The United Church -- a “Palm Sunday Church?”

A couple of years ago, on Palm Sunday, I invited my congregation to consider the contrast between that morning’s Palm Sunday observance, and the celebration of Easter Sunday that would take place the very next week.  In truth, the contrast between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday is an intriguing one, not least because Palm Sunday (the minor Christian feast) commemorates a far more "grasp-able" event than does the major Christian feast that follows close upon its heels.  Far more "grasp-able", in the sense that the crowd that gathered for that first Palm Sunday knew exactly why they were there.  Like a crowd turning out for a hockey or football game, these folks could taste victory -- not a Vancouver Canucks or a B.C. Lions victory perhaps, but the victory of a Messiah, a liberator, marching through the gates of Jerusalem.  And while the realm of power politics is obviously far weightier than the realm of power sports, the emotions unleashed at a well-staged political rally are not really all that different from the emotions unleashed at a well-played sporting event.  By contrast, Easter Sunday is a remarkably fragile occasion.  A risen Saviour, leaving behind the riddle of an empty-tomb, appearing to a small group of painfully puzzled persons, all of whom find themselves (at least initially) deeply perplexed by the strangely elusive events to which they have become the witnesses.  Leaning on their fragmentary testimony, we Christians gather at Easter to celebrate a victory that is infinitely rich, but one that remains fragile and elusive, if not quite beyond our reach, certainly beyond our grasp.

No sooner had I preached that sermon, than I found myself formulating a question that continues to haunt me well after the event.  What would a church be like, were it to regard Palm Sunday not as a minor feast but as its central feast?  What kind of a church would it be, that regarded Palm Sunday not as a prelude, but as the main event?  What would a church be like that only knew Christ's triumphant Palm Sunday entrance: that knew nothing about the defeat of Good Friday, that knew nothing about the paradoxical victory of Easter Sunday, that had never heard Christ differentiate between the things of Caesar and the things of God, that had never heard Christ insist before Pilate that His Kingdom was not of this world?  What kind of a church would that be?

I sometimes fear that my United Church of Canada -- a United Church of Canada that remains for me a beloved church home -- is well down the road toward becoming just such a church.

On a personal level, there is considerable irony in this, irony in my having come to notice, let alone be disturbed by the fact that we are in danger of becoming a Palm Sunday Church.  If truth be told, when I was first drawn to the Gospel back in the late 1970s, this denomination's political stance was one of the characteristics that attracted me.  I am reminded of a famous statement the Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel once made, in which he claimed that "religion begins in mystery, but ends in politics", an affirmation I would have been only too glad to share back in the late 70s.  The problem, if not in Heschel's case certainly in my own, is that even then (even as a newcomer to the Church), I knew far more about mystery than about politics.  Worse still, I presumed to know a great deal about politics, based on little more than an aversion to the Vietnam War and a no less trenchant aversion to Richard Nixon and his Watergate scandal.  The point being that there was most certainly a time in my life, when the thought of joining a church that might be derided as "the NDP at prayer" would not have bothered me in the least.  At worst I might have found such an accusation amusing; at best I might have worn the intended slur as a badge of honour.  Suffice it to say that my own journey has reached a stage at which I am neither amused nor honoured at the prospect of a church—my (!) church -- eager to emphasize the political dimension of the Gospel, seemingly at the expense of every other aspect of the Gospel.

At the outset, fairness demands a clear acknowledgement that politics within the United Church of Canada rarely, if ever, takes the form of a crass endorsement of the NDP or any other political party.  It would be terribly unfair to accuse the United Church or its leaders of blatantly partisan behaviour; my experience is that the United Church makes a genuine (and I believe heartfelt) effort, to avoid backing specific political parties, or particular political office seekers.  The problem, in my judgement, is far more subtle, and perhaps for that very reason, far more insidious.  Not the endorsement of a specific political party; rather a heightened emphasis on the political dimension of the gospel.  A heightened emphasis on the political realm, coupled with a tendency to adopt a quasi-socialist vision as the governing (though rarely explicitly acknowledged) orthodoxy that guides our political deliberations.

