Prodigal Daughter

This sermon was preached at a Roots Revival Wednesday evening service at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on May 8, 2013. Roots Revival is a worship service grounded in Americana/roots-based music featuring Martha Bassettand friends. We used Michelle Shocked’s “Prodigal Daughter (Cotton Eyed Joe)” and Polecat Creek’s “Midway Road” to explore the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

[Listen to Michelle Shocked's song "Prodigal Daughter" HERE]

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” — Luke 15:11-32

On Monday night, I had the privilege of being present at a graduation ceremony. It was not, however, a college or high school graduation. It was a graduation service at Prodigals Community, a 12-15 month residential program here in Winston-Salem for men who are addicts or alcoholics with a history of chronic relapse.

Many of the men shared about their experience at Prodigals, how the program saved their life, how they see miracles there every day. But what struck me most was what I kept hearing about the first time they walked through the door. When a new person comes into the community, the other brothers, as they call each other, say something simple but profound: “Welcome home.”

The parable of the prodigal son is one that we are probably all familiar with, even if we haven’t read the actual Bible passage recently. Son takes father’s inheritance, goes crazy with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, father’s inheritance runs out, son goes crawling back on his hands and knees, father hugs him and throws a big party. Everyone wins (except, of course, the fatted calf).

But like so many Bible passages, there is a lot more going on here if you dig deeper. Here’s one question: what is the father actually doing when he welcomes his son home? Is he forgiving his son’s sin, or is he just forgetting about the whole thing?

I have a possible answer to this question, but to get there I’m going to briefly share another story of a father and a son. Retired United Methodist pastor and former dean of Yale Divinity School the Rev. Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree was recently the subject of an article in The New York Times. The article told how Dr. Ogletree had performed his son’s wedding last October, which might not be of much interest—except that his son married another man.

The United Methodist Church’s official doctrine does not allow pastors to perform same-sex marriages, and so it should come as no surprise that Dr. Ogletree’s decision to do so has caused some controversy. Ogletree made it clear that he disagrees with church law. What’s more, he believes that when a law is wrong, you should change it, and if you can’t, you break it.

But what really grabbed me is this—when Ogletree’s son asked him to officiate his wedding, he said, “I was inspired…I actually wasn’t thinking of this as an act of civil disobedience or church disobedience. I was thinking of it as a response to my son.”

That right there—“a response to my son.” That is what I believe the father in the parable was doing. He was responding to his son. Even in this broken world, there is no more natural response of a father to his son than one of love and welcome with no strings attached.

Now, let’s be clear that “Welcome home” does not mean “Anything goes.” The men at Prodigals Community are greeted with love and welcome, but the program is not an easy one. For those 12-15 months, home is a place of high structure and rigid discipline. There are rules and expectations, and by the time they leave, those men are changed.

However, the church today is often too quick to assume that we know who needs to change and how. I’m going to throw out a question that we’ll come back to, so keep it in the back of your mind:

Who is the prodigal?

In Luke 15, the answer seems pretty obvious: the prodigal son. Duh.

But we’ve forgot about one character. Remember the older brother? He was the one pouting in the corner the whole time. He was the son who did all the right things, who worked hard to please his father and certainly would never think of spending his inheritance on sex, drugs, OR rock and roll.

There are two books about this parable that I love. The first is by Henri Nouwen, and it’s called The Return of the Prodigal Son. This is the first book that called my attention to that older brother. Through Nouwen, for the first time I saw how self-righteous, how angry, how unforgiving the older brother was—and it shook me.

I knew without a doubt that I was the older brother. Not only am I actually the oldest of three siblings, I was always the overachiever, the goody-two-shoes—and I was obnoxious about it. If one of my younger siblings got away with anything or gained some privilege at age 12 that I didn’t get until I was 13, my parents got the third degree.

The older brother wasn’t just good, he thought he was better than his brother and deserved more—and from my own experience, I can tell you that sense of elitism and entitlement can be worse than sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The older son’s attitude poisoned what should have been acts of love and respect toward his father with a sick need for recognition and praise over against his brother.

The other book about this parable that I like is by Timothy Keller. In it, he says this:

“Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake. This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently. It’s a shocking message: Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.”

So tell me again—which son was the prodigal? Sometimes those who seem to be doing all the right things are the ones most in need of a change of heart.

Now that we’ve looked at both of the brothers, I want to call our attention to a character that doesn’t appear in the story. The younger brother’s actions didn’t just affect him and his family. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll usually involve more than one person, and Michelle Shocked imagines one of them: the prodigal daughter.

The prodigal son may have come home with nothing, but this imagined prodigal daughter comes home with something—“the oats he’s sown.” She has a choice: to bring a child into the world or not. Either way, she will bear the burden alone.

When I was in high school, I remember one day our carpool got diverted from its usual route into the school. I later learned that anti-abortion protestors were outside with large posters showing images of aborted fetuses. School officials had decided that was not the best way for a teenager to start the day.

Why those protestors were at my school, I still don’t know, but I have seen such demonstrations since and am always left baffled. What’s the purpose? I can’t see any outcome but deeper pain for women already in unimaginably difficult situations.

What’s more, I intentionally called this kind of thing an “anti-abortion protest” and not a “pro-life demonstration,” because this approach falls into a trap that the church finds itself in far too often these days: being more clear and vocal about the things it is against than the things it is for.

For me, being pro-life means that one of the lives for which I am “pro” is that of the mother, and I don’t mean just in a medical sense.

My Christian Ethics professor, Dr. Amy Laura Hall, said this (here): “In order for a woman to decide to bring an unexpected, unplanned fetus to term, she must believe that there is enough love in this world for her and her baby. She must look at all the economic and political indicators and believe, in spite of the fear and danger of our menacing situation, that there is safety. She must, in sum, believe that God will provide.”

