The Shifting American Religious Landscape

I listened with interest on Tuesday to a report I heard on NPR about the changing religious landscape of America. The Pew Forum interviewed more than 35,000 people on their religious experiences—the largest study of its kind. They studied individual religious groups as well as the shape of faith in America as a whole.

0.7% of Americans are Buddhist; 0.6 are Muslim, and 0.4% are Hindu. 1.7 % are Jewish and 23.9 % Roman Catholic. The remaining 51.3 are Protestant. There are more Evangelical Protestants than “mainline” (the usual historic categories of Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc): 26 percent vs 18 percent. That difference could give us pause for thought to see what we have to learn. There was a time when most of Americans were part of mainline churches; not so any longer! The results about the Episcopal Church are not so surprising. More of us are older than are younger; 19 percent more of us are over 50 than are under 50, with just 11% being 18-29. We also learn other pieces of trivia: 26 percent of Episcopalians surveyed lived in the Northeast, but 40 percent lived in the South. 24 percent of us have one or two children at home, and 27 percent have attended graduate school. Nothing earth shattering there.

What’s interesting, though, is how fluid the American religious landscape has become. In the old model of religiosity, you were born into one thing and you stayed that one thing, and there wasn’t much diversity of experience within traditions. But now, 44 percent of Americans have changed their religious affiliation since they were children, and 12 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with a religious tradition. That’s remarkable! What is compelling about a shifting landscape is that it shows a society that is very much open to what we have to offer. If 12 percent of the people you know are not affiliated with a church, why not share yours? We can have the best website and prettiest garden, but most people come to church because someone has invited them personally.

I think that this cultural fluidity can be a good challenge for us. We have a lot to learn from each other’s experiences and questions; when new people come through our doors, it’s our job to listen. Just from talking to each of you, I know that your lives have been formed by a variety of contexts, and you’ve come to Christ Church for a variety of reasons. That makes for a strong community that can accommodate many points of view and life stories. Yesterday at our “Connect” course, we talked about how, in the feeding of the five thousand, no one knew where the food came from or who the other eaters were. This was a pretty shocking situation in a purity code/kosher law-conscious culture where “you are what you eat” was equally true as “you are WHO you eat with.”

But that’s the story of Jesus; God inspires us to sit down and eat with people who are different from us. That’s the reason people are willing to try new faith communities and find a place that is comfortable and challenging in the right ways. I would be mortified if I were expected to wave my hands in the air or speak in tongues just as a young Pentecostal woman in Texas would be bored to tears at the thought of the Episcopal hour of stand, sit, kneel, stand, sit, kneel, stand. We don’t have to be the same or force ourselves into a certain mold—maybe our religious realities are only now catching up to that.

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (BCP)

For the Globe article on this study, visit: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/26/us_religious_identity_is_rapidly_changing/

For the Pew Trust’s original report: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

God is your trust

I hope this second week of Lent is treating you well. As is my custom on the third Thursday of the month, I was with the Sisters of Saint Anne this morning for Eucharist. One of our texts came from the prophet Jeremiah: Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit (17:7-8).

Lent is a season of evaluating. We are asked to take a critical look at the way we live our lives. It’s specific; Lent is emphatically not about 40 days to remind ourselves that we are sinners. It is, the words of our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, a time for a tune up; like checking out all of the parts of the car to see if they operate correctly, Lent is a time to look at all the parts of ourselves and ask if they are working effectively.

Do you need to make more time to talk with your spouse? What about how you take care of yourself? Do you need to eat better, or exercise more? Do you need to give more money to global poverty relief or to community organizations, or your church? Where are you in your family relationships? In your work?

One reason it’s so hard to do this work of self-evaluation is that we are afraid of what we might find. We’re afraid we won’t be able to change (or, perhaps more frightening, that we will). I think that’s why I find today’s text about trust from Jeremiah so compelling. It’s almost as if the very grammar of our language can’t accommodate the magnitude of God’s intimacy with us. All of our usual ways of thinking will have to go. We tend to think of trust in terms of transaction; when someone has disappointed us, we say they have to “earn” our trust. If you do something nice for me, then you deserve my trust. I then give you my trust—as if it were a set of keys. I can then take the keys back—or, more aptly, change the locks—whenever I want. Christian faith is different. The love of God is so broad and so deep that God’s very self can be our trust and God’s promise can be our hope. We can become constituted by the trust of God—that trust can be as part of us as the blue in your eyes or the brown in your hair. That trust can permeate each cell. As Jeremiah writes, our roots will spread wide and our leaves stay green, even in seasons of drought.

That trust gives us the courage to take stock of our lives and to know that God will love us and be with us no matter what we find. The love of God isn’t just something that makes us feel good; it empowers us to love each other and ourselves more deeply. It gives us the boldness to make change in the world and in our lives and catches us when we fall. It impels us outward as well as inward. What does it look like? The answer to that question is up to each of us to discern for ourselves. I think it is something to do with living courageously. A priest I know told me a story about a teenager who was going to be baptized. When she asked him why he wanted to be, she thought he would say something about pleasing his mother, or pleasant ritual. But he told her that it was because he wanted to know that the future could be different from the past. That faith in God’s power of transformation for the future is as good a vision as I can imagine of what it means for God to be your trust. What is it for you?

Blessings,

Sara+

Feb. 14: Cyril or Valentine?

Happy Saints Cyril and Methodius Day!

