Mainline Christianity-what’s wrong?

March 18, 2018

Fifth in Lent (3/18): “What Must We Give Up to Follow Jesus? Our Sins? Our Lives?”

Call to worship: Jeremiah 31: 31-34

Psalm 51:1-12

John 12:20-33

Some people in churches like ours are just done with the word sin. It sounds so backward and old-fashioned, and it’s too often been used to shame women or LGBT folks who don’t conform to “Leave It to Beaver” domesticity. I, on the other hand, am just getting started with the word sin. Despite the risks, I think we need to greatly expand our appreciation for that powerful word, and reclaim it from its petty and narrow use. Because if you remove the word “sin” from your vocabulary, you are going to have a hard time reading the Bible. But the Bible has a wonderfully rich and surprising grasp of sin. And I’ve been trying to convey that surprise by considering the sin, or fallenness or, if I must, the imperfection that shows up in surprising places, like in our religion and our clinging to spiritual experiences.

But I recently realized that my desire to make sin hip and interesting could wrongly neglect the truth of even the old-fashioned, backward sense of sin. I have been reading studies and stories of people who drop out of churches like ours. One story was a man named Wayne Sanders. Wayne had been struggling for some time with his sins and failings. He burned through one marriage and was on his second, and his wandering eye as well as substance abuse made him think that his life was not on the right track. As he looked ahead to possibly failing again as a husband, or worse, as a father, Wayne talked to friends at work, and he watched Billy Graham, God rest his tireless soul, on tv, and all this led him to give his life to Christ. He then joined a fundamentalist megachurch, for he had quickly concluded that the mainline Presbyterian church he had occasionally attended was not calling people to Christ. He would probably say the same of us. Now, I’m not sure I trust his judgment about that. I think fundamentalists who seek absolute authority directly from the Bible don’t realize that the Bible, too, can become an idol. Scholars even coined a nifty word for that: bibliolatry. But it is true: churches like ours often do not speak to the kind of problems Wayne was dealing with. What really seemed to bother him was sexual sin. Wayne believes that sex is a “huge issue, probably the bottom line in most people hearts and minds when” it comes to religion.

Wayne’s story, as well as reading Psalm 51 in our lectionary for today, made me realize that I should not go through Lent without addressing our personal sins, those actions and habits and inclinations that we don’t like about ourselves. Probably many of us feel personally out of control in one respect or another, much like Paul puts it in Romans 7: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Now, some of us don’t feel that way, and some of us really aren’t that way. Keep listening.) This is a real problem; but it doesn’t have to be about sex. Wayne made a common mistake; he assumed that everyone must have the same problem with sex that he does. We don’t. It might be all kinds of things. It might be substance abuse or alcohol, it might be that you have a bad temper you cannot control; you might be unable to stop picking on your spouse or your children and pushing their buttons; you might be even violently abusive to your spouse or partner or loved one. You might find yourself breaking rules, shoplifting, acting out—and for no good reason. My mild-mannered high school guidance counselor was arrested late in life for shoplifting—go figure. These are real sins. And they are hurting others around you.

Let me be clear. God wants you to stop sinning. God wants us to stop sinning against others, that’s for sure. But God wants this for us, also. God wants us to be liberated from that feeling of being out of control. You cannot find real peace within the Kingdom of God if your own actions are not really yours, if your sins are controlling you. God wants you to stop, I want you to stop, and this church wants you to stop sinning and be free. We are a community under God that is here for sinners.

The human spirit is often murky and irrational. We like to pretend that all of us are fully in control of ourselves, and the fact is that none of us is in complete control. Most of us hold it together well enough to stay out of trouble and to appear like responsible people. Some slide off the deep end and commit the kind of heinous acts that we read about every day. We like to draw a clean line through all this murkiness and say, “As long as you aren’t hurting anybody else, you’re ok, you got it all together.” But nothing in the Bible supports that easy compromise. Anything short of a pure heart fully directed to love is a failure to attain the perfection to which God has called us. And I know of none who have attained this perfection. The Biblical view of sin does not allow us to condemn some group of sinners out there. Instead, it calls us all to charity and compassion toward one another, and in humility to take a good hard look at ourselves—remove the log that is in your own eye, as Jesus put it.

And so, beyond the sins that harm others, we should also attend to the kind of private hang-ups we have that don’t seem to hurt yourself or anyone else, but which cause us private shame. It might be a habit for porn or some other embarrassing habit. You might have weird fantasies that you can’t seem to shake. You might often be consumed with pettiness or envy, even if you keep it to yourself. Now Wayne and others can focus too much on private sins. But even though they are affecting you only in secret, the fact that they trouble you means they are somehow affecting your relationship with yourself and with God, and perhaps with others more than you realize. They do not testify to the reign of God’s peace and righteousness in your heart, to what the Psalmist calls “truth in the inward being.” And God wants you to be free of these sins also.

Lent is the right time to confess all of these sins. This is the time to pray, with our Psalm, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love. … Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” Our sin might be secret; it may not seem to harm anyone else. But you can’t hide from God. “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight.” When we have to hide something from God and others, we are cutting ourselves off from our source of life and truth and love. “You desire truth in the inward being; Therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence”—I would add, when we are out of control, we cast ourselves from God’s presence, we lose our union with God. “Do not take your holy spirit from me.” / You don’t have to be perfect, but you have to be unified and collected to stand in God’s presence and receive God’s power. And finally, the Psalmist’s prayer is not only about being free from guilt, free from a bad habit, or even free from harming others. The point is to put yourself on the path to true joy: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.” We want a spirit that joyfully and with holy pride does good, and has nothing to hide. That is where God wants you to be, and don’t settle for anything less. Confess yourself before God. If it helps, you can confess before me or before a trusted friend or counselor who understands divine mercy. And especially if you are trapped in substance abuse, or abuse against others, you need God working through others to restore you.

