Brad Sullivan
2 Christmas, Year C
January 3, 2015
Saint Mark’s
Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX
Matthew 2:13-15,
19-23
Mary and Joseph took Jesus from Bethlehem and fled to Egypt,
fleeing for Jesus’ life, threatened by the murderous king Herod. This was not the first time someone from
Israel fled to Egypt under the threat of death.
Back before Israel was a mighty nation, there is Israel the man, whose
favorite son, Joseph was about to be killed by his brothers because they were
jealous of him. At the last minute, one
of the brothers, Judah, decided to sell him into slavery rather than kill him,
so Joseph was taken by to Egypt by some passing traders. Going to Egypt, his life was spared.
Years later, Joseph had become the Pharaoh’s second hand in
Egypt by predicting a drought and having them store grain to prepare. When the drought hit, Joseph’s brothers and
his father, Israel, were starving, and so they fled to Egypt to escape
death. Once there, they were reunited
with their brother and son, and the sons of Israel became the people of Israel,
and centuries later, under Moses’ leadership, the people of Israel left Egypt
to become the nation of Israel.
Jesus’ life retells this earlier story, fleeing to Egypt to
escape death, then returning to his home to become who he was. Neither journey was an easy one to make, but
they were necessary. Mary and Joseph
took the journey to Egypt, to the unknown, in order to protect their beloved
son, Jesus, and by doing so, they kept the light of his Gospel burning bright.
The church throughout the United States, we’re facing
declining worship attendance for many reasons.
More folks work on Sunday than they did 30 years ago. Many folks are traveling to see family,
others are tired and wanting to stay home with their immediate family. Still others are finding more entertaining
ways to use their free time on Sunday.
Additionally, more and more people are changing their
religious affiliation from Christian to “none”.
People are leaving the church, and leaving their faith in Jesus along
with it. We now have a new mission field
full of people who either don’t know or have forgotten the light of the Gospel,
and we have a church that is not equipped to bring the light of the Gospel to
them.
We’ve operated under an attractional model of church for
centuries. “Build it and they will
come”, or even “invite them and they will come” has been our primary way and
often our only way of spreading the light of Jesus. Our invitations are reaching some, but our
invitations are not reaching the majority of people who have either left the
faith or have left the habit of coming to church to worship with their
community.
The slow and steady shrinking of the church is happening
faster and faster. More and more people
see the church as an institution, and they are untrusting of the
institution. Many people live in small
communities where it is not economically feasible to build a church and pay a
clergy to lead them and fulfill their sacramental life. Our sacramental way of life and sharing the
light of Jesus has become limited by our attractional model of church, bringing
people here, being the only way that we live out the Gospel.
It is time for the church, like Jesus before her, to go to
Egypt.
In our context, going to Egypt means adopting new ways of
living and sharing the Gospel. We’re
going to continue worshipping here.
We’re going to continue inviting people to share in our life here. We also need to start meeting in small groups
and small communities in which not everyone may come here to worship, but their
communities and groups would still be connected here, even sacramentally.
Bishop Doyle in his upcoming book calls this “Small
Batch: The Local, Organic, and
Sustainable Church.” This is not the end
of church as we are used to, but the addition of new ways, or really old ways,
of being church. Some of the earliest
churches met in Synagogues or other places for worship in fairly large
communities. Some of the earliest
churches also met in peoples’ homes or in small assemblies in public
places. They would share scripture
together, pray together, and they would share a meal together in Jesus’ name,
remembering his last supper with his disciples and his command that they
continue to share bread and wine in remembrance of him.
This was the fastest period of church growth ever, and there
were many models for how people worshipped and lived their lives as Jesus’
disciples in community with others.
Quite unlike our modern sensibilities that church and faith should be
quiet and private, faith was talked about in these small communities of friends
or small communities of people with similar vocations. Faith was shared, and peoples’ relationships
came to be formed around their affection for each other and through sharing
their faith with each other.
The light of the Gospel spread not only through invitation
to large communities. The light of the
Gospel also spread through sharing faith in Jesus, through prayer, worship, and
Eucharist in small batch communities:
people who were together first through their affection for each other
and then held together even more strongly through their faith and life in
Jesus.
Over the centuries, our worship life centralized around the
altar and we developed the model for church and the way of life to which we are
all accustomed. This way of life for the
church has worked well and continues to work well for many of us, but we cannot
continue with our current way of communal church life as the only way. Nationwide, declining membership in the
church, declining membership, and declining faith in Jesus show us that we
can’t simply stay as we are. We must
remain as we are, and we must also go to Egypt.
We must go to a place that is for us, largely unknown, but is the place
in which the sons of Israel became the people of Israel, the place in which
Jesus escaped death, and the metaphoric place in which the early church thrived
and grew.
While keeping one foot firmly where we are, we’re also going
back to the earliest times of the church, and like the earliest church, we
don’t exactly have a roadmap. The
earliest church often had traditions which they kept and they also made their
way as they went.
We don’t have a roadmap for how Small Batch communities are
supposed to work either. So we’ll try
things. One thing I’ve talked to some
folks about already is forming some small groups with people for whom we
already have great affection, people who are already our friends. These small groups of friends can agree to
meet here for worship together at least once a month. They can also meet together at other times
for Bible study and prayer, for meals and sharing faith. They can grow their affection for one another
by intentionally living out their faith tougher. Then, these small batch communities could
invite another friend to join them, and our shared life in the Gospel of Jesus
would deepen and grow.
There are other things we’ll try, other small groups with
some folks who may or may not worship here, but who will worship together. We’ll succeed, and we’ll fail, and we’ll try
again. We don’t exactly know where this
is going, but we do know where we are headed if we do nothing and continue on
the same path. Nationwide continued
decline.
I’m going to keep pushing for folks to start small batch
communities. If you’ve got an idea for
one, start it, talk to me about it, and I’ll support you. We can’t be afraid of failure or afraid of
what others will think. What we need to
do is to dare greatly for the sake of the sake of the Gospel, and so I leave us
with the words of Theodore Roosevelt and the words of St. Paul.
It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of
deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face I marred by
dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short
again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great
devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best know in the
end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at
least he fails while daring greatly…
- Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a
Republic
Do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that be testing you may discern
what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
- Paul, Romans 12:2
Amen.
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