Sermon from January 29, 2006
I read a book last fall called America's God. Professor Mark Noll of Wheaton College wrote it. It's a book about ideas that brought the Puritans to Massachusetts and ideas that brought about the American Revolution. At the heart of those ideas was a revolt against the past. It was a revolt against the ideas of the past, which we will call tradition, and it was a revolt against any institution that transmitted the ideas of the past, including the Church.

The Protestant Reformation embodied a giant change in the way people looked at the world. It dissolved the visibile unity of the Church, and in doing so it dissolved the visible unity of Europe. It recovered the purity of the Gospel, which the late Medieval Church had allowed to be distorted. It failed to articulate a compelling doctrine of the Church, and the result has been a revolt against the past that has spawned as many as 10,000 denominations worldwide.

The American Revolution also embodied a giant change in the way people looked at the world. On one hand, it was change from a deferential attitude toward hereditary authority, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, the Church. On the other hand, it was change to a democratic, anti-hierarchical organization of life. In other words there was a revolt against the authority of the past, whatever form it took – church or government.

However, in the Christian civilization which the evangelical heirs of the Reformation built in this country there was one exception to this revolt against the past. One authority from the past survived. It not only survivied, it had a power equal to and perhaps greater than that of king and pope and general. It was the Bible. The Bible was supreme, and people didn't need help in understanding it. It "was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person's intelligence," (Noll, 418).

The Civil War exposed the fatal flaw in this belief. Ordinary people and some most extraordinary people read the same Bible but came to opposite conclusions about African slaves. One side of the population said the Bible clearly supported slavery. The other side said the Bible clearly supported emancipation. Each side could prove its case from the Bible without tradition. The dispute could only be adjudicated at places like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Appomattox.

I love this book. But we aren't sufficient to read it in such a way as to discover the truth of God without the church to help us. This book is not for our eyes in isolation from other eyes and other ages. The past always has a place at the table of interpretation. It takes the whole Church, past, present, and future to read it right. The name of that communal reading is tradition.

But if the past, if tradition, has a place at the table of interpretation, that means also that the authority of the Church is back at the table, because the Church is the institution that has preserved, interpreted, and transmitted the understanding of Scripture from generation to generation, down through the ages.

My conclusion has been: Let us love the book. Let us love the Church. Let us hear their wisdom and speak it to our generation. The question for today is, how do we do that? What follows is an answer to that question in the form of a personal meditation.

Start With Your Community of Faith
First of all, we begin with our community of faith. For most of us that means that we begin with the beliefs, practices, and experiences of BVBC. This congregation powerfully shapes our perceptions of God and man and the Bible and the Church and the world. I don't mean that BVBC is the only source of these perceptions. I do mean that its beliefs, practices, and experiences silently impose a positive unity over the diversity of its people. They give us a sense of identity, safety, and stability.

From my vantage point, here is some of what I see at work at BVBC. The Apostles' Creed expresses the core of what we believe. Our BVBC Statement of Faith reflects that, but it also brings out more clearly the priority of the Bible and the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ.

Furthermore, there is a certain rhythm in our life together. We have communion on the first Sunday of the month and on Christmas Eve and Holy Thursday. We have four distinct worship services, a Thanksgiving Day service, and four Christmas Eve services. Special music events draw us together. Missions trips for different ages to various parts of the world keep us looking outward.

Here's the point. If we are going to see our part in the global Church more clearly and draw on the Church's accumulated wisdom more judiciously, we have to begin here. BVBC is the only congregation we can do much about. So, we make the most of what we have here. We can't love other congregations that we don't know and have never seen, if we don't love the one we worship in every week.

So, if this is the only congregation we can do much about, how should we try to connect with the larger Church? It's a good question, and answers begin with our deficiences. The beliefs, practices, and experiences of BVBC don't give us possession of all God's truth.

Here are two verses from the Bible that encourage us to think that what we have is only a partial grasp of God and His truth. 1 Corinthians 8:2 says: The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. In the back of my mind there is always the nagging reminder that there is truth abouut God that this congregation cannot yet bear (John 16:12) at this point in its life.

The second verse that lays bare our partial grasp of the faith is John 17:23. Jesus prayed for His followers: "May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." Evangelical churches in New Castle Country exhibit less unity than in any other place I have lived. We just don't get it.

Using the Past, Not Living in the Past
It is our deficiencies that turn us outward to the larger Church and its accumulated wisdom. Let's start with its accumulated wisdom. Romans 15:4 says: Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

There was no New Testament. The Scripture Paul referred to was already hundreds of years old, and he said it could make a difference in the pressing circumstances of the moment. That makes the past, preserved in scripture, interpreted, and transmitted by the Church, indispensable to the present.

So, how do we access wisdom? It depends first on how faithfully I access the past. The chief way I do that is by reading. The streams of Christian tradition come flowing into my life from many quarters, and through me they give you access to the Church's accumulated wisdom.

First and last is the Bible. No commentaries. Not yet. Just the effort throughout my life to hear the Bible speaking in its own voice; at times mysterious, at times unintelligible or confusing, at times exhilarating and life-changing.

