We've Got to Tell It

By The Reverend Matthew Fitzgerald
Matthew 28:16-20

Address by The Reverend Matthew Fitzgerald, Pastor
Epiphany United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois.
Presented at the Midwest Regional Event of
Voices for an Open Spirit
Kalamazoo, Michigan, March 27, 2004

Christ's disciples are walking to the mountain in Galilee where Jesus had promised to meet them. Of course, he's been killed, so this reunion promises to be unusual. Peter walks at the front of their column, several paces ahead of the rest. He knows that he will see the risen Christ. He's seen stranger things in his time with Jesus. Thomas brings up the rear, muttering impossible. In between them nine others walk, torn between faith and logic.

As the mountain begins to loom large, the eleven see a familiar figure on the road. They realize immediately its Jesus. Peter begins to sprint. Joy overwhelms each man, as a tidal wave rolling over sand. To see the risen Christ is to grasp the Christian story. God calls to us and we turn away, insisting there is nothing wrong with the world or awry in our lives. God responds to our refusal by coming to us in Christ Jesus. We ignore him, betray him, kill him, continue in our sin. But God will not be stopped. Christ is risen! When they see Jesus on the road, the disciples hear God say, Stop fleeing from my love. You can crucify it, it will return. You can deny it, it will remain. I have risen not to condemn you, but to love you. I am with you. I am yours. Jesus' friends stand in silence, absorbing this new truth. And then their teacher speaks. "God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near in this resurrection way of life. Share your faith. Invite others to discover your joy. I will be with you as you do this, day after day, right up to the end of the age."

All of Christianity can be traced to the disciples' faithful response to this command. Every sermon preached. Every church built. Every soup-kitchen. Every hospital. All the hope-filled funerals, stained-glass windows, stands for justice, sacred songs, pacifists and summer camps, the fellowship, the friendship, the marriages, the selfless acts and the seminaries; the realization that God is not some inscrutable string-puller, but is instead, our teacher, brother, savior, friend, on earth as well as heaven, shouldering our burden, singing out our celebration, walking with us until the end of the age.

H. Richard Niebuhr once famously said "Christianity is always one generation away from extinction." Its beauty is rooted in a story far too idiosyncratic to be intuited. No one will discover the incarnation or the resurrection on their own. It is too strange. The story must be told and learned. This means that if our faith is not shared, it will die with the first generation who choose to keep their mouths shut.

Instead of his original disciples, see Jesus encounter today's Liberal Protestant Church walking north on Damen avenue. Those with eyes to see spot him first up near Irving Park, but we all run toward him, hearts racing, steps light. He embraces us and then says, "God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near in this resurrection way of life. Share your faith. Invite others to discover your joy. Evangelize. I will be with you as you do this, day after day, right up to the end of the age."

Evangelize? Most of us look down at our feet, embarrassed by the word. Someone softly asks, "does he know what church he's talking to? The fundamentalists are 3 blocks south, near Roscoe." One brave soul pipes up, "Um . . Jesus? I think we have a committee for evangelism. I saw a line item in the budget." And then the rest of us nod our heads, relieved. And we don't tell our friends. And we don't invite our neighbors. And Christianity moves one step closer to extinction.

Don't feel guilty. Given some of our basic assumptions about religion there is absolutely nothing we can do. We're caught on the horns of an impossible tension between the broad-minded tolerance espoused by the Liberal Church and the evangelist's explicit claim that "Christianity has something you need!"

Behind this tension lie two very different ideas about how religion works. Conservative Christians see Christianity as a series of truth claims about objective realities (Lindbeck, 16). They believe that "Hell is real and fire is hot!" That those who don't accept Jesus are going to burn. That Christianity is a series of truths and propositions the believer must swallow like so much oatmeal. It is easy for people of this persuasion to evangelize. They've got the truth. And they think everyone else needs it. They understand themselves as answers in a world full of questions.

