Leaving the Village
EPIPHANY 3C
Nehemiah: 8:2-10 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 Luke: 4:14-21
It was in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was running for president that I
first heard the word “charisma,” even though my friend mispronounced it
“chair-is-ma.” After that, it seemed that everywhere I turned, I
was seeing or hearing some form of that word. I wondered why I
hadn’t run across “charisma” before? It had surely been in
the dictionary all along.
Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences of suddenly becoming aware of
something that had been right under your nose all the time and then
finding it cropping up again and again, sometimes in unexpected ways.
So it has been for me since I first heard Bishop Larry Maze refer to
current times as the “post-Christian era.” The term startled me
and made me uncomfortable. What did it mean?
Yes, I had noticed that quite a few young adults were turning away from
organized religion and that soccer fields and Starbucks were Sunday
morning destinations for many. Still, I clung to the vision of
the church in which I grew up, the church in which I am even now
perhaps a little too comfortable.
I gave grudging intellectual assent to societal shifts accounting
for the term “post-Christian,” but I hadn’t yet internalized the
reality. Then I came face to face with today’s readings and a
series of “aha” experiences like those I mentioned earlier.
First was a Christmas Eve conversation with my first-grade
granddaughter and third-grade grandson. This year they
transferred from the Episcopal day school they had been attending to a
public school, coincidentally the same one I attended so many years
ago. I was telling them how we kids used to gather every December
morning on the stairs in the front hall to sing Christmas carols and
about the pageant we put on based on Luke’s Nativity story. They
looked at me aghast. “You sang Christmas carols in school?”
Then the eight-year-old said, “Oh, Nana, we’re not allowed to talk
about Christmas. Not like when we went to St. Paul’s. It’s
really, really sad. We can talk about Kwanza, but not about
Jesus.”
Shortly after Christmas, we received the newsletter from Emmanuel
Episcopal Church in Houston, where a friend of ours is the
rector. She told of delivering food and gifts to the needy
families the congregation had adopted as a Christmas outreach and
finding that “… neither family had any sign of Christmas in their home.”
In early January while I was in Little Rock for a meeting with
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori, I browsed in the Christ
Church bookstore. The first item I picked up was this. Most
of you can’t see the cover, but it might as well be our very own
steeple and bell tower. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to
it. The title is Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith by Diana Butler Bass.
The author begins by describing what she calls, “the vanished
village.” A place many of us remember from our childhoods.
Where the family and neighborhood remained constant, where the lady
down the street was a as apt to look out for you as your own mother,
where everyone went to church on Sundays, and teachers, Scout masters,
plumbers, and doctors shared common values and beliefs.
Butler Bass describes that “vanished village” in these words: “The vast
majority of people shared a worldview based on order, reason, and
objective truth — all based on the idea of a benevolent Creator.
They acted out their roles on these assumptions, and they trained the
children in the village to be good citizens and good Christians in this
interconnected and self-contained world.” [p.19]
Like it or not, in a post-Christian era, that bygone village no longer
exists. In her January column in Episcopal Life, our new
Presiding Bishop confirms these sociological changes which challenge
the church. She says, “I come from a part of the country where
few people are active in religious communities, and the culture is
quite clearly non-Christian.” [p. 23] She goes on to say, “… we have to
figure out how to tell our story in language that a person who doesn’t
know anything about Christianity can begin to understand.” [p. 23]
Think back for a moment to this morning’s reading from Nehemiah.
The crowd Ezra addresses is composed primarily of those who have
recently returned from generations of exile in Babylon, where they have
been subject to the influence pagan symbols and practices. They
are hungry to learn about and embrace the tradition of their
forefathers and to help rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, which was the
focal point for devotion and a symbol of God’s presence.
Ezra leads in reading from the book of the law, “with
interpretation.” For most, this may be the first time they have
been able to hear and understand their ancestral tradition. They
stand for hours, listening and praising God. Their joy at finally
understanding the sacred words is overwhelming: “. . . all the
people wept when they heard the words of the law.” [v. 9]
They were hungry for their God, and they were fed.
The spiritual exiles in our own culture are those of whom Katharine
Jefferts-Schori speaks and who lie at the heart of what Edie asks of us
in our most recent newsletter: “ … to pray with open hearts and minds
that we may discover more ways of passing on the treasures of the
Christian tradition to the young.” And I might add, to the
unchurched.