OK, it’s also Valentine’s Day, but not on our saints’ calendar. Cyril and Methodius were a pair of Greek brothers in the ninth century. They were missionary priests sent to the Khazars, near the Black sea in what was later Russia. They learned the local language and translated much of the Bible into Slavonic, which had no written form, so local people would be able to read Scripture for themselves. Their work to give it a printed language gave rise to the Cyrillic alphabet (Cyrilà Cyrillic), still used (in a modified form) in Russian and its linguistic cousins. They are regarded as the founders of Slavic literature, and celebrated today because Cyril died on this date in 869. You can read more about them at (http://satucket.com/lectionary/Cyril&Methodius.htm).

A lot less is known for certain about “St Valentine.” There was a historical St Valentine (or several—of the early church martyrs there are three by that name—it was actually pretty common), and there are many legends surrounding the name and the reason Feb. 14 has come to be associated with it and romantic love. One story holds that Valentine was a priest in Rome, and the Emperor (Claudius II) ordered young men not to marry. He thought he’d have more soldiers if there were no wives to convince their husbands to stay home. Valentine, a priest, secretly married young lovers. He was supposedly martyred on Feb. 14. We also may have Gregory Chaucer, author of the medieval Canterbury Tales, to thank for Valentine’s Day on Feb. 14. He mentions it in the context of the mating of birds halfway through February to encourage all of creation to, well, mate.

So which is it? Cyril or Valentine? Obviously, the Christian tradition has a lot to say about love: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.” (1 John 4.12). The church has not historically been very excited about the romantic love that Valentine’s Day sentimentalizes. Sex is bad, sex is dirty, and nice people don’t talk about it. Or, on the other extreme, sex is so elevated and so otherworldly, regular people don’t talk about it. The problem with this attitude is that it’s allowed our cultural conversation about relationships to be totally dominated by gender stereotypes and one-dimensional, frequently antagonistic views of human relating. None of us are from Mars or Venus—we’re from earth! All of us! We can speak to each other, and share what’s on our hearts in trust and in faith. We can show our love for each other in mutual and life-giving ways. But you wouldn’t guess that watching “Wife Swap” or “Desperate Housewives.”

So, here in my newsletter, I’m encouraging all of you to take this February 14 for both Cyril AND Valentine. Cyril and his brother worked to make the word of God intelligible to people, so they could understand each other and God. Love in all its forms is surely the word of God and a sign of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So sit down with the person you love and ask them: where is the word of God in this relationship for you? How can we speak God’s love to each other, in all of the ways, physical as well as emotional, we relate to each other? If you aren’t part of a relationship like that, pray for a moment about how God is glorified in the way that you show love for yourself; how you take care of your health, how you eat well, how you exercise and how you make time for friendships and community. Thanks be to God for all of our saints.

Feb. 7: Penitence

We observed Ash Wednesday yesterday, and had close to 50 people attend between our two services. Thanks to Stephen Sikorski, our organist, who was able to play for both. Special thanks also to Paula and Ginny, our Altar Guild. The altar guild sets up for all of our services and cleans the linens—not an easy task when the central image of the service are actual ashes!

Ash Wednesday is one of my favorite liturgies we celebrate. One of the things I love about being an Episcopalian is the way our liturgy uses the ordinary things of life—bread, wine, water—and helps us to experience the God’s eternal truths in the midst of them. Liturgy is a full-body experience; we sit, we stand, we kneel, we sing, eat, drink—we do liturgy. It’s not about being a spectator.

Putting ashes on our faces reminds us who we are—“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We were made of the earth, and that’s where we go back to. We put it on our faces to symbolize our penitence and our knowledge that we in ourselves aren’t terribly much to look at or get too excited about. On Ash Wednesday we confess in a litany that is as exhaustive a list of sins as we will ever see, from garden variety dishonesties and selfishness to consumerism to our abuse of the earth.

The season of Lent is about penitence. What’s important, though, about Lent and Ash Wednesday is that they aren’t an end in themselves. The point of penitence is that it brings us to forgiveness—this is part of the story we sometimes forget. Our American culture is relentlessly focused on being positive. It’s easy to look at a service like we celebrated yesterday and ask, “What’s the point of that? Life is hard enough. Why do I want to go and dwell on such negativity?

The thing is, though, that when penitence is understood as it is intended, it’s about restoration, not punishment. We confess all of those sins because it’s a realistic assessment of what it is to be a person in this world; our inner moral landscapes are intensely complicated. To kneel down in church, dirt smeared on your face, to say, I am sorry, please forgive me and please welcome me home, is what we are all in such desperate need of. And God is always willing to hear that confession and to forgive us.

Peter asks Jesus, ’How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’ (Mtt 18: 21-22). That’s a lot of forgiveness! If that’s what Jesus asks of us, how much more so will God, who understands our hearts better than we ourselves, forgive.

This Lent, I hope you’ll be able to find some time in your prayer to hear God’s forgiveness as loudly and as clearly as you hear your own sinfulness. Take some time to pray for forgiveness, and allow yourself really to hear how God answers you. If you are in conflict with someone, maybe this Lent is a good time to try to reconcile with them. God’s forgiveness can be a pretty ethereal reality, and asking forgiveness of each other is a good way to ask God, too. If you have something specific that’s heavy on your heart, the sacrament of reconciliation may be appropriate for you; Episcopalians don’t practice “Confession” quite like they do in the Roman Catholic Church (no one ever “has to”), but it can sometimes be a good thing.

Prayers to you for a holy Lent.

Blessings,

Sara+

Welcome to the blog!

Hey, everyone:
I am officially joining the 21st Century. After looking at the years of E Criers pile up in my documents folder, I decided to put them up here so you can see old ones, if you so desire, from week to week. This is the email newsletter for Christ Church, Waltham. The messages here relate to parish life sometimes, to whatever I happen to be thinking about at other times. I usually write on Thursdays. Thanks for reading.