All of that needs to be said here more than I’ve been saying it. Now, I think I’ve neglected addressing that kind of sin because some churches both today and in the past have overemphasized them. Like I said at the start, sin is much bigger than those bad habits and inclinations that we cannot seem to control. Feminist theologians helped me learn that lesson, by pointing out that the church’s tradition of teaching (and harping on about) sin spoke mostly to those in power: mostly to males like Wayne whose main problem was maintaining personal control. Still today so much serious wrongdoing is by men who are out of control: name me a female mass shooter. Roughly 90% of both sexual abuse and homicide is committed by men. And so on. So yes, let’s not forget to address all the sins that men, and women also, commit by their wrongful habits and inclinations. But what about the victims? Those without power, typically women and minorities, have often experienced sin primarily as something done to them: as violation, as bodily injustice. Now I’m sure all women, who have been gaining power in many ways, can also identify with something in my earlier words about the personal sins we can’t control. But is a woman who is abused or harassed supposed to deal with that before God and the church by confessing that she is a sinner? No. Jesus healed and restored the victims of sin. He could be hard on sinners, but that was almost always the powerful men who were in charge in his day—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes, the Roman rulers. So let us all confess our sins before God, and let us ask God to heal us when we’ve been sinned against, and to bring us justice where appropriate (#metoo), and to help us forgive where appropriate. This will take a lot of discernment, and we are here to help each other do that.

Finally, we are sinners, and we are sinned against, but we are more than that. We are called to be Jesus’ disciples. And Jesus taught his disciples to set their sights higher than just overcoming their personal sins, or the sins committed against them. Jesus was more than a therapist. He was ushering in the Kingdom of God, a community of people set aside to live a unique life together dedicated to God and to loving all others. And when some Greek-speaking Jews come looking for Jesus in our reading from John, Jesus reveals the full extent of this life for God for which he came to earth. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.” What does that mean?

If you have come here with your sins, and maybe your wounds from others, and are looking to be made well, Jesus desires to heal you, for God created you and wants you to be well. But if you then say, “Thanks!” and go home and get on with your life, get back to your career, you will remain “just a single grain.” Your work place will appreciate you, and at your retirement or after you are gone you will be remembered briefly for your accomplishments, your single grain of fruit. But that’s about it. Or, freed from sin, you may go back home and be a good parent. I marvel at the joy and responsibility of raising Silas, and how much impact I will have on him. But I also realize how limited my impact may be in some ways, how much is out of my control. And I wonder about how much from my ancestors was preserved in me and will be passed on to Silas. My father and mother—yes, he will remember them and I will pass on to him stories and some of the values I learned. My grandparents? My great grandparents? I’m not even sure of their names. Can I expect the generations after Silas to bear my imprint? I just don’t see a whole lot of fruit which I will be able to call mine. That’s what I have to show for being a single grain of wheat.

“Those who love their life,” Jesus said, love their single grain, which is not nothing, and is a good gift from God, “Those who love their life lose it.” Let’s be honest about that. And so we come full circle to where we began Lent on Ash Wednesday. “From dust you were created and to dust you shall return.”

But Jesus also said this: “And those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Now, that doesn’t sound very inviting. I am not going to hate my life, my work, my role as husband and father, the little things that I get a kick out of doing. But we can love our little life too much. We have to admit that what I do doesn’t add up to a whole lot. And more painful still, we have to admit that “life in this world” is not fair. There are many, like the Bermudez children, who never have the chance to love their little grain of life, and this was true for some of Jesus’ followers also. But if you give of your life to follow Jesus in God’s way, you will participate in something infinitely greater than yourself. “Whoever serves me must follow me,” he said, “and where I am there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” Now I don’t claim to know what exactly that means for life beyond this one. But if you truly give yourself to the Christian way of being servants together, following the way Jesus came to serve all, and you plant your grain of wheat in this soil, you will bear much fruit, because you are now united in worldwide and history-spanning communion with God, a people committed to loving one another and loving across all barriers and divisions.

We are lucky. We probably won’t have to give up and hate our single-grain lives to take part in this eternal life, the life God honors and makes God’s own in the church. But maybe this Lent, which is almost over, we should listen to see if God is calling us to follow Jesus in this way, and so to be ready to give up our little grain, to let it fall to the earth and die, so that we together can bear much fruit, the fruit of eternal life.

 

February 22, 2018

A Critical Eulogy of Billy Graham

Some will say we should never speak unkindly of the dead, although I think that rule is flexible when we are dealing with people who have had an outsized influence in the world, some of it negative.  So I agree with much of what David Hollinger has to say on Graham in the below opinion piece.  Only I would not be so sanguine about the mainline establishment that Graham spurned–that’s us.  I’m no so confident that making the faith “cosmopolitan” is an unalloyed good, nor that our only problem is that evangelicals have poached on our faithful.  I think we are decaying from within, too, despite our many virtues celebrated by Hollinger.

Hollinger on Graham

 

 

February 9, 2018

Please improve my next book by commenting! Topic: What’s lacking in mainline theology

I thought I would post this, taken directly from the Spire (February 2018), so that folks could have some place to register feedback.   I’ve included some questions for personal reflection below, but what I would love are thoughts (using the “comment” feature below) on whether I am correctly describing the typical views of a church like ours. I’m trying to figure out in my current work what about people’s views of God and faith need to be pushed in a new direction or stretched; or put otherwise…   

…What is holding back mainline churches like ours from experiencing the presence of God “with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction” (1 Thess. 1:5). Here’s a sampling (I’m still in the “early draft” phase, so I welcome feedback!):

  1. We lack a sense of God as a reality above and beyond us; the presence of God is for us easy and comfortable, rather than a reality that weighs heavily upon us and must be taken with the seriousness and gravitas that the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.” Is that true for you?
  2. We treat church as a worldly, secular affair, often thinking of church as bringing us (and our children) the same kind of benefits we can get elsewhere: values and moral guidance, socializing, volunteer opportunities. Is that you, or are you seeking something else?
  3. We have lost the drama of the Christian story, especially the story of being saved from a terrible plight—what we used to more often call “sin.” True? Do you think of faith as “saving” you? From what?
  4. We still have a hard time understanding grace as the center of Christian faith; often we think of “good works” first. How central is grace to you?
  5. We are pretty confused about Jesus. Was he divine, and how? What did the cross do? Did he rise from the dead? C’mon, I know you are out there!
  6. We have many questions about what the goal of a Christian life is: Is the goal in this life or in some afterlife? Is it about personal spirituality, or living in community? Is it about seeking justice, or worshipping God? What do you think? Am I missing some options?

