Church Eternal

Pastor’s Epistle—February, A.D. 2019 C

Times have changed for the Church in the West.

Gone are the days when ethnic descent was enough to tie one to a religious community. Gone are the days when worship attendance marked out citizens as good God-fearing anticommunist Americans. Faith, it seems, is ever subject to fashion, and history often seesaws between periods of fundamentalism and godless abandon. All one might say with relative certainty is that while the Church has been declared dead in well-nigh every age since Christ, she has thus far continued to rise up again from out of her many graves.

Worship today is but one of a number of activities we can elect to attend on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday evening—competing, of course, with school sports, television, hobbies, exercise, and that ever-closing window of opportunity we have to share dinner together as a family. There are many worthy causes, many good charities, and many noble service groups all vying for our limited treasure, time, and attention. As a people we seem busier than ever, yet without the powerful institutions of a robust civil society (including home, church, local government, and voluntary associations) which have historically buttressed our individual efforts and seen us successfully through generations of adversity.

For the Church in America this has meant a slow and steady decline in both attendance and in giving over the last 50 years. How then shall we respond? With panic? With guilt? With an ever-expanding menu of customizable options for the individualistic preferences of potential attendees? No, I should think not. This would not only betray our 2,000-year heritage as the people of God in Christ Jesus, but would negate the very purpose of our being the Church here together. Flexibility and innovation are key, but not at the cost of our mission, not at the cost of who we are. We are not in the business of entertainment, therapy, or self-help. We are not even primarily in the business of education, though broad and classical learning has always been a crucial aspect of our faith.

We are in the business of miracles, of death and resurrection. We offer not one more diversion but the solution to a life frittered away for diversion’s sake. The Church offers the deep things of reality: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness; meaning, purpose, and value; God, humanity, and the world both as it is and as it was always meant to be. Here in our worship, in our liturgy, in Word and in Sacrament, Font and Altar, God pours out His life for the world. Eternity enters into time. And we, small gathering of sinners that we are, thus contain within us the very Spirit of the Infinite.

Here we are forgiven. Here we are raised up. Here we are made at long last what we were always meant to be: truly human. Christianity has preached this scandalous Word of Life before emperors, dictators, barbarians, cynics, judges, juries, and executioners for millennia. We have faced persecution, ridicule, corruption within, violence without, sword and fire and tooth of beast, and (perhaps worst of all) apathy. And God has seen us through it all. Nations rise and nations fall, but forever Christ is Risen.

And so we will continue to be Church in this place, regardless of fashion’s fickle winds. We will continue to be sent out, as the Body of Christ, to a world still very much in need of Him. We will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, instruct the ignorant, rebuke the sinner, forgive the unforgivable, and raise the dead up from their graves. We will do all of this and infinitely more because it is Christ who accomplishes all things through us.

There is little room for the soul these days. All is the body, everything the body. Our society has no patience for the slow and quiet things, internal things, invisible things. Not when there’s so much to see and do and eat and buy and always forever consume. But one day this mania will burn itself out. One day our people will have bought all the junk, eaten all the treats, seen all the shows, pursued every possible iteration of carnal indulgence, and they will stop and look about and start at last to ask again that question of real import: “Is this everything? Is this all?”

And then, my brothers and sisters, we will be right here, as we always have been. And the times will have changed again.