Sermon Text - April 20, 2008
"Deepening Your Spiritual Roots"
Margaret Bendroth, Director, National UCC Congregational Library
Psalm 46, Hebrews 11:32-12:3
Rev. David Kratz:
Our scripture readings this morning are two actually, the first one is from the book of Psalms, the 46th Psalm. Listen for God's Word to you.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord; see what desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
The second scripture is from the Hall of Fame of the book of Hebrews. It's the end of it from verse 32 of the 11th chapter to the third verse of the 12th chapter. Listen for God's Word to you.
And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.
Margaret Bendroth:
Well thank you so much, all of you, for inviting me here. It was a little bit opportunistic having this trip to Seattle. It’s not very frequent that someone who is in charge of a historic Library in Boston gets to talk to anybody outside of New England. So it's a real pleasure to be here and to be in such a lovely setting. I’ve had a chance to read the history of your church, and I know a little bit about you, but I’m certainly glad for the chance to know more and to get to know a few people outside our own little quaint New England circle.
I see dead people. From my office window they're hard to miss. Hundreds of our dear departed lie in scattered uneven roads in a granary burial ground, which is just two floors below my desk in the Congregational Library. Every day droves of tourists and costumed tour guides passed among them in a constant flow, pausing for group photographs in front of ancient granite headstones. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, James Otis, even a woman who is better known as Mother Goose. Sometimes when all the library staff have gone home, the lights are off and I'm working alone at my desk, I feel a little bit vulnerable. I force myself not to turn to quickly and if I'm walking in the stacks I try to avoid idle glance down empty hallways.
It would make perfect sense for a stray Congregational ghost to indulge a little earthly nostalgia with a visit to 14 Beacon St, but if so, I'd rather not witnessed it. Of course like that famously frightened little boy in the movie the Sixth Sense were all surrounded by dead people. They may not be materializing through our bedroom walls at night, but they are around us and among us all the time. But don't worry, I'm not suggesting anything as literal as clanking chains, or floating bedsheets. Seeing dead people requires far more imagination than that that.
Thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Winona Ryder, many people have a fairly negative image of our Congregational forebears. Sometimes I hear the tour busses going down Beacon Street informing people about which burnings, persecution of Quakers, the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, whose statue I walk past everyday on my way to work (and I’ll give her a little apology under my breath sometimes). I want to run after them and tell them that's not the whole story! That the Congregational tradition is much deeper and richer and more interesting than most people realize. I wanted to defend that enormous cloud of witnesses, whose voices have been silenced by the years of stretch between their time and ours. I think this is a profoundly spiritual task.
I chose a passage from Hebrews to remind us that in God's eyes all of us, past and present, are as single community. Some of us have voices, and some of us don't. Those of us who are still alive and kicking have a responsibility to those who have gone before. I do the work I do because I'm profoundly convinced that the past is relevant and interesting. It tells us who we’ve been, and therefore who we are. It gives us a sense of our future, our present and our future trajectory. And more deeply I think it pulls us out of the narrow world we inhabit as Americans who live in the tyranny of the here and now.
So today I thought I'd open up a page or two on our family album and see what there is to learn. I know that in many ways that complicated New England Puritan past, that I run into in Boston all the time, has in many ways has relatively little to do with your story here. From reading your Centennial history I gleaned a much gentler set of circumstances than I often hear in New England. A church growing up in the forest glade, beautiful surroundings and hard-working and loyal people, building a community – time and circumstances definitely shape what it means to be a Congregationalist.
In fact, many scholars tell us that religion itself works differently out here west of the Rocky Mountains. And people form of allegiance in different ways when the pull of tradition is not so immediate. I mean I literally stumble over it on my way to work up the sidewalk in Boston. But even so, just as we don't choose our own families, we don't use our past. We can deal with it in creative ways, but we can't change it. Better, I think to learn it, stand it, and to enlist it a spiritual resource.
So, what about those Puritans? Despite all legends and stereotypes, the New England Puritans were English farmers who loved their homemade beer and a good laugh as much as anybody. In fact, it our old church records we have in the Library are any indication, they spent far more time than you'd expect straying outside the bounds of so-called Puritan morality – all disciplinary cases, people who were giving them problems, some are very interesting! They cared an awful lot about religion, they organized their lives around their beliefs, not just their personal devotional lives, but their lives as families, their political system, their social life together.
If anything it's that deep and explicit religiosity that modern people find difficult to deal with. Not the supposed issues about the definition of a Puritan, it used to be that you're just someone who doesn't like it when someone has else is too much fun in public. It was their conviction that within the core idea of the Congregational tradition that no person, no institutions, no hierarchy should ever stand between an individual and the God of Heaven. They wanted their religion direct and unfiltered – poured from the divine dispensary, no ice, straight up. That’s not a metaphor they would have used.
When the first migrants from England settled in Massachusetts Bay they had a conundrum. Back in the old country they were dissenters. Members of the established Anglican Church, but in hearty disagreement with the hierarchy, ceremony and ritual that they felt was an anathema to pure simple Christianity. And New England of course, they had nothing to dissent from – they had to establish their own churches on their own terms. And I’ll talk a little bit more about this in the time after the service, but just a little bit.
What would that look like if they started on their own terms, will it lead, would there be membership requirements, and more fundamentally, what would constitute (and they used this word) a TRUE Church? What would differentiate it from the any odd group of malcontents and fanatics who thought they had a corner of the truth, and if you know the history of United States in New England, there were plenty of them around too.