Augustine's Confessions tells his story of lust and lack of faith and coming to faith. It is the window into a man's soul in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

I found Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica in a small bookshop off York Road in Baltimore. I spent $4 for it, and I have spent hundreds of hours following his analysis of the Christian faith.

This is The Imitation of Christ by Thomas á Kempis. He writes on page one, "What does it avail to discourse profoundly of the Trinity if you are void of humility and thereby displeasing to the Trinity?" I read that and knew I had come home.

This is The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. Calvin is so much more edifying to read that most Calvinists, and easier too.

This book is a devotional book from the seventeenth century by Jeremy Taylor. It is called The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living. Christian spirituality fills every page.

This is J.B. Lightfoot's Commentary on Colossians and Philemon. I read it first as a sophomore in college. The Bible came alive. I discovered layer upon layer of meaning and saw how the Bible can relate to present circumstances.

G.K. Chesterton was a journalist and a Roman Catholic. This little book, Orthodoxy, showed me how to be simultaneously serious and lighthearted about the faith.

I found The Vision of God in the used book department of Blackwell's, Oxford, England. It tells the twenty-century story of Christian worship and spirituality.

In many ways Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was the portal for me to most of these and many other writings. He made righteousness readable and shaped not only my mental outlook but also my imaginative outlook on the faith and on so much else.

Another English scholar, Alister McGrath, gave to the Church Christian Theology, an introduction to all the major themes of theology for the last 2000 years and to the major writers on those themes.

I have included Mark Noll's book, America's God. It is the latest and in many ways the best of the histories of Christianity in pre-Civil War America.

All my reading might make you wonder how I avoid living in the past? Among my many faults, living in the past has not been one of them. On a positive note Alister McGrath shows how the past is to be used. He wrote:

"To attribute authority ... to Jesus of Nazareth is to attribute authority to this past event, not because it is past, but because what happened in the past is perceived to be charged with significance for the transformation of the present and the construction of the future," (McGrath, Theory, 176-177).

Voices from the past that can't speak to present circumstances cease to be heard. The great doctors of the Church have a place at the table, because they speak with power to our present needs and future hopes, and they do it generation after generation.

The Church Universal
So much for the accumulated wisdom of the Church. What about the Church itself for whose unity Jesus prayed? How do I think about the Church? I confess without satisfaction that there was a time when I greeted the invitation, "Why don't you go to church?" with the same enthusiasm with which I would greet the invitation, "Why don't you get a root canal?"

I now think the expression, "go to church," is pathological. We don't go to church. We are the Church, and we go to worship. And we don't just gather with each other. Like some great tsunami of praise that circles the earth, hundreds of thousands of other congregations from Talleyville to Taipei to Timbuctu gather in the name of Christ; and they gather with thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven (Heb. 12:22-23).

There is one Church. God has one household. If we look at the Church sociologically, it might seem that our heart-rending divisions and multiple denominations have turned the Bride of Christ into the harem of Christ. It is not so. There is one Bride, one Household, one Church. The problem is with our fractious refusal or inability to recognize and maintain its unity in the bond of peace.

And what do I think I can do about that? Precious little, I'm sure; but I'll tell you what I try to do. First, because it is the only church I know and can do anything about, I am bullish on BVBC. I will do everything in my power to love this congregation and lead us to do the will of God.

Second, if Pasto MacAdoo invites me to speak at Union Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Day, I'll rearrange my life to be there. If I can meet over lunch with the Director of Religious Education for the Catholic Diocese of DE, I will be there and discover how much we share in common and where the fault lines still exist. If the Evangelical Ministers Fellowship will have me each month, I'll be there.

David Hart and Kallistos Ware are Eastern Orthodox theologians, and I read them with profit. Richard John Neuhaus and Avery Cardinal Dulles are Roman Catholics, and I read them with profit. Timothy George is a Southern Baptist, and I read him with profit. Karl Barth is a Reformed Theologian, and I read him with profit. T.D. Jakes is a legend in his time, and I listen to him preach on T.V. with admiration and with profit.

In the language of J.I. Packer, the distinguished evangelical theologian, I swim in "the authentic biblical and creedal mainstream of Christian identity, the ... 'great tradition' that the church on earth has characteristically maintained from the start," (Cutsinger, ed., Reclaiming the Great Tradition, 185).

Do I always agree? Of course not! Real engagement with this giant that we call the Church encounters boundaries, some of which seem insurmountable. We are no friend of the Church Christ bought with His blood, if we pretend to agree on everything. Neither are we its friend or His, if we refuse to see the substance that unites us.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Finally, what can you do? First, read the book. Read the great stories of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, the Gospels and Acts. Read the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Romans, Hebrews, and, yes, Revelation. You don't want to miss Revelation.

Read other Christian books. Don't be a snob. Read what makes sense to you. The Church's wisdom is like a city with many roads leading in. What you read will connect you with other people on other roads into the same city. You can enrich each other.

Love BVBC. Don't dabble in its life. Take ownership here by getting connected somewhere. Intertwine your life with other lives here. And from time to time lift up your eyes and see the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church filling heaven and earth.