Sunday, June 23, 2013

This Week's Sermon: "When Children Ask"

Exodus 12:21-28

21 Then Moses called together all of Israel’s elders and said to them, “Go pick out one of the flock for your families, and slaughter the Passover lamb. 22 Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood that is in the bowl, and touch the beam above the door and the two doorposts with the blood in the bowl. None of you should go out the door of your house until morning. 23 When the Lord comes by to strike down the Egyptians and sees the blood on the beam above the door and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door. He won’t let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you down. 24 You should observe this ritual as a regulation for all time for you and your children. 25 When you enter the land that the Lord has promised to give you, be sure that you observe this ritual. 26 And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ritual mean to you?’ 27 you will say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt. When he struck down the Egyptians, he spared our houses.’” The people then bowed down and worshipped. 28 The Israelites went and did exactly what the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron to do. (CEB)


“Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church,” Week Four

The refrains coming out of this tiny, minority community sounded noble, even courageous, when placed in a vacuum: “We feel that our culture is being threatened and we want to protect it and we want to nurture it…and suddenly, we don’t feel welcome anymore.”

Except that the refrains were coming from an all-white community of Afrikaners—of Dutch Reformed settlers—in South Africa.  This is the nation that the Dutch Afrikaners were responsible for decades for constructing and maintaining the apartheid system of segregation that systematically disenfranchised an entire nation’s indigenous peoples from their own government, and I have to assume the plaintive cries of preserving one’s culture were told without a trace of irony, despite the shameful past of this community’s forefathers repressing and threatening the culture of native South Africans for the better part of a century.

And it is a tradition that continued on to today in worst of forms in this small, cloistered community outside Pretoria.  The rules are clear and unyielding: no Jews. No blacks.  No Catholics.  Even people of mixed-race backgrounds need not apply.

And having served on a mission to South Africa seven years ago, I saw bits and pieces of this lingering mentality, but not like this.  I read about and hear about these stories now, and all I can think of is, “What is it that you are fighting so hard to preserve, really?  Is it tradition?  Is it culture?  Or is it a way you have grown accustomed to that should have gone extinct long ago?”  And in so many words, that describes the thought process of the church, over, and over and over.

We tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they don’t.  But the church is what I imagine a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it in her memoir Bossypants, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to be whatever she is going to be (and, ironically or no, that very line reflects the wonder and splendor of the divine name itself from Exodus 3: I Am Who I Am).

And that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know?  Lots of people would say they know what we should look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up in—but at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is.  And after being here as your pastor for nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering to a missing generation of believers.

This term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author.  And we will be basing this new six-week sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and what it can truly do.  We kicked off the series by examining one of the initial tenets of the book: “fostering intergenerational relationships,” followed by “encouraging economic understanding.”  This past week, we had the theme of “cultivating unambiguous inclusion,” and this week, we arrive at the theme (and chapter) of “discovering affirming traditions.”  Carol writes in this chapter:

As new generations gather in a church, vital congregations learn to adapt their customs while keeping their traditions…Church members want new people to attend the church because they hope to lighten the load in fundraising events, keep dwindling programs alive, and support the diminishing budget.  Sometimes it happens that way, but more often, if the members become intentional about ministering to younger generations, they will move away from assimilating the new people into existing customs and begin a process of forming new communities.  The body will become aware of the gifts and needs of that particular group and respond to them by teaching the traditions of belief and practice in a more fluid, not rigid, way…

In the midst of this spiritual renewal, it’s difficult to point out the steps of the process.  Instead, forming spiritual communities is like painting: an artist sketches regularly, studies objects and figures, learns from the great works of history, and shows up at the sketchbook or canvas every day.  Much of what she produces may be inconsequential, but then suddenly something begins to move within her.  She picks up the brush, after some time she feels stirred internally and externally, and creates a work of great beauty.

