A Sermon from 1992

 

A Sermon from 1992 on a Vision of the Church

 

In 1992, nearly thirty years ago now, I was a practicing lawyer who had never had a thought about going to seminary and becoming a church pastor. My late wife Francie and I were members of Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ in the Shoreline area just north of Seattle. One Sunday our pastor, Rev. Steve Hanning, was going to be away, and either he or someone else at the church asked me if I would preach that Sunday. I agreed. I gave a sermon with the title “Vision of the Church.” I just rediscovered the text of that sermon and reread it. It’s really good. I would edit it a bit today, but I’m going t present it here just as it is in text I discovered except for correcting a couple of typos. When I reread the sermon I thought, gee, I guess it was inevitable that I would end up going to seminary and becoming a pastor. I am posting it here for what it’s worth.

 

In 1975 and 1976 Francie [my since deceased wife], our son Matt, and I lived in what was then the Soviet Union while I was doing dissertation research. The Soviet state was officially atheistic. The society it created was, in its outer, public aspect at least, bleak, humorless, largely hopeless, and both oppressive and repressive in a way that it is difficult for most Americans to conceptualize. The official values of that society were entirely material. Soviet ideology did not even officially recognize a spiritual aspect to human life. Outer conformity to standards of conduct and to a system of belief, Marxism-Leninism, was rigorously enforced by a system of secret informers, and any deviation from the imposed norm was punished, not so much by arrest and jail, thought that did happen, as by the withholding of career, housing, recreational, and other opportunities, the absence of which made life, already materially difficult in that country, virtually unbearable. Most Soviet citizens adopted a survival strategy of coldness, even rudeness in public life that made the accomplishing of even routine daily tasks difficult and unpleasant. Although in private Russians could be the most gracious and engaging of hosts, daily life in the Soviet Union was depressing and oppressive in a way I had never experienced and could hardly have imagined before living there.

It became clear to me that the bleakness, hopelessness, and malaise of Soviet life was the direct and unavoidable consequence of a rigidly materialistic philosophy. In Marxism-Leninism, the ideology by which the Soviet Union was nominally run and which in fact informed most of its civic life, there is no moral standard other than the good of the state. The individual counts for nothing, and there is no moral deterrent to even the most brutal and ruthless actions as long as those actions can be cast as being for the good of the working class and the state which supposedly represents it. This devaluing of the individual led in the Soviet Union to a society in which no one trusted his or her neighbor or even his or her own family members and in which an all-pervasive sense of hopelessness led to rampant alcoholism, domestic violence, and other social ills whose existence was no secret despite the official policy of silence and neglect with regard to most of them.

In this oppressive atmosphere, I was exposed to an alternative—actually the only intellectually consistent and comprehensive alternative to Marxism available in the Western world—the Church. Francie, Matt, and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church associated with the American and British embassies in Moscow. We became friends with the American pastor, a liberal Presbyterian, and his family. The Church became for me a refuge from the materialism and despair of Soviet society. The contrast between the warmth and love expressed in the church services and the coldness and meanness of Soviet life was overpowering. In the church I came to see the humanizing and enabling power of faith in God in stark contrast to the dehumanizing and diminishing effect of faith in man.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church in contemporary America? I submit to you that the society in which we live is not all that different in its fundamental aspects from the society created in the now defunct Soviet Union. The underlying principle by which both order their lives is materialism. In neither society are people valued for who they are. In our society—

 

·       People are valued for what they produce not who they are.

 

·       Success is equated with wealth, and it doesn’t much matter how that wealth was acquired.

 

·       We elect top national leadership which legitimizes racism by failing to provide leadership for the continuation of the civil rights movement and by catering to bigotry in the guise of code words like law and order and opposition to so-called quota bills.

 

·       We allow racism and economic policy based upon the selfish, short-sighted good of the well-to-do to create a third world in our inner cities, and when that third world reacts emotionally, irrationally and violently to the oppression under which it lives we are outraged, and our reaction is first and foremost the call for “law and order,” with any conceivable constructive response coming slowly and half-heartedly.

 

·       We purport to believe in the equality of all people, but one form of bigotry remains not only acceptable but politically necessary—bigotry against people of minority sexual orientation. Bigotry based on sexual orientation destroys families and blights the lives of millions of decent, constructive citizens.

 

·       We create a society in which domestic violence reaches epidemic proportions and most of us don’t even know it.

