Christ Church
United Methodist

“Progressive Christianity: An Invitation to Journey”

Gayle Pickrell, Pastor
Sermon at the Sunday worship service on September 18, 2005

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Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty – more value in questioning than in absolutes.

Matthew 15:1-20

Nine year old Joey, was asked by his mother what he had learned in Sunday school.

“Well, Mom, our teacher told us how God sent Moses behind enemy lines on a rescue mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When he got to the Red Sea , he had his engineers build a pontoon bridge and all the people walked across safely. Then, he used his walkie-talkie to radio headquarters for reinforcements. They sent bombers to blow up the bridge and all the Israelites were saved.”

“Now, Joey, is that really what your teacher taught you?” his mother asked.

“Well, no, Mom. But, if I told it the way the teacher did, you’d never believe it!”

How do we explain some of those biblical stories that just don’t make much sense to us today? They just aren’t very believable. So do we discount the Bible as full of misunderstandings? Do we discount religion as irrelevant? Do we leave the church behind in our search for truth? Or do we enter the realm of complexity and ambiguity as basic to our Christian practice?

Living with complexity and ambiguity seems like it would be basic to the way we deal with things in our day and age. But there seems to be an even greater desire for certainty, dogmatic approach to faith, black and white answers, and a literal Bible than ever before. I sometimes wonder if it has to do with the fact that we have so many options, so many choices to make in our world today, that we are overwhelmed. Coffee, for example – how many choices do you need to make when ordering coffee?

After a while, our brains just want to turn off—we want someone else to make definitive statements about something. When it comes to matters of faith, there should be right and wrong answers, right? What we are told in the Bible, or in church, is either true or it’s not, right? And if it’s not, then what’s the point of being on a spiritual journey?

It is true that the more conservative churches are growing bigger and faster than ever and that the more liberal mainline denominations are shrinking. Christ Church United Methodist is not alone in our declining numbers while the Bible churches are growing by leaps and bounds, with many young families joining their ranks.

Paul Laughlin, in the book we’ve studied recently, Remedial Christianity, writes about the development of Liberalism and Fundamentalism.

In a religious context, Liberalism... reflects the tendency for any long-enduring religion to produce a sub-tradition characterized by free-thinking and flexibility in interpretation, belief, and practice. Such liberalism is grounded in the conviction that, for any religion to survive and remain relevant, it has to move beyond the specific views and practices of its founder [and tradition] to question, adapt, absorb, and change as it moves from time to time and place to place, applying the original principles of the faith to each new historical era and cultural context. A synonym of “liberal” in this sense might be “progressive.”[1]

He goes on to talk about the modern Christian Liberal who holds a modern scientific worldview, who uses the historical-critical method when studying the Bible, who values internal authority, particularly reason and experience, over against any external authority. Basically, first and foremost, Liberalism insists that religious claims must make sense. Secondly, Liberalism tends to maintain that human nature is basically good rather than sinful or corrupted. Third, Liberalism tends to assume that the world and humanity work in accordance with natural law. Miracle stories in the Bible do not mean that they are not true, but that they are broadened from a literal interpretation and may need reinterpretation or re-contextualization.

Liberals tend to have intellectual difficulties with a number of doctrines held by the church, and when they challenge some of these doctrines, they are accused of heresy. Laughlin points out that the Greek word for “heresy” comes from the word that means “choosing.” That is the task of liberals then, to choose what to believe and how to practice that belief. To defenders of Christian orthodoxy, that becomes a very slippery slope indeed. But to those who have left the absolutist position of orthodoxy behind, it is a wonderful gift of freedom, as well as an awesome task of responsibility.

That’s where we enter. I invite us to take up the awesome task of responsibility for our day and age, to enter the debate that is similar to the questions Jesus had to deal with in his day between those who wanted a stronger, more dogmatic traditional approach to faith, and those who were ready to follow a more open path. It may be a bit uncomfortable at times, but choosing our path is what we need to do. We need to do it for ourselves, and we need to do it for those who are desperately searching for a faith that makes sense today, and that doesn’t have such a narrow agenda on what it means to be a person of faith.

Bishop Spong refers to this group of searchers as the “church alumni.” They are a growing group of people who have a religious interest, who think of themselves as spiritual, but who feel the church is no longer relevant. Whenever Bishop Spong speaks, he draws a huge crowd, often of these alumni who are hungry for an approach to faith that makes sense, who do not take the Bible literally, who are not afraid of ambiguity, and who are less concerned about dogma and creed than about living the questions and serving the world.

And so we are invited to be on a journey of faith, to become thinking, searching and discerning Christians who are part of a progressive movement. We do not all start at the same place, and we may not all travel at the same pace. Some may be fearful of where this will lead us. But I submit we’ve been on this journey for a long time, and we need to claim it, boldly and with confidence that we have a message and a faith that the world needs. The Progressive Christianity movement will help us reclaim the symbols of our faith and to find ways to make Christianity a transformative, relevant, life-changing force in our lives and in the world.

I believe we are at a time in our 43 year CCUM history when we need to claim who we are, and what it is we stand for as a faith community. We start with some basic assumptions that come out of a progressive spirituality. We will be helped along through the small groups that are forming to watch and discuss the Living the Questions DVD series, and from the CDs that are available from the Conference for Spiritual Progressives that some of us attended last July. My hope is that our church will be able to proudly claim we are a Progressive Christian faith community where we search together for understanding. But before we get to that place, I want us to spend some time — in sermons, in study groups, in dialogue — about what that means for us.

I will be preaching from the eight tenets of faith that come out of the Center for Progressive Christianity, and I start with one today:

Progressive Christians find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty – more value in questioning than in absolutes.

