Globalization was well underway. New technology allowed ideas to cross borders and social classes, information more available to more people than ever before. Science was starting to challenge superstition.
The institutional church looked increasingly out of touch, disconnected from every day reality, more concerned with wealth and power for the few than with anything a poor itinerant rabbi from Galilee, committed to reforming his faith, a man that was executed by those with wealth and power, might have taught.
But really, that rabbi’s follower in those changing times centuries later didn’t intend to start a revolution. He just meant to open a debate about one particular practice, to pursue reform from within. The more effort they put into quashing him and his ideas, the further they drove him out. What started as a debate on 95 theological points about paid indulgences ended with the Lutheran Reformation.
The same cultural forces were at play to the south, where an Erasmian humanism and a hard-headed independence lead Zwingli and the authorities in the Swiss canton of Zurich to challenge superstition, to also challenge the sale of indulgences, and in the end, to challenge the mass itself. While some would come to call this branch of the Protestant Reformation “Calvinism,†after a prolific and influential early theologian, it is best labeled Reform Christianity, and gave birth to many modern forms of our faith, including the Presbyterians and our ancestors, the Congregationalists.
The world would never be the same again.
Reformation Sunday is today, timed to the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, but as we celebrate the 499th anniversary, we must be mindful that even before the Reformation there was not one single, universal church. That myth is pure Roman propaganda, a fiction, and the reformation that was so needed has never ended.
While some, even among Protestants, still claim an authoritative understanding of God’s will, while some long for a perfect Golden Age of Christianity, often defined as how things were when they were young, we humans still actually stand in the face of divine mystery, our every attempt to confine God to what we can understand doomed from the start.
We find ourselves once again at a moment when technology, science and globalization are changing everything. We have access to new ideas, and the church presented to the world by mass media and televangelists looks increasingly irrelevant. Creationism, the literalist creationism of the fundamentalist heresy, has no place in the world of genome research, and there is no heaven above us nor any hell below us in the quantum multiverse.
The idea that the divine would prefer one tribe over all others, essentially a racist creator, no longer makes sense in light of human evolution, nor does the notion that a loving God would create beings that, because of their race, location or cultural context, were predestined to eternal torment.
We see the role of religion in history, the many ways it has been used to oppress, so we are not ready to accept one authoritative myth. Fortunately, most of us also see the many ways faith has contributed to human thriving, but it is understandable that some would doubt, some would be hostile to religion, for much blood has been spilled in the name of religion, much in the name of Christ.
The decline of Christianity in Europe in the last century is not surprising considering the complicity of the church in the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the resulting dictatorship of Franco, in the silence and complicity of the institutional Protestant and Catholic churches in the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. We can celebrate Bonhoeffer and other saints of that age, but we must remember that most Christians did not act their creed.
American churches at the start of the last century, Roman and Protestant, were progressive and active, were engaged in what came to be known as the social gospel. But by the 1970’s, American Christianity came more and more to be represented in the media and in the public consciousness not by leaders like Rev. King, but by racial segregationists, by Anita Bryant, that vigilant guard against the homosexual teachers hellbent on recruiting a new generation of deviants, and by Jerry Falwell and his falsely named “Moral Majority.â€
This Babylonian Captivity of the Gospel coincided with a number of demographic shifts, as increasing equality allowed more women to enter the workplace, as everyone worked longer hours, and as media-fueled paranoia, poison Tylenol and images on the milk carton, combined with an aspirational culture to create over-programmed children, scheduled play dates and standardized testing.
The church, which had boomed as a “third good place,†a center of community life after the Second World War, the place that was neither home nor work, lost steam as we became more and more isolated, even as technology made us more connected. We can video chat with someone on the other side of the world, and are more lonely than ever.
We are in need of a new reformation, a chance to restore what is beautiful in our tradition, even as we build something new, a roomier faith, one that fits our age, fits real humans, even misfit humans.
Unfortunately, we have allowed our tools to rust. Too few understand the arc of salvation history Too many are unable to deconstruct the layers of text in scripture to reveal the ways it tells the story of an evolving faith that is oriented toward justice. Too many hear the hate-filled bible-thumpers and too few know that the Bible actually tells the story of a God who reaches out to humankind in love and who is always with the oppressed and the poor.
We have lost the tools of theological thinking, so present just a couple of generations ago, that allowed lay people to take stands on issues like baptism and communion.
Yet, even in these challenging times, new voices are emerging, new movements of Christians who seek to make the world a better place. For these Christians, it is less about judgment and hell and personal salvation or personal damnation.
It is all about loving the God who loves us, loving God’s creation, and working to make true what we say so often, that we want God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that we are willing to take action to make it so, even if we don’t know exactly what that will is. But we know this, it looks like love and justice, a generous and grace-filled justice, not the retributive justice that so often seduces us.
A new Christianity, sometimes called “emergent†Christianity, sometimes called progressive Christianity, is growing. It is attentive to Isaiah’s word that the sin of Sodom was injustice, not sex. It hears the story of Zacchaeus not as a story of abstract faith displayed in the climbing of a tree, but in the actions of that wealthy tax collector, doing justice to those he had wronged and giving half of all he owned to those in need.
So it was that progressive Christians gathered across denominational lines to begin to articulate a shared vision, an affirmation of a Christianity that made the world a better place, a Christianity that was expansive and loving. The conversation began in Phoenix, and the Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes, a United Church of Christ pastor, was an early leader in that conversation. He would eventually author a book on the affirmations developed by that team, a set of affirmations that has evolved, that is included in your Order of Service.
These Phoenix Affirmations, twelve in total, are organized around love, love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self, the three components of the Great Commandment. They include such untraditional ideas as an acceptance that there might be other paths to God, care for creation rather than dominion over it, recognition that the reflection of the divine can be found in all people, gay, straight, black and white, able-bodied and disabled, of every caste and tribe. The affirmations call for the true separation of church and state, and an embrace of science and doubt.
The Phoenix Affirmations include the self, include the vertical relationship with the divine, but mostly it is a statement of a horizontal and externally-focused faith. It is a statement that is old and new and evolving. It is us.
In fact, it is so much us, that it was to that same Great Commandment in the Gospel attributed to Matthew that the United Church of Christ Board of Directors recently turned as they considered the UCC’s vision, mission and purpose. Here is the mission statement they adopted: “United in Spirit and inspired by God’s grace, we welcome all, love all, and seek justice for all.â€
I have said that we have much to learn from those parts of society that are thriving. We need to learn from business how to articulate the practical value of a life spent in a community of faith, how to articulate the value of compassion, resilience and hope. We need to learn from the non-profit sector ways to do mission that truly help rather than hurt, that create justice rather than becoming one more form of toxic charity. We need to learn from big data and we need to learn from Disney, those master storytellers that know how to bring you into their story and make you feel welcomed.
We need to learn all of those skills then bring our “plus one,†a real encounter with the transcendent, the mysterious divine, with God. We must articulate a system of belief that actually fits the world in which we live.
There is room in that emerging faith for mystery but not for stupidity, not for rigidity. You and I need the tools to articulate what we believe and why we do what we do. We must be ready to change course, to evolve, just as the prophets did in their context, just as Jesus did in his context, just as Martin Luther did in his context, just as the authors of the Barmen Declaration did in theirs.
On Friday, the most recent issue of Wired magazine, guest-edited by our president, landed in my mailbox. In one article, Silicon Valley executives are asked to explain how tech can address six big challenges that face our society, six challenges identified by President Obama. In a question about how technology companies can lessen inequality, Tim O’Reilly writes about companies that create value, versus those that try to capture value, the latter exacerbating the gap between rich and poor. As we struggle to balance our church budget and maintain these big old buildings, including the one in which I live, we must attend to this question. Do we create value in people’s lives?
In our new reformation, our emerging reformation, we must be a church that creates value rather than one that tries to capture it. We must change lives, and to do that in an ever changing world, we must change ourselves. That goes against our nature, isn’t easy to do at 30, or 50, or 70. But it must happen. Jesus allowed the rich but righteous young man to walk away. But Jesus touched the heart of the wealthy and unrighteous Zaccheus, and he was changed. He became a new human.
We claim that Jesus, to use the words of the Authorized Edition, “maketh all things new,†but all too often, we don’t want anything new. We want what we know, long for the familiar. And it is killing us.
Ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg. A priest gone off the reservation in Zurich. A church that believes it is not meant to serve the powerful, but instead to serve the oppressed. This is not the old and familiar.
May the Holy Spirit grant us restless hearts and the tools to make the world a better place, to create value in the lives of others. May the Holy Spirit grant us reformation. Amen.