Making the Faith Our Own
I remember the exact moment I knew First Church was the right place for me. The night before I preached the candidating sermon upon which the congregation would decide whether or not to call me to be their pastor, the people held a meet and greet. When I got my first look at the potluck table, I knew. On the table, side by side, were Dibbie’s homemade lemon squares, and takeout sushi. I knew this was a church that could treasure the old and welcome the new. “I’m home,” I said to myself.
We lost our sister Virginia Saunders this week. She wasn’t young, and still, she wasn’t ready to die. We also weren’t ready for her to die. There are some churches in which the young people might breathe a secret sigh of relief when an old person dies. There might be inchoate thoughts in the subconscious, relief and even joy at the old making way for the young, freeing up resources, freeing up power and the possibility of trying new things. But here, when one of our elders dies, we know what we’ve lost. We don’t know the whole of it, but when the lemon squares start to disappear from the table, we realize more and more that the new generation of Christians is on their own, that our continuity with our past, theological, political and culinary, is going away. We are on our own—have we learned enough from our ancestors? Do we know how to lead, teach, pray, testify to the Good News?
Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is a young one. It is exactly 52 years old this year. We are, ironically, part of the oldest denomination in the U.S. as well, the Congregationalists, who came here as the Puritans and Pilgrims to escape religious persecution from the Church of England. John Robinson, one of their leaders, famously said “There is more truth and light yet to break forth from God’s holy word,” meaning, the Christian religion is a work in progress. Centuries later, the United Church of Christ echoed this testimony when it affirmed in its Constitution, “the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.”
“The responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own.” Do you feel it, people? Can we do this thing?
When I was a student minister, I worked at a juvenile hall as part of my training. Some of the boys, the boys with the most serious transgressions, lived on the locked unit, an unholy place that was essentially a prison. When I went to visit them to do Bible study, I’d offer to bring them a Bible for their very own. Several boys in particular said they’d like one, but said, “Make sure it’s the Holy Bible.” I didn’t know what they meant. I brought all kinds of Bibles: strawberry-leather gilt-edged, hippie-era with fake denim cover, in all kinds of modern translations. They’d flip through, read a few words, shake their heads sorrowfully. Not the Holy Bible.
On my next visit, one of the boys, Kenny, told me he’d scored one. A Holy Bible. He held it out in reverence. It was a King James version. Ahhh. The Holy Bible. “But can you understand what it’s saying?” I asked. They looked at me like I was entirely missing the point. In their minds, the less they understand it, the more power it must have. These were boys negotiating their way to manhood amidst violence and degradation; spooling their lives out in cinder block cells. I had failed to see that what they needed first was a taste of the transcendent—of awe, of reverence, of magic. But I was unwilling to let go of the urge to give them practical instruction to live a different sort of life than the one they had been living. From that day on, I brought the boys each two Bibles—a King James, so they could feel the mystical power of the Word, and an NRSV, so they could get some practical guidance in how to make their way in the world.
You heard the story from the book of Acts today. The Church of Jesus is at the same sort of cultural crossroads at which we find ourselves. It’s a small but growing Jewish sect that is struggling to decide what it means to be a member of it. How are they to navigate in the wider world, to be in it but not of it? Are they still, in fact, Jews, or are they becoming something else entirely? At this point, not a single person has ever been called a Christian—that won’t happen until Chapter 12, and we are only in Chapter 11 of Acts. Church isn’t as yet a place—there were no buildings called churches; but the word we have come to know of as church, ekklesia, from which we get words like ecclesiastical, meant gathering, assembly, or, more literally, a people “called out.”
In the midst of this, Peter, and Paul, and Philip and Steven and many many others travelled around Asia Minor teaching people about the rabbi Jesus, his message and his works. Up to this point, they only taught other Jews. But there are some non-Jews, Gentiles, who are eavesdropping, and want to get in on the game. This was repulsive to the followers of Jesus, who held themselves aloof and apart. They had their own rules and customs, which made them distinct and special to God, the most important among these customs, were circumcision and keeping kosher. This seems so antiquated to our modern minds, not to mention, exclusionary. It’s hard for us to understand what the big deal was about sharing a dinner table with a pork-eating Gentile, why Jews were so disgusted by other Jews who did it. It might help to think of it like sleeping around, and then bragging about it at coffee hour.
