The scent of evergreens is strong on Broadway as Christmas trees are bought and sold. Santa Claus has arrived at South Street Seaport, and Roger Franklin is not in church. Can there be a connection? At Rutgers we have our Christmas luncheon after church today. Advent and Christmas music is in the air and in our worship service. Later we will hear Handle's setting of words from our first reading: O Thou that tellest good tidings to Zion. We are well into Advent, the time when Christians prepare for Christmas.
This year, as in no other time of my ministry, we prepare to celebrate Christmas against a background of world-wide economic uncertainty. The fear that people speak of is less focused than the fear we experienced seven years ago in the aftermath of Nine-Eleven. But it is real. The unemployment numbers are larger than expected, and we are told they will get worse.
It was in a world no less fearful than ours that a man named Mark, so far as we know, set about two thousand years ago to write the true story of a man named Jesus. His first words are "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ...." Mark's document came to be called a Gospel, which is the Greek word for good news. It can be read in a couple of hours. Over the centuries that have passed since Mark wrote his short Gospel, thousands of books and articles have been written about Mark's Gospel and hundreds of thousands about the one who is its subject, Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus Christ, as Mark calls him.
We know from Mark that Jesus invited people to get to know him, to respond to his message, and to continue the work he began. The people who became his followers were at first a persecuted minority, but their number increased and their influence multiplied, not always in ways he would have approved. Eventually they became a world-wide movement that became an institution as it got organized—for better or for worse. The followers of Jesus became the Christian Church, with its glories and its faults.
It is not my intention this morning to talk about The Church, although all of us here today have thoughts and feelings about The Church. According to a couple of its earliest scholars, men named Luke and Paul, The Church was marked by disagreement and controversy from its beginning. Paul commented that too often The Church majored in minors, obsessing about such things as the way people dressed when they went to church, who had the better spiritual pedigree, and the right way to worship God. There were other issues way back in Paul's time: ecstatic speaking in tongues, eating meat that had been used in idol worship, and who should have the places of honor at church gatherings.
We have our lists of secondary priorities that become primary issues in our time, and I don't need to itemize them. I'm not thinking of important justice issues such as the role of women in the church and the ordination of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered people. For me they are not secondary at all but rather are directly related to what I believe the central truth of our Gospel is.
If I could summarize our good news, it would be something like this:
God, as we know God through Jesus, is a God of love—a God of righteousness and judgment also, yes. But first and foremost a God of love&mash;love that is astonishingly inclusive in its scope, love that is affirming and accepting, love that reaches out to care for all people, especially people on the fringes of society, love that invites dynamic relationship as response.
It might not be a bad idea to memorize those first twelve words: God as we know God through Jesus is a God of love.
I believe everything we do as a church should be related to understanding and proclaiming our good news to the world around us. Every other aspect of church life is derivative from that. We proclaim our good news by what we say, by what we do, and by what we are as a faith community—by the way we relate to one another, by the way we treat one another, and by the way we relate to people outside the church, especially people who may be very different from ourselves, and by the way we address the social and economic issues of our world.
That's where the matter of repentance comes in. The good news of God's unconditional love comes to us as a gift, a gift freely given. The process of our accepting it, or believing in it, necessarily involves our looking at ourselves and undergoing change, which is what repentance means. Repentance literally means, "turning around," "re-orienting," "moving in a new direction." To be a follower of Jesus Christ is to be moving in a new direction—continually, and we need to be intentional about that. The path of our discipleship will often lead us to question the values and practices of the broader culture we live in. Jesus did that, and following him means we do it too.
In my many years of life and ministry, I have come to believe that many, maybe most, people aren't experienced in self-examination. That can even be true of church members. We church people are often quite adroit at looking at other people and seeing their weaknesses while remaining blind to our own. Jesus spoke about that when he told the religious people of his time that they could see specks in other people's eyes while ignoring big splinters or logs in their own eyes. Some of my friends call that "taking other people's inventory"—not a healthy spiritual practice.
People in twelve-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon take a fourth step: made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. That comes right out of the Christian faith, right out of today's Gospel lesson, right out of classical Christian spirituality, which insists on self-examination as the basis for Christian discipleship, which is what church membership is all about. And so I ask you and myself in this Advent season, What is our practice of self-examination? Do we make time for it?
Today's Gospel reading calls each one of us to engage in repentance in preparing to celebrate Christmas, and repentance begins with rigorous self-honesty. For me self-honesty means asking myself all the time, "What are my character defects that I should be working on?" "If I am in a troubled relationship, what is my part of the trouble?" "If there is conflict in my life, what is my role in that conflict?" Only after I have answered those questions and checked my answers with someone who will be honest with me can I look at other people's piece of the problem.
The theme of repentance is appropriate for institutions like churches as well as for individuals. There is wide agreement that the Christian Church in Europe and North America is in serious need of repentance—change, new direction. Membership is declining, and many people, especially younger people, perceive the church as irrelevant to modern life, even though they speak unashamedly about their desire for a meaningful spiritual connection. I believe the Church needs to repent in the same way individual Christians are called to repent—that is, move in a new direction, CHANGE! Congregations need to be self-aware in the same way I suggested you and I need to be self-aware.
This past week I read about a new church development in Paso Robles, California. A couple of years ago a Presbyterian minister, Graham Baird, was asked to take the job of starting a new Presbyterian church there. This is part of the story:
Baird remembers the trip he and his wife took to see the proposed location for the new church. "We went to Paso Robles to say No," he remembers. But when they got there, things changed. They were amazed at the beauty of the place, a once small town in central California that is growing in part because of the many wineries and the temperate climate.
Baird prayed about the presbytery's invitation and decided to give it a try. He remembers, "The first worship service was on Easter, 2006. It was raining, but we had sent out hundreds of postcards and we set up 200 chairs. We planned our service for 9 a.m." At 8:55 there were Baird, his wife, and his brother. At 8:56 there was a stream of cars that looked like Field of Dreams. One hundred and ninety-eight people attended the service.
"There were a lot of churches in Paso Robles," Baird explains. Forty-seven to be exact. But Highlands Church is different. Many of the other churches have a more fundamentalist theology. Highlands Church's theology helps people live their lives in a practical way that is needed in our world today.
"Our mission is to help the de-churched," Bair says. The term refers to people who have been in other churches but were broken or turned off by that experience.
One result? Flip flops and cowboy boots. Paso Robles is in the midst of a transition between the old and the new. Old Paso is the Pioneer Day Parade with cowboy boots and hats. New Paso is more symbolized by the growing winery presence, the designer jeans and flip flops crowd. It's a fascinating convergence, Baird says. At the moment he preaches in cowboy boots, but admits that as Paso continues to change, he will likely move to flip flops.
But that's not what Highlands Church is about. With 198 people at that first service on Easter 2006, the next Sunday the attendance was 40. Two and a half years later it averages between seven and eight hundred. Baird says, We care deeply about connecting with broken people and we will sacrifice almost anything to do that.
I believe we in Rutgers Church have good news to share: God as we know God through Jesus is a God of love. We have this good news not just for ourselves, but share, to share especially with people who may have had painful experiences with religious communities that have been judgmental and unfriendly. How can we connect with such people in New York City? Flip flops are probably not the answer, but there lots of other possibilities. I'm interested in what you think they may be.