Written by John H. Thomas December 11, 2006
Turning fifty is, at least according to the greeting card industry, a momentous and not altogether welcome event to be celebrated with biting humor, deep sarcasm, and not very subtle allegations of the bodys diminished capacity. Most of this is, of course, just a playful jab accompanied by a faint anxiety that our energies are indeed abating, though happily much of this seems to be treatable, if you can trust the many uninvited emails that find their way past the spam filters. Nevertheless, fifty is a milestone in a persons life and, while it is altogether different from the institutional milestone the United Church of Christ is marking, it may offer a few hints at how we ought to respond to the challenges and opportunities of this anniversary year.
People react to their fiftieth birthdays in different ways. For some its a sad recognition that what had been the increasingly faint echoes of youth are permanently silent, that ones lifespan is now almost surely more than half over. Closer to death than birth, its a time to recognize that some dreams will not be attained, some hopes will be left unfulfilled, that choices have led to irreversible consequences. Things havent turned out the way we had anticipated in our youth, and they are not likely to in the future, and this can lead to grieving, anxiety, even depression.
Others choose various forms of physical and emotional denial. This can include the nips and tucks of the plastic surgeon, frequent trips to the hair salon or the hair implanter, a frenetic exercise regimen, health food and dieting plans, all of them seeking to maintain the appearance, if not the reality of youth. Others go on a toy buying spree, replacing, however, ToysRUs with the car dealership, the electronics store, or the singles bar. In our culture its reasonable to assume that everything, including youth, is for sale, and a depressingly large number of people seem to be bent on spending whatever it takes.
There is, however, an option other than depression and denial. It is, simply, to recognize that its time to grow up: Coming to terms with the reality of finitude, not as an excuse and not as something to fear, but simply as the way it is with creaturehood. Learning to love oneself not in a narcissistic way, but gracefully, recognizing that it is Gods love, not the degree of our own perfection or that of our parents that defines us. Adapting ourselves to the triumphs and disappointments adherent to being, as Erik Erikson famously put it, achieving the ego integration that was the culmination of his eight stages of development. Much of that ego integration, for Erikson, depended on knowing that each individual life is the coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history. In other words, and in a more theological framework, understanding that our life is the intersection of a unique or distinctive vocation God has bestowed on us with the unique circumstances of our time and place, knowing that integrity comes not in resisting either that vocation or the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but rather in living that vocation faithfully, courageously, and fully within the limits and opportunities of our historical moment and location.
Paul speaks of this as leading a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It is growing up into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the bodys growth in building itself up in love. Growing up. Finding ourselves growing more and more comfortable within our own skin which is, for the church, the body of Christ knit together by the ligaments God supplies. We have a calling to which we have been called, and we are to lead a life worthy of that calling. In so doing we grow up into Christ, the head. Thus our integrity, our maturity, has its origins in Gods call and its destiny in Christ. Growing up consists in discerning the contours of that call, and living it in such a way that it is oriented toward Christ and not an idol of our own devising. Growing up.
The twin lures of despair and denial are certainly evident in our corporate life as the United Church of Christ turns fifty. Things have not turned out in quite the way we imagined in our youth. Ill spare you the litany. Suffice it to say the exuberance evident in the liturgies and speeches in Cleveland in 1957, which Ive read as part of the work were doing for Synod worship preparation, feels rather distant. We arent in quite the shape we expected to be, with losses and diminishments that are painful, some of the more painful ones coming just in the months since our last Synod. Many things in our common life just dont quite work. And we worry a lot about money a sure sign of getting old! Lets face it; weve got a fifty year old body that we havent always taken very good care of and were maneuvering in a culture that isnt always very kind to us.
Now I suppose we could spend a lot of time this year lamenting that were not where we thought we would be. This is not just a matter of wishing things were the way they used to be. The visions and dreams of our birth as a church were expansive and inspiring; grieving the inevitable yet very real disappointments, even as we celebrate the very real triumphs, is understandable and perhaps even necessary. But hanging black bunting is hardly the answer. Or we could go off on some kind shopping spree through the ecclesiastical toy store looking for the elusive thing that will make us feel young again. Lets be honest. Every one of us here tonight has found him or herself driving to one of our slightly frayed, down at the heels congregations and felt a little lust in our hearts as we passed by a slick new megachurch going up in a prime part of town. We call in one consultant after another, some of whom have great gifts to share, but others who are little more than the plastic surgeons of the ecclesiastical world, making us look better in the mirror but not altering the basic body much at all.
Yes, we could despair or deny. But why not just grow up? Claiming the essential integrity of the vocation God has bestowed in our origin, living it faithfully and courageously in the midst of todays time and place our time and place orienting that vocation day by day toward our destiny which is Christ. Living a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called. Adapting ourselves to the triumphs and disappointments that are so often far less the badge of honor or shame our egos try to wear, than simply the byproduct of the historical moment in which we find ourselves. Is it time for the UCC at fifty to grow up?
