When I was in High School, there were Chevrolet people, Dodge people, and Ford people.
There were jokes:
CHEVROLET – Can Hear Every Valve Rap On Long Extended Trips
DODGE – Dead On Day Guarantee Expires
MOPAR – Moldy Old Parts And Rust
FORD – Found On Road Dead
These were done mostly as good-natured teasing, but some people had real annoyance at other auto manufacturers.
Then there were the computer wars:
Apple, IBM/Microsoft, or Unix/Linux?
Now it’s iPhone vs Android.
Technology fans seem as loyal as sports fans.
Let’s go to God in prayer.
God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.
Amen.
In the 2008 book The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle quotes Anglican Bishop the Right Reverend Mark Dyer:
“about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. And, he goes on to say, we are living in and through one of those five-hundred-year sales.”
The rummage sales she refers to are:
1517: The Great Reformation and the birth of Protestantism
Protestants not only separated from the Roman church, but also from each other, with Lutheran, Reform, Anglican, Anabaptist, and other churches coming into being.
1054: The Great Schism in the church and the split into the Roman church and Orthodox church
590: Gregory the great and Monasticism in the Dark Ages
First century: the beginning of the Christian church
Because Jesus was Jewish, some Jewish scholars point out that the second temple period of Judaism began around 516 BCE, and ancient Israel and Judah were around 1200 BCE.
There seems to be a pattern.
Ms. Tickle attributes Bishop Dyer with proposing three outcomes from this upheaval:
- “a new, more vital form of Christianity emerges…”
- “the organized expression of Christianity, which up until then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self.” This creates two new entities: “a brand new expression of its faith and praxis” and the older, more dominant, expression of the Church is “refurbished” or revitalized.
- the faith spreads exponentially into new geographic and demographic areas resulting to a wider and deeper reach of Christianity. (p. 17)
It’s been 17 years since Phyllis Tickle’s book was published, and we’re still not quite sure what this new emerging church will look like.
But it must be different.
A Christianity that was based in hand-copied Bibles and theological tracts was transformed by the technology of the printing press, and so the technology of the internet, cellphones, and social media will again transform Christianity.
Information is everywhere now. Sure, not all of it is good or helpful information, but even in remote areas one can get internet via satellite.
Once most people only received wisdom by speech from clerics. Then printing presses made it possible for most people to read a Bible themselves. And now we can find all kinds of ideas on our Facebook timelines.
And so the Church is changing.
In some ways, the church is becoming more fractured than even the Protestant Reformation made it: people are not abiding by a particular creed or statement of faith put forward by a denomination, instead constructing their own theologies out of things they learn from many sources.
In other ways, the church is coming back together, with denominations like the United Church of Christ merging from other merged churches, or our own local church being a merger of a United Church of Christ and a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
So maybe what is happening is that we are beginning to recognize that we are all gifted by one Spirit, but we are gifted differently.
Maybe we are learning to proclaim the same message: “love God and love your neighbor,” in different ways to different communities, but recognizing that we are still one.
The Christian church seems to undergo a major rebirth every five centuries or so, but local churches change more rapidly, adapting to changes in their communities.
And so here we are, a church on the very far western edge of the contiguous 48 states, in a community behind the redwood curtain, in a time of national change and upheaval.
We are not the church that we were when Eureka was a mining town in the 1850s.
We are not the church that we were when Eureka was a port for logging.
We are an every-changing church with a history of social justice, but we must be born-again: that is, we must find a new sense of purpose periodically.
Our mission statement reads:
Trusting in God, we build community, advocate for justice and serve with love.
A vision statement would say what we aspire to, who we want to be.
Our Rob Christensen led a couple of Grow the Church meetings and a church retreat. We have seen where we have been and have an idea of where we want to go. But we need to commit to a vision for the near future of the church.
These times are challenging, with helpful and unhelpful information swirling around everyone. People are searching, but unsure of who or what to trust. Can we be a home for seekers?
My challenge to each of us this week is to seek the wisdom of the Spirit of Truth in imagining what this church will be in the coming years.
What is the vision for the United Congregational Christian Church of Eureka?
The last verse of today’s Gospel reading is
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
John 14:27, NRSVue
May that peace comfort you in times of change.
Amen.
* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue
* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.
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