Proclaiming the Text

I have a friend who is deeply concerned about the divisions that exist between Christians, as well as the divisions that exist between Christianity and other faiths. My friend is convinced that religious divisions are a source of great concern for the future well being of the world. Therefore, he is committed to attempting to find those aspects of the world's religions on which people of goodwill can all agree.

Not surprisingly, my friend spends a lot of time focusing on today's Gospel from the 22nd chapter of Matthew. Jesus is attacked by his critics, who attempt to publicly embarrass him by getting him into a theological discussion over which of all the laws in the Torah, the sacred way of Israel, is the greatest.

Jesus responds simply, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the greatest, first commandment. Without it, we cannot truly do the second.  Then Jesus follows with a second commandment, "You should love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus says that upon these two commands hang all of the things said by all of the prophets, and within all the laws of Israel.

My friend says that Christians make a big mistake when we attempt to complicate Christianity, adding on a whole bunch of rules and regulations and speculation about the identity of Jesus. My friend says that we would be much better off to focus almost exclusively on this text. We should love God with our entire being, and we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

Not only that, my friend has engaged in a study of many of the world's so-called great religions. And he believes, from the study of other faiths, that this statement by Jesus is one thing that all religions have in common. Muslims may disagree with us on just who Jesus is, but they agree with us that we should love God with our entire being and our neighbor as ourselves. My friend says that Buddhists think much the same.

I think we should celebrate the fact that loving God with our entire being and loving your neighbor as yourself is in Judaism, Islam, Buddism, and Christianity.  However, I question my friend when it comes to reducing Christianity to this one-sentence summary. Is this all that Christians believe? Is this an adequate summary of the entire, full Christian faith?

My friend could respond to my objection by simply saying, "Take it up with Jesus." When Jesus is asked to summarize what he thinks are the greatest principles, commands, and regulations of Israel, he gives this two-sentence summary. There you have it. The whole of the Christian faith boiled down to love of God and love your neighbor as yourself.

And yet, Jesus doesn't stop his conversation there. He goes on to ask them about the "Messiah," the expected anointed one and savior of Israel. Is the Messiah a "Son of David?" They say, “Yes, of course, the Messiah must come from the lineage of David.” Throughout Matthew's Gospel, from the very first, has been the statement that Jesus of Nazareth is a "Son of David." So, Jesus complicates the conversation by moving his critics from a discussion of religious behavior and religious ideas, to the much more complicated and controversial idea of the identity of the Messiah.

If one is supposed to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, as the scriptures say, what are we to do if this one standing before us, this Jesus of Nazareth, is the Savior, the Messiah?

And right here is my major problem with my friend's program to have all religious differences blended with the phrase of loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.

This love Jesus is talking about is more complicated than it first appears. In our culture, we like to go by the words of the old Beetles song and believe that "all you need is love," as if love were a fairly simple activity. Trouble is we have attempted to make love a very vague word that can mean just about anything we want it to mean.

Until we meet Jesus. Jesus not only said that God is love, which everybody all ready believed, but the way he lived demonstrated a very different definition of love than what everyone already believed about love. And that's when love got complicated. Jesus loved not simply as a strategy to be “nice” to everybody, or make them feel good.  He loved by commanding us to go the second mile even when we don’t have to, to forgive our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, and to give without expectation of return.

If Jesus had only been a moral instructor who came and told us, "Love your neighbor as yourself" then perhaps love could be reduced to some simple attitudes. But Jesus didn't leave it at that. He not only said that he loved us but he showed us he loved us. Christians don't simply believe in "love," we believe that love is defined as suffering, sacrificial, nonviolent action as we witnessed on the cross of Christ.

I’ve asked couples thinking about getting married what they’re going to do the first day something happens and they’re really angry with the other person and just want to walk out the door.  Of course, they’re “in love” and think that will never happen.  But you see, that’s when the kind of love Jesus is talking about needs to “kick in.”  This is a kind of love that goes deeper than how you might feel at the moment.

When those moments come, we need to stop and think about how a tee-shirt slogan put it a few years ago, "I asked Jesus, 'How much do you love me?' And he spread out his arms wide on the cross, and he died." And don’t the scriptures say something about giving up one’s life for one’s friend.  It’s all over the words and life of Jesus.

This is love as defined and lived by Jesus. That is what is wrong with my friend's program. Christians don't really know what "love" is until Jesus tells us and shows us what love is. A Christian definition of "love" may, therefore, be very different from other religions.

Jesus' critics ask him what are the most important things for a loyal son or daughter of Israel to do. And Jesus responds using scripture that everybody there knew by heart since they were children, quoting the same scripture that is prayed by faithful Torah - observing Jews every morning and every evening. There wasn’t anything new in these words.

