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No more kings

No more kings

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Actress Claire Foy trying on her crown in a scene from the TV series The Crown
Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in season 1 of The Crown

This coming Sunday I am the guest pastor at a nearby church. At my request, I will be preaching on the Gospel text for Thanksgiving, Matthew 6:25-34, from the Sermon on the Mount. Officially this Sunday is Christ the King, which a while ago I decided to ignore. The following is a post I wrote a couple years ago to explain why I think creating Christ the King was a bad idea and needs to go. I will use a few of the points here to explain to my host congregation why they are hearing a Thanksgiving sermon, rather than one for CTK.

Recently I’ve been watching the latest (and next to last) season of The Crown on Netflix. The multi-year program is the semi-fictional account of the life and reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The center of this season has been the final marital breakdown and divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

The recurring themes of The Crown are the obvious ones. Questions like what role does a monarch play in a democracy, how can the ancient traditions of monarchy be brought into the modern world, and how do all the “lesser royals”, including the heir apparent, keep from going crazy when they frankly have so little to do.

Queen Elizabeth is portrayed as having some awareness of these issues but not much insight into what is to be done about them. Her husband and eldest son show more practical concern than she does (it was Prince Philip who made the case for televising Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation). Where Elizabeth is completely befuddled is knowing what to do about all the disintegrating marriages in her family. The resulting sorrow and heartbreak are the most moving parts of the series and an overarching sadness pervades the story.

I thought of all this as we approached the last Sunday of the church year, designated in many churches as Christ the King. I decided a couple years ago I would no longer observe this festival. Last Sunday was simply designated as “The Last Sunday after Pentecost” and it served as our Thanksgiving worship service.

Christ the King has been on the liturgical calendar for less than a century, in contrast with most festivals which are over a thousand years old. It was made a feast day by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Originally in October, it was moved to the last Sunday of the church year in 1969, which is about the time many Protestant churches adopted it.

Ostensibly Pius XI’s goal was to challenge the growing power of authoritarian governments. “Christ is the true king, not you,” in other words. But it was also the case that the Pope was in a long-running struggle with the Italian government to save some remnant of the Catholic Church’s once formidable political power. A short time later, Mussolini agreed to the establishment of the Vatican State, the postage stamp size “country” in the middle of Rome, ruled by the Catholic Church.

That part of the story is mostly forgotten now and was not even thought of when Protestants adopted Christ the King for their usage. Today, it is understood as a hope-filled look to the future establishment of God’s rule on earth, and a challenge to forces of domination by the example of Christ’s power of service and compassion, symbolized by the cross.

But as the adage goes, saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. Words have meaning, and the symbol of “Christ the King” simply doesn’t communicate the laudable message intended by liturgical officials. “Christ the king” is not a biblical idea, for the obvious reason that the common understanding of “king” does not fit either the earthly Jesus or the risen Christ.

The Windsors are a pathetic last gasp of England’s centuries long monarchy. They retain the wealth and soap opera lives but now lack their ancestors’ power to use and abuse. Most of Europe’s monarchies ended in the violence of war or revolution. The few remaining kings and queens know their role is largely public relations, promoting tourism and national industry.

Presumably such kings are not what are in mind when thinking of Christ the king. But what then? Those revolutions (including our own) happened for a reason. Overall, kings have an abominable record. The ideal of just and benevolent monarchy lacks one thing: actual examples!

You can learn all you need to know about the Bible’s view of kings by reading the story in the 8th chapter of Samuel. Tired of their Judges, the elders of Israel come to Samuel demanding he appoint a king, like those of the countries around them. Samuel knows this will be a disaster and angrily describes the calamities that will befall them. But they won’t listen, and God tells Samuel to go ahead, give them a king, but don’t take it personally, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me”. The biblical saga that follows demonstrates again and again the truth of Samuel’s warning.

In the New Testament, Jesus never refers to himself as a king. His response to Pilate’s question if he is a king is basically, “you can call me whatever you want.” Even more telling is the story in John 6. After feeding the crowd with the loaves and fishes, they want to make Jesus king, but he runs away. Paul, writing earlier than the gospels, also never calls Jesus a king.

What is prominent in both the gospels and Paul is the phrase basileia tou theou, or “kingdom of God.” But for Jesus this is really a miniature parable in itself, and is the subject of most of his parables. The kingdom is at hand, Jesus says, it is in your midst, it is within you, it is spread upon the earth but people don’t see it.

This kingdom has no earthly equivalent but is an ironic, anti-kingdom, if you will. It is the end of all external rule, giving way to an internal and all-pervasive truth and life of the heart. Jesus and Paul both called it love, empowered by the Spirit.

