Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 11 July 2020
As you will know, the readings we use Sunday by Sunday aren’t based on the whim of the clergy team. With millions of other Christians throughout the world, we use a three yearly cycle of readings. This is a good thing, because it makes sure we don’t just preach from our favourite passages. And that we are often confronted with uncomfortable passages that perhaps shake up our thinking.
So it’s been particularly interesting during lockdown to have been given so many readings that refer to buildings – particularly the Jewish Temple, and also the early Christian community, being described as living stones. This week continues in the same vein. The prayer and desire of David to have a house of God, a house for prayer. A place of beauty that is holy, set aside. A place where God is present, signified by the metaphor of cloud that fills the temple.
Then we have Jesus in full on righteous anger mode, driving the sellers and money changers out of the Temple shouting:
“My house shall be a house of prayer”;
but you have made it a den of robbers.’
Pitting temple or physical church building against the community of faith is of course a false dichotomy. It clearly isn’t the case that buildings = bad; and the community of faith = good. And yet there is sometimes, as these passages today highlight, an uneasy relationship between building and people or community. And this has relevance for how we see faith today.
Because, particularly for the younger generation, institutional religion is viewed with great suspicion – for them, it represents rigid structure, organised authority, power, hierarchical order, buildings. Institutions like the Church of England are seen as perpetuating white male privilege, and deeply homophobic.
One in vogue way of describing this cultural change affirms that we now live in a secular, post-Christian age. This is often celebrated as a good thing - we have freed ourselves from the shackles of outmoded religious superstition. We’ve waved good-bye to oppressive institutions in order to celebrate the fullness of human potential in the absence of a divine overseer. I find this perspective short-sighted and it doesn’t reveal the broader culture trend that is happening.
Perhaps it’s true that we are less religious than we were 50 or 100 years ago. Although, there has never been some sort of golden age of church attendance.
What the post-Christian narrative misses is that many of those who are ‘religiously unaffiliated’ are nevertheless deeply spiritually engaged. But they express this piety outside of traditional religious institutions.
They celebrate, in differing ways, the inward turn, the human possibility of self-making. One writer puts it like this: ‘I call this “religious remixing”: not secularism, nor traditional faith, but rather a freewheeling space in between, where a generation of spiritually hungry millennials (and Zoomers) seek out practices, communities, and senses of meaning that resonate with them personally.’
This is the new young generation. Far from being atheist – they hunger for, and are interested in, the spiritual, but outside of religious institutions.
This leaves some significant questions for us as the church, with our beautiful buildings, carefully crafted liturgy and creeds.
How might we engage with this new younger culture? I wonder what we as a community might do, or how we might change. Because as we slowly return to church physically after lockdown, might we, rather than simply going back to how things were, rather go forward, having learnt something new.
One journalist put it like this: ‘disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds.’
As the Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, put it: ‘We are not who we were four months ago. We have lost, lamented, learned, longed and loved. We cannot be squeezed back into our former shape’.
I don’t have any concrete answers to what new shape we might consider. But as we return to developing our Mission Action Plan in the coming months, we need to think creatively about developing new vision and purpose. Not simply ‘going back’. But going forward, changed in some way. As we fling open the doors of our buildings to welcome our people, might we also fling open our hearts and minds to welcome with equal enthusiasm what new things the Holy Spirit is yearning to breathe into us.
References:
Tara Isabella Burton, THE TABLET | 4 JULY 2020 p.4-5