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January 3, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

This One Goes Out to
the Ones We’ve Left Behind

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
John 1:1–18
Jeremiah 31:7–14

There are countless people who betray Christianity, individuals who turn their backs on its message because they no longer believe in it or because it asks too much of them. But there are a few who betray Christianity not because they no longer believe in it, but because they believe in it so deeply, because they understand that unless the seed of our Christianity falls to the ground and dies, it will remain a single seed, but if it is allowed to die it will produce many seeds.

Peter Rollins
The Fidelity of Betrayal

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Before our second scripture lesson, I want to share with you a recollection from my childhood. This memory came to me last week as I was home with my family in Florida. We had a gathering of almost all the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mother’s side of the family, the first such reunion we have had in a long, long time. The occasion was my grandmother’s upcoming ninety-first birthday. We had intended to do this last year, for her ninetieth birthday, but you may recall that my wife, Anna, was very pregnant at this time last year, just days away from the birth of our son, Noah. So this year we got to celebrate my grandmother’s ninety-first birthday and my son’s first. It was a special time together with family.

While we were down there, my sister pulled out the collection of old videotapes we have from our childhood. There was a Christmas, more than twenty-five years ago, when this same group of family gathered together in Texas. We are fortunate to have these old tapes. We watched them together and laughed at our childhood selves, marveled at the youth of our parents, and missed the people in those videos who are now gone.

This all opened up for me a flood of memories from back then. Like the old videos we watched, these memories are little scenes, spliced together in my mind. One of these resurrected memories came from a family visit to my other grandparents, my father’s parents. On this particular occasion, I took apart an old clock that was in a closet full of toys and odds and ends that my grandmother encouraged us to play with when we were there. My family marveled at my ambition to take apart this machine, learn how it works, and then put it back together. They thought it was a sign, I suppose, at an early age, of a sharp mind, perhaps a natural aptitude for engineering. After all, my grandfather was a tinkerer, and my father is, in fact, an engineer.

But the truth is, I never figured out how to put that clock back together again. Instead of an old clock, all that was left was a bunch of useless pieces.

•          •          •

Our second scripture lesson comes from the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah, and the prophetic oracles collected in his name, date from the time right before, during, and after the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people in the sixth century before the birth of Christ. The original hearers of these words were exiles, people who had been removed and displaced from their homeland and their people. All that they had known of God and the world had been torn away from them and called into question.

Our lesson today contains two oracles of salvation, prophetic utterances that promise the hope of redemption and return for the exiles. These people who had felt as abandoned by God as they were estranged from their people would be ransomed and restored.

This message was for them. It is for us, too. So listen, now, for God’s word in these ancient words, and may we have ears to hear what they speak to us today.

•          •          •

So soon after Advent, and while we are still in the season of Christmas, I can’t hear these prophetic words to exiles without hearing the stirring mix of melancholy and hope in that favorite Advent hymn, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”

Today we celebrate the holy day of Epiphany, the conclusion of the Christmas season, which actually takes place on January 6. Epiphany commemorates the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In the Western church, it is associated with the story of the magi, or the wise men, who visit the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem. This story has represented for the church the manifestation of God’s revelation to the Gentiles, the expansion of God’s covenantal relationship beyond the historic children of Israel to all of God’s children throughout the world.

This morning I have left the story of the magi to be told in our beautiful music and have chosen instead for our scripture lessons the texts suggested for this Second Sunday of Christmastide. The familiar words of the opening of John’s Gospel embody the meaning of Epiphany: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” We live in a world that has experienced and continues to experience the incarnation of God’s good news of love. We have celebrated and continue to celebrate what this transforming reality has done in the world, what it has done in our own hearts.

But the oracles of Jeremiah beg a different question in the midst of our celebrations of light and transformation and incarnation. What about the exiles? What about the ones who aren’t here with us now to celebrate?

