August 24, 2025 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15.11-31
Revelation 2.1-7
An Ecclesiastical Crystal Ball
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
The morning of November 14, 1940, the skies over Britain were crystal clear. The German bombardment of England’s industrial cities, known colloquially as The Blitz, had been going on since early September. On that cool November morning the Luftwaffe concentrated its fire on the region of Coventry, and scored a direct hit on St. Michael’s Church, built between the 15th and 16th centuries; St. Michael’s was better known as Coventry Cathedral. Following the attack, the only things remaining of St Michael’s were the tower, the spire, the outer wall and the tomb of its first bishop. It was more than a simple casualty of war, as Coventry Cathedral was a church dear to the hearts of all English, a symbol of the nation’s rich and storied history.
Ten years later, Great Britain held a competition among designers and architects to rebuild St Michael’s, a competition won by Basil Spence. What made his design stand out, in part, was his refusal to rebuild the original, or demolish the ruins and start all over again, or to build directly on top of it. Instead, he incorporated the ruins into his design, which you can still visit today, and built the new church alongside, effectively melding the two structures into one church. It was Spence’s intent to allow present and future worshipers to pay their honor and respects to the past, to allow the past in all its ruined majesty to inform and engage the present, even as a new cathedral was built for the future. (And for the musically inclined in the congregation, it was for the dedication of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 that composer Benjamin Britten composed his enduring choral masterpiece the War Requiem.)
I’ve been thinking of Coventry Cathedral this week for two reasons. One is that my daughter Blythe recently gave me a book about how different composers used music to remember not just the twentieth century’s two world wars, but the Holocaust as well. The book describes works by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich (who composed this morning’s prelude) and Benjamin Britten. The other, and primary reason, is that a number of you have asked me to reflect on the future of the church, the future of the church as a whole, and that of our own congregation. And I thought the example of Coventry Cathedral would be a useful metaphor as we do so. In order to envision the church’s future, we cannot overlook the past, it needs to be as much a part of our vision as the bombed out remains of Coventry Cathedral sits there for worshipers to pass by on their way to church every Sunday morning.
Much has been written, spoken, preached and worried about the future of the church of Jesus Christ, and the reasons are as obvious as they are multiple. Attendance is dwindling across the board. Churches are closing at an alarming rate. Once a respected voice in the cultural conversation, it is now only one of many. Self-inflicted wounds and scandals have diminished the church’s authority. Denominations are splintering into ever-smaller and particularized divisions. The list goes on. Indeed, the church’s trajectory is something I have been concerned about since I was ordained forty-five years ago. My candidating sermon for my very first church addressed it. It was titled “Too Close for Comfort,” and it warned, not just of the splinters and sects that were calving off from the mainline churches, but also of the mega-churches who based their theology on such spurious foundations like prosperity and success, on judgment and condemnation, and not on the gospel of Christ. Paul wrote to the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” I am not claiming to have been a visionary, only to say that the pattern has been around for quite a while.
One of the reasons we believe the church is in decline is because our understanding of the church is largely based on our own experience, and what most of us remember is a church that grew by leaps and bounds at the end of World War II with all the GIs returning home and starting families, going to school and buying homes in part thanks to the GI Bill. Many folks remember going to church every week, we remember packed pews, bustling Sunday Schools, multiple choirs, active youth groups, ladies circles and men’s clubs and a powerful mission focus. What we do not remember are the generations before the Second World War. Twenty-first century worries about the church’s marginalization were just as prevalent in the early twentieth century. The American landscape at that time was largely dotted by ethnic congregations who had recently emigrated from Europe. If you grew up in a city of any size, you probably remember the French Church, the Polish Church, the German churches, the Irish church, the Italian church, and so forth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the church was the keeper of ethnic traditions, it is where people went to keep the language and customs of the old country alive. These were faithful and dedicated congregations to be sure, but they were small enclaves at the start and by definition kept to themselves.
Here in New England we have a particular, equally ethnic, sense of history, that of our pilgrim forbears. We know the history of an early theocratic state with clergy firmly in charge of civic life, we remember the blue laws, the legal requirement of church attendance, and the centrality of our own Congregational church in the development of the young nation. But we seldom stop to ask ourselves the reasons for those blue laws and the compulsion to attend church services every Sunday. Simply put, it is because people were not going to church. On the contrary, they were too busy drinking and carousing and taking advantage of the no-work-on-Sundays laws. Think about it: if colonial churches were filled on Sunday morning there would be no need to close the shops and pass laws that compel church attendance, would there? This is the truer picture of some of the earliest American attitudes toward church.
