10 Things You Never Hear in Church
1. Hey! It’s my turn to sit in the front pew!
2. I was so enthralled, I never noticed your sermon was 35 minutes long.
3. Personally I find volunteering at church much more enjoyable than watching basketball.
4. I’ve decided to give our church the $500 a month I used to send to TV evangelists.
5. I volunteer to be the permanent teacher for the Junior High Sunday School class.
6. Forget the denominational minimum salary. Let’s pay our pastor so he can live like we do.
7. I love it when we sing hymns I’ve never heard before!
8. Since we’re all here, let’s start the service early.
9. Pastor, we’d like to send you to this Bible seminar in the Hawaii.
10. Nothing inspires me and strengthens my commitment like our annual stewardship campaign!
Have you ever noticed how women seem to get stuck with the really dirty jobs? Not at my house, of course, because I am an enlightened male. Right Linda? I said, “Right Linda?” I enjoy cooking – almost as much as I enjoy eating – so I am always willing to help out around the kitchen – at least while food is being prepared. But when it comes time to clean up, I’m usually looking for an excuse to be somewhere else (aside: I’ve got to work on my sermon dear). And I did try to help out when my daughter was young. I even came up with a definition of fatherhood. You know that you are a real father when you can change a dirty diaper with one hand while eating a peanut butter sandwich with the other.
Back in the first century Jewish women always got the dirty jobs and men had a wonderful excuse for it. It had to do with religious duty. The Jewish people of that day had a concept of ceremonial cleanliness. If a person touched blood or touched something dead, it made them ritually unclean. They were then unable to perform their religious obligations until they were purified. The same rules applied to women, but men were the spiritual leaders so women had far fewer obligations -- it was much less serious. As a result, if it involved something bleeding or something dead, it was a woman who needed to take care of it.
That’s one of the reasons that the women play such an important role in our story today. Jesus had been buried in haste so the body had not been properly cared for. Of course, preparing a dead body was women’s work. I bet that was especially true when the body was three days old.
But there is another reason why these women were headed to the tomb alone. The men were afraid for their lives and were in hiding.
Think what a horrible three days this had been. There was a Passover meal on Thursday night – much like the one we experienced here last Thursday. (aside – If you missed our Seder dinner this week, you missed a real experience – though you probably got to see the U of L game.) Passover is always a bitter sweet experience, especially when you are eating the horseradish and cheroset, but this last Passover was especially bitter because it was the disciples’ last meal with Jesus. After supper, they went to a garden so that Jesus could pray. The disciples nodded off while Jesus was praying so intently that he actually began to sweat blood. Then, in the worst of all treacheries, Judas, one of the twelve, betrayed Jesus with a kiss and turned him over to the Temple guards. There was a brief scuffle and everything might have ended there, but Jesus put a stop to the fighting and went peacefully. Over the course of that night and the next morning, Jesus was tried before the Jewish court, Pilate (the Roman governor), Herod (Rome’s puppet king of Judea), and Pilate a second time. He was convicted of sedition against the Romans, flogged and crucified, dying at 3:00 pm that Friday. He was placed in the tomb before 6:00 pm in accordance with Jewish law.
Imagine what it was like to be one of those disciples. What would you do? Your teacher was convicted and executed for leading a rebellion against Rome. How long do you think it will be before the Roman soldiers come looking for you?
The disciples gathered together in a secret spot somewhere. Imagine being in hiding. Imagine the concern every time there were footsteps outside – or worse – a knock on the door. How would you pick a place to go? How would you let others know where you were? Remember that Judas the betrayer had been part of the inner circle. How many places would be known to the other disciples but unknown to Judas? True, Judas committed suicide, probably on Friday, but how would you know that? Even if somebody reported that to you, would you believe it or think it a trap?
My guess is that disciples must have spent these three days in near terror, made worse only by their grief and their disappointment. How would they know what was going on? They couldn’t exactly punch the remote or check their email. They also could not venture out in safety. Well the men couldn’t, but the women could.
Jesus, and those of his disciples who followed his example, had a history of treating women like people rather than like possessions. Female followers of Jesus were among the inner circle. Even strangers, like the woman at the well, were treated with uncommon concern and respect.
There weren’t many advantages to being a woman in the first century, but one of the few was that women’s opinions didn’t matter to anyone so they had some freedom of thought. A woman would never be arrested for sedition unless she actually engaged in some criminal act like serving as an assassin. So while the men hid, the women were their eyes and ears. I suspect that the women in our passage today were on a mission more important than putting spices on a body. I suspect that they were sent to learn all that they could and to bring back a report.
