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Marks of a
Vibrant, Progressive Church
2. Looking
Out
by the Rev. Rich Smith
October 28, 2007
Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22
The first sermon I
ever preached was from the prophet Jeremiah. It was “Youth
Sunday,” 1969, and at the age of seventeen I was very much a youth,
filled with youthful enthusiasm, precociousness, as well as naivete and
pretentiousness. In other words, I really had no idea what I was
doing, but I was doing it with exuberance, and as President of the
youth group, I was given the privilege of being the anchor in a
four-part sermon relay. I’m not really sure what I said anymore, but I
do know that it was based on Jeremiah. Not the text we heard this
morning – that would have been too gloomy – but rather the opening
words, when the young prophet protests his call, saying, “Wait a
minute, God, I am only a boy! Are you sure you want be speaking
for you?” And yet God says, “Don’t be afraid – I am appointing
you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to
destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” As I said, I
don’t remember what I said in that sermon, but it must have been
Jeremiah-like, maybe even a Jeremiad, as prophetic orations are called,
because I was not to preach from the pulpit of my home church again
until I spoke at my father’s memorial service some thirty-four years
later!
I don’t think of myself as a fiery, Jeremiah-like
prophetic preacher, but I have throughout my ministry resonated with
his message. That same text about plucking up and pulling down,
building and planting, was also read at my ordination, and I have often
found myself preaching from Jeremiah or one of the other prophets,
because I have taken seriously the charge implicitly given to all
ministers that our role is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable,” in roughly equal measure! And Jeremiah is really
effective when it comes to afflicting the comfortable!
Today’s lesson, certainly fits that
description. As usual, things are not going too well for Judah,
the Southern Kingdom of what was once a unified Israel. Apostasy,
iniquity, sin, troubles, terror – all words Jeremiah uses here to
describe their current mess, a mess they got themselves into by
ignoring justice, trampling the poor, turning aside the stranger in
their midst, by seeking to solve their problems militarily rather than
trusting in God and God’s ways. That’s the larger context of this
passage, and part of that context is that there were a lot of religious
leaders and priests who were simply ignoring all that, preaching a
comfortable and comforting word: “Everything is all right; God will
give us peace in our time.” In contrast to that, Jeremiah saw his
job as being brutally honest, speaking an inconvenient and even
unwelcome truth to power – but a truth that needed to be spoken and
heard if a greater disaster was to be avoided. It was, but it
wasn’t: that is, truth was spoken, but it wasn’t heard, and disaster
was not avoided, and after the Fall of Jerusalem in 598 BCE, Jeremiah
had to spend a lot more time comforting the afflicted, bringing God’s
word of hope to a seemingly hopeless situation. Perhaps today
Jeremiah would be given the Nobel Peace Prize. More likely locked
up, as he was in his own day.
It is this conviction that religion is about both
justice and mercy, judgment and comfort, that has shaped the way I have
done my ministry for some thirty-one years, a conviction growing out of
that first Youth Sunday sermon. And I have learned a lot in these
succeeding years, especially about how this really is our tradition in
the United Church of Christ, and in the Christian church at its
best. Faith has been not just what we believe, but what we do –
action, love, growing out of belief and encounter with God. It
has made our church especially bold. As a part of the celebration
of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Church of Christ, a page was
produced for the website, www.ucc.org, called “UCC Firsts.” All
the times our church has stepped out ahead in a prophetic way – saying
“the status quo isn’t good enough, not what God has in mind, there may
even be something drastically wrong, and we intend to witness to a
better way.” The list includes such things as Congregationalists
being among the first Americans to take a stand against slavery, when
in1700, The Rev. Samuel Sewall writes the first anti-slavery pamphlet
in America, " laying the foundation for the abolitionist movement.
1773 - First act of civil disobedience.. “Five thousand angry colonists
gather in the Old South Meeting House to demand repeal of an unjust tax
on tea. Their protest inspires the first act of civil disobedience in
U.S. history—the "Boston Tea Party."
1785 - First ordained African American pastor, Lemuel Haynes, in a
Congregational Church!
1839 - in a defining moment for the abolitionist movement,
Congregationalists are among those coming to the aid of the Amistad
captives. The Amistad case is a spur to the conscience of
Congregationalists who believe no human being should be a slave. In
1846 Lewis Tappan, one of the Amistad organizers, organizes the
American Missionary Association—the first anti-slavery society in the
U.S. with multiracial leadership.