Someone recently told me that the church should be the headlights and not the taillights in society. Could the energy spent on lobbies to legislate morality be better spent? What if those resources went to finding compassionate, contextual responses to sons and daughters in need, to efforts to making the world safe and loving enough that a woman could choose to have a child?

Because whether we are talking about homosexuality or about abortion, we are not talking about “issues.” We are talking about people—sons and daughters whose prodigality we are in no position to define.

I quoted Timothy Keller’s book on the parable of the prodigal son earlier, and I’d like to do so again. He says this:

“Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. …We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

Jesus was silent on homosexuality. Jesus defended and befriended women whose sexual ethics were questionable in the ancient world’s rigid patriarchy. The tables he turned over belonged to those who weren’t too different from a lot of church folks today, and the people he shared meals with were not the well-to-do but the outcasts, those labeled as “sinners.”

So who is the prodigal?

Surprise! It’s God.

I didn’t tell you the title of Timothy Keller’s book. It’s called The Prodigal God. Keller challenges our assumptions about the very word “prodigal.” We generally take it to mean “wayward” or “disobedient,” and that’s not wrong—but really it means “recklessly spendthrift” or “wastefully extravagant.” Sure, this applies to the sex, drugs, and rock and roll—but more than that, it applies to the father’s illogical, excessive welcome home party.

God is the prodigal because God is wastefully extravagant with God’s love. God is not interested in morality or family values or issues. God is interested in reckless, transforming, surprising, undeserved, eternal, unconditional, socially unacceptable love for all sons and daughters.

Whoever we are, whatever we’ve done, wherever we’ve been, when we come to God, we meet the open arms of a loving parent who wants nothing more than to lavish love on us in a wastefully extravagant, recklessly spendthrift manner. What God says to all of us is this: “Welcome home. I love you. Let’s party!”

I wouldn’t mind the church being a little more like that. “Welcome home. I love you. Let’s party!”

Amen.

[Listen to Martha Bassett's version of Polecat Creek's song "Midway Road" HERE]

Selah

This sermon was preached at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on May 5, 2013, Music and Arts Sunday. At the large traditional service, it was broken into five parts and delivered in between the movements of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Five Mystical Songs.”

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May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, Selah, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Selah. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us. May God continue to bless us; let all the ends of the earth revere him. — Psalm 67

Selah.

We heard this word twice in the psalm that was just read. It appears 71 times in the Psalms and 3 times in Habakkuk, and never is it translated from the Hebrew. The reason is simple: no one knows for sure what it means.

Certainly people have made guesses over the centuries, very good guesses that I’ll talk more about in just a minute. But a friend told me that their professor once said if anyone claims to know for sure what “selah” means, you should run screaming from the room. It remains untranslated for a reason. “Selah” tells us something about the nature of God and our relationship to God.

First off, we cannot ever know God completely. God is made known to us in many ways, and part of the beauty of the life of faith is that there is continual revelation and discovery—but there remains the mystery, the transcendence. If knowledge is power, then perhaps to know something objectively and completely is to have power over it—and if we think we can do that with God, then most likely our god is actually ourselves.

But if there is something we cannot know, something beyond our grasp, then to some degree we are powerless. This is not a bad thing. 1 Corinthians tells us that “power is made perfect in weakness.” In the not knowing, in the powerlessness, in the mystery—that is where we find God’s grace.

Today, we celebrate Music and Arts Sunday. At their best, the arts help us tap into that mystery. A song can make us cry for reasons we don’t quite understand; a painting can be a portal into another world; and when ordinary words are arranged into a beautiful poem, they become transcendent.

At their best, the arts in all their forms do more than just allow for self-expression; they help us tap into the transcendent, the beautiful, the mysterious, into a world where power is made perfect in weakness, where knowledge is made perfect in not knowing.

So I’m perfectly comfortable with not knowing what “selah” means.

Now that I’ve said that, I’m going to give you a few possible definitions.

Many people have said that “selah” could be some kind of musical notation. Remember, the psalms are actually songs. There are many different ways to sing the psalms, but the most common is a form known as antiphonal singing. Rather than explain this to you, I’m going to show you, and you’re going to help me.

Don’t worry, it’s not hard. We’ll have two sides. Left side of the room, sing this after me: “Let the peoples praise you, O God…” And right side of the room, here is your response: “Let all the peoples praise you…” One more time, left side, remember your part? “Let the peoples praise you, O God.” And the right side: “Let all the peoples praise you.”

All right, now, turn toward the center aisle so that the two sides are facing one another. Now, left side sing your part, and right side, sing yours back. “Let the peoples praise you, O God…Let all the peoples praise you.”

Congratulations! You just sang antiphonally. I’m sure you can’t wait to go home and tell all your friends.

I had you face each other because antiphonal singing is a back and forth, a call and response—not between a minister and the laypeople, but within the congregation itself. Our liturgist called us to worship this morning, but really, we call one another to worship.

More than that, God calls us to worship. It’s not all about us. The back and forth of psalm singing is an exchange of breath. At creation, God breathed life into Adam. The breath in our lungs, all the air we breathe, it is the breath of God. When we exchange breath, whether in a conversation or while singing a hymn, we share and exchange the life God has given us.

Unlike the exchange on Wall Street, this exchange of breath is not competitive. My breathing doesn’t take away your air. I’m going to ask you to sing one more time, and then I promise I’ll leave you alone. Left side of the room, I’d like for you to sing this note [tonic]. Now, right side, here is your note [perfect fifth above]. Left side, one more time. And right side. Now, can we sing both of those notes together?

Wonderful. You just sang in harmony.

Harmony singing gives us a metaphor for the kingdom of God. There is space for difference within our music and among ourselves. We have these two different notes, but instead of drowning one another out, they create harmony. They do something together that neither one of them could do alone.

Diversity does not destroy unity; it makes it richer. When we sing in harmony, we use the same breath and fill the same air with sounds that are different and yet are one. When we exchange the breath of God or harmonize our voices and our lives with one another, God’s Spirit is present with us, and we are not too far from heaven.

One of the most common understandings of “selah” is that it indicates a pause. Let’s move now from the world of sound to the world of silence.

These worlds are not as separate as we might think. Silence is an integral part of music. You may have heard this quote from Miles Davis: “Music is the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”

Music isn’t all about making noise. The pauses, the space within the music—that’s what takes it from the practice of a technical skill to something truly expressive.

Many say that “selah” is a signal not only to pause but also to reflect, to weigh what has been said or sung, to listen. The psalms are songs, but they are also prayers. Listening is an integral part of prayer.

I’m sure we all know someone who will talk your ear off but won’t let you get a word in edgewise, someone who is always ready to share but never wants to listen.

I have to confess, sometimes I think I do that to God. Prayer is supposed to be a conversation. If I’m talking with another person, I sometimes have to pause and listen, or else it isn’t a conversation at all. Prayer is the same way. God wants us to bring our joys, our concerns, our needs, but God also wants us to listen. If our prayers are one big run-on sentence of complaints and demands, how can we expect to hear God’s answer to our prayers?

Of course, sometimes the only answer we hear is silence. When that happens, we may feel abandoned. But sometimes, silence is how God speaks.

One of my favorite Bible stories is in 1 Kings 19. Elijah is told to go out on the mountain and wait for God. While Elijah is waiting, he hears a great wind, but God is not in the wind; then after the wind, there is an earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake, there is a fire, but God is not in the fire; and finally, there comes a still small voice, or a sound of sheer silence.

Maybe some of you have heard the audible voice of God. I have not. But I don’t think that means that I have never heard God’s voice. I’d like to invite you now to sit in just a moment of silence, and to listen. Put away your expectations of what it should be like to hear God, and open your hearts and minds to the sound of silence.

[30-second pause]

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann imagines that “selah” is a sigh. I like this because it sums up a lot of what we’ve already talked about—the exchange of breath, a pause, a silence.

During seminary, I served as a chaplain intern in the hospital as part of a Clinical Pastoral Education program, or CPE. In our CPE reflection group, we used what is called an action-reflection-action model. In CPE, there is a little orientation, but mostly you get thrown into the fray and have to figure it out as you go—much like church work. We would visit patients, offer pastoral care, then come together as a group to reflect on our work. The purpose of this reflection was not only to look back but also to look forward—what did we do well and what could use improvement? How might we offer better care next time?

Before we do something brave or risky or exciting, we take a deep breath. If “selah” invites us to reflect, then it also invites us to move forward. The most important thing to remember is that God is very much present in that sigh of reflection and preparation. Romans 8 says that when we cannot pray, the “Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” The Spirit is in the sigh as the very breath of God, helping us to reflect so that we might act in accordance with God’s will.

The sigh of “selah” is our cue to get ready to sing. Whether you are a musician or a painter, a dancer or an engineer, a writer or a storyteller, and even if you are convinced that you have zero creative talent, the Spirit of God is at work within you and among us. She is making holy mischief, inspiring our hearts, our minds, and our hands, and quietly equipping us to do the creative work of God’s kingdom—one song, one pause, one moment of silence, one sigh at a time.

Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you.

Selah. Amen.

I Was an Oak Tree

This sermon was preached at a Roots Revival Wednesday evening service at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on April 17, 2013. Roots Revival is a worship service grounded in Americana/roots-based music featuring Martha Bassett and friends. This particular service was a shortened one featuring special guest musician Jonathan Byrd and was followed by a concert given by him. We used Jonathan’s song “I Was an Oak Tree” as our focus song.

What would you say if I told you the sky isn’t blue?

You’d probably say I was crazy. Or maybe my parents taught me my colors wrong.

All right, now, what would you say if I told you that time isn’t linear?

I’m just going to assume that most of you would say the same thing.

But, if there are any Doctor Who fans in the house, you might agree with me. I’m outing myself as a nerd, but I love the BBC series Doctor Who. It follows the adventures of an alien called The Doctor. He travels through space and time in a blue box called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor finds that time is…well, not linear. He describes it as “a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey…stuff.”

Now, we don’t have to become time travelers to get out of this linear way of thinking. All we have to do is look outside. Have you noticed that ominous coat of fine yellow dust on everything? Yep, it’s spring. I love when things start blooming this time of year, because it’s all so beautiful I barely notice how miserable I am from the allergies.

North Carolina is infamous for dramatic mood swings when it comes to the weather, but we do experience four distinct seasons here.

Especially in this climate, we’re all aware of the cyclical nature of seasons. Winter is gone, but it’ll be back. Every year we travel around this wheel of seasons, always coming back to where we were a year before.

This is true in the church as well. Many Christian traditions follow a liturgical calendar that moves through an annual cycle of liturgical seasons. Right now, we are in the season of Easter. Yes, Easter is a whole season! It’s not over! Go buy all that candy that’s on sale and eat it without shame!

The season of Easter is all about celebrating resurrection and new life. How appropriate in this season of spring. After the cold and darkness of winter, we emerge into a time of sunlight, of blooming flowers and new gardens, of outdoor activities and sidewalk seating at all the restaurants on Fourth Street here in Winston-Salem.

But my favorite season has always been fall. There is nothing like watching the leaves change in North Carolina. But if you think about it, that process we find so beautiful is actually a process of death. How strange that we should find the dying away of spring and summer bounty beautiful.

And even though I love fall, every year I experience a touch of sadness when summer is over. Even as I get excited for hoodies, bonfires, and pumpkin flavored everything, I mourn lemonade, the pool, sundresses. Every change, even predictable change, even good change, comes with loss. Even good change brings a touch of grief.

But grief isn’t necessarily bad. When it is a reaction to a natural or good change, it is so closely tied to the joy of whatever new thing is coming about that it’s hard to separate the two. To risk a second Doctor Who reference, in one episode a character says, “Sad is happy for deep people.” When we understand and inhabit time as non-linear, as made up of seasons, we can hold the sadness and the happiness together as part of the same cycle.

I was a little too pleased with myself when I realized that a song I thought of in my preparation tonight was made famous by a group called The Byrds—Jonathan, any relation? Anyway, you may remember this song:

To everything—Turn! Turn! Turn!
There is a season—Turn! Turn! Turn!

This song is a deliciously 60s adaptation of a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up; 

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 

a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace. — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This is all beautiful poetry, but I have to tell you something about the book of Ecclesiastes. The author’s main point is simple: everything is meaningless. The book of Ecclesiastes is all about how life is fleeting and the work of humans is futile.

But many scholars argue that Ecclesiastes could actually be read as life-affirming. Especially if you read Ecclesiastes in the season of Easter, you might see it as a celebration of the cycle of death and rebirth.

Because in order to get to spring, we have to go through winter. In order for something to grow, a seed must fall from the plant and be buried. 1 Corinthians 15:36 says, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”

You may remember that a few months ago there was a controlled burn at Pilot Mountain that got a little, um, out of control. But flare-up aside, the burn itself was an effort to supplement a natural process: the renewal of forest through fire.

Forest fires are a natural way of clearing underbrush to make room for new plant life. Some cones require heat to release the seed by which the trees germinate.

These days, you hear a lot about people having been “burned” by the church. I’m sure many of you in this room would say that you have been. These days, too often Christians are known for what a few of them are against than what all of us are for.

We’ve seen an interesting mix of this recently here in Winston-Salem. Green Street United Methodist Church just decided they will not perform any weddings until gays and lesbians can be married in the United Methodist Church and legally in the state of North Carolina. In the weeks following, they met with protestors shouting slurs at Sunday morning worshippers, including children. Whatever you think about gay marriage, I hope that all of us can agree that saying hateful things to children isn’t the best witness.

This past Sunday, the Green Street congregation was prepared. They convened a few hours early for some instructions, and church members and supporters got ready by standing in front of the church with signs bearing messages of love and welcome. Greeters were prepared to escort worshippers inside to protect them from any harassment. They weren’t there to argue or counterprotest. They were there to worship. They had been burned, but they responded with love and a welcome for all.

If you have been burned by the church and have left, I do not blame you. Sometimes fire is purely destructive. But inexplicably, miraculously, some people who have been deeply burned by the church are still here. And it seems to me that there is a fire being kindled within the church itself, and change is coming.

We will never get it right; the church is made up of people, after all. And I’m not saying we’ve got it all wrong—I wouldn’t be here if that were the case. But I believe the church will change more in my lifetime than it has in hundreds of years.

My hope is that this fire will not simply destroy. We may not have it all right, but we don’t have it all wrong either. My hope is that this fire will burn away the excess and bring us back to the core, to the seed of goodness, of truth, of love, to the root of it all, to Jesus who died and lived again, to the God who is love.

The fire Jonathan sang about burned away the cries of the rebels who were hung from the oak tree’s branches, It burned away the blood of the souls who suffered and died in the belly of that hallelujah holocaust of a slave ship. And it burned away the hunger of the sailors on that beach. Out of the ashes of that fire, a spark of life stirred in one small acorn, the beginning of a millennium of new growth.

If you’ve been burned, wherever, however, by whomever, I challenge you to look for what new life might come from the ashes. Whatever season you are in, this is the season of Easter, of new life, of resurrection, and I have hope. I thought of one more song, and I’ll close with that refrain:

My heart shall sing of the day you bring.

Let the fires of your justice burn.

Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,

And the world is about to turn!

Shout, Sister, Shout

This sermon was preached at a Roots Revival Wednesday evening service at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on April 10, 2013. Roots Revival is a worship service grounded in Americana/roots-based music featuring Martha Bassettand friends. We The Boswell Sisters’ “Shout, Sister, Shout” and Florence + The Machine‘s “Shake It Out” as foci for the service to talk about the devil and hell.

One of the other pastors here at Centenary recently told me a funny story from Halloween a few years back. You see, his wife had dressed up as the devil—long red dress, tail, horns, the whole nine yards. At a costume party, someone asked their son what his parents were for Halloween. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure what Dad is, but Mom is a red cow!”

Here’s our first question for tonight: who is the devil?

A lot of us in the modern world have this image of a red figure with horns and a tail wearing a cape, maybe trailing fire. We think of the name Lucifer and of a story of an angel who rebels against God and is thrown out of heaven.

This picture has nothing to do with anything. I just thought it was funny.

It may come as a surprise to some people, but most of that does not come from the Bible. Actually, most of the narrative we’ve heard around this character is straight out of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is there, and not in the Bible, that we hear of the fallen angel named Lucifer.

In the Bible, we get a few different references—to ha’satan, the tempter, in the Hebrew Bible; to diabolos, the slanderer, in the New Testament. In popular Christianity, this becomes the devil, the personification of evil, a character who works continuously to lure people away from God and toward hell.

Ever heard the phrase “The devil made me do it”? Even if you might never utter that phrase, we all have ways of rationalizing or shifting blame when we do something wrong. Especially when we do something that doesn’t fit with the kind of person we think we are or want to be, we grasp for some justification—and what could be more convenient than a supernatural devil whose sole aim is to cause us to do bad things?