Not that any of this is entirely new.  These tendencies have deep roots, roots that take us far back into the history of the Protestant movement on Canadian soil.  As Phyliss Airhart reminds us, writing of the years between Confederation and the onset of the First World War:

    ...there are few countries in the western world in which religion exerted as great an influence on the development of the community as in Canada.  Pulpit and religious press combined to galvanize public support for the nation which Protestants believed would become `His Dominion.'  The idea of Canada as `His Dominion' sparked the Protestant imagination and provided symbolic coherence for a broadly-based consensus. It expressed a determination to establish the Kingdom of God in the new country and became a way of articulating a mission for the nation.[1]

These tendencies, according to Airhart, took on special significance for the progressive wing of evangelical Protestantism, as this era drew to a close.

    Caught up in a technological revolution, progressives were persuaded that science offered unlimited possibilities for the future.  Understandably, then, Christian progressives exuded a confidence that the Kingdom of God was at hand and might be brought nearer still by the intervention of Christian reformers at home and missionaries abroad.[2]

   

        In short, long before church union in 1925, there was a tendency within Canadian Protestantism to regard the work of nation building in terms of Christian mission and, more tellingly, to equate that mission with the establishment of God's Kingdom.  While there is a great distance between such hopes, and the radical proposals put forward in the mid-1930s by members of the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order--the radical, depression era group that published the manifesto, Towards the Christian Revolution--the gulf is perhaps not as wide as some of us might like to imagine.  Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order was never representative of mainline United Church thought.  As historian Robert Wright reminds us: "Practically from the outset the Fellowship was at odds with the United Church hierarchy.  George Pidgeon and J.K. Mutchmor, in particular, espoused a conservative philosophy of Christian social service and were openly hostile to the idea of radical social change."[3]

The Church and Political Radicalism

It goes without saying that much has changed in the United Church of Canada since the days of Pidgeon and Mutchmor.  The tables have been turned, the shoe is now on the other foot.  To put the matter bluntly,  but I think not too crassly: the cautious conservatism of Pidgeon and Mutchmor is no longer representative of the United Church hierarchy.  Instead, the radical politics of the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (albeit in an environmentally conscious refit) is now the shaping tendency within most of the United Church's higher courts.  Indeed, there is very little to distinguish the essays that were published back in the 1930s in Towards the Christian Revolution, from those that were published as part of our former Moderator's Consultation on Faith and the Economy. Very little to distinguish them other than the latter's greater ecological sensitivity, and the fact that the advocates of radical social, economic and environmental reconstruction have become the shapers of the official political stance of the United Church of Canada.

A handful of recent examples will suffice to demonstrate the tendencies I have in mind.  Exhibit A is Mending the World, a document that was the fruit of a ten-year study process by the United Church's Inter-Church and Inter-Faith Committee.  It is important to recall that this study-process was designed to help the United Church of Canada respond to the theological challenge of religious pluralism.  The final document, however, displayed very little interest in any of the world's major religions; instead the report's implicit counsel was for all religious communities (including the Church) to put questions of faith on a back-burner, so as not to detract from the ecumenical politics of world-mending.  Exhibit B is the collection of essays, To Seek Justice and Resist Evil: Towards a Global Economy for all God's People, a volume that is the main fruit of former Moderator Bill Phipps' Consultation on Faith and the Economy.  The essays in that volume, although hardly uniform either in their tone or their political orientation, appear to be unanimous in regarding the business community (particularly large corporations) as the main danger to the social, cultural and environmental fabric of our world.  Exhibit C, for me the most troubling, is the statement the United Church placed on its web-site back in April 2001, at the time of the Quebec City Summit.  That statement makes it clear that the United Church officially allies itself with the political vision that inspired protestors to travel to Quebec City in order to disrupt the meeting of government representatives who had gathered in Quebec to pursue an agenda of freer trade.

