Have you walked on the water lately?
Epiphany II - Sunday January 15th, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)
Have you walked on the water lately? You haven’t? Why not? If you are part of today, then surely you must know that today and tomorrow are totally the result of your thought and your intentions. You are not committed to whatever the past knew. Why haven’t you walked on the water lately?
What a wonderful thing it would be to have someone grab you by your coat on Sunday and say, “Wait, I want to go with you, for I have heard that God is with you.” Would that the desirability of going somewhere that people expected to meet God, were so strong among people we know.
Perhaps it is.
I’ve been reading Reginald Bibby’s latest book, Restless churches: how Canada’s churches can contribute to the emerging religious renaissance. Bibby is a sociologist out of the University of Lethbridge who has been studying religion in Canada and the U.S. since 1975, and is sort of the United Church’s guru. For years he and his co-researchers have documented the decline of religious organizations in Canada, even claiming at one point that Canadians simply were not asking any deep life questions, were not searching for anything. That message had been deeply disquieting, because if people are so disengaged or shallow that they no longer ask questions, then the answers of religion have nothing to say to them.
But now he says that the common press reports, and the research of other organizations, have misled us in understanding religion in Canada today. Bibby counters several previously assumed “facts” about religious participation in Canada.
Attendance is dropping: Across the country, not much. While the proportion of Canadians attending church on a weekly basis was 31%, and has now dropped to 22%, the portion attending monthly has dropped merely from 10 to 8, and most attend less frequently (48%, up from 41%). While the identified proportion of people who never attend church has increased from 18-22%, his research shows that there are changes: of people who listed themselves as no religion, about 1/3 affiliate within five years, and an additional 1/3 in the next five. And about 1/3 of people who indicate no religion, attend church at least a few times a year. Between 35 and 40% of adults and teens who claim no religion, nonetheless say that they
- believe in God
- believe in a God who cares about them, and
- pray.
As Bibby puts it, it’s not so much that people have dropped out of church; it is that now they drop in. Finally Bibby’s research concludes that people who are less active would be interested in becoming more active were they to feel that the church spoke relevantly to their current issues. The issues they name are numerous and diverse.
Well, perhaps. As I listen to people talk Meanwhile, 80% of Canadians say they have positive belief in God, and 75% of them pray. Here we have probably the key to understanding the difference between “spirituality” and “religion” in peoples’ minds. Bibby describes peoples’ beliefs as being the composite of things they have picked from one place and another (he calls it “upgrading”); and while they are upgrading, they generally maintain their identified religious affiliation, i.e., that’s where they “drop in.” So, I think, “religion” means an identified and coherent set of beliefs which people are expected to adopt if becoming a formal part of a church. “Spirituality” is a more customized approach, based on what makes sense and/or is within the experience of the individual. People are reluctant to get involved in religion because they expect that their customized set of beliefs will not be approved by the religion and that, therefore, neither will they. And they don’t feel the need to have their experiences of God ratified by someone else.about their individual experiences of God, I think that they would like to have their experiences validated if only by someone listening without critiquing it. The experience of God is heightened by sharing it. Of course, that’s what church is supposed to be about. It is noteworthy that in the closing lines of “First Zechariah,” the Hebrew term for God is not the highly patented term Yahweh, the name used by Israel to identify their “national” god, so to speak; it is rather, Elohim, which should be translated as “the Deity.” Zechariah hopes for people to recognize that Israel has built a place for the god whom any and all could recognize.
So he looks to a time when people would say that the Deity is with them. In Zechariah’s time, the assumption was that good crops, good weather, healthy children, and justice were the sure signs of God’s presence and approval. I wonder how people would know today? Signs are tricky things – do we expect the members of a church that God is with to be more prosperous, less beset by troubles, attractive to larger numbers of people, what? We all know that being followers of Jesus does not guarantee freedom from trouble and trial, nor from disease, nor from suffering, nor from natural calamity. I wonder if people would know because of a particular feeling, a mood, an atmosphere, or something like that. Or maybe they would know because they see in the people some essential honesty, compassion through-and-through, gentleness, attitude of acceptance? Or simply the clear indication that their presence matters to the others, and this is taken as a sign of God’s interest and acceptance, as well.
