It had been a hard year when the pilgrims celebrated the great feast that would become our Thanksgiving holiday. Their voyage from England had been delayed the previous year, putting them into Cape Cod at the beginning of a harsh winter, low on food, weak from the journey, and lacking shelter or any idea of where they were. Between the ocean crossing and that awful winter, half of the brave Mayflower pilgrims died. It had been a hard year - so much loss, and yet there was Governor William Bradford, calling for hunted fowl to provide a feast so that they might rejoice together.
How do we approach these holidays of rejoicing if it has been a hard year? How do we face a dinner table with fewer places set? How do we give thanks when our heart has so much grief?
These are difficult questions, but I take comfort in the fact that they are not new. Perhaps old Bradford was on to something. Maybe he knew that a time to rejoice for the blessings they had was an important balance for all their times of shared grief. In the midst of all they had lost, they also needed to remember what they had, and what they had gained. A feast of rejoicing didn’t mean that they were done with grief and sadness. It just meant that they weren’t going to allow their losses to be their only story. Their story was also one of blessings. They had gained a foothold on a new continent. Plymouth was beginning to feel like a home, and not just an emergency shelter.
In some ways, their blessings were the same as ours. They had food to eat for the winter ahead, and a dry place to sleep. They had each other – a community of support to share the burdens and sorrows. They had faith in God, and their faith helped them to remember that their lives were part of a grand history that began before their births and would continue past their deaths. It is a history of God faithfulness and love for all people. It is a promise that everything lost will finally be found; all that is broken will be made whole.
So let us rejoice and give thanks, even when the year has been hard. It won’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sermon - Faith and Works
Part IX of XI in the sermon series "What Happened to the Church After Jesus: The Untold Story."
Preached on November 8, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Dedicated to my stepson Sam, on his eighteenth birthday; and always to the glory of God.
When the founders of Tallmadge came here to create a community, they envisioned a town which would be ordered around worship, charity, and community. Our nation had recently won freedom from the British Empire, and the congregational church, like its puritan ancestors, saw their freedom as an opportunity to submit themselves to the order and discipline of the Christian faith.
Notice how that sounds so out of sync with the way we talk about freedom in modern America. For our ancestors, freedom was not freedom from order, but a freedom to create order amid the chaos of life. For them, discipline was not a negative word; they desired the disciplines of the faith, freely chosen to bring structure, stability, and maturity to their lives.
You can trace a line from the ancestors of this congregation right back to John Calvin and Martin Luther and the time of the reformation in Europe five centuries ago. At the time they lived, one of the great mistakes of the medieval church in Europe was a bad understanding of what divine justice meant. If we may generalize, the people of the medieval church thought divine justice meant that everyone was appointed to their proper place in life and was to observe their station. Some were born to feudal nobility, and others were born to serfdom, while the tradesmen and merchants held the middle class. No leveling of the playing field was necessary. Desegregation would have violated God’s plan. You didn’t expect more for yourself, and you handed some charity to those on the lower rungs of the ladder. That was justice.
They saw the radical equality among all people proclaimed in the scriptures as the promise of heaven, and the church held the keys to the kingdom of heaven. If you were baptized in the church, if you did penance and received the communion bread at mass, and if you were buried in the church yard, then your salvation was obtained. The sacraments of the church became the works of faith. People became adjusted to the inequalities of society, and the church became comfortable with its power. Martin Luther and the other leaders of the reformation argued that it is not for the church to decide who receives God’s salvation. Luther claimed that we are saved by faith alone, not by works.
Dr. John has already preached about all that came into place for the reformation to occur in the church, so let us move ahead to the era of our own church’s founders and let me ask an important question that almost sounds like a church history riddle: If the protestant reformation was about being saved by faith alone, and not by works, then why were our ancestors so keen on ordering their lives and their entire towns according to the discipline of faith?
We have some baggage left over from the reformation. Luther said that we are saved by faith and not works, and people have taken that to mean that we are only saved by believing in Christ, not by being a good person. You’re not saved by being good; you’re saved by believing. But that’s not what Luther said. When he said we are not saved by works, he meant the works of the church: we’re not saved by whether or not the church gave us the sacraments, or whether people paid indulgences for us after we had died. And when he said that we are saved by faith, faith means much more than belief in Christ, it means a way of Christ-like living: practicing compassion, mercy, and generosity. Those practices of faith are a part of what faith is. In the gospel of Matthew, 25th chapter, Jesus tells a parable with the basic point that those who practice with love toward others are the ones who draw closest to Christ.