What was new was that Jesus continued the conversation, leading his interrogators into a question about the Messiah. He took the words of the Torah and added to them.  He added to the meaning of love.  He added that love of God and love of neighbor, and love of self mean exactly what it was going to mean for the Messiah.  Real love means commitment and sacrifice – commitment and sacrifice for God, commitment and sacrifice for your neighbor, commitment and sacrifice for yourself.

Jesus showed us that kind of love by the way he walked! No wonder that after this exchange, Jesus' critics got organized and conspired to silence him.

Christians are those who believe that Jesus was not only a wonderful teacher; he is a savior. We believe that he was not only a child of Abraham, but the embodiment of the spirit and teachings of God; e.i., the son of God. We believe that the way he walked, and what he taught not only made good sense for daily living, but was the way of truth, the way of life.

Those of you who have been walking that way for some time, those of you who have heard the teaching of Jesus over the course of a lifetime, who have sat through lots of sermons, and read lots of scripture, could tell us all that there is very little that is simple about Jesus. His way is demanding, and there aren’t any shortcuts in how to do it.

            “Jesus, how much do you love me?”  That much (cross).  Then Jesus turns to us and says, “And you?”

 September 28 – Chapter 6 – Congregational Spirituality: From Givers to Receivers Who Give

             While it may be "more blessed to give than to receive," the truth is also that it's often easier to give than to receive.  Why? Giving puts a person in a position of power, which says, in effect, "I'm not a person in need.  Your are.  I have gifts, talents, skills, resources to give."  To act from that position isn't only to be wealthy in a certain sense, but also to be powerful.

            For many years, churches had the mindset that said to those in poor countries:  "Let us build houses, fix up your church, bring medical services.  We have so much.  Your needs are so great."  Now, in and of itself, that's not a bad thing.  We did a lot of good, needed, work.  But what we sometimes missed in that was that some of those places were saying to us:  "We don't want you to come and do for us.  We want you to come and be with us.  We want you to know us, and we want to know you.  We want to share our country, it's beauties and its tragedy, with you."  They didn't want to just be the receivers.  The wanted things to be mutual.

            When you're used to being in the "giver mindset" only, it's hard to switch and see yourself and also being a receiver.  Not only can a one-sided emphasis on giving and behaving as  giver be a power trip fro some, it can blind us to our own needs – for grace, for healing, for conversion, for God.  In churches, we've always been encouraged to be noble by giving, but in doing so, we really ended up discouraging our sense of need to receive – sometimes even the need to receive God's presence.  In other words, by blocking out our need to also be receivers, we also blocked out our need for God.

            In the church of the past, we were forever being reminded of our responsibilities, our obligations to others.  It was all about service and action.  Make no mistake, this has a place, and the church should never abandon service and action.  However, those things should not be the top priority, they should be the second priority.  As the Gospel According to John puts it:  "We love because God loved us first."  Our giving is in response to having received.  That's why the offering belongs after the hearing of God's word.

            Our author says he's heard a lot of people say they didn't need to be reminded, every Sunday, in each sermon, of their responsibilities, they very conscious of their responsibilities.  What they did need to hear each week, and in every sermon, was to be reminded of God's grace.  Too often the church of the past asked people to bear fruit without getting their roots fed.

            We can't assume that everyone who comes in the door is ready to be sent off on a service project.  Not everyone has the resources to do that.  And it doesn't matter where one is financially or socially, we need to hear about, and receive, the grace and love of God in our own lives before we can serve and act.

            One of the ways this shift is evident in the church is in our approach to the sacraments and rituals of the church.  Those sacraments and rituals invite us into the role of receivers:  "Take, eat, this bread is Christ's body, broken for you."  "Take, drink, this cup is Christ blood, shed for you."  We become the receiver of ultimate symbol of God's love for us.

            If we are constantly or solely being described as givers and doers, those who must build the kingdom, what place is there in our faith for receiving, for acknowledging our need for the love of God that is conveyed in the symbolic receiving of the life of Christ?  We must finally give ourselves permission to be receivers, to acknowledge our need for the love of God and for the nourishment Christ's ministry gives to us.

            Some churches have a regular Sunday each year for the renewal of baptismal vows and covenants.  As part of this service, those baptized persons who wish are invited to come forward to a pastor who will take water from the font, touch it to their forehead, and say, "Remember you baptism and be thankful."  It also means, "Remember that because of the love of God, you are a child of God, a disciple of Christ and a member of Christ's church.  This God's gift to you, and it cannot be taken from you."  We are receivers.

