GENERAL PRESBYTER’S REPORT – SEPTEMBER, 2014
Since her death earlier this year, Maya Angelou has been greatly celebrated around the
world. Maya was a poet, a prophet, a celebrity, and a grand dame. She was also a lifelong
follower of Jesus. Raised in Stamps, Arkansas by her grandmother, Maya spent much of
her childhood in church, and was a member of a Baptist Church in Winston Salem when
she died. And yet despite this religious pedigree, Angelou could be very critical of the
church. In one of her books, she wrote a rather biting poem entitled “Savior:”
Petulant priests, greedy
centurions, and one million
incensed gestures stand
between your love and me.
Visit us again, Savior…….
.
We cry for you
Your agape sacrifice
although we have lost
is reduced to colored glass
your name.
vapid penance, and the
tedium of ritual….
Clearly, Maya is drawing a distinction between Jesus and the Church. And though we as
the church are called to be the Resurrected Body of Christ on earth, all too often we
substitute institution for incarnation. We have turned Christ’s organic fleshy body into the
static structure of organization. As the established Protestant churches in America
continue to diminish and decline, perhaps we can sympathize with Angelou’s despair about
the vapid tedium of too many of our rituals. And like the poet, we yearn for a fresh
visitation from Jesus and a re-acquaintance with his holy name.
A few years ago, Leonard Sweet wrote a book called The Gospel According to Starbucks.
Lifting up Starbucks as one of the capitalist wonders of the modern world, he insists that
the church has much to learn from our local coffee hangout. The philosophy of the founder
of Starbucks is simple. For him, selling coffee is his Grand Passion. Except that it is not
about coffee. Starbucks is not a coffee shop – it is a lifestyle. It is what Sweet calls “a third
place” – a place that every human being needs – a place of comfort and community and
connection – a place beyond home and work. Church used to be that third place for most
Americans – but no more. Instead the music, the techy comfort, the quiet neighborhood
hub bub of the local coffee shop has become a place where strangers become friends. And,
Sweet suggests, if Jesus showed up tomorrow, he would be more comfortable in Starbucks
than in most of our churches.
Riffing off this Starbucks image, I want to agree with Maya Angelou that we need Jesus to
visit us again. And we need to recover the radical, rich, and real power that the Living
Christ offers us inside the church and out. Rather than a bland buddy or pious preacher,
the Jesus we meet in scripture is more of a bold barista - preparing the unique jolt of
spiritual caffeine each of us needs to live our lives fully. And what the church at its best can
offer us is not comfort and complacency, but commitment, connection, and conviction.
If we wander through the Gospel pages with this bold barista Jesus, what we discover is
caffeine for the soul – much at odds with the watered down brew of the conventional world.
Love enemies. Don’t hurt them. Focus on the poor, and let the rich fend for themselves.
Touch lepers, don’t shun them. Invite women into the community of discipleship. Let the
little children come, and bless them with all their noise and energy and interruptions.
Honor the authority of Caesar, but only give your true allegiance to God. Suffer willingly
in order to bring healing to others. And don’t be scared of death. For it is only when a seed
dies that healthy grain can grow. Not only does Jesus turn religious wisdom on its ear. He
turns living wisdom on its ear. And if we want to be his disciples – disciples of this bold
barista of rich, hot, caffeinated faith - then we need to turn the wisdom of our
contemporary world on its ear, too.
In trying to infuse the church with the best learnings from the Starbucks strategy, Len
Sweet has come up with the anagram E-P-I-C. EPIC. And he suggests that vital churches in
the 21st century must be EPIC churches.
E stands for experiential. None of the disciples in scripture understood faith until they did
it. We Presbyterians think too much – and experience too little. Instead of thinking about
prayer – why don’t we just pray? Instead of wishing that we had more children in our pews
or more people of color in our congregation, why not go out and find them and invite them
and welcome them? Any educator will tell you that children learn by doing, not by
listening. We must experience our faith first – and then we will discover what we really
believe.
P stands for participatory. Despite the cultural lure of finding our “individual bliss,” Jesus
makes it clear that we can’t be Christians by ourselves. By definition, the church is a
community of partnership and participation.
One good trend in Presbyterian worship is the rise in participation of all the people in the
pews. As Kierkegaard so aptly suggested, in Christian Worship – the “audience” is God –
and we you and I are the actors – all of us playing the various parts in acting out the drama
of scripture. Rather than listening to a concert, we are all called to make music – to sing, to
clap occasionally, to feel the Gospel in our bones and our blood. More and more of our
churches are encouraging weekly communion – and often by intinction – people actually
getting up and walking forward – offering ourselves to God as we are fed with the Bread
and Life and the Cup of Blessing. And in growing family congregations, children are more
and more an active part of worship – participating in the liturgy, playing instruments,
pouring water, blowing bubbles - and not just restlessly waiting to be released for Sunday
School. Friends, if we participate – if each one of has a chance to act out the various parts
of worship – then it becomes part of our bodies and our souls – and not just passive
entertainment for our minds.
I stands for image rich. Images, metaphors, stories, visual art, banners, colors, water,
bread, wine, instruments, dance, poetry, video clips. More and more worship and education
is becoming a goldmine for the senses and the imagination. After all, God cannot be fully
captured by words or doctrines. Jesus is a person, not an idea. And the more we play with
images, the more the Spirit can fertilize our hearts.
Finally, C is for Connection. Not just the “friendly” connections at Coffee Hour but the
more intimate connections of heart to heart relationships. Of taking off our masks. Of
trusting that our brothers and sisters in Christ want to know us – really know us – and that
we can trust both our joys and our sorrow, our successes and our failures into each other’s
keeping. In addition , a truly connected church is one who is not just bound together with
those inside these walls – but also bound together with the people outside these walls – our
neighbors, those who are different, those who are in need.
One of the enduring images for me from those tumultuous weeks in Ferguson, Missouri in
August was the picture of 100 volunteers from five local churches who banded together to
reach out to their community. The morning after the first night of rioting, they arrived
outside the looted stores to clean up the glass, to reach out to the protestors, to serve coffee
and donuts - to get to know their neighbors. They made a connection with strangers in
order to become friends. It was EPIC in a nutshell.
EPIC – EXPERIENTIAL, PARTICPATORY, IMAGE RICH, CONNECTED - a
caffeinated. committed, community of disciples – trusting, playing, risking – all to the glory
of God. Dear friends, this is my dream for our presbytery – our community of Presbyterian
congregations - as we move forward.
To paraphrase a blessing we received on our wedding day almost 40 years ago: May our
journey together be as comfortable as an old shoe, and as mysterious as a Chinese puzzle.
May it be so. Amen.
Susan Andrews