Sermon: Deserving Deconstruction

Texts: Micah 5:10-15; Mark 13:1-2; 1 Peter 2:4-10 (Plus a clip from “Rivers and Tides”)

Date: October 16, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            Three of the four gospels re-tell the story of Jesus predicting that the grandiose temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed.  The fact that Jesus’ prophecy is remembered so well says to me that people were shocked when they heard it.  It was such a beautiful, solid edifice, and had been a valued and well-maintained part of the landscape for so long, that the people couldn’t quite imagine it ever not being there. 

          Suggesting that it might be destroyed in the future bordered on blasphemy for those who whose religious lives revolved around the sacred rites of the temple.  Jesus’ saying comes up in the charges leveled against him by the leaders of the Judeans.  They twisted Jesus’ words, accusing Jesus of saying that he personally would knock down the temple and rebuild it in three days, as if he was some kind of superman.  But even if they hadn’t taken his saying to an illogical extreme, I think they would have been deeply offended at the very idea that the temple might not be an eternal structure.  God wanted it built, after all; why on earth would the God who had (according to the scriptural record) given a lot of input on the architectural design and furnishings allow anyone to knock it down?  It was a horrifying idea.

          I can sympathize with the Judeans who loved the temple and found the idea that it might be destroyed one day appalling.  I am a lover of the mainline Protestant church.  I grew up in a variety of mainstream churches, including United Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and now United Church of Christ congregations.  My faith was formed and has been nurtured in mainline—now commonly called “oldline”—churches.  Decline in membership, financial resources and attendance has been a constant trend in such churches for my entire life.  The United Church of Christ alone has lost half of its membership since the 1960’s.  At this rate, the denomination I love will have dwindled to nothing by the time I die of old age. 

          A few of us who went to Diana Butler Bass’s lectures on “Christianity After Religion” last week got a page full of statistics to back up what we who have stuck around in the church have been observing for a few decades.  The changes are dramatic and accelerating.  Although 92% of Americans say they believe in God (down from 99% in 1955), only 64% report being certain God exists (down from 95% in 1960).  In terms of attendance at religious services, only about 18-24% of Americans now attend a religious service regularly.  The number who say they never attend is up, from 13% who described themselves that way in 1990 to 37% in 2010.  That’s a big swing in a pretty short time.  A growing number of people are electing to stay away from communities of faith, leaving those of us who stick around to wonder if one stone will be left on top of another in the institution of mainline churches when this dramatic shift comes to an end.  We don’t wonder with the dispassionate interest of statisticians; we wonder with distress, grief, frustration, resentment, even panic.  It’s appalling to watch institutional churches we have built up with our time, creativity, money, sweat, etc. wane before our eyes. 

          Jesus was right about the destruction of the temple.  During an uprising in the year 70 C.E. the temple was set afire.  Legend has it that the many gold and silver ornaments and treasures within melted and the metal ran into the cracks between the stones. After the fires cooled Roman soldiers pried the stones apart to get at the precious metal, so that there was not one stone left on top of another.  (Except for the west wall which still stands, now known as the Wailing Wall.)  It was a dreadful episode in the life of the Jewish faithful. 

          However, it was not the end of the Jewish community.  A movement that had begun during an earlier Exile continued and gained strength; that is, the heart of worship that had once been centered around the temple moved to the homes of the faithful.  The most important ritual shifted from the temple sacrifice to the Sabbath meal; mothers and fathers recalled the sacred story and knit together the community of faith at thousands of dining room tables in dozens of countries as the Jews were scattered around the world.    

          I don’t know if later Jewish theologians, observing what happened, interpreted the destruction of the temple as the will of God.  I do look at that story and its aftermath with a spark of hope about our situation.  It seems apparent that the institutional mainline church as I have known it is being broken down, bit by bit.  I don’t like it at all.  However, it seems quite possible that God is doing a new thing in the midst of what looks like destruction and decay to someone who has been nurtured by what was.  That was Diana Butler Bass’s suggestion as she examined the mainline church’s situation; she thinks we may be in the beginning stages of yet another Great Awakening on American soil.  The telltale sign of this new awakening is, she thinks, the growing numbers of people who identify as both spiritual and religious—an identifier claimed by nearly half the Americans polled.  Further, the number of Americans who report having a “mystical experience” has more than doubled since 1962.  She is hopeful about signs of a new, different kind of spiritual and religious life taking form, a spirituality that attends to experience more than tradition, one that is less patriarchal, less hierarchical, more attuned to the rhythms of creation. 

