Sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on February 5, 2023 drawing from Isaiah 58:2-12 and Matthew 5:13-16.
The first thing I was ever taught about preparing a sermon, before I ever went to seminary, before I ever got my biblical languages down, or anything like that, was that a sermon should always follow a pattern. Oh sure, you can change up things here or there, have fun with it and whatnot, but no matter what you do one should always stick to the following pattern when writing a sermon:
Start positive; end positive.
The theory, or so I was told, is that if you don't end your sermon on a positive note, people will walk away from the sermon feeling emotionally unsettled, even disturbed. If you don't end on a strong, supportive, positive note, then people will end feeling as though the word of God - or at least the pastor - has just attacked them, rather than uplifted them.
And of course the inverse is said to be true as well, you don't want to start your sermon off as anything but positive either, because if you hit people with a massive downer right at the beginning, they'll be too distracted to hear anything else you might have to say.
Now, as anyone who's ever heard me preach can attest to, I've never really been all that good about following that advice. Fun anecdotes, testimonies and other personal stories - long-winded rants about used-book sales - these things can be worthwhile, I think, if they're being used to set up a sort of narrative context - a story-within-a-story that you use to build a connection between a Biblical message and the congregation you're preaching to. But if the only reason you're telling fun stories is to spare the emotional labor of your listeners, if the only reason you're telling fun stories is to prevent people from feeling spiritually or emotionally challenged - then I think we cross the line from education to condescension, handing out candy when what we're supposed to be doing is feeding people.
We don't come into this space solely to be encouraged, to be told how awesome we are at all that God-stuff we're supposed to be doing in our lives. We don't come looking for a savior just to fill the role of yes-man to our own inflated egos, and we certainly don't come here to exchange a painful reality for a comforting lie. We should come to church ready to be challenged, ready to confront ourselves, ready to practice self-awareness and self-correction; ready to learn, and change, and grow into the people God always meant us to be, rather than the broken, imperfect creatures we already are.
Which is why I feel confident starting out today not with a fun anecdote, a silly story, or with one of my many, many, many absurd Star Trek easter eggs; but by jumping right in to the one most depressing, most challenging, most impossibly terrifying topics we have; something that has been hanging over the life and ministry not just of this church, but of every church, for decades now:
Church decline.
According to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study by Pew Research, self-identified Christians make up approximately 63% of the US population a number which, according to Gallup, actually increased to 69% by 2020. At the same time though, according to the same poll by Gallup, only 47% of the US adult population belongs to a church, or a synagogue, or a mosque.
That's actually a crazy figure, when you take a second to think about it. 69% of the US population considers itself Christian, but when we account for the fact that that 47% of religious attendees includes our Jewish and Muslim siblings as well, we wind up looking at something roughly in the neighborhood of 20% of the population being an active, enrolled member of a church.
20%.
And that number gets even more insane, when you realize that while we're seeing a record low for belief in God in general, that low point is 81% of the population!
EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT!!!
Let's walk through the numbers one more time, shall we, just to make sure we're not missing anything:
81% believe in God
69% self-identify as Christian
But maybe 20% actually attend Church.
What exactly is going on here?
When we think about church decline, we tend to think that it's a rejection of belief in God, that people are turning away from their faith, turning away from their belief in Christ in an increasingly stable, secular world. But what the statistics show us is entirely the opposite: the percentage of people who self-identify as Christian has actually gone up in the last 8 or 9 years.
God isn't the problem here.
We are.
"…day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God."
According to Pew again, 60% of the people who don't attend church, choose not to attend for reasons "other than nonbelief." That is to say, they still very much have faith, they believe in Christ Jesus…they just don't want to come to church.
Why?
71% of the US population - across religious lines - holds that gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable (per Gallup), and that non-straight marriages are, and should be, legally legitimate. At the same time, the loudest voices in our world which claim the name of Jesus don't just simply disagree with that broad majority, but are actively fighting against them. Instead of a supporting, loving church in the world we get evangelical and other cultic institutions fighting to actually criminalize all non-straight relationships; we get people like Rick Warren, among others, actually flying to Uganda to advocate for legislation making homosexuality a capital offense. We get hate speech, fiery sermons about sin and eternal damnation, and the unending trumpet blast of hatred, disgust, and dismissal from people claiming that they're just playing a piece that Jesus composed.
And sure, it's easy for us sitting here to dismiss this in our hearts and in our heads as right-wing nonsense, something that we don't do, that we don't support, and which has nothing to do with us. After all, these hate-filled, non-denominational, evangelical groups aren't connected to us at all, and we have no say in what they do or don't do.
But as these groups have gained in popularity and power over the years, as their prominence has risen and their visibility increased a thousandfold, where have we been, the church of the God of love? With each lobbying institution founded to oppress or destroy in Jesus' name, with every political action group, or congressional prayer breakfast' with every so-called "revival" broadcast on national television representing the Word of God as an instrument of restriction, hatred, and exclusion, where was the public response from our churches? Where was the televised statement from our denominations, the redoubled efforts to counter this hatred with policies and programs to foster inclusion, support, and care in our communities, our nation, and our world?