No image of “king”, whether from the past or present, could ever invoke such an astonishing mystery, the “good news” which Jesus proclaimed. “Christ the king” invokes confusion at best, if not an outright contradiction of Jesus’ message. Like most monarchs, it needs to go.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

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Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Can Jesus be saved?

Can Jesus be saved?

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Road to Emmaus painting
Road to Emmaus (crop) by Robert Zund (Swiss 19th century)

A retired Lutheran pastor (who I don’t know) had a letter to the editor in our local paper this past Sunday. It was titled “How Christian nationalism ignores Jesus.” In his view, the tenets of the Christian nationalism that has risen in popularity here in the US clash with many of the teachings of Jesus found in the gospel. The pastor is appropriately passionate, cogent, and reasonable. He describes the understanding of Jesus common to most moderate and liberal churches and the attitudes and behavior such a view supports.

Practices of hospitality, welcoming strangers, feeding the hungry, supporting those in distress, bringing healing to those who suffer, and creating communities of love and understanding — these acts are central not only to Christian teachings and beliefs, but also central to the vast expressions of religion and spirituality. However, they are not part of the Christian nationalist perspectives.

Members of denominations like mine are often astounded at the beliefs and values of conservative Christians. But then the reverse is also true.

The central problem is how these Christians define and understand the values embedded in the Christian tradition.

And “those Christians” are also puzzled and often angered by the values liberals find in their understanding of Jesus. The real “central problem,” however, is that such splits have been true of Christianity throughout its history and there is no way to resolve them.

This problem became baked into the cake with the rise of orthodoxy and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire in the 4th century. While Jesus-inspired values and right behavior were always taught to folks in the pew, they were not the church’s main concern. Christianity’s core was the salvation that Jesus had procured for believers by dying as the only Son of God and being raised from the dead.

For that reason, both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds can go directly from Jesus’ birth to his crucifixion and say nothing about his adult ministry, nothing about his teachings or his behavior. This, of course, fit very well with the injustice and cruelty of the Roman empire. And it’s fit well with every similarly inclined culture and government since then.

Those believing in a Jesus of compassion and mercy often react by saying, “They just need to read the gospels!” But it isn’t that simple. Orthodox Christianity is a version of Pauline Christianity. Paul never knew Jesus and says nothing about Jesus’ life. For Paul, the gospel is all about believing in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus. As he writes to the Christians in Corinth, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Paul. We know now that Christianity from the beginning was a diverse, fractious, and divided movement. Paul’s biggest conflict was with the church in Jerusalem, led by Jesus’ brother James. These Christians believed Jesus was a reformer of Judaism and that its rules and traditions remained in effect. In the first few centuries there were also other Christian sects, many of which drew on a variety of spiritual and religious traditions from Greco-Roman culture.

Orthodoxy arose from the desire to corral this motley crew into a centralized belief system and organization. Was it right? Is orthodoxy the rightful successor to Jesus? Or was one of the other groups more like what Jesus intended? No one knows and it’s unlikely anyone ever will know.

Perhaps, even Jesus wouldn’t know. “What was Jesus’ intention?” is the question that hangs over the New Testament and the church. What was Jesus’ goal? What was he trying to do? Consternation over those questions can be found even in the gospels themselves.

The most famous modern person to attempt to answer those questions was Albert Schweitzer. To most people he is the French-German missionary doctor of colonial Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner. But prior to that, he was an accomplished Lutheran pastor, theologian, and musician.

Dissatisfied with what modern historical critical biblical scholars were saying about Jesus of Nazareth, Schweitzer undertook his own investigation. The result was the bombshell publication in 1906 of The Quest of the Historical Jesus (English title). Schweitzer asserts that the scholars of his time were simply finding the Jesus their prejudices wanted to find, rather than the Jesus who really was and who may have not been all that appealing or relevant to us.

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb. This image has not been destroyed from outside; it has fallen to pieces….

But Schweitzer was no conservative traditionalist. In his view, Jesus believed his purpose was to be the catalyst for bringing about God’s kingdom on earth. He had an apocalyptic vision of God acting soon to turn the world upside down. But it didn’t happen and he died a humiliating death. Jesus tried to spin the wheel of history but it only ended up crushing him. It is no coincidence that soon after writing his book Schweitzer began medical training and then left for Africa as a missionary doctor.

Then and since, Schweitzer’s book has been both condemned and praised. Over a hundred years later, it is still considered a significant work in theological and biblical circles. Even among those who reject his specific conclusions, Schweitzer is recognized as the one who exposed theology’s inability to say definitively who Jesus really was. Savior? Apocalyptic prophet? Reformer? Revolutionary? Mystic? Wisdom teacher? Religion founder? Religion destroyer?

Support for all of these can be found in the ancient texts, but there is no way to combine them all into one person. As New Testament scholar Robert Price has said, our problem is that we have too many Jesuses. It’s like the old To Tell the Truth TV program. The announcer says, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?” and the guests each pretend to stand up but none of them ever do.

Since Schweitzer, the church has avoided the consequences of this realization by playing its role as a cultural institution, but that’s no longer working. As a result, millions are leaving Christianity. Among those who remain, new groups are re-imagining Christianity as an amazing array of self-help philosophies, social service organizations, nostalgic recreations of the past, and apocalyptic authoritarian political movements. But no one can point and say with authority, “That’s what Jesus intended.”

Can Jesus be saved? Does Christianity have a future? “Maybe” is about the strongest answer I can give. How ever understood, Jesus has inspired millions and remains a powerful symbol. I think he’s worth saving. So, next time, I will give at least a sketch of how this ancient tradition could survive and be of value to our perilous world. And that’s the key point. Perhaps our global crises may be the needed catalyst for the church to pull its feet out the mud of its long-irrelevant doctrines, theologies, and structures. We can only hope.

Why worship?

Why worship?

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Church interior with people sitting in pewsMy last blog post crossed what would traditionally have been a theological “red line.” I came out, in essence, as a (qualified) a-theist. As I said, I do not believe in a divine being existing someplace “out there.” In the context of the Trinity, I rejected “God the Father” as an ancient concept that makes no sense in the modern world.

And what was the response? Silence. Well, mostly silence. I did get a few positive comments but nothing in disagreement. No one unsubscribed. One person made a donation. But the truth is that a statement which through most of Christian history would have been viewed as heresy, with possibly dire consequences, got nods of agreement or, perhaps, yawns of indifference.

Now I know that my audience is not a representative sample of the population or of Christians. Certainly, some Christians reading my post would have a fit. But I think it’s significant that this group of mostly mainline Protestant and progressive Catholics were open to what I said, either as a new idea or as confirmation of something they already believed. I don’t think they are unusual.

In the seven months since we moved, I have been to a church worship service six times, the last on Easter Sunday. The two nearby congregations my denomination don’t work for me at all. There are a few churches of other denominations I like, yet after worshiping at them I haven’t felt any real desire to go back.

After I left their services, my reaction was that they were just too much. Too much what? Too much talk, mostly. Paraphrasing the emperor’s criticism of Mozart in Amadeus, there were just too many words: hymns, prayers, liturgy, readings, sermons, and assorted miscellaneous commentary.

In the last years of my ministry, my goal was for a Sunday service to not last more than forty-five minutes. This past Advent, I attended an Episcopal service which lasted an hour and forty minutes! I couldn’t help but think of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6: “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”

Increasingly I have wondered, “What is worship for?” Traditionally, Christian worship has been very theistic. Its various actions have been directed towards the God-out-there: praise, prayer, confession, lament, etc. Creeds and hymns usually presume a theistic God.

More recently, however, worship has become increasingly directed towards the congregation, with a wide range of entertainment and self-help components, plus the clergy’s inclination for chit-chat (yours truly included). The intention is to make worship personal, relatable, relevant, accessible, casual, etc. All of which is an admission that traditional worship is now failing most people.

So, what should worship look like if, as I wrote last week and I think many people intuitively believe, God isn’t “out there” but right here, within us and all around us? If, as Paul is quoted to say in Acts, God is “the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being”? Let me use again a quote I cited in a recent video. It’s from the story in John 4 of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. She asks Jesus whether the Jewish temple or the Samaritan one is the right place to worship. Jesus replies,

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, … when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

What does “in spirit and truth” mean? From the rest of John, as well as from the other gospels, I don’t think Jesus has in mind anything to do with sitting in a building in rows of seats, focused on the action on a stage up front. In fact, this story is the only place in the gospels where Jesus actually talks about worship, and in its traditional sense, he essentially dismisses it. Jesus shows little personal interest in worship and rarely, if ever, directs anyone else to worship.

Traditionally, worship was done for God because presumably that’s what God wanted. Nearly everyone worshiped at their local congregation because that’s what you did. You might have opinions, pro or con, about the minister, the building, the music, etc. but it had nothing to do with deciding whether or where you were going to worship. Today, as I said above, the focus is on what the congregation wants. Where people worship, or if they worship at all, is very much dependent on what they like and whether they are “getting anything out of it.”

There is a story told about a medieval stonemason creating an intricate carving for a high and inaccessible space of a cathedral. He was asked why he was putting so much work into something no one would see. “God will see it,” was his response. He was almost certainly sincere but I can’t imagine anyone having such an attitude today.

To “worship in spirit and in truth” is much like Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” It isn’t about reciting prayers, performing rituals, or attending a weekly event called worship. Rather, it is a life stance, an attitude, an orientation. It is to live with a constant awareness of the sacredness of life: of ourselves, of every person, and of the world around us. This is the meaning of spirituality.

There are, of course, what are typically called “spiritual practices” which help develop and maintain such an awareness. Their purpose is not to “please God” but to awaken us to God’s presence within us, as us, and all around us. Meditation, or contemplative prayer, is usually seen as the basic and essential practice for spiritual awareness. But again, rather than something to be done, most spiritual teachers agree that ultimately meditation becomes simply part of who we are and how we are present in life.

Traditional worship is not about this. Worship is about fulfilling a religious task. In worship, some may experience moments of spiritual awareness, but they are not assumed or expected. Nor is it assumed that worship will lead to metamorphosis, to transformation, which is what both Jesus and Paul mean by salvation. It will not awaken us from the illusion of duality and separation to the fundamental truth of our oneness in God with all creation.

In a recent church newsletter, the pastor said that the single most important reason their church existed was to provide the space and time to worship. I have no doubt many or most pastors believe this, as do many of their churches’ remaining members. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people share that interest, and for good reason.

Today, people don’t want to go through religious motions but to know spiritual truth, as Jesus says to the woman at the well. They want to know “the peace that surpasses all understanding,” the silent sacred presence that is at the core of our being. People no longer want to imagine a God out there but rather, they want to know the God within.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

 

God has left the building

God has left the building

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Intoned in a dramatic voice (by lead actor Kelsey Grammer), many of the episodes of the long running TV comedy, Frasier, concluded with the announcement, “Frasier has left the building.” If he had known the phrase, the iconoclastic 19th century German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, might have used it and declared, “God has left the building.” Instead, he famously (or infamously) said, “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is an odd “feast day” because it is the only one dedicated to a doctrine. The Trinity has been argued about throughout church history. The meaning of it has never been clearly stated, so that Jews and Muslims both view it as a polytheistic heresy. Nearly every group that has separated from orthodox Christianity has done so, at least in part, over rejecting the Trinity.

Nonetheless, century after century, the church has clung to the Trinity like a life preserver. But as is always the case when we need to rise to a new level of maturity, it’s time for the church to let it go, and swim.

Typically, the problem with the Trinity has been with “persons” two and three: Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. How could the human Jesus be divine? How can the Holy Spirit be a separate divine entity? But I don’t think that’s the real problem. The “problem” is actually with the first person, God the Father, because he’s the one that’s “left the building.”

When I was in seminary in the late 1970s, there was great controversy over “God language” and the maleness of God. “Inclusive language” should be used to refer to God, it was said, as God was not male or female. Or God was both. It was never clear which it was. Old prayers and hymns were revised to reflect this, and new ones were created. Even the Bible was retranslated. But the results of all this were often awkward and stilted.

What was rarely discussed, however, was who, or what, this God actually is. In other words, Nietzsche’s announcement from over a century ago was not part of the conversation. In debating God’s gender, were we actually talking about anything at all?

“God is dead… and we have killed him.” That second phrase often gets left off. What Nietzsche was referring to was the transition to the modern world. In ancient and medieval times, superhuman divine beings existed in a nearly invisible heavenly realm above the clouds. The three-tiered universe was like a layer cake, a lower realm or “underworld” of the dead and/or hell, earth was the middle layer, and above that was an upper realm called heaven. It was often believed to have several levels of its own, where God, or the gods, and various angelic-type beings all existed.

As I said in my latest video, all this, of course, was swept away by Galileo and his scientific successors. The being called God, or God the Father in Christian terms, disappeared along with God’s abode. How can there be a God if there is no place for God to be? That this is now universally accepted is demonstrated by the fact that no one is breathless waiting for the new Webb telescope, peering further into space than ever before, to discover heaven at the edge of the universe. God the Father has left the building.

The belief in God as a supreme being existing somewhere “out there” is called theism. To not believe in such a God is called a-theism. In American culture, it’s one of the most disreputable labels a person can be given. But that’s because it’s misunderstood to mean not believing in God, when it actually means not believing in the theistic being God-out-there.

