Thompson 07-26-15

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. Bishop 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 the New York Times 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 bishops 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 ordination, 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 New York City 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.

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