The reformation helped us to rediscover the practices of faith, reminded us that divine justice is for this life as well as the life to come. They discovered that God’s will was not for a great imbalance of wealth between lords and serfs. Indeed, God’s justice demanded a greater equality among the people. And, eventually, the people of the reformed faith came to Tallmadge, to establish a community based on equality, justice, the acts of faith, because faith is what saves us.
We need the disciplined practices of faith because our world requires nothing less. In this past week, we have learned of great tragedies, as police piece together the history of rape and murder in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, and as we learn details of the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. What are we to do with such horrific tragedy? One response is to ignore it, hoping that it will go away. I can tell you that I have sought to spare myself from the news often this week, because we do risk overexposure from too much media. We need sanctuary from the images and details of violence. But we cannot go to the extreme of ignoring human suffering as if it does not exist in the same world as us.
Another response is that of pessimism: the world is a place of random chance and chaos, and bad news only confirms our overly-cynical outlook. We can’t make the world different, we might think, so the best we can do is to protect ourselves. And so we get tough, and we build prisons, and we give up on the complex and costly efforts of treatment, societal reform, and rehabilitation.
Needless to say, neither the willful ignorance of evil nor the fortress mentality match up very well with the call to spread the gospel of God’s love.
These are the times when the practices of our faith can see us through. Our faith never promises to be easy, or to spare us pain, but it will see us through, and it will lead to our salvation. I believe that when we seek to order our lives around the kingdom of God, then we have the strength for the tragedies of these days. An active faith has a set of disciplines, or practices, that are strong enough to meet even a tragic week such as this one.
First, we practice trust in Jesus Christ, remembering that God has faced the worst of human suffering, tragic violence, fear, and even death, and has conquered them all. We practice humility when we confess that our own capacity for evil differs in degree, not kind, from the evil committed by others, and so we practice mercy, asking God’s forgiveness for those who do not understand what they do. We practice our work for peace-making, to spare all people the trauma of war; we practice care for our communities, so that all people might have the support of many mothers and fathers looking out for their well-being; we practice justice, so that everyone might have shelter, treatment for illness, the reward of honest work, and daily bread. The practices of faith, the order and discipline of faith, does not promise to prevent all tragedy, nor to free our lives of hardship. Nothing can deliver a life of ease, contrary to what we are constantly being told. But in the face of a world that is both wonderful and tragic, the practice of our faith leads us to live with the depth and maturity that a complex world deserves.
When our lives are ordered around the acts of faith, tragedy serves as a renewed call to order all of society around justice, peace-making, and security for all people, just as it died for our ancestors in this very congregation. They had seen great tragedy in their own lives, but they trusted that God had a different vision for our lives.
It is said that someone once asked Martin Luther what he would do if he found out that the world was ending tomorrow. “Plant a tree,” he said. May no tragedy or hardship ever prevent us from the acts of faith that God is waiting to in us, in our communities, in the world. Trust the spirit of God working within you. Take heart when you are disheartened. Act in faith.
Preached on November 8, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Dedicated to my stepson Sam, on his eighteenth birthday; and always to the glory of God.
When the founders of Tallmadge came here to create a community, they envisioned a town which would be ordered around worship, charity, and community. Our nation had recently won freedom from the British Empire, and the congregational church, like its puritan ancestors, saw their freedom as an opportunity to submit themselves to the order and discipline of the Christian faith.
Notice how that sounds so out of sync with the way we talk about freedom in modern America. For our ancestors, freedom was not freedom from order, but a freedom to create order amid the chaos of life. For them, discipline was not a negative word; they desired the disciplines of the faith, freely chosen to bring structure, stability, and maturity to their lives.
You can trace a line from the ancestors of this congregation right back to John Calvin and Martin Luther and the time of the reformation in Europe five centuries ago. At the time they lived, one of the great mistakes of the medieval church in Europe was a bad understanding of what divine justice meant. If we may generalize, the people of the medieval church thought divine justice meant that everyone was appointed to their proper place in life and was to observe their station. Some were born to feudal nobility, and others were born to serfdom, while the tradesmen and merchants held the middle class. No leveling of the playing field was necessary. Desegregation would have violated God’s plan. You didn’t expect more for yourself, and you handed some charity to those on the lower rungs of the ladder. That was justice.
