Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, November 27, 2016, "Behaving Badly"

Advent A1 OL BFC 2016

Isaiah 1:10-28; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 42

November 27, 2016

          In chapter 1 of the great prophet Isaiah, God entreats us, “Come now, let us argue it out,” says the Holy One, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.  Come now, let us argue it out.”  Never has a singular passage made it so clear that what God wants is relationship with us.  Isaiah, the prophet, believes that God has a case against the people, but enjoining the people, God wants to hear their side of the story.  “Tell me, so I understand,” God seems to be saying, “help me figure out how you could have gotten it so wrong.  Don’t hold back.  Don’t pull punches.  If you have something to say, make your case.”

          Some scholars believe that the first chapter of Isaiah is the prologue for all of the latter prophets, prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all who spoke from the Eighth Century B.C.E. forward.[1]  All of these prophets understood judgment and hope as the two sides of one coin.  This same understanding is part of the gospel text we have with John the Baptist preaching repentance to the people in the Jordan River.  Repentance is not about hell-fire and damnation.  Repentance is about purification leading to a different set of values, a different way of being in the world that shows we have chosen a different path. 

          These prophets hear the same message from the people in protest, “But we are the chosen people.  We are the people of Judah and Jerusalem.  We are the people who regularly go to church and do our religious duty.  We are the ancestors of Abraham and Sarah.”  To the prophet, these are empty titles which do not recognize what God truly desires—to protect the weakest in their communities, the widows and the orphans, by doing justice.  I know I have preached it several times before, but I believe it is worth hearing again and again.  There are several places where God refuses the people’s worship because they continue to do injustice.  But nowhere in the Bible, absolutely nowhere, does God refuse the people’s justice because of the imperfect way they pray, or sing hymns, or do worship.  It is one of the most common themes throughout these Latter Prophets:  God refuses the people’s worship because of their unwillingness or inability to do justice. 

Isaiah clearly states in this passage that God will not accept the worship practices, religious observances or festivals, because of their violence and injustice.  Their hands are full of blood.

John the Baptist, much like the Hebrews walking in the wilderness, does not depend on the Roman meal for his food.  He practices repentance.  He eats locusts and wild honey as a way of showing his independence from Rome and dependence on God.  John screams along Jordan’s shore, that the axe is being laid to the root of the tree because the whole system is sick and diseased.  No good or real fruit can come from running the world in this way.  In this judgment, asking for people to show their repentance, this is our hope.  We recognize that we cannot re-make the world without God and God will not re-make the world without us.

As we begin this Advent season, we remember early followers of Christ who believed God was acting to continue the story of salvation during a dreadful time in human history.  They created a narrative that ran counter to the violence and death and injustice and night they found all around them.  Dawn was breaking and they knew they were to pay attention to the breaking of that dawn.  They were practicing repentance.

Rev. Grant Gallup said of early Christians:

Our believing ancestors thought of themselves as the subjects of their own history, for they were The Story and they were the tellers of the tale.  They were wide awake dreamers of wonderful dreams, in a world of nightmares, and they were awake to tell the dreams.  They brought light into a world of shadows.  They brought hope into a world that had lost its hope and lost its way.  They had been told by the God who visited them in Jesus that they were Light in the world.

 . . . God saves us not as a pinchpenny saves coins but as a mother saves her child from danger and delivers it to safety and health and maturity and responsibility . . . [2] 

I love that line.  “God saves us not as a pinchpenny saves coins, but as a mother saves her child from danger and delivers that child to safety and health and maturity and responsibility.”  God does not save us to continue the same violence and death and injustice and night.  God saves us to be the fruit of a different tree.  God saves us to be people who bring health and maturity and responsibility to our community and our world.  We are to be the actors not the acted upon, the subjects of salvation not the objects done in by the violence, death, injustice, and night that surrounds us.  We cannot save the world without God, and God will not save the world without us.

