What to Do When Christendom Dies
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Trinity Church, Hartford
June 28, 2015
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 8B
Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“What To Do When Christendom Dies”
We are today, as individuals, as a Church, and as a nation in the midst of overlapping identity crises.
Recently the news has not been good for those who find their identity through membership in institutional Christianity if that identity is dependent on Christianity being a thriving and robust power in society. A new Pew Poll is showing a precipitous drop in the number of persons in both Europe and North America who officially identify themselves as Christians. The number of persons who tick “none” when asked for their religious affiliation is steadily growing. More and more people are saying that they are not religious even though they still want to think of themselves as ‘spiritual’. All of these trends suggest that Christianity’s identity as an institutional religion in America is in crisis or at least has become problematic for many. As Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has said, commenting on the Pew Poll, “the advance, particularly among the young, of an appealing, powerful culture that has its own standards and values (expressive individualism, moral relativism, lifestyle liberalism) . . . no longer presupposes religious belief and finds traditionalism to be repressive.”
We also face another identity crisis. On this Sunday we are a week away from July 4, a date on which we celebrate the importance of our national identity. That identity has often been associated with the belief among many Americans that we are a Christian nation. But this belief is simply not true since claiming institutional affiliation with one Christian church or another is not the same as believing and adhering to the core principles and values of Christianity. Calling oneself a Christian for the purposes of a census is not the same as being a Christian in heart and mind and practice. Unfortunately our national history reveals the enormous gaps that have and continue to exist between professed Christian values and those we actually live by.
In our national mythologies most of our founding fathers were thought of as Christian and sometimes attended Christian churches but many of them were not Christian in any traditional sense. People such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and George Washington were, for the most part, Deists who believed there was a deity who was a remote, distant being who wound up the world as if it were a clock and then left it to run its own course without interference by God. Deists rejected the literal truth of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, original sin, predestination, the corruptions of institutional religion, the sacred powers of the clergy, and the abstruse notions associated with the doctrine of the Trinity. Whatever the founders of this nation gave us, it was not a Christian nation in any traditional sense.
And if these two crises of identity were not enough, there is the continuing crisis within the Christian churches over what exactly does it mean to believe and be a Christian? As a parish and as a denomination we still remain deeply at odds with some other parishes and dioceses within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion as a whole over how inclusive we must be of diverse forms of sexuality, or how to interpret the Bible, or what historical doctrines are still to be accepted uncritically, or whose authority for acceptable belief and practice we are to acknowledge. Many of us still struggle over the question of whether, if we still have questions about the intelligibility of the doctrine of the Trinity, we have forfeited our identity as Christians.
What then should we do in the face of these multiple identity crises? What do we do when the cultural powerhouse once known as Christendom begins to wither and die around us? What do we do when our church no longer controls the cultural agenda of an increasingly secular society?
As strange as it may sound, perhaps the response we ought to make is to actually give thanks that our privileges as a once powerful religious tradition have eroded. Christianity in its institutional form has not done well when it is the privileged power in society. When it was rescued from persecution by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century, it quickly succumbed to the blandishments of royal favor and advancement. Priests and bishops became ‘princes of the church’ and were entrusted with the kind of worldly power that Jesus had warned against. After having lived for a time as people who were suspicious of wealth and shared equally what little they had, the Christian church became the largest landowner in all of Europe. People genuflected before clergy rather than before God. And the inevitable result was that the clergy who were supposed to represent Jesus, the impoverished, itinerant carpenter, who died a shameful death on a cross, wound up being dressed in the finest raiment and living in splendor and ostentation and building grand cathedrals on the backs of the labor of those who remained in poverty.
Later the cultural privileges given to Christianity in Europe took new forms in America when it became complicit with the defense of slavery, or the denial of rights to women, the segregation of African Americans, and the repression of sexual minorities. Lusting after the privileges of power corrupted much of Christianity and prepared the way for its slow but perceptible decline in America.
Given the sorry history of much of institutional Christianity’s seduction by worldly power, we should both acknowledge and give gratitude for the decline of the Church’s institutional privileges. As long as Christianity was the dominant cultural force in America it tended to become an apologist for that culture with its vaunted individualism, self-seeking, and worship of material success, values which are hardly in tune with the core Christian values of community, justice, and compassion for others. From the beginning Christianity should have been, as it was for its first few centuries, an irritant to the dominant culture, a critic of that culture, a disturbing force, a worm in the apple of complacency, continually pointing to the hollowness of trying to live by material values alone or by refusing to treat the needs of the poor as more important than the wants of the wealthy. In this morning’s reading Paul reminds us of the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. If the Church is to follow this poor Jesus, it, too, must become poor so that others might become rich in all the basic spiritual goods in addition to those material goods essential to a flourishing and healthy life. Christianity by its very nature should be a destabilizing force in a culture dedicated primarily to greed and the acquisition of wealth. Because its roots lie in a transcendent, not a cultural source, it should always be at the edges of society, challenging it from the margins, not safely ensconced at its very heart where its radical potential for spiritual renewal and transformation is virtually suffocated. Instead it should be offering something from the realm of the transcendent, not just echoing the values of self-absorbed secular values that cannot glimpse reality beyond its present cultural enclosure.
But, we might ask, if Christianity is relegated to a second or even third class place in American society won’t it lose any influence it might have in keeping its moral voice alive? A voice that can identify and name the rot at the heart of a self-absorbed culture, a rot that eventually leads to a lack of concern for social justice? That voice is vital to the continuing significance of the Christian faith. But it lacks seriousness when it is uttered from within the corridors and bastions of privilege and worldly power. It can only be taken seriously when it emerges from the communities of the dispossessed, the outcasts, and the marginalized. How can the princes of the Church stand with the poor and disenfranchised and still wear their garments of splendor? How can they speak with and for the poor unless they are one of the poor?
So the increasing marginalization of the Church in America might be just what is needed if the Church is to find its true voice and authenticity in speaking for the poor and the other disenfranchised people in our society. And don’t underestimate the power, the real spiritual power, of the voice of those who speak with authenticity from positions of non-worldly power. In time, that spiritual power can transform both lives and whole societies. Look at the transformational power unleased by the radical message of one member of the most marginalized people in the first century: Jesus of Nazareth, a marginal Jew. And in our own time, the words and lives of previously marginalized people such as African Americans, and more recently, gays, lesbians, and trans-gendered persons have moved themselves in an amazingly short period of time, from a place of powerlessness to a place of real moral power as their voices and actions are making a real difference to the shaping of a new America and a new world. When the Church continues to remain stuck in outdated views about sexuality, such as the Roman Catholic Church did before the recent referendum in Ireland on gay marriage, it will be overcome by the forces of compassion and love and justice. The response to the recent terrorist massacre of black Church people in South Carolina indicates a faint but real attempt to come to grips with the history, causes and symbols of continuing racism in America. But all of these recent and dramatic changes have arisen out of an initial position of worldly powerlessness and dispossession. With the grace of God we have reason to believe that the brave voices and actions of those once outside the mainstream will eventually become the voices and actions of the majority in America. And that could have happened only because those fighting for true justice were not the initially privileged or powerful. Their outsider status reminded them that God comes first to the poor and powerless. Poverty of worldly power is a reminder that true power comes from God, not from all the material wealth and power we accumulate in this world by worldly ways and means. Out of poverty comes true richness and for that we can be grateful as our false wealth is slowly peeled away leaving us resting solely in the hands of God.