I think that God has a tremendous sense of humor. In one of the great ironies of history, the people who were given the privilege of being the first evangelists, the first to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ, were women who were thought by society to be incapable of participating in religious teaching. In Jewish courts of the day, women were not allowed to testify because they were considered too unreliable. Now, they were bearing witness to God’s great act of salvation. Even now, there are good Christian people who will not permit a woman to speak from the pulpit, but God chose these women to be his heralds in our world.
There is another great irony here. The role played by these women was seen as an embarrassment by many in the early church. For example, when Paul was writing to the Corinthians about the resurrection, he specifically mentions Peter and the disciples, but he never mentions the women. I don’t think that he was motivated by chauvinism. Instead, I think he left the women out of his story because including them would have caused some of his readers to turn aside. Ironically, today the fact that these women played such a prominent role in the Easter story is often cited as proof that the story could not have been fabricated. What first century man would ever make up a tale that focused so much on the faith of the women while reminding all who heard that the men were hidden away, cowering in fear?
Technically speaking, there is no such thing as the church at the time of our story. The church isn’t actually born until seven weeks later, on Pentecost. So these disciples huddled in some room somewhere aren’t really the church, but maybe it is fair to say that they are the church in utero. And in utero they were, hiding in the womb, seeking safety and survival above all else. This was a church that was living in conflict with their culture and the culture was in charge. The church was paralyzed and ineffective until these first evangelists came, not to proclaim the good news to the world, but to proclaim the good news to the church. A church that is frozen by fear accomplishes almost nothing.
Have you read this week’s Newsweek? Actually, you don’t have to get the magazine because the article I want to call your attention to is posted on MSNBC as well. The cover story for this week’s Newsweek is called “From Jesus to Christ.” Don’t misunderstand me. This piece is not some affirmation of faith made by a committed follower of Christ. This is a piece written from the perspective of a skeptical investigative reporter. It is that skeptical perspective that makes the article so interesting.
John Meacham, who wrote the article, describes Jesus as “A king who died a criminal’s death.” How did a small Jewish sect following an executed rabbi, become the largest religion on earth, with over 2 billion people who identify themselves as believers. More specifically, how did the church grow from a handful of believers to an estimated 34 million believers by 350 AD? That was 56.5 % of the population of the Roman Empire. Meacham quotes Rodney Stark, a sociologist, who points to these factors. The decision by the church that gentiles did not have to become Jews before accepting Jesus created the first religion in the world that was free of ethnicity. Before Christianity, people could worship the gods of Rome or the gods of Greece, or the gods of Egypt or the God of the Jews or whatever. At every turn, religion was inextricably bound to national or ethnic identity. Christianity was the first faith to proclaim that “there is neither Jew nor Greek … for you are all one in Christ.” This was evidenced by Christian charity for all. The Roman Emperor Julian is reported to have hated Christians because “they support not only their poor, but ours as well.” How insidious!
The message of Christianity in those first four centuries went far beyond a brake from national and ethnic limitations. I only quoted a small part of that Galatians passage a moment ago. Here is what Paul actually wrote. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Christianity proclaimed that we are all created in God’s image and are all equal in God’s sight. That is a tough thing to put into practice, but it is a tremendously powerful idea. Christianity spread among the slaves because it proclaimed brotherhood and freedom. Christianity spread among women because it stood against the practice of infanticide, a practice most mothers found detestable.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if the church of the first century had hired a PR firm and asked them to shape their message. Would that group have ever suggesting downplaying loyalty to your nation? Would they have suggested appealing to women and to slaves? Of course not. The church’s message was not shaped by opinion polls and focus groups. The church confronted their culture preaching the good news that God gave them to proclaim. As a result, this movement known as Christianity thrived in spite of the prevailing culture. Eventually, it shaped the culture. The church transformed the world.
The world of the church changed in 312 AD. The Roman Emperor Constantine was a worshiper of the sun god, Apollo. As Constantine was about to engage in a battle with Maxentius, he was filled with fear. The night before the battle, he had a vision that convinced him that the Christian God would protect him in this battle so Constantine ordered his soldiers to paint the Chi Rho, the first two letters of the name Christ, on their shields. While Constantine himself never actually converted to Christianity, all the emperors who followed him claimed Christianity as their religion and Christianity became the official faith of the empire. The faith that had spread because it refused identification with any nation or race was now the faith of the most powerful nation the world has ever known.
Becoming a national faith ensured that the church as an institution would thrive, but it weakened Christianity as a movement. There were now political implications to every move that the church made. It was impossible for the church to fulfill its prophetic mission by standing apart to confront injustice and to proclaim a need for personal commitment. In the confrontation between the church and the culture, the church appeared victorious, but the vitality of the faith was diminished by the success.