Can we grow up more and more into the church catholic, claiming as our own the faith of the church through the ages, the practices of the church through the ages, the liturgies of the church through the ages, the sacramental life of the church through the ages? Im not about to join our harsher critics who allege that we have abandoned the Christian faith in favor of false readings of scripture or flawed theological adventures. But I often do detect something of the adolescent in the United Church of Christ, enjoying being different, even idiosyncratic, with almost obstinate teenage delight. There is much maturity to be gained in a careful, broad, and deep claiming of the Tradition that has nothing to do with merely being traditional, nothing to do with becoming conservative, nothing to do with shrinking back from our frequent courage and theological audacity. Isnt it time for the almost exuberant, spontaneous commitments of our church to more overtly and evidently find their grounding in the faith of the mothers and fathers down through the ages who have far more to teach than an adolescent church sometimes wants to think? Many do find our church odd. An adolescent church simply glories in that, regardless of the consequences. A mature church demonstrates how that oddness is, in fact, deeply faithful to the texts and traditions of the ages, so faithful that it stands out amid the concessions and compromises that often pass for fidelity. Isnt it time to grow up?
Words like Tradition, with a capital T, and catholic, evangelical, and orthodox make many United Church of Christ folk uneasy, even dismissive, and that is, in itself, somewhat suggestive of a certain immaturity. We are often so busy arguing we are not a creedal church that we forget the central role of creeds in our confession of the faith. We are so worried about becoming traditional that we stand aloof from other churches that share the one great Tradition with us. We drop frequent laugh lines about Roman Catholics and latch on to the latest Papal gaffe as expressions of that great tradition rather than distortions, and with many former Roman Catholics among us its not uncommon for the word catholic to simply trigger fear of a magesterium rather than hearing it as an invitation to share in the ecumenical churchs expansive experience and life. We have allowed the word evangelical to be hijacked by the religious right and have not only forgotten that the word named one of our predecessor churches, but have often allowed the evangelical mandate to atrophy. And when I suggested recently that we might seek to claim in our life a progressive Christian orthodoxy, I knew many would recoil from the term orthodox as if it was a carrier of some dangerous virus.
God is still speaking. But that speech is never an unexpected letter arriving like a message in a bottle washed up on the beach. No matter how fresh and new the language may be, or how urgently it presses us to confront dramatic new challenges in our time and place, the speech of the still speaking God always originates in the Word that is Christ, and is, therefore, deeply resonant with the words of the church through the ages. The Mercersburg theologians were right. Neither restorationism nor the Anxious Bench is faithful or wise. Not then, and not now in their contemporary versions of narrow and literalistic interpretations of Scripture or of liturgies where PowerPoint screens and American flags leave little room in chancels for the Table and the Cross. Isnt it time for us to grow up?
Can we grow up more and more into the church catholic even as we grow more and more into the particular vocation God has given us as our distinctive contribution to the witness of the church universal? Youve heard me describe this as extravagant welcome and evangelical courage. An open and affirming church in which the abundant gifts of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons are honored and received both in the church and in the larger society. A multi-racial, multi-cultural church in which the continued reality of racism is confronted and the diverse spiritualities of Gods people are honored and shared. A church accessible to all where the architecture of our buildings and our liturgies and perhaps most importantly of our beliefs and attitudes reflects the architecture of the Holy City where doorways are extravagantly wide and eternally open. No ejector seats or bouncers. And a peace with justice church, a church responsive to the demands of justice in a world easily intimidated, a church committed to peace in a world intoxicated with violence. Extravagant welcome, evangelical courage.
The words can reflect deep and profound commitments. Or they can simply make for wonderful T-shirts, provocative bumper-stickers, and little more. Can we grow up into this vocation? Again, Paul describes it as leading a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called. A youthful church proudly displays this vocation with enthusiasm, even exuberance. But there is also a shadow side, for growing into our distinctive vocation apart from growing more and more into the church catholic can lead to a kind of reckless abandon that easily slides into sectarian arrogance. In her report to the Executive Council in October Linda Jaramillo challenges us to move from self-righteousness to Gods righteousness. In other words, to grow up, celebrating triumphs and acknowledging disappointments, neither denying our failures nor being paralyzed by them.
A maturing church will confess that its extravagant welcome has not been as extravagant as it ought to be, that its evangelical courage has been more timid than we would like to admit. Far too many of our churches are caught in the grip of respectability, eager to bless the cultures respectable values and to cloak with respectability the cultures golden calves. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the churchs tepid response to the horror of the Iraq war. Some have tried to name its idolatrous violation of Gods design. Some have tried to expose the deceptions of its origins. Some have tried to call us to repentance for the moral disasters into which we have lured innocent young men and women. Some have tried to provide names to the dead for whom our government is not even willing to assign a number. But in the end this has failed to sufficiently arouse the prophetic passions of the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffers haunting question from a context increasingly and eerily similar to our own hangs before us: Are we still of any use? We have been content, for the most part, to pray for peace and protection. We have been cowed by an administration adept in the manipulation of fear. And we have continued to guzzle the oil this war was launched, in part, to protect.
