Sermon

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 26, 2007

The Reverend William Flanders

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When Isaiah tells the king of Judah and his administration in Jerusalem that their alliance with Egypt against an Assyrian invasion will only end in catastrophe, an “overwhelming scourge,” he is fulfilling half of his role as a prophet. That half is to expose the futility of the present social and political policy. Isaiah fulfills the other half of his role as prophet by announcing an alternative, a new possibility: a society based not on fear and military opportunism, but on justice and righteousness.

When Jesus tells his listeners that, for many, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, he, too, is fulfilling half of his role as prophet - letting them know that their life under Roman occupation can only be a continued humiliation and despair. But he also offers the alternative of living under a different regime, that which he calls the Kingdom of God. The gate to that kingdom is narrow, he warns, but the promise is new life.

Contrast these prophetic voices to that of the writer of the 46th psalm. Referring to the then flourishing capital, Jerusalem, he declares with total confidence:

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved...
The Lord of hosts is with us...”

And so it seemed - until the Assyrians invaded, and until the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and dispersed the population.

The psalmist clearly is no prophet; he avoids all criticism. Everything in Jerusalem seems perfect to him. And so, in spite of his stirring poetry and religious devotion, he has nothing new to offer or hope for.

In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann, writes: “It is the task of prophetic imagination to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.” - “To bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.”

There was a time when it seemed that no people were more engaged in the promise of newness than the members of this church of St. Mark’s Capitol Hill. I first came to be convinced of this in 1960 when its rector, Bill Baxter, told our Virginia Seminary class that within fifteen years of graduation, most of us would be burned out. It was the frankness that was new. I had come not to expect this kind of honesty in church circles. A few months later a theater group of St. Mark’s parishoners staged Bertoldt Brecht’s drama Mother Courage in the seminary chapel. This was my first encounter with a new “chancel drama” that wasn’t churchy drama.

When I was Bill’s assistant here in 1965 to 66, all the pews were taken out. How new and how liberating that was! And what followed was also something new: worship fully in the round, with communion being an unselfconscious gathering around the central table, no longer a seemingly individual, kneeling act of devotion at a far altar. At the time I thought that was perhaps as innovative as St. Mark’s could be in worship.

When I came back as a parishoner twenty years ago, I was unsure that St. Mark’s was the right place for me to be. The worship was the same as it had always been. And “more of the same” was the last thing I was looking for. And then I experienced my first sermon seminar. Here, I immediately felt, was something not only new, but extraordinarily inventive and even revolutionary in the church: a chance for any parishoner to respond immediately to a sermon. This was not only new then, it remains new. And for anyone attending the nine o’clock service here for the first time, and staying on for the sermon seminar, it must be an extraordinary experience. Unlike almost anything they have experienced in the midst of worship before.

Recently the idea has been expressed here, and received some sympathetic response, that familiarity with the old brings comfort, while the new and unfamiliar is challenging and un-comfortable. For some, one can accept that this is true. And, in certain cases and situations, this is true for all of us. I’ll admit that I have not yet caught on to all the cadences of the alternative “Our Father” in the Prayer Book. The whole prayer doesn’t flow out of me as the original has always done.’

Yes, the old and familiar may bring comfort, but, in the history of our Judeo-Christian relationship with God, it’s in newness that there’s promise. And it is in the promise of newness that I want to engage us.

One of the most exciting theological assertions I have ever heard is in a book called God After Darwin by the Georgetown University professor John Haught. He writes: “[God]...comes into the world from ‘up ahead,’ out of the realm of the future.” And this, he offers, is a “new understanding of divine transcendence,” one that corresponds “to the God of the Bible, where God is the One who ‘goes before’ the people, leading them to liberty.” God is a God of novelty, in evolution, in thought, in expression, and in action. And the challenge to us, as children and worshipers of God, is to keep following God’s lead, to reach for and live into God’s promise in the new.

In a parish setting this can be done successfully only if it becomes the common goal of both clergy and lay. Leadership may come from any individual, but hope for success in creating something new, especially in the setting and expression of worship, must come from a common vision and a concerted effort. Every major innovation at St. Mark’s has been the result of a vision to which the majority of this parish has said YES!

I have a particular interest and investment in exploring new expressions in worship. I have introduced here both new music and a new wording of the liturgy. And to whatever degree these have touched others’ spirits here, I can only be gratified and thankful. But my deeper concern is for the continued viability of church worship itself, especially in the Episcopal tradition into which I have been ordained.

I mentioned this in a sermon here some time back, and a gentleman, in the sermon seminar, protested strongly that he didn’t want guitars and folk songs invading the worship here he’d come to love. Oh, but guitars and folk songs are sooo sixties! The newness that I believe beckons us into the future is a new expression of our faith, a non-theisitic expression in which God is addressed as the deepest mystery and reality of life, but not as if God were an existing all-powerful being. I believe a non-theistic thology of God has been the spoken and unspoken theology here at St. Mark’s for decades. But we have not allowed this to enter and raise up our Sunday liturgy. And, in this sense, I believe we have missed the chance to affirm, and be a church to, countless persons who long for such honest expression in worship, and don’t believe it’s possible to find it in any Episcopal church.

I have four grown children; my wife Susan has three. There are, so far, four spouses. That makes eleven, young to middle-aged, well educated, reflective, and quite modern adults. Not one of them attends church services anywhere. Why? Is it because none of them has the chance to attend a so-called progressive church like St. Mark’s? I don’t think so. I think it is fair to them, to you, and to Susan and me to say flatly that they wouldn’t feel comfortable in St. Mark’s, in spite of the newness that once was characteristic of the worship of this church. In fact, it might well be that Susan’s and my involving them in worship here, when they were young, has led them to believe that worship is always going to be “more of the same.” That’s fine for the parents, but not necessarily fine for a new generation who want to think and question for themselves.

I know we think St. Mark’s is special, maybe even unique. And we are inclined to praise St. Mark’s in ways not unlike the psalmist praised the wonders of Jerusalem. “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved.” But prophetic imagination counters that God is, indeed, up ahead - coming to us out of the future, and beckoning us into the promise of newness. The challenge to us, and to any church body, is to engage that promise of newness with our imagination and our talents. On this most surely depends the future of St. Mark’s. Amen.