Too often people feel threatened when we begin to raise questions of the faith, and open up the scriptures for study. Yet, it is strange that over and over Jesus didn’t shy away from questioning of the faith and tradition. In fact, he rarely gave a straight answer to a straight question. Instead of giving an absolutist response, he would turn the question around or tell a puzzling story. At the risk of disappointing his questioners, Jesus put them in a position of having to think for themselves. Rather than offer his disciples answers to life’s most perplexing problems, Jesus introduced them to deeper and deeper levels of ambiguity.[2]

In the Scripture that I chose to use today, Matthew 15, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, the ones who hold to the tradition and the law, put a question to Jesus. “Why do your disciples break the tradition? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” They probably said it in such a way that it was truly scandalous.

Now, I think it’s just good hygiene to wash your hands before you eat – particularly in a time when eating utensils were not terribly common. But that was not the concern of the question. The question was about religious doctrine and tradition. It had to do with the purity laws. It might seem unimportant to us, but it should not be trivialized because the matter of what is clean and unclean, maintaining the holiness to which the people of God are called, was a very serious matter indeed.

The Hebrew law is actually somewhat vague so the question put to Jesus was really more about tradition and practice than absolute law. In the view of the Pharisees (the law-abiding Jews of the day), the “tradition of the elders” was ancient, going back to the Sinai revelation. The Pharisee’s of Matthew’s time, though still dominant, were competing with other groups as to the identity of the true Israel , particularly since the destruction of the Temple in the 66-70 war. Although I have thought of this passage in Matthew, not as a Judaism vs. Christianity debate, but more as a Tradition vs. Reformist issue, the Interpreter’s Bible explains it was more of an inner-Jewish debate of a particular practice. “Your tradition” has a very particular meaning: Jesus is responding to a charge that was a particular practice of the Pharisaic tradition. The issue was a conflict where the Pharisee’s successors attempted to enforce their understanding of tradition on Jewish-Christian communities still within their sphere of influence.[3]

The framing of the question by the Pharisees to Jesus doesn’t really get answered until later in the passage. First Jesus turns it around, challenging their understanding of tradition. He raises the objection that the prophets often raised: true worship is more than lip service. It is more than following particular laws. It is more than holding on to tradition. He tries reasoning: “Listen and understand,” the passage goes on. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person but what comes out that makes a person ‘unclean.’” Jesus makes reference to a plant God would pull up by the roots. Peter, faithful, bumbling disciple that he is, needs Jesus to explain what he means — a perfectly logical comment, I would say. Jesus replies, “Are you still so dull? Don’t you see — the things that come out of the mouth originate in the heart — that’s what makes a person unclean. Evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. And you get all hung up over whether a person has washed his hands or not!”

Do you get a sense of why I chose this passage today to begin our series on Progressive Christianity? The traditionalists, the conservatives, the religious agenda of the culture of our day all seem to get hung up over a few particular issues that for them define the purity of religion, you might say. I can almost hear Jesus say, “What is the matter with you people? You are so stuck on what a person’s sexual orientation is, as though it defined whether one was acceptable or not? Or, you argue over what a woman may or may not choose to do with her body, or whether everything in what you call the Holy Bible is literally true, or whether evolution is acceptable. Don’t you see? These things have nothing to do with being my followers. I have offered a whole new way — a way of love, a way of shalom, a way of wholeness.”

You see, Jesus re-framed the question – something we need to practice in our day, also. The issues are different today, but we are very much in a conflict, similar to the early Christian movement. In Matthew, on one side were the traditionalists. On the other side were the disciples, who were being taught a new way. In the middle stood the crowd — who could go either way, wooed by the appeal to tradition and conservatism, or they could make a choice to follow this man Jesus who had a whole new vision of faithfulness that wasn’t concerned with every word of the law.

This passage frames a conflict that anticipates the passion story where the conflict will conclude with the death of Jesus. Because the Gospels were written 30-50 years after Jesus’ death and assumes the absence of the hand-washing ritual as typical Christian practice, the author of Matthew reflects the conflict already emerging between emerging Jewish Christian leadership and those who hold to the past. Jesus was able offer new guidelines.

In the March 2005 Center for Progressive Christianity newsletter, there was an article written by a clergywoman who served a church named Christ Church , which happens to be an Episcopalian church in New Hampshire . But her words echo what I would want to say as well:

We at Christ Church have chosen to call ourselves a progressive Christian community... As I ministered at Christ Church, I realized that this Body of Christ was just that, progressive in its thinking about being a Christian. We know we are not [totally] there yet but are progressing along the way. To do that means we are open to questions, doubts, and searching. That opens up interesting and provoking dialogues. We believe that searching for understanding is more important than laying dogmatic certainties on people. Having an inquisitive mind and heart leads people to a deeper understanding of their relationship with God.

Maybe there are those who believe it is already spelled out for us and we need go no further. It is exciting though for me to listen... [to people] as they explore the meaning of what it is a Christian is to do to bring about justice and peace among all people. It is enlightening as people are willing to share their struggle with the truths Jesus gave to us. It is fun, yes fun, to listen as a skeptic begins to grasp a certain understanding or hold a position! It is every more touching to hear how these progressives seek to restore the integrity of God’s creation and to bring hope to those whom Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers...

[As a progressive Christian community,] we believe that one can find hope in a progressive Christian environment. Hope that God is accepting of each and every one of us. Hope that the people of the world will become like that. Hope that we are equipping each other for the work we feel Jesus is calling us to do, to offer radical hospitality.

It is good that integrity and authenticity can find a place to be open, accepting and giving. It is best yet that there is a safe place for those who still in humility acknowledge they do not have it all together, do not own the “truth,” and are willing to go “for the ride of their life” as progressive Christians...[4]

So, here we go, Christ Church United Methodist of Santa Rosa, CA. We’re in for the “ride of our lives” as Progressive Christians.