Recently, pollsters have expressed confusion about why the decline in religious identity has not been matched by a rise in atheism, which remains in the low single-digits. That’s because many of these people also think atheism means “no god.” In reality, many of them likely are a-theists because they have dropped a belief in a God-out-there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God.

What do the “spiritual, not religious” believe in then? What are the alternatives to God the Father, to God-out-there? Not to be flippant, but it’s the God-right-here. Such an understanding of God is found around the world and throughout history. In fact, archaeology indicates such a notion of God has been around a lot longer than that of a God-far-off.

Early archaeology and anthropology were dominated by Christian Westerners. We still live with their prejudiced judgments. They scoffed at, what was to them, the primitive and clearly inferior animism and pantheism of prehistoric and indigenous peoples. Yet the notion that God pervades reality and that we live in a sacred, spirit filled world has been the a more common view than theism. Today, contemporary indigenous spirituality is viewed much more positively, often as something modern people can learn from.

There has also been renewed interest in the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism. To borrow the title of the popular 17th century mystical work of Brother Andrew, in simple terms mysticism is “the practice of the presence of God.” Mystics (who are present also in Judaism and Islam) generally have little interest in traditional liturgy and theology. They are usually not concerned about achieving forgiveness of their sins, but of knowing God’s presence within and around them, and of being awakened, enlightened, transformed by that experience.

What’s surprising to many is that such a description could also be applied to Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus shows little interest in temple ritual, believing rather in God’s presence within and around him. Unfortunately, the church got the notion that this made Jesus unique because he was the Son of God. Yet the case can be made (and increasingly now is made) that Jesus viewed himself as a child of God, like everyone else. His ministry was demonstrating a life possible for anyone who has been awakened by the Spirit to their true identity.

Today, much of the language of the Bible and traditional religion is too pious and antique for modern ears. Indeed, in the 1960s, the renowned Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said the church should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because it had been so abused and misused! What we need to remember is that all words are metaphors and approximations. There is a valuable Buddhist saying that all words and teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon. We too easily get obsessed with the finger, when what we need to be looking at is the moon.

Surprisingly, and significantly, “spirituality “is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, or of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

God the Father has left the building. Yet rather than being dead and gone as Nietzsche assumed, God is increasingly recognized as a sacred spirit, the unifying and energizing dimension of all reality, embodied must fully in human consciousness.

In the biblical story, this spirit brought creation out of chaos and the first human to life. At his baptism, the spirit awakened Jesus to his sacred identity. Knowing this spirit, he taught that the “realm of God” was not a unique place far off somewhere but here and now, within and all around us. Centuries later, that vision may finally be coming to life.

 

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Church optional

Church optional

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Pictured here are Tim and Kathy Johnson, sitting at their kitchen table. Just four years ago, that space held the communion table of Zion Lutheran Church in Benedict, Nebraska. The Johnsons bought and remodeled the building when the church closed. At one time, they were members of Zion. Their son was married there, and grandchildren have been baptized there. Now it’s their home. Here “a house full of memories” has whole new meaning.

The Johnsons’ experience is part of an excellent report in the local Nebraska journal, Flatwater Free Press. Of course, the story of church closures is a national, and even international, one. The regional focus of this article makes the story more personal and more poignant. I was a pastor in Nebraska for several years and can easily imagine the towns and congregations mentioned here.

Nebraska has been what you might call “church country.” I often heard of small towns with multiple congregations of the same denomination. That’s all changing. Some of this, of course, is due to shifting populations as rural and small-town people move to the cities and suburbs. But surveys show that the remaining residents are just as likely to have little or no religious involvement as their urban counterparts.

The Flatwater piece shows that the decline of Christianity is not just about individuals but also communities. A Canadian agency recently declared it a national emergency that so many historic church buildings are being abandoned across that country. Anyone who has traveled to Europe is aware how many church buildings have essentially become museums, even if a small worshiping congregation remains. Many others, as in this Nebraska story, have been converted to some other purpose: houses, condos, B&Bs, stores, galleries, restaurants, bars, gyms, etc.

But not every church building is convertible or worth saving. Some are on land that is too valuable to retain the original building. In Florida, where I just moved from, the closure of a downtown Miami Lutheran church resulted in a multi-million-dollar sale, with the proceeds going to a synod ministry development fund.