A maturing church will not deny its complicity or its silence or even its own idolatry. But it will not grow discouraged and despondent either. It knows that it lives not by success or failure, and certainly not by perfection, but by grace. It will reclaim the enthusiasms of its youth without succumbing to the arrogance of its adolescent ideologies, leading a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Extravagant welcome and evangelical courage beyond the perils of arrogance and apathy. Isnt it time for the United Church of Christ to grow up, even into Christ who is our head?
And finally, can we grow up, or grow beyond our distorted views of autonomy and our ambivalence over authority which fragment the church and frequently renders leadership impotent under the guise of a misdirected polity? Classic Congregationalism understood that autonomy was primarily a quality of the gathered community, the local church under the Word of God discerning Gods will for its own place and time. Autonomy guaranteed not the independence of congregations or other church structures, rather it guarded each local church against the temptation to transfer its responsibilities inappropriately to other local churches or hierarchies. Congregationalism, in the words of the famous congregational theologian, P. T. Forsyth, honored the Great Church. What it despised was what he bitingly called granular autonomy.
But if not in theory, at least in fact, we have often turned our Reformed and Congregational polity into a carefully crafted system of distrust that has sought to insulate various interests, settings, and structures from the influence of others. Systems of distrust build structures to ensure that nothing harmful can intrude; sadly, mutual paralysis is often the preferred option to vulnerability. But the gathered community in whatever setting is a community of discernment, vulnerable not only to the Word of God but also to the activity of the Holy Spirit working through covenantal partners. Thus it is the responsibility of each setting of ministry in Congregational polity not to protect itself, but to make itself increasingly vulnerable to this alien word of God that comes from beyond. And it is precisely to a frightening vulnerability that covenant calls us. When was the last time you heard covenant and vulnerability used to describe each other? Isnt it time for us to grow up?
It was the leader of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, James Wagner, who taught the Congregational Christian General Council members something about their polity when he spoke to them in 1956. He reflected on three words carved into the mantel in the meeting room in New York where the General Council had its offices and where he had sat for countless meetings during the merger negotiations: Faith, Freedom, Fellowship.
Not faith in isolation, a congregation living to itself alone, but faith within the fellowship, constrained by the fellowship as well as contributing to it. Not the freedom of irresponsibility, of an anarchy answerable only to itself, but freedom within the fellowship, recognizing always that no man, no minister, no congregation is an island . . . . and that in corporate religious faith and experience, unlike the axiom of geometry, the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.
This culture of distrust reflects not simply a misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of autonomy, but a deep ambivalence about the exercise of authority. There was reason in the origins of our Reformed and Congregational heritage to be anxious about authoritarianism. But King James is dead, and the current archbishop of Canterbury has as little control over his far flung provinces as any General Minister and President. A healthy hermeneutic of suspicion born of the experience of racism and sexism, not to mention the individual experiences weve had with authoritarian leaders permeates the life of our church for both good and ill. But a healthy suspicion of authoritarianism and a culture structured to distrust authority are two different things. One holds leaders accountable to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. The other de-authorizes leaders, making the exercise of leadership challenging at best, nearly impossible at worst.
If we take any lesson from our union fifty years ago, it is that change is possible and can lead to marvelous consequences wholly unanticipated by those involved. Again, James Wagner, commenting on the blending of Presbyterian and Congregational systems, suggested that the outside. . . world will be skeptical of the possibility of thus bridging the historical abyss between two traditions apparently so divided on basic theory. . . . Ours will be therefore all the more the wondrous opportunity to demonstrate in our time and in this country for the first time that this impossible can be done, and that, further, in church government as in life,
Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be, They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
Erik Erikson, referred to earlier, reminded us that the ego integrity of the mature adult included an emotional integration which permits participation by followership as well as acceptance of the responsibility of leadership. Isnt it time for us to grow up?
There are no plans to decorate our fiftieth birthday party in Hartford with black streamers and bunting. This will be a festive party! But it will also be a time to acknowledge and reflect on the fact that if we are not exactly old as churches measure their span of years, we are certainly older. Things havent turned out the way we thought they would. Some will be tempted by discouragement and gloom. Others will cling to denial, persisting in adolescent, immature approaches to our common life. But most of us, I hope, will instead give ourselves to the task of figuring out what it really means for the United Church of Christ to grow up. Adapting ourselves to the triumphs and disappointments of our first five decades. Living faithfully in the intersection of Gods distinctive calling and the unique circumstances of life in 21st century North America. Growing up into the great church, the church catholic which has given us birth and to which we owe incalculable debts. Growing into our distinctive vocation, reaching wide for an extravagant embrace and risking all for justice and peace through evangelical courage. Learning to recognize that while all our structures and leaders are subject to sin and to the distortions of idolatry and are, therefore, never to be trusted blindly, our Reformed tradition also teaches us that structures and leaders can in fact become, and must be allowed to become indispensable signs and instruments of Gods design.
The UCC at fifty. Time to grow up? Leading a life worthy of the calling to which God has called us with all humility and gentleness. . . . Growing up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. Let it shine! is a far better theme for a Synod, a far better rallying cry for the whole church as we head toward Hartford. But Lets Grow Up! is not bad for a church led by the letters of Paul and not the story of Peter Pan. So yes, Let it shine! But lets also find ways to show our age in the process.
