Going Public – A Bold Church in Changing Culture

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Going Public: A Bold Church in Changing Culture
Molly T Marshall

Dr. Molly Marshall is Professor of Theology, Worship and Spiritual Transformation at the Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City. She preached this sermon at the First Baptist Church of Austin on Sunday, January 7, 1996. In the Lecture series named for Carlyle Marney, former pastor of the church, Dr. Marshall has here continued a profoundly important line of strong preaching. Without preaching like this the churches are doomed to mediocrity; with it we can mount up with wings like eagles.

Ephesians 2:11-22 (NRSV)

"So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called "the uncircumcision" by those who are called "the circumcision"-a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands-remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God."

I am grateful to be here especially at this tender time in the life of your church. The transition from one pastor to another is a tender time. I am grateful to be here, especially as one of Dr. Browning Ware`s final invitations in his distinguished pastorate. (I am also grateful that he announced his plans to retire before I came-I have been blamed for such things!)

The favorite designation for the church given by the earliest Baptists was simply the "gathered community." Our forebears had a sense of the church`s particular role responsibility both within its membership and to the world. It was to celebrate and support; it was to challenge, even resist. It was to forgive and heal. They understood with all the people of God the call to witness our inward sense of unity in outward ways: the life of the church and the experience people have within it are to manifest the oneness we find in the Spirit. They understood and now call to our remembrance the reality that the church is to go public.

As Parker Palmer writes: "When people look upon the church, it is not of first importance that they be instructed by our theology or altered by our ethics but that they be moved by the quality of our life together." It is our particular vocation that they also feel welcomed to join with us. In the early church it was said of the Christians, "See how they love one another." In early Christian correspondence we also know that they loved those not just within their gate, but the stranger as well.

The call to community is constant in the Scripture, but the form the church community takes has depended on how the church has assessed its surroundings.

Christian community has tended to form in reaction to the larger society.2 Our image of the gathered community has often attempted to be the opposite of what we perceive the larger culture to be. The early church was a highly committed circle for sustaining and for support, a sanctuary for a persecuted minority finding themselves in a hostile society.

This identity of the church changed in 313 A.D. with the edict of Milan in which Constantine allowed or promulgated social sanction for Christianity. And the church community became synonymous with the politics of the land as it aligned with the empire. This pivotal event has been called the "fall of the church." It certainly changed its outlook.

In the early middle ages, in the midst of cultural decline, the church took monastic form, becoming more a community of retreat and withdrawal in order to preserve an endangered tradition. In the years following the Renaissance and Reformation, the church became adversary to the so-called humanism of the larger society, especially its academic forms.

Perhaps we need today to question whether or not the church ought to consider itself over against our culture or in reaction to our culture. What form have we chosen with which to react?

What is our vision of the larger society that animates our gathered community? The answer seems to be clear as we listen to the news. Our society is fragmented. It is disconnected. Many say it is in the process of disintegration. Clearly it is an arena in which human relations are often cold and competitive, sometimes violent. Neighborhood ties have been broken by individual mobility and urban sprawl. My new home, Kansas City, is one of the worst cities for urban sprawl as people flee the city and the insistent "otherness" of its inhabitants. Relations in the work place have been depersonalized by bureaucracy. Politicians tell us the family is in trouble, often forgetting that it is because current economic realities force parents to spend more time earning a living than raising children. Divorce, depression, suicide, alcoholism and other addictions-all the measures of personal and social disorder-are on the rise. More and more we hear of the rending of what was presumed to be a seamless robe of American culture.

Perhaps my description is stark and overdrawn, more caricature than photograph. It is, however, the image of mass society against which the church seeks to structure its inner life. So when church folk say they want "Christian community," they often mean they want the converse of what they experience everywhere else in their lives. Rather than conflict, they want comfort. Rather than the church being a place where distance exists between persons, they want intimacy. Instead of criticism, they want unreserved affirmation and good will.

Please don`t hear me as the Grinch still lingering around in January who wants to steal these qualities or somehow dismiss them as of value to Christian community, for there is much in this which is vital to the nurture of the human spirit. But because often our image of mass society is overdrawn, so is our communal reaction to it. Palmer, to whom I am indebted for provoking my thinking in this area, contends: "LT]he emphasis on intimate community as an antidote to mass society excludes some equally vital elements of human experience-elements which have much to do with our capacity for public life."[3]

When we seek community as an escape from an impersonal society, we often think of community in familial terms. We image the church as a large family in which intimacy is the primary and often exclusive goal; a family in which we can know and be known in depth, trust and be trusted without reservation. It is hard to argue against the metaphor of the family for the church. At one time I thought that was the only metaphor that the Scripture used to talk about the people of God. Yet there are other images such as commonwealth and new humanity which can expand the categories of familial life.

