The Church as a Community of Teaching and Learning
Acts 2:42/Deut 6:4-9
Intro:
The Question(s) we start with this morning are… Who taught you about faith? What did they teach you? How?
[time of sharing]
Part I: The Apocalypse of Faith?
The Book of Eli is a movie starring Denzel Washington who plays a character on a mission. He lives in America, but it is a post apocalyptic America, an America after the destruction of nuclear war. If you have ever seen the Mad Max movies you can imagine the landscape… no vegetation, little food, little clean water, small colonies of disfigured survivors, ruined and abandoned cities, rubble. As with any post apocalyptic movie you have to have cannibals for the good guys to fight and Denzel fights more than a few cannibals.
We don’t know much about his mission, not at first. He carries a book. A rare book. He needs to get it from the East Coast to the West Coast where the last enclave of civilization stands.Carnegie is the bad guy. He is looking for a book. He controls a little settlement because he controls a supply of clean drinking water. He wants the book because in the book are words with power, words that would enable him to take control of what is left of the America.
As we go along we find out two things. The book that Denzel carries and that Carnegie seeks is the Bible. The last Bible. There is no more religious faith of any kind in this apocalypse. Denzel has to save the last Bible and Carnegie wants it for his own purposes. There is no prayer, no faith.
I’m not recommending this movie necessarily. It’s ok, some good fight scenes. But the thought of an America without any memory of the Bible or the Christian Faith, accept for one lone man on a mission to save that tradition, to save the Word of God, intrigued me.
But its only fiction.
Right?
Part II:
A new book just came out about youth ministry. It is based on a study by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton who work for the National Study of Youth and Religion. The book is by Kenda Creasy Dean and it is called Almost Christian.
I am going to read to you, from an article about the study and the book, by the books author, as found in the Christian Century.
I don’t generally read long quotes but I think we need to hear this…
Smith and Denton reported ‘seeing an alternative faith in American teenagers, one that ‘feeds on and gradually co-opts if not devours’ established religious traditions. This faith, called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,… is affiliated with traditional faith communities but… [leads to teens] practicing a very different faith than historic orthodox Christianity. If teenagers wrote out the creed of this religious outlook, it would look something like this:
• A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible…
• The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.
• God is not involved in my life except when I need God to solve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.
Smith and Denton claim that MTD is ‘colonizing many historical religious traditions and , almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness’… It may be the new mainstream American religious faith for our culturally post-Christian, individualistic, mass-consumer capitalist society….A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that it is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into… Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.’
Dean summarizes the report in this way:
“American young people are, theoretically, fine with religious faith — but it does not concern them much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school.” [Quote from her book]
Then she adds this: “One more thing: we’re responsible.”
Part 3:
I grew up in a very conservative evangelical church, American Baptist, but very different. From childhood I was bombarded with stories from Revelation of the rapture, the anti-Christ, the Tribulation, war and suffering… and it scared me to death. It really did.
I grew up and went to seminary and learned what I think is a better way to read Revelation and it doesn’t frighten me any more. It challenges and convicts and inspires me, but it does frighten me.
This frightens me.
It frightens me because my experience tells me that Smith and Denton and Dean are not Henny Penny running around crying the sky is falling, the sky is falling. We’ve are watching it happen.
Dean writes ‘we ‘teach’ young people baseball, but we ‘expose’ them to faith. We provide coaching and opportunities for youth to develop and improve their pitches and their SAT scores, but we blithely assume that religious identity will happen by osmosis and will emerge ‘when youth are ready ‘ ( a confidence we generally lack when it comes to, say, algebra). ‘
Dt 6:4-9
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Part 4:
Last week, we talked about the Vision of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Do you remember that Vision? God tells Abraham that he will be blessed and that he will be a blessing. He will have child, who will have a child and eventually many and they will have a land…
What we read today was the conclusion of that part of the blessing… Moses and Israel, the descendants of Jacob have reached the Promised Land…
And now the next stage of the Vision unfolds. All the peoples of the earth will be blessed… that is what God promised, that was the next stage of the Vision…
That Israel would be the people that God entrusted with the very words of God for all the nations; Who would devote themselves to being shaped by that word into a living witness, In their practice of prayer and worship, in their practice of justice and righteousness.They would not only have the word but hold it in their hearts and minds and be before a watching world The embodiment of God’s word and the life it brings.
Deuteronomy is a Mission statement. Carry my Word to the People.
Wake up to It, and go to bed with it… walk with it and talk about it, and fill your home with it Take it to work and above all, impress it upon your children…the Hebrew word translated impress literally means pierce… a permanent mark
the Word of God, given to Moses and the people of Israel…
the word of God, the faith, the Christian lifestyle handed down to us…
entrusted to us by; [the list of our church's saints and those people they told me about to open the sermon]
The Word of God Entrusted to us by the word made flesh Jesus
Mt 28:19-20
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
We have been entrusted with this Word.
Our mission is to be a people devoted to it, to reading it and learning it and discussing it and living it and in so doing passing it on…
I heard an Imam respond to the threat to burn the Koran and he said something that I found very inspirational. He said that you could burn the books, but that the Koran was in the hearts and minds of the Muslim people and that could not be burned.
In the end of the movie, Book of Eli, the bad guy gets the Bible, Eli, looses the book, it is lost…
Incidentally, Carnegie gets the Bible but he can’t read it. Eli is blind. The Bible is in brail and Carnegie can’t interpret it. There is no one to explain it to him. (Which I think is a startling metaphor of the fact that the Bible itself is not enough… it takes a community to interpret it, explain it and live it so that it can be taught. Which is what the text from Deuteronomy is telling us. Read it, Learn it, Live it, Teach it)
But all is not lost. Eli doesn’t have the book, but he has memorized every word.
And his last act before dying of the wounds inflicted upon him by Carnegie and his evil henchmen
Is to dictate the Bible to a scribe so that the word is not lost.
Friends, the Word is not lost.
We can pass it on to our children and to all the un-churched and de-churched folks who enter our doors…
The saints we remembered have dictated it to us through their lives of faith
Christ has entrusted it to us…
It will take all of us…It doesn’t matter if your children are grown and no longer here, it will take all of us…It isn’t enough to believe that the Bible is God’s word or to be of the opinion that the Bible is important.
Convictions, wrote James Wm. McClendon, are not just beliefs or opinions, … for our convictions show themselves not merely in our professions or belief or disbelief, but in all our attitudes and actions…
And if that were not challenging enough, McClendon goes on to say of the church…no mere collections of the curious will count.
James William McClendon, Jr.
Doctrine p 29
John Howard Yoder wrote similarly contrasting two choices for the church… ‘run-of-the-mill’ devotion or a ‘heroic’ level of devotion.
J.H. Yoder; The Priestly Kingdom
The Kingdom as Social Ethic, p. 83
These are serious times my sister’s and brothers. We are not living in the post Apocalypse described in the book of Eli, the land with no faith and with no Bible and with no one to teach what it means and what it looks like in action. But Denton, Smith and Dean suggest that we are slouching toward apocalypse. This is not the time for casual or curious Christianity. This is the time of Conviction and Heroic Efforts.
This is our Mission. To be the Heroic and Convicted Community of Learning and Teaching.
Will we accept it?
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