Hilton Head Island, SC – November 10, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
II Corinthians 4:13-5:1; II Timothy 4:1-8
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings. – II Tim. 4:3 (RSV)
An introductory word at the outset: This sermon in going to be a “teaching” sermon, not a “preaching” sermon. It will be didactic, not declarative, prosaic, not poetic.
The dictionary has several definitions for the word “culture,” but the two I want us to think about are these: “5a : the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts and depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”
Certain types of clothing are emblematic of Orthodox Jewish culture, while distinctly different clothes symbolize the culture of the American Southwest. Navajo rugs symbolize a certain kind of American Indian culture, and boiled peanuts and collard greens are equated with Southern culture. Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a cultural slice of education in an early twentieth-century English boys’ school, and Blackboard Jungle is a cultural expression of American urban education in the middle of the twentieth century.
Sometimes we suppose that “culture” equates to “refined.” Thus some imagine that classical music is superior to rock music, Fetzer wine is preferable to Two Buck Chuck, a Ralph Lauren button-down is better than a tee shirt. Rock bands, Two Buck Chuck, and tee shirts are also examples of a sort for culture, however, and their relative value depends on the one who doing the evaluating. One or two hundred or five or ten thousand years after they were buried beneath the earth’s surface, archaeologists dig up the artifacts of peoples and cultures to try to piece together how people lived way back when and what gave meaning to their civilizations.
Religion plays an important part in every culture. We speak of Hindu culture, Buddhist culture, Jewish culture, Christian culture, and Muslim culture. Wherever major religions have had a long and strong impact on the societies in which they flourish, the people living there may be unaware of the origin of many of the things they say and do, but the dominant religion may provide the cultural explanation for much of their behavior. Honesty and integrity are promoted because of what religion teaches, fairness and justice are sought because the Bible proclaims them, and young people who never attend church respect those virtues because they grew up in a Christian culture which respects those values.
Culture is both visible and invisible, material and spiritual, tangible and intangible. It is all around us everywhere we look, but we don’t think about it very much, because it just “is.” It is the framework upon which our way of life is built.
Most of us had ancestors who emigrated to this country from Christian lands in Europe. Southern Europe had an essentially Christian culture for almost two thousand years, western and eastern Europe for fifteen hundred years or so, far northern Europe for a thousand years. Most of our forebears who came here came as Christians of one sort or another. They didn’t always get along with one another in the old country, and they didn’t necessarily get along with one another in the new country, but they did live together fairly amicably, and they created their own Christian culture in the New World on the basis of what they brought from the Old World. Eventually Americans established one of the most pervasive Christian cultures in the world. Even today, when church attendance has markedly fallen off, the United States of America still has perhaps the highest level of regular religious observance of all the nations on earth.
Christian culture practically disappeared in North Africa, the Middle East, and what is now Turkey after the Muslim Conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries. It was there in great strength, and then it was gone. A religious culture has no guarantee in perpetuity.
According to the Pew Foundation Research Center, only 49% of American millennials identity themselves as Christians. Millennials are those who were born in the generation just before the year 2000. Of Americans seventy and over, 84% identify themselves as Christians. In just two generations, American Christian culture has markedly eroded. In other words, nearly twice as many people the age of most of the folks in our congregation see themselves as citizens of a Christian culture as do the generation of our grandchildren. Millennials live in what they experience as a secular culture, if they think about that at all.
The percentage of Americans who identity as Christians has fallen 12% in just the last decade; twelve percent! Sociologists define “nones” (n-o-n-e-s) as those who claim no religion. Nones are now one-quarter of the American population. There are more American nones than Catholics, and of course I’m not talking about Catholic sisters in religious orders. A large majority of Americans attend church only a few times a year, if that --- mainly Christmas and Easter.
Many people have become disaffected with all the churches. Churches are hypocritical, they say. And churches are hypocritical, because people are hypocritical. Those who perceive themselves to be Christians don’t do what they should do, but those who don’t identify with any religion also don’t do what they should do. Many people who have bailed out of Christian culture do so because they suppose rigid evangelical Christianity is the only type of Christianity there is. They read about it wherever they read things or they see it depicted in films or videos, and they are repelled by what appears to be its rigidity and smug certainty. All Christianity is not evangelical Christianity, but many outside Christianity steadfastly choose to see it that way.
Relatively little is known about biographical details from the life of St. Paul. The Book of Acts says a few things about him, and his various letters in the New Testament tell us a bit more. In II Corinthians, he makes the observation that as we get older, we are more aware of the gradual breakdown of our bodies, and how that affects our outlook. He wrote, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed,” (our physical body) “we have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (II Cor. 5:1).
It is my observation that many of the parishioners I have known become more concerned or melancholy about the status of the world as they get older. Speaking for myself, I certainly see that tendency within myself. When we perceive ourselves as being involved in what happens in the world, we are less distressed by it, because we imagine that we are helping to shape what happens. But when we are more advanced in age, and thus less have less energy, we feel we can only watch what is going on around us. Because we no longer have much oomph to affect it, we may become more worried that things are not doing as well as they once did. After all, if we aren’t in the center of the arena, how can the world possibly operate really well?
This is probably what Paul was thinking when he wrote his second letter to his much younger missionary colleague Timothy. In the first verses of the final chapter, he gave Timothy a pep talk on how to carry on with vigor and confidence. Then, as an example of why his younger friend needed to be vigilant, Paul said this: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings. They wil turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths: (II Tim. 4:3-4).
