In our lifetimes, the Church has gone through a great deal of change and trouble. The older you are, the more you can testify to that. Actually, if you read the New Testament much at all, passages such as the ones we have today (Philippians 3:17-4:1 and Luke 13:23-35) will probably convince you that the church was born in troubled times. The specific troubles have changed through the centuries, but if you read much church history, you’ll be hard pressed to find a time when the church wasn’t going through some sort of crisis.
I was born in 1955, the year when church attendance in the United States reached a peak at 49 percent of the American public telling George Gallup that they attended church in the same week he asked the question. Not just some of the time, but half of the United States population had been in church that week. Some people even said that you had to be a churchgoer in order to be a good American, though of course not everyone felt that way.
However, church attendance began to decline as soon as it had peaked. It was gradual at first. By 1966, the percentage was down to 44 percent. Fast forward to 2013 and the Gallup organization reported polls showing weekly church attendance down to 37 percent. A different poll found that by 2010, only 30 percent of Americans said they attended church weekly, while many more – 43 percent – said they attended church rarely or never.
Back when I was born, church leaders must have felt on top of the world. The economy was great, unemployment was low, and people were building new homes in new suburban neighborhoods that were rising up out of cotton fields and cow pastures. New churches were being planted in all those neighborhoods, and large, modern sanctuaries were built to hold hundreds of people. The fifties were a time of great optimism in the church.
How quickly things can change. By the time I turned ten in the 1960s, church leaders had started using the word ‘crisis’ to describe what was happening. In 1969, a sociologist named Jeffrey Hadden published a book entitled The Gathering Storm in the Churches: A Sociologist Looks at the Widening Gap Between Clergy and Laymen. Hadden made the case that the church in America was becoming irrelevant, in part because it hadn’t been very prophetic. In fact, it was doing the opposite of being prophetic: the American church had come to embody and defend the status quo in American culture, not challenge it.
Hadden laid out three kinds of crisis that had come to challenge the American church. The first crisis was over the very purpose and nature of the church. A number of clergy in the sixties had gotten involved with the civil rights movement. It isn’t hard to find Biblical support for justice and equality, and seminary studies seemed to open a lot of pastoral eyes. They interpreted the Bible to mean that the American institutions of slavery and then racial segregation hadn’t represented the gospel of Christ very well. But a lot of lay leaders didn’t agree, and in church after church they withheld donations or voted out the pastors who preached on civil rights or other ‘social issues.’ This conflict opened up a rift in nearly every denomination that led many to question the moral integrity of the church.
In 1965, the Anglican Church of Canada was looking for a fresh approach to its Lenten study series. The series had gotten pretty stale, and very few people bothered to read it. The decision was made to ask Pierre Berton, a well-known Canadian journalist, to write a study guide for them even though Mr. Berton was not an Anglican or even particularly a churchgoer. He was a “name,” as we would say today. It was a bold step. Mr. Berton came back with a challenging book entitled The Comfortable Pew. The book succeeded in one sense beyond all expectations; within six months it had outsold every other book ever published in Canada.
But the book was a bombshell in another sense. It said that Anglicans and all other Christians had simply ceased to matter in the modern world. Berton declared that the voice of the church had become “weak, tardy, equivocal, and irrelevant… The Church to its opponents has become a straw man, scarcely worth a bullet.”
Berton pointed out that the church had failed to take any strong prophetic stands until after the rest of society had already taken them and moved on:
“It has all but been forgotten that Christianity began as a revolutionary religion whose followers embraced an entirely different set of values from those held by other members of society. Those original values are still in conflict with the values of contemporary society; yet religion today has become as conservative a force as the original Christians were in conflict with.” (The Comfortable Pew, p. 80)
So much for the first crisis. Jeff Hadden described the second crisis of the church as a crisis of belief. In 1963 an Anglican bishop named John A. T. Robinson published a little book called Honest to God. We don’t hear much about it anymore, but like The Comfortable Pew it became an immediate best seller. It set off a firestorm by claiming that the image of God held by the typical churchgoer was a bad or just outdated image. He tried to translate the academic work of contemporary theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich for the masses, who of course don’t often read many serious theology books.
But the masses fought back! Many of them couldn’t separate their traditional image of God from the worship of God himself, so they thought that Bishop Robinson was saying that God didn’t exist. C. S. Lewis thought the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot; he said that most people “had long abandoned the belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time.” But the controversy lived on and even expanded.
The crisis of belief had many sources other than Bishop Robinson’s book, but it led to tremendous conflicts within religious bodies that continue into our day. The seminary I attended – and the Louisiana College that some of you attended – were both forever changed by the reaction to that conflict, and not for the better.
Hadden’s third crisis was a crisis of authority. Churches are voluntary associations, meaning that people choose whether or not to attend. If they don’t like a particular pastor or lay leader, they are free to go to another church or to go nowhere at all. I remember my mother once saying that in her day, meaning the 1940s, if the pastor of a church like First Baptist Dallas said something, it never occurred to her to question it. By the time I was a teenager, that wasn’t so much the case. I remember being disappointed in a young assistant pastor who told my mother that the Simon and Garfunkel song, Mrs. Robinson, was sacrilegious. I told Mom that, to the contrary, I thought Jesus would appreciate the song’s message, which wasn’t anti-God as much as it skewered the hypocrisy of modern religion. The sixties were a tough time for pastors who expected their authority to be respected.