In the midst of centuries of enslavement in Egypt, followed by the brutality of the ten plagues required to release the Israelites—and to prove the superiority of YHWH to the Egyptian deities—we would be forgiven for thinking of our religion in the same manner as the artist, for much of what was produced probably fell short of great beauty, of profound expectation, or of, quite simply, the warm-and-fuzzy love we might associate with God these days.  The circumstances of the Israelites in Egypt were not—and are not—a masterpiece in any way.

But out of those circumstances of enslavement and bondage comes one of the most immortal religious traditions ever to grace the globe, a tradition that lives on not only in Jewish tradition, but in Christian tradition as well under the aegis of the Passion story: the sacrificial lamb.

Part of the Passover tradition—and the holiday gets its name from the most literal sense of the term, for the Lord “passed over” the houses of the Israelites during the tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn—included a meal, prepared quickly to be consumed quickly: unleavened bread (possessing yeast that week was punishable by exile!), bitter herbs, and the meat of a lamb.

But whereas today, we might discard any part of the animal we did not want, God instructs the Israelites to use every part of the animal, including its blood: they are to use it to mark the lintel and posts of their doors, to protect them from the destroying capability of God’s own power.

And so a tradition was born.  The Passover became a part of Jewish religion, and then a part of Christian religion, for the Passion story takes place during the celebration of the Passover.

But notice how, in Exodus, when the first Passover is being prepared, it is not enough for Moses to simply instruct his people on how to do it—he also tells them why.  Because this is a ritual that will be adhered to for millennia, at some point our children, and our children’s children, will ask, “Why on earth do we do this?” And we can say, “Because God Himself calls us to do so.”

Imagine saying that in church today!  When someone asks us, “Why do you do this,” or “Why do you do that,” how often do we reply with, “Because God tells us it is right that we should do so?”

Or, more to the point, how often do we really reply with, “God instructs us to,” rather than, “Well, this is the way we have always done it?”

There are a many great things in the church that were nearly sacrificed upon the altar of “Well, this is how we have always done it,” like having Bibles translated into our native languages, rather than remaining entirely in Latin, or not renting out pews to families of the highest bidders.  God called us to neither make Scripture or the sanctuary inaccessible, yet for centuries, the church was in the business of doing both.  Why?  Because that’s how they had always done it.

In her book, Carol calls this sort of thing the difference between custom and tradition.  Traditions are the things that must be kept because they what make a church community distinct: traditions are what make us who we are today.  Just as the Passover led the Israelites—and, subsequently, the Jewish faith—to who they were and are today, so too do traditions like Easter, like Pentecost, like Epiphany all lead us to be the Christians whom we are today.

As such, we could no sooner stop doing those things than we could stop being Christians.

But then there are customs that we keep, and often for the best of reasons—it isn’t always that the reason is to nakedly raise money for the church at the expense of shaming the poor, as was the case when churches would do things like auction off pews.  But those customs—like clinging to the apartheid of old in South Africa—can at times segregate churches from the outside world: the world they are called to make better, the world God created for them, the world from which they receive new brothers and sisters who come in the doors and say, “Teach me about Jesus.”  It’s the sort of stuff that we won’t have a good answer for when our children ask why we do it.

What do we as a congregation do that maybe segregates us from the people we are called to serve and to reach on behalf of Jesus?  What do we do, that when our children or our children’s children come to church and ask us why we do it, will we perhaps not have a good answer for?

I don’t really know the answers to those questions, because I have been in the church my entire life. I am steeped in its ways.  This is where we lifelong churchgoers can be taught, as it were, by our newly-christened and baptized brethren: how do they see us, versus how we see ourselves?

And if it sounds like I am asking you to obey the dictates of others at the expense of what we choose to do, know that it is in fact quite the opposite.  The Passover—the entire story of Exodus, in fact—is a tale ultimately of liberation from the chains of slavery.  And I truly believe that one of the ways that we can remain true to that story today is by seeing what we have chained ourselves to—both inside and outside of church—and working anew towards cutting ourselves free.  For that is, I think, what God wants, in end: a people made free, liberated from themselves and from one another, because only when such liberation takes place can the authentic worship of the maker of heaven and earth truly begin.  

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
June 23, 2013

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