Community Christian Church
Nov. 21, 2010 Christ the King
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. 2Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 3Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
5 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’
Several weeks ago our small band of Wednesday evening book study folks took up a book by Jesus Seminar scholar, John Shelby Spong. My copy of the book had turned slightly yellow around the edges because it has been on my shelf for nearly a decade. When I first bought it I couldn’t make myself read it because, it seemed to me that Spong was too cynical about the church, too dismissive of traditional faith, that he went too far in his prescription for how the church of the future must be different if it is to be relevant in the modern world.
Like most of you, I grew up in the church. In the days before computers, when TV was mostly vacuous sit coms and public schools were more indoctrination than education, church was the only place where I rubbed elbows with people who could show me a more broad view of the world. My parents were very blue collar folks who were not readers and not much concerned with the events of the world. But my Sunday School teacher was a lawyer who became a judge who often, just between the lines of a simple lesson, would dare to mention the serious matters of life. One of our elders was a prominent attorney who became the state’s governor when I was a young teenager. He sat in the pew in front of my family, State Police stood at the doors keeping guard against an assassination attempt….. the prospect of a gun battle in church helped me to endure otherwise pretty dull sermons and music.
When I was very young, my church went through a huge controversy when our pastor helped to organize a labor union in a local sewing factory because the owners, who were church members, were mistreating their employees. Our church fired Brother Duncan. My father called him a communist. Of course, my dad thought that the writers of the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, were communists. There were apparently a lot of communists in Glasgow, KY back in the 60’s.
No one in my family ever traveled any farther away than the mountains of Appalachia where our relatives lived but in church we were visited by missionaries who lived in Africa, India, New Zealand. The irrelevant, corrupt and ignorant church which Spong described in his book was not the church of my memory which was filled with people that I did look up to.
I was inspired by, shaped by, empowered by the church that I remembered. What I found impossible to accept when I first tried to read Spong’s book was that the church I remembered no longer existed.
Now, you might argue that the church I remembered never existed. It’s not like the church was a gallon of fresh milk that just soured over time. Ours has always been the church that stoned the prophets and not just in the ancient world. Spong mentions the case of Giordano Bruno, a 16th century astronomer who was the first to realize that the earth rotates around the Sun and not the other way around.
Bruno was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600 under orders of church officials. While the Catholic Church has found the conscience to admit wrong doing in the execution of other early scientists, they have yet to apologize for murdering Bruno.
By the 19th century the church had lost the authority to burn free thinkers at the stake but when David Friedrich Strauss, the great German New Testament Scholar, published a ground breaking critical look at the historical life of Jesus, a book which would be considered rather tame and even conservative in our day, the church did have the power to not only fire him but to make certain that no one else would hire him and so Strauss simply died quietly in poverty and obscurity rather than sparks and smoke.
Which is similar to what happened to my first pastor. After being fired and labeled a “communist” it was not easy for him to find any more work and he shortly had a heart attack and died. Still, during the early years of my ministry, I had professors and regional ministers and denominational leaders who were persons of great faith and great intellect. Martin Luther King wasn’t the only preacher fighting for civil rights in America. Gandhi wasn’t the only religious thinker who worked for peace and liberation.
It wasn’t just Dorothy Day who saw the violence and injustice of poverty. I knew men and women who inspired me to study, to strive to be a better man, who gave me the courage to stand up to institutions and governments knowing that a rural boy with Appalachian roots could, when armed with the truth, stand up to Senators and corporate bosses and still win.
But several years ago some of those giants of the church began to retire and as I had grown older, I was being called into positions of leadership which allowed me to peer into the inner workings of my own denomination. I found that we had been guilty of covering up serious sex crimes and of protecting people who had embezzled, plagiarized, and manipulated the church in order to make themselves wealthy. I found people coming into positions of leadership who were intellectual dullards and whose work habits reeked of incompetence and sloth. I was not good at hiding my feelings or expressing myself in politically correct language. I became a thorn in the side of my former denomination and though it took them several years to do it, they finally found the means to remove me from their ranks and to protect years of their own illegal and immoral ethics violations from ever coming to light.
They tried to do to me what the Catholic Church had successfully done to David Strauss and they would have succeeded except for the fact that you people have had the courage to come together as a church and have bestowed upon me the honor of being called your pastor.
So I know what fire Jeremiah had in his stomach when he looked back on the faith community he remembered and saw how corrupt and irrelevant it had become. I understand what made Jeremiah stand outside of the temple and shout at the priests, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! Says the Lord.” When Jeremiah preached about God raising up a new leader from the house of David, he called it, there in verse 5, “a righteous Branch.” Jeremiah didn’t say that there would be some change and hope. This was not a course correction. There was to be no more rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. What we remembered cannot be dusted and repainted and kept alive.
Jeremiah speaks of a radical new beginning. He says that God will raise up new leadership which will, he says, “deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness.” Righteousness is a church word that we don’t use very often anymore. We associate it immediately with negative things like “self-righteous” or something worse. But let me remind you that “righteous” is the opposite of things like using church money to both pay for prostitutes and then paying them to keep quiet as was done in National City Christian Church. Righteousness is the opposite of raising money from the churches to start a congregation for poor Latino immigrants and then taking the money to pay the salary of a white Area Minister whose only familiarity with Latino culture comes from his addiction to Taco Bell.
A few years ago I picked up a guest lecturer for Drury University at the airport. As we drove towards the south east location where we were going to dinner, she looked out my car window and sighed….. “Springfield sure does have a lot of strip clubs…… and churches.” Steeples and strippers…. There is a title for a good mid-western novel.
And, honestly, from my perspective, a strip club is much less a sign of moral decay than a Payday Loan business. The former takes money from gullible stupid men, and the later takes millions of dollars from desperately poor families who are the most vulnerable people in our city.
This song by Sting which I asked Sean to sing before I began this sermon today first came to my attention about 15 years ago. It was a popular song being played on the radio and its images seemed to me to be describing a kind of cultural collapse…. An embrace of nihilism.
“You could say I’ve lost my faith in science and progress…
You could say I lost my belief in the holy church…
You could say I lost my sense of direction….
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV,
You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians…
I never saw no miracle of science that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse,
I never say no military solution that didn’t always end up as something worse…
The refrain of a song seems to hang all of the singer’s hope on faith in one person whom he loves…. I’m not sure how that’s worked out for him but in my experience romance is more fickle than science, the military, politics or even the church. I choose to re-interpret the song’s refrain to be talking about the message of Jesus, or of the righteousness we have seen in the real spiritual leaders both of our own memory and of history.
The church of my childhood and young adult years no longer exists…. It is gone…. But my faith was never in the institution. My faith is not gone.
I have faith in the message of Jesus…. I believe in justice, in compassion, in mercy and forgiveness. I have faith in the ability of human beings, through prayer, worship, study and practice, to leave behind the unrighteousness of greed, exploitation, violence and prejudice and to become better people, spiritual people, people who can heal the brokenness of the world.
I believe in God and I believe, with St. Theresa of Avila, that God has no hands but your hands, no feet but your feet. I believe that you are the agents of God’s mercy, God’s justice, God’s righteousness. And so, I believe in you…. I have faith in you… and I hope that you believe in yourselves and the faith that we share.
