gearing up for a career, our children are getting one main value: success. Is that going to be enough? Can you build a loving family or a caring community based on the ultimate value of success?

So some mainline leaders are starting to declare that we need to stop being the chaplain and cheerleader for our secular culture and start calling out its superficiality and vanity. If we are already treated like rejected prophets, as was Jesus, then we might as well start acting like prophets; at least the world will know that there has been a prophet among them. And we might find we actually begin to grow again if we do this, because we can offer something that secular culture cannot: a community of caring, humility, responsibility, and love (and not just the romantic love of our pop songs and movies); and an orientation to something truly beyond, truly transcendent: God who is never just a means to some pragmatic goal but who is the ultimate goal and purpose of everything. The myth makers and message crafters of secular culture ought to be terrified of us, because we could upend the whole apple cart. Instead they find us curious and laughable. (The movie maker Paul Schraeder recently said that church is good for providing “organized boredom.” You know, I almost invited some church members to go see his current movie, First Reformed. Then Jess and I saw it. Please don’t.)

On this score I am in considerable agreement with other mainline leaders. I think we should be faithful and true to the community we are, to the Gospel that animates our common life, and we should call out and oppose secular culture more than we do. People need to realize that there is a beautiful, compelling alternative to the crap that fills the airwaves and the internet. But I don’t want us to get too worked up too on this one. Secular music and messages can be insightful and moving portrayals of natural, creaturely life. We the church have received the Gospel of God’s holy redemption, but we still remain natural creatures, full of ordinary longings, foibles, and even great sin. Secular culture should be no stranger to us. We should not think ourselves completely above it, or too pure and holy to indulge in it. Jesus didn’t keep his apostles hidden away, he sent them out—out with a message to be sure. But a message of service rather than arrogance and domination. I don’t think we should see secularism as the enemy; and of course there is good and bad in secular culture, and we have much to learn from the good. Still, the church needs to be there to show people that there is more to life than success, competition, sex, violence, and reveling in human foibles. And I believe some people will respond enthusiastically to having an alternative to all that. //

So where are we? In some ways, we as a church are right now, and have continued to be, a good and faithful servant to our Lord. We were sent out, and we cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. We should take holy pride in our good work and celebrate it as the work of God in us, bringing glory to the name of God.

One shape of that work has been advocacy for justice and compassion. There has been some good work done at the congregational level in ministering to those in need in our community, and being a voice of integrity for justice and compassion and inclusion. This voice and work is badly needed in the face of secular messages, and some religious messages, that often precisely oppose or at least distract people away from justice and compassion and inclusion. But our voice and work has at least been perceived in a partisan political way, particularly when it comes to the kind of advocacy done by our denomination. Many think mainline denominations have simply jumped on the progressive bandwagon. It could be that we are playing into the polarization of our culture.

Aside from advocating for progressive social values, the church has also been a good and faithful servant when it comes to conveying God’s grace and love to people, and endowing their lives with a sense of ultimate purpose and the earnest joy of life in community. This divine service is also desperately needed in the face of some secular values and forces that would dissolve us into self-seeking individuals in search of merely immediate, private goods. We must keep nurturing spiritual life in community. Indeed, we need to step up our game, because we seem to be losing out to secular living (which again, isn’t all bad) among our townsfolk and among our own youth.

There is some reason for optimism in the face of mainline decline: we have done good and faithful work and should persevere against the outside forces that stand in our way. But can we really claim that our losses, as a denomination and as individual congregations, are the result of our faithfulness to God? Are we, the church, simply the victims of outside forces or unfavorable conditions? Place yourself before God’s throne of judgment, where no truth shall remain hidden. Can we stand before God and claim that we have been righteous servants? If so, then we should persevere in the path we have followed, resting content that whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. And we will have nothing to fear or to regret. But if we cannot thus stand before God’s all-searching and righteous eyes full of holy pride, then we better start confessing.

July 1, 2018

Mainline Ills and Cures (July 1): “Healing by Touch”

This was not a wowzer of a sermon, but it served to introduce my July series, which explores the causes of mainline church decline and what we can do about it. It was great to have the Center Church folks back with us!

Lamentations 3:22-33; Mark 5:21-43

I want to spend the next five Sundays talking about the decline of the mainline church—how’s that for a summer pick-me-up!—and what we can do about it. I’ve been researching this topic for many months now. In general, mainline churches, including the United Church of Christ, have seen a steady decline in membership since the mid-1960s. Our two congregations have not been affected as much as some, but we have seen our share of decline. There is no single cause, nor silver-bullet solution to this slowly dawning crisis, but I believe we can learn something from looking at the bigger picture. And it’s always helpful to know that our problems are not unique to us.

Mainline churches, sometimes called the oldline churches or the historic Protestant churches, are those denominations that go back to the early days of this country: Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ (my denomination), Reformed Church of America, American Baptist (but not Southern Baptists), and of course, Congregationalist churches who have become part of the UCC. These denominations tend to enjoy high prestige, in at least a stuffy way; most US Presidents have come from mainline churches. More importantly, they are ecumenical, meaning they believe in cooperation and mutual recognition even when we have differing traditions. Mainline denominations ordain women, and now most ordain gays and lesbians, as part of their commitment to humanistic justice. They don’t teach inerrancy of the Bible, but believe the Bible is the work of inspired human beings, rather than a miraculous and transparently accurate revelation of God. In all of this, they (that is, we) are quite distinct from the evangelical, Pentecostal, and conservative Protestant neighbors (let’s stick with white Protestants for the time being). You can very readily split the whole mess of Protestant churches, including those in Granby and South Hadley, down the middle, with the various conservative Protestant churches, despite their differences, on one side, and the mainline denominations, while far from all the same, falling on the other side. And the mainline side of that divide all shares one other trait: we are shrinking.

