Sermon Archives
Date: October 22, 2017
Title: “Every Five Hundred Years”
Scripture: Jeremiah 31: 31-34; John 8:31-36
Description: This is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. According to Phyllis Tickle, every 500 years the church has a giant yard sale, replacing what has grown old and is no longer useful will things that are fresh. What are some of the innovations ahead for us?
Every five hundred years the faith has a big yard sale. Like items in a yard sale, the structures that have contained our faith and have served us well no longer function effectively and, in fact, get in the way of our faith. The last big yard sale, according to Phyllis Tickle1. (no relation to Holly Tickle), was five hundred years ago. Martin Luther started it, but his yard sale sprang up in several places spontaneously so that it quickly became an event through the entire neighborhood of Europe. The birth of the Protestant Reformation brought forth new ways of practicing and experiencing being Christian.
(By the way, five hundred years before Martin Luther was Gregory the Great, a.k.a Pope Gregory the First. It was the Fall of the Roman Empire; the world as they knew it was in shambles. Pope Gregory unified the western world under a single brand of faith. Five hundred years before Gregory the Great, the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed were written. Through those creeds, Christians worked out an agreed statement about the identity of this Jesus of Nazareth whom they followed.)
You see the pattern: every five hundred years the faith has a yard sale, clearing out the old stuff that needs to be discarded, making room to replace it with new practices and new forms that have the power to bring new life. This year is the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther. This year Dave Fry is retiring. Large scale changes in the Christian faith are on the way.
Actually, several important Christian thinkers believe we are beginning a new transformation of faith. As Walter Bruegemann said, the world as we know it is coming apart. This is God’s great gift to us. A new kind of Christian faith is on the horizon. God’s best skill is making all things new.
Changes are taking place not only in faith but in all of our life. In the big picture, classic economics don’t work as well in a service-based economy as in a production-based economy. The growing gap between rich and poor indicates that we need to discover something new that works for our current situation. Same with national borders and national influence. I was taught forty years ago that in the future global corporations will hold greater influence and exercise more power than governments. That future now seems like next week, if not already today. Our government seems paralyzed to enact anything on any topic, while Exxon and Apple and Amazon can merge, adapt, move huge sums of money and create thousands of jobs overnight.
It’s becoming personal. Employees at the cash register can no longer make change by adding/subtracting numbers in their head. My total purchase was $13.26; I handed over a $20 bill. (Which in itself was unusual; who doesn’t use plastic now?) Then I noticed I had twenty six cents in my pocket, which I gave to the employee. Having already entered $13.26 cost and $20.00 amount paid in the cash register, she was completely frozen. She was completely unable to subtract $13.26 from $20.26.
I’m the same way. I don’t know my own daughter’s phone number, because it’s on my speed dial. “Listen Google: phone Kristen’s cell.” I haven’t actually dialed her number in years. We all are storing more and more of our “selves” outside ourselves. Although it enables us to do so much more so much faster, it’s a change, and it’s a bit unsettling.
Our world is changing. Our very own Christian faith is changing. Dave Fry is retiring. It’s a bit unsettling. But, like the great Reformation five hundred years ago, it may be God’s gift, bringing new life and new energy to our faith.
Look at the trends: the Bible is being kidnapped by fringe groups like white supremists who quote scripture to support their hate-filled rhetoric. Hard-core fundamentalists own the public image of Christians here in the south. We’re seen as people who are against women, against homosexuals, against evolution, a religion that is mostly against.
The Christian faith is also pregnant with new possibilities. You recall the stories of Sara, the wife of Abraham, and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. They were old women who stunned every one by giving birth when everyone thought it was too late. Think of the church that way: an old woman past her prime, closer to a nursing home than to be nursing new life. But I see it differently. I see a new generation of Christians being formed, coming of age and coming alive. I believe that, just when you think this old gal is over the hill, she may take a pregnancy test and surprise us all.
Here are a couple of ways that faith is changing. You’ll probably notice that these ways are actually not totally new at Pleasant Hill Church. Here, we’ve been on the growing edge for some time. In fact, those may be the parts of Pleasant Hill that attracted you to this church when you first came here.
At Pleasant Hill Church, we aren’t about appeasing an angry, distant God-Father, but instead we emphasize a loving parent-God and open our vision to how close a loving God is to us. When we use God’s love as the lens to reading the Bible, scripture opens up to us in an entirely new way. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is about repentance and return becomes the Parable of the Loving Father in which God is the one who embraces and kisses the son and invites both the one who left and the one who remained to join in celebration. As I preached this summer, the story of Adam and Eve becomes less about original sin and the “fall of man” and more a story about our most important challenge: living a life of love, especially when love goes wrong.
With the image of a loving God, faith becomes less a matter of staying inside the lines and more a trusting in the buoyancy of God. It’s like learning to walk on water.
We’re moving from faith as a system of belief, where the main task is to learn correct doctrine to faith as loyalty, fidelity to God, allegiance to God. The most important part of faith is not what we believe but where we place our loyalty and trust.
Try something with me. Take out a pen/pencil. (There’s probably one in your pew rack.) Using a blank space on your bulletin, draw a five-pointed star without lifting your pen.
When you’re finished, at the center is a shape. It’s called a pentagon. Chances are very high that the sides are not equal, but it’s still a pentagon. Chances are very high that your pentagon is not exactly like anyone else’s pentagon. If faith were about belief, the main thing would be to get our shapes as close to alike as possible. But faith is about our lives being changed. Faith is about shining light into the darkness, about being light in our world. We’re moving from “Here I stand” to “Here we go!” We’re moving from statements of belief to lives of loyalty and action.
Salvation is no longer primarily about getting into heaven. It’s primarily about getting into a new way of life, a way to be transformed, new again. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature…” says 1 Corinthians. We’re growing more willing to leave the afterlife up to God. As Martin Luther said, heaven is God’s business—I don’t have to worry about that.
Faith is loyalty, fidelity to God, allegiance to God. It’s like being faithful in a human relationship: it means to be loyal to it, pay attention to it, spending time in it. Faith is a deep centering on God and allowing our living to emanate from that centering.
These are big changes, and I believe they are welcome changes. They mean that most of us need to re-learn our faith. We learned a faith that has stopped being convincing and worse, has stopped being workable. We’re over trying to believe things that don’t make sense, but we’re hungry to trust a God who changes our life. Faith still has the same ingredients—God as creator, Jesus as Lord and Savior, the power of God’s Spirit bringing us to life. But those ingredients are emerging with different proportions.
Rejoice! Like Peter stepping out of the boat to walk on water towards Jesus, let’s go all in. I want you to listen to a story about what going all in might be like. (Caught in a Pipe, from podcast, “The Leap.)
God is challenging you to do more than check it out, wait and see, take a sip and first find out what everybody else thinks. God is challenging you to go all in.
Let’s honor Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday. But let’s not take our faith back to the 1600’s. Let’s trust in God to take us into a new day.
1. The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, by Phyllis Tickle, 2012.