Chautauqua Morning Worship
Bishop John Chane's Homily: “The good old days” (were not the good old days).
Bishop John Chane's Homily: “The good old days” (were not the good old days).
“Until the time Christians and denominations use a new common language, they will continue to be outdated, judgmental and unfaithful,” Bishop John Chane said at Friday’s 9:15 a.m. morning worship service. His sermon was titled “Searching for a Common Language in the 21st Century” and the Scripture text was Matthew 9:16-17.
During a previous visit to Chautauqua, Chane had lunch with philosopher Huston Smith. Religious language had not been able to keep up with the languages of science and philosophy, Chane believed, and the gap between the two needed to be bridged.
Chane said that originally his sermon was going to be about building bridges between science and religion, but he changed it to talk about the Christian community and its own language gap. He told three stories that he believes illustrate this gap.
When Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s former president, visited the Washington National Cathedral in 2004, Chane took him to the cathedral’s bookstore and told Khatami that he could have anything in the store. Khatami chose three books by Huston Smith.
“He was a follower of Smith and his writings,” Chane said.
In 1953, Chane was invited to a birthday party for a classmate. The party was set for 2 p.m. and he arrived on time with his present. No one else came, and by 2:45 p.m. the classmate’s mother cut the cake and served the ice cream.
“I asked her where everyone else was,” Chane said. “She said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it is because we are Jewish.’ ”
In 1955, Chane’s mother, a real estate agent, sold a house to an African-American professor who was teaching at Tufts University.
“We were gathered around the tube one evening and there was a crash and a flash of fire,” Chane said. “Someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at the house and thrown a rock on the porch.”
“Those events, and knowing that Khatami was reading Smith, said to me that we have to find a more common language,” he continued. “ We have to find a better way to live.”
He described the post-Depression and post-World War II culture of the United States as one of conformity and nonconfrontation.
“There was a clear and commonly used language in families, schools, churches, towns and cities,” Chane said.
The language expressed white, Western values and encouraged people to believe in an “amorphous melting pot of broad Christian ethics,” he said.
Chane described the states’ enforcement of the Christian Sabbath through “blue laws,” which forbid most commerce on Sundays. In the public schools, the common language was Christian. After the Pledge of Allegiance, there was a Bible reading, usually from the New Testament, and a prayer that was Christian in context.
“It was a stable, uniform, monoculture that was oblivious to the diversity that was beginning to permeate the nation,” Chane said. “That is why there was a significant time of turmoil in the 1960s and ̓70s.”
He described Vietnam as a platform for people to question churches, theological language and the moral authority of the government. Americans questioned the comfortable ethnocentricity of the churches and their silence on race and human sexuality.
Christian denominations feel marginalized in society today, Chane said, and they will stay that way as long as they continue to use nostalgic language about the “good old days.”
“We could go back to the ‘good old days’ when the buildings were full, but I am not sure we would be a church,” Chane said. “The church is really about being a community, giving gifts to the world based on the teachings of Jesus.”
Churches use language based on the common cultural past of the United States as the foundation of Christianity, rather than Jesus or the Gospels. Chane said that many churches act as if Christianity is the only religion that has value and believe that Jews and Muslims do not worship the same God as Christians.
“These churches are theologically reactive,” Chane said. “They are an aggressor striking back at rapid change and the nihilism of post-modernism.”
Chane said a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 70 percent of Protestant pastors believe Islam is a violent religion.
“Many people ask if Islam is a religion of war, when too often Christianity has been a progenitor of war,” he said. “Christianity is guilty of genocide, slavery and misogyny, and the only way these institutions have found to address those crimes is with silence.
“The Christian church is not the exclusive keeper of common theological language,” he continued. “There is other theological language; other faiths are points of revelation. We need to welcome the Great God’s gift of diversity, acceptance, love and forgiveness. I believe that we are all raised up and sent by the one God. A common language will show us a new reality to life of joy and reconciliation. This new vision of life will be defined by our compassionate care of the other. We need to find a way to embrace what is already given to us by God.”
The Rev. James Hubbard presided. Carol Christiansen read the Scripture. She has been coming to Chautauqua since 1990, has sung in the Chautauqua choir since 1998 and participates in the CLSC Great American Picnic and the Guild of the Seven Seals.
The Motet Choir, under the direction of Jared Jacobsen, sang “Day of Arising,” with text by Susan Palo Cherwien, music by Carl Schalk and an arrangement by David M. Cherwien. Deborah Grohman provided clarinet accompaniment.
The Robert D. Campbell Memorial Chaplaincy Fund and the John William Tyrrell Endowment for Religion provided support for this week’s services.