The Gathering
Fourth Sunday of Easter – Year B
Sunday, May 3, 2009

Let us pray: O God as we struggle to find new metaphors for your relationship with us, even as we take comfort and find solace in ancient words and traditions, help us to know your presence in both the old and the new, the cultural and the counter-cultural. Amen.

There's an old debate in worship and liturgy discussions that revolves around the issue of being relevant to the culture of the day. There are some who would make a compelling case that the gospel must be told in ways that are understood in the context and language of the present time. There are others who say that we must hold on to the traditions of the past because of the richness and layers of meaning that they hold within them. The point of agreement between these two perspectives of course is one of making the message understandable. The first group would take the message and translate it into a cultural vernacular, and I don't just mean language, that is understood in the current culture. The second group would work it the other way around, taking people and immersing them in the culture of the faith, teaching them the language and the customs which have developed over centuries of time.

In late January I attended once again a most remarkable continuing education event, the Epiphany Explorations symposium which I think was in its seventh year. I've talked about this venture of First Metropolitan United Church on other occasions, citing it as a wonderful example of the theory of asset mapping – which takes a look at the particular gifts and assets within a congregation and then develops programs that match and develop those gifts. So, I'm not going to go into any detail about how the congregation has taken a wonderful set of abilities and resources and turned them into something amazing. However what I do want to do is tell you a bit about one of the seminars that was part of this year's offering. Apparently Tom Long is one of the premier preachers in the North American context. I guess it is a comment on my own lack of knowledge and education that I did not know this, but I soon received some of what I was lacking as I settled in to listen to him. Tom Long is a professor of homiletics at Emory University in Atlanta.

Before I say a little bit about what Tom Long had to say to us, let me take a little diversion and give a quick observation on the subject of the spoken word – a subject which is, of course, important to me in my profession.

I think the spoken word was in decline, at least the spoken word in a particular form. The speech was being replaced by sound bites and as a result, new paradigms and metaphors were being called for what had traditionally been called the sermon. Power point presentations and talk show host style encounters were a couple of the new ideas being offered as an alternative to the ten, fifteen or twenty minute homily that had been a part of worship tradition over many decades in the past.

I'm speaking in the past tense, because I think something changed in the past year. It's hard to pinpoint a date. I could offer a date, but it wouldn't be accurate because the change happened well before that date, and as it turns out, the word change is a clue to the event I am referring to.

We've now been witness to the first one hundred days of the presidency of Barack Obama and it is this presidency and the run for it that are providing my example of how things can change. Of course he ran for president on the theme of change, and yes there were many sound bites in his many stump speeches along the campaign trail, but by and large, the main characteristic of Obama's speaking is that it can be heard and listened to as a whole. I think the oratory of President Obama has singlehandedly raised the profile and importance of the speech as a form of communication.

Perhaps I'm wrong. And certainly listening to the presentation of Tom Long, which occurred a few days after the inauguration of President Obama, I might have been convinced that I am wrong. Professor Long, no slouch as an orator himself – the handle of “good preacher” is well justified began by telling of a recent incident in one of his homiletics classes. He cued up a video tape or sound recording of one of the great sermons from the past fifty years, preached by one of the great sermon writers and speakers and played it for his class of wannabe preachers, expecting them to be awed and inspired by what they heard there, and also expecting them to want to emulate what they had just seen and heard. Instead, Tom Long says, they were underwhelmed. Of course they had to remove their ipod headphones long enough to listen to it, and it didn't have any of the choreography they had come to expect from twenty years of exposure to music videos and a lifetime of thirty second television ads. And so, Tom Long then led us on an exploration of the episodic nature of North American popular culture. It's a facebook, twitter and myspace generation with a generous side helping of YouTube. People don't have time to listen to even ten minute speeches, especially when they can hear about it later and watch perhaps an edited version on YouTube.

As if to prove himself wrong, Professor Long spoke for about forty minutes and no, it wasn't too long or too boring, and in those forty minutes seemed to make a case for the death of the narrative sermon because of this episodic nature of the average young person in today's world – at least the world we live in here in North American. Entertaining as it was, I found myself reflecting on what he said after the fact, and even discussed it with other of my colleagues who had also been there to hear what he had to say, asking myself and them, what he had ended up saying. We mostly agreed that despite talking about the death of the narrative sermon as a tool for interpreting the gospel in worship services of our time, he also made a case for reclaiming the narrative sermon in a culture which is coloured by short, media savvy, video enhanced messages. In other words, I think he said that we just need to be better at it. The narrative sermon is not dead, we just have to work hard at the narrative – especially the story behind the narrative.

And that's the dilemma I faced this week. I know I've said this before, but it seemed to come upon me with more clarity this week than it has in the past. I refer to a comment from a friend who protested the metaphor of sheep and shepherd which is so common in the scriptural record. My friend does not like being called a sheep because sheep are followers not leaders. This week all those sheep references just weren't doing it for me. It's that old cultural context dilemma again. How many of us have been close to a domestic sheep lately? How many of us really know what sheep and shepherding are all about. And so I struggled this week with trying to think of a new 2009 metaphor for the much loved but perhaps outdated image of a good shepherd and God as a shepherd. I'll have to keep working on it because nothing remarkable came to light in my ponderings this week. What I can say is that another image came to mind as I pored over the passages assigned to this week. In the gospel passage from John, Jesus talks about gathering the flock. And it is that which spoke to me.

One of the remarkable things we do is gather. In the midst of all the pressures of other commitments and outside influences and a commercial environment that more and more stays open on Sundays, in spite of all this, we gather. We gather in spite of the culture around us. We gather in a way that runs counter to the ways of the world. We gather to hear the story, be inspired by it, learn to live more faithfully because of it, and once a month, we gather to share a meal together – a meal that is both a remembering and a re-commitment – a meal which strengthens us a community and as people who want to live our faith in the relationships which touch our lives beyond this community. We also gather as a statement about who is in – wanting to be a community without borders except those borders that are defined by radical love and acceptance. Does that make us counter-cultural? Or are we called to open the doors to this inclusive community by being more acceptable and accepting of the culture around us? And so the debate continues. Probably because the truth of what is appropriate is somewhere in the middle. I just know that wherever we place ourselves in the discussion, that God wants us to keep gathering – for that is what church is. It's not about the rules and the order, although they have their place, it's about the gathering and word has it, there's a community meal this week. Amen.