Issues pertaining to the LGBTQIA community are but one example, but Lord knows this lukewarm, passive reaction presented itself on a great many more issues as well. Homelessness, poverty, the treatment of prisoners in our community, immigration, the treatment of refugees; on all of these things we have long paid witness to the voice of the oppressor as they wielded the name of Christ Jesus as a cudgel to keep down all those who seek justice, peace, and relief. But where were we?
For a lot of us, that answer is simple; we were at church.
I've made no secret of the fact that I grew up in the church. I was raised in one of the conservative hubs of the RCA, and it was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Whenever there was something happening in the community or the world, some issue on which the church might, just might, through practical action, dedication, hard work and deliberate effort, have some kind of positive effect, our community - like many others - would leap into immediate action. We'd host a prayer breakfast, or a fast, or "very special worship service." There was a period in the 90's when every church in the RCA was all up in arms about poverty in Africa for some reason, and I'm pretty sure that our church did a 30-hour famine roughly every 36 hours for something like three weeks straight!
And in that period of time, we heard sermon after sermon on today's passages; lights were placed on stands, bushel baskets were brought in just to be kicked over demonstrably, and there was salt thrown around just everywhere - though, in retrospect, that might have had something to do with the Michigan winter, but I digress.
We talked a good game about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and all that. Our church was active, constantly engaged, talking, fasting, worshipping, and praying constantly.
Of course, it wouldn't be a story about me growing up in the church if I didn't wind up getting in trouble for being wildly impertinent at some point, and that point arrived when, after a time, I asked - perhaps more pointedly than a pre-teen should - what, if anything, we were accomplishing with all of this. We would pray, and fast, and worship, read the Bible and sing all the great spiritual songs, cover ourselves in sackcloth and ash, but it seemed as though everything we did was conveniently contained neatly within the walls of the church. Where, I asked, was the protesting, the fundraising, the acts of practical justice and direct, personal support for these suffering and oppressed groups? Where was the visiting of the prisoner, the feeding of the hungry? Why were we having youth group meetings where we discussed among ourselves how hard it is to be homeless in our community, but never once saw so much as a cot set up in the church gym during the coldest months of the year?
What…exactly…were we doing?
The response I got to that question was what most of you probably expect; a rolling of the eyes and a reminder that, as a member of a younger, less experienced generation, that my understanding of the ways of the Christian faith were still limited, and that as a Christian I was still very much in need of seasoning. I would be fed, with an attitude of general grumpiness, some vaguely theological non-answers that sounded pretty and quoted some scripture or another, but didn't actually say anything of merit. We prayed, and sung, and preached, and fasted because that was what churches were meant to do; to stay in our lane, to draw spiritually nearer to God in all things, to the exclusion of all else.
That, as I was told, is what it meant to let our light shine: to be unafraid to talk about God, and to practice spiritual discipline in our own, personal lives. Privately.
But while the passage from Matthew today, taken in isolation, may leave enough interpretative space for that kind of understanding to roll on through like an unattended semi-truck with the brakes out pointed directly at a pre-school, when taken in the context of Isaiah (and, indeed, all the other prophets who share this understanding of God’s role in our world), we start to see just how truly wrong this understanding of God is.
“if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
Take this understanding from Isaiah, this very practical, very directed understanding of what it means to give service to the Lord; what it means to truly let your light shine out in the darkness, bold and visible like a city on a hilltop. Sit with it for a moment, and look back over the last 20-30 years of church life - not just here, but in our denomination too, and as mainline, Protestant Christians in general. Look back, and ask yourself one simple question.
What has the church - what have we really been doing all this time?
Over the years I've watched as my generation has continued to ask where God is, and where God’s people are, in our lives. For many of us, we’ve grown up watching family and friends suffer through oppression and hatred in the world, we’ve seen people we care about pushed aside as hateful ideologies - things like racism, hatred towards interracial marriage, condemnation of the immigrant and the refugee, homophobia, and so many other things that we had been taught were relics of an archaic and bygone past - exploded into resurgence all while the people we most expected to be vocal and active in opposition in the name of Christ - the church - stood idly by in the name of fearful conflict avoidance,“agreeing to disagree” in the hopes that the pews would remain full and the coffers might never run dry.
These “younger people,” which the church even still asks after constantly, spent years turning their eyes towards the church of Jesus like the Rohirrim looking for Gandalf on the coming of the fifth day, waiting for that beauteous heavenly light to break forth like a shattering dam, only to be greeted not with welcome, support, or the thundering charge of God's people storming to the rescue, but only the deafening sound of silence.
