Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Luke 7:21-29; Ezekiel 37:1-14

Elder Barbara Jordanger and I were delegates to the Wisconsin Council of Churches board meeting in December. As we walked into the orientation meeting for new delegates, there was the Executive Director of the WCC, Scott Anderson, saying “Denominations as we know them are not going to be around very long – my own denomination will likely not be here at all in less than 50 years.” Well I certainly paid attention to that – Scott is a Presbyterian.

A week ago, I went to Madison overnight to hear a theologian who was described as “the leading theologian of our generation in North America.” Douglas John Hall was a fascinating speaker – I took 25 pages of notes. The Men’s Group is reading one of his books, the Session is reading another of his books, and in addition to these, I read his theological autobiography in December. I have quoted him from time to time before – he is quite perceptive. He also was talking about some major changes coming for the Church – he was talking about the end of Christendom. With the word ‘Christendom,’ he was referring to the Church as a major social and political influence – as it has been since the era of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, but this influence has been declining since the early 18th century.

Where Christendom was the Church of the empire, the disestablished Church will be at the edges of power – much as the church was before the middle of the 4th century. And just as the beginning of Christendom seemed to result in some significant changes in religious life – so too, might the end of Christendom. Douglas John Hall describes these two: the beginning and end of Christendom, as the two most significant changes in the Church throughout its history, even when considering the split between the Eastern and Western Churches in the 11th century and the Reformation (along with the subsequent rise of denominations) in the 16th century.

There was a liveliness, a power and experience in the early church, that has seemed to largely elude the institutional church over the intervening centuries. Professor Luke Timothy Johnson asked in his book, The Writings of the New Testament that was my primary text in the introductory survey course in seminary: what made the early church so successful? What accounts for its growth? Was it the social status associated with being a member? No, clearly not – it was largely a church of the working poor, slaves, and women, hardly the social elite. Was it the ethical system? No, nor was it the philosophical system. It was, he argues, that people could see that the early believers had experienced the power of the living God. In a later book, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity, Johnson describes the earliest Christians as having been “…themselves caught up, defined by, a power not in their control but rather controlling them, a power that derived from the crucified and raised Messiah Jesus.”
While many people of our era may scoff at such an experiential dimension to faith, absent such an explanation, the growth of the early church doesn’t make any sense. This experience seemed to have two dimensions: one was the individual religious experience which was often, indeed, a life-changing experience. The other experience was the shared experience, which while lacking the mystical dimension of the individual experience, did result in a vibrant community life, which crossed economic and cultural lines. Any reading of the New Testament has to conclude that such vital and energized communities didn’t just happen – they clearly were the result of considerable intentional work. The letters of Paul, James, Peter and John to early churches frequently address issues of theological and/or practical conflict that required considerable wisdom and commitment to work through. These were not magical communities – they were chosen, and the choice was made again and again in working through the challenges they faced, but from within and from without.

These early communities were communities with a high level of commitment: they were financially committed to the church, and personally committed to its teaching, worship and fellowship. And so these became dynamic communities of care and teaching, where members were nourished and nurtured together. They knew themselves to belong to God and to one another.

Who they were in God defined how they were in the world and with each other. And how they were was noticed, which was how the early church grew. Over the last two weeks we’ve read some of the Sermon on the Mount, the primary behavioral teachings of Jesus, and I’ve argued that in these teachings, Jesus is teaching us who we are. He is describing how the people of God behave, and it is challenging, but it is less challenging when it is understood as the norms of a community that is shaped by the love of God. But it seems it was not only a community shaped by the love of God, but also by the way they responded to that love in following counter-cultural norms of non-violence, deep sharing, and non-adherence to culturally-defined roles of gender, status, and the like. In retrospect, I wonder whether it wasn’t easier to live according to counter-cultural norms when the Christian community truly was living at the edge – than during the long era of Christendom, when the Church was usually the official, or at least the normative, religious choice for the culture.

So the early Christians were a more radically different group, who seemed to take the Sermon on the Mount and its teachings seriously as a description of how God’s people are, but I wonder if that wasn’t perhaps a little easier when Church membership was not automatic. Perhaps the challenge in the waning days of Christendom is to rediscover our identity as people of God, when that is no longer an automatic dimension of life in our culture.

