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LINKS TO THE SERMONS |
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| Heritage Sunday Nineteen-sixty-eight was forty years ago. It was the pivotal year in the post-WWII twentieth century and one of the water-shed years in history. I once did a presentation for a convention of Air Force officers where I contended that anyone who couldn’t remember 1968 lives with an entirely different world view than those who do – we might as well be from different planets. In 1968 the Apollo astronauts circled the moon for the first time, “Hair” premiered on Broadway, “2001, A Space Odyssey” was playing at the movies, in Vietnam the Mi Lei massacre happened, the Democratic Convention turned into a riot, Bobby Kennedy was shot and, on my birthday, Martin Luther King. That’s not all. 1968 was the year my wife was born, and The United Methodist Church. I remember it vividly; it was my second year in seminary. The Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren were coming together to form a new church, the United Methodists. The EUBs were supposed to bring a renewed fever and evangelistic purpose to the stuffy old Methodists. The Methodists would provide the stability and financial security that comes with size. That was what we hoped for as we came together at the uniting General Conference in 1968 in Dallas, a mere twenty miles from this year’s General Conference that celebrated the Church’s fortieth anniversary. But dreams and reality don’t always mesh as they should in spite of our prayers and speeches and the gusto with which I sang the hymns in the conference choir in that historic event in Dallas in 1968. In the ten years that followed the union, the new church lost more members than the EUB Church had. The decline continues to the present day and the great 11.5 million member denomination we created now stands at less than 8 million and subtracting. But take heart, we are still the second largest Protestant denomination in America – a dubious accomplishment since it is only because the other denominations are declining as fast as we are. The exponential growth in churches is not in the denominations; they proudly identify themselves as non-denominational as if that means they are free from contamination. And the church shopping public seems to agree as they flock to those churches while we so called mainline denominations continue to languish. It must be hard to be a bishop and to have to put a happy face on the dismal statistics. But in the most recent issue of the “Circuit West,” our bishop has attempted just that, picking just the right data and assembling it in such a way that it would make the Clinton campaign blush. Her article was a gallant attempt to satisfactorily answer a rhetorical question of her own asking but one we have all advanced. She said it well; let me quote. “After 40 years in the wilderness of powerful cultural, economic, political, ecological and global forces, we stand at the river Jordan.” That was a strange choice of metaphor since the River Jordan is a universal symbol for death. One of the Wesley hymns we sang today asks the question, “Are we yet alive.” We used to sing it at Annual Conference with great gusto but not so much any more. When we do sing it, it is with a certain introspect that betrays an uncertainty about the answer. The bishop’s quote continues: “on the far side (of the Jordan) is the promise land, the ‘Kingdom come’ that we pray for daily. In the plainest words, it is the future, and the question is, what will be our place in it? Will we have a place in it?” I think to answer that question by trotting out statistics that help build a case for the possibility that things aren’t really so bad, is to miss the opportunity to hear the new word God may be speaking to us – a new role and commission for us under the giant umbrella called Christianity – a role that perhaps only we can play by virtue of our maturity borne of long history and the fact that in spite of struggles and decline, we are yet alive. Yes there is a place for the Methodists in that Promised Land called the future, but if we are going to take that place, there are some things we are going to have to give up. We don’t have the clout we once had, political, economic or social. We have to give up that fantasy. People are not going to flock to us because of our brand name; we aren’t Coka Cola. We are Ford in a world dominated by Toyota – maybe we are an Edsel. Maybe we are becoming not even Ford but Studebaker. We are not what is happening – we are mainline but not mainstream – we are not what the average church shopper goes looking for – we are not the emerging church. The mainstream church is not just non-denominational but anti-denominational. It operates more like a benevolent dictatorship than the democracies the mainline denominations tried to establish. The mainstream church shuns infant baptism though the church has practiced it for 2000 years. The mainstream church tends to equate the blessing of God with economic prosperity. The mainstream church cares more about what happens after this life than securing for the downtrodden the abundant life God wants for his people in the here and now. The mainstream church adores, almost worships the Bible but only lets it speak on certain subjects. It will not let it speak a troubling, challenging, dangerous and critical word. The mainstream church requires uniformity of belief, political opinion and even the language that is used to speak of holy things and personal religious experiences. The emerging church thinks the biggest threat facing the church is radical Islam – The Bible thinks it is radical self-righteousness. The new mainstream church certainly wouldn’t tolerate a preacher like me. These are not criticisms – the new emerging churches are the hope of Christianity, like we were one hundred and two hundred years ago. But they are young and immature – they desperately need the seasoning and direction we have to offer. I agree with bishop Swenson, there is a place for us in the future, but it’s not the place we had hoped for and hoped to occupy again – it is a new role and an infinitely more difficult one, that of what the Bible calls the righteous remnant. It crops up all through the scriptures. After the flood, Noah and his family were the righteous remnant charged with the task of not just repopulating the earth but making the knowledge and righteousness of God as ubiquitous as the water that had covered the earth. Joseph was sent into exile in Egypt so that a righteous remnant from the children of Abraham might be preserved through the famine. And the righteous remnant referred to in both the Isaiah and Jeremiah readings for today, was that group taken captive when the Assyrians and the Babylonians destroyed the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. But a hand full returned under Ezra and Neiamiah to rebuild the city, and the temple and the true faith in Yahweh. The righteous remnant; that was them and I believe that is us. The Christian community needs us more than ever, the righteous remnant, to make the whole Christian community wider and deeper more diverse more uncomfortable and less self satisfied. We remind them of our traditions and the lessons from our past and what we are called to be and do. The church exists to make disciples of Christ: not to fill stadiums, warehouses and former movie theaters, or provide platforms for super-star preachers – disciples are made one at a time, not all from the same mold but all set free to be who God created them to be, set free by the grace of our universal Lord. It’s not about the spectacular show and trendy technology. It’s about the call to joyous discipleship and being made alive and new in the Spirit. It’s about picking up the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of healing and hope and of calling. Jesus called his disciples one at a time, then nurtured them, taught them, and when they were ready, sent them out – to do just as he had, find them everywhere in the world, go to where they were and issue the invitation, patiently nurture them, pray for them, help them identify their God given gifts, polish those gifts and give them back in ministry. By the amazing grace and efficacy of the process I just described, we all stand in the faith today. Maybe we aren’t called to be big anymore. Maybe we never were. But we are called to play a roll in the emerging church, what Jesus called the leaven of the lump – yeast. In his one verse parable he said the Kingdom was like that, and transforming the world into the kingdom image was not done by big things but little things – like mustard seeds an yeast. It’s amazing really that Jesus used that image. Yeast, leaven, is a kind of impurity. That’s why on holy occasions the Jews ate unleavened bread. Leven is spoilage. In the epistles the image is used negatively, like we would say “one rotten apple will spoil the whole batch.” But Jesus used it to describe his disciples, and the faith. You get just a little yeast in a big pile of dough and the whole thing will rise. That’s our new job, not to be big but to help the whole Christian loaf rise. The righteous remnant, the salt of the earth (just
a little bit makes the whole meal taste better), the leaven of the
lump; some may see us as an impure contamination in the Christian
cake because we embrace diversity of opinion and experience, but
because of us the whole bath will rise to the maturity God desires.
It’s who we are, our heritage, not for just forty years but
for two centuries. Now we must offer the power and wisdom of that
heritage to our Christian brothers and sisters who need the yeast
and salt we have share, because that’s who we are –
the lean and mean manifestation of the Christ’s Church for
the 21st century. |
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