St. James the Fisherman July 26, 2015 Feast of St. James (Jeremiah 45:1–5, Psalm 7:1–10, Acts 11:27–12:3, Matthew 20:20–28) Danielle Thompson

How does one tell the story of a place like this chapel if she has not lived it for very long— especially when surrounded by people who know its story so well? Saints and apostles, both seen and unseen, surround the altar here and while I did not and do not know all of them, I can still find an entry-point into some of their legends. James Pike, who was instrumental to the founding of St. James the Fisherman, is a name I know not from Massachusetts, but from Tennessee, where he refused an honorary doctorate from my own seminary, because at that time it refused to admit persons of color. Apparently he strategically alerted of this boycott just before he alerted the school, causing me to think that, among other things, Bishop Pike would have been an early and enthusiastic adopter of social media had he lived to see the days of Facebook and Twitter. The first time I sat in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and listened to the incredible and almost terrifying acoustics produced from the pulpit there, the senior clergy person next to me leaned over and remarked, “You can’t imagine what it was like to hear Bishop Pike in here.”

I know less about Bishop John Coburn of Massachusetts who was one of Bishop Pike’s associates here, along with The Rt. Rev. Morgan Porteus of Connecticut. But the little connection I do have to Bp. Coburn is more direct and more affectionate. I was my first rector’s last associate before his retirement, and though his career had taken him away from Malden and Osterville to Manhattan and Chicago, he was once and always a priest from Massachusetts. John Coburn was my rector’s seminary dean and his bishop. He was one of his spiritual fathers, one of his ecclesiastical heroes, and figured in many stories of his early years of ministry. So in a certain kind of apostolic succession, I can’t hear about Bishop Coburn without thinking about my first boss, who is now my friend.

But I also think about the world my rector friend started off in, which was changing every day in the 1960s and 1970s, presenting challenges to like Pike and Coburn and Porteus that churchmen before them could not have imagined or anticipated. What did it mean, suddenly, to be at war? What did it mean to be a woman, a man, a person of color, a person of faith? What was the future of religion? What was the future of the family? Where was American culture headed, so very quickly, and what had the Gospel to say in that context? What did the Church require of its overseers and its elders—its episkopoi, its presbtyers—in an age of cultural revolution?

It would be a mistake, of course, to imagine that the transformation that swept the church and society in those days were things that happened to church and society, and that Christian women and men had to passively adapt to them. Certainly not every person in the pew and pulpit was beating their 1928 Prayer Books for change and rushing headlong to welcome the next new thing. Yet, much that has happened in the last six decades was pushed forward and moved along by Christian leaders and people of faith like the bishops we’ve mentioned, and many of you here this morning: civil rights, feminism and women’s , ecumenism, dialogue around human sexuality, more acceptance of people who were divorced or whose families were blended, a noticeable swelling of the progressive left in many Protestant denominations. Not to mention the liturgical movement, which was championed at this Chapel years before Vatican II and before the introduction of a new prayer book and its vision of a church whose identity arises from the baptism of all people into the body of Christ Jesus. Last week we heard how Jesus’ disciples, whom he had “sent out” into the roads and countryside, returned to him and began to relate all that they had done in God’s name. It is easy to recall that scene when reflecting on the busy and fruitful years of Christian social witness and institutional transformation that precede us here.

But was every change that happened one for which we hoped and struggled? Was every change anticipated? When I reflect on my friend and all of the colleagues I know who began their ministries in the sixties and have retired in the last few years, I have to recall the critical mass of more mundane changes that have turned the way we do work on its head. My first rector started off his ministry with home visits and calling cards, and a secretary who typed his sermons for him and was always there to answer the phone. The church had a sign out front and a bulletin on feast days. One clergy friend tells great stories about three-hour long steak-and-beverage- laden gentleman’s luncheons on the Upper East Side of that served as wardens’ meetings in his affluent parish in those days. I’m sure that lunches like these are still happening somewhere—although I have yet to be offered whisky and a porterhouse at 12:30 PM. And certainly visitation and regular communication are still the backbone of pastoral care. But email, texting, phone menus and voicemail, websites, video, Facebook pages, a bulletin for this, a brochure for that, an app for everything else, and lots and lots of signage have replaced much of the former routine. Even for recent college and seminary graduates, who may be more tech- fluent than the rest of us, the work of creating and maintaining awareness can be overwhelming. What it takes simply to get the right information out there can consume much of one’s energy and one’s time.

It is the cost of being visible. It is the cup we are drinking from these days, the struggle for mere visibility. But why would we have to work so hard at it? Why would creating and maintaining awareness be anything that concerns and consumes the church? Here, perhaps, is the biggest change of all, the one where the church realizes that while we have gathered a lot of great new things onto the rug on which we are standing, that rug is moving beneath our feet. It is inching out from under us. And what’s more, when we look around, there aren’t as many of us standing on the rug as there used to be. There were two publications this Spring that were forwarded to me by multiple parishioners and friends, and that I saw repeated on my Facebook page over and over again. One was the a study that you may have read by the Pew Research Center for Religion and Public Life entitled, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” I just knew what this study would say from the minute I saw it and I was prepared to be totally unaffected, totally cool about its findings when I finally sat down to read it. And sure enough, it began just like all the anti-pep rallies I feel like I’ve been attending for the past five years: “The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing.” But this time, unlike in former years when the survey has been conducted, it was found that numbers of Catholics and Evangelicals are not growing steadily. Some black church traditions appear to have stagnated. People who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition, sometimes called “nones” are the only steadily growing group and their numbers shot up since 2007, while the median age of that group dropped from 38 to 36. A 36 year old is a still a Gen-Xer by about two years, and about a quarter of Gen-Xers self-identified as nones in this study. The Millenials are younger, in their twenties and very early thirties, and they are a radically unaffiliated group. So given the makeup of these younger generations, Pew can interpret its data for us in clean, social-scientific language, telling us that religious affiliation is down because the religiously affiliated are not being “replaced.” Which, in more maximizing language, reads: Christians are dying and their children are not going to church. But Pew can’t tell us why that is happening. Nor can it tell us why, for instance, more Baby Boomers checked the unaffiliated box this time around than ever before. I ended up putting down the Pew survey and checking to see whether the University of Alabama offers a nighttime MBA.