I am going to jump forward, past the crusades, past the protestant reformation, and past the role of the church in the early United States. It is not that these matters are unimportant; it is just that I am sure that some of you have plans for lunch. The history of the church for the next millennium and a half is the history of an institution.
Let’s fast forward to the first half of the twentieth century in America - to the period that we talked about during our moment in time today. While there was no official state religion in the United States, Christianity, especially protestant Christianity was firmly engrained in the culture. Anybody who was anybody was expected to be in church. Everybody was expected to be familiar with the scripture and biblical allusions were everywhere in literature. Churches could build their buildings, hang up a sign, and the appropriate people would find their way into the congregation. We had pastors with M. Div. degrees (I have one of those).which were the church’s equivalent of the MBA that was everywhere in corporate life. The women and men who filled our pulpits (mostly men) were trained to lead the organization, teach the scriptures, and provide pastoral care. Neither the method or the message ever seemed to change. There are stories about the sons of ministers who went to seminary and were not only taught by the same professors, but took the same classes using the same books. They weren’t, for the most part, trained to lead a movement. They weren’t prepared to address their culture. Congregations wanted the safe and predictable, not the risky and radical.
This sort of church thrived as long as church was an assumed part of society, but increasingly that ceased to be the case. Scientific advances seemed to weaken the assumptions about the world on which the church rested. The nation became more culturally diverse. Advances in communication and travel caused the world to shrink and people to think multi-culturally. The development of television kept people in their homes and reduced the importance of the church as a social center. Individuality and self expression became more valued than family and tradition.
It was not that the church failed to see the shifts. The problem was that the there was consensus about how to respond.
A theologian named Rudolph Bultman offered a possibility. He said that scripture is the unchanging truth of God (Bultman used the Greek word kerygma) expressed in a culturally conditioned way (he called that muthos). What the church needed to do was find a way to express that truth in a way that could be understood by the culture. So far, I’m with him. The problem came with his next step. He said that modern people are people of science who will no longer accept the idea of the miraculous, so we needed to develop a Christian message devoid of miracles. Now I think that maybe I could leave out the healings and feeding of the five thousand and even the walking on water and still have Christianity, but Bultman didn’t stop there. Removing miracles means removing the virgin birth and removing the resurrection. In the end, Bultman seemed to say that to survive Christianity must surrender its heart.
The church in America is in serious trouble. For the last decade church attendance has been dropping by 1% per year, even as the population as a whole has been growing. The average church now has fewer than one hundred people in attendance on a typical Sunday. The average church does not see a single adult profession of faith in a typical year. Overwhelmingly, new church members are either the children of existing members or they transfer from other churches, increasingly from churches that are closing their doors. How should the church respond?
Bemoaning the changes is no solution. We can’t go backwards. The world will never be the way it used to be.
Some would have the church be a safe harbor. With so much change going on, they want the church to remain stable and unchanging. They seek to survive by clinging to the past, but our goal must never be simple survival. Jesus told us that we must loose our lives to find them.
Others, like our friend Bultman, would have us surrender to culture. They would have us simply reflect back what the culture already says. Sure, we might be relevant, but we would also be impotent. A church that fails to challenge has little to say and no reason to exist.
To me, too many of our churches remind me of those disciples hiding in that little room. Because we are afraid, we have isolated ourselves from the world pretending that our gathering together is our greatest purpose and survival is our highest goal. But the church does not exist for the sake of the church, the church exists to bring the good news to the world. We need to speak in ways that our culture can hear. We need to make our houses of worship into places where modern people feel welcome. They need to be safe places to hear a dangerous message. We need to take risks. We need to reach outside ourselves. We need to have conversations about faith with our friend and neighbors. We need to transform the church from an institution back into a movement.
Think again about that early church hiding in a little room on that first Easter morning. Just like them, we need to hear the message that “He is Risen!” We are in the service of a powerful God who is seeking to reconcile the world to himself. We need to move beyond thinking about how to relate to culture and accept our mission of shaping culture as we bring the kingdom of God into this place.
Maybe you have come here today, not having embraced the message of Easter yourself. The timeless message of our faith is that no matter who you are or what you have done, you are loved by God. Because of our own failings we are separated from God and alienated from His love. We have lost our purpose and our way. Since we are incapable of bridging the divide that we created, God has reached out to us to bridge that gap. Jesus came as our teacher and example, but more than that, he came to endure death on a cross. Our failings and weaknesses were nailed to the cross with him. On that first Easter Sunday, the tomb was empty and Christ rose from the dead. Through his resurrection, we also find new life. Christ invites us now to accept the Love of God and to become his people in this place. That is the story of our faith. It never changes.