There are some good reasons behind our confusion and doubt with regard to traditional Christian beliefs. In the book I will give some direction on these questions, but not always a simple answer. But what I’ve outlined above hopefully explains our tendencies that make Christianity look kind of flat, unessential, and not very compelling.

February 5, 2018

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Feb. 4): “A Teachable Spirit”

This sermon met with very different responses.  Some people really loved it and told me so.  One person really disliked it and told me so; I’m sure there were others.  I worry in such a case as this that the sermon and the pastor will become a rallying cry for dividing the church.  (“The Pastor is great!”  “No, he’s terrible!”)  That has to be our first concern. The church is bigger than any of us, certainly me.  (See Paul’s first few chapters of Corinthians.)  

I can see where some people might not like the accusatory tone of the sermon, although I think my main point was to make us all aware of the situation we face and what we can do about them, not our personal failings.  I’m pretty rigorous about never preaching guilt or shame.  It is possible that the sermons reflects a defensive posture toward a line of criticism that I’ve heard a lot (that I’m stuck in my own head). I’m not sure if my insecurities are coming through in this sermon; but it would be a serious mistake to let my personal feelings get in the way of preaching the Gospel.

One person did an admirable job at confronting me right after church with a concern: that when I say “You are not scholars,” I am making it sound like the congregation are thoughtless lunkheads, as though I am looking down on them.  (This person had also found my former blog motto objectionable.  See my explanation for it and why I changed it here.)  

Writing sermons that step out on a limb is a dangerous business.  When I wrote about how my parishioners are not scholars (and actually a few of them are), that was in no way meant to be a put-down.  (For one thing, my book contains a lot of criticism of academic theology.  I value academics but I really believe that theology has to revolve around what happens at church.)  As is typical, I came to my ideas by way of many conversations I’ve been having with a variety of people.  I’ve been told I lecture to the congregation like a professor to a college-level class.  I learned from this criticism, and most people have told me that I’ve made my sermons much more approachable.  So when I say, “You are not scholars,” my intent was to acknowledge that I should not assume people are looking for erudite theology–and indeed I’m glad they are not!   (Well, a little of that might be fun.)  But people not privy to the conversations I’ve been having (and no one would be except me) could easily conclude I was looking down on the congregation.  I’m sorry about that; I could have foreseen that misunderstanding and avoided it. 

The Granby folk really are very thoughtful and spiritually minded; that’s what drew me to them.  But I don’t think they realize just how differently we all understand what the faith is all about.  While we are a thoughtful bunch, we really don’t talk about our faith and what we believe in (as someone pointed out at the new Sermon Discussion Table).  I heard some confirmation of my analysis of our church, and would welcome alternative views in the comments. 

1 Cor 9:16-23; Mark 1:21-28

We have in our readings today two remarkable passages about teaching and authority. From Mark, a story about Jesus teaching in the synagogue. Jesus taught “as one having authority,” and the synagogue crowd is astounded. Since he has no degree and no training, his authority seems to come right from God. His authority is such that it provokes a demon lurking in one of those attending to taunt Jesus, and the demon is cast out. That astounds the crowd even more, although the fireworks of it might have distracted somewhat from what Jesus was trying to teach them.  And from Corinthians we have Paul’s moving and deeply personal testimony to his sense of vocation as a teacher of the Gospel. He says, in essence, that his rights, his self-interest, and his whole ego have been absorbed into teaching the gospel. “I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more.”

Now, this is going to get tricky. I think we have a problem with teaching in this church, and specifically with my role and authority as a teacher. I think we, as a congregation, need to work on developing a teachable spirit. The Gospel would never have taken hold if it weren’t for the teachable spirit we see in our readings. The people around Jesus allowed themselves to be astounded, and Paul found that non-Jews were suddenly believing in a Jew who was crucified. There was a hunger for a powerful message in the time of Jesus and Paul; and we need that hunger today.

The problem is, I’m not Paul. And I’m sure not Jesus. There will never be another to teach as Jesus did. And I do not have Paul’s incredible rhetorical gifts (you really appreciate that when you study him closely), nor do I have his total selfless passion for the Gospel. (By the way, he’s telling the Corinthians in this chapter why he is not exercising his right to be paid for preaching; you won’t hear that from me!) He was able to become all things to all people, he was able to reach people who were not Jews like himself, facing all different kinds of concerns and problems, and connect with them so that they could all come to submit to the same one truth, the Gospel, the good news of Jesus the Christ. I am awe-struck at his achievement, and while I am thankful for my own gifts, I can only feel inadequate next to Paul.

Now, where are we: we need to figure out how the power of teaching is going to work with us. We have two passages about the power of teaching in the Bible. But we’ve seen that I’m not a teacher like Jesus or Paul. What about you? Are you all the searching and eager synagogue of Capernaum, or the enthusiastic church at Corinth? Back then, hearts and minds were dramatically changed by the Gospel and a whole new way of living before God took off. Why does that magic seem so rare today?

I think there are lots of good reasons; so that even if a Paul or a Jesus were to arise today, I’m not so sure they would find the same success. Our culture is largely the product of Western European history. 500 years ago, Western Europe began to be rocked by modern science, which brought many advantages, but tended to undermine traditional religious beliefs. And there’s much more. 500 years ago, Western Europe had one Pope. But after the Reformation, Christianity split up into almost innumerable voices, each with a distinctive teaching. Many of those Protestant groups divided again over slavery, and then again and again starting about 100 years ago over science and biblical authority, and nowadays over political and cultural issues like gender equality and homosexuality. The Christian world today is a mess. All these opposed churches, and they all believe they know the Gospel.

