Sermon: Writing On The Wall
Texts: Daniel 5:1-30, Matthew 19:14
Date: Feb. 1, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
“The handwriting is on the wall.” A harbinger of doom. One of the online dictionaries I consulted spells it out this way: “to understand that you are in a dangerous situation and that something unpleasant is likely to happen to you.” Further, “if the writing is on the wall for a person or an organization, it is clear that they will fail or be unable to continue.”
You are probably familiar with that idiom. I thought it was possible that you had never heard or read the story that it comes from until a few moments ago. It’s a rather bizarre little tale. In case you didn’t catch exactly what the king did to bring on his doom, it was not just ordinary drunkenness and debauchery. It was the use of the holy vessels that had been stolen from the Jerusalem temple during the ransacking of Israel to toast foreign gods. It was something like one of the bejeweled chalices from St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City being filled with the local brew and raised in a toast to Shiva the Destroyer. The punishment was swift, but it came with the mysterious warning of the handwriting on the wall, which had to be interpreted by Daniel, an exile from Israel living as a captive there.
Some would say that the handwriting is on the wall for mainline denominations such as the United Church of Christ. The UCC, like other mainline denominations, benefitted from the rapid growth of mainline churches through the 1940’s and 50’s. Starting in the mid-60’s sometime numbers started to decline; our denomination and others of our ilk have lost roughly 25% in terms of numbers of members. Some of these changes are due to demographics—we’re having fewer children, collectively—and some are not.
More alarming than raw numbers is the evidence that our membership is aging fairly dramatically. Do you know how many clergy in the UCC are under 40? 4%. That’s it—4% under 40 years old. (Did you know Pastor Emily was such a rare bird?) That’s a problem for churches on a number of levels, including the fact that churches often mirror their leaders, demographically speaking.
The number of young people who are turning to religious communities in our nation is getting smaller. Less than half of people under the age of 25 identify themselves as churchgoers. If that’s the nationwide average, you can be sure that in this relatively un-churched frontier the number is considerably smaller. People under 25 may identify themselves as spiritual, but they are less and less likely to affiliate with a particular religious group. If current trends continue, there might not be young people in our churches, and those of us who are aging might end up going down with the ship. Not a happy thought.
These things are especially on my mind because of the subject of our clergy retreat this past week, “closing the generation gap.” Our teacher at the clergy retreat, a livewire named Da Vita McCallister from the Connecticut conference of the UCC who specializes in youth and young adult ministries, wanted us to take a look at what may be handwriting on the wall. I don’t think she wanted us to turn pale and fall in a knock-kneed faint like King Balshazzar, but she certainly wanted us to think about the elements of the current situation and how we might take steps to reverse this trend. I want to share some of what she was trying to teach us with you this morning.
Day told us a little story of an encounter with her daughter that puts flesh on statistics. Her daughter said to her, “You like pink, don’t you, Mom?” Day agreed, she likes pink. “You like to wear pink.” Day agreed. The daughter said, “Why would you try to get me to wear pink?” Day said she wouldn’t, since pink is not her daughter’s thing. Then her daughter asked her why Day wants her to be a Christian, to share her faith. To the youngster it’s the same as trying to get her to wear pink—an insignificant matter of personal preference, nothing more. Day countered with comparing sharing her faith with trying to share a beautiful and delicious piece of fruit with her daughter. The daughter replied, “How do you know I want fruit? How do you know what kind of fruit I might like? How do you know I lack fruit in my diet?” Do you see what’s up here? What seemed to many of us a given—that faith is an essential part of a full human life—seems a lot more optional to those who are coming to maturity now.
There’s no point in wringing our hands or deriding young folks for having this kind of attitude about the faith that is so dear to us. There are many external factors that contribute to the way younger folks view faith and religious institutions. There has been a general decline in American confidence in institutions of all kinds. The 1960’s saw a loss of confidence in government. Our confidence in the ability of our educational system to prepare children to compete in the worldwide market slipped in the 80’s. In the 1990’s our confidence in the business sector slid with the Enron scandal and similar situations. Now in the 2000’s we are experiencing a similar loss of faith in the financial sector. Few of us view the cultural institutions in which we once put our trust as particularly trustworthy. Various church scandals, plus the general decline in other institutions, have caused lots of people to view even the church with a more jaundiced eye.
Declining financial resources as churches have shrunk has resulted in cuts on a national, regional and local level of programs that used to particularly care for youth and young adults. When churches feel anxious, they often cut programs that may have some vague future benefit in favor of putting resources into people who are paying the bills right now. For instance, outdoor ministry programs have been cut `most everywhere, even though 75% of clergy who are ordained before age 40 cite camp as the place they first experienced a call into professional ministry. That potential future benefit tends to lose to more pressing current needs like paying the light bills. Fewer programs targeted for youth and young adults mean fewer youth are nurtured to faith by them.
Eagle Harbor Church, I commend you for not cutting back on your commitment to funding professional youth ministry here. Give yourselves a pat on the back for your consistent and generous support of our youth program! Give yourselves a round of applause for all the volunteer hours y’all put into supporting our program as well! I tried not to brag too much at the clergy retreat but I sure am proud of what we have done here, and I’m proud of the youth’s commitment to the youth groups in the midst of all kinds of competition for their time.
We should congratulate ourselves, and at the same time recognize that even these efforts may not be enough to nourish faith in our young companions. There is a generation gap of an entirely new kind afoot, and we need to understand it if we hope to communicate anything, including the faith we value, to young folks. We spent a lot of time at the retreat discussing the differences between people born before 1980 and those born after 1980. I’m going to summarize what Day was trying to teach us because I found it so interesting.
