Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

I hope no one here is suffering from Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – did you know that’s the fear of long words? It’s unlikely that any of us have that particular fear, although many people are nervous about complexity. That will be a problem over the coming months because we are fully entering the campaign season now. When people in a democracy are unwilling to deal with complex issues, candidates try to appeal to voters in more superficial ways. We’ve been seeing that trend for quite a number of years, and ultimately it weakens democracy. An informed and participatory electorate is fundamental to democracy – if we don’t understand the issues, we can’t make wise choices.

I remember a few years ago during an Indiana gubernatorial campaign. The incumbent, Joe Kernan, was running against Mitch Daniels. Daniels centered his campaign around a reference that President Bush had made to Daniels when he had been running the Office of Management and the Budget. Bush had called him “My Man Mitch” and so that became his campaign slogan. A friend of mine was discussing the governor’s race with her neighbor, and she listed all her objections to Daniels, describing his background before his work in Washington, his record there, and when she finally finished, the neighbor said, “Well I like that slogan, ‘My Man Mitch.’ I’m going to vote for Daniels.” The issues were too complicated.

This is part of why freedom of the press is so critically important in a free society – we need the freedom to study issues from all perspectives. Life is complex, and we diminish our experience when we are unwilling to deal with complexity.

This is not only true in politics – it’s also true of that other subject that is not appropriate for polite conversation…religion. Perhaps when the adage against discussing politics or religion arose, polite conversation was supposed to be superficial.

It’s important to be able to discuss complex issues in religion because theology matters. Diversity is important, and tolerance is an essential virtue in a pluralistic society. But tolerance is not the same as the kind of mushy-headed indifference to truth that is expressed when someone says, “Oh it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere,” or “well, it’s fine for you to believe whatever you want, as long as it works for you.” It does matter. Sound thinking matters. Theology matters. What we believe and what we value shapes how we act. When what you believe causes you to devalue the people who disagree with you then theology matters. When what you believe sanctions a parent beating their child, then theology matters. When what you believe lets you drink cyanide-laced purple KoolAid, as over 900 true believers did in the Jonestown cult suicide 30 years ago this year, theology matters. My grandmother was Christian Scientist, and what she believed led her to refuse medical treatment for diabetes, so she died, at 52 …just my age… leaving my mom parentless just after her college graduation. I wish I had known her because I so admire her commitment to her faith, but theology matters.

Now, I am NOT saying that everyone needs to believe the same thing. I am NOT saying that the Christian way is the only valid way. I am NOT saying that I have cornered the truth and all those who disagree with me are wrong, although sometimes in political conversations it sounds like I mean that.

And I am not supporting that wing of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. who used the phrase “Theology matters” to raise a backlash against the first Reimagining conference in 1993 which explored different images and language for God. Many of you probably don’t know about this issue, but others of you might remember that there was a feminist conference, in Minnesota. Among the events of that conference were trying some no-longer-traditional liturgical rituals dating from the early church, and using the Biblical name for wisdom, Sophia, as part of blessings in worship. There was a huge outcry in both the Presbyterian and Methodist churches – scholars and church leaders who had attended the conference were vilified and accused of paganism. A witchhunt atmosphere ensued, which I remember very well, since I began seminary a year later. It was a period when some folks in the church were trying to create a climate in which people would be discouraged from thinking outside orthodoxy, and so they used the slogan “theology matters”. And they were right that theology matters, but they were wrong to discourage theological exploration and reflection. Thinking outside the box is what we all ought to be doing.

A few years later, in 1999, I attended a Continuing Education event at Princeton Seminary for youth ministry. I heard some amazing theologians. Once of them, Jürgen Moltmann has been internationally eminent for decades. The other, Cynthia Rigby, is Brita Knippel Hansen’s advisor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and was her theology professor last semester. Both Moltmann and Rigby are important theologians, and as I was looking at the transcripts of that 1999 conference, I was struck by the importance of some of their messages for us this week as we consider theology.