The first Congregational churches were carefully and intentionally organized around the idea of covenant. The basic concept was not new, of course, they took it from the Old Testament. But it’s significance in the 17th century was radical. The very first Congregational churches formed when a small group of ordinary people, the preferred number was seven, to fit the biblical model in Matthew 18 about bringing grievances and so forth. They met together, they fasted and prayed together. And they usually a whole day at least to do this and then if the spirit moved and they felt it was going to work, they drew up an agreement using at that very language of walking together before God and before each other, and everybody signed it.
Many of these we have Library and there are all of these ancient signatures, men and women both. Church happened in other words, when people agree to live together under covenant. Not when a bishop consecrated space or a minister began offering sermons, but when ordinary folks decided to commit to each other. After that is all settled, they call the pastor, they got him ordained and installed, they had something called an ecclesiastical council, a delegation from the churches in their vicinity, who offer them support. And as the local church grew, each new church member had to affirm his or her intention to abide by the covenant – to provide a testimony of their genuine spiritual experience of conversion. They called these relations and again we have many copies of these old letters from people, they started putting them in writing after a while, preserved in the library – it’s very moving, they’re very intentional about this.
In other words, this was not a denomination for the idle church shopper. George Puncher is one of these guys, who I think about a lot, wrote a church manual in 1840 and he described Congregationalism as the most spiritual system of church government. In other words, it is adapted to what he called “spiritual persons.” He said those who have been taught and are now led by the Spirit. And so in other words, he's trying to say that, this is not a denomination for the weak of heart – there free rides. To be a Congregationalist, you have to have your spiritual act together because other people are depending on you.
Now, I'm not suggesting that any of us should be latter-day Puritans. They were able to keep tabs on each other, and sign these covenants, and to know if someone was behaving morally or if their conversion was real and true because they lived every minute pretty much in each other's presence. They went to church with people who farm next to them, who helped at their harvest, who nursed him back to health when they were sick, and of course they knew what was going on at the neighbors house. In fact in the area of Massachusetts where I live you see small towns incorporated. You drive just a few miles and there is a new town with an incorporation date, maybe some of you travel about there. Partly because whenever a church got too large, or the members too scattered, you had to start a new one so that people could be together and know what was going on.
So in a very simple way being a real air about legacy means taking our church covenant seriously. It means even for the famously independent folk of the Pacific Northwest, of course I’ve read about you, it means being willing to be known and to know the other folks in the pews. All of his statistics and surveys I looked at and I confess I’m a true nerd for books and statistics, they all told me an interesting story. And maybe you can tell me whether this is true or not, that denominational identity is a little bit and more negotiable here than in other parts of the country, certainly in our New England probably, that people do in fact seem to start a fresh new slate when they move out here.
Then in many ways, history seems to be a lighter burden. But the Congregational tradition runs counter to all of that. It directs us to inquire after others, to pray for them, to watch out for their spiritual as well as their physical health. It sounds uncomfortable perhaps, but I think that in our days of globalized economies and mega-churches the size of airplane hangars, that our message is that small is still beautiful. We all need some kind of honest human contact in order to live our faith. Local congregations are the heart and soul of religion in the United States today. And they are the heart of the old Congregational way.
Being a Congregationalist today, and in being one in the 17th century or even in the 19th of course vastly different things. People often call me at the libraries and they say were having our 300 for our 200th anniversary and we'd like to have a worship service they way they did back then. And my first answer to them is really don't. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that after the service, but you can guess that we don’t go for hoop skirts and bowler hats anymore than we go for two hour sermons these days, of course I’m just getting started so I don’t know . . . but we’re still the conservator of their central idea – that God speaks in a special way when people are gathered together under covenant.
The genius of our tradition is really the genius of American society, that there is wisdom among ordinary common folk when they are mutually accountable to each other and to the teachings of the Bible. Being a Congregationalist means more than just the idea that though no one else can tell your church what to do, it means taking on an obligation to become part of the Communion of Saints, a community that the Apostle’s Creed tells us, includes both the living and the dead.
I like to tell people out in mainline Protestant churches that they are something. They have the specific history, a tradition, an identity – they’re not just religion in general. It means that like it or not we are part of a continuing conversation that started long before we were born and will continue on we hope and pray, long after we are on our way. Rowan Williams, who is the Archbishop of Canterbury, has a wonderful little book called “Why Study History?” He argues that Christians who ignore the past have made themself spiritually poor. They’ve shut themselves off from a rich and deep conversation about the Christian faith, between those who still have voices and those who no longer speak.
When we begin to understand that we are part of a Communion of Saints, we open ourselves to an important piece of the world that God has created. As Rowan Williams said, “we recognize ourselves and our concerns in a distant mirror, and we are reminded that we are not our own authors, that we have not just covered what it is to be human, let alone what it is to be Christian. The more that we are able to engage that strange and distant country of the past, the more we can deal with what is strange and threatening and incomprehensible in our own time.”
I find it fascinating that the writer of Hebrews ends that long list of Biblical heroes, that we just heard about, with the declaration that only together with us, will they be made perfect. In some deep way our lives are still linked together. We are all part of what theologians call salvation history. God is working through all of us, past and present and yet to come, to redeem and restore the world.
And so I applaud you, I encourage you as you mark your centennial year, bringing to light the names and deeds of people that the rest of the world may have long forgotten. Sometimes even when I'm in the library I just like to say the names of people out loud because I think it's important that those names are just repeated by someone and they're not lost forever. Looking across all those years is important. It's a way of honoring the most mysterious, the most invisible, the most important group still awaiting inclusion in that extravagant welcome that is the United Church of Christ, and it's generous hospitality.
May God bless you as you continue to explore all that this partnership across time and space and imagination may mean to you in the future. Amen.