Scriptures:
1 Samuel 3:1-11 and Ezra 3:10-13
In the book of Samuel, we get to read
about Samuel, the last Judge of Israel, who almost functions as a King. He is a
bridge figure between two worlds, two ways of being Israel. The story of his
life reflects the crisis of this transition.
Before
Samuel, Israelite society was decentralized. According to the book of Judges
the 12 tribes govern themselves—they were semi-autonomous, other than in times
of crisis, when God sends a charismatic individual to unite the tribes and deal
with the threat. Likewise, worship is done locally, and strange bands of
prophets wander the land doing mighty and surprising deeds.
After
Samuel his society is centralized. Like other nations the Israelites are ruled
by a dynastic king. The government and temple are located in Jerusalem, and
prophets largely cease their wandering and instead serve in the king’s court.
The book
of Ezra tells of another crisis in the life of God’s people. They were freed
from Exile in Babylon, and given funds to rebuild the temple. And they do. It
is a glorious thing—the younger returners have dreamed of this day their whole
lives. The aged returners have done so too, but they remember what once was.
The
rebuilding of the temple is both a thing of joy, and a sorrowful event. Such a
clamor, weeping and huzzahs intermingled. Shouts of, “Is this it? Shouldn’t it
be better? Don’t you remember the good old days?” as well as, “Finally, what
we’ve been waiting for! It is here, God will be present with us again; God’s
glory among us!”
Imagine,
in both of these times of crisis and transition, how folk had to re-think
everything. Not only that, they had to live differently, imagine in new ways,
and dream sacred dreams like never before! Times of crisis can be the most
fruitful and faithful, because the only other option is failure.
St.
Augustine—City of God
Once the eyes of Rome fell upon the
Christian faith, persecutions, be they led by Emperors or neighbors with
pitchforks, began. The Faith hid and struggled and did what it could to
survive. Then along came Emperor Constantine, who first made Christianity a
legal religion within the Roman Empire, then the preferred religion of the
Empire, and finally THE religion of the Empire.
This was
a heady time for the Faith, going from outsider to insider, persecuted to
persecutor, all in relatively short order. Such a reversal could only be
ascribed to the Holy Spirit. “Could,” these Christians wondered, “this be the reign
of God Jesus describes in those parables? Great reversals are surely a sign of
resurrection and new life!”
“Could,” they wondered within a generation of their
acceptance and ascendancy, “the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of God be one in
the same? Could the Kingdom be a literal kingdom, not an experience to be
noticed and savored, a framing to help us discern the Spirit at work, but
instead a particular government, a particular secular patron turned sacred?
Being a good Roman Citizen and being a Citizen of the Kingdom of God are one in
the same!” they concluded.
And
then, in the year 410 of the Common Era, Rome itself, the heart of this new
Kingdom of God, was sacked. “Oh no! If Rome fell, does that mean God has
failed? What do we do now?”
After a
decade and a half of reflection, Augustine, a Bishop in the hinterlands of the
Empire, Hippo, North Africa, wrote a response. In a thick book titled The
City of God he answered the question, “Did the Kingdom of God fail?” He
unraveled what had become ungainly wound, the distinction between the City of
Rome and the City of God, secular citizenship and being a Christian.
To this day
City of God, written in response to such a crisis, informs not only
Christian theology, but also political philosophy and theories of the mind.
When you have to rethink everything from the root, every branch blooms afresh!
Simone
Weil—The Need for Roots
Another such crisis was that of Europe
after the Second World War. Simone Weil, a French Christian Mystic, considered
the crisis of confidence in her home country of France, as well as the
continent as a whole. She noted how quickly France fell to the Nazis, and how German
fell under the sway of fascism so easily. She felt those events were two sides
of the same coin. Both were symptoms of a similar demoralization and lostness
that pervaded Europe. If those were all symptoms, the disease was rootlessness.
The bulk of the European continent had been uprooted from any semblance of
tradition or family or nation or much of anything else. Industrialization and
urbanization were the Petri dishes in which totalitarianism and demoralization
grew.
And this would have simply been an
interesting assessment, save that Charles DeGaulle was working on a new
constitution for France, and he asked Weil to not just diagnosis the disease,
but also offer a cure. Weil threw herself into this project and offered the
following:
Reinvigorate
Local French Cultures—Part of why France failed to fight, Weil surmised, was
that they were being told to fight for Parisian values, yet they were not
Parisian; at the same time, they had been discouraged from identifying with
their regional culture for so long they no longer identified with it either. For
generations they had been encouraged to throw off their local culture, but were
still looked down upon as parochial in their attempts at assimilation, and
therefore they were left rootless. So, Weil saw the way forward to be a
celebration of local French culture alongside the Parisian mainstream.
