Delivered at Stated Meeting of the Presbytery of Western New York
held at First Presbyterian Church, Westfield
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Text: John 12: 20-33
I was talking recently with a former executive presbyter from the northeast who served a good long time in the position. He was recalling his career, both early and late. “Thirty and more years ago,” he said, “we EP’s thought we had the best job in the denomination. We were going to help turn around the decline of the church. But at the end of those years, most of us felt that we were only managing the decline, steering churches through the changes along the path of their demise. Nothing made any difference. I was glad to retire.”
You hear that, and you have your reaction, and another has hers. I’d bet we could have a division of the house over that one, whether righting the sinking ship is possible or not. Certainly presbyteries invest a good deal of time and energy on the assumption that their next application of good will and good thinking will do the trick. Certainly some congregations have not declined; some have even grown through these years, and their leaders may have concluded that other churches would grow too, if only they adopted our theology or our practices. Then again, an awful lot of people have certainly left the churches, but not for other churches; just left, unmoved. An awful lot of people have died, and an awful lot of their children and their children have not heard a word of the Word–not really, for no one who has truly heard the Word of life goes in search of another. Will the things of God be handled in a body called the Presbyterian Church (USA) fifty years from now? Does it matter? We could probably have a hot argument over that.
Consider the possibility that we already are having that hot argument; that all the serious divisions we experience in our presbytery and throughout the denomination are driven by dispute, discomfort, or denial over the decline of the church, and over which way is the way of Christ now. Consider the possibility that, unlike Abraham and Sarah, when we considered our own body, which was already as good as dead for we “were about a hundred years old,” we did weaken in faith. We do! Consider that, when we are so weakened, more base emotions have sway over us–“enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, things like these.” Isn’t it remarkable that a spiritual tradition unable to reproduce itself in new generations should fight so hard not over spiritual regeneration, but over sex, who’s got it right, who’s wrong; and over abor-tion. I don’t suggest that either side in these fights is empty of reason; only that it may be easier to fight over sex and its relationship to births “in the will of the flesh” than to face why this tradition does not midwife many births from on high, births not in the will of the flesh, but in the will of God.
A painful tear in the fabric of our presbytery has nothing to do with that fight or with any of the usual liberal/conservative alignments concerning biblical interpretation. The question is rather about our decline into penniless irrelevancy: What future for this Presbytery? What priorities, what goals? Some have seemed to believe that those opposed to the recent adoption of new priorities and goals have confused what it is to have a hearing with what it is to have their way. Some have seemed to believe that various of the leaders are not leading, or are even misleading. You hear these things, and you have your reaction, and another has hers. And of course this is division of the house. I would have you consider that it energy derives from the passion about the unresolved question, whether this sinking ship can be righted. Can that painful energy be directed toward strength?
Last year, I learned a method for strengthening the body called “focus intensity training.” The gist of it is, with a push-up or sit-up or another calisthenic, not to count the number completed or compare today’s achievement with yesterday’s, but to stop the physical action at the point of its maximum demand, and hold. And hold. And hold. Now, while holding, the mind flares with thoughts. “This hurts. This is boring. I can’t do this any longer.” But in the manner of meditation, this training is to practice not using words and labels for the experience, good or bad, but to re-center awareness in the muscle, to bring attention directly to the body’s resistance; indeed, to let go of any measure of accomplishment– number of reps, time on the clock, and so forth–so to be present to the body and to the possibility of intending the action now, now, now. Attention in the body without language or labels while the conflict with gravity–with decline!–races the heart and strengthens the whole. It’s good.
Now, to still the conflict of the label-making mind and be present to the body is just a technique. But Jesus made this the way of life. Or rather, Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life, was in himself stillness from the conflict of the label-making mind, thus up building this Body now and forever. When the Greeks come to Philip saying “Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” he knows that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, for the Greeks stand for wisdom, for counting, and comparison, and achievement. The Greeks are the mind that wants to have at the truth, to grasp it with words, to wrestle it down and incorporate it into a larger system. They will offer Jesus a book contract and access to the talk show circuit. They are wisdom. And we, especially we Presbyterians, we are all Greeks now. We have all smelled the sweet meat of success by reason of strength, by reason of reason, wrestling with what is so and pinning it down to the canvas with our labels, at least for the count of ten. We are all Greeks now, eager to incorporate Jesus into our plan. But Jesus does not resist the Greeks in the Body; the hour of his glorification is at hand.