Now, I do not disbelieve that demonic powers exist. I’ve seen and heard enough strange things to hesitate when I want to dismiss the validity of accounts of demon possession or demonic influence—but we’ll save that for another time. For now, I want to suggest that when looking for the devil, often we don’t need to look very far.

We can turn on the news and hear of another tragic victim of gun violence—devil. We can walk through a homeless shelter and see the ravages of poverty and addiction—devil. If we’re really brave, we can look in the mirror and admit to our own sinful nature—devil.

The demonic, the hellish, can be found in other people, in systems of injustice, and in ourselves. It would be easier to blame the guy in the red cape.

Here’s our second question for tonight: what is hell?

I don’t have time to get too far into this, so I’m going to draw briefly on a book Rob Bell put out a few years ago called Love Wins. This book caught a lot of flack, but Bell didn’t really say anything new. Rather, he pointed out that a lot of popular conceptions about hell are relatively recent developments, and he went back to the Bible and to early theologians’ interpretations of hell.

Bell goes through the Bible and pulls out every mention of “hell”—and, much like the devil, it turns out that a lot of the mentions are more ambiguous than we might expect. In the Old Testament, we hear about sheol, a word for the grave or a place of the dead. The exact nature of this place is murky, but what we do see is that God is present there and has power there.

In the New Testament, there are a few different words that get translated as “hell.” The one I want to talk about is gehenna. This word refers to the town garbage pile. Bell remarks, “Gehenna was an actual place that Jesus’s listeners would have been familiar with. So the next time someone asks you if you believe in an actual hell, you can always say, ‘Yes, I do believe that my garbage goes somewhere…’”

What we don’t see is a clear description of the kind of thing we hear about in popular Christianity—a place of eternal conscious punishment where bad people and unbelievers are sent after death. Now, I am not saying there is not a hell, just that our modern ideas about it might be too narrow. Just as there are devils among and within us, hell is not necessarily something reserved for life after death. Here is a story that Bell shares to give an example.

“I remember arriving in Kigali, Rwanda, in December 2002 and driving from the airport to our hotel. Soon after leaving the airport I saw a kid, probably ten or eleven, with a missing hand standing by the side of the road. Then I saw another kid, just down the street, missing a leg. Then another in a wheelchair. Hands, arms, legs—I must have seen fifty or more teenagers with missing limbs in just those first several miles. My guide explained that during the genocide one of the ways to most degrade and humiliate your enemy was to remove an arm or a leg of his young child with a machete, so that years later he would have to live with the reminder of what you did to him.

Do I believe in a literal hell?
Of course.
Those aren’t metaphorical missing arms and legs.

[…]

God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it.
We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free.

We can use machetes if we want to.”

If we want hell, we can have it. We can use machetes if we want to.

Have I thoroughly depressed you now?

Don’t worry. It’s about to get better.

March 31 was Easter Sunday. The next day, Easter Monday, is in some traditions a time of celebrating what in Latin is called the Risus Paschalis, or the Easter laugh. It was especially appropriate that this year, Easter Monday was April 1, April Fool’s Day.

In some traditions, one aspect of the resurrection is that Easter becomes a huge joke on the devil. The devil thought he had won when Jesus died on Friday. But then Sunday came. The devil did not get the last laugh.

Peter Abelard was a theologian who lived in the 11^th and 12^th century, and he wrote 15 hymns for Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Each ended with this stanza:

Grant us, Lord, so to suffer with you
that we may become shareres in your glory,
to spend these three days in grief
that you may allow us the laugh of Easter grace.

One of my favorite movies is Steel Magnolias. The colorful cast of thoroughly Southern characters includes M’Lynn, played by Sally Field, and her daughter Shelby, played by Julia Roberts. Shelby has severe diabetes, and after the birth of her son it rages out of control and eventually claims her life. After the funeral, M’Lynn and several of her close friends are walking through the cemetery when M’Lynn bursts into a grief-stricken tirade of sobs and shouts.

“I wanna know why. I wanna know why Shelby’s life is over. I wanna know how that baby will ever know how wonderful his mother was. Will he ever know what she went through for him?”

Her friends look on, dumbfounded. Then M’Lynn’s grief turns to anger.

“I just wanna hit somebody ‘til they feel as bad as I do! I just wanna hit something! I wanna hit it hard!”

In a surprising turn of events, the sweet but sassy Claree springs into action. She grabs the well-loved but ever-ornery Ouiser Boudreaux and shoves her toward M’Lynn.

“Here! Hit this! Go ahead, M’Lynn! Slap her!”

Ouiser shoves her off, “Are you high, Claree?!”

The confusion that was already present during M’Lynn’s outburst is even more bewildering now, but something has changed. Suddenly, all the women fall onto each other, laughing, crying, in a hysterical tangle of grief and joy.

It is a strange, terrible, and beautiful thing that grief and laughter should be so closely tied together. But thank God for that, because in there somewhere is a ray of light, a laugh of grace.

C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters that can be a little disorienting to read. The premise is that Screwtape, a demon, is writing letters of advice to Wormwood, a young devil new to the ways of tempting humans away from God. Screwtape offers his wisdom and experience to Wormwood as he seeks to follow the will of “Our Lord Below”—the devil—in the fight against “the Enemy”—God.

At one point, Screwtape addresses laughter. Although he says that sometimes derisive laughter can be a useful tool for them, in general is should be avoided. “Laughter…does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.”

Hell is serious, and whether we are talking about hell here and now or hell in the hereafter, we should take it seriously. But we must also remember that the devil does not get the last laugh.