In 1853, Antoinette Brown becomes the first woman since New Testament
times ordained as a Christian minister, and perhaps the first woman in
history elected to serve a Christian congregation as pastor.
In 1897, Congregationalist Washington Gladden is one of the first
leaders of the Social Gospel movement—which takes literally the
commandment of Jesus to "love your neighbor as yourself." Social Gospel
preachers denounce injustice and the exploitation of the poor.
In 1952 Evangelical and Reformed theologian Paul Tillich publishes "The
Courage to Be"—later named by the New York Public Library as one of the
"Books of the Century." Full of cutting edge theological ideas.
In 1959 when Southern television stations impose a news blackout on the
growing civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. asks the UCC to
intervene. Everett Parker of the UCC's Office of Communication
organizes churches and wins in Federal court a ruling that the airwaves
are public, not private property. The decision leads to a proliferation
of people of color in television studios and newsrooms.
In 1972 the UCC's Golden Gate Association ordains the first openly gay
person as a minister in a mainline Protestant denomination: the Rev.
William R. Johnson. In the following three decades, General Synod urges
equal rights for homosexual citizens and calls on congregations to
welcome gay, lesbian and bisexual members, and the “Open and Affirming”
movement is born.
1976 the Rev. Joseph H. Evans becomes president of the United Church of
Christ, the first African American leader of a racially integrated
mainline church in the United States.
In 1995, The United Church of Christ publishes The New Century
Hymnal—the only hymnal produced by a Christian church with fully
inclusive, non-patriarchal language for both humans and God.
In 2005, the General Synod overwhelmingly passes a resolution
supporting equality in marriage, affirming that gay and lesbian people
should be able to have the same marriage rights currently available in
most states only to heterosexuals.
And, while it’s not on the list, just two weeks ago, the Rev. John
Thomas became the first president of a major denomination to be
arrested in front of the White House for protesting the war in Iraq.
All of this is in the spirit of the prophet
Jeremiah, who pointed out injustice as a first step to doing something
about correcting what was wrong, of easing the ills of the world.
In their studies of churches that are at once
progressive and vibrant, of which there are far more than you might
imagine -- counter to the prevalent image of thriving conservative
mega-churches and dying liberal ones -- Hal Taussig and Diana Butler
Bass each found that one of the primary marks they exhibited was this
concern for the prophetic, for justice – a concern that grows out of
their open theology and their vibrant spiritual life. It’s like
breathing in and breathing out. Prayer leads to action. Love from
God leads to love for neighbor. It takes both, receiving and
giving, and without both, you are essentially dead!
Harry Emerson Fosdick put it this way: “The
Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows
down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the
cedars of Lebanon. The Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, for it has an
outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them
out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same
water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It only gets to
keep.” And that’s why it’s dead!
This applies to us as individuals – which is the
message of this Stewardship season, take note! – but it also applies to
churches. Churches that are vibrant, alive and growing take in the
richness of God’s awesome and marvelous works, but we also give it
away, and the one of the forms in which we give it away is our work for
justice.
Taussig sees that justice being played out in
several ways – in advocacy for civil rights, in concern for the poor,
not just in matters of charity but in doing things or changing things
so that the poor will not be poor. He sees it in the growing
concerns for ecology, for taking care of our planet. He sees it in what
he calls “gender bending,” twin concerns for the full inclusion,
equality and rights of women and GLBT (Gay, lesbian, bi-sexual,
trans-gendered persons). Did you know our largest UCC
church is Trinity in Chicago, “unashamedly black, unappologetically
Christian?” 7,000 members. One of our newest is the Cathedral of
Hope in Dallas – 4,000 members, with major outreach to LBGT community.
Diana Butler Bass takes note of all this as well,
also describing justice as one of the ten marks of vibrant progressive
churches, and adding “diversity” and “hospitality.”