They saw the radical equality among all people proclaimed in the scriptures as the promise of heaven, and the church held the keys to the kingdom of heaven. If you were baptized in the church, if you did penance and received the communion bread at mass, and if you were buried in the church yard, then your salvation was obtained. The sacraments of the church became the works of faith. People became adjusted to the inequalities of society, and the church became comfortable with its power. Martin Luther and the other leaders of the reformation argued that it is not for the church to decide who receives God’s salvation. Luther claimed that we are saved by faith alone, not by works.
Dr. John has already preached about all that came into place for the reformation to occur in the church, so let us move ahead to the era of our own church’s founders and let me ask an important question that almost sounds like a church history riddle: If the protestant reformation was about being saved by faith alone, and not by works, then why were our ancestors so keen on ordering their lives and their entire towns according to the discipline of faith?
We have some baggage left over from the reformation. Luther said that we are saved by faith and not works, and people have taken that to mean that we are only saved by believing in Christ, not by being a good person. You’re not saved by being good; you’re saved by believing. But that’s not what Luther said. When he said we are not saved by works, he meant the works of the church: we’re not saved by whether or not the church gave us the sacraments, or whether people paid indulgences for us after we had died. And when he said that we are saved by faith, faith means much more than belief in Christ, it means a way of Christ-like living: practicing compassion, mercy, and generosity. Those practices of faith are a part of what faith is. In the gospel of Matthew, 25th chapter, Jesus tells a parable with the basic point that those who practice with love toward others are the ones who draw closest to Christ.
The reformation helped us to rediscover the practices of faith, reminded us that divine justice is for this life as well as the life to come. They discovered that God’s will was not for a great imbalance of wealth between lords and serfs. Indeed, God’s justice demanded a greater equality among the people. And, eventually, the people of the reformed faith came to Tallmadge, to establish a community based on equality, justice, the acts of faith, because faith is what saves us.
We need the disciplined practices of faith because our world requires nothing less. In this past week, we have learned of great tragedies, as police piece together the history of rape and murder in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, and as we learn details of the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. What are we to do with such horrific tragedy? One response is to ignore it, hoping that it will go away. I can tell you that I have sought to spare myself from the news often this week, because we do risk overexposure from too much media. We need sanctuary from the images and details of violence. But we cannot go to the extreme of ignoring human suffering as if it does not exist in the same world as us.
Another response is that of pessimism: the world is a place of random chance and chaos, and bad news only confirms our overly-cynical outlook. We can’t make the world different, we might think, so the best we can do is to protect ourselves. And so we get tough, and we build prisons, and we give up on the complex and costly efforts of treatment, societal reform, and rehabilitation.
Needless to say, neither the willful ignorance of evil nor the fortress mentality match up very well with the call to spread the gospel of God’s love.
These are the times when the practices of our faith can see us through. Our faith never promises to be easy, or to spare us pain, but it will see us through, and it will lead to our salvation. I believe that when we seek to order our lives around the kingdom of God, then we have the strength for the tragedies of these days. An active faith has a set of disciplines, or practices, that are strong enough to meet even a tragic week such as this one.
First, we practice trust in Jesus Christ, remembering that God has faced the worst of human suffering, tragic violence, fear, and even death, and has conquered them all. We practice humility when we confess that our own capacity for evil differs in degree, not kind, from the evil committed by others, and so we practice mercy, asking God’s forgiveness for those who do not understand what they do. We practice our work for peace-making, to spare all people the trauma of war; we practice care for our communities, so that all people might have the support of many mothers and fathers looking out for their well-being; we practice justice, so that everyone might have shelter, treatment for illness, the reward of honest work, and daily bread. The practices of faith, the order and discipline of faith, does not promise to prevent all tragedy, nor to free our lives of hardship. Nothing can deliver a life of ease, contrary to what we are constantly being told. But in the face of a world that is both wonderful and tragic, the practice of our faith leads us to live with the depth and maturity that a complex world deserves.
When our lives are ordered around the acts of faith, tragedy serves as a renewed call to order all of society around justice, peace-making, and security for all people, just as it died for our ancestors in this very congregation. They had seen great tragedy in their own lives, but they trusted that God had a different vision for our lives.
It is said that someone once asked Martin Luther what he would do if he found out that the world was ending tomorrow. “Plant a tree,” he said. May no tragedy or hardship ever prevent us from the acts of faith that God is waiting to in us, in our communities, in the world. Trust the spirit of God working within you. Take heart when you are disheartened. Act in faith.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Sermon - Hospitality
Part V of XI in the sermon series "What Happened to the Church After Jesus: The Untold Story."
