WHY I AM A (lower-case, uncapitalized “e”) eVANGELICAL, Part 2

Why I Am a (lower-case, uncapitalized “e”) evangelical, Part 2
(Luke 24.13-35 and “Let Us Stay Together for a While” by Bruce Woodcock)
A reflection by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ,
Sammamish, Washington,
The 22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: August 29, 2011 The eleventh in a summer series on topics you’ve asked to hear reflections about.

This morning’s topic: What are the differences & similarities between evangelical and mainline and progressive Christian churches?

I wanted to offer a word of explanation about the title of this reflection for those of you who weren’t here last week for the first part of it. These days when we hear the word evangelical, most of us think of people who say every word in the Bible is literally true. And say people who don’t believe the “right” things about Jesus are going to hell. And God made men to have power over women. And God made everyone heterosexual. And anyone who says otherwise isn’t a real Christian.

There are more and more people who call themselves evangelical who don’t believe these things. Some of them call themselves “lower case, uncapitalized e” evangelicals, to distinguish themselves from the traditional “capital E” Evangelicals who divide the world so easily into saved and damned. It is these lower case, uncapitalized “e” evangelicals, also called emergent Christians, whom I find myself at home with. And this morning I’ll say why.

Let us pray.

God, you who walk with us every moment of every day, may only your Word be spoken. And if I do not speak your word, may only your word be heard. Amen.

To celebrate Thanksgiving in 2002, Peter and I went to Washington, D.C., to visit his sister and her family. By that time, Peter and I had been pastors I’d been pastors at University Congregational United Church of Christ in Seattle for over eight years. I still felt incredibly thankful the members of that church had taken the risk to call Peter and me as a couple to be their pastors.

At the same time, on that Thanksgiving-eve flight nine years ago, I felt restless. Instead of feeling filled by good work and a good life, I felt empty. I felt like dry, waterless ground. And I didn’t know what to do.

Like I do every time I’m in Washington, D.C., I went to National Cathedral. And I found myself heading downstairs to a chapel that’s in the bowels of the Cathedral. It’s a damp and musty place that feels like a tomb. Which makes sense. Because the front of the chapel has a painting that shows people carrying Jesus’ body from the hill of the crosses to his tomb.

After praying in that chapel for about two hours, I heard a voice that said, Come and die with me, Dave.

What does a mainline, progressive Christian do when he hears the Risen Jesus Christ speak to him?

Five hours later, Peter and I were on a plane back to Seattle. And I was writing the sermon I had to preach the next morning at University Congregational UCC. Here’s what I said in that sermon about this experience:
Die with me, Jesus said. Die to all that keeps God from tearing open your life and claiming you fully as her beloved son. Die to your fear of disappointing people, your desire to please, your cautious engagement with the injustices of this world. Die to your safe religion and your moderate faith that seduce you into believing you can be a Christian without sacrifice and [into believing] God can be served without cost. Die to these, Jesus told me….

All my adult life, I loved reading and talking about Jesus. But now that Jesus had spoken to me, I couldn’t keep him at arms’ length. I needed to talk to him as well. But that meant I had to do what mainline, progressive Christians never talk about in polite company. Talking to the Risen, Living Jesus means forming a personal relationship with him. And that sounds so evangelical.

So I didn’t talk about this experience in National Cathedral with many people. How could I? What would they say? I feared I was losing the “faith home” I’d had my whole life.

Which is why I think during this time I kept going back to the Road to Emmaus story in the Gospel of Luke. In this reading, Cleopas and his companion are lost. It’s the evening of the first Easter. They’re walking back to their home in Emmaus. They’d been so sure who Jesus was. And now their certainty shattered. Their walk with the Risen Jesus broke open and changed their lives forever. Because Jesus refused to stay dead. And God refused to let anyone limit the Mystery God could cause to break into the world. And refused to let anyone tell God what was and was not possible.

Listen for a word from God as Paula reads this morning’s Gospel lesson. And as the choir sings the same story.

