1
John 5:1-8
Easter
6
May
13, 2012
William G. Carter
If we
continue after Easter to explore the Easter life, we need to talk about
believing and belonging. Believing and Belonging. Those who believe belong,
those who belong believe. At least, I thought that was the connection. These
days we aren’t so sure.
Like a
lot of you, I grew up in the church. There were twenty-one seventh graders in
my seventh-grade Sunday School class. It was the high water mark of the Baby
Boom. But I don’t know how many of them still go to church. I’m going to guess
five, maybe six. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
Confirmation was a big day for us. In seventh grade, in
1973, confirmation was a big deal. Confirmation was the ceremony when seventh
graders joined the church and left the church on the same day. Maybe their
parents cut a deal: if you endure confirmation to the end, we will let you
decide from now on if you are going to go.
Some resist joining a church because a church seems like just
another organization. And they won’t have it. They want nothing to do with
organizations. Organizations have dues to pay, gatherings to attend, and structures
to maintain. If that’s all it is, they don’t want to have any part of an organization.
My generation has its own issues. If you grew up in the
‘60’s, you learned to question organizations and talk back to power. If you grew
up in the ‘70’s, you saw how corrupt Nixon’s White House was, and it signaled
that any pre-existing institution was also probably corrupt. It’s not unique to
my bunch. If you grew up in the ‘80’s, you saw those old TV preachers were
greedy and sinful. If you grew up in the ‘90’s, you discovered some of the dark
corners of the Roman Catholic church.
The curious thing about the Christian faith is we don’t
believe in an organization. We believe in Christ. Through Christ, we belong to
everybody else who believes in Christ. That’s how he set up everything. “When
we love God and his commandments, we love the children of God.”
When we say, “I believe,” we find ourselves in a larger
family. That’s what 1st John is working with, in a way. John is a
church leader who writes this letter and says, “We are the ones who have seen,
we are the ones who have heard, we are the ones who testify.” If it’s the case
that not everybody has seen or heard, or that not everybody was there around
the circle, there is a living center to it all that keeps everybody pulled in.
We have heard the past couple of weeks about the
character of that community. It is the character of love. Tertullian was a
church leader who lived in Carthage about 180 years after Jesus. He was also
one of the crankiest figures in church history. Yet he reported what the
non-Christians around him in North Africa said about their Christian neighbors:
“See how they love one another!”[1] He was particularly
talking about how the Christians cared for the poor and the outcast.
Practical
love was the mark of the church from the beginning, in the name of Jesus, about
whom it was said, “He will not crush the weakest reed or put out a flickering
candle.” (Isaiah 42:3). “When we love
God,” said John, “we love the children of God.” There is a constant magnetic
quality about that love that pulls people toward it.
The sad news we hear these days from the young adults is
that when they hear the word “Christian,” the very last thing they think is
“love.” It’s not only the flap about gay and lesbians being allowed to marry,
it’s the general judgmental attitude acquainted with the word “Christian.”
One of the twenty-something’s went to a church that a lot
of her friends were raving about. It seemed exciting – they had strobe lights
and a fog machine. She sniffed it out immediately and said, “They downplay
their bigotry as a marketing ploy. It was clear they would treat me as
second-class because I was a woman, kind of the same way that people who were
slave-owners never thought they were racist.” Her decision was to never go to
another church ever again. She gave them one chance and they blew it.
This attitude is in the air. There was a recent article
in The Christian Century about the
reluctance of young adults to join churches, to actually sign up and become
members. One of the interesting facts is that Americans have not always been big
church members. Historians think that in the year 1800, only one American in
six belonged to a church. By the 1850’s, due to the revival movement and its
individual commitments to Christ, the number was one in three. Fifty years ago,
church membership climbed to over eighty percent – but it’s been declining ever
since.
On May 3, the Scranton
Times-Tribune ran a front-page article about church membership in our
region. It was fascinating, if only because the headline was wrong. The
headline said “Evangelical population growing, Catholic population flat.” The
editor really should have read their own article. The evangelicals are growing,
mostly in the Assembly of God churches. The Roman Catholics are shrinking, and
the Methodists are shrinking worst of all. But what the headline missed is that
the biggest growth section in our region is in the people who have no religion
at all. They claim no affiliation. They don’t belong anywhere – and once they
did.[2]
Statistics like these have been making the rounds nationally
for twenty years, but we live in an area where things seem to happen ten years
later. If you saw the March 12 issue of Time
Magazine, it featured a cover story on the “Ten Ideas That Are Changing
Your Life.” Number one: Living alone is the new norm. Number two: information
is kept in a cloud. Number three: carbon emissions are the air.
Then there was number four: “The Rise of the Nones.”
That’s N-O-N-E-S, as in, none of them go to church, none of them declare a
religious affiliation, none of them profess a religious belief, none of them
much care for anything religious at all.
Do you know anybody like this? Let’s ask for a show of
hands: how many of you know somebody like that? How many of you know somebody
like that in your extended family? (I’ll stop there.)
Now, there may be any number of reasons for this. Let’s
list a handful:
·
Maybe they hooked up
with the church when the kids were young, and now that the kids are older, the
incentive is gone.
·
Maybe it’s because
we are now an attention deficit nation, and nobody wants to sit still for an
hour, or because people are entertained everywhere else and they want to be
entertained in church, too.
·
Maybe it’s because many
people don’t read books, and the Bible is a book.
