I had a delightful conversation with a parishioner this week. We had a little church business to talk about, but then we digressed and he told me a story about when he and three of his friends were home for the summer between college semesters. All four of them were Methodists (back in the day when college students actually went to church), but one of the friends had heard about a Lutheran pastor in town who had the reputation of being a good preacher. The four of them decided to check him out, and they were not disappointed; in fact they were so impressed that they attended the Lutheran church all summer. This was not pleasing to the mothers of these four free thinkers….where had they gone wrong that their children would forsake their own church for the likes of another, even if for just a summer. One mother asked her son why….and he replied that at their own church the preacher was always trying to convert the people already there….whereas at the Lutheran church the preacher preached assuming the ones there were already converted, else they wouldn’t be there in the first place; it was just so refreshing he said…..The person who told me this story obviously now is an Episcopalian, perhaps for the same reason he discovered as a young man home from school a few decades ago.
Sadly, the history of Christianity has been marked by an adversarial relationship between the church and its people….the church presuming to straighten out a foundering world of sin, the sinners being the ones in earshot….Ironically over the centuries the church has been as corrupt as the world it has sought to straighten out. Augustine taught that there were two types of human…the saved and the damned, pre-ordained by God….but still one must live as if they belonged to the saved, just in case they actually were…some real pathology going on there…Calvin followed suit with his theology of a divine elect…however he thought it possible to lead the sinner to salvation though that required miraculous intervention….and then Jonathan Edwards, considered by many American Church historians, as the greatest preacher in American history…his most famous sermon entitled “sinners in the hands of an angry God….” He believed that the miserable sinner, which apparently included most of his congregation, could be frightened away from hell into the arms of Jesus…..fear, a tactic with plenty of precedence in the church. Many other preachers in our history have felt it was their call to rescue the poor sinner from damnation….and the poor sinner was a vast demographic which included all….One’s Baptism, conversion, forgiveness, active spirituality, faithful worship and prayer all notwithstanding.
One of the alluring features of the so-called mega-church in our own day is not just that the “prosperity gospel” is being preached…you know, believe in Jesus and get a bigger house…but also what is being preached more recently is that people through repentance are indeed worthy of God’s love…this message a reaction I think to the centuries of being told we were miserable sinners. That’s an improvement in American spirituality….But for those of us of the Anglican tradition who have been taught that we are loved by God and worthy of that love, and nurtured in the environment in which we don’t have to worry about our own salvation, we who know that we live in a dynamic of the forgiveness of sins…and we who worship not with a predisposition of supplication, but with one of thanks and praise….I think the big question for us (the modern and enlightened church as a whole) is What now?
Last Sunday I said that God’s love at its heart boils down to two things….well-being and dignity. So I think as to the what now question:…our vocation is to share that love with all who are given to us….because we are taught in scripture that God’s love is for all peoples and nations. Salvation is not just about us. That means attending to the dignity and well being of each other in this place to be sure; and it also means that we are duty bound to share God’s love with those who don’t know it, the ones out of the loop, the lost invisible ones among us….the ones stooped under indignity and a moribund existence that passes for a life….We feed and attend to each other, nurture our own dignity and well-being so that we are strengthened to share God’s love i.e. dignity and well-being with the ones desperate for it….Thomas Schattauer calls this the “inside out church,” a church that is not adversary, but life giving community. We attend to the dignity and well being of each other and for the ones starved for what the saved know they have…. this life giving love of God….dignity and well-being in short. So the what now is that we live our lives for the good of our broken world….It is what we are born for, and by the grace of God what we’ll die trying.