            Our author also states that we need to begin to understand what it means to move from obligation to motivation.  This is basic in order to make the shift from "givers" to "receivers who give."  It's basic to how we live our life as congregation.  In the church of the past, "church going" was often experienced and described in the language of obligation.  It was something one was expected to do as a member of the community, as a good citizen and a decent and responsible person.  For better or worse, few people, especially in our very secular society, feel any obligation to attend or participate in the church anymore.  Obligation is more likely to be felt toward family or self-care, leading to family activities and sports on Sundays.  On the plus side, people are more likely to seek and participate in church today because they are motivated to do so.  They are motivated by there need for depth in the lives, by their felt need for God, their need for meaning, or their need for community.  They may come because they need forgiveness and the healing of their spirits.  The church that will speak to a society where people no longer come solely or primarily out of a sense of obligation, but because they are motivated to do so, will be a church that maintains a balanced spirituality of giving and receiving.

            Another thing that reflects the shift from "givers" to "givers who receive," can be seen in how leaders in the church understand themselves.  This is important as you look to calling a settled pastor.  There was a time when those who became leaders in the church were chosen for that role because they were leaders in the secular community.  They had the connections, the history, and maybe the skills to lead in the church as well.  Today people are more often called to leadership in the church because of their own faith and faith experience.  They seen as being grounded, and they are mature Christians.  They are people of faith.  This doesn't mean they are without needs, or that they are perfect.  Quite the contrary, it may mean they know very well – and are able to share – their own needs and imperfections.

            Another way to put it would be to say that, in congregations where there is a shift in congregational spirituality from "givers" to "receivers who give" you will see leaders who are also willing to be led.  They seek and respond to the leading of God.  They are not solo operators.   As leaders, they are learning to say, "Not my will, but God's."  Which is why being a leader in the community doesn't always translate into being a leader in the church.

            Bottom line:  Because God loved us first -- we come to God's church, to receive God love for us, to do God's ministry,.  Our "mantra" is:  May God's love be done through us.

SERMON: September 07, 2008 – From Civic Faith to Human Transformation (chapter 3)

                 Our author, Anthony Robinson, has told us that when we are in the midst of adaptive change, we need to ask questions:  What is our purpose, or mission?  He states that, in the past era Christianity was the unofficial official religion.  Therefore, people had what he calls a "civic faith."  Meaning, everyone was assumed to be some kind of Christian.  That has changed.

                Now, no one group or even one religion can lay claim to being the exclusive voice of conscience in the community.  There are many voices and perspectives today – even within Christianity; the churches can – and should - be one of the voices at the table, but we are no longer the table's host, nor is it our table.

                Our author sees this as a good thing because the church's self-understanding as the conscience of the community tended to distort the gospel itself and tilt the church toward being moralistic interpretations of the Christian faith.  Mainline churches taught that a "good Christian" was a morally exemplary person, rather than someone who life was growing in a relationship with God.

                The truth is that churches have finally begun to realize that the gospel message is not "Be good and then God will love you;" the gospel message is "You are loved – so be who you are, a beloved child of God." Christianity is not a religion of virtue, as civic faith tended to make it, but a religion of grace.  We don't have to jump through the hoop of a bunch of moral tests to make God love us or to prove ourselves worthy in God's eyes.  God has already declared us worthy and loved.  It's called grace.

                Our author states that in the day when everyone was thought to be a Christian of some kind, many seemed to come to the conclusion that God's first word was the Ten Commandments.  Post them on the wall of schoolrooms and courthouses! In fact, however, the Ten Commandments were not God's first word but God's second word.  The first word was God's act of grace and liberation in the Exodus.  The Ten Commandments described the way of life God intended for those who had been redeemed, who had known God's saving love and action.  When we remove something like the Ten Commandments from it's context of saving grace, Christianity becomes little more than a legalistic list of behaviors.  This made Christianity and Christians more like Pharisees than the Pharisees, whose laws of behavior were more important than the unconditional love of God.

And what happened when mainline churches emphasized their moralistic ideals?  The generation of seekers began to say:  What happened to the love of God? They began to discover they didn't need the church to be a good person.  There were all kinds of things they could do outside the church and still be a good person:  Breast Cancer, AIDS, walkathons, bike-athons, etc.

Being a Christian and being good middle-class American were no longer synonymous.  And a lot of people started saying to themselves:  "If that's all it means, why do I need the church?  Why go there?"  The result was that the majority of "baby boomers" left the church, not for more conservative churches, but to blend into secular culture.

