Sermon - Faith is a Journey

Part II of XI in the sermon series “What Happened to the Church after Jesus: The Untold Story.”

Preached on September 20, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC

Introduction:
Last week, John and I began a sermon series that will carry us until November about our Christian history. We are indebted to a book by the church historian Diana Butler Bass called A People’s History of Christianity. She claims, and we agree, that taking time to learn about the history of the Christian church is important, and well worth our attention. This is a historic year for this congregation, and we’ve enjoyed the celebration of our 200 years: the courage and vision of generations past. In this congregation, we have a good story to tell. But people don’t often feel that way about the history of the Christian church as a whole. Whether people are Christians or not, what they tend to remember most is the ugly side of church history: the Crusades that brought war to the Holy Land, the Spanish Inquisition, Witch trials, persecution of heretics, whether they were Protestant, Catholic, or non-Christian. There is a lot of ugly church history, and so for the most part we ignore our history and focus just on Jesus and the first generation of his followers: “sure, the church has messed it up, but if we go back to basics, we’ll do better,” we think. And that’s a real loss, because our history also has a story that has gone untold, a story of people who have sought to love God and to love their neighbors in courageous and creative ways. Next week, we will go back to the church in its early centuries and begin to work forward, telling the stories of those who have gone before us in faith and love. But we begin by looking at where we are today, and how we got here.

Dr. John began last week by describing how the church is changing in our generation, facing the challenges and opportunities of a time when even we Christians in Ohio are in close contact with people of other faiths and practices. Some parts of the church have responded to these changes with genuine curiosity and open minds, with respect and honor in addition to tolerance, while other parts of the church have become more insistent in their claims of absolute truth. Today we will look at what happened in the past few centuries that brought us to this point. This is the story of the church in the modern era, after the renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This is our story.

Prayer: O God of every age and generation, speak to us through the stories of those saints who have gone before us, who witnessed to the faith of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

In 1906, a minister and theologian by the name of Albert Schweitzer published a book titled The Quest for the Historical Jesus, in which he summarized two centuries worth of new theories about the real history of Jesus: how the historic Jesus of Nazareth might be different from the portrayal of Jesus Christ in the New Testament and in the theology of the church. This book tells us a lot about the way the church changed from the end of the medieval period to the 20th century. It started when the Roman Catholic church was challenged by the Protestant reformation, ending centuries of a single authoritative voice in western Christianity. In many ways this was a good development, but it also began a chaotic time in church history. With Protestants claiming that the Bible was the new authority for faith, Christians had to figure out “whose interpretation of the Bible?” and then, what happens when Christians disagreed, even to the point of persecution and war? Who was right?

Meanwhile, the successes of the scientific revolution in discovering new truths about the solar system, gravity, and disease, gave theologians the confidence that just as a careful study of the world could produce breakthroughs in understanding it, so a careful study of the scriptures and the history of 1st century Palestine could produce a true account of who Jesus really was, truer, perhaps, than what the church had been teaching about him. The quest for the historic Jesus: What did Jesus really say and what did that mean? Did he really perform those miracles, did his body really rise from the tomb, or are those symbolic stories, told to convey spiritual truths? You might recognize these as questions that remain active in the church today.

In 1906, Albert Schweitzer summarized the quest for the historical Jesus and added his own theory. As these theories were gaining prominence in the American church, there was resistance from a group of theologians whom we would call fundamentalists, because they decided on five fundamental beliefs as a test of proper Christian belief. They said that the Bible was inerrant, without error, and that Christians believed in the literal and historic truth of the virgin birth of Jesus, his miracles, and bodily resurrection. That was the beginning of Christian fundamentalism, one hundred years ago. To this day, the debate between the strict fundamentalist view and mainline theologies has been a divisive issue. But notice how recent it is. It is only in the modern era that people began to think that the most important aspect of being a Christian is the content of what you believe: whether you believe literally in certain things or believe them spiritually, in a more-than-literal way, as Biblical scholar Marcus Borg put it.

