Becoming One

5^th Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. C, June 23, 2013

Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 22:18-27; Galatians 3:23-39; Luke 8:26-39

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

This week I spent a day at Northeastern Seminary listening to a conference on Emergence Christianity given by Phyllis Tickle.  She talked all about the sociological changes that have taken place over the last 100 years that have brought us to the place we are today in Christianity. 

So, you might be asking yourselves, what does this event have to do with today’s readings?  Good question.  I ask myself that question every week.  What does anything in my life have to do with what I’m reading in scripture?  Maybe it’s a question we should all be asking ourselves; because if we believe that scripture is the source of authority for our faith, than it has something to say about the decisions we make about how to live our lives.

Is scripture the authority?

  Martin Luther would say so.  About five hundred years ago we had this event called the Reformation, and Martin Luther has become the focal point of it.  The Church had been the seat of authority for hundreds of years, but everyone could see how corrupt it had become, selling positions in the Church to the highest bidder, selling forgiveness through indulgences, selling relief from punishment by veneration of relics.  One day, Martin Luther had had enough.  He knew that forgiveness was a free gift from God, and the faithful should not be deluded into thinking they had to pay money for it.  Forgiveness was already given to the truly repentant.  It was grounded in faith, not acts.  Purchasing indulgences and venerating relics didn’t absolve the faithful from following the way of Christ.  These practices actually led people away from faith, not toward it.  So one day, he walked up to the church in Wittenberg, nailed his 95 theses to the church door, and challenged all comers to debate with him at Wittenberg University.  This act was a definitive sign that the Christian Reformation had been born. 

Scripture, Luther said, was the seat of authority, not the Church.  Sola scriptura, scripture alone.  We have been living under that mantra for about five hundred years.  When you put your trust in the written word, that word is open to interpretation. Everyone and anyone can read it, and begins talking about it, and thinking about it, and sharing their ideas about it.  We called that the Enlightenment.  For the last five hundred years we’ve been reading and molding our lives using scripture as a benchmark, but then things started to change … rapidly.

            In 1843 Michael Faraday published his First Principles of Electricity and laid the foundation for the modern motor to be developed.  His insight into electricity and magnetism led to many of the practical uses of electricity that we have today.  Electricity changed our world.  It changed the length of the day.  It changed communication.  It changed transportation.  Days were longer.  We could talk to people without being in their immediate presence.  News travelled more broadly and more quickly.

In 1855 we entered the Civil War, and not only every state, but every church was split over the issue.  Slavery is clearly permitted in the Bible.  As much as we hate to admit it today, we know it’s there.  It’s in the Old Testament and it’s in the new.  We can try to talk it away by saying that it’s written for a specific context, a specific place and time, but it’s still there. 

In 1859, Charles Darwin published the Origin of the Species and the theory of evolution came into public discourse.  The Bible has a pretty clear story of creation, actually two of them, but neither of them contend that humanity came into existence through a process of natural selection.  Both conclude that humanity came into being as the top of the creation order and in the image of God, not an ape.

In 1917, we had the first of two World Wars.  Tickle says, “women get a big case of spine” and Wikipedia says “the flapper redefined womanhood”.  Hate to tell ya, but there’s no gender equality in the Bible.  Wives be subject to your husbands.  Women don’t speak in church.  The Bible is a patriarchal book.  It’s a man’s world and there’s no arguing that. 

Then we encounter Pearl Harbor and the second World War.  All the men go off to fight Hitler and the Nazi’s, and for the first time, happily married women leave their homes and enter the workforce.  When the war ends and men come home, the women have changed.  Men go to college on the GI bill, and the women want to go too.  But there’s this thing called the glass ceiling, and it has a lot to do with a woman’s monthly weakness.  In the early 1960’s something called a birth control pill comes along, and within two or three years it’s available to the public.  Now women have some control over that “monthly weakness”.

The Civil Rights movement gains momentum and our African American brothers and sisters start to claim their rights as citizens of the United States.  The written Word hasn’t changed, and it’s used quite liberally to defend the oppression of those who had once been slaves.   And then in 1969 a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn turns into a riot, and the gay rights movement is born.  One of the biggest opponents to gay rights has been the Church, and their use of the Bible to defend their stance.  It’s the last straw holding our sola scriptura together.  Maybe that’s why it’s been such a long and vitriolic conflict. 