Another preacher once told a story of some prisoners in a POW camp during a time of war—I couldn’t track down the original story, but I’ll share the general idea anyway. The prisoners were being held, but they had one thing that gave them hope: they had a radio. One day, news came over the wire: the war was over, and the prisoners’ side had won! However, their captors had not yet gotten the news, and so they carried on business as usual, and the prisoners remained in their jail. But a fundamental change had occurred. The prisoners were no longer afraid. They celebrated the victory and ran around the camp cheering for joy. They laughed in the faces of their captors. Though the gates remained barred and the prisoners remained inside, they were free.

Whether it is the devil in another person, in a system or in ourselves, often what truly cripples us is our fear. But when we remember that we are free—to do evil or to do good—we can make that choice. We can choose fear or joy. And laughter can help.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Harry Potter series. In one of the books, these magically endowed minors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry meeting a strange magical creature called a Boggart. No one knows what a Boggart really looks like because it takes on a different form depending on who sees it. The Boggart takes the shape of whatever your greatest fear is. What might your Boggart look like?

Here is how the young witches and wizards are taught to defeat the Boggart. With a wave of their wand, they are to cast a spell: Riddikulus! But the spell won’t do the trick by itself—you have to finish off the Boggart with laughter. You do this by imagining the object of your fear transformed into something funny—so one boy sees a dreaded professor clad in his grandmother’s clothes; another sees a giant spider stumbling around on roller skates; a girl turns a huge snake into a jack-in-the-box. The laughter overwhelms the fear.

I am not going to sit here and blithely tell you, “Laughter is the best medicine.” I hope I have not come across as diminishing the reality and seriousness of the demonic and the hellish. Evil is very real and very present. Laughter will not undo the work of those machetes in Rwanda.

But maybe if we laughed together more, we wouldn’t want to pick up a machete. Real laughter—not the nervous, superficial kind—builds bridges. To really let loose and release a belly laugh—that requires knowing the people you’re laughing with, trusting that they can handle it if you have a weird laugh or snort or something ridiculous. How many people can you laugh like that with? What if we could laugh like that with our enemies? Could we dare to be so free?

There still plenty of stones I left unturned about the nature of the devil, of sin and of hell. But for me, it boils down to this: am I brave enough to face the demonic and the hellish in my own heart? Most days, I am not. But just as we are free to do good and to do evil, we are also free to confront the hells in our communities and in ourselves without fear, because God is with us. We have the weapons not of guns and swords but of song, of dance, of laughter, and of love. These are not tools of denial, and they may not banish our grief but might simply intermingle awkwardly with it. But where laughter and tears become indistinguishable, something both terrible and beautiful is born.

And maybe one day, we will see the devil and we will laugh him down—because in the end, he’s really just a red cow.

Giving up “I know.”

Lent ended a week ago, but I just decided to give something up.

I’m giving up “I know.”

Whether consciously or not, I’ve always associated being a grownup with knowing THINGS.

Up until last May (except for the first 4 or 5 years of my life), I had been accustomed to consistently adding to the list of THINGS that I know. With 7 years at a certain university whose men’s basketball team will not be appearing in tonight’s NCAA championship (sigh) under my belt, I darn well better have a huge list.

But none of that seems to count for much in everyday life, and in fact a lifetime of being evaluated based on what I know has made me cripplingly insecure about the THINGS I don’t know. I find I quickly fall into feelings of incompetence or stupidity when the simple THINGS elude me–when to get my oil changed (the guy at the Honda dealership definitely laughed at me last time when I showed up and said, “Um, the wrench-shaped light on my dashboard came on?”), how to do my taxes (paid someone to do it for me), where to look for a primary care physician (what happened to Student Health?!), how to make a budget (still don’t have one).

When faced with having to do the real life work of finding out about THINGS I don’t know, I tend to overcompensate by making sure everyone around me knows what THINGS I do know, and even by asserting that I know some THINGS I do not, in fact, know.

Read these two words, and pay attention to what tone you put with them:

“I know.”

Was it defensive? Reassuring? Compassionate? Irritated? Arrogant? Excited? Mocking? Despairing? Matter-of-fact?

I suppose it could be read any one of a million different ways. But I have begun to observe in my own life that most frequently, the words “I know” are uttered in a defensive tone, and I am usually defending against being seen as not knowing THINGS–even those THINGS I could not possibly be expected to know. Too often, ”I know” becomes a knee-jerk reaction to feelings of insecurity and uncertainty within myself.

You might have guessed it, but this has something to do with God as well. I know (ha!) I am not the first seminary grad to find that the many interesting and profound THINGS we know about God can get in the way of knowing God personally. Certainly those THINGS can enrich my faith, but that enrichment is not automatic and often must be sought with care and intentionality. My thoughtfully nuanced theology of the atonement may actually be a roadblock to my acceptance of God’s salvific work in my life.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about surrender, and it seems to me that being a grownup is not about knowing THINGS at all. In fact, it may just be that the more mature thing to do most of the time is to say, “I don’t know”–especially where God is concerned. I know lots and lots of THINGS about theology, ethics, liturgy, prayer, history and the Bible, but unless I can submit my will to the mystery of a love that is completely beyond my ability to know in any way other than through faith and trust, it is all meaningless.

After all, Jesus’ followers were called disciples–students. If I know all of the THINGS, what is there left for God to teach me? If I think I have nothing left to learn, I have made myself into a god–and if I know anything about God, it’s that I am not him/her.

I’m ready to let go of my need to know THINGS so that I might be free to know God–not as an object, not as the ultimate THING, but in a relationship of humility and love. I will never stop pursuing knowledge and intellectual growth (not to mention basic life competence), but neither will I make it my ultimate goal or measure of self-worth.

Because my worth is not in what “I know”–it is in the fact that I am known.

So if you catch me saying “I know” anytime in the next few weeks or months, maybe respond, “Do you?” or “So what?” But do it nicely, because I’m sensitive, you know.