Much of American religion in the mid-twentieth century assumed that everyone ought to go to church. It wasn’t just a religious duty; it was a civic duty. American neighborhoods were supposed to have at least one neighborhood church. If you didn’t go to church every week, and many of course didn’t, then at least you were supposed to be a member somewhere.
All this leads us back to a basic question: do we really expect everybody to be a full-fledged person of authentic faith? Is being a Christian really so easy that everyone not only can do it, but will want to do it?
Jesus didn’t seem to think so. In our passage from Luke today, some unnamed person has obviously been disturbed by what Jesus teaches. He asks Jesus, “Lord, are you telling me that only a few will be saved?” You can imagine the unspoken “Surely not!” It sounded as though entering the kingdom could be a challenge. Here’s what Jesus said:
13:24 Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able…
13:29 Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.
13:30 Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
Jesus made the kingdom of God sound important, but he never made it sound easy. He never seemed to assume that everyone in the country would find it convenient or take it for granted. In fact, Jesus warned his fellow Israelites not to assume they were ‘safe’ with respect to God just because they were Israelites. In the same way, many people in our country today assume that they are ‘safe’ or ‘correct’ because they’re Americans, or because they belong to God’s favorite church.
But Jesus repeats in verse 29 something of what almost got him killed in his hometown synagogue (see Luke 4): people from outside of Israel – east and west, north and south – will ‘eat in the kingdom of God.’ Those whom we think of as last will end up being first in the kingdom, and those who think of themselves as first, will find that God has put them last.
Jesus went so far as to say that Jerusalem, the capital city, was already far gone away from the kingdom. Most people back then called Jerusalem the “city of God” because it was the political center of Israel as well as the religious center. Jerusalem had the one and only Temple, a fantastic edifice where Jews came from all over the world to worship. Jesus shocked his listeners when he said that Jerusalem wasn’t what they thought. Jesus labelled Jerusalem as the place that killed God’s prophets, the place that rejected the son of God.
We need to be very careful not to repeat the mistakes Jesus warned Israel about so long ago. Jesus honored the prophets, those bold men and women who pointed out where their country failed to provide justice and a decent life for the poor. Prophets denounced rich people who enjoyed luxury when others had no food. Prophets said things like “Do justice and love mercy.” They focused their warnings on their own country’s leaders because they cared more about the kingdom of God than any kingdom of men – even their own.
Jesus warned us not to trust to our institutions to protect our spirituality. He warned us that human institutions, even religious ones, can be just as likely to threaten authentic faith as to promote it. It’s dangerous to assume that because we belong to the right church or the right country, God is happy with us.
The challenge for us who would follow Jesus today is to do so honestly, with integrity. Simply going along with what our religious friends and family think is no guarantee that we opened ourselves to follow the Christ who sacrificed all for us. As someone said long ago, it’s possible to be sincere and sincerely mistaken at the same time.
So what are we to do? Perhaps the first thing is to stop looking to our culture or our institutions to do our spiritual work for us. That’s the wide door that most people use. It’s important for us to take the narrow door, to meet God ourselves and not rely on someone else’s report about him. We look to the God who created our world and then placed us in it, the God of love who calls us to follow in loving even ‘the least of these,’ the God of justice who cares about widows and orphans and the poor. Especially in this political season, that’s the road less traveled.
The good news is that this God of love and justice and creation cares about us and is available to us. We cannot achieve our own salvation; our job is to empty ourselves and open ourselves to his presence. If we follow that divine presence in our lives, we will find ourselves caring about different things than others do. We may find ourselves bored by the things everyone else finds exciting. But we will find joy in the following, joy in the praying, joy in just being who we were created to be.
I’ve often thought that the church of my youth had gotten off on the wrong track. Back then we spent a lot of time developing our intellects for God. That’s not a bad thing; I’m for it. But intellect isn’t the core business of the church. Living out the kingdom of God is. That takes faith, humility, and openness to God’s presence. Intellect helps, but you can be as dumb as a box of hammers and still live out the kingdom. The last shall be first. The first shall be last.
I’m encouraged that the church in some quarters has begun to take a contemplative course. It’s about becoming aware of God’s presence in our world. It’s not about achievement or authority or orthodoxy; it’s about love and service. Really. It’s about learning to listen and pray in silence. It’s about emptying ourselves and allowing God to fill and transform us. It’s about a lifelong journey of prayer and faith.
The door is not narrow because it’s hard. It’s narrow because most people won’t want it. And no institutional system will make it any wider or more popular. The challenge is whether we live it and learn to love it.
Let’s pray together now:
God of our hearts, we confess in this Lenten season that we often seek to take the easy road,
the road with fewer stones and bumps, the road where everyone seems to be on autopilot.
Help us to remember our ultimate goal: to know you, and in knowing you, to know ourselves.
When we feel at odds with our world, help us remember that the world has rejected you.
Forgive us our lack of courage.
Help us to pray.
Amen.
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