Choose
to Decolonize Africa and Asia—To lose a colony is to be
humiliated, to create more men pining and valorizing the past, to root
themselves in domination and oppression. To free your own colonies is to be on
the right-er side of history, to give your people something positive to
celebrate now.
Create decentralized and contextual education—If
factory work in cities creates alienated and broken men who won’t fight for
their nation, or alternatively will be attracted to strong men, teach non-factory
work. Teach, too, local cultures so every French-person has something to be
proud of, be they in the center or at the periphery.
Decentralize manufacturing and give workers incentives to
work—Again, if the majority rushing to one or two manufacturing
hubs leaves the urban folk feeling squished and atomized and the rural folk
feeling abandoned, shift how manufacturing operates. Sure, things might be a
tish less efficient, but if that reinvigorates the spirit and pushes away fascist
tendencies, it is worth it. For that matter, meaningful work gives people dignity
and a sense of purpose, so prioritizing that over idleness, even when it is inefficient,
is worthwhile.
Have fact checkers for everything—One of
the horrifying things about totalitarianism that Weil noticed was how
ruthlessly truth gets mugged. For that reason, France ought to fight against
disinformation at every turn.
Redefine Patriotism as that which can be lost… a Politics
of the Cross (like Theology of the Cross)—The lines between
patriotism and nationalism were easily blurred and many of the finer details of
a national life, not to mention the little people, can be easily lost in the
shuffle. For that matter, so much of the totalitarian vision involves false
nostalgia and promises of an impossible future. Part of a healthy patriotism is
seeing the good that is actually present, and preserving it.
Redefine French Identity as a people for humanity—So much
of nationalism is defining who a people are not. I am German not Polish, French
not Spanish or Algerian. Weil flips that on its head, what if the French
identity is defined by inclusion and solidarity with all people?
Pastor Chris—The
Four D’s
That brings us to our present crisis,
the crisis of the North American Church. If the statisticians are right, the
mainline tradition (denomination churches associated with the European
Protestant tradition who have structures in place to weed out bad actors and
hold people to account. I serve in the ELCA, a hub of the Mainline tradition.) will
cease to exist in about a decade.
I’m just one guy, certainly not a
mystic like Weil or a Genius-Saint like Augustine, but I think I occasionally
can see things clearly, and this is my assessment.
In the
present crisis, the mainline tradition is failing because it is not grappling
with the four Ds: Disestablishment, Decentralization, Demographic Shift, and
most importantly, Disenchantment.
Disestablishment:
When the Baltimore Colts were a team,
or so I’ve heard, they were only allowed to play football after a certain time
on Sunday, on order of the Archbishop of Baltimore. Then when Baltimore got a
new team, the Baltimore Ravens, the Archbishop went to the owner of the team to
schedule when the team could play on Sundays, and he was gently shown the door.
As the above story illustrates, something
has fundamentally shifted in how American society treats Christianity. While
America has never had an official state religion, we have often informally
acted in ways that centered the Christian faith. This is an insight Theologian
Douglas John Hall has famously pointed out in his
own country, Canada. There were once a host of cultural norms that assisted the
church, and the church has grown to rely on them. In fact, often the Church
returned the favor, teaching American cultural values instead of the gospel. As
long as the Church was vaguely “nice” a bunch of social organizations would
help it out.
For a variety of reasons (Bowling Alone dynamics,
the end of the Cold War and the rise of the War on Terror, etc.) that reality
came to an end. Some in the Church are desperately trying to claw our way back into
the halls of power, others despair. I would suggest the whole situation is an
opportunity.
We can
now reconsider all those formal and informal cultural connections and start
again. The Church has been given an opportunity to rethink how we make
partnerships. One of the places doing this sort of work, at least on a building
use level, is Partners for Sacred
Places in Philly. The Mainline needs to intentionally remake
connections with new partners. We need to re-imagine our place in society and
find where the Holy Spirit is already acting in our neighborhoods!
Decentralization:
Once, or so I have been told, the
world was centralized. Everyone received news from a single trusted newscaster,
desks in schools all faced forward looking at a teacher, organizations were
very hierarchical, a top-down kind of thing. The Church too functioned in this
way, top down, facing forward in your pews, trusting the Pastor as the
authority on the Faith. And this all worked quite swimmingly, at least for a time.
