Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

God, Postmodernity, and the Common Life of Three Congregations  

Transcribed from the sermon preached June 8, 2008

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Is. 40

28] Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
his understanding is unsearchable.
[29] He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
[30] Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
[31] but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

Eph. 4:

[1] I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,
[2] with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love,
[3] eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
[4] There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call,
[5] one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
[6] one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Five years ago James Lee came to the leadership of St. John's and said he needed a place for new congregation of college age students to worship. Over a year ago, Patrice dropped in and said he was starting a church with French speaking Africans. It has been said that the most segregated time in America is Sunday morning.  Certainly, to the degree this separation is because of racism, or prejudice, it is contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  On the other hand, to the degree that it represents the incarnate Christ, and God’s ability to come and speak the Good News where we are at, this is a beautiful gift and should be celebrated.

The early church was running into similar difficulties to which Paul responds in Ephesians.  The Jews lived one way, the Gentiles another.  The Jews had certain laws and expectations for worshippers of God and the Gentiles had another.  Paul was not against cultural distinction, but he was against making the norms and laws of culture into the norms and laws of the Gospel.  God’s grace through the risen Christ comes to us where we are, through our language, music, food and culture, but it is God’s grace, not the culture that unites and saves.  Our prayer and hope, since Pentecost forward, is that the Holy Spirit will lead us to celebrate and worship the one God, regardless of our language or culture.

The prayer and hope for a lot of churches in America is to be big. America is the land of big.  We like super sizes and big gulps, big houses, big cars, big churches.  Big is good.  Now there is a certain size below which it is difficult to survive: we need a big enough loaf of bread so that our family will not starve.  We need enough members and resources so that our churches can sustain ministry.  And, it is true that when the Holy Spirit is not found in a congregation, when it fails to speak the Gospel to the current culture, it will have a hard time keeping or attracting new people.  Why will people come if there is no Good News?

On the other hand, I don’t know what the population of French Speaking Africans is in the East Bay, but I am certain it is not that large.  I would be surprised if Église Franco-Américaine would grow American size big with thousands, but isn’t it beautiful and important that God brings the Gospel in French to Africans in the East Bay? 

And there is nothing about the Gospel message preached by James that says Living Water is only for Asian College kids, even though he did start his evangelism with kids on campus, and this is reflected in who comes to worship at 1:30 on Sunday.  It is also reflected in limited resources: I do not imagine we are going to see James driving around in a Mercedes Benz anytime soon, or Living Water venturing off day after tomorrow to construct another facility like this one, at least not until some of your graduate students become the next Bill Gates.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am only saying this is not likely. Who knows what God will choose to do?  And, more importantly, isn’t it beautiful what God is doing in your lives and worship now? Isn't it wonderful that James has answered God's call to this ministry?

Back in the day when most everybody in this part of Berkeley was Anglo Saxon, St. John’s was big, one thousand members and probably four hundred in worship.  The city integrated and became more secular; many white people left the neighborhood or the faith.  And perhaps we became a bit petrified in style and in our intellectualism, hung on a bit too long to methods that proved successful for previous generations, and lost some of the power and grace of a personal relationship with God.  The congregation shrank and I imagine there were some who wondered whether St. John's would survive to see its 100th birthday.  It feels to me that the power and grace of God is ever more visible here at St. John’s, and our energy and numbers are beginning to reflect that.  Even as we loosen and liven up our worship, even though we have Asian, African, Latin American and European members, we still serve a particular niche, and gone is the day when we can expect everyone to be fed by one way of doing things.  Who knows what God will do? Surely we can expect great things, but I doubt we will ever grow to the numbers we had in the 50s and 60s.  On the other hand, five years ago there was one service and sixty worshippers, now there are three services and close to two hundred fifty worshippers each Sunday.  The growing numbers and the Church are not ours; they are God’s.  Have we now known, have we not heard, the Lord is an everlasting God; he does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. They who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings like eagles.

And big is not what we are called to be.  We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ. What we need to do is speak and live the love and grace of God any which way we can. It doesn’t matter how old we are, where we come from, what we look like, the type of music we play or what language we speak, there is just one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father and Mother of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.

I forget who said that America is a great “melting pot,” conjuring up the image of immigrant cultures losing their distinctiveness and melting into one. We might attribute it to postmodernity, but a better, more accurate analogy for today may be the salad bowl: where the ingredients don’t lose their distinctive shape, taste or color, yet nevertheless join together to form a beautiful, tasty, nutritious meal.  Paul uses the analogy of the body; each body part serves its purpose, and Christ is the head.

And whether recognized or not, ever since Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came into the disciples and they began to speak in many languages, the Church has always been more like a salad bowl than a melting pot.  Some Christians today say that Christianity should be against culture, separate from culture.  But we understand the world through our culture, and therefore if the Gospel is going to come alive for us, it will come through culture. 

Rather than being against, the Gospel both transforms and preserves culture.  The Church has been criticized for destroying culture, for being imperialistic and ethnocentric - and for good reason.  Yet despite the cultural blindness and arrogance of many missionaries, the saving, liberating Gospel has come through.  And in many cases the missionaries themselves are transformed, and wind up being advocates for indigenous peoples, and advocates for change within their own culture.

Lamen Sanneh, an African convert to Christianity from Islam and professor of Mission at Yale, explains in his book Encountering the West, that in order for missionaries to communicate, for instance, that the One God sent His only Son Jesus, they had to use the indigenous word for God.  The word already existed and may have had a meaning quite different than the way missionaries might have understood it.  Yet this image of God was already understood, indeed intimately known by the people through their culture.  Through translation, the Word, Jesus, the One God of the Hebrew and Greeks, transforms Himself, makes Herself known in different ways to many different peoples and cultures.

Sanneh writes, “The good shepherd image would have confused rather than enlightened an Eskimo congregation.  Yet detailed attention to indigenous particularity fostered unprecedented pluralism within the general theme of world Christianity.  The psalmist may declare that God is a shield or a rock, Luther that God is a mighty fortress or bulwark, or a western liberal that God is the God of motivation, without any of them excluding other descriptions of God.  Such as the Wet-Nosed One of the cattle owning culture, the One-of-the-Sacred-Stake of the pig herding people, the Nimble-Footed-One of the sacred dance, and the Long-Necked-One of the hunting group.  When missionaries translated the word God into the languages of these different cultures, the One God became intimate, known and knowing in all these many ways…”

          God through Christ has come and knows and cares for us all, where we are, as we are. “Cultural signs and symbols which differentiate us in our respective particularities unite us in our relationship with God.”  We are created and blessed with uniqueness, yet bound together through our relationship with the One God.

          Several decades ago, my friend and mentor Ben Weir was taken hostage in Lebanon, and kept in solitary isolation for nine months.  For nine months he never saw another human face.  Very quickly he feared the loss of his sanity.  Then he began to worship.  Every Sunday he would break off a piece of the bread he was given for his meal and set it aside.  After the guards would leave, he would take off his blindfold and repeat those words that Jesus said at the Last Supper.  Then he would eat the small piece of bread.  Ben said this sharing of communion kept him from going insane, because he knew that all throughout the world Christians were doing the exact same thing, and by sharing in this ritual, in the eating of that tiny piece of bread, he felt the presence of the very great spirit which united him with millions.      

Today we break bread together, but every time we partake of this feast, together or separate, by the grace of God, we are united together as the One Body of Christ, and nourished and empowered to go out and carry the Good News of God’s justice, grace, peace and love to all the world.