Cornelius was one such Gentile who wanted to eat around with Peter and the other Jewish Christians. Cornelius was a man who was very much in the world. He was a military leader of the Italian cohort, the repressive Roman regime, and his work had made him very wealthy. His slaves had slaves. And now he summons Peter, to talk about religion. Can we understand how strange and appalling this is? Think about it like this: a wealthy white American vice-president of Blackwater, calling a poor brown Muslim cleric to his gated community in suburban Iraq, to ask him about his faith.
Peter might have been as disgusted as an observant Jew should have been at such a request, but God had sent him a timely vision, in which God says, “What I have made clean, you must not call profane.” In other words, God affirms the responsibility of Peter, the head of the Church, to make the faith his own in this generation. Peter went to Cornelius, and they talked, and Peter was converted as much as Cornelius was. What he says is: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” These words struck me to the core: “anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” The two things that matter most to God are: reverence, and right action. These are like the two axes to the Cross: the vertical is reverence, reaching toward heaven, acknowledging the Divine; the horizontal, is right action, reaching toward one another in compassionate love.
As the Church grows older, as the Christians in it move through the centuries, we have a responsibility. That responsibility is to learn our history and orthodoxy, and at the same time, to live deeply in the world as it is, to make sense of where these meet. Our responsibility is to translate the Good News for those who have never heard it, speaking their language, making sense of the ancient faith in a fresh context. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Just think about what the last 52 years of the UCC have brought us:
~A revolution in how we communicate via technology
~A revolution in sexuality, including reproductive rights, fertility and homosexuality
~A revolution in how we travel, and how far
~A revolution in how deeply we can see both out into the universe, and into the building blocks of Creation
~A dramatic rise in single-parent families, and the number of families where two parents work
~A more dramatic demarcation between rich and poor, and a deeper relationship between the labor of the poor and the wealth of the rich
Or, in more precise terms:
Facebook, text messaging, IVF, abortion on demand, private jets, the space race, stem-cell research, Wal-Mart, factory farming, far-flung, frantic families who worker more hours for fewer wages, just to name a few.
What does Christianity have to say about any of these? In the United Church of Christ, we have a general Synod, a national meeting, every two years, and this body will reflect on issues of grave importance to modern life. Four of our men, Ian, and Jason, and Branden and Joe, are all going to Synod this year, and will bring back the wisdom of the whole with them. But our church has flat leadership—no Pope, no Collegium—which means we can’t just leave it up to Synod delegates every two years. We have a responsibility in between times, to figure it out for ourselves. Making the faith our own doesn’t mean “keeping up with the times.” Nor does it mean putting a strawberry leather or a denim cover on your Bible, or reading it with Kindle II. It means blowing the cover off the Word. It means blowing the walls off the church. And you are the Church that in this generation will make the faith its own—or will fail to.
Why is this so urgent? What does it really matter? It is urgent because the generation of people who are coming into power, young people ages 18 to 29, see the Christian church as increasingly irrelevant, and worse. Christianity is failing now more than ever to inspire people to reverence for God, and right action with one another, and with Creation.
Some of you are holding a little piece of paper with a word on it in your hands. They are not nice words. They are names that many young people, outsiders to the Christian faith, call us. I want you to hear those words and feel the impact of those words right now:
Antigay
Antichoice
Angry
Violent
Illogical
Proselytizing
Coercive
Nostalgic
Lukewarm
Empire Builders
Sheltered
Too Political
Boring
Judgmental
Hypocritical
Do you feel your defensiveness rise up? Do you suddenly want to prove how good we are, how pro-gay, peace-loving, hip, open and tolerant to those who would throw those stones? And yet, some of those names are founded in truth. The Christian church has been all of those things. But our work is not to win the approval of our detractors, to be liked. Our job is to make the ancient faith, a faith durable and beautiful, oriented toward reverence and right-action, to make this faith relevant to modern times: to speak our truth in words people can understand, a truth that will set people free, if they choose to be freed.
Over the next five weeks of Lent, we will gather every Wednesday, downstairs. We will pray and sing in the Chapel. We will break bread, and eat around with whoever walks through the door. And then, we will talk about how to make this faith our own in our generation. It is not an intellectual exercise, tidy and sterile. It is not something we will do for those poor people who have no faith, like we do. We’ll do it for ourselves, to deepen our own sense of reverence and right action, and then we will do our best to be the Church in this generation: not a building full of people, huddled together, but a book with the cover blown off, a church with the walls blown off, a people called out to speak with our lives.
