April 25, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 10:1–10

Acts 2:42–47

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. . . they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
Acts 2:42, 46b, 47a

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“. . . that old time religion” the old gospel song puts it. “It’s good enough for me. It was good enough for our mother, good enough for Paul and Silas, . . . that old time religion, and it’s good enough for me.”

The clear assumption which is widely shared is that old-time religion is somehow superior to whatever it is we currently have—present time religion, modern religion, if you will. What it really is, I think, is nostalgia, the longing each of us experiences for a simpler, less complicated time than the week just past; longing for a world which perhaps never was: a world in which what is going on in Kosovo and what went on in Littleton, Colorado, last week never happened; a world of peace and serenity and understanding and tolerance; a world in which people care for one another; a world where compassion and sharing and understanding were the operative realities; a world not unlike the one our earliest spiritual relatives, the very first Christians, valiantly tried to create.

“Give me that old time religion” usually means the world of my personal past, my childhood world before things got so complicated. I propose this morning, however, that “old time” means that time when it all began, when a small group of men and women experienced together the death by crucifixion of their friend and leader and Lord, and who individually and together experienced his presence so that they became convinced that he was risen and present in their lives and in the life of the world: those remarkable people who finally did burst out of their locked rooms in Jerusalem, so full of spirit and energy and courage and love that they turned the world upside down, literally.

I love what Annie Dillard says about them. Writing an essay for a book of contemporary authors on the New Testament, she says that “The Gospel of Luke ends immediately and abruptly on that Easter Sunday when the disciples had walked so much and kept receiving visitations from the risen Christ. The skies have scarcely closed around Christ’s heels when the story concludes on the disciples. . . What a pity, that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians. There is no breather. The disciples turn into the early Christians between one rushed verse and another. What a dismaying pity, that here come the Christians already, flawed to the core, full of wild ideas and hurried self-importance. For who can believe in the Christians.” (Incarnation, edited by Alfred Corn, p. 36)

It is, of course, the easiest project in the world to identify what is wrong with Christians in general and the Christian church in particular. Part of being a minister is hearing unhappy church stories. “I haven’t been to church for years because my parents made me go every Sunday when I was a child and it was awful.” (Probably the all-time favorite.) The second one is “I don’t go to church because church people are all hypocrites,” or “I don’t go to church because all church people do is fight.” That’s third, and true. The church and its inhabitants are easy targets, and given the fact that the mainline church today, the Episcopalians, Methodists, United Church of Christ, Presbyterians and others continue to decline in numerical strength and stature with the culture, everybody has an opinion about what’s wrong with us and has written a prescription in a book.

Leander Keck, retired dean at Yale Divinity School, is the author of one of these, a very thoughtful one, and in it, he observes that “Diagnosing the malaise of the mainline church has become a growth industry. (The Church Confident, p. 19)

And so, rather than adding to the clutter this morning, let’s just go back to that authentic “old time religion,” to those very first Christians, and see what we can learn about what they had in mind.

There they were, after the tumultuous events at Passover: the arrest, and trial and public execution of Jesus; the resurrection appearances; the time of fearful waiting and watching in locked rooms, still in Jerusalem; there they were—not very many of them, actually. And on the feast day of Pentecost they ventured out of their hiding place and Peter, full of the Spirit of God, made a speech and the Christian church was launched. The Acts of the Apostles, a history of the early Christian church written by Luke, tells the story. They were together, they held all things in common, they took care of one another, they ate together, they were conspicuously happy, particularly at their common meals, and they had the good will of all the people. And as a result, the movement began to grow dramatically.

They taught and learned. They ate together in a way that attracted attention. The scholars tell us it was the radical openness and hospitality and inclusivity of their table that was so noticeable and controversial and impressive. People who never ate together, rich and poor, men and women, morally pure and morally not-so-pure, clean and unclean, all were welcome. All the barriers were gone in this new community. And they apparently were so full of the love of their Lord that they did the unthinkable—they started to love each other and forgive each other and have compassion for one another.

One commentator put it like this: “The combined energy of God’s spirit and their love for one another and for those outsiders was irresistible.” (Texts for Preaching, Charles Cousar)

People who think and write about church growth perhaps should pay a little more attention to the book of Acts. The earliest Christians simply acted like Christians, like friends and followers of Jesus. They devoted themselves to love and compassion. It doesn’t say they devoted themselves to church growth or evangelism. It says they devoted themselves to caring for one another and for others, and the world was compelled by their authenticity, the integrity of the life they lived in the world. Their life together was the very best evangelism.

In fact, they loved one another so much that they shared all they had and established a kind of communal living for a while.

