(1) But now thus says the LORD, he who
created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I
have called you by name, you are mine. (2) When you pass through the waters, I will be
with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire
you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. (3) For I am the LORD your
God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba
in exchange for you. (4) Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love
you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. (5) Do not fear,
for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will
gather you; (6) I will say to the north, "Give them up," and to the south,
"Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the
earth - (7) everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed
and made." (8) Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet
have ears! (9) Let all the nations gather together, and let the peoples assemble. Who
among them declared this, and foretold to us the former things? Let them bring their
witnesses to justify them, and let them hear and say, "It is true."
- Isaiah 43: 1-9
Last Sunday, we ordained and installed church officers, commissioning some to lead us
into PPC's future. In that sermon, I proclaimed that ordination is a calling to lead by
orchestrating, with God's help, deeds of liberation and hope.
This Sunday, I want to reflect further about our calling, but this time I will frame
the conversation more broadly. I want to look beyond our individual callings or even PPC's
collective calling. I want to suggest some themes that I believe should be the calling of
the movement of progressive, mainline Protestantism as we move further into the third
millennium.
Let us turn to our scripture lesson from Isaiah 43. Isaiah 43 is a part of the writings
of the prophet known as Second Isaiah, the prophet of the sixth century before Christ who
ministered in the midst of Israel's darkest hour, the Babylonian exile.
For the ancient Hebrews, the Babylonian exile was like the Holocaust for 20th-century
Jews. In addition to killings and the systematic dismembering of a people, the exile tore
apart every assumption Israel had about enjoying God's special protection. The old Davidic
promise that God would perpetually look with favor on Israel had been torn asunder by the
brutality of the Babylonian conquest. Overnight, the Hebrews were either killed or
imprisoned. Survivors were marched in chains to the farthest reaches of the Empire. Into
this dark night of Israel's soul, Second Isaiah, both prophet and pastor, issued his
proclamation of hope.
Second Isaiah is the Old Testament's greatest theologian. He surveyed the landscape of
history and Israel's suffering and brought the hope-filled message that God was still
shaping their destiny and their deepest suffering would be redeemed. More than anyone in
the Old Testament, Second Isaiah conveyed the wisdom that even in the midst of deep horror
and pain, God can work to bring about good purposes.
In today's text, the long travail has ended. The people of the Exile have been freshly
released from prison and are heading home after four decades of captivity. There is joy
but also profound fear. There is fear that the new Persian overlords will change their
minds. There is fear of perishing in the wilderness. And like all survivors of profound
trauma, there is fear of believing too deeply in their dreams. Six hundred miles of alien
land separate their childhood home. The group comes to what seems to be an unsurmountable
obstacle, a dangerous river crossing. They panic and the prophet smooths the waters of
their anxiety.
"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are
mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they
shall not overwhelm you; For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."
"When you pass through the waters," not "if" you pass through the
waters. All of you will pass through the waters. There is no escape. We can think of
countless personal trials where the waters of chaos threaten to overwhelm. But today I
call your attention to a collective meaning of this metaphor.
Mainline American Protestant Christianity has been passing through troubled waters for
several decades. We, the mainline Protestant church, are in white-water times. Caught in a
leaky raft that we call the church, the waters of change and uncertainty threaten our very
survival. We look back to the distant shores of yesteryear when our feet were firmly
planted on solid ground. We remember good times when Sunday schools were overflowing,
church coffers brimming, and the church had a major role to play in society. We strain to
look ahead and cannot see the features of our promised landing. The waters roil with such
violence that we have come to fear that our very life is at stake. Survival becomes the
dominating ethos, not mission, not evangelism, not justice, or compassion, but survival.
We patch a leak here and bail out water there, but there is little that gives us
confidence that our future is bright. "When you pass through the waters. . ."
We are in white-water times. In a shrinking world torn apart by tribalism whether of
race, religion or culture, most churches remain mono-cultural ghettos. The river roils and
boils.