Hard Times

This sermon was preached at a Roots Revival Wednesday evening service at Centenary United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC) on March 27, 2013. Roots Revival is a worship service grounded in Americana/roots-based music featuring Martha Bassettand friends. We used Gillian Welch‘s “Hard Times” as a focus for the service alongside John 12:1-8, following it up with the similarly titled “Hard Times” by Stephen Foster.

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)

My mom—who happens to be with us tonight—is the Director of Volunteer Engagement for a nonprofit in Charlotte that works with homeless families. A few years ago, I got roped into helping with childcare for an event they held for some of their families. We put a movie on in the background, and at some point, it caught the attention of a 6- or 7-year-old girl.

“Why are they doing that?” she asked. I started to clumsily explain what little of the plot I had picked up from halfway paying attention, but eventually gave up and went straight for the moral of the story. “The point is that you don’t need money to be happy.”

I was not prepared for this little girl’s response.

“Yes you do!”

I started to argue, then realized—I had left my home on the campus of a private university for the weekend to visit my parents’ home, where I have my own room to this day. She was staying in a homeless shelter with her family. Who was I to tell her that you don’t need money to be happy?

Our passage for tonight has always troubled me. John is the only Gospel writer who tells us explicitly that Judas wanted to steal the money for himself—without that parenthetical aside, Judas’ concern is a fair one. And Jesus’ response is disappointing: “You always have the poor with you.”

Does that mean we should accept poverty as a natural part of life and move on? What the heck, Jesus?

As it turns out, Jesus isn’t much for the status quo. There is another place in the Bible besides the gospels that talks about always having the poor with you. Jesus’ Jewish listeners might have picked up on it. Deuteronomy 15:11 says, “there will never cease to be some in need on the earth,” or in another translation, “There will always be poor people in the land.”

But there’s more to it than that. There is an imperative in Deuteronomy—a “since” and a “therefore.” Here’s the whole verse: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’”

Jesus wasn’t saying, “Oh well.” Jesus was asking us, “What are you going to do about it?”

You may or may not have noticed it, but earlier in the service I used a version of the Lord’s Prayer that isn’t the one that typically shows up in Methodist contexts. Do we have any Presbyterians here? Y’all are the primary group I know of that says, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Now, I’ve always preferred the other version, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is partly because I just don’t like using the word “debt” when talking about salvation. That sort of transactional language is connected to some theories of atonement that don’t fit with the nature of God as I have come to understand him. It tends to make God out to be wrathful, legalistic, and frankly kind of a jerk.

However, I used “debts” and “debtors” on purpose tonight. Here’s why. The Deuteronomy passage I mentioned is not talking about poverty as a general concept. It’s talking about a concrete Jewish practice known as the Jubilee.

Let’s back up. In Genesis, we have the creation accounts that tell how God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That seventh day is the Sabbath. At the end of each day of creation, God saw that it was good. When God created humans, he saw that it was very good. But he called the Sabbath not good, but holy.

The Sabbath is a day of rest when no work is to be done. We just completed a church-wide Lenten study on the Sabbath here at Centenary, and many people found the concept very challenging. A whole day of no work in this 24/7 world?

Well, the Sabbath day is nothing compared to the Jubilee. Here’s how the Jubilee works: every seven years, you take one entire year to do four things: let your fields lie fallow, meaning you don’t plant any crops; remit all debts owed to you; liberate slaves; and redistribute property. The Jubilee year was like a massive reset button for the economy—I bet you wish we had one of those today, huh?

In his book The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder claims that the Lord’s Prayer is actually referring to the Jubilee, specifically to the practice of forgiving debt. The Greek verb used here means “remit” or “forgive” specifically in a monetary sense. There’s nothing wrong with us taking this as a call to forgiveness more broadly, but for Yoder, it’s important that we not lose that very concrete sense of forgiving monetary debt and its connection to the Jubilee.

Deuteronomy 15 is tackling a problem with the Jubilee. As the seventh year approached, people were much more hesitant to lend money for fear of not getting paid back. Think about it—if you’re in year one, no big deal, surely this person can pay you back in six years. But if you’re six and a half years out from the last Jubilee, if you give a loan, chances are pretty good you’ll lose that money when the debt gets cancelled.

The writer of Deuteronomy has to remind the faithful to be generous and not tight-fisted. Refusing to lend money to the poor for fear of losing it defeats the purpose of the Jubilee, which goes back to the idea of Sabbath—it’s all about trust in God. One of the things people here wrestled with most was this anxiety that if they took a whole day each week where they didn’t get anything accomplished, it would negatively impact their lives or their careers.

John Howard Yoder addresses this by looking at Matthew 6—that’s the passage that says do not worry, looks at how God clothes and feeds the birds of the air and the lilies of the fields who do no work. That sounds nice, but Yoder puts it in the context of the Jubilee and offers his own interpretation:

“If you work six days (or six years) with all your hear, you can count on God to take care of you and yours. So without fear leave your field untilled. As he does for the birds of the heaven which do not sow or harvest or collect into granaries, God will take care of your needs. The Gentiles who pay no attention to the sabbath are not richer than you.”

The Jubilee is not something for the wealthy to fear. It is a celebration of God’s providence for all people and a foretaste of the kingdom. The remission of debts and redistribution of property is a tangible sign of our part to play in the bringing in of the kingdom.

There is a Haitian proverb that says, “God gives, but God doesn’t share.” Gandhi said something similar: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” We live in a world that is intensely focused on scarcity—not enough money, not enough food, not enough weapons. The truth is that we have more than enough, we just haven’t figured it out yet. God has given us more than we need. The jubilee reminds us of that. It helps us to share what we have been given and to remember that it was never ours in the first place.

The organization my mom works for, the one through which I met the little girl I told you about earlier, is called Charlotte Family Housing. They provide a myriad of services to homeless families, all aimed at helping them “achieve long-term self-sufficiency.”