The curious thing about this passage is that there was no solid Christian culture in Paul’s time which was quickly sliding into oblivion. The world was still almost 100% pagan. Christians represented far less than one percent of the population of the Roman Empire by the time Paul died. So how could he be so upset if a few of his converts were backsliding? Backsliding has always occurred among human beings ever since Adam and Eve first munched on the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
Within a thousand years of Paul’s time, however, Christianity had become dominant in Europe. (Islam replaced it in much of the territory where Paul first began his missionary journeys.) The fact is that every religion everywhere ebbs and flows. Things go well and then don’t go so well. But God, who is the focus and essence of every religion, continues on, unaffected by all of it.
Nonetheless, only the most irrepressible of optimists would conclude that Christian culture in America or in most of the places where it was strong centuries ago is flourishing as never before. Not only is Christianity not thriving in many areas where heretofore it has been strong, but the culture it produced is also not thriving. The kind of environment which Christianity produced in some respects has become almost invisible in the present day.
I want to give three brief examples of what I mean by that. The first is the widespread use of very vulgar language. Christian culture has always strongly frowned on vulgarity, as does every advanced culture. On the other hand, the secularized culture in which we are living seems to revel in it.
Consider the various media. Thirty or forty years ago profane language was never heard on radio or television. Foul words were never repeated in the press, nor did newscasters ever use them. Now profanities are frequently used by public personalities or politicians, and video clips are aired in which such words are used without bleeps. In the print media the words are either printed verbatim or with the first letter and then a series of asterisks, leaving the reader no doubt as to what the word was. Why they try to be so coy I don’t know. Many comedians, including late-night comedians, seem to use more four-letter words than shorter or longer words put together. It is as though they are incapable of speaking without the use of profanities.
I can easily imagine that many of us here, both females and males, utter more No-Nos now than we did years ago. We may do it because we think others do it more than when they were younger. Bad behavior can beget bad behavior, and good behavior seems harder to emulate.
Many people seem openly to express their anger with less reticence than in previous years. Wrathful explosions are more likely to erupt in a less cultured society. It isn’t just coaches or team mangers vent their spleen on umpires or referees; too many of us feel free to heap abuse on anyone we think deserves it. We apparently have forgotten that “a soft answer turneth away wrath” (Prov. 15:1), as it sayeth in the King James Version of the Bible. We have also forgotten that “an evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives heed to a mischievous tongue” (Prov. 17:4), as it also says in holy writ. In fact, holy writ is not nearly as much a part of everyday usage as was the case fifty or a hundred years ago. The Bible is no longer familiar to everyone.
Having referred to lying, one of the greatest evidences of the secularization of the former Christian culture is how widely lying is accepted. In many comedies in movies and on television sit-coms, failing to tell the truth is a vital feature of the comedic plot-line. Spouses don’t tell one another the truth, children lie to their parents and vice versa, and we are expected to be amused by or to overlook all that. There was a time when most people would be incensed by it.
If a very well-known public figure frequently chooses not to tell the truth, it may encourage others also to lie. And when the person who is currently the most publicized person in America lies so often that a major newspaper keeps a running account of his lies, and he uses his authority to prevent others under his authority from speaking the truth, we may validly conclude that Christian culture is no longer anywhere close to its zenith. American culture is also past its prime. Our best years were the 1930s through the 1950s. From then on it has been all downhill.
This past week I happened to be speaking to a man who emigrated to the US from a European country over fifty years ago. I officiated at his wedding over thirty years ago.
He told me that he was greatly impressed with the extraordinary honesty of most of the Americans he met when he first came to this country. Now he said he is shocked by how dishonest many of us are. As the years rolled by, he came to a conclusion about two particular groups of people: politicians and lawyers. When his sons were ready to go to college, he pleaded with them that they would never become either a politician or a lawyer.
The decline of Christian culture is a major part of that man’s lament. I can identify with part of what he says. Some of the people I most admired when I was a young and even middle-aged person were politicians of both parties. Now it feels difficult to have unqualified admiration for anyone in politics. In part that is because the media seem capable of successfully digging up dirt on anyone. Too much investigative journalism can sour us on everyone.
As for lawyers, I have known many lawyers whom I admired very highly, both in the congregations I have served and in the communities in which I have lived. I knew state Supreme court justices in both New Jersey and Minnesota who were two of the most stellar human beings I have ever known. I greatly respected a federal Appeals Court judge in Chicago who might have become a US Supreme Court justice had he not had the misfortune of being a Republican during an extended period of Democratic presidents. But today lawyers are at the low end of the totem pole for cultural respectability.
As the title of this sermon suggests, Christian culture ebbs and flows. Things get worse, but eventually they also get better. It is natural for us to lament when things seem to be coming unglued. On such occasions we need to remember that bad cycles are followed by good cycles, that doom and gloom are countered by the dawn of new eras of commitment to the carefully nurtured cultural values of previous generations.”Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching” (II Tim. 4:2). All we can do is all we can do. But we can do that, and therefore we should.
God will never abandon the world. We might, but He won’t. Inevitably Christian culture will regain its strength. Christianity is like dandelions or kudzu; no one can kill it, even if they tried. Good shall ultimately triumph over evil. That is always and only its end.