Douglas John Hall suggests that perhaps the most appropriate response to the incipient disestablishment of the Church is to recognize it, appropriate it, and find some meaning in it. In other words, we should “Disestablish ourselves!” Establishment is that cozy relationship between Christianity and the political power, Christianity and cultural norms, that have ironically rendered Christianity not powerful but so bound to the institutions of the culture that it is irrelevant. Douglas John Hall tells the story of speaking to a group, when a man angrily said, “I’ve never heard such un-American stuff in my life!”
Hall replied “As a Canadian, I am unsure how to respond – can you tell me what it means to be un-American?”
“Easy!” the fellow replied: “Unchristian!”

When being Christian is the same as being American, then the church has lost its identity. Hall challenged us, in saying, “The goal is not abandonment of the culture, but re-engagement with the culture. We will disengage in order to re-engage. Heretofore we have merely reflected our culture in stained-glass tones. We need a point of view that is not merely a stained-glass version of the culture’s point of view.”

In other words, we need to re-establish our own identity, and the key, he says, is theology. We need to become newly conscious of our identity in Christ, and that will come through engaged discipline and prayerful thought. He says “It’s not just doctrine, it’s what we do.”

Action, thought and prayerful experiencing God: loving God with all our strength, all our minds and all our hearts. Letting the Sermon on the Mount seriously guide our actions, letting our study of theology guide our thinking, and letting God reshape us through our willing openness to God in prayer – these habits could make us different, from the inside out. Perhaps, like the believers before the era of Christendom, our own identity will become shaped by our participation in the beloved community, and our own experience of God.

It sounds more demanding than the faith we were taught as children – it is. Even the practice of studying theology is demanding – it is much more difficult to honestly wrestle with our doubts than to passively accept what we’ve been taught. And the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are challenging, as is the regular discipline of prayer. But as British author G..K. Chesterton wrote almost 100 years ago: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

The counter-cultural ethics of Christianity meet the needs of our hurting world. The intellectual demands of theology meet our own need for challenging thought. The community dimensions of the Church meet our need to belong to each other. And the experiential dimension of prayer is about our need for love and for God. It is a faith that is both demanding and rewarding.

The Sermon on the Mount just doesn’t make any sense as an abstract teaching – it only makes sense as it shapes us as people of God. And while the objection can be made that it’s somewhat idealistic, and might not work in our culture, our culture isn’t working all that well either, and I think I’m ready to take my chances with God’s idea of how we should be.

And yet, while behavior is very powerful in terms of shaping who we are, just doing is both too much and not enough. The intellectual integration between our own experience and our hope that comes with theological study gives us a way of understanding ourselves and God’s world that shapes our identity. Next week, I’ll be talking more about theology, and the very exciting theology of the cross which Hall proposes.

Finally, Hall reminded us of the sign he saw once which read, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” Instead of just dismissing the possibility of experiencing God, why not leave space for such experience?

For some of us, the constant level of activity and busyness leaves us at risk of feeling as dry and dispirited as the valley of dry bones before Ezekiel. In Ezekiel’s story, receiving the teachings wasn’t enough – it wasn’t enough for the prophet to prophesy to the bones; they also need to receive the breath, the spirit of God. And in that breath was the tender phrase, “O my people,” as God not only breathed life but love into these people.

I know it’s hard to be convinced about experiencing God from a sermon – and I know I talk a lot about contemplative space, and taking time for silence with God. I wish I could share with you how nurturing and nourishing such time can be, but I can no more make it real to you in a sermon than I could authentically describe a kiss, or the taste of an orange, or the experience of swimming. All of these can be described, but the descriptions only point to the experiences, they don’t really convey the experiences.

All I can say is, while the constant rush of activity, of doing, leaves me feeling drained and decentered, the regular habit of silence with God leaves me feeling watered, centered, and simultaneously grounded and buoyant. I find it very hard to incorporate this discipline into my life. Activity is somehow very seductive. But my recent time away, with considerable contemplative time as part of that experience, has reminded me how essential the silence is for my own health and vitality. As I love God by allowing myself to just be with God, I somehow receive a sense of being loved that is profoundly reorienting. Mother Teresa said once in answer to a question that she doesn’t say anything in prayer, she just listens to God. The next question was, what does God say? Her answer? “He doesn’t say anything, he just listens.”

Don’t just do something, sit there. Amen.