The idealized image of family so popular in American culture poses a threat to public life.~ If you have been listening to all of the political verbiage, you hear, "If we strengthen the family we strengthen America." Well, maybe. We tend to forget that the family functions in the private sphere. And more and more the individualism and isolationism and insularity of the family pulls away from the public good. When we form a church along that model it does not prepare its members for full public involvement. Yes, the family should be strong, but the church is different from the family.[5]

Our image of community tends to force people to hide their disagreements instead of getting them into the open where we might learn from them, where the problems might be worked through. What cannot be spoken in the community of faith probably cannot be redeemed. Though such familial (read "nice") churches may achieve an apparent unity, it is fragile and unfulfilling, and behind it one often finds anger, frustration, and other taboo emotions.

When we envision the church as an idealized family we are not very capable of welcoming the stranger. People with whom we cannot achieve intimacy, or with whom we do not want to be intimate, are squeezed out when family is the only metaphor we use. Since intimacy often depends on social and economic similarities between people, our church communities become preserves for people of kindred class and status. Our churches become places of retreat rather than places of true hospitality, which requires acknowledging the "other." Such a church does everything in its power to eliminate the strange and cultivate the familiar. Such a church can neither welcome the stranger nor allow the stranger in each of us to emerge. Such a church is a barrier to the public life.

This may be a hard word for us to hear. In all of this there is irony and some self-defeat. My father was known for his rather acid commentary on some things about the church, although a faithful churchman. He is what T. B. Maston would call a "loyal critic," but a critic nonetheless. He was fond of asking, "Why is the church always going on retreats? What are we scared of? When are we going to go forward?" Good questions.

Our engagement with the world around us will inevitably evoke diverse viewpoints and conflict. Since some are not comfortable with diverse viewpoints, they never bring up anything that might generate such. Churches committed to a familial self-image forfeit their chance to become tools of collective action and become, instead, vehicles for emotive expression and relief. In this kind of community, Christians fail to receive the training and empowerment which might enable them to confront the mass society and help to humanize it. Paralyzed by a fantasy image of the ideal church family, we are unable to invent new forms of church life which might minister to a public in need.6

Our mission involves a public outlook among Christians. Such a public outlook will ask us to care for the good ordering of people who are not saved and may never be. However, I would certainly consider that our efforts in their behalf may be our best evangelism.

And this background brings us to the text. Ephesians is preeminently about the church`s identity amidst cultural conflicts. The problem addressed in the text is about a great divide among people, Jew and Gentile. Perhaps the best analogue we can fathom is the chasm between black and white in earlier days in the South. The overcoming of the separation between Jew and Gentile is an example of an evil-dominated human institution (prejudice) which has been transformed by the unifying work of Christ. The image here is of a new humanity, a new household, a new commonwealth that has come about because of Christ`s reconciling work on the cross. These people have long been separated by heritage but not by sin (they have been equally sinful). Antagonistic toward each other, now they have become one through the activity of Christ. Coming into existence is a new humanity where all barriers of race and culture and social status have been broken down in the "discipleship of equals." [7]

Now, remarkably, real differences are not ignored, but they no longer divide. Real differences are not ignored in this little church in Ephesus, they simply cannot sever the bond of love in Christ. The author adopts a Jewish standpoint, with an allusion to Isaiah 57:19: "Peace, peace, to the far and to the near, says the Lord." It is a way of talking about inclusion. Those who were long separated by walls of partition have been brought near through their baptism. "To bring near" seemingly functions as a technical term in Jewish proselytism meaning to accept an outsider as a full member of the Jewish community (which included circumcision). Now one is "brought near: through Christian baptism, and he or she must, with all Christians, adhere to one Lord, one, faith, one baptism (4:5). This required that the congregation go public as they allowed the community to be dislocated by the infusion of a very different kind of person in their midst. And yes, the Spirit allowed them- as the Spirit will allow us-to bear the strain of our differences.