The church closures in Flatwater’s report span the denominational spectrum: Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic. Also included are the now familiar but still stunning numbers on nationwide religious decline. A ten-year increase in those saying they rarely if ever attended worship, from 43% to 56%. A twenty-year decline in median worship attendance, from 137 to 65. This latter figure goes a long way in explaining the closure of congregations, and why the trend will continue. Increasingly congregations simply can’t afford to maintain their buildings, and/or don’t have enough volunteers to maintain their organizations.

Are congregations essential to Christianity? Many probably can’t imagine it any other way. Yet there have always been Christians who lived where churches were not available. And few, if any, other religions are as congregation oriented as Christianity. Some have shrines and temples, but worshipers aren’t necessarily “members” of them. Many Jews have only a nominal relationship with a synagogue, yet annually attend high holy day services and faithfully light Shabbat candles at home.

One of my interpretations of the recent “great de-churching” is that it has been a rejection of corporate worship. When people leave Christianity, in practical terms, it means they stop “going” to church. I still think that is true but perhaps that’s too narrow a perspective. Perhaps leaving organized religion is really a rejection of belonging to a congregation.

In my experience, Christians often have a romanticized image of their churches, viewing them more favorably than is warranted. Such responses usually come from the active core who worship often, sing in the choir, participate in church organizations, volunteer for committees and governing boards, etc. For that reason, they usually know each other and often count such people among their friends. Yet they are always a minority.

My last congregation had a vibrant and celebrated coffee and fellowship time after Sunday worship. I joked that we had a coffee hour preceded by a worship service. Yet fellowship time participants were only half the story. Each week after worship, I stood at the door shaking the hands of at least as many heading to their cars to leave. Most of these were largely unknown to those getting their cake and coffee.

Every church I have known has members who declare, “We’re so friendly here.” Yet those same congregations have other members who will say, “No one ever talks to me.” When I started in ministry, denominations were in a push to make their congregations more welcoming, especially to visitors. Many churches sprouted big “Welcome Place” banners or put something similar on their signs. Yet to the end of my ministry, it was still common to hear stories of people visiting other congregations where no one said a word to them.

Church leaders have a habit of “whipping the crew until attitudes improve.” Why don’t people sing? Why won’t people read their Bible? Why don’t people volunteer to help? Why aren’t people more friendly? Each question leads to new programs and challenging sermons to bring about the desired change, usually to no avail.

I think congregations will be what they will be, and often that won’t be so great. They will tend towards being cliquish and self-absorbed. There will always be a few who want to run things. Many will never get enough attention for their needs or recognition for their accomplishments. Brick and mortar and landscaping will usually be prioritized over human needs because people want to be “proud” of their church and want something tangible to point to: “See what we did?”

In other words, congregations tend to behave just like any other organization. And for many, that’s just what they’re trying to get away from, or at least don’t need more of. They’ve had their fill of committee and planning meetings, budgets and fund raising, cleaning and maintenance, squabbles and conflict resolution. Even that holiest of gatherings, corporate worship, is more than many can bear given the prevalence of mediocre music, mediocre preaching, and mediocre spaces, plus all the inevitable challenges of being with people in an enclosed space, multiplied now in this pandemic time.

What is Christianity? What does it mean to be a Christian? For a growing number today, “belonging to a church” is no longer the obvious or necessary answer. Most clergy and active laity can’t wrap their heads around this. I think they better learn how. This trend isn’t going away.

Amid the Nazi horrors, and near the end of his life, German theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speculated about the need for “religionless Christianity.” He was responding to the mediocrity of German churches and the passivity of their memberships in the face of Nazi oppression and atrocities. Bonhoeffer had come to realize that belonging to a church had little effect on how people thought or behaved.

“But when you pray, go into your own room, shut your door and pray to your Father privately.” Matthew 6:6, J. B. Phillips

Jesus was ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to the organized religion of his day. Whenever he went to the temple or synagogue, there was always a row. The early church’s biggest problem was that Jesus had laid no plans for a new religion. Perhaps those wannabe church leaders missed his point. As the saying goes, “Jesus came preaching the kingdom, but what we got was the church.”

A bishop’s religion problem

A bishop’s religion problem

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Crumbling church in the countrysideJames Hazelwood is bishop of the ELCA Lutheran New England Synod. Remarkable to me for a bishop, he seems to prioritize spiritual concerns as much as institutional church promotion. Recently Hazelwood wrote a blog post titled, “Our Religion Problem.” As a churchman, he is somewhat tentative about this, as is the priest he quotes to start his reflection, who says:

Sometimes I wonder if the church’s main problem is that it points people to the church rather than God.