So when we find ourselves pining for the good old days of the centrality of the church in community life, we are really only remembering from the late 1940s onward. The ruined cathedral on which a new one was built represents the remains of indifference and neglect. Put another way, current trends in congregational vitality are in reality a reversion to the mean.
And what does this mean for the future? We face a host of challenges, but although they may differ in detail from the challenges of the past, they are similar in aspect. Attendance patterns and numbers are settling back to their pre-World War II levels, and there is as much splintering going on as ever. The recent passing of conservative church icon Dr James Dobson, who incidentally had neither a medical nor a theology degree, reminds us of the splintered church of the 1970s with folks like Jerry Falwell and Robert Schuller and their own particular brands, to borrow the words of Paul, of “philosophy, empty deceit and human tradition.” I will not count the current political atmosphere into the equation, because the church has always faced headwinds such as these, and our call to champion the cause of the poor, the outcast, the immigrant and alien, is as central to the gospel of Jesus as it ever was. We may need to talk about it more in these days, and to show up for our marginalized neighbors, but we always have, and the church is up to the task because God is always present and urging us on.
David French is a writer for the New York Times whose specialty is contemporary culture and religion. A few months ago he wrote a piece that essentially asks, What type of church are you? Are you a fear-the-world church or a love-your-neighbor church? For French, it boils down to the church’s posture vis-à-vis the world around us: is that world a threat to be engaged, or a community to be loved and served? I think the answer to this will determine the trajectory of the church’s future, and the good news is it doesn’t matter how big or small the church is. The church that lives in fear will eventually become so closed in on itself it will finally wither, while the church that lives in love has the grace of the gospel on its side.
This is one of the reasons I asked Pat to read the parable of the prodigal son this morning. It is a parable of the victory of love. There is a lot going on in the story, and it is a hard story. While we join the father in welcoming the younger son’s change of heart and his return to the father’s embrace – his return to the father’s embrace – we cannot help wondering what to make of the older son who stayed home and did all he was supposed to do. Here is my way through it: this is not a story about three historical individuals, it is a story Jesus invented. It is a parable. We are not meant to dissect the story into its component and in this instance puzzling details. It is a story about the undying love of a parent for a child, about the power of repentance, about the miracle of grace. And if the younger son, who squandered his inheritance on vice and squalor and excess and yet was genuinely welcomed home by his father, then there is equally abundant grace available for the older son, who at the end of the story stands resentfully alone, abundant grace available to some day return as well to a right relationship with his family. God’s grace is more than sufficient for them both – and it is more than sufficient for all of us.
Which is why, when I wonder about the future of the church – when I worry about the future of the church, I am reassured, not because of who I am or because of who we are as the church, but because of who God is, the God whose grace is more than sufficient for all of us. There is no instance in history where the church – with a Capital C, what we call the Universal church of Jesus Christ – has not survived.
And this is true of our little 135 member church in Chester as well. The temptation is strong to look around at the numbers in the pews, diminished by the pandemic, and at our annual struggles at budget time, and worry about what the future holds. I understand. Here are my thoughts. First to the notion that we only have x number of years left, regardless of how you calculate x. I don’t agree. You know I do not measure church vitality by the number of members or the budget’s bottom line. But a) we have more members than we did eight years ago, and b) our invested funds continue to grow even with our annual withdrawals from them. I do not worry about numbers in either instance, because we are not driven by them, we are driven by mission. Which leads to my second thought: Even if we do have x number of years left, think of all the mission and ministry we can still accomplish in those years. Think of all the lives we can still touch and change in the years ahead. Think of all the folks whom we have not even yet met who will become part of our congregation in the years ahead. Think of all the folks who depend on us for spiritual nurture and support, within and outside our congregation. Think of all the good work God has for us to do. Regardless of our size, regardless of our budget, regardless of the trajectory of the church as a whole, God is not finished with us yet.
And third, and most important, because this underpins everything I believe about the church: The abundant grace of God continues to uphold us and equip us in every respect. The abundant grace of God welcomed back the younger son who turned his back on his father and his family; the abundant grace of God holds tremendous possibility and opportunity for the older son who had yet to return. The abundant grace of God will work through us to accomplish the ministry we can do, and will surprise us by helping us do the things we think we cannot do. This is what I believe.
The book of Revelation begins with personalized letters to seven churches in Asia Minor. Some are words of encouragement, some are words of correction. The letter to Ephesus contains both. This morning may we take to heart these words of encouragement:
“I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance; I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers… I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary… Let everyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. To everyone who perseveres, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God.”