But it gets better. And I mean that sincerely. The other item I received more than one copy of this Spring and Summer was an article by a thirty-four year old journalist and religious writer named Rachel Held Evans. Now Ms. Evans is coming from a very different place. She is in the vanguard of the Millenials, so according to Pew, this woman should be a none. But Rachel grew up in Tennessee, and Tennessee grows a lot of things, but “nones” ain’t one of them. Rachel’s crisis of faith came when she could no longer support the Evangelical tradition to which she belonged and had to discern whether she would join another church, or no church at all. She now attends an Episcopal Church, and has written a lovely book, Searching for Sunday, that tells the story of her faith journey. Her editorial in the Washington Post, which was such a hit this year, mentioned the Pew Study and advised against trying to lure young people to church with flashy marketing, hip amenities like coffee bars, and worship music that could be mistaken for dance music. Rachel does think that young people want church, and that they want it to be substantial. This line of hers stuck out to a friend of this Chapel who reminded me about Rachel’s article this summer: “You can get a cup of coffee with your friends anywhere, but church is the only place you can get ashes smudged on your forehead as a reminder of your mortality.” I like this one: “What finally brought me back [to the church] after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments … you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the last 2000 years.”

Rachel Held Evans offers a hopeful vision for those of us who worry about the church. I believe that’s why her article impacted so many people from peers and colleagues who are my own age to fellow Christians whose generations are named things like “Silent” and “Greatest.” There’s not something fundamentally wrong with this thing we love so much, she seems to be telling us. We’re not doing it all wrong if we aren’t tweeting or if we don’t have a praise and worship band—apparently we don’t even need to be wearing skinny jeans! What a relief! But the truth of the matter is that most of our churches weren’t trying to reach out to people by those means anyway. Most of us belong to very normal Protestant assemblies, like the Episcopal congregation where Rachel has found a home in the Diocese of West Tennessee, and we still wonder whether we are graduating our high school seniors for good—if we had very many to begin with. So in a follow-up article that ought to have been as popular as the first, Rachel offers tips for welcoming young people into mainline traditions. And she scolds churches like ours, rightly I think, for not explaining why we believe what we believe and why we do what we do. A young Episcopalian probably does not have the theological language to tell her more conservative Christian friend why her pastor is a female. Or why her diocese marches in the Pride parade. She may not know who the are. Or about the Jacobsons’ friend Jonathan Daniels. Or why Mac Gatch took his students to march in Selma. Why the recently deceased Gerald Gilmore kept the peace in New Haven for protesters of the Vietnam War. She may not know how her story connects to those stories, or how those stories connect to faith.

And most importantly, I think, she many not have the theological language to tell any of her friends—more conservative Christians in Rachel’s setting, more likely the unaffiliated or the disillusioned in ours—why she believes the crazy-sounding things she does. Why she believes that a dead man defeated death and exists on the other side of it, forever. Why she believes that a water bath and a piece of pita bread help her receive the strength and power that the Creator of the universe for some reason wants to share with her. Why she practices these things in a community of people where she doesn’t know everybody and she doesn’t like everybody and where she is no longer, at this point in our history, receiving tangible social benefits from doing so. So Rachel Held Evans’s final word to the mainline churches regarding people like herself is, “Challenge us.” Don’t assume, she writes, that Millenials require “a dumbed down, inoffensive, and unobtrusive faith.” Help us study the Bible, she pleads. Don’t be afraid to be unapologetically Christian, she begs. And a final quotation, because she says it so well, “As passionate as young Christians are about social issues, we realize that both Jesus without social justice and social justice without Jesus leaves something to be desired.”

It might sound like Rachel’s article suggests something is being kept from the young people among us. That scriptural exploration and theological understanding are being somehow withheld, when what I think is that they are things that we are all equally hungry for, and that we owe not to younger generations specifically, but to one another for the invigoration and the maturation of our faith, and for the life of the world in which we are called to serve Christ. For we are caught up in something very, very serious together. Jesus knew it when he told the mother of James the Fisherman about the cruciform life her child had chosen. The prophet knew it when he saw the desolation and the scattering of his people. We have all known it in public and very private moments of humility, courage, and struggle when we become present to suffering and called to believe our way through it, hoping that this word of God’s is true: “I will give you your life as a prize.”

Bishop Porteus preached two years ago about the founding of this Chapel, and spoke about presiding at the new altar in 1956 when he had just arrived in town for the summer He noted that this was first time he had faced the congregation while praying the Eucharistic Prayer, and that he was struck by the holiness of the event, how participatory and uniting it was, in his words, “becoming one with each other though still being different from each other.” Having read this sermon when I visited the Chapel last year, that image is the one that comes to mind for me this morning. I grew up Evangelical, too, and I must have heard this Bible verse a million times, mostly to justify the Creation story: “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.” It is possible to break these sixty years up into generations, to think about the changes we have witnessed as divisible instances of overcoming, and to be overwhelmed by what feels like a wholly uncertain future for those of us who are just beginning: the Jameses and Johns who wonder what will fill our cups in this lifetime. But we are part of one continuum together, the closest of siblings in the mind of God, held together with one another in the Body of Christ and held together by bonds of kinship and friendship in this briefest moment of history we are sharing.