Raise your hand if you were born before 1980. Here is one characteristic of our group: In a learning situation, we prefer a single stimuli—one thing going on at a time. In worship, for instance, one person preaching, followed by the choir singing the same song all together, followed by one voice in prayer, etc. One. That’s our number. Give us one thing to learn and we’ll learn that and then you can give us one more.
Raise your hand if you were born after 1980. You people tend to prefer multiple stimuli in your learning settings. You’re doing your homework, and listening to the iPod, and texting your friend, and keeping an eye on your Facebook all at the same time. Your attention can shift from one thing to another very rapidly. What seems like chaos to us pre-1980 people actually seems to help you focus and learn.
Pre-1980ers: We tend to use technology to support existing relationships. We email the people who are already part of our communities. Post-1980 people use technology to form relationships as well as support them. You meet people on Face book or MySpace, gather a group around an issue through a blog, and so forth. That’s different. We pre-1980 folk don’t really get that.
A couple of other things. Pre-1980 people didn’t, for the most part, experience significant diversity until we were adults. As kids, we didn’t befriend people of different races, classes, sexual orientations, or religious affiliations. And we didn’t see much of any diversity on TV—it was “Leave it to Beaver” time. Those born after 1980 have experienced significant diversity as kids. You know people and are friends with people who are in different races, classes, sexual orientations, religious affiliations, differing abilities. And you’ve seen a lot more diversity on TV as you’ve grown up than we did. In other words, diversity seems a lot more “normal” to you.
Lastly, when we pre-1980 people grew up, church was more at the center of civic life. Stores weren’t open on Sunday mornings—can you imagine? There weren’t any soccer games on Sundays—really! In some school systems teachers would give less homework on Wednesdays because it was prayer group and youth group night. Post 1980 people have never experienced Church being at the center of civic life. It’s a different world. You weren’t brought up to believe that churches had clout in the community the way we were.
All this is to say there is a gap between the way those of us who were born before 1980 and those born after experience the world. We don’t always understand each other. We don’t find it all that easy to communicate. Younger folk may find the pedestrian pace of our communication and the lack of opportunity to respond in a forum like a sermon almost unbearably dull. And some of us older folk find that the technologies of communication have expanded so rapidly that those of us who learn things one at a time often have a tough time keeping up. And we’re so not used to the way media has become bi-directional. In the old days if you wanted to respond to the news you could sit and yell at the TV. Now people expect to be able to respond to what they hear and see and read. There are at least 250,000 blogs out there in cyber-space. The person whose option used to be limited to yelling at the TV can now broadcast their opinions to the whole world. Internet news comes with a long string of commentary and discussion following the events being reported. That just seems boggling and confusing to some of us more seasoned adults.
Our teacher Day pointed out to us, though, that all the new technologies are allowing people to live out a core value of progressive faith—that we are all connected. This is a good thing. So those of us who are in charge of institutional maintenance and development would do well to try to embrace the new ways information is shared and processed, the new ways relationships are nurtured and communities are formed. How might we in the church adapt to newer practices so that it is crystal clear that we want youth and young adults to be part of the community of faith? And not just as cute mascots or set decoration. How can we open ourselves to change in the way we worship and meet so that we can embrace the gifts younger people have to offer? How can we engage younger people as teachers who will help us get with the program? How can we welcome new technologies not just as pleasant distractions but as instruments that will help tell the gospel story?
One of the reasons I chose to have the handwriting on the wall story in the book of Daniel read this morning is that the judgment which Daniel translated fascinated me. MENE: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. TEKEL: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. PERES: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. I pray that a similar judgment will not be rendered on the church that I love so much—that its days are numbered, that it has been weighed and found wanting, that the division between generations is not healable and therefore all the resources of our churches will be divided among other religious communities in the future. I don’t think that we are at the end of our days in the UCC, yet. However, we should not be in some stupor of denial, drunk with the wine of the world, forgetting that it is our responsibility not just to march in place but to find new ways to do church.
I chose the writing on the wall story for another reason as well. I’ve been writing on people’s walls of late. Not their house walls, their Facebook walls. You see, writing on virtual walls is not necessarily a harbinger of doom—it can be a way of being in community even when we’re not together. Karen has helped me get going with this networking technology and has given me some patient coaching. Davis told me how to start a group there so I started one for EHCC youth which has 18 members. I hope all the members of that group, plus the college students I am able to stay connected with, will see my participation as a means of reaching out to you because I really want to connect. And if I could write an indelible message on all of your walls it would be this: You are a magnificent creation of the Divine. You are so deeply loved by God, and by me, and by your whole community of faith. We really, really, really want you to know that. We want that message to sink all the way through your beautiful skin, through your gutsy guts, slosh through your hearts, and infuse the marrow of your bones. That is a gift we believe that Christian faith has to offer you: the knowledge that you are loved, that you matter, that you have something to give that this church and the world at large desperately needs. It’s not us but it’s God who has written this evaluation on your wall—that you are God’s magnificent creation.
Maybe, like King Belshazzar, you can’t always see or understand what God has written on your wall. It’s possible you will need to call, as the king did, for someone who can help interpret dreams, explain riddles, solve problems, and share knowledge. Let those of us who have been walking this path of faith for a while longer interpret God’s message for you; let us help you comprehend your worth and find your purpose in this life.
And you can help us connect, innovate, energize, question, respond, take action, network, chill, boogie, hang out, and discover new ways to be faithful.
We need each other, we really do.