 

·       We claim that we believe in peace, but when diplomacy and reason fail we are quick to resort to military force to impose our will on others. In doing so we blithely destroy thousands upon thousands of lives and call ourselves heroic. We give our President his highest approval ratings when he is using military force overseas, thereby inviting him to use it again when his reelection appears to be in danger.

 

·       We tolerate the most violent society in the industrialized world, and no politician can effectively advocate even the regulation much less the obviously needed ban of the weapons which so terrorize so much our population because of the misguided but well-organized efforts of a small special interest group.

 

In short, we live in a society which falls so far short of its expressed ideals, so full of violence, so full of injustice that one is tempted to react with nothing but despair and a self-defensive apathy in the face of seemingly intractable problems.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church? I want to suggest to you that the church properly understood is the only institution that offers a hope of a viable alternative to the evils of the society we live in. Only the church offers a consistent, intellectually honest and spiritually satisfying belief system that answers the problems and vices of the world.

What does the church offer in response to the seemingly overwhelming problems of society? There are two major aspects to its response—a pastoral response and a prophetic response. On the pastoral level it offers refuge, comfort, and hope. Christianity teaches us above all else that God loves and accepts us as we are. That we don’t have to be perfect to be justified. Church is a place where we can bring our cares and burdens and be assured of understanding and forgiveness. When life can be so overwhelming, we need more than ever the refuge and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness and acceptance that the church offers us.

But if the church’s response to the world was merely pastoral, merely a place for us to go for comfort, it would deteriorate into a narcissistic self-indulgence that would ultimately be irrelevant to the world. But Christianity, and the Judaism out of which it grew and with which it is so closely connected, when properly understood, does not stop with the pastoral response. We are the heirs of a great prophetic tradition going way back into Old Testament times. The saints of our spiritual tradition have for millennia called on the societies and states in which they lived to repent and to improve. Inspired by their understanding of the Divine will, they have fearlessly challenged the powers of the world to live by the eternal truths in which they and we believe. The church today is called perhaps as it has not been for many decades to continue that prophetic tradition. Our faith compels us to speak out against the evil we perceive. Our faith also empowers us to do so. We know that God will forgive our failures and our shortcomings. We know that ultimately the world can do nothing to harm us in terms of eternity. And we know that we can be true to ourselves and to our faith only by speaking out, by demanding that our leaders and our society as a whole turn away from the paths of violence and bigotry which they so often travel. Only the church has the great legacy and the great belief system which empowers it to be a prophet. If the church does not speak out for what is right, no one will.

Now the question arises of what I mean by the Church. Obviously a great many churches do not stand for the kind of end to bigotry and violence I am talking about. Many churches, indeed to some extent probably all churches, are more a part of the problem than they are of the solution. Large, socially respectable Christian churches stand today for a subordinate status for women and for Scripturally justified bigotry against God’s gay and lesbian sons and daughters. They preach an anti-intellectual and intellectually dishonest fundamentalism and offer a faith that is so self-centered that it loses all sense of social responsibility. They use our great Judeo-Christian spiritual legacy not as a basis for prophecy but as a narrow-minded justification of the social and political status quo. They preach not the infinite vastness of God’s love for all people but a judgmental doctrine which requires not a life of faith and love but rigid adherence to traditional life-styles and a restrictive morality which results in wide-spread misery among those who would believe and the alienation of huge numbers of people from the faith.

What then is my vision of the Church? It is of a church that is true to its real self. A church that responds to the evils of society by spreading the priceless treasure of the good news of God’s love for all people, where all, regardless of their station in life, regardless of their sex, race, age, sexual orientation or other distinguishing characteristic can come to know the love of God and the tremendous power of God’s forgiveness. And it is of a church that fearlessly and tirelessly calls our society to be true to itself, to its professed ideals, to the vision of live we have received from Jesus Christ our Lord, a life of love and forgiveness for all.

As a church and as individuals we have all been too timid in our prophetic mission. We have been too complacent and too comfortable. If the church is to be what it can and should be we must more aggressively speak out for what we know to be true. We have taken a good step here by adopting our open and affirming covenant. We must continue to speak out, and we must do so more visibly. We must take to heart the message we profess to believe, that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. In that forgiveness lies an infinite empowerment for good if we will only truly believe and act on it. Let us commit ourselves to making Christ’s church all that He would have it be—a refuge four our souls and a source of inspiration and prophecy for all of society.