In some people’s minds, religion/the church has gotten between them and God, because it doesn’t take them seriously. I guess the most extreme example of this of which I am aware is the family who came here for a funeral because their home church insisted that the funeral service for the father would not include a eulogy or a celebration of his life; there would be only the liturgy and reminders of what God had done in Christ. A person would not be mourned; only given up to God.
“Are these not the words which Yahweh proclaimed through the earlier prophets….? ‘Judge with true justice and act with love and compassion toward one another. Do not oppress the widow and the orphan, the sojourner and the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.’” You cannot love God if you do not love other people; perhaps you will prefer to believe that you can love other people without loving God (but then probably you wouldn’t be at church), but the Bible insists that if you are loving other people, you are loving God. That must be annoying for kind atheists, but there it is.
Let’s understand – we stand for belief in the God of the Bible, and we consider Jesus Christ to be the authoritative teacher for us. We understand that God interacts with people and that prayer is effective, although we do not expect all requests to be honoured as intended. These things we have in common, so probably those who view God as totally withdrawn from life would feel “different.” People ought not find their personal experience of God proscribed by these matters, although I understand that even people in the church are troubled by the place of Jesus in all this.
Ulrich Luz, professor emeritus at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and author of a very recent commentary on Matthew, discusses it this way:
What moved me…was above all the basic experience of the absence of God for many, perhaps the majority of, people in my country….we have become a secular, multicultural, and post-Christian country. For most of the people with whom I live the story of the passion has become something exotic and antiquated. The churches are increasingly empty even on Good Friday and Easter. With us most people confront the passion of Jesus only in the art museum, in the churches that have become tourist attractions, and perhaps in the Good Friday afternoon concert. Our daily lives – from politics to science and school to the all-consuming economic competition – take place as if God did not exist or as he had completely retired from the world. Jesus becomes the prototype of the suffering human being from whom God seems to have turned away, and who is so close to us because Gold seems to be far from him. And, I would add, looking from the other direction, people try to deny that Jesus even existed. Having accused God of abandoning Jesus, we now abandon him as well. We are not willing to experience God in the flesh, for fear that he won’t be the God of our personal experience.
So the stumbling block is Jesus. And I must stand with colleagues who are much, much more theologically conservative than I and say, “The question you must answer is, ‘Who is Jesus for you, now?’ Not, ‘Who was Jesus,’ but ‘Who is he?’”
The Bible study class are working on Paul’s letter to the Romans, and in his letter we watch Paul try to figure out the meaning of Jesus. He of course accepts him as a historic reality in his own time. He is dealing with someone “real” in the same way that Paul is real, but also someone who has appeared to Paul personally only as a voice and light, never a person. Paul has had the experience of Jesus without having met him personally, and the experience changes much of what he can believe, but it twists his brain. He calls Jesus a “scandal,” because of the crucifixion, and because he represents God’s way of looking upon us as if we are sinless. A scandal in that he violates almost everything that Paul had believed up until then.
You notice that the gospels do not simply tell us who Jesus is; they tell us the stories about how people met with Jesus and what he meant to them. They tell us the stories about what he said and did. We know what the gospel authors’ conclusions are, but we still must wrestle with the stories to see if we come to the same conclusions. We modern Christians must wrestle with not only our individual experiences, but the history of God’s actions with people, as best as they can understand them. We do not really come to this task of knowing God, without background or foundation.
If we choose to ignore those foundations, I ask why? In what other regard do we ignore what got us to where we are? Do we ignore our education? Do we disregard the genes of our ancestors? Do we seriously believe that everything in our present and our future is to be made up solely by ourselves, that there is no trajectory of our lives, that there is no path that we have been following up until now? No, of course not. No more can we believe that we can totally encounter God solely on the basis of our choices of experiences. Have you walked on the water lately?