          Too often, in the church, we have acted too courteously when God has asked us to be lovingly confrontational, too polite when God has asked us to protest in truth, too respectable when God has asked us to be resolute in seeking out justice for the most vulnerable among us.  “Come, let us argue it out!” God says, the Holy God who desires not platitudes or a fake politeness, but a real relationship with us.

          Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard University since 1974, spoke at the United Church of Christ General Synod for our 50^th Anniversary.  Speaking as an American Baptist in the mist of New England Congregational heritage, a heritage that is part of Billings First Congregational Church, Rev. Dr. Gomes showed his appreciation for the United Church of Christ, saying that we have led out on every important social movement in this republic.  But, he said, one of the greatest things we could do in our own time is “to overturn the climate of low expectations” in mainline churches.  People in communities like Billings have very respectable expectations of local UCC churches, and it is our job to turn these respectable expectations upside down. 

          He went on.  We give the occasional heifer (referring to the Heifer Project), have the funeral for the respectable person, every once in while marry the person not so respected.  “Here is a chance,” Gomes said with a smile, “for a great church to behave badly.”

          As Congressperson John Lewis said after his sit-in on the Congressional floor to protest the lack of collegial courage around gun violence, “Sometimes you have to find a way to get in the way.  Or get in trouble.  Good trouble.  Necessary trouble.”[3]

          What do we think of that wild-eyed prophet calling for repentance out by the Jordan River, eating bugs and wild honey for lunch?  Do we think he cared more about individual respectability or the world’s salvation?

          Is it possible in a United Church of Christ Church, that our best days are ahead of us?  Many mainline churches have a habit of acting like their heydays are all in the past.  As in, “Oh, you should have been here back then.”

          Gomes ended his speech by wondering aloud whether all the history of the United Church of Christ was leading up till now, a time for us to act with conviction and character . . . with a hope that God is still acting and speaking.  What Rev. Dr. Gomes wanted to know is, “Are we still listening?”

          “Dare it be said,” he challenged, “dare it be said, that the last 50 years (the whole of our life as a denomination), the last 50 years were mere prologue for what is to happen, for whatever role you were meant to play?  Dare it be said that your founders simply began what it falls to you to carry on and complete?”[4]

          Dare it be said that all of those people who began Billings First Congregational Church, that they simply began this incredible project that now falls on us to carry on and complete?  As we look at the violence, injustice, night, and death that surround us in this time, a time not unlike the time of Christ, we may be the Light of the world, the subjects of our own history.  So here we are, sisters and brothers of Billings First Congregational Church.  Here we are.  This is our story and we are the tellers of the tale.  Amen.

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[1] J Clinton McCann, “Commentary on First Alternate Reading—Lectionary for August 8, 2010”  WorkingPreacker.org, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=8/8/2010 .

[2] Grant Gallup, “First Sunday of Advent A,” Homily Grits, http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits04_05/msg00020.html.

[3] “Interview with Congressperson John Lewis,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, September 1, 2016.

[4] Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes, Synod in the City, United Church of Christ General Synod, Hartford, CT, June 26, 2007.

Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015

B Pentecost BFC 2015

Acts 2:1-21

May 24, 2015

          It is the season of commencements and commencement speeches when every high school, college, and graduate school tries to outdo the other with an original speaker.  That speaker helps sum up what it means to have an education and what life lessons the speaker has gleaned that they shall now bestow on the graduates.  The speaker tries to do it all with rapier wit and a sense of humor.

          I remember the former chaplain of Harvard, Rev. Dr. Peter J. Gomes, telling the graduates of Bowdoin College that whether the current graduating class was ready, these graduates had to move on with their lives.  For as every college admission’s office will tell you, Bowdoin had recruited a class of first year students that exceed the standards held when they were first year students.  So the graduating seniors necessarily had to leave because they no longer met the college’s standards. 

          Journalist and intellectual, Maria Popova, referenced a commencement address by poet Adrienne Rich who said that an education is not something that you get but something you claim.  Popova went on to explain. 