Preached on October 11, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
When we look at the Christians in the first centuries after the life of Jesus, we see that hospitality was a core practice of the early church. Hospitality is a word that needs some refreshing, because when we think of hospitality today, we might think of the hospitality industry. The service of providing food, lodging, and care has become a commercial industry, given to those who can pay for it. Or we might think of hospitality suites, where people are wined and dined to facilitate business deals, secure clients, and form partnership. But hospitality in the early church meant providing food, clothing, shelter, and care to others with no desire for payment. They remembered the words of Jesus, who advised throwing a banquet not for people who would return the favor, but for those who had no hope of inviting you to a banquet at their home, if they even had a home. That is the religious practice of hospitality.
In the second century, during the years 165 to 180, an epidemic called the plague of Galen claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. While most healthy people fled from the cities where the plague advanced, Christians stayed behind. They followed the example of Christ by putting a priority on compassion, even under the threat of death. Because Christians were often persecuted in the Roman Empire during those first three centuries, many Christian martyrs had already shown that they valued their faith with their very lives, and did not fear death, for they trusted in the resurrection of Christ. In the same way, Christians were the ones who risked their lives among patients of the plague to provide them comfort from pain, regardless of their religion, class, or status as a slave or free citizen. Hospitality for the early church was not white tablecloths and crystal. It was meeting basic humans needs and sharing gladly their meals and homes with all levels of society.
Hospitality is the answer to the historical question of how a religion could grow so dramatically within a society that persecuted it and forced it to operate so often quietly in people’s homes and secret meeting places. The sociologist Rodney Stark wrote that Christianity spread because it “prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.” Or, as translated by Diana Butler Bass, early Christians did “risky, compelling, and good things that helped people.”
This is a story that has continued throughout Christian history. In this congregation, we practice hospitality to those who cannot repay through the missions of shelters, soup kitchens, and food banks. In this building, we seek to practice the hospitality of welcome, of worship and ministries that are open and inclusive, accessible and inviting. And when we go forth from this building we seek to bring hospitality through the interfaith hospitality network, mission tours, and the many places where you give your time, talents, and dollars to others because of the spirit of Christ within you.
In the early church, hospitality was held as the primary virtue. At a time when Christians were bearing witness to their faith even in the face of death, their devotion was to a way of life that offered a radical alternative to the way of the world around them. People converted to Christianity in droves not because of the inspiring witness of the martyrs, but because of the church’s hospitality. How can you stamp out a religion by force and violence when it is growing by generosity and graciousness?
Then everything changed for the Christian church. The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 313. He rebuilt the city of Byzantium and renamed it for himself: Constantinople. Today it is known as Istanbul, in modern Turkey. There he built the Hagia Sophia, the “Church of Holy Wisdom,” which was and still is one of the most beautiful and ornate churches in the world. In a very short time, Christians found themselves moving from meeting in secret to worshiping in the most magnificent buildings of the cities. They changed from being an alternative minority within the empire, one that did not serve in the military service or in any way acknowledge the authority of the emperor, to being the religion of the empire and a requirement of all who served in the military.
Christians found themselves the beneficiaries of the empire’s wealth and influence, and, in some ways, the church has never recovered. In the parts of the world where Christians have held political and material power, the kingdoms and nations of Europe and our own nation, we have a long tradition of altering the Christian message so as to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. It’s that old maxim: power corrupts. This corruption is one part of our Christian history. But there is also another story, the often untold story that we are seeking to tell in this sermon series.
Let me give you one example. In the year 397, the bishop of Constantinople died, and a priest from the city of Antioch was called to succeed him. His name was John, and he was called John Chrysostom, which means “golden-mouthed” in honor for his great gift as a preacher.
John Chrysostom came to be Bishop of Constantinople eighty-five years after the conversion of the empire, and he preached a message of returning to the way of life among Christians before they had the power and wealth of the empire. He preached a sermon on the passage from Acts that we heard today, which told how the earliest Christians did not hold possessions and wealth privately, but shared them among the community. John preached a return to this practice, saying that “if this were done now, we should live more pleasant lives, both the rich and the poor. What abundance there should be!” John Chrysostom envisioned the Christian church using its newfound influence to change the distribution of wealth among the people, easing the difference between rich and poor, as they had done in the early years, when the church attracted so many people by its hospitality.
