Last week we welcomed a visitor at
our Wednesday noon service, a young woman with numerous piercings, and dyed red
streaks in her dark hair. Her right
forearm was in a cast, but you could see the outer edge of the tattoo underneath
it. She remained behind in the church after
the service was over, and when the others had gone, we had a chat. She told me she was visiting friends from out
of town, and had walked by St. John’s earlier that morning and seen the service
time listed on our sign. “I haven’t been
to the Eucharist since…” she said, trailing off at the end of the sentence as
if she couldn’t remember. I asked if she
was an Episcopalian and she said she was, and in fact her a priest.
“My dad and I get along fine,” she
said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked, “but I’m kind of allergic to
parishes.” “There are lots of great
parishes around,” she added hastily, and
then she told me that she worked as the chaplain to the High School grades at a
private Episcopal school. “Schools are a
like whole different world,” she said, “but parishes…” and again she left me to
understand what she meant by what she didn’t say.
This conversation is a pretty good
illustration of the generation gap in the Episcopal Church. With each decade that passes, the number of
young Americans who want to be a part of our congregations gets smaller. Our Wednesday visitor, who is faithful enough
to the tradition of her father to work a spiritual guide to youth under the
auspices of an Episcopal school, is also “allergic to parishes.” She desires the Eucharist enough to come to
church, but she chooses a tiny mid-week service in a town far from home, where
there is no danger of belonging, or even being recognized. And I know hers is no isolated case—I hear
from many of you about your children and grandchildren who have a strong hunger
for religious experience, and desire to lead moral and purposeful lives, but
who do not look for guidance in these things at church.
This generation gap seems to
threaten the very survival of our churches, but before we start panicking, or
blaming ourselves, or our children, or trying desperate measures of one kind or
another to lure younger people to our door, we might want to remember that this
kind of division has been around from the beginning. If the words of the Gospel of Luke that we
heard this morning are to be believed, Jesus’ intended something like this. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace
to the earth?” he asks. “No, but rather
division!” But he is not talking about
war between nations, or power struggles between parties, or even a contest
between religions for the allegiance of souls.
He is talking about division at the most personal intimate level, within
households, within families. And the
relationships that he specifically names as zones of conflict are
inter-generational ones: father and son, mother and daughter, mother-in-law and
daughter-in-law.
If the division that Jesus brings
to the earth hits home in the family, and the faultline is between generations,
than the thing that is at stake must be tradition. His teaching questions the assumption that
the values and customs and world-views handed down from the past necessarily
ought to determine the future. Tradition
must no longer be an infallible guide of the right thing to do, but has become
a sphere of negotiation and conflict, where freedom and inspiration have
something to say, and what matters is reading the signs of the time. And if this is, in fact, at least some of
what this passage is saying, it would be consistent with the general picture of
Jesus that we find in the gospels--a man who continually disrupts people’s expectations of what a religious teacher is
supposed to be like; one who’s bitterest enemies are the guardians of
tradition.
But we have to be careful not to
project our modern biases onto this picture, and conclude that Jesus is against
tradition, which is always bad, and in favor of innovation, which is always
good. We need to realize that Jesus opposes tradition with tradition, the
self-critical tradition of the prophets that runs through the Hebrew scriptures
right alongside the self-justifying traditions of Israel’s special and
exclusive chosenness. The
counter-tradition of the prophets is a voice of division, continually calling
the people, and especially their rulers, to change. The prophets imagine new meanings for
traditional language, turning images of prosperity and contentment, such as
Israel as the fertile vineyard of God, into accusations of hypocrisy and
judgments of doom. They speak on for a
God who identifies with the weak and the marginal, who cries out with them for
justice, and suffers agony in the betrayal that is their oppression. Jesus is the embodiment of this tradition. It
is this God he reveals in person on the cross.
It’s worth noting that when Jesus
talks about the household divided two against three and three against two, he
doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t back the
father against the son, or the daughter against the mother, or the
mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law.
Jesus did not come to settle our family quarrels. But he does seem to want us to have
them. Every generation has to work out
for itself what from the past has outlived its usefulness, and what is worthy
of preserving because it stills holds true. There are ways to shirk this
responsibility. We can fall into
fundamentalism, rejecting everything new as a threat to the perfect order
established in tradition. Or we can
capitulate to the cult of the new, valuing only what feels fresh and exciting
and trending upward now.
Or we can follow Jesus into the
place of division, where we have the kind of conversations that are hardest to
have. They are hard because they demand that
we be really honest about what we believe and what we value and what we want,
not just in terms of superficial things like taste and fashion and opinion, but
about the deep things that really matter, things like faith and work, and life
and death, and suffering, and love. These
conversations are also hard because they show us the limits of our
individuality. The generations that came
before us wrestled with the same doubts and questions and difficulties that we
do. And it will be up to the generations
that come after us to make what they can of our world, because we are leaving
it behind. Negotiating these things
inevitably involves conflict, and a certain amount of heartbreak, because no
two people and no two generations will see the world exactly the same, even when
they are members of the same family.
In the three years that I’ve been
at St. John’s, the biggest fights we’ve had have been about designing a new
logo for our church. In the course of
these conflicts we’ve learned how hard it really is to interpret the signs of
the time. What kind of picture can we
draw to represent our commitment to the continuity of historic tradition, and
at the same time our hope for growth and renewal in the spirit of what God is doing
now? This has been our challenge, and at
times we’ve found ourselves on opposing sides of the divide of continuity and
change. And if there have been moments
when our disagreements have gotten pretty hot, that shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus said he came to earth to start a
fire.
It is a fire that burns away the
traditions that we cling to for their own sake, simply because they are our traditions
and we are afraid to let them go. It is
a fire that consumes our delusions of inventing a future that is all ours, and not
a continuation of a shared past. This
present moment on the earth belongs to all of us, the dying and the being born,
and everyone between. And yet somehow we
must choose our future together. This
means being humble in the face of the mystery of our oneness and our diversity. But it also means not shying away from the
conversations that show us the signs of the time on the other sides of our
divides. This requires a mind as pure
and labile and vital as fire, a heart seared with suffering and radiant with
love. It’s not easy work. It’s never fun to have our family squabbles,
but this is the work of the Church, to continually, attentively, faithfully
seek the mind of Christ, that is never exactly new, and never gets old.
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