May 12, 2008
Change
The liturgical calendar reminds us today that it’s the anniversary of the first Book of Common Prayer and that it got started back in 1549. That was about a big change that people didn’t much care for then any more than they do now.
Change is on everybody’s mind these days. The presidential aspirants talk a lot about it, whose change is better, whose change is worse. Nothing seems to be spared. Talking about change usually creates some serious pastoral problems in the church. If there’s anything we churchers get nervous about, it’s change. When I think about it, a lot, if not most, of my energy over the past half century as an east Texas country preacher has been used up dealing with change.
First of all, there’s the gospel we’re supposed to be preaching. That’s an ongoing problem that keeps rearing its head. It’s not only about the big change as such, the one that conversion is about, but if the story about the widow’s mite means anything at all, it’s also about small change, the one the Every Member Canvass usually ends up being about. But every time I tried to say much of anything about the gospel as change without using carefully veiled terms, there’d inevitably be something come up at a vestry meeting in opposition to it. Like one of our members said once, they all act like a bunch of colonels trying to tell the general how to run the army.
And then there are all the lesser changes down through the years. About the time I got out of seminary, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was coming along and folks were saying things like If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for them. If that wasn’t enough, here came the Seabury Series of Sunday School material with all its so-called maieutic midwifery talk about teachers and students. That really made people nervous to think it was going to be about telling little children where babies come from, and that it was not Chicago like they thought.
Then there was the National Council of Churches which some claimed was a communist front masquerading behind a Christian mask. Next there was Bishop James Pike, and people began to realize that Isaiah wasn’t so nice after all. Then it suddenly began to dawn on people that Jesus probably loved all the races about the same, and we started integrating the schools and even the churches alongside. A reporter called me up one Saturday, said he was going to bring some black people to our eleven o’clock service the next day, and what was I going to do about it. I told him we’d usher them to a seat and give them each a pledge card. He said they’d go somewhere else, and they did.
Not long after, we got into ordaining women and changing the prayer book and the hymnal all in about the same time and opening up all kinds of ways of getting the laity up front to lead the liturgy. One of our bishops got so incensed about it, he called it the creeping gangrene of participatory democracy.
Now it’s sexual orientation. Trouble with that is that people think it’s about sex when in fact it’s not about sex at all. It’s about orientation. And it’s orientation that’s always bothered churchers. When that gets out, we’ll really have a problem, because orientation usually means change or at least paying attention to where you’re headed and to what’s going on. Now that’s a real problem, especially when you’ve still got the 1928 prayer book memorized and are wondering when it’s ever coming back.
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