Joy to the World

“Counting It All Joy”

10. Joy to the World

Matthew 5: 13-16

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

August 26, 2007

Some of the children of our church annually attend a particular denominational summer camp on the shores of Chautauqua Lake . It is a popular camp and most of the children enjoy themselves a lot and that is a good thing. The denomination of which the camp is a part is considerably more conservative, theologically, than is our church. In many ways, that does not matter. I can tell no discernible difference between a Presbyterian s’more and a Covenant s’more. Climbing the rock wall at the camp is a challenge for every child no matter his or her theological stripe. Swimming in the lake poses no theological conundrums unless, of course, the conversation turns to whether or not Jesus actually could walk on it. But there is also a teaching theme each week at the camp and that produces a little more angst in the pastors of the more theologically progressive churches in the area which, now that I think about it, means me.

The camp sends to the pastors of the children who attend the camp a survey sheet that each camper is required to complete at the end of the camping week. It poses questions to find out each camper’s favorite part of the week, what could have been better, and then it goes on to make some theological inquiries such as whether or not the camper has “made a decision to ask Jesus into their life.” The final question of the survey invites the campers to share their concerns about what will make it hard for them to continue to develop their spiritual lives once they have left the protected environment of the camp. I could get the drift of this year’s camp theme when, to my chagrin, many of our children who attended answered that question by saying either directly or by allusion, “I am afraid that the world is going to distract me from God and Jesus.”

What? The world as a distraction? How can the world be a distraction? “God so loved the world…” “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it; the world and all who live therein…” As I told a Chautauqua congregation a couple of weeks ago, the world is not a distraction. The world is our vocation. No matter our age, we all share the same work in this life. We all have responsibility for the building of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community and what scripture calls the new creation in which there is harmony, hospitality, and everyone is afforded an opportunity to thrive. We may each have differing roles and jobs and circumstances in life, but we all share, no matter our age, the same work: loving the world. Thus I was not happy that our children were being taught that there is a dichotomy or division between God and the world and that God is good and the world less so, that they are to attend to God as the focus of their spirituality and not the world.

Can someone please look up hymn number 40 in our hymnbook and tell us the name of it? Oh, it is “Joy to the World”? Are you sure? Are you sure it is not “Joy to the Church, the Lord is come?” Okay, I will put my sarcasm away but one of the reasons the church is in the process of being thrown to the sidelines of our culture is that for too long too much of the church has been too sure that the purpose of the church is to turn the world into a church.

I am not one of those in the church who laments the disestablishment of the church in our society or the marginalizing of Christianity. The unprecedented upheaval in the church today affords the church, I believe, some tremendous opportunities it does not have when it enjoys a favored place in the culture. The case surely can be made that ever since Constantine conscripted the church to help to keep order in the state in the fourth century, the essential nature and purpose of the church and Christianity have been compromised. Christendom means literally the domination of the western world’s religious scene by Christianity. Christendom through the centuries too much has concerned itself with becoming ever bigger and more powerful and more successful no matter the cost to those on whose backs such triumphalism is achieved. Christendom has sought to become a thing-in-itself and to capture the world for its own means instead of serving the world.

There always has been something dubious about Christendom. When Christianity is too closely identified or aligned with the culture in which it lives, it lacks the possibility of bringing to that culture something it does not have. It lacks the possibility of what Douglas John Hall calls “prophetic vigilance” for that culture. It becomes instead something like the “religious aspect” of its social location and context, tamed and domesticated, instead of being the vibrant and courageous community of testimony to the gospel that the New Testament envisages.

That is why I am so interested in the metaphors that Jesus used to describe the community of faith as he envisioned it. He said that the church should be like a pinch of salt that enhances the taste of food. It should be like a bit of yeast that helps the dough to rise. It should be like a little light shining in the darkness, like a small city set on a hill showing travelers, by its light, the way to go. Do you notice? There is nothing grand or grandiose about any of them. They all are metaphors of littleness…little things that do something to bigger things. A dab of salt that makes a meal delicious. A dash of yeast that causes the dough to rise into bread. A little light to shed on seekers and sojourners struggling to find their way. The church that Jesus envisioned likely was rather small, but a small witnessing community that proclaimed and propagated a message of hope for the larger community, for the world in which it found and finds itself.

The purpose of the church is not to denigrate the world but to leaven it with care, not to condemn it but to salt it with compassion, not to run from it in fear of its darkness but to stay and bathe it with love’s light.

The church has responded to the decline of Christendom and to the favored status of Christianity in our culture in several ways. Parts of the church simply deny that it is so and go on preening, primping, and pontificating as if the world still sits breathless awaiting the church’s pronouncements. Parts of the church try to stop the decline and to reverse it by trying to return to “the basics” whatever they are, by retreating from an emphasis on involvement in the public square to a preoccupation with personal spirituality, by using judicial procedures within the church’s polities to try to enforce theological purity and conformity among its ministers and members rather than unleashing their creative imaginations that can follow, interpret, and implement the Spirit’s contemporary will. Still other parts of the church lament what they see as the apostasy of the western church and find solace in the seeming rise of Christendom in Africa, Asia, and Latin America .

My sense is that we ought to embrace the falling away of Christendom as a new opportunity for Christian faith…a new opportunity not in terms of power or quantitative success, but wisdom and quality and worldly engagement. The world today is torn and tattered by incredible forces of disintegration and future shock and does not need any more aggressors, least of all aggressive and competitive religion. There is a great need in the world today for religion and faith as we are trying to practice it here in this church…big-minded, open-hearted, world-directed.

So let us, then, let the church, bring joy to the world not by seeking to turn the world into a church, not by trying to make the world religious, not by seeking to become important and influential in our own right, but by helping the world that God loves and of which we are a part to “taste better” for everyone who lives in it, to rise in a way that brings opportunity and hope to all, and to shine the light of justice and mercy into every dark corner.

That will give us something to do this week, will it not?

Amen.

Following the sermon, the congregation sings the rousing traditional spiritual- “This Little Light of Mine.”

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…

Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine…

Come put your hand in mine, let’s make the whole world shine…

The little light of ours, We’re gonna let it shine…

Hide it under a bushel, no! We’re gonna let it shine…

Come put your hand in mine, let’s make the whole world shine...

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