Shaking Foundations

[A sermon I preached in the late summer which I think proves even more true after an election in which we saw mountains of blue amidst seas of red. Perhaps the sermon points a way forward for us post-election.  Ultimately, that way forward is for me a people I call church.]

"The Shaking of the Foundations:

America, The Church, and the Future"

Hebrews 12:26,26:

At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” 27This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. 

"The Shaking of the Foundations: America, The Church, and the Future" -- I hope this sermon title is not too unambitious!  You know what they say, "If you don't have a strong sermon, give them a strong sermon title; they're more likely to remember that anyways."

I don't know that I have a strong sermon for you this morning.  But I do have what I think is something important to say. And I hope you'll listen. 

My choice to talk about America this morning comes after listening Monday to one of my favorite afternoon AM radio shows, featuring two of my favorite AM radio show hosts, Jay Leeson and Cliff Wilkes. Jay and Cliff are -- and I say this with sincere appreciation and respect -- like the Bo and Luke Duke of Lubbock County.  And just like Bo and Luke's show "The Dukes of Hazard" was about a place called Hazard County, Jay and Cliff's show, "The West Texas Drive", is about a particular place -- our place, Lubbock County, and the rest of West Texas.

Jay and Cliff were talking Monday about the 2016 presidential election and one of them -- I think it was Cliff -- said if Hillary Clinton wins in November there will be a large percentage of people here in West Texas and in the rest of what is sometimes called "heartland" and sometimes alternatively called "flyover" America, who will be left to wonder if they still have a place in this country.

This conversation coincided with the recent publication of a book by Robert P Jones procoactively titled The End of White Christian America.  In the book, Jones takes white Christianity to be a symbol of the kind of cultural and political world white Protestantism built over the first 175 years of our country's existence. That world is in decline, Jones says and he points to some important recent statistics to make his case. At the time of the 2008 general election, a solid majority of 54% of Americans were both white and Christian, but in the course of only seven years that number has now dropped precipitously to only 46% of Americans.

The reasons for this are primarily two-fold:

First is of course immigration and the rise of the non-white Hispanic demographic in America. Our country is getting browner, and just in case anyone has been pulling a Rip Van Winkle over the last two decades, Lubbock is getting browner also. In fact, this part of Lubbock is getting browner also. Our public schools start back tomorrow and two of mine will go back to Whiteside Elementary, here in southwest Lubbock. Last year, I was intrigued to see just how many Latinos were dropping their kids off and picking them up and so I looked up the school's demographics. Thirty-three percent of the students enrolled at Whiteside last year were non-white Hispanic.  Let me repeat that . . . Thirty-three percent are brown at WHITEside.

But there is something else that is driving down the percentage of white Christians and that is the incipient rise of the number of young people now no longer self-identifying as Christians. A 2014 survey of 35,000 U.S. Americans revealed that the religiously unaffiliated (also called "nones" -- as in "none of the above" now accounts for 23% of the adult population, up from 16% in 2007.  The community around our church is growing increasingly less and less Christian, and with that has come an increasingly  more and more secular social order. 

How long has it been now since teachers wouldn't assign homework and coaches wouldn't schedule practice on Wednesdays because Wednesday was church night? (I for one did not attend Wednesday night church as a kid, but I sure appreciated the kids in my class who did. But how long has that been?)

Just how different everything is now became clear to me when I read an article from our next Adult Retreat Leader, Dr. Bill Leonard wrote about a visit he made to Mayberry, USA.  He had been invited to preach on a Sunday morning in one of the churches in downtown Mt Airy, North Carolina, inspiration for the "Andy Griffith Show" set. But Andy, and Opie and Aunt Bee would not have recognized the town Bill Leonard drove into that Sunday morning. Rather than the quiet, quaint town he imagined, Main Street was bustling with droves of people who had all come to participate in and cheer on the "Tri-Mayberry Sprint Triathlon", a Rotary-sponsored charity scheduled to start right there in downtown Mayberry, USA on Sunday morning . . . Palm Sunday morning, no less.

And if Toto were still alive he would say not only are we not in Kansas anymore, we're not in Mayberry anymore either.

But if Mayberry's changed, twenty minutes down the road, in a town neighboring Mt Airy, things have changed for the much worse. Mt Airy has been able to survive on a niche and kitsch market for Mayberry memorbelia, but writing in this week's edition of "The American Conservative" Michael Cooper describes what is happening in his hometown, the real Mayberry c.a. 2016, the one not able to still draw on the benefits of a bygone era of film. I quote him at length:

My town is twenty minutes from where Andy Griffith grew up.  The real life Mayberry.  It's the next county over. Last month there was a national reporter going around town doing interviews like we're a war zone.  Mayberry is ground zero of society's fall. Who saw that coming?

Last Thursday I go into the gas station, and this young girl comes in, probably mid-20s, in a very nice dress, desperately in need of cigarettes.  Obviously on meth.  Otherwise she'd be very pretty.

She's so frantic and anxious that the line lets her cut.  As she walks out we all just stand there. Silent.  Not even shocked. Just sad. 

Humanity has always had problems, Slavery, etc. . . . But this is something new. Man is not made to act like that. 