And that is kind of like what we have in this room. I sometimes feel like each of you has your own unique take on Christianity, which you picked up from here and there, not exclusively from the church, but also from your own experiences, your reading of the Bible and contemporary works of spirituality, whether from Christian authors or others. Where do your views come from, anyway? Some of you have been influenced by Catholicism, some by a strong reaction against Catholicism. Some of you have been influenced by evangelical, born-again Christianity; others by a strong reaction against that. So some of you love your Bible, you read it every day and you trust it as a direct word from God. Others just find the Bible confusing and unhelpful, maybe even backward, and would rather get your wisdom from somewhere else. And frankly I don’t think any of you has a very solid grasp on the classical creeds and beliefs of Christianity. Some of you have been influenced by progressive Christianity and the social gospel or even liberation theology—me too, somewhat. Others abide in a conservative blend of patriotism and Christianity that starts from a belief that America is a special agent of God’s providence. Some of you believe God is a voice of inclusion and tolerance, who frees women and oppressed people and GLTB folk from the shackles of traditional morality; others of you believe God is the pillar and bedrock of solid, old-fashioned family values.

In one way, you all are a wonderful tapestry of diversity, displaying all the varieties of what it can mean to be a Christian today. In another way, you’re just a sloppy mess. Please, laugh with me. I need you to laugh with me, laugh at the absurdity of trying to be a church today. Imagine what it looks like to me, when I look out and see you folks coming from all different directions spiritually, religiously, politically, theologically, or maybe you don’t have much direction, just befuddlement. I recognize these different places you’re coming from, because I’ve studied Christian history and American religious history, and I know something about how we got in the pickle of all these different ideas about our faith. I look out and see wonderful people individually, but collectively this mess, and I ask myself, how do you pastor to this motley crew? How do you teach when there is so little of a shared belief structure to begin with? I look out and am confronted with an absurd task.

So what do we do? What do I do? You have called me your teacher: our Constitution says, “It shall be the duty of the Pastor to preach the Word of God; …to exercise the privilege of teacher and counselor in public and in private.” How is this going to work? I’ll tell you what won’t work. You can’t all expect me echo back to you’re your own peculiar and unique take on Christianity. Would that I could be all things to all people! I mean, I hope you’ll hear something that sounds familiar and affirms something of your own understanding, because you all have valid insights. But you’re not going to get only that every week. It’s impossible. I can’t give each of you your own personal version of church, especially when they might sharply disagree.

Now, what I could try to do is to go for the least common denominator. I could try to say something every week that sounds more or less familiar and acceptable and comfortable to most of you. That would make for inoffensive sermons, I suppose. But there wouldn’t be much to it. My message would have to be pretty thin and watery. In fact, that’s what a lot of preachers resort to, probably some of your former pastors. It may be the reason that the message coming out of mainline churches like ours is often so…blah. Such sermons never sat well with me.

Now, there is a wiser path to make church work amid so many different understandings of our faith; and we’re already doing this. Instead of focusing on learning together, we put our energy into doing together. We get involved in mission work and church work together. We also share in fellowship and enjoy each other’s friendship. This is wise and to the good. A sermon cannot carry a church. You can have church without sermons. Now I love thinking about the faith, but we put too much emphasis on the sermon.

So we must continue to live out our unity among a common work and common fellowship. But not everyone can take an active part in this work, and not everyone chooses to. We can also rally around our shared worship or liturgy; but that’s trickier, because I think all those different views on Christianity is all about lead us to expect different things out of worship. (Look at my report on your views of worship from the Spiritual Inventory series.) I wish more than anything that we had a liturgy that was powerful, compelling, moving, formative—that shaped and changed us. I wish we felt like our life depended on our liturgy. I don’t think we do. I’ve tried some new things, which met with mixed success.

Let’s keep searching for that liturgy, and keep building ourselves us by working and fellowshipping together. Still, I think there is no powerful and effective future for us as a church without a strong effort at teaching and learning together. Without a common understanding and even common language for what we are doing, our common work will be weak and scattered. Our efforts to run the church together will be plagued by dozens of personal agendas and sometimes trivial differences in opinion—sound familiar? And our efforts at crafting good liturgy will collide with a hundred different expectations of what worship is for. So let’s really work at coming together and by learning together, try to share a common understanding.  We’ll never all agree and understand God in the same way; I wouldn’t want that. But who knows how far we’ll go toward unity in the mind of Christ.

This might not be what you signed up for. But think of it this way. Many of you will be members of this church long after I’ve moved on. Your next minister will have different gifts and present different challenges. I’m your chance, for a few years, to really rethink what Christian faith is all about. That’s not my only gift, but it’s the best gift I got. If you are ready to learn about the faith, about God, and about how to live as Christians in our world, you’ve got the right guy. More than your typical minister, I’ve had to think about how the Gospel relates to the views of all kinds of experts and scholars—scholars writing about science, psychology and sociology, philosophy, history, sexism and gender, racism, capitalism and economics, colonialism, and so on. /No, you are not scholars. I know that, and I’m good with that. I didn’t want to sequester myself with other scholars; I wanted to preach to ordinary folk like you. Sometimes my scholarly training gets in the way of my being all things to all people.

But if you go a little ways with me, you’ll find I am a very flexible teacher. I don’t have a narrow view of our Christian faith. To me it’s like a beautiful jewel with many facets. And each of us has insights into at least one of those facets. Where we get into trouble is when we think our one facet is the whole. So I use the diversity of the liturgical seasons to explore all these different facets; that’s what my next book is about—and you all will be in this one. You will probably find yourself at home in one or another of those seasons; but the next one to come along might stretch you and challenge you to grow and experience a different side of our faith. But it won’t work if you are only satisfied with something that already speaks to you, but then the rest of the time you say, well, this isn’t for me.

The jewel of our faith is beautiful for all those facets; but it’s complicated. And this gospel jewel is being bombarded by all kinds of different lights, the different sources of knowledge and wisdom in our day, many of them flashing and twirling like disco lights. Our jewel is also swathed in patches of thick darkness, the sources of ignorance and godlessness of our day. It’s hard to get a good, steady, clear perspective on its beauty. We need to have compassion on each other—I for you, you for me—because we’ve all been dealt a very messy hand of being the church in a time of great upheaval and confusion.

Most of all, I need you to strive to have what John Calvin called a teachable spirit. I have been so blessed by some of you who receive me so openly and eagerly as a teacher; and not because you already agree with me. I could use some more of that. The church needs more of that.