In a technological world where too often human beings are valued on the basis of the
bottom line, and spirits are crushed in the name of efficiency, cultural support for
church and synagogue is at its lowest level ever, despite lip service by political leaders
extolling the virtues of religion. We are in white-water times.
In a crowded world where wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands and the poverty of
the have-nots is pandemic, the ecumenical church's collective voice is weak and virtually
ignored. For too many years, the church in the face of withering criticism and
accommodation has turned away from its prophetic voice and sold our soul to being nice. We
are in white-water times.
The National Council of Churches in Christ, founded on the ashes and horror of World
War II, has been forced to slash staff by more than half in the past few years. Its
weakness mirrors that of its supporting denominations plagued by internal wars over human
sexuality and withering attacks by well funded arch conservatives like the Presbyterian
Layman and the Institute for Religion and Democracy. What is lost on the national and
international level is the church's historic voice on behalf of voiceless, the poor,
political refugees, and victims of racism. The weakness of the ecumenical church's
collective voice is a good part of the explanation why this nation refuses to have a
substantive debate about poverty, health care and public education. The collective voice
of the progressive tradition is swallowing water. We are in white-water times.
The challenge for the mainline, progressive church is to lift our heads above troubled
waters and look to the opposite shore, trusting that as we pass through the waters, God
will be with us, giving us life beyond survival, purpose beyond maintenance, direction
beyond looking back to a shore to which we will never return.
In white-water times, the church will surely drown when survival is foremost in our
collective mind. "Play it safe." "Keep looking back." "Keep doing
what used to work" are the epitaphs of well meaning church folk who, without knowing
it, naively do the devil's work. The landscape of American architecture is littered with
quaint religious museums, hollow church monuments to past vitality, devoid of living human
beings, whose memorial plaques are inscribed with the seven last words of the church:
"We have always done it this way."
What is our calling as mainline, progressive Protestants in these white-water times?
What distant shore beckons?
First, some definitions. By "progressive and mainline" I mean those American
churches who historically embraced the social justice dimensions of the Gospel:
Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, American Baptists and a few others,
not without debate and division, but with confidence and clear identity. From the Social
Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that fueled social reform causes
from the enactment of child labor laws to the creation of the United Nations, to providing
crucial leadership for civil rights for people of color in the 1950s and 1960s, to working
for the full inclusion of women in church and society in the 1970s and 80s, the
progressive movement within American Protestantism came to believe that to be faithful to
Jesus meant that the church was to work for a more just, compassionate and peaceful
society.
In Pasadena Presbyterian Church's own history, this progressive identity was led by
great church leaders like Doctors Freeman, Blake and Little. These are the commitments of
progressive, mainline Christianity. In contrast, I suppose, were those churches that
openly resisted social reform in the guise of saving souls while they dispensed Reader's
Digest folk wisdom on how to cope with modern living.
For a while, mainline churches depended on the goodness of the fertility gods and times
were good. Then birth rates plummeted and cultural supports for church going largely
disappeared. Mainline churches went into meltdown mode. Memberships plummeted. Social
witness declined. Membership aged. We slipped from mainline to old line to the sideline.
Hello.
Meanwhile, fundamentalists and charismatics, who always had a clearer sense of identity
than mainliners, emerged out of nowhere with remarkable strength like stealth bombers
flying over the Rose Parade.
Nobody in power is really listening anymore to the mainline churches despite all the
"God bless Americas" and faith-based initiatives from political officials. True,
General Assemblies and their counterparts among Lutherans, Methodists and the rest
continue to issue progressive resolutions, but nobody of influence is really listening. In
the 1950s when Eugene Carson Blake was Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly,
he could pick up the phone and call President Eisenhower on a matter of church concern. He
was the last Presbyterian to do so. Our clout as an establishment church is gone. The cozy
alliance of mainline church and a benevolent government where the church helped shape
governmental policy and promoted vague civic virtues is only a memory.