            And I think that's very much true of knowledge itself. The reason we're so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we've been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it. I mean, the true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia. And the only way to glean knowledge is contemplation. And the road to that is time. There's nothing else. It's just time.[1]

This is what we are all about in the church.  Church is about making meaning, and we come together in community with the understanding that meaning is not lodged in one person or even one people.  It will also mean if our young people, teens and young adults, are truly going to learn, they will necessarily have to rely on the hard-won wisdom of elders who have had the time to contemplate and make meaning.  Our young people need our elders to truly make and share meaning. 

Last week I was sitting in the church of my mom, Willow Hills United Methodist Church, a church really built by the former members of the community UCC church who left when the search committee called an authoritarian, unhealthy pastor.  My mom was the only dissenting vote on the search committee.  The red flag for my mom was when this enlightened clergy candidate claimed he could never marry a Christian and a Roman Catholic.  The United Methodists saw an opportunity for a new church start in a neighboring, growing community as people poured out of the UCC church.  Not everybody went to the new United Methodist Church.  Other people just left religion, faith, and Christianity altogether. 

I was in my hometown of Metamora, Illinois, for the graduation of my nephew, Bryson Maddock, from Metamora Township High School, my alma mater.  I visited the gravesite of my dad and my grandmother and grandfather.  We took Sophia to see the high school baseball field named after my dad.  But on Sunday we were sitting in Willow Hills United Methodist Church while my sister, brother-in law, my niece, and my graduating nephew worshipped at Great Oaks church, just a quarter mile down the road.  For years, my sister, an amazing public school teacher, had been the Christian Education Chair and Sunday School Superintendent at the Willow Hills United Methodist Church..  My nephew went through confirmation at Willow Hills and loved the pastor there, but . . .but.

My nephew is an accomplished musician and performer who has starred in all of the high school musicals, plays, and madrigal dinners.  This past year his high school put on the Broadway production of Les Mis, and he absolutely loved the meaning, the message, and the music of a story that is also very dear to my heart.  He had a DVD copy waiting for me, and wow, the voices and talent of my nephew and his classmates.  For his graduation party, he and his band, “Unamused Dave” played an hour long concert.  Much to the chagrin of his mother and father, Bryson is skipping college to save up money and travel with his band to California and make a go of it.  And who can really argue with him?  His band has won a ton of awards at Peoria and Chicago competitions.  This summer Bryson will take classes at Second City, to hone his performance skills.  

He would have loved to be part of the band organized at Willow Hills United Methodist Church but they asked the choir director who is a little older than me to put the band together.  The choir director chose people around his age to form “a praise band.” 

Meanwhile, Great Oaks, the evangelical church just down the road, asked Bryson and his friends not to form a “praise band” at their church but a band of some kind.  It was up to them to figure it out.  So, gradually, my sister and her family gravitated to Great Oaks where my nephew was given a chance to belong and interpret his own faith. 

In much the same manner, the church I just pastored in Byron, Illinois, was the community United Church of Christ church that was either losing its youth to neighboring churches or to just staying at home.  When I first began at the church, every first chair from an award-winning high school band was sitting out in the congregation.  None of them were asked to play.  One of the most amazing young women was playing violin at the Baptist Church every week because they had asked her to be a part of a bluegrass group.  I kept her in the church by having her play, beautifully on Maundy Thursday, the “Theme from Schindler’s List” and one of my favorite pieces from Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, “The Ashokan Farewell.”  I cried each time she played them.

  The Music Committee at that former church, staffed by the daughter of the former long-time organist, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and the former long-time band instructor at the high school, did not see the purpose of enlisting the young people in the music ministry of the church because they did not want to “lower the church’s musical standards.”  Instead, they schemed and plotted to fire the present organist so they could employ the Junior High choral instructor who was known as the best organist in town.   He chose not to apply for the job. 

We brought in one of the recent college graduates, the lead singer for his own band, to sing the Beatles’ “Let It Be” with the choir singing as backup for the 175^th Anniversary of one of the oldest churches in the State of Illinois, a church begun as a pivotal part of the Underground Railroad, providing freedom seekers with safe haven.  The General Minister and President of the UCC, Rev. Geoffrey Black, there to help us celebrate on that great day, shouted a loud “Amen!” when the song finished and the congregation universally loved it.  Only to be never tried again. 

