A Fourth Church Sermon by John W. Vest

October 25, 2009 | 4:00 p.m.

You Say You Want a Revolution

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 14:15–24

In churches like ours around the world, today is celebrated as Reformation Sunday. It is a day to remember and celebrate the great cultural, intellectual, and religious revolutions that took in place almost 500 years ago in the sixteenth century, what we refer to as the Protestant Reformation. We remember these great men of faith: Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. We hold up their work and their time as the generation that gave birth to this thing we call Protestantism. Ours is a particular type of Protestantism, following in the lineage of Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox, and so we especially venerate these theologians and pastors as the founders of a new way of being church.

It is a worthwhile endeavor to remember these men, to learn from them and recall what it was that inspired them to at first attempt reform and then to completely break away from the Roman Catholic Church of their day. We can think about their critiques of ecclesiastical abuses. We can think about their longing for religious freedom. We can think about their promotion of free thought and critical inquiry. Most importantly, in my opinion, we can remember that these men devoted their lives to the democratization of Christian religion. No longer were spiritual matters and religious authority solely in the hands of the Catholic priesthood. Instead, these men taught the priesthood of all believers. They empowered people to read the Bible for themselves, in their own languages, and to develop expressions of faith that actually fit their context. No longer were church services only celebrated in Latin. No longer was the Bible only read in Latin. Christianity once again became a religion of the people, not a hierarchical institution controlled by a religious elite.

It is worthwhile and important to remember these men, to celebrate what they did and how it quite literally changed our world forever.

But it is a mistake to assume that God’s continuing work of transformation and reformation ended there. It is a mistake to carve these faces into stone and assume that we are through or that God is through.

In the nearly 500 years since then, the world has continued to change. The question is, has the church changed and adapted along with it?

There are interpreters of Christianity today who suggest that we are in the midst of another great cultural, intellectual, and religious upheaval, not unlike what happened back in the sixteenth century. These pastors, theologians, and scholars suggest that the church of today is on the brink of something new, that we are emerging into a new way of being church, a new way of living into the kingdom of God in this world.

Religious scholar and writer Phyllis Tickle has written a brilliant little book called The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why. In this book, Tickle talks about the great cultural shifts we have experienced in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries as the “Great Emergence” and puts us in succession to the great cultural shifts of the past: the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Great Schism between east and west in the eleventh century, the work of Gregory the Great and other monastics in the sixth century, and the revolution of Jesus and the early church in the first century.

To trace the cultural history of the West from antiquity through the Middle Ages through the Renaissance through the Reformation through the Enlightenment through modernity and into this thing we call postmodernity is a fascinating journey and a little bit more than I could cover in one sermon on Sunday afternoon.

But to give us a little taste of this journey, I want to share with you some of the ways Phyllis Tickle lays out the incredible changes that took place in the twentieth century and where that leaves us today: the church trying to faithfully bear witness to the gospel in the twenty-first century.

Tickle begins her narrative with two great scientists who, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, revolutionized the world and the way we think about it. Albert Einstein’s “special theory of relativity” suggested that space and time were never absolute but were always perceived differently in relation to a particular observer. Werner Heisenberg took this one step further and suggested that the very act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. The ripples these insights sent through Western culture were enormous: no longer could we be certain about absolute truth or fact. Instead, we began to understand that physical and cultural phenomena must always be understood contextually. Though it was not his intention, Einstein’s theory of relativity began to unravel the claims of various cultural authorities, including religious authority.

Think next about how technological advances have resulted in the shrinking of our world. At the turn of the twentieth century, automobiles grew in popularity and affordability such that many Americans were suddenly able to travel great distances in short amounts of time. In addition to drastically changing family and social patterns, it served to make the world a much smaller place. Commercial airplanes came next and made the world even smaller. And now we have the Internet, a powerful tool that has literally connected the world at the speed of light. The world is smaller. The world is once again flat. Whatever metaphor you use, the world has changed.

Similarly we have seen a transition from nation states into a phenomenon we call globalization. The entire planet has become a connected community, for good and for bad, in ways that even the greatest empires of the past could never have dreamed of.

In the twentieth century, a related phenomenon happened in our own nation. Throughout the century, a great influx of immigrants has shifted the demographics of our country. While Americans of European descent are still the majority, that majority is growing smaller and smaller. The face of America is changing. The election of our first African American president and the regular appointments of minorities to high levels of government bear witness to this change in our nation.

The role of women also drastically changed over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940s with Rosie the Riveter, women have slowly become the equals of men in all professions and callings, oftentimes, however, too slowly and not always completely equally. But there has been a remarkable change nonetheless.

In the midst of all this, the questions of authority that arose during the Reformation have come to a head during the emergence of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century. Think about how this has developed in the church. The Reformation slogan sola scriptura—scripture alone—elevated the Bible to the preeminent place of authority in the church. But over the course of the twentieth century, this ultimate authority began to wane.

Even before the twentieth century, the issue of slavery challenged the way the Bible was used in our cultural discourse. When some Christians used the Bible to justify the practice of slavery, other Christians found ways to argue against it, using both the Bible and other rationale. In the twentieth century, Christians debated the practice of divorce, once again finding ways to work around biblical laws that prohibited it. Then came the question of ordaining women as pastors, an issue that some churches still wrestle with, though thankfully ours does not. Yet we are still deep in the trenches of debate and division when it comes to the question of homosexuality.

And friends, this is only a fraction of the story. Standing here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can look back at all that changed during the twentieth century and feel our heads spin. What a drastically different world it is in 2009 than it was in 1909.

So much has changed. It makes some people uncomfortable and nervous. People who look like these Reformers. Or like me.

Because people like me have been in power for a long, long time. And the church has reflected that.

So we must ask ourselves, is it in fact time for a new revolution? Is a church full of people that look like me, led by a professional class of pastors trained in special seminaries, connected into a centralized denomination—is this church reflecting the new world we live in? Is this church meeting the needs of the new world we live in?

Are people like me the ones that should be setting our agenda? Or isn’t it just as important to hear from you . . . and you . . . and you? Isn’t it just as important to hear from people in the global south? Isn’t it just as important to hear from people on the margins, whatever the boundaries may be: race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomics, age?

• • •

Jesus often told parables to try to explain what the kingdom of God was all about, what this new thing he was doing was all about. One day he was invited to dinner at the house of a great religious leader. He used the occasion to tell some parables about meals, parables that challenged the status quo and encouraged his followers to think about God’s kingdom in a different way.

One of the parables he told went something like this: Someone, probably a wealthy person of power, put on a great dinner feast. He invited all the people he was supposed to invite—the other rich and powerful people in the town. But each and every one of them came up with some kind of excuse for why they couldn’t attend.

In frustration, the man invited anyone who would come: the poor, the sick, the ostracized. These people came. They gathered around the great table and tasted a feast like they had never experienced.

I imagine that this meal changed their lives. Just as important, their presence changed the meal.

This is what the kingdom of God is like. People on the margins sitting with people of power, gathering around a common table, nourished by God to go out and change the world.

Amen.