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A Believing Community
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 16, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 16:4-12 Philippians 2:1-11
On one hand, the world into which the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill was chartered, 150 years ago, would be unrecognizable to this congregation today. That I could type into my computer “1853” and come up with that year’s headlines almost says it all! Roger Owen, founder of Chestnut Hill Academy and first minister of this church, came to the Hill in 1850, the year in which Levi Strauss invented Jeans and Republicans organized a political party. In 1851, Owen began holding services in his schoolhouse as Herman Melville published Moby Dick and as the first underwater telegraph cable was being laid between Calais, France and Dover, England. In 1852, the first British public toilet for women opened in London, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and James Smith was named chairman of the Building Committee for a Presbyterian Church on the Hill. The next year, Franklin Pierce became the 14th President of the United States and one month before Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay, Japan, the First Presbyterian Church’s sanctuary was dedicated and Roger Owen was installed as the congregation’s first minister: June 16, 1853. What the headlines of 1853 do not reveal is a profound unrest among Presbyterians, an unrest that may be more recognizable than we care to admit on such a day of high celebration. Fifteen years earlier, the Presbyterian Church had divided at the 1838 General Assembly, held in Philadelphia, between what was called the Old School and the New School. At issue were matters of theology, governance, reform, and slavery. Notes James Smylie, “Despite New School professions of faithfulness to the Reformed faith, Old School adherents, especially in Pennsylvania, suspected a lack of New School orthodoxy.” One would have to search the session minutes to find any hint of this congregation’s take on the controversy, for the available histories mention nothing theological. Also recognizable to us should be the fact that--during this period in American history--Presbyterians were losing out numerically to Methodists and Baptists because of the commitment of Presbyterians to an educated clergy. The emotional appeal of frontier revival preaching was enjoying great popularity, whereas the Presbyterian insistence upon the marriage of Christian piety and the life of the mind appealed to a more select group of believers. Given that the schoolhouse and the church house were held together in the person of Roger Owen, we may assume that our founders were a thoughtful group! Taken as a whole, such was the theological, political and social world into which this community of believers was chartered. So what of the world opening before this congregation today and in the years stretching before us? What peculiar challenges do we face and what will be required of us if a congregation is to be assembled in celebration of this community’s 300th anniversary on some Sunday in the year of our Lord 2153? According to Lesslie Newbigin, this congregation at its beginning was on the front end of the whirlwind the church still is reaping today. The paradigmatic gusts of change had begun to pick up in the 16th century as the cohesion of European Christendom came to an end at the Reformation. Thus in the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe turned to another sort of public truth, a truth grounded in the methods of “the new science and eventually embodied in the idea of a secular state.” Acknowledging with gratitude the intellectual Enlightenment that followed, Newbigin nevertheless bemoans for each succeeding age the loss of a common hope through which humanity may view the future and the loss of what he calls a public truth: a truth capable of lending meaning and coherence to the events of the day and of addressing the deeper questions of human existence. Because one truth is now, in principle, as good as the next, societies such as ours “are at a loss to respond to religious fanaticism without denying their own principles.” Given this situation, Newbigin asks after the church’s witness to the gospel in a pluralistic society, contending that the gospel, if it is true, is public truth: “the truth by which society can be given coherence and direction.” Given the confusion of people’s hearts and minds and souls today, I think the question before any thoughtful believing community, a question that was not before the founders of this church in quite the same way, is how we might become, more and more, “a place where men and women and children might be given, in the gospel, the framework of understanding, the ‘lenses’ through which they are able to understand and cope with a world” awash in truths that are powerless to save. How is it possible that people should come to believe that the truth of human existence is to be found in him who emptied himself and took the form of a slave? How are human lives to be given coherence and direction in the death of One who was nailed to a cross? How is the world to bow its knee and with one voice confess the truth of God’s love when all we have to tell is this ancient story? The only possible means of understanding such a truth, of believing such a gospel, of trusting such a story, says Newbigin, is the existence of a congregation of men and women who believe the gospel and live it. That is to say: the existence of a people who dwell in the story of God’s redeeming purposes and out of that story, come to understand the plot and purpose of the days before them. Were we to be this community, true to our calling, what would we look like as we believed and lived the gospel for such a time as this? If the character of a believing community is given by the character of the One in whom we believe, then in the first place, we would be a community bowed down before the living God: “a community of praise.” Praise “articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are.” How foreign such praise is in the eyes of a society no longer given to yielding or submitting or abandoning the self to anyone or anything, least of all to God? How foreign such praise sounds even to us as, Sunday after Sunday, we barely manage to mouth the psalm between the Old Testament and the New. Psalms were songs of praise sung by ancient Israel to “redescribe, rearticulate, recharacterize God. The stuff of God, the speech out of which God is dramatically offered,” says Walter Brueggemann, “is no longer the speech of static adjectives; now it is the drastic verbs of ‘rescue, deliver, heal, release, redeem, snatch, feed, guide, give….In such singing Israel no longer lingers over the slow idols who celebrate the status quo….The praise of Israel banishes such false gods and makes possible grateful trust in the living God.” In such praise, I tell you there is a public truth with the power to offer a society coherence and direction for such a time as this. In the second place, we would be a community of truth. Now the point is not that we possess the truth. Rather there is a sense in which, like Pilate who first asked, we stand before him whose standing before us prompts the question. And what we know in his presence is that we do not know so much as we are known: known in all our brokenness and need, with our pants down, our knees trembling, our hearts breaking. The truth of being known, of living in relation to him through whom the Mystery at the center of the universe is love revealed: this truth is the truth for which we were made. We glimpse this truth in our life together. But only in Christ is the incredible paradox encountered: that the one who alone really knows us…truly loves us. Only in the presence of such mercy and such grace can we become a believing community, a community sent into the world as living witnesses to the truth above every truth, confessing the name above every name, that gives meaning to these disparate pieces of our human existence. Third, we will be “a community that does not live for itself but lives for the other.” That is to say, believing and living the gospel is a self-forgetting sort of existence. This is so for the individual Christian, but it is equally so for the believing community. The consequences of not believing and living thus are a kind of death in life: individually, we cease to be truly human, and collectively, the church literally ceases to be the church. So in May of 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write from the prison in Tegel, “Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world.” He later goes on so say that what Christians and so Christ’s church are called to be and do in the world is not to be religious institutions, but “to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world…. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in secular life,” he says. “Not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sin and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ.” To be a community that exists in the world for the world is to be a community that believes and lives the truth that gives to people’s lives meaning and coherence. Finally, we will be “a community of hope,” a community that trusts the future into God’s hand and not our own. Therefore we inhabit this community as those who make it clear we inhabit a tent, a provisional home, a temporary dwelling. We are a pilgrim band, a community on the way, a gathering of strangers and sojourners seeking a better country. For God has given us to one another for a holy restlessness until we rest, with the whole human running race, in him who has traveled into this far country for our poor sakes. In a world obsessed with control and permanence and power, we believe and live as a people who seek a home that will not be given until all arrive. It is a truth which, when believed and lived, offers to the world the coherence and the direction available only in the witness of the community whose home is God. How, then, is it possible, in times such as these, that people should come to believe that the truth of human existence is to be found in him who emptied himself and took the form of a slave? How are human lives to be given coherence and direction in the death of One who was nailed to a cross? How is the world to bow its knee and with one voice confess the truth of God’s love when all we have to tell is this ancient story? The only possible means of understanding such a truth, of believing such a gospel, of trusting such a story, is the existence of a congregation of men and women who believe the gospel and live it. May we, by God’s grace, in the 150 years stretching before us, be that community in this place! Thanks be to God! |