          It’s possible that before such a new awakening can take form even more breakdown of old institutional forms of religious life than what we have already seen needs to be accomplished.  The speaker at the Turner Lectures this year, John Caputo, suggests that the church deserves to be deconstructed.  When he uses the word “deserve” he means it in both senses: that the church will get what it deserves (picture a clenched fist) because in many ways it has been unfaithful; and that it deserves—in a loving way—to be deconstructed because there is so much of value in the institution of Church that it ought to be saved and renewed, not simply abandoned in the wreckage of a moldering structure.  He urges his readers and listeners to think of deconstruction not as destruction but a way of opening something up so that it can continue to do what it’s supposed to do.  Deconstructing isn’t just taking something down; it’s releasing its potential energy.

          I want to turn, now, to reflecting on what I heard Caputo saying at the lectures this week.  I can’t mush down three hour-long lectures, a sermon, and hours of discussion into what’s left of my socially acceptable allotted time to preach.  But I want to give you a glimpse of what inspired me and fanned a spark of hope.  

          Caputo set the stage for what he wanted to say by describing what is meant by post-modernism, now that it’s widely acknowledged that we live in a post-modern era.  I don’t want to go into all the details of that; I am going to assume that if you have been awake at any time during the last couple of decades you have already done some reading and thinking about post-modernity and what it means.  One helpful definition was by some French philosopher whose name I didn’t catch.  Post modernity is characterized by “incredulity toward meta-narratives.”  As I understand it, that means that the Big Stories that humans have been telling themselves over the eons about the Way Things Are have come under scrutiny as to their reliability.  For instance, the story about God creating the earth in six days, once widely accepted in the Western world as Truth, is still taken as literal truth by some; but there are lots of other big stories of origin that are being told at the same time, and the variety of stories have a variety of adherents.  The very idea that there are universal claims of absolute truth has come into question.  We live with a democracy of truths, a plurality of truths.  Caputo says if you want a one-word definition of post-modernism, it’s the word “but.”  When someone tells you something is absolutely true, you say “Yes, but…”  We have more or less given up on capital-T Truth.  Caputo jokes about how we have become T-totalers.  Rather than believing in Truth we believe in small and contextual truths.  We live in an age of poly-versalism rather than uni-versalism.  We’re big on interpretation.

          The obvious democracy of truths with which post-modern people are acquainted is one force behind the breakdown of traditional religious institutions.  Claims that you better believe and behave the way we do or you are on the fast track to Hell just don’t have the traction they used to.  It’s still a successful pitch in some quarters, but it’s increasingly difficult to make a case for universal Truths in our era, and what’s more, we don’t wield the social pressure we used to as churches.  Not that many years ago it used to be embarrassing to admit you didn’t go to church; now quite the opposite is true.  Recent scandals and bitter conflicts in the American church haven’t exactly helped people’s trust in the claims of the church.

          So, church folk, we can no longer coast on our reputation as good people or as purveyors of obvious Truth, expecting that people are going to see the light one day soon and join us here on Sunday mornings.  We live in a whole new context.  Trouble is, a lot of our habits, traditions, organizational structures, songs, rituals, and so forth were molded by a bygone era.  They have rigidified while the culture has evolved.    The good news is that Church (including all its practices) never was an end in itself; it is only the means to the end, which is responding to God, and for Christians, embodying the spirit of Jesus.  Caputo points out that the Church has been Plan B from the beginning, since the early Christians didn’t think they’d be around very long after the first advent of Jesus.  We can freely move on to plans C-Z.

          I’m going to lay a concept on you now that Caputo taught us.  He distinguishes between what he calls “the Event” and “What’s Happening.”  The Event is a memory and a promise, something that calls us relentlessly to pursue the impossible.  What’s Happening is a construction, some practice or institution within which the event is housed.  One example is the difference between justice and law.  Justice is the Event—it is a promise, a hope, a desire, a calling.  The Event, justice, solicits us, leads us, commands us.  The law is What’s Happening; it is a construction that has been created in the name of justice.  But everyone knows that justice isn’t fully embodied in law.  There are just laws, and then there are laws that are unjust.  Oftentimes justice demands that we adhere to the law; but sometimes justice demands that we challenge the law, change the law.  Law is constructed in the name of justice, and it also must be allowed to be deconstructed in the name of justice.  Segregation laws, for example, needed to be deconstructed because of the demands of justice.  What’s getting itself desired in the law is justice; and the law must be allowed to be repealed, revised, expanded, and deconstructed in the name of justice.  Sometimes the Event is a spook, a specter that haunts What’s Happening until it changes.