Moltmann gave one talk titled, What is a Theologian? in which he argued that every believer is a theologian, and further, that atheists are theologians, too. What is theology? The word comes from two Greek words: theos and logos which mean, respectively, God and word. Theology is words about God – it is the conversation we have with people, with ourselves, with the circumstances of our lives in which we seek meaning, through which we seek to understand ourselves and our lives in a larger context. Moltmann reminded us that Luther had said, “We are all theologians.” And in fact that is a key piece of the Protestant tradition. In the Catholic tradition, the Church hierarchy is the arbiter of truth. In fact, the Church has long had the practice of granting official approval to Bible translations and theological works so that Catholics know what is sanctioned to read and study. The approval is called the Imprimatur, and it appears on the copyright page of sanctioned works.

We don’t have that kind of practice. Presbyterians do talk about essential tenets of doctrine – later this morning our new elders and deacons will be ordained and installed for service and as part of their ordination, they will be asked 9 questions. The third asks, “Do you receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what the Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?” The essential tenets are not defined anywhere and that’s not an accident. In fact, even those confessions of faith are a moving target. Our constitution includes a Book of Confessions – it is a collection of 11 creeds – statements of faith – that begin with the Nicene Creed which was written in 325 as the first creed of the early church. The collection ends with the Brief Statement of Faith which was approved in 1991. These eleven creeds are not identical. Part of what is essential about who we are as Presbyterians is that we are people who throughout the centuries have struggled to put our faith into words – theology, God-talk, is at the heart of who we are. In every time, and different places, we have tried to discern what it means to live faithfully in our circumstances, understanding that it might be different for us here and now than it was for someone else at some other time.

We have just finished celebrating Christmas, and part of the importance of the doctrine of incarnation – that God came among us as one of us in Jesus Christ – is that the incarnation affirms that this world and our place in it are important in the living out of our faith – and our faith is meant to be lived out. The early Christians were called People of the Way – and that needs to be understood in two ways: first, Christians are people who follow the way of Jesus. Being Christian is not just about what we believe, it’s about who and how we are. And the second implication of being People of the Way is that we are on a journey – we are not standing still. In every time, in every place, men and women and children of faith are called to wrestle anew with what it means to be faithful. And so we all are called to be theologians.

Faith isn’t a matter of having all the answers, it’s a matter of being willing to ask the questions, and to wrestle with the hard task of discerning the answers for today. Being faithful isn’t coming to a point of saying “the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Quite the contrary. Being faithful means being willing to enter each day with our eyes, ears, mind and heart open to how God might be leading us, and trusting that the living God is still guiding, and has fresh wisdom for us today.

The Magi were open to new knowledge – they were scanning the skies, looking for what might be happening right now in the world that could lead them to new truth. And when they found it, when they experienced God, when they encountered the living God – not just a new idea but the reality of God, the Bible tells us in Matthew 2:12 that they went home by a different way. They followed a new way! They were willing to change, they were willing to engage uncertainty, they were willing to be lost for a while on the chance that a different way might still lead them home. . But King Herod, who was chiefly concerned with maintaining his own power, was not willing to have his world challenged by new truth. And we need to remember also, that as important as theology is, the magi did not encounter an idea in the manger – they experienced the living God. Theology is part of how we grow to know God.

Being a theologian means being hungry for truth, hungry for meaning, and committed to living a life that matters. And it is critical to the health of the church and to our own lives that we all become willing to be theologians, willing to think about faith, willing to ask questions, challenge assumptions, speak truth to power, and yes, re-imagine God in our time, because theology matters. Because God is alive and so our thinking about God has to remain lively. Being a theologian is not being in a place where everything stays the same.

