Our Story. (Monmouth Presbytery)

Mark 1:14-15

September 26, 2017

Preached at the Presbytery of Monmouth

I.

In 35 days we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which of course is our tradition.  When I was younger I remember thinking that this would be a great milestone in the continued progress of Reformed Christianity.  Now, however, I wonder if it isn’t really more the closing of a chapter of church history.

The late observer of the religious scene, Phyllis Tickle, has famously speculated about the phenomenon of the “giant rummage sale” that comes over Western culture — the church in particular — every 500 years.  This pattern of a major paradigm shift every 5 centuries or so arguably goes back to the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the pseudepigraphal prophecy that the Messiah would arrive 10 jubilees, that is, 500 years, thereafter.  Some scholars think this is what Jesus means when he announces that “the time is fulfilled.”

If Tickle is right, we are traversing one of these tectonic civilizational transitions right now.  She is not the only one suggesting this.  The term “paradigm shift” has been in our vocabulary at least since I was in seminary in the late 1970’s.  Navigating the treacherous waters of cataclysmic change has been the main theme of the church for my entire career.  Almost every day in this line of work I have had to deal with memory, nostalgia, and the stages of grief over a church and world that is simply not what we were used to, expect, or want.  Denial, anger, bargaining, blame… few churches have graduated to acceptance.  I have served in several churches where it seemed appropriate to open each session meeting with a litany beginning with the words, “It’s not 1956 anymore… and that is a good thing!”

Part of our frustration and bewilderment is that the usual way we were used to telling our story just doesn’t seem to work.  For 500 years the insights and narratives of the Reformation guided us.  “Salvation by grace alone.”  “Sola Scriptura.”  “The priesthood of all believers.”  These and other classic Reformation principles have been placed under constant scrutiny and are being robustly challenged.  The assertive and confident positivism about the Reformation faith, and our Calvinist/Presbyterian version of it, that was held through the first half of the 20th century, is all but gone now.  

For at least 40 years people have been leaving us in huge numbers.  And we have been floundering around trying to come up with a narrative that works for people today.  All we get for our efforts is a sharp rise in those who want nothing to do with us.  Especially among young people, more and more check off “none” when polled about their religious affiliation.  We’re even losing people who used to be active; we call them the “dones.”

We can continue to stew about this if we like.  But the fact is that the Reformation happened in response to historical conditions in Europe that just don’t apply anymore.  I wonder if our tradition isn’t so wedded to the issues of that time that, as the Modern Age fades into history, so will we.

II.

And yet, another one of those Reformation mottos is “semper reformanda.”  The church is “always being reformed” by the Word of God.  The Word, Jesus Christ, is always present in the church and always drawing us out of our self-interested, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing dead-ends, and calling us into our true nature and mission.

In all this I am drawn again to Jesus’ words when he emerges from his vision quest in the wilderness after his profound mystical experience at his baptism.  The Lord says, “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near.  Repent, and believe the good news.”  In Mark’s gospel, these are the first words Jesus utters, and they summarize his whole mission.  Jesus begins his ministry with a statement about what he calls the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God, God’s truth, ultimate Reality… has “come near,” the word for this in Greek means it is right here, available, accessible, present, ready, and waiting.  It is, as Augustine said, closer to us than we are to ourselves.  Later Jesus will say in Luke that it is “within” or “among” us.  He will repeatedly begin parables with the words, “The Kingdom of God is like….”  Explaining this Kingdom and its nearness is the most important thing Jesus is about.  

Jesus’ own story has to do with the proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God.  If to be a disciple means to follow, to do what the Lord does, then he also intends for it to be our story as his disciples.  If we’re not communicating the living, available presence of the Kingdom of God, we’re not doing our job as disciples.  Our calling is to reflect and express the nearness of this kingdom, this realm or reign or or even, as some say today, “kindom” of God.  While profoundly spiritual, this has to be real, embodied, relational, political, and economic.  In our personal life, and in our communal gathering together, we have to be about witnessing to and enacting among us, by the power of the Spirit, this Kingdom of God, with, within, and among us.

If one Christian era is closing, it also means that another is opening.  Jesus says that no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom.  We find ourselves at an amazing kairos moment that only happens to a generation every 500 years!  

Every day we offer the same prayer to God: “Thy Kingdom come!”  Which means we have to tell our story, the story of the nearness and presence of God’s goodness, peace, justice, and love, here and now, with us, within us, among us.  This is urgent!  It is a matter of life and death!  If people don’t get this, if we do not live together according to the Kingdom Jesus announces and teaches, characterized by simplicity, humility, gratitude, forgiveness, generosity, peace, justice, and love, we’re finished.

III.

Because the world is strangled by a powerful and contrary, and very bad, story.  We have for millennia been force-fed a self-serving, ego-centric, self-righteous narrative that rationalizes and justifies the power of cynical, destructive elites over us.  When I was at Standing Rock last November, I saw that story in the well-armed forces of violence, profit, and extraction arrayed against a group of Native Americans gathered in prayer.  We saw it in Ferguson.  We get that story right in our faces when in some parts of our country they erected in public spaces statues honoring terrorists, traitors, and slavers.  Some have an issue with that now.  Even this past weekend, we see how controversial it is not to stand for that story, but to kneel for another.

In a world of propaganda, fake news, marketing spiels, shameless spin, and big lies, nothing is more imperative than that people hear our story, the old, old story, as one hymn tells it, of Jesus and his love.  Which is the truth.  It is the story of the nearness of God’s Kingdom, a place of joy and delight, characterized by redistribution, reparations, and restitution, the very reversals that Jesus proclaims throughout his career, beginning even before he is born in his mother’s magnificent hymn in Luke 1.

If the Reformation meant anything, it meant getting back to the basics of the faith.  And it doesn’t get more basic than these words of the Lord as he commences his work.  

• What would it mean to take Jesus seriously here?  
• What would it mean to focus again on Jesus’ story that God and God’s Kingdom are very near, that God comes into the world, and into our hearts, to save, liberate, redeem, heal, and bless?  
• What would it mean if everything we did as disciples and gospel communities was engineered to reflect and express the possibility of finding in ourselves and in the whole creation the emancipating love of the One who creates, redeems, and sustains everything?  
• What would it mean to live out the truth that in God’s Kingdom all are one, there are no divisions or inequalities, no Jews or Greeks, no slave or free, not even male and female, as Paul says?  
• What would it mean to remember that the Lord’s Table represents God’s stupendous abundance and generosity?  
• What would it mean to deliberately lift up and empower the lowly, marginalized, disenfranchised, hungry, excluded, and losers, beginning in our own gospel communities?  
• What would it mean for Christ’s church to follow his example of self-emptying, and join those with nothing?
• What would it mean to have our churches become intentional communities of discipleship and contemplation? 

The Kingdom of God is near: it is within us, it is among us, and it extends into all the world.  The whole creation is this Kingdom, this real world of shalom and goodness.  To see and inhabit this, all we have to do — and I mean all we have to do — is repent, which is to change how we think and see, and step into this reality in open and whole-hearted trust in this truth.  Gospel communities are communities of repentance, where we help each other turn from the false and lethal story of exploitation, death, and extinction, to the true story of life in God.

That’s our job for the next 500 years: starting… now!

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