How does the church "go public" in a day such as ours? Our challenge is really no greater than that of the first century, as the fledgling Christian community sought to live out its vocation for the world. Where are the walls of partition in our day? Baptists pride themselves on overcoming racial barriers-we even have a resolution about it! But have we really? Where does the church engage the poor? Perhaps only in expressions of largesse. Does the church learn from the poor? The church is struggling to give women equal voice in all its ministry, but resilient pockets of resistance remain. We have only begun to speak about the barrier of sexual orientation. It terrifies us to acknowledge that the church is going to have to embrace compassionately this difficult issue, too. But we must.

There is a tendency toward puristic thinking among Christians. We want to resolve all dilemmas neatly and to be able to draw back from situations which are ambiguous. Sisters and brothers, you well know that to be alive is to be faced with ambiguity! It is part of the human condition.

The word from Ephesians reminds us that centrality of the church to God`s salvific plan does not waver. Skeptics-within and without the church- are tempted in every age to scuttle the church for its frailty and failure to live up to the Gospel it proclaims. Yet, by God`s grace we as gathered community remain the outpost of God`s redeeming activity in our world. The experience of the Ephesian Christians can encourage our faithfulness. This little church, few in number and of little political significance, claimed that its experience would become normative for all people everywhere. People are to learn to live in harmony as we have learned to do with these disparate peoples in our midst, they proclaimed. These early Christians "brought the whole of their spiritual and cultural heritage with them into the church"[8] and there found new direction and experienced a critical engagement with their environment. So must the church today be engaged in resocialization of its members. We face the same recurring problem: how to be Christ`s church-which is not of the world, yet lives in the world. Perhaps we are discovering anew what the first century well knew: the church lives by a different insight and ethics than our surrounding ethos. Our witness depends upon being true to this difference for, according to Ephesians, the church is "the sphere in which the breach between the nations is healed and the nations are reconciled." The church is the new humanity which portends the completion of the incarnation.

The church is the field of force, the sphere of salvation used by Christ in the goal of transformation. Thus, Ephesians is concerned with the historical process in which the church emerges as the mediator of salvation and peace and justice for the world. Completing the incarnation is the church`s work in the present. And the work of the church opens out into all creation, embracing all things for the sake of the one who "loved her and gave himself up for her" (5:25b).

How can this church go more public in this new year? It is the heart of the Gospel that we learn to be inclusive. The liturgical season of Epiphany recognizes that Christ is God`s gift to the world, thus we must learn to give Jesus back to the world. How can First Baptist, Austin, contribute to the renewal of public life in this city? Your location is a part of your vocation. Flannery O`Connor wrote, "limitation implies vocation." A church cannot be everywhere, but a church situated like yours can so some things that no one else can do, given this particular time-and the church`s historic role within the city. Perhaps the church this year will takes its worship public, celebrating services in a public place-in a park or as a part of a "block party." (Surely someone here has enough pull to get a street closed for just a bit!) What events for the community might you offer? What kind of artistic gathering would attract seekers after religious faith? What kind of celebrations can you offer the community that surrounds the church that will claim a more visible civic role in Austin for this congregation?

We have expected them to find us, you know. Perhaps we ought to begin to find them! Thomas Merton tells a wonderful story in his essay Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He has lived the monastic vocation for a long time. One day he had to go to Louisville from the country where the Gethsemani monastery was located . There, standing on the busiest intersection in downtown Louisville, Fourth and Walnut, he had an epiphany. He had a disclosure of the vision of what God wants for God`s people. He said that he suddenly realized that he loved all of these people. These are my brothers and sisters. These are my neighbors. We are part of the same human family. Later he wrote a poem entitled "Celebration in the Streets" which reflected his concern that the church go public.

Several years ago one of my students went to Sri Lanka on a graduate fellowship to study other ways of faith. When he returned, I asked him, "What did you learn, Harry?" (That is the favorite professor question, of course.) His answer was profound:

"I learned that we need to give Jesus back to the world. He doesn`t belong to us."

That is our calling, sisters and brothers, to give Jesus back to the world. May God grant us new love for the larger world that we might open our hearts and extend our arms, rather than consigning to perdition all those whom we pass by as guilty bystanders. May we, for Jesus` sake, go public as the church in this new year. AMEN.

Footnotes:

[1] The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America`s Public Life (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 118.

2lbid.

3lbid., 119.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Palmer writes, "When an idealized image of family is imposed upon the church, our experience in the congregation becomes constricted. Now the church-where we might experience creative conflict, heterogeneity, and freedom for innovation-becomes dominated by the expectation of closeness and warmth" (120).

[6] [ibid.

[7]This term comes from Elizabeth Shussler Fiorenza and is to be found throughout her writings.

[8] Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 197.