From the Psalms:
He gave his decrees to Jacob
and established a law for Israel, *
which he commanded them to teach their children;
That the generations to come might know,
and the children yet unborn; *
that they in their turn might tell it to their children;
So that they might put their trust in God, *
and not forget the deeds of God,
but keep his commandments.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalms 78:5-7 (1979 BCP Version) – August 7, 2012)
Just a few days ago the Public Religion Research Institute issued a new report entitled A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials. A “millennial” is somone currently 18 to 24 years of age, the youngest cohort of adults. (From my point of view at nearly 60 years of age these are children; my son and daughter are both older than this group!) According to the report, these young adults are more likely then the general population to be religiously unaffiliated; one-quarter of them so identify themselves. Interestingly, most of those who do so were reared in religiously affiliated households. The greatest movement away from religious affiliation was seen among those raised in Catholic and white mainline Protestant families. It would appear that we have not been doing a very good job of teaching our children “that they in their turn might tell it to their children”!
Exactly what the causes of this movement are is anyone’s guess. A lot of author’s have made suggestions. Ross Douthat in his recent book Bad Religion blames it on the churches’ movement away from conservative dogma toward a liberal agenda. Diana Butler Bass in Christianity After Religion, on the other hand, suggests a failure of religious institutions to continue an awakening begun in the mid-20th century, falling instead into a reactive fundamentalism reinforcing conservative dogma in the last quarter of the century. Local pastors give anecdotal evidence of parishioners drifting away from Sunday church services to other alternatives including youth soccer and little league, major league sports offerings, Sunday morning TV programs, or spending the morning with the New York Times; they say American families have become “over programmed” and have relegated religion to the hopper of optional activities. Everybody has a different story to tell about what’s gone wrong with American religion; everybody has a different story to tell about how someone else has gotten it wrong.
I don’t know which of these and many other suggestions is most accurate, which story truly tells the tale of the American church. I suspect that to some extent they are all correct and that for every person, millennial or older, who has left “organized religion” behind there is a mix of stories reinforcing one another. And what this means for the church is that the answer to attracting the millennials is not going to be a single program, a single style of worship, a single ministry style, a single outreach, a single anything. There is no silver bullet, no quick and easy answer.
I nearly wrote “attracting the millennials back” in that last paragraph and then stopped myself, because a lot them were never here in the church to begin with. They represent a new mission field, not a lost membership group. They claim to be “spiritual but not religious” because, truly, they’ve never been a part of religion. They may be spiritual; all human beings are if St. Augustine of Hippo was right that “our hearts are restless till they find their rest in” God. If we in the church are to attract them to a religious expression of that spirituality, it is going to take hard work, time, and most of all its going to take integrity.
The past half-century has seen the church lose its integrity. Various parts of the church have taken up competing political and societal positions, so that the church has fractured even beyond the denominational divides of the Reformation. Instead of focusing upon the core values and teachings of the undivided church, we have taken up social causes that, though important, have divided us. Each faction seems to be telling a different story, so that the church can no longer claim (as it once could despite denominational differences) to be one. Because of the differing stories, the church can no longer lay claim to a unity based on shared moral and ethical principles. The church needs to recover that, to stop fighting with itself, to stop telling these contradictory stories.
If we could just do that, we’d be a much more attractive venue where the millennials (and everyone) could explore the spirituality they claim and clearly have. Just that . . . if we could just stop the internal bickering and fighting, stop telling stories about each other and, instead, tell stories of God. Wouldn’t that be novel?
Well, no . . . as the psalm suggests, it’s an idea that’s been around for a few years. “He commanded them to teach their children, so that they might put their trust in God, and not forget the deeds of God.”
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Father Funston in the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Reading these oh-so-familiar words in the introduction to John’s Gospel, I remember other words I read on another blog yesterday:
It is intriguing how often in stories of Holy Scripture food plays a role. From the “apple” in the Garden, to Abraham offering a meal of cakes and meat to the three men (who turn out to God) at the Oaks of Mamre, to this story of Gideon, to David and his men eating the Bread of the Presence, to all the food items listed as items of sacrifice in Leviticus, the Old Testament (indeed, the whole Bible) is food focused. The People of God define themselves through the annual reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the Passover; the new People of God define themselves (in my tradition and others) by the weekly reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the death and Resurrection of Christ and anticipating his return. It’s intriguing but not surprising. The Jewish and Christian faiths are not, in the long run, about following rules of ritual or moral conduct; they are about being in an intimate relationship with that which is the source of being, that which we call “God” and address as “Father” or brother or redeemer. And, other than sex, there is probably no more intimate activity two or more people can share than eating together.