Jesus has just come from the festal procession into Jerusalem, where a crowd had strewn the way with palms “because they heard that he had performed a sign” in raising Lazarus from the tomb. So the Jews, demanding signs, had their sign; and now the Greeks, desiring wisdom, were come to Jesus’ door for more wisdom. But neither that old, naïve belief in a God who will prove his power by saving us from our gloomy demise, nor the wise ego’s will to propagate itself through knowledge and plans and goals will avail for the kind of life that God would give. For hope of life whose end is God alone, we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to our superstitious wishes from religion, and foolishness to our good Greek minds. But to those who are called–against both the old idolatry lurking in us and against the crackling corporate can-do wisdom we love–Christ crucified is the power of God, Christ crucified is the wisdom of God. No other sign sought, no other wisdom wanted than God’s foolishness, God’s weakness. That is why, when the Greeks arrive, Jesus knows his hour has come. “Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” And wasn’t that our question, how to be fruitful and multiply?
How are we doing with falling into the earth and dying? In human weakness, rather than the weakness of God, Christians are everywhere at each other’s throats, calling one another fools, though hardly for Christ, and forgetting Jesus’ claim upon us, that saying You fool! is as much as murder, with a like price to be paid. The world is utterly dismayed by our human weakness and our worldly wisdom, as we chase after measures of success just like those that animate the corporate mind. It’s not that the unchurched world has great spiritual strength or wisdom, but for more than a few of them out there, there was courage and wisdom in walking away from churches marinating in mindless literalism, or churches constantly stirring up a new committee to serve on, or churches fighting and accepting fighting and bitterness as normal. So how are we doing with moving beyond compare-and-contrast and falling into the earth and dying?
So many of the books and techniques which set out to show how to reverse the decline of mainline church traditions seem to assume that one’s tradition or one’s particular congregation is as good or better than the others, and ought to be preserved. While Jesus is whispering, again, “Those who love their life lose it,” these wise plans and techniques retort, “Foolishness! Let us save our ship! Let us marshal our demographics, make our comparisons, set our goals, and yes, send our G.A. statistical report by February-whatever this year.”
But shhhh! May the label-making mind be still. There is nothing to fear in expiration that breathes with divine inspiration. “Those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Is it possible that the decline of the mainline traditions is but the out breath of God in God’s Body, and that in the fruit of Christ, God’s Body is much, much bigger than you and I dreamed, ever? Is it possible that God is calling you into that stillness between expiration–and inspiration; asking you to accept that you cannot know how long the still small voice will last, or whether your own heart will beat and thrill with that new breath in God, but to know that here, in the stillness which human wisdom calls decline, you dwell in Love beyond compare–no labels, no conflict, no plan, no future–but strength in Christ indeed; dwelling with just these people now around you, who are not your enemy, or if they are, whom you love in spite of their enmity?
Speaking of the patriarchs and matriarchs, Hebrews says, “All of them died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them . . . If they had been thinking of the land–the church–that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return.” You are the matriarchs and patriarchs of a new reformation. You are the leaders of these churches. If you do not heed the call to die in faith without having received the earthly promises; if you are do not make real through the practice of Love this dying and falling into the earth thing, how will they do it who look to you?
“Whoever serves me must follow me,” says the Lord. You must take up this cross; hourly, take your picture of God’s church from the wall of your mind, empty, so that God might lift up another, a new, his Christ, from the earth. For “if I be lifted up from the earth–if I be freed from your earthly plans, your wise ways, your superstitions and passions–I will draw all to myself.” Friends in Christ, one thing only the world needs from us, and our fellow faithful too: that we bring our whole attention to the question, how we die to what we know, so that through our willing humbling, God in Christ may draw all into the church beyond compare.
© Stephen H. Phelps, 2006
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