The Church of the Past

The Church in Time, Three Sermons on the Church:
Past, Present and Future

The Church of the Past

My sermons over the next three weeks deal with the church in the past, present and future. I want to talk of the church as the "home of the faithful," that it has been, is, and will be. But in a way, I’ve already stated a bias by calling the church a "home of the faithful." I haven’t said what faith is, nor have I indicated what accouterments or personnel are necessary to furnish and maintain such a home. It would be presumptuous for me to do so. But I have called the church a home of the faithful and will stick by this definition throughout these three meditations.

This is the church, we used to say in the children’s game. "This is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people." And at the end, when we opened those doors, we could giggle at the wiggly fingers we made to symbolize all of those who came to worship and do as members of the congregation – to symbolize you and me and everyone here as well as everyone in other congregations meeting today, wherever they may be, whatever their particular faith stance or religious tradition – All of those people coming together in their own special ways to make a home for the faithful.

My father, as a minister before me, used to distinguish carefully between church buildings and church people, honoring the central importance of those people who brought life to a congregation, saying that the building could be destroyed as long as the people remained, yet he worked long and hard to see that the buildings, as tangible expressions of the congregation’s faith, were maintained and used appropriately.

This congregation has honored itself through a similar love of people and of property. Before church, I was standing over by the window of our sanctuary, as I often do. I don’t take the role, but I do occasionally find myself drawn to that window to watch you as you are coming to church, and looking out this morning, I saw Ann Blackburn and Jim Aldrich coming up, and looking around as they went, and I looked around, too, and commented again on the beauty of the place. The beauty we’ve made of this place: the wonder of the flowers, the effort that’s gone into the buildings. And I found myself enjoying this sacred place that we’ve created through the eyes of two members of the congregation and my eyes too. Yet I knew as well that there was something even more special about the people themselves. We love our buildings and our property and want to see them used according to our best understandings of what that use should be. But we recognize that even more important are the people who are here and the people who have been here.

Isn’t that the grand thing about our sanctuary quilts: that they talk of the people of the past, the people who remain important to us.

When I was a student in Boston years ago, I found myself going to a number of black churches. Churches that had been built in black neighborhoods by the white inhabitants that preceded them and that had then been sold to black congregations just as the homes had been sold to the black people. On a number of occasions I found myself sitting in one of these churches contemplating the stained glass windows, dedicated to those earlier white people, often of different denomination and belief, whose followers had sold that property. Now there were other caretakers of that land, other peoples in those pews, different doctrines being delivered from the pulpits and yet the stained glass was there to talk about that other past. At that time, a smug kid, I looked around me and said to myself, "How foolish this is, that these dead representatives of a dead past are here still in the windows." Now I think back and say, "No. No. Those windows still honor the worship that goes on today, no matter what, no matter how much the worshippers have changed. They were given to the present as it was and the future no matter how it turned out.

Congregation and property are both important as a home of the faithful.

Thus as a "faithful people," we have found "a home" in the church we unite to form and to maintain – a home in this church.

But where in society does that home fit? How do we express ourselves to each other and to those about us through this home we make together? Has it always been so? And will it ever be?

– o –

Perhaps the best way to understand the church of the past is as a cultural center or ethos. It was home of the faithful, but it was a home that conformed with that which was about it, a home that supported the status quo, calling people back to an image of relationship that had been inherited from time.

The early church was a part of a society in turmoil, and self-destruction. It was a period that Gilbert Murray characterized as suffering "a failure of nerve" as people ceased to be contented with that which had been central to the past, lost their direction and ceased to trust the very wisdom they had gained.

The idea of the city, or polis, that had been put forward by Alexander the Great had been blasted wide open so that it was less used than abused.

A real sense of community within the polis had foundered. If you can imagine the situation: there was Alexander, talking about the possibility of creating cities across the world where people could come together to form one culture out of many. But three short centuries later we see these very cities divided into separate communities or ghettos of Jews and others who kept separate laws, separate customs, and that did not trust each other. The very understanding that Alexander had used to build up a new institution had been broken down with the passing years. The real sense of community in the city was lost.

And the church in this situation called the people out as sojourners, looking for the righteous way. But what was that righteous way? It was really a harking back to the communities that had been before, that Alexander had dreamed of forming.

There were lots of other groups doing similarly – such as the worshipers of Mithraism and the other mystery cults, the Jewish synagogues throughout the world, other followers of new religious teaching, and "ethical culturalists" of the Marcus Aurelius stripe – but somehow the language and practices of the early church proved most successful in uniting the people of late antiquity.

From a pilgrim church in a foreign kingdom, the church became the foundation stone of the revised culture it created.

Dark ages came and went. The church established its position through mystery and brutality, through love and torment, through new revelation combined with the usurpation of much earlier speculations, through the olive branch and the sword.

