Second Breakfast

I had a chance to preach again at our church, Northside Presbyterian in Ann Arbor. Here’s the text of my sermon.

Year B – Pentecost 21 – 10/22/2006 – Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church, Ann Arbor MI

Scriptures: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35c; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:35-45

Small churches have an inferiority complex. Or at least this one does sometimes. Or am I projecting my own “congregational anxieties”? Just in case you were wondering, this is going to be one of those “topical sermons”.

You know what I am talking about. Take a drive east on M-14, and you will pass by NorthRidge Church, a 14,000 member evangelical congregation which recently completed an 85,000 square foot addition to its 145,000 square foot facility. On their web site their vision for themselves is as a “spiritual shopping mall”, offering a variety of ministries to “meet the spiritual needs of people in all of life’s varying circumstances in an exciting, relevant, and enjoyable way”. I don’t know what their annual church budget is, but I suspect it is somewhat larger than the $94,000 number that Nancy, the Lindas, Jenny, and I discussed on Wednesday evening! I’ve never been to NorthRidge, but I know people who have, and despite the obnoxious and perhaps incongruous nod to commercial culture in their vision statement, obviously many find experiences of healing, community, and spiritual nourishment there. The numbers obviously speak for themselves, right? Big building, growing ministries, one of top twenty fastest growing congregations in the country. They’re doing something right, and God is obviously rewarding them for it, right? I mean, it must be a sign of God’s favor.

I will admit it. Every time I drive by that church I think “what is their secret?”, and the next inevitable question is (perhaps whispered into my ear by my own private Wormwood) “what are we here at Northside doing wrong”? I mean, our church building needs help, our budget includes a perennial “Will of God” line item (that the Lord always somehow provides for us), and of course as we’re conducting our annual stewardship campaign, the number of “pledging units” is always on the minds of those whose ministry among and to us includes paying the pastor and keeping the lights on (God bless them). And of course my personal daemon Wormwood, as a final jab at this particular bruise of self-doubt, suggests that maybe the problem has something to do with our “liberal theology”.

Of course, these anxieties about numbers and size aren’t particular to our congregation, and indeed have become part of the arsenal of talking points in our so-called “culture wars”. Charlotte Allen, the Catholicism editor for Beliefnet (a popular online spirituality web site) wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in July[1] of this year blaming the decrease in the number of members of mainline denominations on the liberals. She writes “When your religion says ‘whatever’ on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize, and lets you do pretty much what you want, it’s a short step to deciding that one of the things you don’t want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.” She also suggests that a “causal link between the critical mass of female clergy and the [so-called in my opinion] mass-exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a conincidence?” Given our apparent laissez-faire liberal attitudes, I’m pleased to see so many of us bothered to get out of bed this morning.

The numbers don’t lie. Or do they?

Now I’m certainly not an expert on statistics, demographics, religion, the Old Testament or the New, or really anything else for that matter (and I suspect Ms. Allen lacks any similar scholarly credentials). Yet I think there are some deeper issues at work here, and more fundamental truths we must uncover.

First and foremost, we have Mark’s account of Jesus and the two troublesome sons of Zebedee, James and John. Now I love the way that the Gospel writers portray the disciples – sometimes they’re really dense, and just don’t get what Jesus is saying to them. In this exchange, they come to Jesus and say “Teacher, we want you do for us whatever we ask of you”. Seems reasonable enough – I mean, hey, this guy asked them to leave everything they knew and follow him wandering around Palestine, so it seems reasonable to ask that he do something for them, right?

But if we take off our lectionary-induced Biblical blinders a bit, we see that in the tenth chapter of Mark’s gospel Jesus is pointing the disciples directly to the via negativa, the downward path that his own life is destined to take, and the path that he pointing us all towards. Jesus talks about receiving the kingdom “as a little child”, an example to first-century ears that would have evoked a lack of power, ability, and status, and not the sentimental notions of innocence and goodness that we hear. He tells a rich man to sell everything he has. And, in Mark’s account at least, he foretells his own death and resurrection. In none of this does he include a popularity contest, or suggest starting a building campaign.

And so James and John to come to Jesus, like somewhat naughty little children themselves perhaps, and ask him to do “whatever they as of him”. I can only imagine the wry and skeptical look on Jesus’ face as he replies “So what do you want me to do for you”? And of course while their request to “sit at his side in his glory” is well-intentioned, Jesus immediately sees it for what it really represents – the desire to have power and status. For if James and John were to sit at his right hand and his left, where would the other ten sit? At his feet? In the other room? Not surprisingly, the ten weren’t pleased to hear this, and the Zebedee brothers’ grab for power immediately caused dissention and conflict in their little community. Jesus cuts through this game immediately however, exposing it for what it really is, and tells them the real meaning of leadership, which is service.