The theologian Douglas John Hall, in his book Bound and Free, talks about his own theological journey. He writes, “...Probably most of us who have felt theology to be our vocation have known ourselves covertly, if not openly, to be persons who do not "believe" easily!  As Jürgen Moltmann has written, ‘We are not theologians because we are particularly religious; we are theologians because in the face of this world we miss God.’”
We miss God, and we’re willing to go looking for God. Today, several of our youth will be beginning the confirmation journey. Unfortunately, for too long, confirmation has been understood as some kind of conclusion to Christian Education – quite the contrary. It is a beginning, not an ending. When one is confirmed, one is choosing to live a life guided by the questions, which means the learning never ends. At the same conference where Moltmann told us that we are all theologians, Prof. Cindy Rigby challenged us not to shy away from the complexities of faith – she reminded us that life is complex and that we need to be willing to engage in hard thinking to discern where faith leads us.

Our officers, too, are called to be theologians, to be continually guided by their understanding, and their questions, as they together discern how to be People of the Way in our time in this place.

So what about the sermon title? It’s not just nonsense words – antidisestablishmentarianism is the doctrine that opposes separating church from the government. It calls for theocracy, for a religious authority to govern the nation. It is opposed to freedom and insists on uniformity. For a long time, even though our government has officially disestablished religion, our culture had established nominal Christianity as a cultural norm. And the loss of that in recent years has brought grief and fear to many people, but it ought to bring hope and excitement to us. When our faith is no longer taken for granted, it can challenge and inspire our lives. When our faith is part of the wallpaper, it doesn’t make a difference, and it doesn’t make us different.

Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious was a word from the 1964 Walt Disney version of Mary Poppins. In the song about this word, Mary Poppins teaches that this word has the power to make you sound and feel better. Its pretentiousness can make you feel important and the song suggested that being able to say such an important-sounding word could impress others, and make you feel good, too.

Theology is the opposite of a pretentious, feel-good exercise. It’s being willing to love God with our minds, being willing to be confused, to live with the ambiguity that comes in-between certainties.

Douglas John Hall reminds us that it is precisely because Christianity is no longer the dominant paradigm of our culture that we need to all be theologians. He writes: “For with the disestablishment of the Christian religion, there comes a new demand for both clergy and laity to search more diligently for ‘the reason for the hope that is in them.’  Why, otherwise, would they remain?  In short, the need for theology increases as automatic Christianity decreases….” And he continues, speaking of churches whose pastors are unwilling to engage in theological challenge, “What happens to the churches when they are abandoned by their teachers is hardly news.  They become collectivities of a nebulous sort of ‘fellowship’ or of random activism, or of undifferentiated ‘spirituality,’ or of moralisms old or new, or simply of ‘nice’ people who don't quite know why they are there but feel they ought to be....”

I’ve been asked sometimes why we have done the Season of Creation – there are several reasons, but one is that it is important in developing us as theologians. It is an opportunity to look to the natural world as revelation, to see what we learn of God by studying God’s creation. It has been a challenging process in theology for me – it means taking God’s Word seriously, because the Bible tells us that God is revealed in the natural world. It means taking God’s presence in creation seriously. It means taking the task of theology seriously. And it is an important task at this time and place in history – for us as Christians in America, it is essential that we reclaim the prophetic role. The planet is at a critical juncture – many responsible scientists tell us that we are running out of time to make the changes in our lives that will let the earth survive. And so it is necessary for us to do theology, to faithfully seek understanding of what the particular challenges to us are now, in our context. It’s not a political issue, it’s a prophetic issue, and theology matters as we consider it. Theology matters in all of life.

In the time of Luther and Calvin, it was not only the leaders and scholars who understood and debated the great theological issues of the day – ordinary people in that era were part of the conversations that reimagined and recreated the Church. Barbara Jordanger and I were recently at a Wisconsin Council of Churches meeting where we heard a Presbyterian speaker describe the changes that are facing churches in our era. He predicted that denominations would not remain as they are for many more years, and that challenges all of us to be theologians, reimagining and recreating the church for the future. Neither antidisestablishmentarianism nor supercalifragilisticexpialidocious will do. We need to be willing to live between rigid certainties and peaceful easy feelings. Let us follow the light wherever it leads, knowing that a different way can still lead us home. Amen.