Here at Westmoreland, we’re getting better at
hospitality. I’ll talk about how we can do even better at an
after-church forum today. Diversity - well, that depends on what you
mean by it. One of my colleagues said of his church, just down the
road, “Sure, we’re diverse - we have lawyers who work for the
government and we have lawyers in private practice.” Obviously,
when you get to know people, you discover that we are indeed diverse,
each of us a unique reflection of the God who created us, and things
like our worship initiative show just how diverse we are in our tastes
and what moves us..... And we know that diversity is a healthy thing –
nature teaches that polycultures of plants and animals thrive far
better than the monocultures that are fast becoming the norm and cannot
survive without a lot of artificial help. A diverse organization
is much more sustainable. So the question is, how diverse are we,
really? Taussig notes that in terms of racial diversity and
economic diversity, most progressive churches are not very
diverse. We’re like most. Like them, we tend to reflect the
community in which we find ourselves. And also, he notes, while
we are concerned for racial and economic justice, our concerns for
gender bending are not always shared to the same degree by the poor or
people of color. Butler Bass does profile a few progressive
churches that are both diverse and justice seeking, but they are almost
always in downtown areas. Yet it remains something we need to
find ways to work on.
Certainly when it comes to an emphasis on justice,
our church does well. We really do quite a bit to help make the
world a better place, to respond to the prophetic call to action, to
take seriously our charge to be keepers of God’s garden and get it
right. Nearly every week during our announcement period you hear
about the things we’re involved in: Action in Montgomery, the Marie
Reed Learning Center, the Johanning Center, SOME Casseroles, Lincoln
Westmoreland Housing and the Shaw Community Ministry, the Green Group,
the Middle East, Palestinian Olive Oil, the Volunteer Corps. Over
one hundred of us signed the petitions to end the war that John Thomas
tried to present at the White House. We may soon have the
opportunity to join other church folk in opposing the expansion of
legalized gambling in Maryland – the slots at horse tracks issue.
Our Youth will be part of a walk for the homeless next month that we
will all be invited to support. We hope to explore the issues
surrounding immigration and see where we might take action. The
Bazaar is next Saturday, a kind of giant recycling project the proceeds
of which all go to supporting outreach. I don’t mind that these
things take up a bit of time during the announcements. It means I
can keep my sermons shorter – but mostly, it says, we are about
reaching out, breathing out as well as breathing in, loving our
neighbor just as God loves us. We are not a service center for
our members, so much as a launching pad for mission. Without it,
we wouldn’t really be a church based on the preaching of the prophets
or the teaching of Jesus. And we’d be like the Dead Sea.
Last Sunday, as a part of the rock service, designed
to be even more participatory than ususal, we included in the bulletin
a little yellow slip of paper, “An Offering of My Whole Self.” It
invited you to fill in the blanks – “This week I will pray for----“ and
“This week I will serve God and creation by ----“ A way of
pointing out that the offering is more than just giving money.
Especially in an age when most people give once a month, or maybe once
a year, if the gift is stock. Back when people were paid weekly,
they tended to give weekly. No more. In fact it is our hope
that more people will give electronically – just the way that house
payments and other bills are now often paid. If everybody did
this, and that may someday be the case, the offering might become a
meaningless exercise. But it’s not meaningless – in fact in many
ways it’s the most important thing we do in worship. Not as a way
of taking in money to meet the church’s budget, but as our way of
breathing out, of recognizing that giving is what makes us disciples of
Jesus, people of faith. And we give a lot more than money.
We give our prayers on behalf of others, on behalf of the cause of
justice. And we serve God and creation by what we do. So we
have the opportunity to offer that as well. If you are not
putting in your pledge check this week, you can still participate in
the offering. We had intended to introduce this as a regular
feature of the offering at Thanksgiving, but since we started it last
week, well keep it going. You don’t have to get up out of your
pew and go to a certain station – we’ll pass the plates to you, most of
the time. But you do have to get out of your pew and go back to
the world and offer your whole self – for we really believe that when
the service is over, the service begins!
When I think of all this, the marks of a progressive
vibrant church that Taussig and Bass call hospitality, diversity, and
justice, I think of our Westmoreland Statement of Purpose, which call
us to exactly these things:
“It shall be our aim to bring joy to little children, instruction and
high ideals to youth, inspiration to men and women in the midst of
life, and comfort to those in life's later years; and to labor together
for the betterment of humankind.
“Our fellowship shall not be dependent upon identity of theological
opinion, or of outward circumstance, or of denominational name, but
shall grow from a common loyalty to Jesus; a command passion to serve
the world; and a common purpose to do justly, to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with God.”
May God give us the grace and the courage and the
passion to do exactly that! And maybe Jeremiah will approve!
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
Westmoreland Circle
Bethesda, MD 20816
301-229-7766
Email the church office: churchinfo@westmorelanducc.org
www.westmorelanducc.org
An
Open and Affirming Congregation
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