          Now, between Jesus and the church, which is the Event, and which is What’s Happening?  Jesus is the Event, and the Church is What’s Happening.  That is, the church is here to sustain the memory and the promise of Jesus.  But it is a construction in the name of Jesus, and therefore it must be deconstructable.  If it is not deconstructable, it is the enemy of Jesus.  Jesus and his message about the Kingdom of God (which Caputo also names an Event) haunt the church, calling it beyond where it has currently settled.  In the visual parable of the clip from “Rivers and Tides,” Jesus would be the water, and the leaves all connected together would be the church.  The current carries the leaves along, and sometimes they get stuck or tangled, but still the current pulls on them to move forward.  Think of water as the Event, and the leaves as What’s Happening.

          Events that are bigger than all of us continue to call to humanity.  Justice.  Democracy.  Jesus.  God.  The Rule of God.  Caputo says these are forces in the universe that are not deconstructable because they don’t exist as such.  Don’t panic about the preacher just suggesting that God doesn’t exist.  Listen to the rest of it: God doesn’t exist, God insists.  God, Justice, Democracy, the Kingdom of God—they don’t exist, they insist.  From God comes an insistent provocation, a solicitation, a disturbance, a “very holy spook.”  Whether God or the Kingdom of God exists, Caputo says, is up to us, whether we make it happen, give it body, give it existence, give it life.  And that’s what the Church is supposed to be: the Body of Christ.  Without our response, Jesus is just a promise,  just a distant memory.  The church harbors the memory of an Event and the promise of an Event. 

          Our human constructions—be they buildings, Bibles or bylaws—always fall short of the urgent, insistent promise of the Event.  The Event, remember, is not What’s Happening, it’s what’s going on inside what’s happening.   It’s tricky business to know when to let go of What’s Happening in order to make room for the Event to be released in the world in fresh and powerful ways.  Sometimes what we construct is not only not conducive to the Event, it’s actually getting in the way.  Caputo, who describes himself as a perfectly terrible Catholic, says that Doctrine is one human construction that gets in the way of the Event of Jesus.  The Event is always open-ended, urgent, and insistent; and doctrine tends to be about closing doors and slowing things down.  The text we heard from Micah is about the judgment of God in a time of upheaval when God promises to be the destroyer for a time.  God says that strongholds will be thrown down and sacred poles will be uprooted.  Those “sacred poles” in Micah’s time are pagan articles of worship that have been set up on holy ground—probably to hedge the people’s bets by worshiping more than one god.  I included this text because I believe we are always erecting sacred poles of one kind or another on holy ground.  We end up paying homage to ideas and practices that have nothing to do with the reign of God.  For instance, the common notion that the ideal leader of a church is a straight, white, attractive male with a lustrous head of hair is akin to a sacred pole.  It has nothing whatever to do with the Kingdom of God; but it keeps influencing what’s happening in church leadership.  You can no doubt think of lots of sacred poles planted in the practices of the worldwide church that God might just like to see uprooted. 

          One aspect of the call of the church is to evaluate its own constructions to see what might need to be changed.  Caputo reminds us that deconstruction is not anti-institutional; the memory and promise of Jesus would be long gone if there hadn’t been a church to harbor the Jesus Event.  Deconstruction is about having an open institution, one that auto-deconstructs, remaking itself in order to more effectively release and re-release the Event called Jesus, or the Kingdom of God, in the world.  Part of our work is to resist the inertia of our own institutions, and to keep our structures de-stabilized and porous enough to respond to the call of God.

          I don’t think that the United Church of Christ is one and the same with the kingdom of God.  I do think, with gratitude, that we are gifted with more flexibility than many denominational structures enjoy because of the way we are organized.  We have the potential to be more agile, and in this local church we made a move toward agility when we de-constructed our old stiff bylaws and put something more adaptable in place.  That doesn’t guarantee that we will faithfully harbor the Event named Jesus, but perhaps we are on the journey.  We’re not done, of course.  How else might we need to change in order to harbor the memory and promise of Jesus in these times?  How can we embody the hallmarks of the Jesus event: the hungry getting fed, the despairing finding hope, the lonely finding love, the divided being reconciled, the wanderers finding a Way? 

One other concept Caputo brought us is a word coined by novelist James Joyce: Chaosmos.  That’s a hybrid of chaos and cosmos; it implies the optimal amount of disorder within order.  I think that is an extremely fertile idea.  What would it be like if that were our byword here, that we seeking to be the cha-osmic house of God, maintaining just enough order to communicate and get organized, while remaining radically open to what Jesus calls us to do and be?  What if we claimed Christ as our cornerstone, and agreed that everything else is negotiable?  The invitation put down in the epistle of 1 Peter is also for us: Come to Christ, the living stone, and be built into a spiritual house.  I am persuaded that it is faithful in our day to add to that:  Come to Christ, the living stone, and be built into a spiritual house can also be unbuilt when the call comes.