Examining today’s Gospel, we see that following in the footsteps of our
Lord means bringing “good news to the poor, release to the captives,
recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed.” [v. 18]
Beyond the literal meaning of those words, Jesus surely intended also
to bring good news to the spiritually hungry, release to those enslaved
by materialism, new understandings to those blind to truth, and release
to those oppressed by moral absolutes.
When Jesus sits in that synagogue in Nazareth and proclaims to the
people that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,”
[v. 21] he is announcing himself as the Messiah. But as we know,
so many of his hearers cannot or will not accept such a radical claim,
such a complete departure from their expectations.
There are ways in which this Gospel passage is an apt metaphor for our
own cultural blindness. Jesus is in our midst right now, every
minute of every hour of every day, yet fewer and fewer people recognize
him, even as they yearn for that elusive something that will give their
life meaning.
So, in this crazy, post-Christian world of ours, how is God made manifest? Where does the spiritual exile find God?
In answer, we can turn to the reading from 1 Corinthians: “Now you are
the body of Christ and individually members of it.” [v. 21]
The Rev. Frederick Buechner puts it another way when he paraphrases
Teresa of Avila in a 1997 sermon preached at the Washington National
Cathedral:
On this planet the church is the only body that for the time being
Christ has, which is to say that you and I are the only bodies Christ
has. He has no hands to reach out to people except our hands, no
feet to go to them with except for our feet, no other eyes to see them
with, no other faces to show them his love.
When Bishop Maze was here on Dec. 10th, he challenged us to live into
our baptismal covenant and employ our varied and amazing gifts for the
spread of the kingdom. When we do, he said, we are “the organic,
lively Body of Christ.”
Such inspiring words of wisdom, coupled with recent experiences, have
led me to the conclusion that I must venture to leave the comfort and
safety of Butler Bass’s “vanishing village” and step into the world in
which I now live — a post-Christian world.
However, no words or anecdotes were as powerful a persuader for me as
my worship experience at St. James’ at the 5:00 p.m. Christmas Eve
service. Since many of you were out of town on that occasion,
permit me to offer some observations from my unique perspective as
chalice bearer.
As you know, Edie has been working on Mondays with a group of eight to
ten children and on Tuesdays with eighteen to twenty young children and
adults, mainly unchurched. Ever the skeptic, I doubted Edie’s
estimate that forty or fifty children and adults, including quite a
number who had never been inside a church building, would show up for
our service. Many, she told me, had no prior knowledge even of
Christmas carols.
But show up, they did. Grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and
uncles, parents holding babes in arms and beaming as their older
children participated in a moving Nativity pageant. The simple,
yet sacred service was designed to help the newcomers feel comfortable
in a church setting and to welcome them to the ancient tradition of the
Eucharist.
As I looked out over the congregation, I saw young people mixed with
AARP members, faithful churchgoers sitting beside tentative
first-timers, a congregation of beautiful and varying ages and
ethnicities. Almost universally, their faces reflected hunger and
awe: the hunger of deep spiritual longing and the awe of an encounter
with the mysterious presence of the living Christ.
I was captivated by the golden-haired, curly-headed cherub who stood in
front of me throughout most of the service studying the Plaster of
Paris crèche. At intervals, he would smile as he pointed
out the figures and solemnly instructed me about “baby Jesus, “the
mommy and daddy,” and the “stah of Befweehem.”
At communion when people came to the rail, I was deeply moved as Edie
knelt to bless each child and many of the adults, some whose eyes were
moist with tears of homecoming. Some took the cup tentatively,
others as if they dimly remembered the experience from a long ago place
and time. One toddler lurched from his father’s arms and dipped
the tips of his chubby fingers in the cup.
Like the Babylonian exiles, they were hungry for their God, and they were fed.
Jesus lives in our midst, if only we can recognize him and help others to know him.
In truth, we are the body of Christ in 2007 on the planet Earth.
The presiding bishop calls for new ways of telling our story.
Edie guides us gently into some new ways of being the church.
Listen to these words from the January 13 meditation in Forward Day by
Day: “When Jesus gives us new wine, how often do we insist on
storing it in old wineskins? When Jesus calls us to a new life of
service and fellowship, how often does religion get in the way?”
How is God made manifest to the exiled and hungry in this post-Christian era?
Through us, “the organic lively body of Christ,” if only we find the will to leave the “village.”
AMEN.
Laura Shoffner
January 21, 2007
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