On the other hand, our brand of Christian locates the origin of religion in the depth experience of the inner self. Religions are creative expressions of our deep, internal, personal experiences of God. These expressions take different shapes and forms, but the root experience is the same. I can talk about Jesus. You can talk about auras. She can find God in the cold blue water of Lake Michigan. And we're all singing the same song. This approach holds that the deepest experiences and commitments of every religion are universal. They simply surface differently. Poetic expressions of our universal, and inward experiences of God. It makes sense that those who understand religion in this way are very hesitant to tell someone else where they ought to go to church or what they should believe. It is as odd as saying, "here, I wrote this poem. Memorize it and feel the same emotions I felt putting pen to paper." How can a church that holds such theology evangelize? We can't. Liberal Protestants follow what Lindbeck calls an "Experiential Expressevist model.In this understanding, different religions are expressions of humanity's universal experience of God. "Experiental Expressevists" locate the origin of religion in the depths of the inner self. Religions are creative expressions of our deep experiences of God. These expressions take different shapes and forms, but the root experience is the same. This approach holds that the deepest experiences and commitments of every religion are universal, they simply surface differently. Again, religion surfaces from within human beings as a poetic expression of our universal and inward experience of God.

In practice: If I were sitting across the table from a devout Muslim and we were to scrape away the contradictory and distinctive claims our respective religions make, we'd find that underneath all the pious jargon we're talking about the same God. If I set aside the distinctively Christian claim that God suffered on the cross, and he set aside the distinctively Muslim claim that the Koran completes and perfects Christian revelation, we'd find that we're talking about the same God. If this jibes with your own experience of religion, you are probably an experiential expressivist. Most Liberal Protestants are.

My mother is. I think it is a description she would accept gladly. I have this clear memory from years ago of sitting with her in church, listening to a Children's sermon as some well-intentioned minister tried to tell the frightening story of the crucifixion to a group of uncomfortable five and six year olds. "Why" my mother whispered, "do we tell our children such a strange story? Why can't we just tell them about God?" Do you see her logic? God can be known, indeed is known outside the parameters of Christianity's distinctive, strange, claims.

Years ago, three weeks before Easter I visited my neighborhood UCC. The minister celebrated communion without once mentioning Jesus. When I stepped forward to receive the bread he said, "sustenance for your Lenten journey" as if he were handing out ham sandwiches before a hike. I have rarely felt so let down. The blurry religiosity of his words wandered well-past the point of meaninglessness. For me they proved that "One can no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general." I admit the situation was absurd, but this is the ultimate conclusion of our approach. A refusal to talk about Jesus in the Eucharist out of fear of offending one other's personal spiritualities. Given this understanding of how religion works, we stand a better chance of flapping our wings and flying to Canada than we do telling strangers how much Jesus loves them. All the while our sorely needed, broad-minded, inclusive, progressive Christianity moves one step closer to extinction.

But we should not despair, for God is still speaking, still solving our problems and giving us the answers that we need. The solution to our dilemma must begin with the realization that our liberal protestant understanding of religion is wrong. Admirably motivated, but wrong. This is easy for me to say because, my own journey into Christianity proves it true. I now risk seeming self-absorbed but I'm going to share that story with you. Not because it is unusual, but because it is typical, and it might help point toward a third alternative between the Christian right's fear-based evangelism (Come to the savior, or burn in hell!) and our church's deep-seated discomfort with faith sharing.

I am the son of a minister and I grew up in a home that paid careful attention to the particularities of the Christian story. One of my clearest memories is of Christmas morning sitting on the parsonage staircase in Alpena Michigan, waiting to race into the living room to tear presents open. But having to sit still as my father read the account of Jesus' birth from Luke's gospel. "This comes first" he said, "It comes before everything."

And in my childhood it did. The stories of our faith were woven into my upbringing. Noah, the arc and its animals were on my bed sheets. Moses and his burning bush lived in my imagination, and I made sense of the world through the story I heard time and again. The story of Jesus, of his death, the terrible price he paid to bring us the good news of God's love. Of his resurrection and victory over the grave, over anyone and anything that would say "no" to the love of God. During my childhood God was in my life clearly and tangibly.

My father died when I was thirteen. And soon thereafter I stopped going to church. Initially this was because it was hard for my family to attend the church where my dad had been the pastor, and it was hard for the church and their new minister as well. But ultimately I stopped worshipping because the Church's stories lost their hold over me. I don't know why this happened. It is something of a chicken and egg question, but I think that, first I stopped going to church and then the story lost its power. In any event, aside from the occasional holiday obligation I stayed away from church for nearly fifteen years.