You can’t really blame James and John – they, and their Jewish friends and neighbors, had been waiting for centuries for a Savior who would come with fire and a sword to lead and save their nation. Instead, they got an itinerant carpenter and rabbi who healed the sick and cast out demons, broke bread with sinners, traitors, and outcasts, and whose idea of leadership isn’t the ascent into popularity, prominence and power that is the world’s idea of leadership, but rather a descent into solidarity, service, and voluntary suffering. You can’t blame them if it takes them a while to get it. Nor us, although we have had a couple of thousand more years to collectively think about it.

I wonder when Jesus said to them “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”, what did the disciples hear Jesus say? Did they think that Jesus was evoking the hundreds of years of prophetic and apocalyptic traditions that were part of Israel’s collective consciousness since the Exile? You know, the idea that “things are bad now, but just wait, and some day we’ll get ours eventually!” Jesus is inaugurating a radical reversal to be sure, but not a literal swapping of social status, but rather a whole reimagining of the society itself. That’s why he keeps telling them the Kingdom is at hand, because it is within their grasp and their power to manifest this new reality in their lives and their communities, and the whole world.

Jesus is calling them, and us to new lives of radical discipleship, of service not to just our particular communities, but to everyone. A tall order, to be sure. Gandhi is famously quoted as having said, in response to the question “What makes you different from the average Christian”, he replied “I think Jesus meant it”.

And in this season of stewardship, of rededicating ourselves to God’s work through this community, and through the chuch universal, I invite all of us to think about how we can better be of service to those around us, and to this community in particular. Whether it be through our pledging, or through our reimagining and breaking down the limits we think are placed on us because of our resources, time, and talents.

So back to our small church dilemma. Yes we are small. And yes, we’re liberals. (Some of us? Many of us?) And yes, in many respects it would seem that we’re “unpopular” and “unsuccessful” by the yardsticks of our mega-church sisters. They say “numbers don’t lie”. Or do they?

I say to you that our small size isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and certainly isn’t a sign of God’s favor or disfavor. For I find nothing in today’s scriptures to suggest that our God is a bean counter. And as I have experienced my own rediscovery of faith in the God of Jesus in this community, I have seen and experienced here no lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, or absence of desire to evangelize (although I think we find it more difficult than some), or a lack of commitment to attendance at worship or the countless ways that all here serve each other in our common life together. We are small, to be sure, but small churches create opportunities for intimacy and nurture, and for participation in so many aspects of the life of the church that would be invisible, impossible, or unnecessary with a large congregation or professional staff to handle the details. And I think that a slickly-packaged multimedia worship presentation, while engaging and “relevant” as the NorthRidge web site describes their philosophy, smacks a little too much of buying into the prevailing commercial culture that I think the Gospel calls us to resist.

And as one faithful member has said on more than one occasion, “This is the only place I could go”.

In terms of our anxieties about “the liberals and the mass exodus”, I think we can all use a little reality check. As three commentators in Christian Century recently observed, “for most of the 20th century conservative women have had more children than the mainline women did. It took most of the 20th century for conservative women to adopt family-planning practices than have become dominant in American society. Or to put the matter differently, the so-called decline of the mainline may ultimately be attributable to its earlier approval of the contraception.” So instead of looking to heaven for an explanation of the mainline membership decline, we might have a much more prosaic and demographic reason. If so, the fertility rates for conservative households have now become similar those of the liberals, and we will probably be having the reverse conversation thirty years from now.

We’re also an increasingly less-white and more Hispanic country, and those immigrants are often attending their local Catholic parish and not the mainline or the nondenominational church down the street. Perhaps this is a sign of nothing more than recent immigration patterns and changing demographics.

None of this is to say that we are excused from our call to share the Good News that Jesus has for us both in our manner of life and in our invitations to others to talk about our faith and our faith community and what it means to us. But we don’t need to feel guilty for being small, nor cast aspersions on those who are large. God is not an accountant, nor is God a republican, nor a democrat, nor a liberal or a conservative. God is.

In terms of what Northside means to me – where else would I get to work out my own faith in such a public yet secure way? This community gives me personally such trust and nurture, which is a tremendous gift and something for which I will always be grateful.

Gandhi said “I think Jesus meant it”, and I think so too.

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[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-allen9jul09,0,2668973.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions