Anxious: May 6, 2018

“What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world?”

These are not the words of some contemporary church leader looking at decades of declining participation in religious life, at churches turned into brewpubs and condos, at the decline of a learned clergy. These are, in fact, the words of letter written 74 years ago from Tegel Prison, in Berlin, part of the correspondence between the prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his dear friend, Eberhard Bethge. Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian in prison, struggled in his correspondence to understand what might come next for the faith he cherished, not because the churches of Germany were already empty, though they would certainly become vast and empty edifices in the decades after the war, desiccated husks of what had once been alive. No, he was concerned that German Christianity had been emptied of Christ, had become a secular nationalist cult that was swallowed whole by the Nazi hate machine. It was an anxious time for those Christians of the Confessing Church, that group that refused Nazi ideology and control. It was an anxious time for Bonhoeffer, no doubt, in prison for his own role in a conspiracy against Hitler, against the Nazi hate machine, and Allied bombers filled the sky above, so that death might come from the drop of a bomb or from the hangman’s drop.

Today’s second reading is from another prison letter, also words written in a time of anxiety. Paul is writing to the church he founded in Philippi, and we, alas, are eavesdropping on a private conversation, for while some of the authentic Pauline texts were written as circular letters, meant to be shared, this one was not. This is a private communication between a pastor and a church, as intimate as an email to a handful of trusted leaders. Those leaders are anxious about the future of the church, their church, and of Christianity itself, though that name for the Way of Jesus is not yet in common use at this point, right around the year 60 C.E. What they are doing is so new that it doesn’t really have a name or a definition, this Hebrew reform movement being practiced by a mix of Hebrews and non-Hebrews, Gentiles in the language of the age. They just know that this “evangelion,” this good news, is powerful, has brought them together, has brought them new life, so that they feel born again in the words Jesus used with Nicodemus, literally re-vitalized, vita, life. But it is hard, this all new thing, and sometimes more than a little scary. They are non-conformists, and even in a diverse region, like the cosmopolitan Roman empire, it is always easier to conform than to stand out. Paul is in prison and Nero is on the throne, the latest wretch to wear the laurels as princeps, and we know how this story goes, with the Great Fire and Christians as the scapegoats. Paul is writing his flock, offering hope, for he is a pastor, even if he too is anxious. Paul is offering hope, encouragement, and he is offering instruction.

We’ll be with this letter for two more weeks, next Sunday hearing what we believe to be the earliest Christian hymn, that powerful text about the kenosis or self-emptying of Jesus, “every knee shall bow, every tongue confess.” But today, today we are at the start of the letter, which follows a formula common to the age and to the authentic letters of Paul. And there, early in the text, Paul announces his agenda, offers a program for a time of anxiety: “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best.”

We all have experienced that fretting that comes with not knowing what to do next, powerless and overwhelmed, sometimes powerless by circumstance, sometimes powerless by choice. Some would leave us trapped there, insist that nothing can be done, no step can be taken, until we have a 100% guaranteed plan, but life does not work that way, nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes you just start, just do something, knowing that the plan might need to be tweaked along the way. Those who insist on a guaranteed plan and unanimous agreement are almost always those benefiting from the status quo, from the discomfort of others.

Things just happen and sometimes we feel anxious as result. This is hard when we are alone, but often even worse when we are in system, a family, a church, for as author and corporate consultant Jeffrey A. Miller makes clear in his 2008 book “The Anxious Organization,” anxiety is contagious, and builds on itself in a feedback loop that gets louder and louder. But, Miller adds, so composure is contagious as well.

So Paul offers contagious composure in an anxious time. What does Paul want for these anxious church leaders in Philippi? Two tools: knowledge and insight.

Paul’s letters teach. Paul’s letters provide pastoral counseling. Knowledge and insight.

Now, knowledge is the easy one. We can learn, if we choose to do so and are willing to invest the time. Paul was able to share with the church at Philippi wisdom he learned from Peter and James, from his experience as pastor to the churches in Thessaloniki and Corinth and Ephesus, even lessons learned from failure, for you heard of his evangelism in Athens last Sunday, but we are not reading a letter to the Athenians.