Now everyone gets their news from
information silos, classrooms are modular and virtual, and organizations are
taught to value decentralized, democratic, “leaderless” leadership, as most
clearly articulated by the book The Starfish and the
Spider. And probably most noticeable, the internet has flattened
the world.
And the Church has changed, some.
The ELCA constitution uplifts lay leadership and democratic principles in a way
predecessor bodies did not. When Covid came around we managed to get most of
our congregations onto the internet. But we’re still struggling with this.
I can’t
help but think of a very confused Roman Catholic who attended my congregation
for a time. He had discovered from some amalgamation of the “History” Channel
and chat rooms on the internet that the difference between Protestants and
Catholics was that Protestants acknowledged that the Apostle Paul was a
werewolf (that was the thorn in his flesh). When I burst his bubble, he wasn’t fazed.
He decided I was an authority figure who was hiding “the Truth.” Then he started
attending an “Entrepreneurial” Church down the street where the Pastor agreed
that mainline Churches often hide things from “the people.”
So, what
do we do in a flat, leaderless, democratic, virtual, world? We harness it. We
recognize that 12 disciples, inspired by the testimony of Mary and her crew,
and empowered by the Holy Spirit, changed the world. “Oh no, we have small
churches” can be transformed into “Wow, we have small teams of empowered people
excited to be the Church in the world!”
Imagine
if we took seriously the Church’s duty to equip and encourage lay folks!
Imagine if we embraced holy experimentation, every congregation had a solid and
sustainable internet ministry, and we met out in the world, becoming seeds
thrown out into the world doing Kin(g)dom work!
Demographics:
The
ELCA, and many Mainline denominations, identify as white and middle class. And
there was a time when that seemed to serve us well. After the world wars European
refugees poured into our country looking for Churches where they could belong
and become American at a pace that was comfortable. In the heyday of the
Mainline, middle-class jobs paid well and offered opportunities for women not
to work. This meant congregations had access to funds and volunteer hours.
To be
clear the above description was never that neat, just talk to old timers,
especially the women and immigrants, or talk to non-white Lutherans, they have
a whole different story to tell. But, granting the above story, it didn’t last.
On one
hand, immigration from traditionally Lutheran countries tapered off. On the
other, being middle class shifted. Those who think of themselves as Middle
Class are now time poor, and financially poorer, than early generations, just
read Reich, or Steve Bannon, for
that matter. Hence new members aren’t beating down the doors, there are fewer
volunteers, and donations are down.
Luckily what is a “traditionally”
Lutheran country has changed. Ethiopia has the second largest Lutheran population
in the world, followed by Tanzania. For that matter, Guyana has a thriving Lutheran tradition, and if you’ve ever been
to a Guyanese wedding, the first thing you notice is how racially diverse the
country is. So, I tell folk, invite anyone who looks Guyanese to Church,
because that’s a way of saying, invite everyone! Throw away those preconceived
notions of what a Lutheran looks like!
For that
matter, we need to take a hard look at what middle class practices of the past
serve us well, and which don’t. And, the impoverishment of the Mainline should refocus
us on poverty and point us to how Church is done by impoverished people!
Disenchantment:
Finally, behind all the
above there is a larger challenge we face, Disenchantment (this presentation
has changed since the first time I gave it, and named only the 3Ds above, then I read Hunting
Magic Eels and decided there is a 4th D). Put
baldly, maybe badly, the way the average American lives makes it hard to
believe in God at all. Our habits and focuses point us to the material and
secular things of this world. We have trained ourselves to notice the ball, but miss the gorilla.
So, what to do? Reenchant the world! Encourage:
Holy Friendships—prayer partners and chancing sharing your faith with
others.
The Romance of the Faith—passionate preaching, feeling as well as
thinking, encouraging people to reflect on their own faith stories,
Practice Gratitude—reflect on the “roses and thorns” of your day, and
give thanks for the roses,
Embracing
Beauty—paint murals on churches, reflect on iconography, create
new pretty singable music.
Conclusion:
Times of transition and
crisis are frightening but can also be times of faithful rethinking. When God’s
people find fresh footing, they can do amazing things, they can move forward
again.
Augustine’s
rethink of the faith has created modes of thought both secular and sacred that still
are helpful almost 1700 years later. It is astonishing that a Christian Mystic
was so revered (or the crisis was so severe) that a secular government would
ask for her advice. Finally, what I see as our own crisis as Church is
frightening, but not insurmountable; we just have to faithfully think through
where we are at, dream new dreams, and follow the Spirit’s leading.
