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When Your Children Ask You Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 9, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 6:20-25 Luke 24: 13-27
What we know of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is this: from the day of their birth until this day, the disparate facts of their lives had been given meaning and coherence and hope because their parents and grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their neighbors and teachers had told them the story of the God who had brought their ancestors out with a mighty hand and redeemed them from the house of slavery…had delivered them into the land God had promised and given them descendants as numerous as the sands upon the seashore. Because this story had become their story, the two disciples had been given faith that the God who had delivered, saved, redeemed and promised previous generations was their God too. But now a fact had entered the story which could not be “accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point,” says Lesslie Newbigin. The resurrection was and is a fact of a different kind that gathered a different sort of community around the story that had been told to Israel’s children as they traipsed across the wilderness and as they wept by the rivers of Babylon in exile. Now the same story could only be told from its scandalous new beginning that was the foolishness of the cross. But, says Newbigin, the “problem of making sense of the gospel is that it calls for a change of mind which is as radical as is the action of God becoming man and dying on a cross. With every new fact, or alleged fact, it is always possible…to take note of it without allowing it to change our minds in any radical way.” I think, by and large, we are a community of parents and grandparents, of aunts and uncles, of neighbors and teachers who have taken note of the claim that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself--have given lip service to the confession that he was crucified, dead and buried and on the third day rose from the dead--without allowing the living Lord to change our minds or our lives in any radical way. But this Hallmark Hall of Fame day leads me to say more: to say that just as most of us in this sanctuary have been raised to extract the values—the cultural dream-wishes—from the story that begins with the astonishing claim about a dead man who lives, so too our children will go from this community to be good citizens who may do unto others as they would have others do unto them. But they also will enter the world as adults who will believe more in death’s dominion and power over their days than trusting their living Lord. And sadly I guarantee that they will find themselves someday on a road leading to Emmaus after suffering a crushing disappointment or defeat with only their own wills and gumption from which to draw strength for the living of their days, being strangers to the God who raised Jesus from the dead. I am beginning to realize at the beginning of my 14th year with you that telling the story is not enough: this community must become the story, if only for a brief hour on Sunday morning, in a world that has lost the narrative thread of human existence. We will arrive at what that means, I hope, before this hour of worship comes to an end. First a word about the world we do inhabit, a world similar to the world that threatened the exiles scattered throughout Babylon in the 6th century B.C. and a world that could easily have overtaken the disciples on the afternoon of the resurrection. To get to this world, we need to remember the world into which many of today’s grandparents were born. The academic word for that world is “modernity.” Dating from the Enlightenment, this was a world dominated by reason, a world that embraced the “values and principles” of Judeo-Christian existence while eschewing the God from whence those values once were said to have been decreed. Yet it was still a world in which we came to know and understand ourselves through realistic stories. By that I mean stories of sequential events that made a kind of dramatic sense. “In a dramatically good story,” said Aristotle, “each decisive event is unpredictable until it happens, but immediately upon taking place is seen to be exactly what ‘had’ to happen.” Moreover, according to theologian and friend Robert Jenson, the sequence of events in the story could really have happened in a world out there. If we step even closer to the bygone world of modernity, we would say that we grew up believing “we ‘ought’ to be able to make dramatic sense of our lives” because, consciously or unconsciously, we believed the world had a coherent story that coincided with a secularized version of the biblical narrative: history was going somewhere! “The way in which the modern West… talked about human life,” writes Jenson, “supposed that an omniscient historian could write a universal history…because the universe, [including] our lives, is in fact a story written by a sort of omnipotent novelist…supposed that the world ‘out there’ is such that stories can be told that are true to it…supposed that…the world somehow ‘has’ its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of the stories we tell about ourselves in it.” Chalk it up to an immersion in Picasso last week, but I am beginning to understand how the end of that world came to be and why the church now finds herself in a postmodern mission field not unlike the exiles in Babylon or the Christians in a crumbling Greco-Roman empire. Like these, we may remember “what has vanished yet do not know what if anything could come next.” Consider the works of fiction from the last century which either have a reality between their covers