How do you get a teachable spirit? Well, you have to confess that what you now know and understand is not enough. It has probably served you well, although sometimes I see your understanding of the faith making your life more difficult. But most of you have an understanding that keeps you going. But look next to you. Your views probably don’t agree with that person (whom you might be married to, by the way). Maybe you can get by with your own understanding, but how are you going to bridge the disagreement with your sister or brother? That’s why I’m here. I can help us do that. But you have to let go of at least some of your own understanding of the faith and admit that we don’t have it all figured out. I can’t set out for you a banquet if you content yourself with your favorite snack, and don’t come hungry to our common table, ready to join in a shared feast together. Get hungry! Get teachable.

From the Questions for Further Thought: 

Do you come to church hungry to learn? To be challenged? To expand your understanding of God’s ways? Should you? If that is not what you are looking for, why not?

From the sermon: “I think there is no powerful and effective future for us as a church without a strong effort at teaching and learning together.” Agree or disagree?

 

 

January 22, 2018

Annual Meeting Sunday! Jan. 21: “The State of the Church”

I went off lectionary for the day, and took a break from my “Love of God” series (all of a week into it!).  But lots of good feedback.  I wonder if anyone disagrees?  I’d like to hear from folks who do.  

1 Samuel 3:1-11;  Revelation 3:1-22

“The State of the Church”

In the Book of Revelation, John the Seer dictates letters to seven important churches of his day; we heard three of those letters. John shows a distinct attitude in each letter, ranging from encouragement to strong warning. I thought about using these letters to address our church in this way, on this day, as we take stock of where we are and plan for where we want to go. Would we be the church who is “dead,” who are told “to wake up and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death?” Or are we like the faithful church in Philadelphia, who has “but little power, and yet you have kept my word and not denied my name?” They are told “to hold fast to what you have.” Or are we like the church in Laodicea, who is so satisfied with their wealth and success that they are neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm. So God says, “I am about to spit you out of my mouth,” like lukewarm coffee. It’s not my focus today, but we do learn something about God’s love here, when God says, “I reprove and discipline those whom I love.”

But I find these letters by John really off-putting too. They don’t read to me like letters dictated directly from God. John’s biases show through; he seems to think only martyrs are real Christians. Maybe John needs to lighten up.

We should be very wary of claiming to speak directly for God. So I have no letter from God for the church in Granby. And it may be that John himself is dimly aware of the dangers and limits of pronouncing divine judgment. The one constant refrain in his letter is: “Let him who have ears hear what the Spirit is saying…” I’d like to think that’s John’s way of saying, “Judge for yourself; if the Spirit speaks to you through what I say, then use it in good health.” Ultimately, the Spirit of God has to judge us from within, both individually and as a church.

So we must ask ourselves, what does God think about our church? And we must listen to one another. Those with long roots in this church can to share what was so valuable from the past that we need to preserve. Newcomers can add a fresh perspective, seeing the church for how it is today, not through some rose-colored lens that those with long associations might have.

I do have a role in this conversation. I see this church in light of the challenges that the larger church faces, and the resources its leaders have proposed. But ultimately I’m left with my own take on what ails the church today and what fresh ideas might help the church regain the right combination of faithfulness and power. I confess you won’t often find a pastor in a small church who has given so much thought and study to these questions, and believes, hopefully not foolishly, that he has insight to offer.

So what problems is the church facing today, and how can we address these? Let’s focus on churches like ours: mainline churches that are mostly middle class, mostly white, which don’t believe in dramatic spiritual powers and don’t believe the Bible is inerrant. Our kind of church is not doing well. According to the Pew Research Center, the percent of the population affiliated with mainline churches like ours has gone from 18% to under 15% just since 2007. And this is down from around 25% a few decades earlier. These statistics can be analyzed in a variety of ways, but they tell us that all is not well. Still, let’s not obsess about numbers; my first concern is always whether our mainline churches are presenting a compelling and faithful way of life, with God at its center. If we’re not doing that, then even if we were growing, we would not be a true church. And you’ll notice that the Book of Revelation’s letters never once mention whether the churches are growing. Let us be faithful to God, and be not ashamed of what we are but share our faith, and I trust God that all will be well. (Not that we don’t need to prudently manage the business side of things, of course!)

So what does that look like? Whether we are growing or shrinking, whether our budget is balanced or not, church should be a powerful experience. Church should change lives, even if it does so slowly. It should take your breath away. It should open you up to that raw, vulnerable, on-edge side of life, like you get when you’ve had a really intense personal conversation with a good friend, or better still, a stranger. You know what I mean? When your ears are perked up, and you feel you’ve finally let your guard down and exposed yourself to what really matters in life. At the end of such a conversation, I find I feel exhausted but also full of nervous energy. A good conversation, a great novel, even a movie that isn’t an escape but really calls to you—these can make you feel this way, like you are on the edge of a great precipice of life. Why shouldn’t church feel that way too—even more so?

What? You say you’ve never felt that way? Well it’s never too late. Imagine how Moses felt at the burning bush; or how Peter felt when, after pulling in a huge trove of fish, said to Jesus, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am an unclean man.” Or how Adim Malek prayed as he fled for his life as a boy solider, and finally found liberation. Or how some of you have faced losing your own children, but God stood by you through it all.  I don’t wish these difficult experiences on anyone, but church can really happen when our hearts are at their most vulnerable and exposed. How many of our mainline churches tap into that kind of power? If they did, they wouldn’t be shrinking, I assure you.

Mainline churches should have that power; we’re talking about God, here, and what more than God can lead you to live life on the edge? But mainline churches have too often managed to make God ordinary, commonplace, blandly familiar, even boring. People who are hungry for life on the edge, who really want to feel life, have to flee the church and look to crazy extreme sports, or grizzly horror movies (or death metal). Maybe they fail to appreciate that ordinary life can also be extraordinary, but they are on to something. / Really, it’s shocking. Right where life ought to be most exciting and on the edge, we’ve made church the home for life at its most conventional—plain-vanilla. We should almost be proud of ourselves for such an unlikely achievement. How indeed?

I think what happened is the church went from praying for the Kingdom of God to come and for this age to pass, to recasting itself as a pillar of social order. It became the church’s role to uphold mainstream society. This dramatic shift started long, long ago; with Constantine, played a big part in the fourth century, but there were a lot of smaller compromises along the way. Our Puritan ancestors were remarkably counter-cultural when they lived in England, but when they settled here they became the establishment, and church became the place where rules were enforced and people kept in line. And still today, the small-town New England church might continue to assume that it is our role to be the center of town, the pillar upholding all the values that make a place like Granby what it is.