It must have been impressive. Kenneth Woodward, religion writer for Newsweek, produced an essay recently, 2000 Years of Jesus, which highlights the key changes in history that happened because of Christianity and the Christian church. He writes: “Like a supernova, the initial impact of Christianity on the ancient Greco-Roman world produced shock waves that continued to register long after the Roman Empire disappeared.”

The church introduced the idea of a God who relates to the world and to individuals in a personal way. They changed forever the way the world regards death and therefore life. They taught the world to value individual human life. Every man and woman and child is precious, they taught and practiced.

The early church protected the children. Under Roman law, fathers could and often did commit infanticide. Female babies were particularly vulnerable because they were nothing but an expense. Rodney Stark, a sociologist at the University of Washington, conducted a study of gravestones at Delphi and discovered that of 600 upper class families, only half a dozen raised more than one daughter. Christians picked up the abandoned babies who were simply left in the gutters to die. Fathers were allowed the option of keeping a baby or banishing it which meant simply setting it outside. The early Christian church became an orphanage for the unwanted babies. Because individuals were precious they did away with a common Roman practice of marrying off ten-year-old girls to older men and they carried into the Roman world their Jewish respect for marriage and the then novel notion that it is based on the consent of the man and woman.

In the Roman world virtue was Aristotelian: justice, prudence, courage and temperance. Jesus taught and the early Christians tried to practice humility, forgiveness, compassion, love. They were conspicuous because they cared for those who were expendable: widows, orphans, the aged and infirm.

Professor Stark sees the most dramatic evidence in the high Christian survival rates during the plagues that repeatedly hit the citizens of the ancient Roman Empire. “The Romans threw people out into the street at the first symptom of disease, because they knew it was contagious and they were afraid of dying. But the Christians stayed and nursed their sick.”

Before Christ, Professor Stark says, victors in wars routinely butchered their vanquished foes. Christianity suggested that even enemies’ lives should be respected and honored.

It is easy to critique the Christian church and the faith which inspired it. Lots went wrong, as Annie Dillard and others remind us. And it is helpful on occasion to be reminded of the enormous and positive and human and good effect the church and the faith have had in the world.

The churches and people of faith started most of the universities and colleges in our nation. A wonderful new hospital was dedicated in our neighborhood last week. The final event of a week of celebrations for the new Northwestern Memorial Hospital was a Sunset Blessing on Sunday evening, an interfaith service of worship. Our Morning Choir and Tower Brass were there and made us all proud. What impressed me most, however, was the brief history of the early hospitals that combined to create Northwestern Memorial; Passavant, started by a Lutheran minister to take care of the poor of Chicago in the 1880s, and Wesley, started by Methodists at the same time, to care for the sick and needy. The first nurses were Methodist women volunteers. I thought about other great Chicago hospitals with names like Presbyterian, St. Lukes-Episcopal, Loyola, Lutheran General.

I recalled Professor Stark’s observations about Christians taking care of plague victims and I remembered a similar story told to us by Korean Presbyterians. Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Korea in 1885 and the first of them, a physician by the name of Horace Underwood, started a hospital in Seoul, Severance Hospital. In 1888 a cholera epidemic struck Korea. And the Korean people did what everybody before them did in response to and fear of infectious diseases, simply put the sick and dying out into the streets. Christianity began to take root in Korea when Christians went into the streets to minister to the sick and picked them up and carried them to Severance Hospital. The king heard about it and sent emissaries to discover who these angels were who were not afraid to care for the sick and dying.

It is all we have to offer the world, after all: an alternative way of thinking and being and relating, a way that is often in sharp contrast to the values of the culture, whether it is Greco-Roman or the consumer, market culture of modern America. It is grounded in our trust in God, our joy at the good news of God’s unconditional love in Jesus Christ, our deep gratitude that God loves, accepts us, forgives and frees us from anything that inhibits or holds us back or down, our profound thankfulness that in Easter even the power of death was defeated so we can live authentic and courageous lives.

We offer the world Gospel: good news. But the world will not respond, will not be much interested, unless it can see that Gospel reflected in the life of the church.

We respond to the crisis in Kosovo because of that basic Judeo-Christian conviction that any human life is precious and that no one should be exiled, discriminated against, shut out, evicted from their home, raped or killed because of their ethnicity or religion. There are no expendable people.

We respond to poverty and need closer to home. There are no expendable children at Cabrini-Green or the Robert Taylor Homes, either. Each is precious, each a child of God, loved by God, intended by God, willed by God to have a full and safe and healthy life. We invest our energy and time and resources, personally and corporately, as an expression of the Gospel, as an act of faith.

And how shall we respond to the death of the children, to the continuing violence that now seems to be a permanent part of life for the young people and children of our nation? I was struck by Ken Woodward’s reminder that one of the things the early church did for the ancient world was help it to change the way it thought about children: protecting children from the customs and mores and morals that put children at risk.