These are not just statistics. We see the effects of it all around us. Congregational churches, some of them very storied, have closed: Pelham, South Hadley Falls, North Amherst. Others are barely hanging on. Also the other institutions that serve the mainline churches are ailing too: publishing houses, denominational ministries, and seminaries: Andover Newton Seminary, which has educated so many UCC pastors in our area and is the oldest graduate theology school in the country, has sold its campus and merged, in reduced form, with Yale Divinity School. These are major changes, and there’s little reason to think they are over. No responsible member of a mainline denomination can ignore this issue. Each one of us is being affected by it on a variety of levels.

But then we shouldn’t rush to conclusions, either. I’ll spend the next three Sundays exploring three different ways, actually three difference biblical perspectives, to see the causes of the decline and respond to it. Now, old-school Protestants have pretended that every problem with the world comes down to personal sins, and so forgiveness by Jesus’ atoning death is the answer to every problem. Scripture, however, sees the world with much more nuance and complexity than we think. In our reading from Mark, for instance, Jesus heals two women. There was nothing about them being sinners. They simply needed to be restored to healthy, created life, and only Jesus had the power to do that. So we’ll look at our current crisis through three different lenses, only one of which will consider our sins as a church.

And even when we consider our sins and failures, we do this full of confidence in God’s steadfast love. Our reading in Lamentations pauses amid a long litany of self-recrimination and blame (it’s kind of a downer) to recall God’s love and goodness. There’s good reason it is called “Lamentations.” Israel had been defeated and sent into exile. The temple was destroyed and the king taken away in chains. All seemed lost. But we read, God’s mercies “never come to an end.” “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul. “Therefore I will hope in him.” If this writer can hope, than surely we can too.

Grounded in hope in God’s goodness, we, like the author, can “wait quietly” for salvation, and “sit alone in silence, when the Lord has imposed it.” As our denomination and others face decline and are in peril, we should not rush into apportioning blame or jump at what may sound like an attractive solution. We do well instead to quietly ponder our plight, full of the awareness that God is our salvation. Maybe God has even imposed this decline on us, in some mysterious way—not “willingly afflicting anyone,” as the passage puts it, whatever that means. We definitely should not fill the void of our discomfort with cheap talk about cultural trends, or church policies, or marketing techniques, without turning to God in the midst of all our troubles and relying on God as our way out of them. No, because we place our trust and hope in God, we can patiently and prayerfully consider the decline of the mainline and receive it with the humility that will bring us clarity of mind, allowing us to consider our own faults and making us ready for dramatic change in response.

We are two churches. We are also the Church. A turnaround from our long-term decline that is indeed serious and potentially deadly will not involve tinkering or just putting a little spin on our message. It will require a deep change in our relation with God, perhaps in our thinking about God and what the church is all about. Let’s sit in silence for a month and really consider why we have shrunk and how God, working through us, is going to deliver us from this plight. Let’s own at least that something is fundamentally wrong somewhere. There is no fix that does not go to the heart of our relationship as a church with God as a church.

And if, before we get into all the analysis and data and reflection, we begin with a confidence in God’s goodness and ultimate power, this process won’t be scary. It will be a welcome opportunity to strengthen our walk with God. Jairus had that faith-confidence to seek from Jesus his daughter’s healing, even as she was “at the point of death.” But the woman with a hemorrhage, a slow loss of blood that wouldn’t stop, is even more interesting. She had consulted all kinds of doctors; and when it comes to church decline, there are all kinds of people who claim they can stop the bleeding. But she finally despaired of the consultants and went back to the source. Knowing very little about Jesus, nonetheless she believed that touching him could cure her. Her healing probably was not the end of her journey of faith, but it was a beginning.

We have much studying and analysis to do about our current plight, and then we’ll need some strategic planning to revive our churches and denomination. But if it doesn’t begin with the touch of Jesus, we won’t have healing, and we won’t be brought back from the dead. We have before us faith in Christ that we can touch. We have a communion with God that Jesus set out forever more as a meal to be shared by his disciples. Even if we haven’t figured out what exactly our faith is and how we should renew ourselves in it, we still have this faith in Christ and this communion God by God’s grace and goodness. Let us ground ourselves in God’s steadfast love here at this table, and then we will be humbled but empowered to go where God needs us to go.

May 10, 2018

Pro- or anti-modernist? The case of Ross Douthat

Reading the conservative columnist’s latest, which could be taken as a promo for his book on the subject, I marvel that an intelligent religious conservative can command as unlikely a stage as the Op-ed section of the New York Times. He is rightly disgusted by the bishop-blessed sexed-up fashion parade of Catholic-inspired garb going on at the Met. But that travesty prompts him to proclaim that the Catholic church made a wrong turn at Vatican II, and should instead offer itself as a supernaturalist alternative to modernity–one that even reclaims the Baroque extravagance being parodied at the Met.

These kinds of debates (pro/anti-modern) always make the same mistake: that there is some one, solid thing called “modernity.” And that this one thing, that is not at all one thing, could be evaluated with a simple pro- or anti-. Still, we mainline (liberal) Protestants do well to be able to hear the (simplistic) concerns about modernity by people like Douthat. It would be foolish of us to assume that all our problems can be boiled down to one: we’re still not modern enough; we’re still too bound by tradition. But fortunately Protestants can’t hanker after the opulence and power-mongering of the Baroque Catholic church. Now if we can just get over hankering after the so-called “Christian America” that either never existed or at least can never exist again…

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