But exactly what those town-‘n’-chuch values are shifts through time and with location. Once it was important for church to reinforce sexual morality and patriotism, to shun divorce, and make anyone who was different feel judged—maybe they were foreign born, dark skinned, or gay. More recently, churches may reinforce the value of self-fulfillment and individual achievement; we endeavor to promote well-adjusted young people who have “positive values,” like healthy self-esteem. Often the main value we promote towards others is tolerance—“live and let live.” If you are up in Amherst, church might be a place to celebrate progressive political values, with just a touch of self-righteousness. In many rural areas, it’s the opposite—conservative social values reign, to which faith lends the hubris of absolute certainty that everyone else is wrong or degenerate. Now, don’t get me wrong; teaching values is, well, valuable. I do it. We can and should have important discussions about what personal and social values best align with the Gospel. But too often church serves simply to lend a vague divine blessing on whatever conventional values we mostly white, middle class people hold anyway; and predictably our teenagers will either rebel against all this just because it’s conventional, or the more conforming teens will ploddingly go along with it. But you don’t need a church to instill these values; the Bible just seems to get in the way of conventional values anyway—it’s such a strange book. No wonder people have stopped coming to church to imbibe conventional values, whether progressive or “family values.” You can rely on youth sports, Disney movies, and school to instill conventional values like self-esteem, hard work, and tolerance, in your kids.

None of this has anything to do with the real heart of church, as I want to present it to you: standing naked and vulnerable before the absolute God—placing yourself face to face with the God upon whom everything depends. That is what church alone can deliver; no other organization can. Church ought to be where everything superficial, everything fake, everything false is exposed; where we bring before the fire of divine love everything we have substituted in the place of real, unbounded living, to be burned away. Paul tells the Corinthians that they should be speaking with such a prophetic edge in church that when a new visitor comes in for the first time, “the secrets of” that person’s heart will be “disclosed,” and he or she “will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, ‘God is really among you.’” That’s power, not borne of manipulation and pulling heart-strings, but truth; real truth-power.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am looking for that in a church, but I’ve never been so explicit. Maybe you’re saying, Yes I want that! How do we get it? Good question. It’s nothing you or I can manufacture. At best we can open ourselves to this kind of raw, divine power: The God “who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one will open.” But we can try to clear out everything we substitute in its place: the god of convention, the god of Granby. We can choose instead to settle for nothing less than the true God who is far beyond our little lives. Maybe we find it hard to believe in this God. We can see convention; the everyday world has an almost oppressive reality to it. What is beyond it can’t easily be seen. Then the place to begin is with honesty. Wherever we are with faith, church has got to be the place where we are at our most raw and honest. You can’t fake it before God. Even if you’re not sure you believe in God, you surely don’t think you can fool God! Whatever God is, he’s nobody’s fool. So if we have intellectual doubts about God or are confused about God, or if we find the Bible strange or silly, we honor God by being honest about it. Nothing so dishonors God as pretending to be a ‘good Christian.’ Then church becomes just a show of piety, where you fake it for the sake of upholding convention; and then we’ve dethroned God. Instead, let’s be honest and vulnerable with our confusion and doubt, and only then are we open to better understanding. And then maybe the God we seek will be gracious and show himself here, will “come in to you and eat with you, and you with him.”

But maybe this isn’t what you come to church for. Maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about, or you just prefer the God of ordinary life, of convention, who upholds everyday values. Maybe I’m freaking you out! You don’t need to be. I can work with where you’re coming from. God is our creator, the one who created the various orders in which our lives move and have their being. And God’s created goodness is still visible in the bonds of family, in ordinary neighborliness, in loyalty and reciprocity with one’s own people. I don’t think that these values by themselves are enough to make church powerful, and they are not the values we find at the heart of our redemption and calling in Christ. But some of you have helped me see that, seen in retrospect from the vision of that extraordinary calling we have in Christ, with its very unconventional way of being a distinct and holy people before God, the continuing goodness of God in even ordinary things can seem amazing. I continue to journey with you and learn; I hope you will do the same with me.

 

 

 

August 13, 2017

Aug. 13: “The Sign of Silence”

This was a long haul; I saw a thread connecting these two scriptures that spoke well to where we are as churches today.  But it proved to be a tangled thread!  Thanks for the expressions of appreciation from the Center Church folks who are joining us this month.  Some asked about reading it online, and I hope they can find the blog.  (And comment at the bottom!)

Scriptures: Matthew 16:1-2a, 4;  1st Kings 19:9-18

A Warning: This is going to get complicated, and a little long. I’m going to weave between these two texts, both of which are weird and difficult. Stay with me. It might help if I give you the simple message right up front: our churches are in trouble; we may be dying, we may continue to live. What I hear these texts saying is that we need to take this time of worship before God very seriously; it is essential to who we are. But the God we encounter here might be mysterious and puzzling to us. Let’s open ourselves to that. Worship can lead, sometimes, to an encounter with the God who is brings more questions than answers, more trouble than comfort. That’s who God is, and we need to deal with it. But I think the place to find our comfort and assurance, our rock of purpose and meaning, if not always in worship, is in our work with and for others to establish God’s reign of justice and love.

We’re reading the Old Testament this August. It’s vital to understand that the Old Testament was compiled in such a way that it contains a big, messy disagreement about whether we are to blame for our sorry lot. Is the suffering that we experience a punishment from God, or are we simply victims of senseless suffering?

We’ve known nothing as severe as the sufferings of Israel. With the exile to Babylon in 587 BC, they lost the temple, the kingship, the land, many lives—everything that was to them a sign of divine blessing. Much of the Old Testament, but not all of it, looks back at this loss and declares, it was God’s punishment because we worshipped the Canaanite gods and failed to practice justice. It’s both troubling and admirable that they could so completely blame themselves.