“Most blessed” be a murderess? What is this? Yesterday, a friend and colleague who was only a little older than I am passed away after several months of pancreatic cancer, so I’m a little sensitive on the subject of death this morning. So, really! What is this? 
These are the words spoken by the great crowd of Jews and others who thronged the streets of Jerusalem for the Festival of Shavu’ot when the Twelve, empowered by the Holy Spirit, begin to tell the story of Jesus in languages they had never before spoken. Shavu’ot is a celebration with both agricultural and historical significance in Judaism. It is known as the “festival of the first fruits,” a harvest feast when the first fruits were brought as offerings to the Temple; it is also known as the “festival of the giving of the Law,” a celebration of the handing down of Torah on Mt. Sinai. It was called Pentecost, a Greek word meaning “fiftieth”, because it always falls on the fiftieth day after the Passover. That year it fell on the fiftieth day after the Resurrection and, thus, the Christian feast of the Holy Spirit carries that name, as well.
This past Sunday, the Episcopal Church marked the 28th anniversary of the women known as “the Philadelphia Eleven” who were ordained on July 29, 1974. Four retired bishops (Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, Edward Welles and George Barrett) chose to defy the General Convention of the Episcopal Church which, at its regular triennial meeting in 1973, had voted against opening the priesthood to women; women were already eligible for ordination as deacons. Joined by male presbyters who supported them and the candidates, they ordained eleven women deacons to the priesthood: Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield Fleisher, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Martha Swanson, and Nancy Hatch Wittig. Shortly thereafter, four additional women were also “irregularly” ordained: Eleanor Lee McGee, Alison Palmer, Betty Powell, and Diane Tickell. A firestorm of controversy erupted in the church: charges were filed against these dissident bishops (Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, Edward Welles and George Barrett) and an emergency meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops was convened on August 15, 1974.
These women were not the first to be ordained to the Anglican priesthood, however. During the Second World War, Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained to the presbyterate on January 25, 1944, by the Rt. Rev. Ronald Hall, Bishop of Hong Kong, in response to the crisis among Anglican Christians in China caused by the Japanese invasion. No male clergy could be found who were willing to take on the onerous ministry, but Ms. Li was, so she was ordained and served with distinction. After the war, the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to make the bishop and the priest rescind the ordination, but neither did. Ms. Li voluntarily ceased serving as a priest until more than 30 years later when she immigrated to Canada where the Anglican Church, following the Episcopal Church’s lead, had begun to ordain women. Her priesthood was recognized and she served as an honorary canon in Toronto, ministering among the immigrant Chinese population.
Have you ever done that thing on a public street corner where a couple of people stand there looking up and pretty soon some passing pedestrian, wondering what they are gazing at, will stop and look up, and then another and then another and so on until a lot of people are looking up into the sky at nothing for no reason? I have an image of that in my mind when I read the this passage, although in this case the “men of Galilee” are not looking at nothing for no reason. They are looking at something they can no longer see, except in their minds’ eye, and it is certainly not “for no reason” that they are doing so. Something phenomenal has happened to them; someone they thought had been killed by the authorities had returned from the dead, had eaten with them, talked with them, appeared to them over the course of over seven weeks, and now he had “ascended into heaven.” They had plenty of reason to stand there staring into the sky into which he had apparently gone.
As the letter to the Romans draws to a close, Paul sends greetings to several persons by name: Phoebe (named here), Prisca, Aquila, Epaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junia, and many others. As I read through there names, I cannot help but wonder who these otherwise forgotten church members were. What were their roles in the church? What did they do outside the church?
How many of you have ever attended a potluck supper or potluck luncheon in this parish? Let’s have show of hands. OK – hands down. Those of you who have done so . . . have you ever known there to be an insufficiency of food at any such event? Ever? Keep that in mind, please, as we take a look at these lessons today.