Well, what do we have to say to a culture which so surrounds young people with violence? Is there nothing we can say about the unrelenting violence produced by Hollywood and by television? Is there anyone who seriously doubts that human life is cheapened and rendered valueless by motion pictures which portray with graphic, bloody detail, the killing, maiming, stalking and blowing up of human beings? Is there nothing to be said or done about popular video games, like “Doom,” that allow the player to stalk and blow away victims hiding and running through the halls of a dark dungeon? Is there nothing we can say about the access angry and disturbed youngsters have, on the Internet, to those who would encourage and celebrate that disturbed anger, and provide detailed instructions for constructing pipe bombs?

And guns . . . 200,000,000 guns floating in and through this society: not just hunting rifles, collections of rare guns, target pistols, or registered hand guns owned by people who respect them and know how to use them, but military weapons, semi-automatic pistols whose only purpose is to kill human beings; guns available at enormous gun shows, guns sold legally from trunks of cars, guns easily accessible anywhere in our society, as many as you want to own, an arsenal if that’s your plan. The political power of the N.R.A. and the gun lobby is so pervasive that in spite of the majority –72% of gun owners favor some kind of mandatory registration and background checks, 80% of the general population and the vast majority of police want reasonable gun control--the flow of firearms of all types continues uninterrupted into our nation.

These statistics are so distressing that I don’t want to believe them. They come from the HELP Network, of which this church is a supporting member and from a recent Louis Harris Poll: In 1996 there were 34,040 firearms deaths in the USA 4,643 of them were children and teenagers. Every day 12 children die from gunshot wounds in our country.

There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world or in human history.

And this, I find unbelievable: 6 percent of high school students reported carrying a gun to school within the last 30 days; 9 percent have shot at someone; 59 percent say they know how to get a gun.

Louis Harris says we are the gun culture. Under the guise of our rights, the presence of guns and their use to kill will be what defines us historically.

Of course, the availability of guns isn’t the whole problem. But somehow to blame schools for not providing value-based education, a silly accusation, actually, in a place like Littleton, Colorado, or parents for not parenting, and to ignore the overwhelming presence and accessibility of guns in our culture is simply irresponsible. It is, I think for us, the moral equivalent of the Roman practice of discarding unwanted infants. Last Friday, Francis Cardinal George called a public meeting on violence reduction. Paul Vallas, CEO of Chicago Public Schools was there, so was the Police Superintendent, State’s Attorney, clergy, and community organizations. We were told: “Pay attention to what is happening to us. . . . Care for all the children. And guns . . . we simply must stop the flow of guns.’

So do pray for parents who are burying precious sons and daughters, and for the churches where ministers are trying to preach helpful sermons, and for teachers and school administrators. But also pray that officials of the NRA and the gun lobby will have a change of heart and help us restore decency and responsibility and safety to the world in which our dear children live.

And then raise your voice: write your Federal and State representatives, Speaker of the House Hassert and Majority Leader Lott. Let the theater owners hear from you about the previews that assault your senses with obscene and gratuitous violence. And for God’s sake, literally, if you own a gun, lock it up, keep it safe.

In recent years, there have been a number of prominent pilgrimages back to the church after years of disaffection. Some are writers who have recorded their experiences: Dan Wakefield, Kathleen Norris, most recently Anne Lamott. And in each case it was not the theology, not even the preacher’s sermons, I’m sorry to admit, that did it, but the community, the quality of life lived by the people, the church itself.

Wakefield came home when he discovered that volunteering in a soup kitchen gave him more pleasure than anything else. Norris came home when she rediscovered the earthy wisdom, integrity and honest piety of South Dakota ranchers. Anne Lamott invited Jesus into her life because the African-American women of a small Presbyterian church in Marin County did not judge her, but welcomed her, loved her into health and sobriety by standing with her in a time of serious crisis and in motherhood.

It’s what we have to offer and I invite you to it again this morning: to the responsibilities but also the joy of following Jesus Christ as part of his people, his church.

We had a fire around here two weeks ago, on Sunday afternoon, or at least what could have turned into a fire. An elevator motor overheated and smoke was coming up the shaft. We called the fire department and when the firemen arrived they told our house staff to clear the building. Fortunately there weren’t many people here. It was about 4:00. But some were here. We have a weekly community supper at 5:30. All are welcome: members, non-members, paying customers and people with no money. A number of our homeless neighbors are a regular part of the community that gathers for the breaking of bread. Some of them come early, waiting for the supper. Our houseman, Roger, found one of them waiting outside the dining room and told him he’d have to leave because there was a fire.

He refused. “No way man. I’m not leaving this church,” he said. “I’ve been waiting all week for this meal and I’m not leaving this church.”

“All who believed were together . . . they broke bread and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church