Having cited these three examples, I hasten to insist that they represent but a small measure of the official and unofficial political commentary generated within the United Church of Canada on a yearly basis. Nor is the question of quantity irrelevant, since the frequency with which a certain facet of the church's life is highlighted, serves as a fairly accurate indicator of its prominence within the church's wider life.  My point is that the United Church's political radicalism, along with its theological liberalism, is now well established as one of this denomination's two defining characteristics.  I have, in fact, long puzzled over a tendency for United Church renewal groups to be far more concerned with the liberal theology than with the political radicalism.  To cite but one example: when Bill Phipps articulated his doubts concerning theological orthodoxy, there was an outcry; when he spear-headed a major consultation that had (as its clear aim) the formulation of a social, environmental, economic and political orthodoxy for the United Church of Canada, very little protest was heard.  And yet, my own sense is that there is as much to lament, perhaps more to lament, in a move toward political uniformity than in any move away from theological uniformity.

Lament for a Church

In the first place, I lament the fact that the quality of political discourse within the United Church of Canada, has become very thin and predictable.  Name just about any issue, especially one that involves economics, and the church's eventual stance can be anticipated even before the conversation begins.  To put the problem succinctly: we have a very selective sense of what makes for a healthy society.  On the one hand, we have a lively sense of the dangers posed by big-business with little appreciation of the ways in which entrepreneurial genius (and the system of liberty that promotes such genius) has benefited each and every one of us; on the other hand, we seem oblivious to the dangers posed by big-government, the dangers posed by the state when it becomes too large, not only for our good, but for its good.  That the state is not always dangerous, that business is not always benign is, of course, entirely true.  That the equation cannot simply be reversed, however (that it is not always business that is dangerous and the state that is benign), is a truth that we seem to have forgotten.  I lament that. 

I also lament the fact that there is a new orthodoxy at work within the courts of this United Church of ours.  In many ways it is quite ironic that I was originally invited to give this address before a United Church renewal group, reputed to be “conservative” in its theological outlook: ironic because I remain a classic product of the liberal theological tradition, a tradition that includes not only names like Schleiermacher, Tillich, Spong and Borg, but also names like Barth, Brunner, Niehbuhr and Pannenberg.  I am proud to call that tradition, broadly conceived, my own tradition.  In short, part of what I continue to cherish within the United Church of Canada, is a willingness to create a culture in which there is freedom for conversation about the faith and the things of the faith.  And so, while there are times when I find myself frustrated by the superficial theological liberalism of the Bishop Spong school, I am far more concerned about (and far more eager to lament) a tendency to marginalize (and perhaps eventually exclude) those of us who are unable to adopt the United Church's reigning orthodoxy in matters of politics, economics, the environment and social change.

Nor does my lament end there.  I further lament the way in which we risk compromising our credibility through what can only be regarded as an increasingly promiscuous tendency to offer commentary on every matter of public concern.  Whatever else the church is called to be, it must surely be obvious that it is a truth-telling community.  In other words, the church puts its credibility as a truth-telling body on the line every time it makes a public pronouncement.  The May 2000 issue of the Observer contained a classic instance of this problem, in the form of a letter from a Guelph farmer.  In response to a cover story on Canadian farming, this letter-writer (whose father had served as a United Church minister) lamented the fact that "most business-oriented family farmers have largely dismissed the United Church as being out of touch with modern food production and agriculture."[4]  Nor is the example of the American sociologist, Peter Berger, irrelevant.  Berger, whose theological stance is classically liberal (you may remember him as the author of the book, The Heretical Imperative), bemoans his disenfranchisement from the church.  Writing as someone who has devoted much of his professional energy to analyzing issues of third-world poverty and development, Berger states: "when I go to church or read church publications I'm irritated when I'm confronted with statements that I consider to be empirically flawed....The irritation deepens when these terrible simplifications are proclaimed to me in tones of utter certitude and moral urgency."[5]  At such moments, I think it becomes obvious, that our very credibility as a church hangs in the balance, every time we pronounce on an issue of public interest and concern.