John Chrysostom saw the church beginning to grow complacent in its new condition of power. He preached to his city that “it is not for lack of miracles that the church is stagnant; it is because we have forsaken the angelic life of Pentecost, and fallen back on private property.” The life of Pentecost is the way of living described in the book of Acts, when they shared all things in common.
It seems to me that we are very much like the post-Constantine church in this country. Unlike the early centuries of the church, when they had no say or power over the governance of the empire, Christians in America have a say and a vote about how to shape the society we live in. I do not believe that we should put the church in charge of government, because that has been a disaster ever since the year 313. But I do believe that our faith calls us to see the world through the lens of hospitality, and our faith reminds us that our resources are to be shared with others as they have need. We do this on a small scale, individually and as a congregation through our budget, our programs, and our ministries, much like the pre-Constantine church. But when we also have influence over our governance, we can work to share hospitality on a large-scale level in our society, by making our will known, by electing those who will help to direct our nation’s wealth to everyone.
The church in America has a history of promoting hospitality at the comprehensive national level. It was Christians who promoted public education and public libraries as a benefit to all people, regardless of class or race or ability to pay. Christians led the movement to abolish slavery for decades before the President signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and later, Christians led the cause to end segregation and secure real civil rights for all races. Christians have been advocates for social safety nets to keep our elders out of poverty by the creation of social security when the Great Depression wiped out the savings of those who had worked and saved their whole lives, and for our society’s commitment to provide health care for our elders, veterans, and the poorest among us. Now we find ourselves in the midst of decisions about extending health care benefits to a much greater number of the vulnerable members of our society, with the costs to be shared by society as a whole, and especially by the wealthiest among us. I believed that my faith calls me to support this effort, and I see in it a reflection of the Christians in the book of Acts, and the 2nd century Christians who provided care during the plague of Galen.
Hospitality was at the heart of the early church when it existed tenuously within the hostile Roman Empire. And then when emperor Constantine empowered Christianity as the religion of the realm, Christians faced a great opportunity as well as a great temptation. Some gave into the temptation and twisted theology to justify their power and status over others; but there were also many who found their new influence and resources to be an opportunity to bring more hospitality to more people, to create equality of care among all people. This is our legacy, and this is our vision.
Preached on October 11, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
When we look at the Christians in the first centuries after the life of Jesus, we see that hospitality was a core practice of the early church. Hospitality is a word that needs some refreshing, because when we think of hospitality today, we might think of the hospitality industry. The service of providing food, lodging, and care has become a commercial industry, given to those who can pay for it. Or we might think of hospitality suites, where people are wined and dined to facilitate business deals, secure clients, and form partnership. But hospitality in the early church meant providing food, clothing, shelter, and care to others with no desire for payment. They remembered the words of Jesus, who advised throwing a banquet not for people who would return the favor, but for those who had no hope of inviting you to a banquet at their home, if they even had a home. That is the religious practice of hospitality.
In the second century, during the years 165 to 180, an epidemic called the plague of Galen claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. While most healthy people fled from the cities where the plague advanced, Christians stayed behind. They followed the example of Christ by putting a priority on compassion, even under the threat of death. Because Christians were often persecuted in the Roman Empire during those first three centuries, many Christian martyrs had already shown that they valued their faith with their very lives, and did not fear death, for they trusted in the resurrection of Christ. In the same way, Christians were the ones who risked their lives among patients of the plague to provide them comfort from pain, regardless of their religion, class, or status as a slave or free citizen. Hospitality for the early church was not white tablecloths and crystal. It was meeting basic humans needs and sharing gladly their meals and homes with all levels of society.
Hospitality is the answer to the historical question of how a religion could grow so dramatically within a society that persecuted it and forced it to operate so often quietly in people’s homes and secret meeting places. The sociologist Rodney Stark wrote that Christianity spread because it “prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.” Or, as translated by Diana Butler Bass, early Christians did “risky, compelling, and good things that helped people.”
This is a story that has continued throughout Christian history. In this congregation, we practice hospitality to those who cannot repay through the missions of shelters, soup kitchens, and food banks. In this building, we seek to practice the hospitality of welcome, of worship and ministries that are open and inclusive, accessible and inviting. And when we go forth from this building we seek to bring hospitality through the interfaith hospitality network, mission tours, and the many places where you give your time, talents, and dollars to others because of the spirit of Christ within you.