In nearly every church and community around this country, there was no speaking out, no protesting, no fighting back. When LGBTQIA kids were cast out into the streets by their families, when non-white members of the community were beaten and murdered by the police, when the economy collapsed and poverty spiked, when the wealthy took everything that wasn’t nailed down…did we hear the sound of the church rising up in righteous anger, braiding their whips of cords and charging in with bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, ready to loose the bonds of injustice being tied around us all?
Or did we hear the tepid silence of a people so afraid to risk losing the few people who have gathered in the church that they missed the masses gathering outside, waiting for the coming of Christ Jesus into the world. Did we find ourselves so afraid of controversy, so afraid of conflict, angry letters, or the twisted menace of conservative online wrath, that we sought refuge for ourselves in the halls of those practices we knew to be “safe;” choosing vigils, ceremonies, worships, and fast after fast just so we could take action without ever courting any risk to ourselves?
Did we choose the fast that kept us out of harms way, safely hidden under a bushel so we wouldn’t have to bear the risk that comes with giving light to the whole house?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Doing all these things, and doing them with the boldness that both the prophets and Christ ask of us, is risky. It’s so much easier to hide ourselves from all our suffering kin, and wrap ourselves up in the comforting embrace of the church sanctuary, surrounded by all the prayers, rituals, practices, and fasts that give us comfort. And it’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re still shining out like the dawn, because all that praying, all that fasting, well…it has to do something, right? We’re putting in the effort, so how can we be doing anything but giving light to the whole house?
But that’s the thing; a light under a bucket still shines. In fact, when you put a candle under a bucket it has to expend more energy just to shine less brightly, because it uses up all the oxygen around it. A light under a bucket isn’t doing nothing - it’s doing nothing effective, because it’s turned in on itself.
But when you rip off the bucket, and put your light right up there on a lamp stand, you may shine so much the brighter, but you’ll also be way more visible. A city on a hill absolutely cannot be hid, but it does make a really obvious, tempting target for a trebuchet! Being the light of the world is risky business, it opens us up to all kinds of conflict, loss, and hurt. It puts us in harms way, leaves us vulnerable to attacks on our character, attacks on our reputation, and even attacks on our person. Being the light of the world means extending ourselves outward from our places of comfort and security, shifting our priorities away from those safe and easy things we can do, and towards those risky and difficult things that we should do, for the benefit of all those who don't have the privilege of choosing a less risky path for themselves.
Not too long ago, a very wise friend asked me to consider whether the most important missing piece of being a church in the modern age isn't entirely about service, social involvement, or care for our weak and wounded neighbor, but an embracing of the transcendence of Almighty God; the ways in which our Creator steps past all the boundaries of the real and the rational, to rest comfortably in the camps of irrational and illogical grace. This friend put forth the idea that perhaps the most successful churches today - at least those which don't embrace the dark and sickly attractiveness of hateful ideologies - might have gained that success not just by being of practical benefit to the people around them, but because they unashamedly open themselves and others up to the unimaginable magnificence of God not only in word and in deed, but through that ineffable presence of something far greater than we can comprehend.
And I am in no way going to argue with that, because I happen to agree with it! Coming into communion with a God whose love is so great and powerful that it cannot be contained within the paltry borders of the real and the known is, for most of us, the point at which our faith began, but as we draw to a close today I would ask you to consider this one final idea:
Our world is, right at this moment, going through a period where there are a greater number of people in and around our communities who are suffering, in poverty, isolated, and in pain. There are people surrounding us who have been perpetually told that they are failed, faulty, broken and unworthy; people told again and again by great hoards of people claiming the name of Jesus that being a minority makes you worthy of violence, that being a member of the LGBTQIA community makes you deserving of scorn, or that being poor makes you worthy of a life of desperation, hunger, and fear.
Imagine for just a moment, what it is like to live that kind of life, to find no rest or relief in a church that seems to deny your existence, to find only stress and anxiety in the songs of our ancestors and the prayers of generations past. Imagine looking to the church with the tearful and upturned eyes of an abuse victim just waiting for the next blow to fall, imagine having a heart full of desire for God, a need to know and share in the transcendent experience of connection that only the Creator can provide, but having come to find the doors of God’s church closed to you and yours.
Imagine, being part of that 81% of Americans who believe, or even part of that 69% who self-identify as Christian, yet not able to find a home among the maybe 20% who have found themselves welcomed in our midst.
Imagine how transcendent an experience it might be to be among those many, to find yourself and turning your eyes up to the hills in desperation, wondering from where any help might come, only to hear the sound of God’s people charging forward over the horizon, armed with food, and clothing, and housing, and education, and resources, and love, and support, and all the things that have been denied you for your entire life. How close might God feel to you if you saw the community of God's people surround you with love and support, and turn their eyes to the darkness with a smirk, saying.
"Not today. Not on my watch."
Friends, let us go forth to live and serve the transcendent, loving, merciful and unending Christ, bearing gladly all the risks of a light on a great stand, of a city on a hilltop, of a people who embrace the controversy of the Lord with gladness, determination, and a willingness to join in the fast that God chooses; to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free.
Amen
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