Nor can I yet bring my lament to a  close.  It has a a further dimension, one that may well represent the most serious danger we face, namely, that our church will adopt an alternative gospel; specifically, the danger that a  particular dimension of the gospel (the socio-economic-political dimension) will be given a place at the table so prominent, that the other dimensions of the Gospel will be crowded out, eventually threatening to crowd out the gospel itself. 

In the Spring of 2000, I delivered a paper to a United Church gathering sponsored by Touchstone journal, in which I spoke about evangelism, focusing on the road-blocks to evangelism that I presently identify within the United Church of Canada.[6]  One of the roadblocks I named had to do with the "utopianism" of our present politics.  And, to be fair, utopianism can take many different forms. There are not only utopianisms of the left, there are also utopianisms of the right.  What all utopianisms have in common, however, is a tendency to absorb all of the energy of those who find themselves captivated by their vision.  No wonder a report such as Mending the World appeared to have neither time nor patience for a conversation concerning the faith distinctives of the various world-religions; if one has set for oneself the far more urgent goal of mending the world, theological disputations cannot help but appear to be little more than trivial distractions.  In the words of Eric Voegelin, one of the 20th centuries most prophetic political theorists: "The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit."[7]  In a similar vein Emil Brunner, during the Cold War, was heard to warn (a warning that takes on new relevance in light of the horrors of September 11th), that:

        The problems of our day have become so incomparably complicated and difficult just because people do not believe in eternal life any more.  They are seized by a kind of time-panic.  Not believing in the eternal Kingdom they try to make this world a paradise and by doing so they create a state of things which is more akin to hell than to heaven.  The loss of real hope, i.e. hope in eternal life, creates utopias, and utopias may be considered as one of the main roots of our present-day chaos.[8]

       

Surely that too is worth lamenting: the increasing tendency for political engagement to absorb all of our church's energy, thereby crowding out the full life of the gospel, which is to say, crowding out the full life of the church.

Now, of course, there is nothing wrong with a lament.  Indeed, lament is an honourable and Biblically based response to a wide range of human woes.  However, because we, in the United Church, remain a practical people, there is no point in remaining stuck in lament-mode for too long.  Which raises the question: what, if anything, can be done?  Permit me to make three modest proposals. 

Modest Proposals

First: I think that there is a pressing need for a renewed conversation about politics within the United Church of Canada.  There is a part of me, of course, that wishes that I did not need to make that suggestion.  Many years ago I came across a quotation from Edmund Burke that I immediately cut out and pasted into one of my note-books.  Writing in response to the French Revolution, Burke expressed his belief that "politics and pulpit are terms that have little agreement.  No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.  Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind."  I think I have already written enough here to indicate that I find myself, here as in many other places, in deep sympathy with Edmund Burke.  And yet, my fear is that the United Church is so far gone down the road of political activism, that those of us who fear the long-term implications of travelling further down that road, are required to do more than merely keep our own counsel.  And so a conversation must begin -- not necessarily on Sunday mornings, but perhaps throughout the rest of the week.  A conversation in which we learn to recognize the profound complexity attached to all of the words we are fond of throwing around as slogans and rallying cries.  Words like compassion, culture, society, politics, economics, the environment.  Above all, that most loaded of words, the word justice: a word that plays such a rich part within the Biblical tradition, yet one that has been increasingly turned into a weapon with which advocates of radical social change silence those who question the wisdom (and fear the long-term destructiveness) of the policies being advocated.

While this present article is obviously not the place to engage that conversation, I do want to do two things that may help us to begin that conversation.  First, I want to make a general point, one that gets at the very heart of the problem and may help some of you to start thinking about these concerns.  In the current issue of The Public Interest, an American journal of social thought, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb contrasts two traditions of compassion, which are clearly linked to two traditions of justice.[9]  One of those traditions is the radical tradition of the French enlightenment; the other is the far more moderate tradition of the British enlightenment, a tradition which (as Himmelfarb painstakingly demonstrates) incorporates British Methodism.  One way of understanding the present political stance of the United Church of Canada, is to regard it as a politics shaped by those who have rejected the measured compassion of their Methodist forebears, in favour of radical notions about compassion that trace their lineage to the French Enlightenment: an Enlightenment which eventually helped to pave the road that led, not only to the French Revolution of the late 18th century, but also to the Russian Revolution of the early 20th century.  If I am correct in this, surely there is something not only odd but very dangerous in such a trend.  Which prompts from me, as a second gesture toward beginning a renewed conversation about politics, the attachment to this article of a small reading list.  It contains a small handful of books that I have found helpful in my journey: not because they contain all the answers, but because they contain a voice in political and social matters, that appears to have been silenced in this United Church of ours.  It is high time to break the silence.