Two of their programs in particular are worth noting here. First, they offer interest-free microloans to help families in emergencies or with a sudden job loss. As part of that, loan recipients are encouraged to keep up with their payment plan as a way to help other families in need—if they pay back their loans on time, the money is there to help someone else. They are empowered to participate in extending the same assistance they have received to others.

Second, each year around the holidays they run a special store, appropriately named the Jubilee Store. Families are able to purchase gifts for loved ones at a reduced price. Instead of simply being given handouts, they are given the dignity, self-esteem and personal accountability that comes with budgeting for and buying presents. Proceeds from the Jubilee Store go back into the microloan fund.

Tomorrow is Holy Thursday. Here at Centenary, we will remember the Last Supper, when Jesus shared a Passover meal with his disciples just before Judas betrayed him. The next day is Good Friday. In the darkness of a service called Tenebrae, we will hear the last seven words of Christ in word and song as we hear the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. On Sunday, this building will be full of lilies and people in pastels and seersucker as we celebrate the resurrection on Easter.

But what about Saturday? We don’t talk much about Holy Saturday in most mainline Protestant churches. Saturday is the day where it seems nothing really happens. Jesus is in the tomb. We just wait.

Some traditions refer to Holy Saturday as the Great Sabbath. Between the crucifixion on Friday and the resurrection on Sunday, Jesus rests in the tomb. Some Moravians will have a Holy Saturday love feast. Many Catholics and Orthodox will hold services to keep vigil as they wait for Easter morning. Here’s part of a prayer from the Matins service for Holy Saturday:

You have sanctified this, the seventh day,
which of old You blessed by rest from work;
for You bring all things into being and renew them, my Savior,
while resting and reviving on the sabbath.

Last week, we sang the old hymn “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed.” The final verse goes like this: “But drops of tears can never repay the debt of love I owe.” That debt was cancelled on Holy Saturday. By dying and rising, Jesus freed us from slavery to sin and death. Jesus became our Jubilee.

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” “God gives, but God doesn’t share.” Jesus is our Jubilee, and we are the body of Christ. Amen.

Nostalgia vs. Memory

On a recent episode of The Office, oddball paper salesman Dwight Schrute finds himself in a predicament: unless he or one of his siblings takes over the family farm, it will be lost. Neither his brother or sister is willing to take it on, so Dwight sets about staging an event designed to bring back good memories of times on the farm. The hope is that nostalgia will win out and convince one of them to preserve the family legacy. True to alarming form, Dwight sums up his approach thusly: “Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses, second only to the neck.”

Lately, I’ve been pondering the difference between nostalgia and memory. It’s a distinction I’ve been after for a while but only began to see more clearly through a month-long Lenten study we did at our church. Using Matthew Sleeth‘s book 24/6: A Prescription for a Healthier, Happier Life, Centenary UMC spent the season of Lent exploring the meaning and practice of the Sabbath through small groups, a sermon series, and special events and conversations.

Sleeth points out that of all the Ten Commandments, the fourth is the only one to start with the word “remember.” Sabbath is about remembering–remembering God’s work in creating the world, when God instituted the Sabbath with a day of divine rest;

remembering and paying attention to God’s presence; and remembering and reorienting oneself to what is most important in life. Sabbath isn’t just about not working–it is a time of active rest in which we lean into God’s love and will.

In many of our conversations about Sabbath, older folks especially shared their memories of a time when Sunday was a day apart not just for the church but for the broader society. Stores weren’t open, restaurants shut down, and in many places you couldn’t even buy gas.

None of this was news to me, but for the first time I found myself noticing a subtle difference between two ways in which people talked about this bygone time. For some, it was interesting to note the difference between then and now; for some, their recollections carried with them a lament–and at times, near indignation–that things had changed. Some people experienced it as a memory; some as nostalgia.

I’m not sure, but I think the difference between memory and nostalgia has something to do with fear and anxiety. Every now and then in our conversations about Sabbath, I heard a hint of fear that the church was losing ground, that we needed to reclaim Sunday as a day of rest in order to secure our place in society.

That is an understandable anxiety, but one question I raised to our small group was this: in a culture where a day of rest is passé, doesn’t that make serious practice of the Sabbath that much more meaningful? Could stopping one day a week become an act of resistance in a world that never stops?

What this kind of approach requires is that we be able to look back while still moving forward. The danger of nostalgia lies in its seductive nature, in our tendency to dwell on the past without living in the present–which is why it can become manipulative, as

Dwight so awkwardly demonstrated in The Office. The power of memory lies in its ability to give us the lessons and wisdom of history and tradition so that we might carry that into the future.

Of course, this memory/nostalgia distinction comes up in many places besides conversations about Sabbath. I’m sticking with the church for now, but I think the balance is important in politics and in the broader culture as well. The church as an institution is at a place it has never been, and the anxiety that is resulting in mainline churches is understandable.

But I am convinced that as the church moves from a position of power in American culture toward the margins, she has an opportunity to reclaim her prophetic voice. (See Elaine Heath’s The Mystic Way of Evangelism and the “Call to Holiness” I wrote based largely on her writing in response to anxiety about decline in the United Methodist Church.) The church can do this only if she remembers who she is in Christ, not if she becomes mired in nostalgia over what she once was in some mythical golden age based more in a religion of American culture than on the Biblical call to covenant community.

We should never forget our history or our traditions. They are sacred elements of the salvation story through which we continue to live into God’s will for God’s people. But I am finding insight in paying attention to when I am engaging memory or nostalgia, and I wonder how such a distinction might help the church as a whole.

We cannot and should not attempt to shed our past, but let’s remember that we do not live there. We live in Christ, in the reign of God who is constantly calling us to a holiness that is ancient to the foundations of the earth and yet new each day.