In his recent book on the church, A New Church for a New World, our Pastor, John Buchanan, offers a succinct telling of the church’s history and significant moments of its manifestations from the first century through the twentieth century. He notes that his reflections on the church are colored by our contemporary location in a postmodern, post-Christendom world. Having told the story of the church’s humble beginnings, its eventual embrace of power and empire, and its domination of the Western world, John ends his book by wondering what is next in the twenty-first century, when the church is no longer the dominant power in culture, society, and civilization. He concludes by noting that scholars like Walter Brueggemann, Douglas John Hall, and Rabbi Irving Greenberg suggest that the church is now in something of a period of exile and diaspora, removed from the established seat of power and influence it once had. To this list I would add retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, who speaks of exile due to the tensions between traditional Christian faith and modern thought (John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile). In this exile, if the church is not faced with hostility, then it is certainly faced with indifference. Thus, as mainline Protestant denominations like ours continue to decline in numbers and as that decline brings with it a steady decline in influence and relevance in this postmodern world, what is next for the church?

I believe, as John hints, that any hope we have for the future of the church is intimately bound to this notion of exile, though I would recast how we frame this idea. You see, I’m less concerned about the exile of the church as an institution and more interested in the people who are exiled from the church, the people who are exiled from communities of faith as children of God.

This is a difficult question for us to consider here at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Just look at us, here in this beautiful sanctuary that is regularly full of people on Sunday mornings, in a church building that is in heavy use seven days a week. If this is a snapshot of the mainline church in America, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to worry about. But we can’t let ourselves be blinded by our own success.

There is a lot of navel-gazing that goes on in this church, a lot of celebrations of who we are and what we do. And to be bluntly honest, some of it borders on self-congratulatory narcissism. Now to a certain extent, there is good reason for this. We are a successful church that does a lot of good for a lot of people. As a growing church in a downtown city center, the second largest congregation in the PC(USA), we are an anomaly in our denomination and in the mainline church as a whole. So there is indeed much to celebrate and be proud of here. This is a vibrant community of faith that is open to the presence of God in our midst and responds to that presence with faithful love for both God and our neighbors. This faithfulness has been rewarded with growth in numbers, in resources, in vision, and in mission.

And yet—you know there would be an “and yet”—and yet, I keep wondering about the exiles. In this season of our church’s life, as we gear up for our second century on this corner of Michigan Avenue and set our sights on expanded facilities that will allow us to do even better what we do so well, I keep wondering about the people who aren’t here.

The people who are here are well known: people who love hearing progressive and provocative sermons that also comfort us and ground us in our tradition from one of the best preachers in America (and people who indulge the B-team players when we get called up on Sundays after major holidays); people who want to hear world-class sacred and classical music from highly trained and skilled musicians; people who want to give back to their community and world as much as they receive. We know who these people are, who you are.

But who are the exiles that God wants to return home? Who are the exiles that God is calling us to reach out to with the gospel message of hope, love, and transformation? Who are these exiles?

In a fascinating book that came out a few years ago called After the Baby Boomers, sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow offers a sobering study of young adults and their relationship to organized religion in the United States. There are significantly fewer young adults participating in Christian congregations today than there were a generation ago. According to his detailed research, Wuthnow attributes this to changing life patterns that find young adults coming into full adulthood later in life, delaying marriage, and having children when they are older. As troubling as his report is, I believe that some of these issues can be addressed through program initiatives and rethinking of ministry priorities.

But Wuthnow’s study is compounded by a recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that demonstrates that about half of American adults change their religious affiliation during young adulthood (“Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.,” www.pewforum.org). More alarming is that the biggest growth due to change has been in the “unaffiliated” category. In other words, when young adults change religions, the group that is growing the most is the group that represents no religion. This, I think, begins to expose some of the realities of our church’s exile.