That's the first of my three proposals.  The second has to do with our need to make the church's own life, rather than the life of the State, the focal point, the starting point if you will, of the church's deliberations over the political realm.  Let me share an example of what I am talking about.  Back in May of 2001, I attended an Anglican church in Winnipeg: a wonderful, lively evangelical Anglican church, filled with energy and vitality.  A member of their outreach committee stood to make an announcement; my recollection is that she wanted to alert the congregation to issues around hunger.  The thrust of her message was that members of the congregation were invited to sign a petition that was going to be sent to politicians somewhere: Winnipeg, Ottawa, I forget which.  After the service, my friend Ed Searcy noted that we mainline Protestants were, yet again, assuming that issues like that of hunger were someone else's concern: primarily the government's concern rather than the church's concern.  Incidentally, by way of truth in advertising, a few weeks later, as I was reading my own congregation's bulletin, we were invited to take action on child poverty.  That action, which thankfully did include prayer and fasting, culminated with one further suggestion: "Call your MP and MLA to political conscience. Urge them to take action on child and family poverty!"  Once again, we prefer to point the finger at government, rather than consider the possibility that the church has failed to discharge its social mandate.

Not that I can claim any originality for this line of thought.  For decades now, Stanley Hauerwas has been urging the churches to remember that the church does not so much "have" a politics, but rather that the church itself needs to embody a politics: as a community that "advertises" its loyalty to the Gospel not through press releases and petitions, but by living the compassion and generosity of Jesus.  Nor is the social thought of Emil Brunner irrelevant here.  With far greater clarity than Karl Barth, perhaps with even greater wisdom than Reinhold Niebuhr, Emil Brunner recognized the danger that lurks, anytime the church is tempted to hand its responsibilities over to the state.  "The fundamental Christian realization," according to Brunner,

        is that the state has only to intervene where individuals, families, free social groups, the churches, the municipalities, cannot perform their tasks.  Any justice created by the state is a makeshift, a substitute for the justice which human society should create of itself.  The more closely society approximates to this conception, the more `liberal' the state can be and the greater space left free of state intervention.  And vice versa, the greater the decline in the moral vigour of society, the more tasks the state must take upon itself, and the greater the expansion of the element of compulsion in justice, the nearer the approach to the totalitarian state."[10] 

       

A stark warning, I realize, but one that the United Church of Canada appears to have all but forgotten.  The politics of the church, must once again begin with a renewed appreciation for the Church's own responsibility for the welfare of culture and society.

That's the second of my proposals.  The third is this: we must return to a more balanced appreciation of the Christian life.  That too is an urgent priority: a more balanced appreciation of the Christian life.  I am struck by the fact that back in the late 80s, when I was preparing for ordination, one of the questions I was repeatedly asked, had to do with identifying ways in which my faith had prompted me to become involved in the work of social action.  At the time I hardly noticed the question, a question which (in my judgment) is well worth asking would-be ordinands, provided it is asked as part of a series of questions.  Alas, this one tended to stand alone, as the only question in which future pastoral leaders were asked to talk about their personal response to the Gospel.  At no point, for example, do I recall having to answer a written question about my prayer life, my evangelistic work, my family commitments, my practice of hospitality, my worship participation, my mystical pursuits, my metaphysical reflections.  In retrospect that bothers me deeply.