Sola scriptura isn’t working anymore, and it hasn’t worked in a long time.  That’s what prompted the Historical Jesus movement and the rise of critical study of the Bible.  The Bible no longer made sense in our world.  It didn’t speak pastoral truth to the situations that were coming before us.  Reading the Bible literally doesn’t make sense.  Reading the Bible alone doesn’t make sense. 

Our Anglican tradition talks about Hooker’s three-legged stool of tradition, scripture and reason, but we haven’t been good about sharing our methods.  Our story has been getting lost since the 70’s and 80’s.  We stopped telling it, maybe because we were trying desperately to figure it out ourselves.  As people stopped coming to our churches our children stopped hearing and learning about our tradition.  Now if people hear of the Bible, it’s only how it’s used in the public media.  If they read it, they’re doing it outside of community and without the grounding of our salvation story behind it. Who wouldn’t find it nonsensical and antiquated?

We don’t.  Those of us gathered here don’t.  We continue to read it every Sunday, and some of us study it together on Wednesdays or Thursdays.  And some of us even read it at home.  We are the ones who still know the story, and we know that scripture alone is hard to digest.  Just as sola scriptura and “justification by faith” are hallmarks of Reformation Christianity, the three legged-stool can be one of the hallmarks of Emergence Christianity.  Even though membership in mainline Christian denominations is falling, Christianity world-wide is growing.  The change that we have been talking about in the Church is happening around us, and Tickle says that we in the west are some of the last to catch the wave. 

Before Christ we had the law, the living Torah, that our Jewish brothers and sisters continue to follow.  They have been called the “people of the book”.  When Jesus came, we were given the living Word, Christ incarnate.  We have been called the “people of the Way”.  Emergence Christianity may be our entryway into the age of the Spirit.  Perhaps in time we will all become known as the “people of the Spirit” … some finding God’s light in the written Word, some finding it in God’s embodied presence, and others recognizing it in the relational connections that we have with one another through the Spirit.  Neither one better than the other.  All paths leading toward God.  All helping us to move toward a time when we can live together in peace without fear or shame. 

Jesus healed the demoniac and sent the demons away.  The people saw what had happened and they were afraid.  They asked Jesus to leave when they probably needed him most to stay.  He had revealed truth, offered healing, returned sanity, brought reconciliation out of brokenness.  The people were afraid.  The change was so far out of their comfort zone.  In some ways, like our last hundred years. 

What would happen in our own world if by some miracle, the deep political divisions of our time were healed, and we began to speak sanely to one another?  What would people think if we started taking people on the fringes, and we started making sure they were clothed and cared for, and we actually sat down and talked with them?  What would happen if we started to give them power and took them seriously?  Would that scare people so much that we’d be asked to leave town?  probably, but I think it’s worth the risk.  That’s what our society has been working on this last century.  Bringing more and more people in … not perfectly, but incrementally.  Religion is always lagging behind culture.  Religion serves culture. 

For there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.  We are meant to be one.  Not all alike, but one in God and with glacial speed we have been moving toward it.  Like those early Hebrews the Church, as an institution, has fought it all the way.   From the Emancipation Proclamation to the 15^th Amendment to the 19^th Amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to the passage of Equal Marriage laws in 13 states – it’s all there.  Only in the last 50 years has the Church recognized it’s place as a prophet to inclusion … and then, it was only some of us.  The people on the fringes are fighting their way into the fold. 

Scripture is still our authority, but the idea that we also have a living tradition that helps us to interpret it needs to be told.  The idea that reason and experience inform our understanding makes our scripture a living document.  It’s now young parents and often grandparents, that have the responsibility  of passing on the story and the tradition, because so many of our children don’t really know it to do it.  They haven’t made the connection between our salvation story and their own lives in a rapidly changing world.  But there’s a spiritual hunger out there, and in here, that we can help fill.  No matter how much or how fast the world changes, no matter how small the Church seems to become, do not doubt that it is God’s love calling us into oneness, God’s love breaking down the barriers we have put up between us so that we might all be freed.

Amen.