In the early church, hospitality was held as the primary virtue. At a time when Christians were bearing witness to their faith even in the face of death, their devotion was to a way of life that offered a radical alternative to the way of the world around them. People converted to Christianity in droves not because of the inspiring witness of the martyrs, but because of the church’s hospitality. How can you stamp out a religion by force and violence when it is growing by generosity and graciousness?
Then everything changed for the Christian church. The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 313. He rebuilt the city of Byzantium and renamed it for himself: Constantinople. Today it is known as Istanbul, in modern Turkey. There he built the Hagia Sophia, the “Church of Holy Wisdom,” which was and still is one of the most beautiful and ornate churches in the world. In a very short time, Christians found themselves moving from meeting in secret to worshiping in the most magnificent buildings of the cities. They changed from being an alternative minority within the empire, one that did not serve in the military service or in any way acknowledge the authority of the emperor, to being the religion of the empire and a requirement of all who served in the military.
Christians found themselves the beneficiaries of the empire’s wealth and influence, and, in some ways, the church has never recovered. In the parts of the world where Christians have held political and material power, the kingdoms and nations of Europe and our own nation, we have a long tradition of altering the Christian message so as to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. It’s that old maxim: power corrupts. This corruption is one part of our Christian history. But there is also another story, the often untold story that we are seeking to tell in this sermon series.
Let me give you one example. In the year 397, the bishop of Constantinople died, and a priest from the city of Antioch was called to succeed him. His name was John, and he was called John Chrysostom, which means “golden-mouthed” in honor for his great gift as a preacher.
John Chrysostom came to be Bishop of Constantinople eighty-five years after the conversion of the empire, and he preached a message of returning to the way of life among Christians before they had the power and wealth of the empire. He preached a sermon on the passage from Acts that we heard today, which told how the earliest Christians did not hold possessions and wealth privately, but shared them among the community. John preached a return to this practice, saying that “if this were done now, we should live more pleasant lives, both the rich and the poor. What abundance there should be!” John Chrysostom envisioned the Christian church using its newfound influence to change the distribution of wealth among the people, easing the difference between rich and poor, as they had done in the early years, when the church attracted so many people by its hospitality.
John Chrysostom saw the church beginning to grow complacent in its new condition of power. He preached to his city that “it is not for lack of miracles that the church is stagnant; it is because we have forsaken the angelic life of Pentecost, and fallen back on private property.” The life of Pentecost is the way of living described in the book of Acts, when they shared all things in common.
It seems to me that we are very much like the post-Constantine church in this country. Unlike the early centuries of the church, when they had no say or power over the governance of the empire, Christians in America have a say and a vote about how to shape the society we live in. I do not believe that we should put the church in charge of government, because that has been a disaster ever since the year 313. But I do believe that our faith calls us to see the world through the lens of hospitality, and our faith reminds us that our resources are to be shared with others as they have need. We do this on a small scale, individually and as a congregation through our budget, our programs, and our ministries, much like the pre-Constantine church. But when we also have influence over our governance, we can work to share hospitality on a large-scale level in our society, by making our will known, by electing those who will help to direct our nation’s wealth to everyone.
The church in America has a history of promoting hospitality at the comprehensive national level. It was Christians who promoted public education and public libraries as a benefit to all people, regardless of class or race or ability to pay. Christians led the movement to abolish slavery for decades before the President signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and later, Christians led the cause to end segregation and secure real civil rights for all races. Christians have been advocates for social safety nets to keep our elders out of poverty by the creation of social security when the Great Depression wiped out the savings of those who had worked and saved their whole lives, and for our society’s commitment to provide health care for our elders, veterans, and the poorest among us. Now we find ourselves in the midst of decisions about extending health care benefits to a much greater number of the vulnerable members of our society, with the costs to be shared by society as a whole, and especially by the wealthiest among us. I believed that my faith calls me to support this effort, and I see in it a reflection of the Christians in the book of Acts, and the 2nd century Christians who provided care during the plague of Galen.
Hospitality was at the heart of the early church when it existed tenuously within the hostile Roman Empire. And then when emperor Constantine empowered Christianity as the religion of the realm, Christians faced a great opportunity as well as a great temptation. Some gave into the temptation and twisted theology to justify their power and status over others; but there were also many who found their new influence and resources to be an opportunity to bring more hospitality to more people, to create equality of care among all people. This is our legacy, and this is our vision.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
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.
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.
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