"Mayberry is ground zero of society's fall. Who saw that coming?"

You know who saw that coming?  Jay Leeson and Cliff Wilkes saw it coming.  The good Ol' boys saw it coming a long time ago.  And really no matter if your in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, or the dry, dusty plains of West Texas or the steel towns of the great Northeast, it's all the same. What we are seeing all across "flyover" America is the shaking of the foundations. A societal fracturing and social disruption.  It is the loss of community.  What sociologists call dislocation. 

And the toll is tremendous. The article mentioned methamphetamine use -- a scourge in our rural communities. In fact, the crisis of drug use is so great now that in New Hampshire the governor dedicated the entirety of last year's State of the State address to the epidemic. Drug addiction is a personal problem; but it is also a social problem. Young whites in the country use drugs for the same reasons young blacks commit crimes in the city -- because there is not a compelling enough reason to keep them from doing so.  This is a war zone.  Ground zero. And the demons causing all the carnage names are isolation, dislocation, and despair.

Those with the economic means get out,while the middle class struggles like it has not struggled in years -- wondering about our schools, and worrying if there will be enough to set aide for college this year now that the insurance premiums are ours to pay.  Those left even further behind fall into one of two categories: one brown the other white; one urban the other rural; or, in some places, one nouveau urban and the other, I am thinking of Ferguson now) ghetto suburban. One category is increasingly fixated on what America was, while the other is still held captive by what it was not.  One flyover the other speed past. 

These are two separate categories and fundamentally two separate American experiences. And the two, both beautiful and also both tragic, both culpable and also both victims, both children of God, are being pitted against one another in the grand theatre we call politics. Pulled apart. 

And I remember Yeats's words:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And we wonder, shall it be isolation, dislocation and despair and everyone hunkering down in their own encampment or is there another way?  Is there another vision?  Is there any word from the LORD, for just such a time as this?

And at this moment the Lectionary gives us the Book of Hebrews. A great preacher, unnamed and unknown, writing in the context of another time when the primary social organizing institution -- the Temple -- had either been destroyed or was in the process of being destroyed. It was, in the preacher's words a time of great "shaking".  The very foundation of the nation's life was being rocked and things -- great and mighty things, things once thought to be eternal -- were falling apart. 

And for just such a time as that, the preacher took up his pen and said that he was not surprised that it was so. He was not surprised, he said, because he had already been told that the earth and the heavens would all pass away.  That all human things would perish.  That they would all wear out like a garment. Only God alone would remain, and God, the preacher said, is the same yesterday and forever.

And that is when he began to speak of God's people -- what he called that great cloud of witnesses.  People like Abraham and Isaac and Sarah and Moses and Rahab.  "They were not seeking what was behind," the preacher said. "But they were seeking a better country."  That litany of names, that great cloud of witnesses, is found in the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews. It's sometimes called the roll call of faith. Each of them was by faith still holding on, still looking, still waking. Each of them had faith that they would find the better country, one that was not behind, but still lay on up ahead.

Faith, hope, and love. These are the things Dallas's Mayor Mike Rawlings said we need to have to go on. Faith that our institutions are here to serve us and will do so with legitimacy. Hope that things will get better -- that the better country really is up ahead. And love -- for ourselves and also for our neighbors. A love that looks after not only our own interests but also the interests of others. 

I don't know where else the world is going to find these things if it's not in us -- the church. And maybe that's why the preacher in Hebrews implores the people not to give up meeting together as so many others have. We need to keep meeting -- browns and whites and good ol boys and good ol girls that we are.  And we need to keep bearing our witness, showing to the world that it is possible to -- as we say in our mission -- to be love, light, and one.

Mayberry is mostly a myth now. It's the town my mother gre up in that is no more. But my word, I do love what it was all about. That's the reason I still have my kids watching "The Andy Griffith Show" on something called Netflix. "Why is it in black and white?" Gabrielle asked." "That's how the world used to be," I said. The other day we were watching an episode and Opie wanted to run away from home.  He had had it with Aunt Bee and was ready to get out of town but he wanted to take Andy with him.  

There's something deeply profound in that. It'll preach. That'll preach because that's where the hope is: that though we can leave the town behind, the promise is our Heavenly Father will never leave nor forsake us. He goes with us.  Even if we lose all semblance of our home as the preacher in Hebrews and his people did, God remains with us.

In 1906, a great 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the foundation of San Francisco, killing 3,000 people and destroying 80% of the city. Jack London wrote of looking down upon San Francisco as it burned in fires beyond control, describing it as the crater of a giant volcano, ablaze with red flowing lava. In the city, the Episcopal Church had a great cathedral, Grace Cathedral, which fell victim to the tremors and the subsequent fire.  Just before the Cathedral fell, the priests were able to escape carrying two very important things with them: the church archives and the communion, powerful symbols of God's able and steadfast provision in times past and and the promise of God's presence in times future. 

And though nations rise and fall, and everything wears out lie a garment, and the mountains be shaken and the hills removed the eternal remains. 

Faith, hope, and love remain.

God remains.

As Sheriff Taylor used to say, "I declare . . ."

God does remain. 

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.