More and more we are becoming painfully aware that Christianity has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. As David Kinnaman, president of the Barna research group, notes, “Christianity has an image problem.” Kinnaman has written an interesting book called unChristian that chronicles this problem. A similar book by pastor Dan Kimball is called They Like Jesus but Not the Church. Both of these studies offer reflections on how young adults are troubled by the following perceptions of the church: Christians are hypocritical, judgmental, and closed-minded; the church is only concerned about converting new members; the church is homophobic; the church is still patriarchal and oppressive to women and racial minorities; the church is too involved in political agendas; the church is arrogantly exclusive of other religions; the church is full of fundamentalists who read the Bible literally.

While we might characterize these as misperceptions that don’t represent our kind of Christianity, the reality is that for many people, especially younger adults (though certainly not limited to younger adults), this is the public face of Christianity. And for many, it doesn’t matter what we say in here or even what we do out in the world, because on the surface we look and sound just like every other Christian they have ever known. And if you have been turned off by the church or if you have been hurt by the church or if you have been damaged or abused by the church, it all looks the same. And so you become an exile.

These studies by Kinnaman and Kimball are pretty informative and sobering as descriptions. But as solutions, I find them insufficient because what they offer in response is basically a cosmetic makeover that changes some surface perceptions but doesn’t necessarily alter some of the fundamental issues that send children of God into exile.

So here is some blunt truth. There is a lot about what we do as a church—and I’m speaking now of the church in its broadest sense—that doesn’t work the way it used to, and we need to be honest about that.

As institutions, we have lumbering bureaucracies that consume more time, resources, talent, energy, and goodwill than they are really worth. When an institution that supposedly exists to be a catalyst for transformation in the world spends so much time and effort on maintenance of the institution, something is wrong.

Some of our theology is, in fact, so tied to the worldviews of the past that we do need some radical revision for our faith to be meaningful in this postmodern world. Even some of our basic beliefs need to be rethought and reimagined for this new world and this new time, a time as ripe for revelation and incarnation and epiphany as any has ever been.

For many people, a building like this and the clothes we wear and the words we speak and the songs we sing have become so foreign and incomprehensible that God gets lots in the confusion. What is sacred and transformative for some is impenetrable for others.

And so while we continue to do what we do so well for the people who find meaning in it, we can’t forget about the exiles. We must be creative and innovative and progressive.

You may know that I stand before you as a former exile myself, a refugee from the church of my youth. I am one of those young adults who changed faith communities. I left the conservative, fundamentalist church of my past, a church I could no longer associate myself with for many of the reasons Kinnaman and Kimball point out, and by the grace of God found my way to this church. Here I have been nurtured with progressive preaching and theology. I have been moved by immaculate worship and music. I have been challenged to rethink the way I understand the world and the people in it. I have been inspired to serve others with selfless urgency.

But before all of that, I was a young adult who had some serious questions about Christianity. My questions threatened to dismantle my faith, as I had witnessed such questions do to the faith of some of my closest friends. I was like a young boy who had taken apart a clock and didn’t know how to put it back together. Yet in my exile, God helped me figure out how to put it back together. The clock I ended up with was a little bit different than the one I started out with, but it worked. And it still does, even as I’ve continued to tinker with it over the years.

One of my favorite TV shows is the cooking competition Top Chef. In one of the episodes this past season, the chefs were challenged to deconstruct a classic dish. The object was not to simply reimagine or modify the dish or to destroy it. The challenge was to break it down into its constituent parts and recreate it in a new and engaging way such that it was still discernable as the original dish, but also different and more edgy (Season 6, Episode 6: “Penn & Teller,” originally broadcast on 23 September 2009).

For me, this is the perfect metaphor for our challenge, for our call to reach out to the children of God who are in exile. In her brilliant little book The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle argues that every 500 years or so the church, along with the culture, has a rummage sale that opens up space to refashion the community of faith into something relevant and transforming for the new culture. Now is one of those times.

You’ve heard about preaching to the choir. This sermon has been different. This one goes out to people that aren’t even here. This one goes out to the exiles, though some of us may be on the edge as well.

So if you’ve heard anything today that gives you hope, that you think might be compelling for an exile whom you know out there somewhere, pass it on. Tell them that there is a place for them at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Tell them that we haven’t forgotten them.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church