Paul grew in knowledge of how to do the Way of Jesus, how to live it, even in difficult circumstances, and shared that knowledge. He also drew from his deep knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, knew the Law, the history, the prophets. Words from Isaiah come as easily to him as they did to Jesus. He understands the deep story.

We need knowledge, need to learn, from our modern-day Corinths and Thessalonikis, from the prophets old and new, but we must also relearn and retell our own story. As Alan J. Roxburgh writes in “The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition”:

“Part of the liminality experienced in Christian communities is that they have lost the sense of the Christian story among all the ideologies swirling in our postmodern culture. They have little memory and few frameworks with which to discern the difference between the Christian narrative and competing stories that seem to reside in grayness of meaning.”

Our faith story evolves. I thank God that our faith can and does evolve, but we must start with that story. It is the rock, the foundation on which we build our community. As some of us heard at a gathering of UCC churches yesterday, when our sister church in Northeast Harbor started wrestling with the question of mass deportations and families torn apart, they started about as far back as you can start, with the Hebrew commandment to embrace the alien in the land, a reminder that the Hebrews had once been aliens themselves. Those sisters and brothers up the road understand that our story is Exodus and abolition. They honor our history and build for our tomorrow.

But Paul does not call for knowledge alone, for our faith is not only a faith of the head, but also of the heart. It is love that Paul wants to see overflow among the faithful in Philippi, love that includes knowledge, love that includes full insight. We could wrestle with and parse the original Greek, but I think this translation gets it right, gets at it, for knowledge and insight are not the same thing, nor is insight as simple as gut-feeling or guesswork or personal preference, though personal preference is often regarded as Law. Spiritual insight, like an improvisation on the keyboard, is the result of countless hours of practice, is intuitive and poetic and based in tools that took years to develop. The pianist plays and the faith leader prays and participates in worship, hours of discipline that are the basis for insight.

Knowledge comes from study and insight comes from piety, two of the three keys to the Roman Catholic church’s development program for lay leaders called Cursillo. The final piece of the Cursillo triangle comes at the end of Paul’s statement: “having produced the harvest of righteousness,” which is to say, results, and results come from action. For piety and study are meaningless if you don’t actually do something with that knowledge and insight. Paul has it right when he calls for a harvest, for scripture tells us we will be known by our fruits, by our results, not by the size of our building or of our endowment.

Want to move out of anxiety? Piety, study, and action are the keys. Do something, start doing something. Don’t wait until you have a fool-proof perfect plan because that ain’t gonna happen. Don’t wait for consensus, for where two or more are gathered in his name, there will be differences also.

Bonhoeffer was doing something in his anxiety, sitting in a Nazi prison cell sketching out new theologies and outlining new books that he would never write, for he would be executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp just three weeks before Hitler committed suicide. The end in sight, anxious and powerless, he prayed, he learned, he worked: piety, study, and action.

Cursillo teaches, Bonhoeffer practiced, and Paul wrote the answer to our anxiety, and we so need an answer to our anxiety today, the anxiety we feel in our lives individually and in our life together, the anxiety we feel as American evangelicals, like the Reichskirche decades ago, capitulates to the basest, most brutal ideologies of our time, greed, racism, and hate. Practice your faith, a faith that rejects greed, racism, hate. Learn your faith. Put your faith into action in your life, in your community, in your world. Do something.

Roxburgh, in “The Sky is Falling,” calls on the church to “cultivate an ethic of commitment and obligation connecting back to older Christian traditions of discipleship and humble apprenticeship.” He also calls for clergy to become abbots and prophets and poets, for like me, he believes that the Way of Jesus still has something to offer. Consumerism may satisfy us for the day, but it will never satisfy that deep hunger, for it does not address the ultimate questions: Who am I? What must I do? Where am I going?

Poets, dreamers, pastors, disciples of every variety, those anxious about failing budgets and failing bodies, about mass incarceration and mass deportation, those anxious because they do not yet have that 100% fool-proof plan, hear the words of the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Step out of your anguished waverings and into the storm of events plunge ahead, borne along solely by command of your God and your powerful faith. Only then will that freedom exultant reach out to welcome your spirit’s embrace.”