Hilton Head Island, SC – September 29, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:38-48; Matthew 6:1-8
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8 (RSV)
Is progressive Christianity in decline? Yes. Without question the answer is Yes. Progressive Christianity most certainly is in numerical decline.
But what is “progressive Christianity?” It used to be called liberal Christianity, and later mainline Protestantism, until the word “liberal” became so negative to so many people that liberal Christians started to call themselves “progressives.” Over time, certain words come into and go out of vogue, and “liberal” is a word which was popular in the 1950s through the 1970s. But anybody who was “liberal” then, theologically or politically, is “progressive” now.
On the back of the bulletin each Sunday is a description of what The Chapel Without Walls is perceived to be, at least by the particular person who wrote that description nearly ten years ago. It says we are “a nondenominational, inclusive, progressive worship community.” Each of those adjectives was carefully chosen to make a strong emotional and theological appeal to the small flocks of progressives which the man who wrote those words thought would be pouring into our services every Sunday.
If you have been here very long, you may not recall any flocks ever flocking and relatively few people who would conceive themselves to be either liberals or progressives have entered into the sacred walls of Congregation Beth Yam or the non-walls of the Chapel Without Walls, since we decided from the beginning never to own our own walls - - - thank God. Financially we barely survive. If we owned a building, we would have trickled out of existence years ago. A recent Shoe cartoon in The Island Packet come close to giving an accurate depiction of our financial status. The Treetops minister, a very portly bird of some sort, says to Shoe, the avian editor of the Treetops Tattler, “The economy of the past few years has really hit the church hard, Shoe.” “Is the parish in arrears, Padre?” Shoe asks. “Afraid so,” says the padre. “If only Moses were here to part the red ink.”
Is progressive Christianity in decline? You cannot create a universe on the basis of one very small congregation of theological and social liberals and progressives located on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which is not widely recognized to be a bastion of liberalism in the first place. But I can tell you honestly that virtually all mainline Protestant denominations (meaning liberals or progressives) have lost millions of members since the late 1960s. Most of those people didn’t gravitate to evangelical churches; they just stopped going to church altogether. Thousands of small and medium-sized mainline churches have permanently closed their doors. Their buildings either were abandoned, sold to evangelicals, or became funky restaurants or nightclubs.
Furthermore, at least since the end of the Seventies, progressive Christians have attended church much less frequently than evangelical Protestants or old-line Catholics. Many evangelicals and Catholics think that if they don’t go to church they will certainly go to hell, but since liberals for the most part don’t believe in hell, they don’t believe they are required by God to go to church either. So they don’t.
When I convinced a small group of people ten years ago to become founding participants in this congregation, I mistakenly assumed that scores or even a few hundred people who had known me in a previous life and who had stopped going to church altogether would begin once again attending here. It was not to be. They had grown accustomed to the faces of one another at home on Sunday mornings, and they decided they liked their new life. Conservative Christians feel guilty about not going to church , but not liberals. And so we started out small and we have remained definitely, perhaps even defiantly, small, ever since.
I want to go back to the two buzz words for this sermon, “liberal” and “progressive.” They really mean the same thing, but they have not been used interchangeably very much in the past 100+ years. At the turn of the 20th century, “the Progressive Movement” in politics came into its own. People such as Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs, Robert LaFollette, Ida Tarbell, and others represented a new outlook with a high regard for social consciousness. Teddy Roosevelt is the best example, with his trustbuster, environmentalist, anti-monopolist views. In foreign policy and military matters he was ordinarily anything but progressive, but in these other factors he was really quite liberal for his time. In 1924 Senator Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket. He received 13 electoral college votes, the Democrat John Davis got 136, and the Republican, “Silent Cal” Coolidge, got 382. Theodore Rex represented the highwater mark of progressive politics in the early 20th century, and Senator LaFollette represented the start of its decline. From then on, “progressive politics” became “liberal politics,” the kind espoused by FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Eisenhower and Nixon were fairly moderate conservatives as compared to Robert Taft, who was a conservative conservative, as was Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were moderate liberals, and George H.W. Bush was a moderate conservative.
I make these observations not to try to stir up a political discussion but rather to suggest that words such as liberal, progressive, conservative, or evangelical change their meanings, or at least their linguistic emphases, as time passes. I personally prefer “liberal” to “progressive,” because in the time in which I was becoming one, the word used to describe this type of person or thought was “liberal” rather than “progressive.” To repeat, however, “liberal” became so freighted with odious verbal baggage that many liberals have jettisoned it in favor of “progressive.” And the question is this: Is progressive Christianity in decline? And the answer, without question, is: Yes.
However, if the truth is told, so is evangelical or Roman Catholic and every other category of Christianity somewhat in decline, at least in the western world. Catholics and evangelicals, especially Southern Baptists, are notorious at inflating the numbers of active adherents. Gallup polls which state how many people go to church regularly are also highly suspect. The numbers of Americans actually in church or synagogue each week are considerably lower than the numbers reported by the media or by the churches or synagogues themselves.
I am now going to make two major generalizations. And, as Churchill said, “Beware of all generalizations, including this one,” or in this case, these two. In general, Catholics and evangelicals are primarily concerned about believing the right things, whereas progressive or liberal Christians are mainly concerned about doing the right things. In the Old Testament, the main thrust was on doing the right things (following the religious law), but in the New Testament the emphasis was on believing the right things. However, the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels said far more about doing than believing, but the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel said almost nothing about doing and almost everything about believing. Paul also was into believing more than doing. Please realize that I am talking about emphases in a “both/and” situation, not in a stark “either/or” situation.