The way mainline churches responded to this departure was to declare their purpose as being to maintain a congenial community for their members.  And the measure of a minister and church has become how well they keep the membership satisfied.  As the author states:  "The experience of communion with God and service to others became secondary, if not lost altogether, as churches replaced the real purpose of the church with that of being a good social club – with a religious overtone – for their members.  Too often this is what the congregations have become in the wake of the civic-faith era.  No longer sure of their role or purpose, buffeted by social change, they have circled the wagons and gathered to meet their own needs for company and reassurance in the face of change and challenge."

Even those who have had the courage to ask what their purpose is have come up with only one "solution."  When things are going badly the church looks for a "visionary leader," someone who will come in and say, "There's the goal, the vision, the promised land.  We need to head there."  This tends to distort the role of the leaders, or leadership, turning once again into an answer-providing agency and relieving the followers of responsibility.  It creates a kind of catch-up mentality.  We are always trying to become something other than what we are, to get somewhere we are not.  In the short term it may be exciting; in the long term in tends to be tiring and discouraging.  Vision has a place, but purpose is the more important question.  What is the purpose of the church .. any church? The shift needs to be made from thinking like a "club" and thinking in terms of human transformation.  The purpose of The Church is to bring about change in people's lives - -  real change.  We're talking conversion type change:  turning around, being made new, changed, given a new heart and a new mind as we become followers of the One who makes all things new.

But even when we use those words, we must remember that this is ultimately God's work, not something the church does alone or by setting up a four, five, or ten-step manual for success.  Faith still remains a gift a person must be open to receive from God.  The church can only provide the environment for that to take place.  Only God can make it happen.

That's one of the church's biggest failures – we look to humans (clergy, lay leaders) to be our savior, instead of looking to the Savior.  We're always trying to find just the right program that will "make it happen," when what we really need to be doing is creating those programs as tools of human transformation – conversion.

We also need to remind ourselves that the church is not the fellowship of those who have been fully and completely changed themselves.  We are not the "saved" who are then to "save" others.   We need to remember that faith is a gift that requires continual care and renewal.  Even Jesus spent time away, renewing his spirit and his relationship with God.  The church is a fellowship, a gathering of those who are in the process of being changed, of those who are being saved and made new, and who invite others to join them in the journey.

Sermon – August 17, 2008

Chapter 2 of our book -- “Transforming Congregational Culture,” by Anthony Robinson -- is entitled “The Challenge We Face, Part 2”—an appropriate title, since it follows chapter one and continues the same theme.  In it he continues to tell us about the challenge of changing the culture of a congregation so that congregation can address and transform the culture of the world.  He talks about the need to learn the difference between “technical work” and “adaptive challenge.”

We like to do “technical work” because it’s usually easy to come up with an answer to the questions asked.  For instance, “technical work” would be:  There’s a hole line roof.  We call the people who fix holes in roofs.  The building needs to be painted.  We call the people who paint buildings.  The answer in usually easy to come up with and the results are usually easily seen and measured.

“Adaptive challenge” is much harder.  “Adaptive challenge” would be something like heart disease.  The doctors can diagnose a heart disease; the problem can be clearly named; but there are a variety of possible solutions.  Usually, all of the solutions will require that the patient do some learning, about himself or herself, and the illness.  It will require life changes:  different diet, a new regimen of exercise, different work habits, and general stress reduction.  All of that adds up to a deep change in a person’s life.

An analogy in the life of congregations might be a change in the community that surrounds it and from which it draws its members.  For instance, changing from being a small community of local residents, to a community whose population booms with tourists and others who come and go and different times of the year.  An “adaptive challenge” this congregation faces.

As our author tells us, one way to put the adaptive challenge we face is to say that we are no longer living in the world of American Christendom.  Many of those in leadership in mainline congregations were those who had grown up in that world where Christianity was the unofficial official religion of our society.  The church and culture around it were intertwined.  Everyone who grew up in this America assumed that everyone else was some kind of Christian.  Those days are over and membership started to decline when mainline congregations refused to deal with that fact.  The church of “be there because you’re supposed to” had forgotten to teach its people what it meant to be a Christian living among many other religions.  They couldn’t answer the question:  “Hi, I’m Hindu.  Why are you Christian?”  They didn’t know because they’d never had to know.  When you’re the only game in town, you don’t have to explain yourself.  But when others move into your town, you do need to know who you are and why you’re there.  And mainline churches hid their heads in the sand because they couldn’t answer the question:  Who are you and why are you here?  You see, the seekers that came along in the mid 60s didn’t care that everyone was a Christian.  To them, thinking that everyone had to be some form of Christian would have been considered narrow-minded bigotry.  They wanted to know:  What makes Christianity unique among other religions?  It’s easy to see why there was conflict.