We’ve never had to reckon with such devastation. If anything, we are like the Israelites of Elijah’s time, before the dreadful exile occurred. Then, the Israelites still enjoyed much wealth and power, although the glory days were in the past, and an ominous cloud already hung over the future. And so it is that we mainline Christians (and the UCC is classic mainline), still remembering our bygone glory days, wonder whether we are heading into exile, whether our temples will be torn down, our leadership lost—and if this catastrophe is indeed coming upon us, we wonder why.  Like our Old Testament, I want us to wrestle with that question today, recognizing that there might be more than one answer.

Let’s begin, though, with Jesus’ strange words. The Pharisees and Sadducees together come and ask Jesus for a sign. Now they already asked him once before for a sign, in chapter 12. So despite Jesus’ performing exorcisms, healings, and feeding 4000 with seven loaves and fish, which he just did, the Pharisees and Sadducees still don’t believe. They want “A sign from heaven.” They won’t be satisfied with the amazing humanitarian, earthly signs of Jesus’ compassionate power; they want fire, and wind, and earthquakes, and great supernatural displays of power that would point right to God. Jesus answers tersely, calling them “an evil and adulterous generation” and saying they will receive no sign but the sign of Jonah, whatever that is, and then he leaves them with silence, having nothing more to do with them for the rest of the Gospel. But they plot to kill him.

It’s a troubling little text that is distinctive to Matthew’s gospel. You see, Matthew has arranged his gospel so that pretty much all the Jews get blamed for Jesus’ death, because in Matthew’s place and day—probably 45 years or so after Jesus’ death—things were getting really nasty between traditional Jews and the upstart Christian movement. So Matthew reads his contemporary breakdown of relations back into the original story of Jesus. That’s why Matthew presents two groups who in Jesus’ day were enemies, the Pharisees and Sadducees, as acting together to challenge Jesus. Historically, that seems unlikely. This hostility that Matthew has toward ‘all those other Jews’ is understandable, but sadly it played into a long history of Christian anti-Judaism; and it took the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany, and let’s not forget, the complicity of many others, for the church finally to reckon with this ugly history. We can never read these anti-Jewish texts the same way again.

Instead, I think today we should read this text in a much more uncomfortable way, by asking, are we now the Pharisees and Sadducees? They represent the empowered, established religion of Jesus’ time. The Sadducees were very old-school, and they put their trust in the old traditions and in the glory of the Jerusalem Temple which they controlled. The Pharisees, for their part, were very bookish and well-educated, claiming ownership of Scriptures, priding themselves in sophisticated argument and new ideas. But both groups had a hard time letting go of the privileges they enjoyed to embrace this new vision of Jesus. Neither party was ready to accept the humanitarian faith Jesus revealed to them, and soon they will find themselves in a terrible crisis, and it will become clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ will not be contained in just Israel, but must break down the barriers between Jew and Gentile. The Pharisees and Sadducees couldn’t imagine God embracing these unfamiliar, unclean people.

You see where I am going with this? Are we the old guard, the perverse generation? I don’t think we are, simply so, but it might be a good idea to try it on and see if it fits even a little. In our own ways, we have a hard time accepting this Jesus, except in the faded form of a sentimental tradition, or as just an emblem of our respectable status—everybody who is anybody is a Christian. But can we accept Jesus as the one who leads us into and through death and on to new life? Like the Pharisees and Sadducees, we have a hard time hearing his words as something new, radical, and life-changing.

And if the shoe does fit, if we are at least a little bit like the Pharisees and Sadducees, what is this sign of Jonah? Now Jonah preached repentance like Jesus; but Jonah was barely faithful, and yet he was successful. Jesus was totally faithful but unsuccessful. On the other hand, Jonah was swallowed by the whale for three days, and for Christians this is a symbolic precedent for Jesus’ death and resurrection on the third day. But in this passage of Matthew, the sign of Jonah is left enigmatic. That’s the point, in fact; for those who cannot hear Jesus, like the Pharisees and Sadducees, an enigma is all that is left to them. Has Jesus become an enigma to us? We want to say, “Surely not I, Lord?”//

Well, if we don’t identify perfectly with the bold and fearless original followers of Jesus, but neither again with the enemies of Jesus, perhaps Elijah is a closer fit for us. He is one of the greatest of the prophets, to be sure; and that seems a bit beyond us. But in this passage he reveals himself to be unsure; he’s even feeling sorry for himself—I can identify with that!—and he is dissatisfied with the predicament God has given him. And in this passage he does not receive a clear answer from God—something that can elude us also. But in his faithful vulnerability before God, he does encounter God in a new way that might prove instructive for us.

Elijah has just come off of a great victory. The king and the people had all abandoned their faith in the one God, for they had become entranced by Canaanite gods, above all Baal. Baal promised them everything they wanted—fertility and good crops—and they lost interest in being a unique people who serve God. So, in the midst of a long drought, Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to a duel and won. Each party prepared a sacrifice and called upon their god to bring fire down on it. No fire comes from Baal. But God utterly consumes Elijah’s sacrifice with—note—fire. The people repent, and then God brought the rains.

But then Queen Jezebel, who favored the Baal prophets, sent Elijah an icy message, vowing to kill him. So he flees into the wilderness, and tells God that he might as well just die on the spot. God then provides him with food, and sends him on a journey to Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, where Moses and the Israelites first met and made a covenant with God. And that brings us to our passage.

I submit to you that, even if we are a little like the Pharisees and Sadducees, we also bear at least a faint resemblance to Elijah. With Elijah, we also look back on our faithful work. Once our churches were powerful, and confident. We offered a way to be Christian that was reasonable, open to science and learning, never dogmatic, but friendly to other ways of being Christian as well as other faiths; shouldn’t that have carried the day? And we could boast of impressive deeds done on behalf of our communities and the world, as well as proud institutions of higher learning. But now we wonder why we seem to be losing ground. The great mainline heyday in the 50s and 60s seems so far gone. Now, like Elijah, our lives are on the line.

And our opponents have the upper hand. They include the fundamentalist Christians who seem to make an idol out of having absolute truth and can’t seem to distinguish Christian faith from a very conservative, patriarchal politics and narrow, Victorian morality. And yet they seem to get all the attention of our media kings and queens; how many times do you hear about evangelicals in the news as compared with the UCC and other mainline churches? These Christians, whom we barely know and can hardly understand, seem to have much in common with other religious zealots and fundamentalists around the world; those who can’t abide by democracy and pluralism, and sometimes even resort to unspeakable violence. It seems the most powerful forms of religion today are those most against who we are.