On the day Jesus rose from the dead, two of Jesus’ disciples were walking to the village Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them. But they were not able to recognize who he was.
He asked, "What's this you're discussing so intently as you walk along?"
They just stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend. Then one of them, his name was Cleopas, said, "Are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn't heard what's happened during the last few days?"
He said, "What has happened?"
They said, "The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene. He was a man of God, a prophet, dynamic in work and word, blessed by both God and all the people. Then our high priests and leaders betrayed him, got him sentenced to death, and crucified him. And we had our hopes up that he was the One, the One about to deliver Israel. And it is now the third day since it happened.
But now some of our women have completely confused us. Early this morning they were at the tomb and couldn't find his body. They came back with the story that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive.
Some of our friends went off to the tomb to check and found it empty just as the women said, but they didn't see Jesus."
Then he said to them, "So thick-headed! So slow-hearted! Why can't you simply believe all that the prophets said? Don't you see that these things had to happen, that the Messiah had to suffer and only then enter into his glory?" Then he started at the beginning, with the Books of Moses, and went on through all the Prophets, pointing out everything in the Scriptures that referred to him.
They came to the edge of the village where they were headed. He acted as if he were going on but they pressed him: "Stay and have supper with us. It's nearly evening; the day is done." So he went in with them.
And here is what happened: Jesus sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him. And then he disappeared.
Back and forth they talked. "Didn't we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road, as he opened up the Scriptures for us?"
They didn't waste a minute. They were up and on their way back to Jerusalem. They found the Eleven and their friends gathered together, talking away: "It's really happened! The Master has been raised up—Simon saw him!" Then the two went over everything that happened on the road and how they recognized him when he broke the bread.
(Luke 24.13-35, The Message Re-Mix © 2003 Eugene Peterson).

“Let Us Stay Together for A While”

Words & Music by Bruce Woodcock, © 2003 Bruce Woodcock

Let us stay together for a time, let us stay together for a while.
When the evening is approaching and the day is almost spent,
Let us stay with one another for a time.
All we have in common is a road; all we have in common is a journey:
we are simply fellow travelers who are passing in the night.
Let us stay with one another on the road for a time.

Dare we trust a stranger with our dreams? Dare we trust a stranger with our story?
If we cannot hide out tears, let us share out hopes and fears
as we stay with one another, with our dreams.
All we have to offer is our Word; all we have to offer is a Bible.
Let us open it between us till the fire burns within us,
as we stay with one another in the Word for a time.

He was nothing to us but a name, and we thought our road would never find him.
He was with us all the while and he’s walking every mile
as we stay with one another in his name.
All we have between us is a loaf; all we have between us is a table:
as we break the bread together we will recognize our brother,
and we’ll stay with one another, breaking bread, for a time.

Shall we stay for ever in this place? Shall we go back home and tell the others?
If we stay on holy ground, we’ll lose the miracle we’ve found
and we’ll be left with one another in this place.
We don’t need a special place or time; we don’t have to travel to Emmaus:
any road and any table, we can meet you, Lord, again;
we can stay with one another any place, any time.

Hearing Jesus in National Cathedral broke me open to discover what Cleopas and his companion discovered. And what the choir just sang.

We don’t need a special place or time; we don’t have to travel to Emmaus:
any road and any table, we can meet you, Lord, again;
we can stay with one another any place, any time.

As I looked around for Christians like me, I found home with a these lower-case, uncapitalized “e” evangelicals I talked about at the beginning of this reflections. These folks who call themselves emergent Christians. Many of these former capital “E” Evangelicals had been expelled from their faith homes because people told them they were way too liberal. Because emergent Christians said the Bible isn’t a scientific text that tells us exactly how things happened. Emergents refuse to say God needed Jesus to bleed and die so sinful humans could be forgiven. Emergent churches celebrate women and gays and lesbians as pastors.

They have built a bridge toward mainline and progressive Christians. A bridge that tries to pass over all the things that have divided Christians from each other. A bridge that tries to bring Christians together.