This “summarize[s] our religious problem quite well,” Hazelwood responds. He then discusses the now familiar trends in society of participation in formal religion in decline, while interest in spirituality and spiritual practices is growing. And here we get into a vocabulary problem. What is the difference between religion and spirituality?

Until fairly recently, the words could be used interchangeably. Or at least spirituality was considered an aspect of religion, along with things like worship, doctrine, theology, etc. Early in the 20th century, Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James published his famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He did not have in mind singing in the choir or attending Sunday School, but individual experiences with God or the sacred, categorized then as “natural theology.”

Similarly, Hazelwood quotes renowned 20th century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.

Again, Jung is not talking about anything to do with the church, which he abandoned early on (having multiple clergy as relatives probably didn’t help). Rather, by “religious experience” Jung means what today would be called a profound spiritual experience. In a famous TV interview late in his life, Jung was asked if he believed in God.  “I don’t need to believe,” Jung responded. “I know.” This is the answer of a mystic, rather than a conventionally religious person, who would rarely be so bold.

It’s Hazelwood’s hope that today’s spirituality movement is returning religion to its original purpose.

As we witness the decline of the institutional expression of religion, we may also be seeing a resurgence of the original meaning of religion. The word religion is derived from the Latin religāre, meaning “to tie back”—to reconnect. At the heart of the word is the Latin verb ligāre, “to tie,” which is also the root of the English word ligament. Are we going back to reconnecting with a more substantive aspect of the sacred?

When we use “religion” today, we associate it with churches, synagogues, and temples. In a way, we are speaking of institutional aspects of religion. But I want us to broaden our understanding of that word. I am hoping we can return to the reconnecting experience of religion.

Hazelwood then points helpfully to a distinction William James made in discussing religion.

[James] distinguishes between primary religious encounters, which are direct personal experiences, and secondary religion, which involves teachings about the faith or its organizational aspects. Most of what happens today in the US American church is secondary religion – information, analysis, and description. I’ve come to believe this is one of the reasons for the decline in participation in institutional religion.

In contrast, primary religion is the direct experience of the holy, such as encounters with phenomena, hauntings, numinous creatures, conversations with angels, and experiences of gentle calm. Those encounters can be mountain-top experiences or subtle reminders of the blessing of being alive. They can be out in nature, inside a sanctuary, or around the corner from your place of work.

I think Hazelwood is spot on here but it’s more complicated than he lets on. He concludes this way.

We may live in a modern world filled with antibiotics, supersonic jets, and indoor plumbing, but the religious function deep within each human being has not disappeared. People are hungry and starved for primary religious experience. I wonder if our religion problem is that it’s not religious enough.

His last sentence is both vague (“I wonder…”) and obfuscating. It should read, “Our church problem is that it’s not religious enough,” for this is where the problem lies.

Richard Rohr has said, “Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God,” meaning religion in its contemporary sense of organized institutions. When you move to “experiential knowledge,” what James calls “primary religion,” Rohr says, “it’s spiritual.”

So, does institutional religion exist for the purpose of avoiding an encounter with God? I think you can make a good case that it does. It certainly is a theme of the Old Testament prophets. In one of his most cutting denunciations, Amos declares,

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

And when Jesus overturns the money changers’ tables in the temple, he says,

It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.

As John Dominic Crossan has said, Jesus’ action symbolically “destroys” the temple. He puts a stop to its normal operation, thus putting an end to temple religion.

Structured religion attempts to formalize our experience of God: this is where and when you should pray, these are the rituals you should perform, this is what you should believe, these are the teachers and preachers you should listen to. So long as the religious tradition and its designated leaders are believed and trusted, participants find this comforting and reassuring. They trust that God is indeed present in religion’s various manifestations, but rarely if ever have what James calls “a direct experience of the holy.”

Today, however, that confidence is much diminished. Religion’s historical origins are now seen as more human than divine. So too is its leadership, sullied in the exposure of countless personal scandals and cases of institutional corruption and abuse of power. Religious communities are increasingly distracted by social and political concerns, maintenance of property and assets, and organizational power struggles.

Hazelwood says, “People are hungry and starved for primary religious experience. I wonder if our religion problem is that it’s not religious enough.” There isn’t any “wondering” about it. The only thing to wonder is, whether religion can recreate itself to be the primary facilitator of people’s spiritual encounter with God, or is this the time when something new is arising to take its place.