that refers to nothing in the world or that describes events that are real enough but have no dramatic coherence. Jenson names Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum as an example of the first, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea as the second and James Joyce’s Ulysses which is both at once. If you happened to see the Picasso exhibit, you likely recognized the same phenomena in paint: “Nothing hangs together in the way we expect; we cannot make out what the story has been, or will be….” Other than the carnage of World War I which put an end to belief in human progress and so in a story that made sequential sense, what happened to bring this about? To put the matter bluntly, the excising of God from the biblical narrative imperceptibly led to the transmission of disembodied values, creating for our children who are now the parents of my generation’s grandchildren, a moral universe with a shelf life of one, at most two generations. The Jews have known this, by the way, since the exile if not before. Why? In Jenson’s words, “Neither you nor I nor all of us together can so shape the world that it can make narrative sense; if God does not invent the world’s story, then it has none, then the world has no narrative that is its own….Moreover,” Jenson continues, “if there is not the biblical God, then realistic narrative is not a plausible means for our human self-understanding. Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives.” Supposedly this is the community that believes otherwise and, if we believe otherwise, I think it high time we started to live as though we did! For if this community is not “a real, substantial, living world to which the gospel can be true, faith is quite simply impossible.” [Jenson] To wit, in a world increasingly limited to 140 characters in a twitter message, we must become again “the narratable world within which life can be lived with dramatic coherence.” The church constitutes this world, first and foremost, says Jenson, in her liturgy. “In the post-modern world,” he advises, “if a congregation …wants to be ‘relevant,’ here is the first step: it must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic intensity, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life.” It must pay close attention to the substance of worship and to its language. Again, says Jenson, whom I quote because his words give me the courage of my convictions, “If liturgy is not to be sickly pretense, if it is to be real presence of reality’s God, everything must enact the specific story Scripture actually tells about that particular God.” That is to say, “the story of the sermon and of the hymns and of the processions and of the sacramental acts and of the readings is to be God’s story, the story of the Bible….What is said and enacted in the church must be with the greatest exactitude and faithfulness and exclusivity the story of creation and redemption by the God of Israel and the Father of the risen Christ. As we used to say, ‘Period.’” But because we usher our children out of this drama at the earliest possible point, telling ourselves that it is not about them and so they will not be interested, we must do more. For thirteen years I have said over the heads of your children at this font, “the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.” When our children ask after that promise, can they expect to hear the story in all of its drama and pathos and passion from us? Or can they simply expect to be driven to soccer on time because church school ends accordingly or expect to be picked up from the Sunday morning birthday party because we would not want to compromise their social life? In sum, can they expect to be taught by our actions that this story matters only in so far as it can be fit into the gaps permitted by a story-less, hopeless, helpless post-modern world? This is, of course, a free world (enslaved to nothing but itself). It is, as I can only imagine, an impossible world in which to raise a child. To that world the church says, “Here is another world to inhabit: a world of meaning and purpose, of mercy and forgiveness, of justice and love.” The church says, “There is a choice to be made by adults who, in God’s providence, were created to be parents instead of pals because there are life and death consequences that follow from those choices.” If, as was said to me in a Christian education committee meeting a few weeks ago, families are here not because they want their children to have faith but want to raise them with values, then I can assure you that you are wasting a perfectly good hour and a half of a Sunday morning. It will not happen, so you might as well suit them up early for soccer or be the first to drop your child off at the birthday party while you get your grocery shopping done. Whether we know it or not, my friends, we are on the road to Emmaus with our children in tow, on the road to the places we go when we no longer know where we are going. We may at best have the bare outline of the story that once told generations who they were and to whom they belonged, but its meaning and coherence have long ago escaped us. Still I am here in this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday, to speak the promise that there will come alongside you, in this hour of worship, if you and your children are in the habit of showing up, a stranger who who—beginning with Moses and all the prophets—will interpret the things about himself in all the scriptures. Invite him into your home, into your life, that your mind may be changed, your life be given coherence and your children be given a God on whom to call when they ask you in time to come, “What is the meaning of these things?” In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. |