WTF — Sermons? Worship? Church?
In this age of radically declining church attendance, rampant social media and interwebs and everything-factual-you-ever-wanted-to-know on Wikipedia… in this time, why am I writing posts called ‘sermons’? Why am I seeking church pulpits to stand in and deliver messages? Isn’t that an archaic form? Aren’t you familiar with the history of organized religion?
I am familiar, and mostly as disgusted by it as you are… If, as the bumper sticker suggests, you aren’t disgusted, you haven’t been paying attention.
It IS archaic, as in ‘having old roots’, I’m not so sure it’s archaic as in ‘no longer relevant’.
A note on the etymology of Sermons which comes from Middle English (also in the sense ‘speech, discourse’): from Old French, from Latin sermo(n- ) ‘discourse, talk’.
A note on the etymology of Worship which comes from the “Old English weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgment of worth’ (see worth, -ship)”. (source = Oxford Languages)
What’s problematic, from my point of view, is that the word ‘church’ is historically and etymologically restricted to Christianity, one of its roots being the Old Norse kirkja — thus the Nordic image above. So, I’ll cherry pick from among the various definitions, the one that most closely resonates with my own intentions and understandings and aspirations.
A Church is a House of Worship where Sermons happen.
A Church is a Time and Place where we Acknowledge ‘That which is of Worth’ through Speech and Discourse.
This is different than a University lecture hall or a Wikipedia page which struggles, not with what is of worth, but with what is true in a much more empirically restricted way. This is a public space, a community space, where we can come to struggle together with the deep questions of ‘What is of Worth?’ What is it that we need in our lives? To what can we turn for insight, for wisdom, for guidance, for grounding? These are public questions, but they are not questions of the ‘public square’ — they aren’t ‘What policy should we adapt?’ They ought to be the myriad of questions that precede that question: ‘What is our calling in this life?’, ‘What values and commitments and priorities should underly and ground our approach to our own good, the public good, the good of life as we know it?’… These questions are the operating theater of public policy, of justice activism, of showing up…
Perhaps the philosophy departments of Universities once owned a corner of this field… perhaps most churches and synagogues and mosques and chapels and temples have wandered so far from these questions that they are now in another field entirely… Regardless, this is a space in which we must struggle if we are to conjure better answers that those of our forebears, and it is abundantly clear that their answers have been, on the whole, insufficient. This is not to deny the existence of truly prophetic voices in our history, this is to acknowledge the fact that those voices have been homologated and twisted and misunderstood and coopted to the point of utter impotence, to the point where they are held up as idols contravening everything they tried to stand for. The reimagined church is a stage for the coming generations of prophets to make new cases about what is of worth and why and why it matters. A place where the messages of older prophets can be reclaimed, and the dross of institutionalized and coopted messages can be cast away.
In the following, when I say ‘church’ please read: ‘church or parallel structure from religions and cultures other than Christian’.
The old church held up a small ‘canon’ of writings as foundational.
The new church acknowledges the possibility of meaningful contribution from all quarters of human writing, expression, art, and endeavor. Not as false-equivalency of quality, but as a rejection of the colonialist idea of primacy and centrality.
The old church was exclusive in its approach to membership, looking for reasons to keep ‘others’ out.
The new church is inclusive in its approach to membership, looking for ways to invite everyone in.
The old church relied upon institutions of training and indoctrination for purposes of gatekeeping and orthodoxy.
The new church seeks voices from any background who can inhabit the intersection between prophetic and pastoral simultaneously.
The old church was denominational and factionalized, it sought to splinter into ever smaller groups by emphasizing differences.
The new church is unitive, is post-denominational, seeking to merge our struggles with these central issues into the fabric of our lived experience as neighbors and as inhabitants of specific places and bioregions.
May it be so. (Which is, by the way, the definition of Amen.)