Why? Because, more than anything else, what emergent Christians care about is relationship. An emergent church leader says, “When people ask emergent Christians, ‘What do you all hold in common?’ the answer is most likely ‘We’re friends’.”
(Tony Jones, The New Christians, Jossey-Bass, 2008, p. 56)
Emergents say, when we allow ourselves to make our home in the love of Jesus, we know we are “surrounded by an envelope of friendship” (Jones, p. 78). In this envelop of friendship, we help mend what has been broken and heal what has been hurt.

What is emergent Christianity? One way to answer this question is to look at what the word emergent suggests.

One of the people who began the emergent Christian movement is a former very capital “E” Evangelical named Brian McLaren. For a while he worked with what are called emergent wetlands. There are wetlands with plants “whose roots are in the soil underwater but whose shoots grow up through the surface of the water to take in the full, unfiltered sun. In this sense,” Brian McLaren explains, “emergents are plants that live in different worlds [at the same time]” (McLaren, p. 276). And emergent Christians do the same thing. They try to live in both the capital “E” Evangelical and the mainline/progressive worlds.

Imagine the cross section of a tree. Each ring represents new growth. But that new growth was only possible because the new ring embraced the older rings and included them in the new. The tree can only continue to grow strong if it integrates the previous growth that has gone on before. Simply rejecting the old will cause the tree to die (McLaren, p. 277).

That’s what emergent Christians are trying to do. They start with Jesus. They ask, How did Jesus live? What did he live for? Why was he executed? What does his rising back to life mean? When we look at these fundamental questions, we see how easy it has been for Christian to focus on the part of his life we’re most comfortable with. And ignore the rest. Capital “E” Evangelicals ignore how Jesus told us God’s kingdom is a place where there was no violence, no poverty, no separation between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. And the mainline and progressive Christians ignore how the only way Jesus could live his radical way was because he shared a living, intimate, deeply personal relationship he had with the God he called Father. It was his personal relationship with God that filled and watered him, and kept him clear about why he was alive.

So emergent Christians invite us to cross the bridge to them, so we can talk and work and pray together to follow the whole Jesus. Not just the Jesus of either personal relationship and personal salvation or the Jesus of social justice.

Which means we will have to do some hard self-examination. Our ancestors thought it was “reasonable” to own slaves and to deny women the right to vote. For centuries scientists believed it was “reasonable” to assert that sun rotated around the earth. These are fruits of human reason that we have seen fit to throw away. Our emergent Christians sisters and brothers ask those of us who are so attached to our faith being reasonable, Why do you limit what God can do by what you believe is reasonable? When will you learn how much you limit God’s power in your life and how much you limit passion and joy and justice by trying to force God to play by your rules?

We mainline, progressive Christians often reject biblical teachings like resurrection and God becoming a human person in Jesus as untrue or impossible. They don’t fit with how we think the world works. But what if we changed how we see truth? Emergent Christians invite us onto this bridge they’ve built toward us, and they ask, “Is the truth a question to be answered, or it is beauty to be sought” (Jones, p. 157)? I hear the Emmaus story Paula read. I listen to the words the choir sang. The story of frightened, discouraged people who were so sure they knew the truth: that Jesus Christ was dead and could not and would not break out of the tomb alive. The story of this Jesus Christ who did exactly that. And lit these frightened, discouraged ones on fire, and gave birth to us who 2000 years later still tell the story. We who worship reason may not believe this story is true. But I believe this story is too beautiful not to be true.

John Howard Yoder was a Mennonite. He was one of the most famous and most radical writer about God in the 1900s. He said the work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society. Instead, Yoder said the work of Jesus is to a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing, and self-sacrificing love in everything that community did. When followers of Jesus come together as friends to build that kind of community, Yoder says the church is not the bearer of Christ’s message. The church is Christ’s message (Jones, p. 178).

We can read stories about Jesus. We can talk about Jesus. But that keeps Jesus as an arms’ length. That limits how much the story can claim us and become us. But when we talk to Jesus. When we walk and break bread with him … when we make ourselves at home in his love, then we become his message. We become his forgiveness, his anger, his non-violence, his joy, his justice, his bottomless well of love.

And isn’t that why we’ve been coming together all along? …