It bothers me deeply, especially in light of a tendency I spoke of earlier: a tendency for utopian political engagements to devalue and eventually to drive out all other currencies.  There is, in fact, no better indication of a church that faces imminent crisis, than a tendency for that church to regard social action as the definitive litmus test of authenticity in the Christian life.  Nor is this problem as recent in its origins as we might like to imagine.  Without denying that the United Church of Canada was rocked by the cultural crises of the 1960s, the fact remains that our roots left us terribly vulnerable to the ravishes of the 60s.  As a community that prided itself on its practical, commonsense approach to the life of faith, how could we not have been vulnerable in the face of a decade that positively demanded that the church prove its relevance to the work of social change and renewal.

I am reminded here of a popular saying, one that tends to get hauled out during stewardship campaigns, about all those ministers “who are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good”.  Just once, I would love to meet a United Church Minister who actually meets that description: one who was not essentially practical, almost to a fault.  I've yet to meet one of our clergy so absorbed in the work of prayer and contemplation, that they can't take time out to rebuild the roof, repaint the narthex, and in a pinch reprogramme the church secretary's computer.  To be fair, I must admit that I generally love that about our church.  Indeed, I would hate to be part of a church (and would not for long tolerate a church) that really was so heavenly minded, that it was no earthly good.  But what I do long for is a church that can once again learn to honour the not so practical dimensions of its gathered life.  A church that can once again honour and celebrate not only the practical call of faith, but also the irreducible mystery that beats at the heart of Christian faith.

The United Church – An "Easter" Church

In short, what I suspect I am really longing for is for this Palm Sunday Church of ours once again to become an Easter church.  Not a church that will forget about Palm Sunday.  Not a church that forgets that it bears a measure of responsibility for the Jerusalem over which our Lord wept with such beauty and compassion, nor, for that matter, a church that ignores the responsibility it bears for all of the other Jerusalems that dot this turning, churning planet.  But a church that will recognize the danger anytime Palm Sunday threatens to become an obstacle to Easter, in short, when an obsession with the kingdoms of this world denies us a vantage point from which to gauge our allegiance to the only Kingdom that will truly matter in the end. 

And so yes: I yearn for our church once again to become an Easter church.  A church that encourages Christians to embrace their identity as a people who recognize that they live between the times.  Between the time of Christ's departure at Easter, and his return at the end of time. 

An Easter Church: one that is not reluctant to be heavenly minded, knowing that the church can be no earthly good unless it becomes heavenly minded.

An Easter Church: one that is no longer embarrassed by its other-worldliness, even when it acknowledges those times and places when Christians have, in fact, abused their other-worldliness.

An Easter Church: one that is not ashamed to confess that this world is neither its true nor its ultimate home, even as it seeks to make this world as just and compassionate a place as this world's fallen nature permits.

An Easter Church: one that is not ashamed to affirm its hope in the next world, certain that such hope has tangible practical value.  Driving despair from this world.  Making it possible for men and women to resist the siren song of utopian illusions, illusions that have produced such horror within this fallen world.

An Easter Church: one that is willing to stand Abraham Joshua Heschel's dictum on its head.  A church that has come to embrace those countless contexts (including this post 9-11 context), in which religion will begin with politics and end in mystery, rather than the other way around.  Make no mistake about it: in a post-September 11th world, religion will begin with politics, including the recognition that there are tragic limits to our politics.  And religion will thereby end in mystery: with the mystery of the God, who having reached His tragic limits on Good Friday, rose again on the third day: with passionate love, unquenchable concern, unyielding hope.  That we, and all creation, might have life and have it in abundance.

Eleven Alternative Voices/Twelve Good Reads

Brunner, Emil: Justice and the Social Order

De Soto, Hernando: The Mystery of Capital

Gilder, George:  Wealth and Poverty

Hayek, Friedrich von: The Road to Serfdom 

________________   The Constitution of Liberty

Hazlitt, Henry:  The Conquest of Poverty

Murray, Charles:  In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government

Neuhaus, Richard John: Doing Well and Doing Good

Nisbet, Robert:  The Quest for Community

Novak, Michael:  The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Röpke, Wilhelm:  A Humane Economy

Sowell, Thomas:  A Conflict of Visions