Mighty cathedrals were built and princes of the church held sway in budding nations.

But the center of the church became the center of rural communities that dotted the land. The people came together in a home of the faithful that protected them throughout the vicissitudes of life. And vicissitudes there were.

Have you ever thought how difficult life was even half a hundred years ago? Ponder if you will the wonders of modern medicine. How many of you here ought to have died, were it not for the medical advances that were made during your own life time. I certainly am among this list. It’s amazing when we realize how many people would be missing from this congregation alone were it not for the advances of the past fifty years – how many of us would have been dead in an earlier era.

You may remember John Woolman, the Quaker who, during the 1700’s, almost single-handedly moved Quakerism into the abolitionist camp through his devout meditations and earnest admonitions. John Woolman kept a journal or daybook of his travels all those years ago that is beautiful to read in its spirituality. It’s been an inspiration to many over the years. But time and again in its pages, he writes, "Woke this morning and threw up." Small wonder, given the poor quality of the food that had to be eaten regardless in order to survive. And this was true of just about everyone in his time. We have it so easy in comparison. We live in a different time and are not plagued by the vicissitudes of the past.

I’m not surprised that our parents and grandparents expressed their faith differently – even those who were Unitarian or Universalist. But they banded together in churches that expressed their community of faith, as unique as their individual perspectives might be.

They were willing to build one church in the small villages of that time and "get along" within it.

The Catholic church did similarly in Europe. For Catholic means universal, and the church – the Catholic church – at its best in the past and present has welcomed all people.

And this wasn’t just in Christian backgrounds. Look at the Plains Indians who valued all the people in the tribe. If you were crazy, they valued you anyway. You had a part to contribute with your different view of the universe. If you were gay, you were valued anyway. Again, you had a part to play.

And the same was true in the country churches when most of America was rural. Churches were formed, not really expressing a doctrine though preachers came and went expressing this theological stance or that. The congregation remained, valuing each other regardless of the individual understandings of God or afterlife because the humanity and the shared experience of life in their little portion of the world was more important.

As I drove through the farm lands of the Midwest this summer, I was struck by how successful this model had been, coming right down to the present day. As we went by the little white country churches that tell of that background. Today many of these little churches are empty because people can drive to the nearest city in no time. But even the empty churches tell what the past was like.

I remember being similarly struck by the churches of New England when I lived there. There might be Catholic and Protestant. There might be Baptist, Congregationalist, Unitarian Universalist, Presbyterian, Adventist, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness and others, but you could tell that there was an underlying cohesiveness by the fairs that every congregation had and to which every other congregation came. It was a way to support each other’s religious stands and to honor the underlying unity that might not be there on Sunday mornings, theoretically, but that was there through the rest of the week and that therefore mattered most.

For that matter, the symbiosis of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan when I lived in that country told the same tale. For in Japan, the two religions sit cheek by jowl. If you find a Shinto Shrine, you will always find a Buddhist shrine nearby. The people go to both: the Shinto is good for the daily experiences of life; the Buddhist for the high moments of birth, marriage and death. The Shinto gods are lazy and you have to clap your hands in a shrine to wake them up, just as we, in our daily lives can be lazy and need waking, too. The Buddhist presence, however, a presence beyond deity, never sleeps and one only bows and meditates. So the same people who clapped in the Shinto Shrine would bow quietly in the Buddhist. And everyone does both.

Faith and community went hand in glove. Each was, as much as anything, an expression of the other. People "did" for the church as an expression of their willingness to do for their community.

It may have been xenophobic at times, this understanding – indeed, it certainly was xenophobic at times – but it was a home for the faithful through many generations when the rural model held sway and when the needs of a people to express their shared religion was so close.

There has been a radical change in society, however, over the last fifty years and more.

Too many of us don’t know our neighbors up and down our streets.

Too many of us don’t share the perspectives of those who live around us.

Too many of us are separated by time and circumstance from the rootage that made our lives possible.

Too many of us are victims of a culture based on a materialism that is more interested in the "sell" than on the soul.

The rural model has gone by the boards for us. The sense of community that held sway for so long has diminished or vanished altogether. While we may need a home for the faithful no more nor less than past generations, we understand that home differently.

Some may yearn nostalgically for the old way – "the old time religion." Some may be ready to throw out baby and bath, forsaking homes of the faithful as unnecessary in our own brave new world. But our presence today testifies to our own valuing of this setting. In the present, we find a need for the church:

for a home for the faithful, who keep faith with each other,
who wish to grow surrounded by those of like orientation,
who are convinced that life matters when virtue is its guide,
who would pass these convictions to a coming generation.
who wish to leave the world a bit better than how they found it.

And the why and how of this is grist for a discussion of the church of the present.