I never stopped believing in God. Indeed I can remember a conversation with an agnostic friend in which I described myself as "spiritual but not religious" and argued that one could certainly have God without having church. But the fact was that during this chapter of my life the God whom I had known clearly and tangibly grew indistinct and seemed to retreat further and further into formless, hazy mystery.

In harsh language Stanley Hauerwas writes that when Christians try to follow God without using Christian language we "damn ourselves into vagueness." I don't like that statement because, for me, it proved true. Without the Christian story, and without the church to tell it, God grew so indistinct as to be non-existent. I knew that something was out there, but what? For more than a decade I experienced God as "the Ultimate Vagueness."

It was not until I read the gospel of Mark nine years ago that God began to grow clear again. And it was not until I re-immersed myself in the Church and its story of Christ's birth, crucifixion and resurrection that God came into sharp relief, a distinct and knowable deity who calls me to surpass my limitations and loves me when I fail to do so. In short I need the distinctive, idiosyncratic truth claims of Christianity in order to have God in my life.

My experience illustrates the great George Lindbeck's theory understanding of how religion works. He argues that language creates experience. That is to say, you discover what it means to be "enthralled" after you learn the word. He goes on to say that religion functions like language. Religion is the producer of religious experience, rather than the expression of religious experience. First, we learn the Christian story and then we are religious.

Helen Keller provides an excellent example of how this works. You will recall that in February of 1882, when Helen was nineteen months old, she was stricken with an illness that left her both blind and deaf.

The following few years nearly devastated Helen and her family. She couldn't learn to speak and became an intensely difficult child, smashing dishes and lamps and terrorizing the whole household with her screaming and violent tantrums. Relatives regarded her as a monster and urged her parents to place her in an institution.

But they couldn't bear to. On 3 March 1887 a teacher named Anne Sullivan arrived at the Keller house. Anne and Helen moved into a small cottage on the land of the main house to try and get Helen to improve her behavior. Anne began by simply letting Helen know that she was loved. She fed her, brushed her hair, buttoned her old-fashioned shoes. Over the coming weeks, Helen's behavior began to improve as a bond grew between the two. Then, after a month a "miracle" occurred. As she cared for the child Anne had been trying to teach her how to finger-spell with sign language. But Helen had not yet fully understood the meaning of words. When Anne led her to the water pump on April fifth 1887, all that changed.

As she pumped the water over Helen's hands, Anne took Helen's left hand and spelled out the word.

Years late Helen recounted the incident:

"We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."

Helen immediately asked Anne for the name of the pump to be spelt on her hand and then the name of the flowers whose perfume she spelled. All the way back to the house Helen learned the name of everything she touched and also asked for Anne's name. Anne spelled the name "Teacher" on Helen's hand.

Helen's progress from then on was astonishing. Her vocabulary grew exponentially. She learned to express her feelings, name her emotions, place existence within a frame of meaning. She stopped throwing tantrums and became serene. The acquisition of language let Helen actualize her capacities for thought, action and feeling. She was transformed! The "monster" became a beautiful human being.

Do you see? We are Helen Keller, blind, unable to speak to God and unable to hear God speaking. The Church is our Anne Sullivan and the Christian story our sign language. Just as clear well-water poured over Helen's hands before she could name or know it, God is being poured out over our lives already. When we learn the story of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience existence in its terms we too will come to know and name the water. God will become distinct, saving, knowable, rather than a distant mystery, or fuzzy non-judgmental energy. And we will become God's beautiful children. Not valuable because of what we've done or how much we earn. Not identified by the things we've learned or the beads, baubles, homes and cars we own. Valuable because Jesus tells us we are loved by God. Identifiable by the fact that this love has changed the way we live our lives.

And the same, of course, could be true for every one of our friends and family members who currently choose to spend Sunday morning in the aimless pursuit of nothing. The same could be true for those who have given up, for the loneliest person you know, for the last woman or man who walked past your church and thought, "there is nothing in that church for me." For all of the people in our nation being shaped by an idolatrous tale whose plot is mine and military might and more. We have a story that could save and change their lives.

But we've got to tell it. We can't be quiet any longer. We must find new ways to say, "come into my church. Sit next to me. Let God's story shape your life."

The Reverend Matthew Fitzgerald
Kalamazoo, Michigan
March 27, 2004