I feel caught.  My daughter regularly runs to me with words from the music of Imagine Dragons or Bastille, two of her favorite musical groups, to show me the theological meaning of their music or videos.  My son does the same with one of his favorite groups, Mumford and Sons.  And my job as their father is to see the wind and fire of God poured out on them so that they can affirm that God is active and moving in their lives.  But both of them recognize they will never have the authority in any local church I pastor to hear the words and music they find meaningful repeated back to them.  So they have kind of checked out.  And I am left realizing that I can keep my job and lose my children in weekly worship.  Or lose my job fighting for my kids’ ability to make meaning and have just a teensy bit of authority. 

While our young people desperately need the knowledge, wisdom, and meaning-making of older generations, our older generations desperately need the energy, curiosity, and idealism of the younger generations.  Without that energy, curiosity, idealism, and vision of the younger generations, our lives together become rote, mundane, and just plain boring.  Through the younger generations, we get challenged to see the world in ways we could not have imagined possible.

In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
    Your sons and daughters will speak truth to power.
    Your young will see visions.
    Your elders will dream dreams.

          The apostle Peter quotes the truth-teller Joel to say that these will be the signs to show that God is active and moving among you.  We know the Spirit is afoot when all ages in the congregation begin to hear God speaking in their own language.  Your young will see visions.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams. 

          The clamor on the religious airwaves this week has been the recent release of the Pew Study which indicates that the mainline churches in the United States are indeed dying while evangelical churches have slipped off just a tad.  To quote from the study:  “While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages.”[2]  The group that experienced the most growth over the course of the seven years of the study was the “unaffiliated” group, with a dramatic shift of 8%, particularly among young adults, who do not identify themselves as “Christian” or “religious” but sometimes as atheist or agnostic.  The Pew Research Center referred to this as a significant change in America’s religious landscape.  Interestingly, the mainline Protestant denominations that took the biggest dip were the United Methodists and the Southern Baptist Convention. 

          This sent pastors, seminaries, and religious writers into deep interpretive mode, trying to figure out what these findings mean.  Diana Butler Bass, religious writer extraordinaire, referred to the Pew Research Center findings as the most important thing we would read this week. 

          We are typical of many mainline congregations in that we are strongly populated by older generations and underrepresented by young families, young adults, youth, and children.  I think the reasons for this are varied and complex, but here is some of my read on what is going on. 

          Time was when the young families--young adults, youth, and children we mentored and brought into the life of our church--were our children and grandchildren.  But we are a much more transient society.  The world has changed. 

I have heard many of you talk about what wonderful children and grandchildren you have living not only in some other part of the country but also in other parts of the world.  Many of our children and grandchildren live outside of Billings or have to show they have grown up by not belonging to or attending the same faith community as you do.  So we no longer work out our diversity over kitchen tables.  That means when our different generations do come together within our churches, it can feel more conflicted because our diversity and our conflicts are much more public.  We might be ok with that conflict and diversity showing up over the privacy common kitchen table, but it feels wrong when that conflict and diversity shows up over a public, sacramental communion table.  We leave the communion table thinking, with our overly-romanticized version of the church, that such conflict should never happen in the name of peace, love, and harmony. 

          And we need each other.  We so need each other’s diverse gifts.  

The early Christian Church had to deal with that kind of transience and diversity.  Rome would regularly dump conquered peoples into new geographical locations, force dislocation and displacement, and leave whole populations of people socially rootless.[3]  In turn, Christianity community served a critical function as a response this social rootlessness—where familial and ethnic identification had broken down.  Baptism served as an initiation rite into a wider social network, a community of care, and an adopted family.  What would it mean for a local church to capture that same early Pentecostal spirit, to become the wind and flame for a city that would revel in a community that worked through generational diversity to find the gifts of each age?

What if there was a congregation that became the flame to hold baby showers for young families that did not have traditional family or extended family around to make sure basic needs were met?    What if we regularly focused on adopting and mentoring young people and making our time with them about relationship instead of fundraising?