Another way to state this is to suggest that conservative Christians focus more on faith, while liberal Christians focus more on action. “Actions speak louder than words,” say the progressives. In response, conservatives say, “Tell me what you believe, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
The Old Testament prophets wrote extensively about both beliefs and action, but in general, their focus was more on deeds. How we live explains who we are, they said.
The prophet Micah was active about 750 BCE. The middle of the 8th century Before the Common Era was the most fruitful and influential period of prophecy in the entire history of the Jews. Isaiah and Micah were living in the southern kingdom of Judah at the time, and Hosea and Amos were in the northern kingdom of Israel. There no doubt were cultural, political, and religious factors which explain this surge of prophetic activity, and we know about some of those factors, but not all of them.
It is not always clear who is doing the “speaking” (so to speak) in the prophets. Is it the prophet himself, or is it God, or is it the whole people of Israel? We must read carefully to know.
The most familiar verses of the prophet Micah are the first eight verses of the sixth chapter. This was our responsive reading for this morning. This section begins with God speaking to Israel. “Hear what the Lord says: Arise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hears your voice.” Then Micah says that God says God has a bone to pick with His people. God shall “contend with Israel” (6”2).
And why will God do this? Because He rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt, and gave them leaders, and led them through the forty years of the wilderness wandering, and yet they did not respond affirmatively to the saving acts of God. They thought that “being religious” was all that mattered, and that they did splendidly, they thought.
Micah expresses these words as what he considered to be the essential theological basis of life among most Israelites. “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?” (6:6) Then, going into prophetic hyperbole, which many of the prophets were often wont to do, Micah asked, depicting the average Israelite of his time, “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (6:7)
Sacrifice had become a centerpiece of Israelite religion, and Micah’s words reflect that. Sacrifice isn’t important in Micah’s view. Obviously what he says is an overstatement, but he does that for a reason. True religion, says Micah, is not a matter of religious observances! You can’t get right with God by going to church and participating in the liturgy and praying the prayers of confession and giving generous offerings! So then what does constitute genuine devotion to God, according to Micah?
And now comes the best-known verse of Micah, indeed one of the best-known verses in the Bible, at least according to progressive or liberal or mainline Christians. “He has showed you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (6:8)
Being properly religious doesn’t mean going to the temple to sacrifice animals in order to have your sins forgiven, nor does it mean going to church every Sunday in order to curry favor with God. Instead it mainly means doing things in the world, not in the religious community! It means to do justice (an active verb yoked with a divine requirement for the world), to love kindness (another active verb yoked with one of the greatest of biblical virtues), and to walk humbly with your God (an active verb closely connected to a biblically-based adverb), and we are to do that on behalf of God. Don’t boast in your religion; keep it modest, for heaven’s sake.
Religious people who believe belief is more important than deeds done in the world tend to focus on the religious community as the center of their lives. Thus their local church or their particular denomination or branch of Christianity is the most important thing in their lives.
Religious people who believe that what they do in life matters more than what they believe tend to focus on the world more than on the religious community. Thus in times of religious transition toward conservatism, conservative churches may tend to grow, whereas progressive or liberal churches may tend to shrink. Does the Church (with a capital “C”) exist on behalf of itself, or on behalf of the world? To overstate it, conservatives think religion exists for itself, and liberals think it exists for the benefit of the world.
What does God think? I don’t know. I know what I think, but I don’t know what God thinks. But I am convinced of this: all churches in the USA are affected by declining attendance, and that is especially true of progressive churches.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew depicted a Jesus who talked more about what we should do than about what we believe. The writer of the Gospel of John depicted a Jesus who was devoted almost exclusively to what we should believe, not to what we should do. Anyway, the Sermon on the Mount is mainly a collection of the sayings of Jesus on what we should do. Do not resist one who is evil, give to those who beg from you, love your enemies, beware of practicing your piety before others, give your offerings quietly, pray unobtrusively. Don’t be ostentatious in your religiosity. In fact, be so quiet in your religiosity that no one even knows whether you are religious. In that millions of liberal Christians pass the test in flying colors, except that no one knows their colors are even flying. Progressive Christians have always been models of flying under everyone’s radar. Conservatives like people to know who they are.
Liberals and progressives shall have their day again, but probably not in our lifetime. A recent poll suggested that among young people 18 to 33, 25% are “religious progressives,” and only 17% are religious conservatives. Another poll said that 59% of Americans say that being a religious person “is primarily about living a good life and doing the right thing,” while only 36% said it is “primarily about having faith and the right beliefs.” Three cheers for our side!
Nevertheless, what does God require of us, those of us who are on the mainline/liberal/progressive side of the spectrum? Micah is our prophetic guide and mentor. “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” If we do that, we being who we are, we will exhibit our own religious inclinations in our own liberal, very low-key way. And we’ll have to wait till the Day of Judgment to see if God approves, if we believe in a Day of Judgment, which we, being the noble progressives that we are, probably don’t believe. But if we show what we believe by what we do, we can’t go too far wrong. So says Micah and so says Jesus, so says I.