Some might say, “Well, we’re doomed! Let’s just close the doors.”  But our author says, “No.”  In fact, he says the beauty of being in a time of adaptive challenges is that, if we will open our hearts to God, adaptive challenges draw out our best and deepest spiritual resources.  Adaptive challenges are, at their core, spiritual work.  They ask us to learn, to be authentically ourselves, to look at ourselves and the church at a deeper level than we ever had before, to risk, and change as a result.

He says, it’s a good time to be the church and to be a leader in the church.  And by leader, he means clergy or lay leaders.  He says it’s a good time to be in the church PROVIDED we recognize the enormous adaptive challenges that come with they dying of one era and the birth of a new one.

He goes on to say that clergy and lay leaders in mainline churches – and this is important to know as you seek a settled pastor – clergy and lay leaders in mainline churches, who are in the midst of adaptive challenges, must provide more than solutions to technical problems.  Their primary question must be, “What are we trying to accomplish here?”  The problem for most mainline churches over the years is that the answer to that question, although unspoken, was always: “Maintaining and surviving -- keeping the membership satisfied – appeasing members whose actions or words shouldn’t even be acknowledges, let alone appease.”

Our author tells all leaders of churches that, in the midst of adaptive change realistic critiques must be given and other options “put on the table.”  Robinsons says, “Good leaders in congregations will allow their congregations to feel ‘the pinch of reality.’”

Another thing the author tells us about those in leadership positions in churches going through adaptive change is that they must orient people to their roles and expectations of the group.  What is expected of a member of this congregation? How do I become a member of this church? What do I need to know about this group of Christians and their ways of doing things? People in leadership positions need to be helping others, or maybe even themselves, to answer those questions.

But he goes on to say that sometimes, when facing adaptive change, it’s the role of the leadership not only to orient but to disorient people, to challenge the accustomed roles and expectations, and to dislodge people from their well-known roles.  The author describes one congregation he served that had five services, not because the church was overflowing, but to keep members by creating different kinds of services to suit different sensibilities.  One group liked organ music, another liked guitar, another for early risers, one for those who didn’t like music at all, and another for people with kids that sang only children’s ditties.  Everyone safely tucked into their preferred box, and worship was a dull as dishwater.   He undertook to disorient people by suggesting that they mix it all up on “Festival Sundays” – all ages, all kinds of music, etc.  Needless to say, this was deeply disturbing to some folks; but for many others it was an experience of richness in which they found new life.

One other thing the author says leadership in mainline churches must do is to deal with conflict in the group or body.  He states that, “Many leaders in mainline churches have somehow gotten the idea that the worst thing that can happen in a church is conflict.  A good church is one where everyone gets along, everything goes smoothly, and no one is ever upset.  It just so happens that, if you ever find a church where this is true all the time, chances are very good that lots of stuff is being swept under the rug, and the illusion of harmony is just that.  Human groups, even churches – perhaps especially churches – have conflict.

As the author states:  “in the midst of adaptive change, good leaders will not simply manage or quell conflict, they will draw it out.  True, they will do it carefully, trying to discern which conflicts are big and which one aren’t.  Robinson says, “Good leaders will question the norms, the status quo, the ‘way we’ve always done it.’  Why do we always have children go out before the sermon? What are we saying when we do that? Whose interests are being served by this strategy?  Why do we give mission dollars to the regional and national offices? Why is that our mission? What does that say about how we understand mission?” etc.

And lastly, he says to congregations specifically about pastoral leadership:  “In our day the pastor may need to lean more toward the prophetic role, especially since there are such powerful forces in the church and culture pushing pastors toward more socially congenial roles of peacemaker, reconciler, smoother of ruffled feathers, and little more than another of the helping professions – trying to make life a little easier, and little less stressful for the parishioner.”  He states that he, as a pastor, has, over the years, come to believe that he is more faithful – and probably ultimately more helpful to the congregation, as a pastor, when he lets the trouble stand on its own, when he doesn’t try to smooth it all out and make it easier.

He closes by saying to all leaders in churches that never to challenge, question, disorient, or lead people onto the risky terrain of conflict can hardly be called leadership.  In reality, that is avoiding leadership.  It may be a fine institutional chaplaincy, but it is not leadership.  It also tends to shut out the working of the Holy Spirit rather than inviting or permitting it in.  It keeps people dependent rather than helping them grow into a mature Christian faith.

It’s a great time to be in a mainline church that is truly seeking to be the church of Jesus Christ – as long as you’re not looking for a comfortable pew!