·
Maybe it’s because
our nation has lost its innocence, in so many ways, and with that loss, cyncism
creeps in.
·
Maybe the preachers are
uninspiring. Or the church members are too petty.
·
Maybe it’s because
there is no current consensus on moral values, and it was a lot easier when we
all pretty much agreed on the same things.
·
Maybe people got out
of the routine of going to church and discovered they liked it.
·
Maybe it’s the fact
(and I’ve given some thought to this) that many Baby-Boomers are burying their
parents, and now they don’t have to feel guilty about sleeping in on Sundays,
and don’t have to justify themselves to mom and dad who always went to church.
·
Maybe it’s because
people travel more, or vacation more, or move around more, and nobody has any
roots anywhere, so why put down roots in a congregation?
·
Or when you get
right down to it, maybe it’s because people just don’t think they need God very
much. They get along fine on their own. They can define their lives, their
work, their relationships, whatever, as if God has little to do with any of
that.
All of these are observations that the historian Diana
Butler Bass has been making. She’s been studying the people who describe
themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” There are a lot of them. Some of
them are in churches, some are not. If we pay attention to them, she says, they
reveal signs of a possible spiritual renaissance.
Diana writes
about this in a new book called Christianity After Religion. I’m reading
it now, and I invite you to read it too.
If you do, maybe we can talk some more about it in the next couple of
months. Anyway, I want to tell you what she says, all as a commentary on our scripture
text. Diana says this:
Three deceptively simple questions are
at the heart of a spiritually vibrant Christianity--questions of believing,
behaving, and belonging. Religion always entails the "3B's" of
believing, behaving, and belonging. Over the centuries, Christianity has
engaged the 3B's in different ways, with different interrogators and emphases.
For the last 300 years or so, the questions were asked as follows:
1) What do I
believe? (What does my church say I should think about God?)
2) How should I behave? (What are the rules my church asks me to follow?)
3) Who am I? (What does it mean to be a faithful church member?)
2) How should I behave? (What are the rules my church asks me to follow?)
3) Who am I? (What does it mean to be a faithful church member?)
But the questions have changed.
Contemporary people care less about what to believe than how they might believe; less
about rules for behavior than in what they
should do with their lives; and less about church membership than in whose company they find themselves.
The questions have become:
1) How do I
believe? (How do I understand faith that seems to conflict
with science and pluralism?)
2) What should I do? (How do my actions make a difference in the world?)
3) Whose am I? (How do my relationships shape my self-understanding?)
2) What should I do? (How do my actions make a difference in the world?)
3) Whose am I? (How do my relationships shape my self-understanding?)
Diana says, “The foci of religion
have not changed -- believing, behaving, and belonging still matter. But the
ways in which people engage each area have undergone a revolution.”[3]
If I might dare to boil it down,
what a lot of people are looking for is an authentic faith. They don’t want
anything fake. They don’t want anything plastic. They don’t want to check their
brains and hearts at the door. They want to be around people who are seeking to
understand the Holy Mystery at work in all of life, people who actually do love
one another, people who doing the hard work of living a life that matters.
And I
guess that reminds me of my mom. She married when she was almost 21. She
birthed a couple of kids, lost a couple of infants, and decided that she always
wanted a house full of love. My brother and younger sister were adopted, and always
treated equally. She raised the kids while Dad was off earning money. She made
sacrifices for us. She had high expectations of us. One of those expectations
was that we would love Jesus, and that we needed to know how much he loved us.
So every week it was church, Sunday School, fellowship, and mission.
When the four of us started to grow and spread our wings,
she decided that the house needed more kids, so she and Dad started taking in
exchange students. They were from all over the place – Ecuador, Sweden,
Germany, Japan. And then, she taught us it wasn’t Thanksgiving Dinner unless we
invited people to the table who had nowhere else to go. So she found some
widows, all of them widows of Presbyterian ministers, and she invited them to
the table. She still does that.
Where
did I learn how to love like Jesus loves? From my mom. She was recently elected
again as an elder to her church. I said, “Why do you let them do that?” She was
assigned to chair the Christian Education committee – and she had never ever
been to a meeting of that committee ever before, and she’s chairing the
committee. I said, “Why are you doing that?” And she said, “We have to teach
people however we can that Jesus loves them, beginning with the little ones.” And
when her town was flooded by the Susquehanna last September, she was one of the
first to say, “We need to invite the rescue workers to sleep on our church
pews, and to welcome the Red Cross to use our church’s hall to hand out food,
water, and blankets.
That’s my mother. God loves her, and she loves the people
that God loves.
Did you
write down the questions that Diana Butler Bass says that the spiritual people are
asking? I have some working answers:
How do I
believe? My mother believes with her heart, her soul, her
mind, and her strength.
What should I
do? My mom says, “I welcome everybody to my table, especially
those who have nobody else.” She adds, “We teach people that Jesus loves them,
beginning with the little ones.”
Whose am I? My
mother belongs to God, and she belongs to all the people who belong to God. And
when I think of her, it makes all the difference.
In
fact, when I think of my mother, I know how to live a holy life in the world.
Because when you get right to it, all of us want to be in the presence of
people who are in the presence of God.[4]
It would always be nice to have more church members, but what I really want is to be
in the presence of people who are in the presence of God. How about you?
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Tertullian, Apology, 39.7
[3] This synopsis is from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/a-resurrected-christianit_b_1410143.html
[4] Thanks to the Rev. Karen
Chakoian for this memorable line.
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