In the weeks to come, we will tell stories from the early church, the medieval church, and the church of the reformation, and I want to be clear that the Christians who came before us didn’t worry so much about the literal historic truth of our beliefs; they were concerned about the meaning of our beliefs. At Christmastime, they didn’t think about whether Mary was literally a virgin when Jesus was born. Instead, they focused on the meaning of that belief: a virgin birth means that God was powerfully present in Jesus of Nazareth. It means that God chooses to work with humble human lives like ours to do wonderful things. It didn’t even occur to them to ask whether the story was literally true or spiritually true, it was just true, because of what it meant. Although we think of fundamentalists as the conservatives in the modern debate, they are really a rather new development. What if we got beyond whether our beliefs ware literally accurate to a place where we are just believing them, and living out their meaning?

Keeping all of that in mind, our purpose in these sermons is to tell the good news about the untold story in the Christian Church. In the midst of debates over true interpretation of scripture; in the midst of persecutions and prejudice, there was another story. Let me tell you about a Congregationalist minister named Horace Bushnell, who spoke out in 1848 for an inclusive understanding among religious people. As Diana Butler Bass recounts, Bushnell thought that “Christian disagreement and sectarianism obscured the light of God’s love. While many of his colleagues were busy trying to prove that only their denomination was true, Bushnell argued the opposite point: that religious diversity does not undermine truth; rather, diversity can be seen as the pathway toward ‘a more complete whole.’” That’s a Congregationalist talking! Our heritage as Congregationalists has always been to emphasize Christian character in action rather than doctrine or tests of belief.

And what about Albert Schweitzer, who brought the debate about interpreting Jesus to prominence? It turns out that Schweitzer didn’t want to spend his life arguing about the truest interpretation of Jesus. He gave up his pulpit and his professorship and went back to school to become a doctor so that he and his wife could move to equatorial Africa to run a hospital, serving the poorest of the poor. And that is where he spent the rest of his life, not in debate, but in service. He did continue to write, and developed an ethical philosophy known as “reverence for life,” which affirms that all life is holy and worthy of our love and care. He once said that “example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”

Faith is a journey, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the journey has an end, a destination at which we have God all figured out, all our questions answered, and a faith that is without uncertainty. That kind of goal is the mistake of the modern era. I tell confirmation students that being confirmed as a Christian doesn’t mean that they fully understand Christianity. It doesn’t mean that all their questions are answered, because they should always have questions. The 20th century poet Rainier Maria Rilke said it best: “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” he wrote. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

The Christian life is not about having answers about the truth. It is, rather, about living our lives in the light of Christ. I believe that this is what was meant in this morning’s reading from the letter of James. “Who is wise and understanding among you?” he asks. “Let him show it by his good life.”

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”

Faith is a journey, and we are called to make this journey our whole lives.

The heritage of First Congregational Church of Tallmadge

When we study the history of our church, we trace a line that runs through churches in Connecticut, early Puritan Congregationalists in Boston, and the Pilgrims who established a community at Plymouth. All of our roots trace back to the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and to one eminent theologian of France known to us as John Calvin. If you were to ask the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or the founders of Tallmadge to identify their religion, they would tell you that they were Calvinists.

This year of our congregation’s bicentennial is also the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, and his legacy is in great need of restoring. It is unfortunate that Calvin, like the Puritans, has come to be viewed as overly strict, rigid, and harsh. With their plain churches, sparse liturgies, two hour sermons, and somber dress, our Calvinist ancestors may seem to us as if they were no fun. But these stereotypes are the result of a failure of historical imagination.

John Calvin and his spiritual descendants did not set out to be somber, but to be serious about celebrating the glory of God. There is a difference between being somber and being solemn. When they held themselves to high standards of action, it was in celebration of their freedom to bring order to their lives. In a disordered and chaotic world, having order was what they longed for. It was appealing to them to be able to structure their lives in a way that overcame the pitfalls of society, and left behind the status markers of wealth and privilege to live in a society of greater equality.

The Calvinists were serious and industrious – good workers – because they found dignity in their work, and their productivity allowed them the means to be generous toward their neighbors, strangers, and the poor. It was their delight to be of service to one another. It was also their delight to be educated, and to provide it to others. The idea of public school being available to everyone came from the Calvinists. The long sermons spoke to their hunger to learn, an activity formerly kept away from the middle and working classes.

If any of these attributes seem strange to modern America, it is not to the discredit of Calvinists. Perhaps it is easier for us to decide that they are just stuffy, holier-than-thou prigs than it is to celebrate their gifts, and allow their values to question the times in which we live.