The world has changed. We've stepped into a fast moving river. A few years ago, Duke
University theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Resident Aliens, painted an
unflattering picture of the progressive, mainline church. Hauerwas said, "Mainline
American Protestantism has plodded wearily along as if nothing has changed. Like an aging
recluse, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house
decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, church leaders
continue to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still
valid."
Then where is our hope? Three themes beckon from the other side of the river. The first
is to go inward by strengthening Christian identity and community on the most basic level
by participating in the classical disciplines of prayer, Bible study, small groups, and
service. It's called making disciples. We need to know and practice what makes us unique.
Without clear identity, our love of tolerance and our openness to other truths will
continue to turn us into tepid, Sunday morning Christians who will slowly disappear when
conflict erupts or times grow more uncertain.
The conservative side of Christianity knows how to make disciples intensively,
systemically and comprehensively. We can longer luxuriate in a 1950s assumption that all
Presbyterians know in some vague general way what our faith is about. We don't. Once we
were one of the most biblically literate denominations. Now we rank sixth in Biblical
literacy among all Protestants. The Bible is the foundational document of our faith. All
of us need to know it, love it, and be claimed not only by its authority, but by its
capacity to expand our lives.
The first source of hope is to cultivate Christian identity. We better know our story
and how to pass it along. With a clear identity, when all of us are gone, the story will
live on.
The second theme is to embrace other faith traditions beyond Christianity. Even as we
strengthen the roots of our own faith we need to learn those who follow other paths. We
need to empathize with them and to be changed by their understanding of the Divine.
Mainline Protestants know a lot about tolerance. We are not a sect that maintains that
we have the corner on all truth despite the arrogance of some Presbyterians. Historically,
we've called such arrogance "idolatry." In an era when Fundamentalists - whether
they are Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Christian - threaten our world with terror, in an era
when religious tribalism is at the root of so much of the world's violence, there is
profound need for people of faith, of all faiths, to come together and tell and listen to
our unique stories at a common table. Our stories and religious practices are profoundly
different. We need to know each other. We need to collaborate on that which we do have in
common: our concern for creation and our reverence for life.
Do you know what a Jain really believes? A Muslim, a Sikh, a Hindu? We better find out
because not only are they our neighbors across the street, the survival of the globe
depends upon it.
As progressive American Christians, we can model what it means for people of all faiths
and beliefs to engage with one another to shape a positive religious pluralism. If you
believe, along with Second Isaiah, that God is shaping human history, then believe that a
part of our calling is to make our American home, the most religiously diverse nation in
the world, a model to our shrinking globe of what it means to affirm religious freedom and
to live the motto of our republic,
E Pluribus Unum - "From Many, One" without violence
and with mutual respect.
We have no less a model than the person of Jesus to show us the way. Jesus constantly
broke through the narrow-minded conceptions of his own religious tradition so that we
could see God in what Israel considered pagan. The stories of the good Samaritan and the
Syro-Phoenician woman are two examples of God working through other faith traditions to
expand horizons and to see that God is marvelously expansive and uncontainable. It is my
form conviction that Christ will be revealed even more fully to his followers when we
encounter and empathize with people from other faith traditions. We will be changed and
our world will have a better chance of knowing the peace that God intends for all
creation.
The third and final theme is to continue our historic and biblical birthright to be a
voice for the voiceless, a tireless advocate for the downtrodden, the despised, the poor,
and the excluded. Our calling is to be about the work of liberation. We do so not because
we're Democrats or Republicans. We do so because we follow Jesus. We follow his way. And
because his way is for the least of these, it is our way.
My friends. We live in white-water times. The waters of chaos threaten. Anxiety rises
high. We're not the church we used to be.
"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; For I am the LORD your God, the Holy
One of Israel, your Savior."
Lift your heads above the waters. You can see the opposite shore. May God give us
sight, courage and resolve to see our calling: to strengthen our identity as Christians,
to reach out to other faith traditions in an embrace of peace, and to proclaim in word and
deed the liberating good news of Jesus Christ to those the world passes by. May God give
us the faith to see our way clear. Amen.