So it is that our other opponent, secularism, hits closer to home. Secularism just means accepting the limits of religious authority, and accepting that our public realm is religiously neutral. In many ways we have worked hard to embrace and adapt to this secularism, but it turned against us. We did so much to show that Christian faith understands its own limits and can be very this-worldly and humanitarian; but now it seems so many people see no reason to step out of the secular and go to church (unless they attend the previously mentioned fanatical churches). Not only our neighbors but even our own children seem skeptical that the church has anything to offer them that isn’t already provided by aspirations toward career and family, by the endless, flashy output of our media and internet, by all of the personal challenge and fulfillment offered through athletics, or being in touch with nature, or being spiritual-but-not-religious. Who needs the church? My life is full.

In all of this, we feel quite a bit like Elijah. We feel like we are fighting a losing battle to preserve the faith. Baal is too strong for us.

But if Elijah is feeling a little too sorry for himself, surely we have even less of an excuse. Remember, we are also a little like the Pharisees and Sadducees. We are at least a little to blame for our loss of power and faithfulness. We can debate exactly why the mainline church has received its comeuppance. Did we become too secular, too American, too blended into middle-class American life? Did we become too wealthy, too white, and too complacent? Did we water down the Holy One of Israel into a milquetoast source of middle class self-affirmation and our much-sought self-esteem? Did we stop taking sin seriously? All of these might be true. But no doubt, in general we can say that we liked being the establishment church, too much. We still prefer to cling on to the trappings of being the center of town life, rather than submitting ourselves afresh to the commands of our Holy God. Maybe the problem boils down to this: we establishment churches worship an anti-establishment God, a God who more often than not takes the side of the wild prophets and the hungry people of the land rather than the self-satisfied kings and respectable Pharisees and Sadducees.

In a way, our problem has turned the corner for us. We have already lost most of our establishment power and prestige. What remains are our gorgeous and grand buildings, and we are left wondering if we can ever again fill them with real spiritual power—perhaps like they used to be, or perhaps like they never have been filled—perhaps more faithfully, more honestly, freed from our Pharisaical past that was always prone to hypocrisy. Perhaps only in the future can we become true churches of faithfulness to God, rather than to small town, middle-class, white Americana. /

Elijah’s journey likewise takes him back to Mt. Horeb, to the original roots of the Jewish faith, before the corruption set in, but did you notice that what he finds when he gets there is also quite new and unprecedented? He’s in a cave at Horeb, and “the word of the Lord” comes to him, asking, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Although God sent him there, the question implies that Elijah ought to be somewhere else, namely, carrying out his mission as a prophet. Elijah unloads his sorry state on God. The story continues: “He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’” Who said? It may seem like this was God speaking, but the voice doesn’t say, ‘I am about to pass by,’ but “The Lord is about to pass by.” So was it an angel? Or Elijah’s own thoughts? Hmm.

Then the traditional mighty signs of God’s presence pass by, the wind and earthquake and fire like the original Israelites saw at Sinai, all signs from heaven like the Pharisees and Sadducees were looking for from Jesus. But the Lord was not in these. And then sheer silence. Only then does Elijah cover his face and go out to meet God in this silent and still presence. And in what follows, the passage doesn’t say, “Then God said…” It says, “A voice came to him and said,”—oddly, the same question again: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And Elijah repeats his lament to the letter. /

I wish I could make all of this perfectly clear. But to me it looks like in this silence, God’s voice and Elijah’s own voice merge into one, just so, when Elijah honestly and freely pours out his heart to God, but also while questioning why he is doing so. We lament before God our sorry and uncertain state as God’s servant, the church; but we don’t really expect a grand answer. We receive the sheer silence, and hear in that the question to ourselves, what are we doing here? And we live with that question. We might not experience the God we traditionally expected, who has all the answers and does mighty acts, the god the fundamentalists cling to and the secularists long ago dismissed as a fairytale. But in the honesty of our lament and self-questioning, there is a profound new experience of the mystery of God in this old place.

And then, and only then, after this uncomfortable silence, Elijah gets a perfectly clear message. “Then the Lord said to him,” and God basically tells him to get back to work. Go anoint these kings and the prophet Elisha, who will succeed you. Do your work and pass it on. And God reminds Elijah that he’s not really left alone and feeling sorry for himself. God has a remnant, 7000 in Israel, who are faithful, though Elijah doesn’t know who they are. Now Elijah isn’t to seek them out or prophesy to them, he’s to do his own work; but he should realize that there’s a remnant out there. Whatever becomes of Elijah’s work, God’s got plenty of accomplices.

So Elijah goes. Curiously enough, he doesn’t accomplish all those tasks that God told him. The work we are called to do is not set in stone, even though it comes from God. But Elijah was reminded that it’s in doing the work of God, out there, not here in the temple, our Mt. Horeb, that we are closest with God and best experience God. Maybe all we do here is to be quietly honest with ourselves, laying our burdens before God, not sure why or what to expect. It may not be for us to experience the flashy spiritual fireworks of wind, earthquakes, and fire. It doesn’t mean God is not in the silence. But let us also remember that God has other servants; there are people foreign to us, like the Gentiles were to the Jews, whom God will call and be present to in different ways, maybe with all the spirit and fire of our Pentecostal sisters and brothers, whether in Africa or South America or Holyoke. Let us not be so small to think the Gospel is not now theirs, perhaps more than it is still ours.

But let us continue to return to our own roots, seeking God in this our Mt. Horeb, meeting God where our honest questions and self-doubt intersect with mystery and silence, and readying ourselves to encounter God in the ordinary miracles of humanitarian service that we do together in a secular world.

Maybe this is the sign of Jonah for us repentant old Pharisees and Sadducees. Jonah was not that faithful; he was not confident in what God told him to do, and he did it begrudgingly. In fact, God had to bring Jonah into the very jaws of death to get him to do his job. But Jonah did it, and it worked, and God was glorified in a way no one expected was possible.