In a time where we are living longer and dying more slowly, in this era of multigenerational aging[4], what if we were the flame to provide a circle of support for individuals and couples whose far-away families are trying to make decisions about hospice and end-of-life care?  What if young families adopted elderly couples or singles to provide accompaniment for them at the end of their lives?

We need each other. 

One of the more interesting reflections on the report issued by the Pew Research Center was given by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush.

          Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, grandson of the founder of the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch, delivered the commencement address last week at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.  He reflected on the Pew Research Center report, recognizing that some evangelical writers are crowing about the report as a validation of the evangelical church.  He believes their chest-pounding to be misplaced.  Rather, Raushenbush believes it to be a great time to be graduating from a mainline progressive Christian divinity school.  He said: 

The most striking news in the report is the confirmation of the extraordinary rise of those who don't identify with any religion, also known as the 'nones', and this is especially true among young people. One in three millennials do not identify with any religion.

In preparing for this day, I asked a younger friend of mine who is not associated with any faith tradition to do a little word association game with me. When I said the word Christian he immediately rattled off: "Closed minded, only out for themselves, wanting to tell others what to do." And I said to him: "But you know that I am a Christian pastor," and he said, "oh, yeah but you are different." Apparently meaning that I didn't represent what "real" Christians are like.

Sociologist Robert Putnam at Harvard and Political Scientist David Campbell at Notre Dame wrote a piece called God and Cesar in America in which they explain: "To (millennials), 'religion' means 'Republican,' 'intolerant,' and 'homophobic, and since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves -- or wish to be seen by their peers -- as religious."

A 2014 study by Public Religion Research Institute showed that fully one out of three young people left their faith because they perceived it to be as hostile to LGBT people.

I want to make clear, most of these young 'nones'  are not atheists, in fact, many of them claim a belief in God. The problem is that they perceive the church to be hostile to them or to those whom they love, unwilling to engage their questions as they seek for meaning, and/or indifferent to the deep and often systemic injustice they are facing in the world in the 21st century.[5]

What we do here in church is make meaning.  If Raushenbush is right, there is a whole generation waiting for a progressive church to become more visible and articulate about a broader and wider love, a church that struggles against systemic injustice.

And in a more diverse, socially rootless world there are young people seeking belonging and acceptance of their gifts, in need of the wisdom and knowledge older generations might give them.  In a more diverse, socially rootless world there are elders seeking the idealism, curiosity, energy, and vision of younger generations, to know that they will still be cared for and honored even as they lose capacity. 

Throw open the windows.  Let the wind blow in so that each may hear the Spirit speaking in their own language.  And may the fire of God’s Spirit, the flame burn brightly so that not only may the elderly dream dreams, women and men alike, but the younger generations may be given the courage to speak truth to power and see visions.  In that moment, in that beautiful, glorious Pentecostal moment, we will know that God’s Spirit is poured out . . . on all people.  Amen.

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[1] “Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age:  Interview with Maria Popova,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, May 14, 2015,  http://onbeing.org/program/transcript/7584#main_content.

[2] http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 

[3] I spoke of this in a February sermon.  See Ray Pickett, “Conflicts at Corinth,” in A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. 1,:  Christian Origins, Ed. by Richard A. Horsley (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2005.   See also, James Carroll, Christ Actually:  The Son of God for the Secular Age  (New York:  Viking, 2014), p. 157, "Patterns of ordinary family cohesion were disrupted, with old people badly cared for, the young deprived of hope.  Many people were made destitute and homeless, and there were few, if any, prospects for betterment.

[4] “The Far Shore of Aging, Interview with Jane Gross,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, May 7, 2015, http://onbeing.org/program/jane-gross-the-far-shore-of-aging/transcript/7564#main_content.
[5] “It's A Great Time To Be Graduating From A Mainline, Progressive, Christian, Divinity School,” Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, HuffPost Religion, May 18, 2015, edited from commencement address delivered to Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School at Third Presbyterian Church, May 16, 2015.