No time for nostalgia

No time for nostalgia

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Shortly before Christmas, a pastor Facebook friend posted a bit of a rant. Why do so few churches offer late night Christmas Eve services anymore, he asked. And why have most dropped Christmas Day services altogether? I understood where he was coming from. I remember as a child going bleary-eyed to our church’s 11:00 PM (and only) Christmas Eve service. The sanctuary was filled past capacity, with folding chairs in the aisles. (And then we lit individual hand candles—a fire marshal’s nightmare!)

Now it’s a different story. Most services are in the evening or even late afternoon, and often no Christmas morning service is offered. In this, churches are responding to the desires and schedules of their members. My ranting pastor friend understood this. Culture has changed and people are doing lots of other things on Christmas Eve. But in the past, worship was the highpoint of the day.

They planned their Christmas celebrations around the church service rather than seeing it as an inconvenience or interruption.

In other words, people’s priorities are screwed up. But in his view, this also reflects a misunderstanding of what Christmas is about.

At the risk of seeming overly pious or dogmatic I ask, what is it again we’re celebrating? Is it family, particularly our own families? Or is it the birth of Jesus who brought the message of the place of all people in God’s family? Before long, if not already, Christmas will be little more than a cultural celebration with but a little religious window dressing for the more nostalgic.

I appreciate his frustration and early in my ministry shared it to a degree. But not anymore. I don’t see people as the problem. Rather, I see nostalgia preventing the self-examination churches need to remake themselves for a different time. My Facebook pastor friend never explains why a late service is better than an early one. That’s the way it was and the way it should be.

Of course, worship attendance has been declining across the board for decades, and the church’s festivals have not been exempted. For most people, both Christmas and Easter are now largely secular, family-oriented events. They, along with Thanksgiving, make up the national trifecta of big sit-down meal family gatherings.

For the church, beating the dead-horses of Christmas and Easter past isn’t going to change that. The symbolic meaning of these days and others like them are too faded now. My Facebook friend asks the right question: What are we celebrating? The voices singing “Jesus is born!” “Jesus is raised! Alleluia!” have gotten less enthusiastic and more uncertain over the years, and the celebration more anemic.

While the church knew better in the past, today it’s assumed these days are commemorating an event. Many evangelical churches have jumped the shark by declaring Christmas to be “a birthday party for Jesus.” Yet modern Bible scholars agree that we have no idea when Jesus was born (the December date having been adopted by the church in the 4th century), and that he was likely born in Nazareth, and almost certainly not Bethlehem. Further, only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, have birth stories at all, and they contradict each other more than agree. Mark, John, and Paul say almost nothing about it.

Similarly, Easter has lost much of its credibility as a datable event. For Paul, the source of the earliest writings in the New Testament, Jesus’ resurrection was demonstrated by visions he and others had some time after Jesus’ death. Mark, the earliest gospel, closes his work with an empty tomb but no appearance of Jesus. Such appearances are added, in different and often contradictory ways, by Matthew, Luke, and John.

Today, many scholars believe the historical “Easter experience” was a series of visions of the risen Jesus by his disciples sometime after his death (and the first may have been to women). To tell the Jesus’ story decades later, Mark created the empty tomb scene to bring his gospel to a dramatic and meaningful conclusion. His successors decided it would work even better to add the risen Jesus to the story, which they each do in unique and inconsistent ways.

Now most people, in or out of the church, may be largely unaware of these modern viewpoints. Nonetheless, to the average person the significance of Christmas, Easter, and the other “events” the church celebrates have all faded. But it’s the modern critical understanding of them that prevents the church from seriously re-energizing them in the old way. We know too much to do it with a straight face.

What’s to be done? This is where nostalgia gets in the way. It’s hard to forget those overflow holiday worship crowds. But they’re not coming back, no matter how the Christmas Eve schedule gets arranged, or whether on Easter you have multiple brass players, a hundred lilies, and a brunch and egg hunt (with a bunny!). In short, the church needs to give up on saving Christmas, Easter, and the whole culture-shaping milieu it created and presided over in the ancient and medieval Western world.

Lent is around the corner, and it provides a guide to what these days and seasons can be about. For Lent is not about what happened in the past but what is happening in our lives now. This was the focus of Jesus’ ministry but its one the church lost when it prioritized “saving souls.” By elevating Jesus’ life into heaven, it forgot that Jesus’ primary revelation was who we all are created to be here and now.

Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation of God in each of us, revealed in the life of Jesus. Lent and Easter present the dying and rising experience we all must undergo to set aside the false self of the ego and discover our true Self in God, enlivened by the Spirit of Pentecost. Learning how this new life happens and what it looks like ought to be the focus of the church’s life, in worship and everything else it does, even if it doesn’t get a folding-chair crowd.