Hilton Head Island, SC – September 2, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Amos 4:6-12; Matthew 24:1-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But he who endures to the end will be saved.” – Matthew 24:13
At the very beginning of this sermon, I want to assure you it will not be about what you might think it will be about. I preached on that subject a few weeks ago, and I’m not going to preach on it now. You can’t relax, exactly, because what I am going to talk about will not be very cheerful, but at least it won’t be that, so you can rest somewhat easily.
Tomorrow is Labor Day. Labor Day used to be much more of a widely celebrated holiday than it is now. Way back when, the nation focused especially on organized labor, meaning unionized workers. Back in the day, nearly half of American workers were unionized. Today only 15% are, and most of them are government workers. Right-to-work laws in many states have virtually negated the influence of unions, and therefore lower and middle-income workers are having to fend for themselves in salary and wage negotiations. Many workers believe that America seems to have --- take your choice --- gone to seed, gone down the tubes, gone to pot, or gone to hell. But it’s not only wage earners who think that. Many others do too.
The number of children born out of wedlock is decreasing, but it is still very high. Over 40% of all babies born in America do not have parents who are married. In isolated pockets of our country, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is nearly 75%. No nation can long maintain strong social cohesion while exhibiting such destabilizing birth statistics. Everyone of child-bearing age should probably be practicing birth control.
Then there is the matter of marriage itself. Up until a few years ago, traditional marriage was the only kind of marriage legally allowed in the U.S.A. Now we have same-sex marriage as well as traditional heterosexual marriage. Many Americans are fiercely opposed to that major shift. To them, this social transformation represents an erosion of morality, although to others, it represents an equalization and fairness which has been far too long in coming.
Then there is the method by which couples become acquainted with one another and begin to date. The week before last, the cover story of the news magazine The Economist declared that at present, almost half of all marriages originate from contacts that are first made online. Over the past decade, I have officiated at the weddings of a number of happy couples who “met” online. Furthermore, according to experts quoted in these two long articles, couples who marry as a result of online connections are slightly more likely to succeed in marriage than those who meet the old-fashioned way ---in person. Does that mean America is improving or that it is more quickly catapulting into digital hell? And whatever you think of same-sex relationships, The Economist says that 70% of same-sex unions now originate online. To this geezer, that is astounding.
Does all this suggest that America is in serious decline? Some people would likely say yes. The Economist is a periodical which began in England one hundred and seventy-five years ago. Thus, by definition, it has to be fairly conservative to have lasted that long. Here is its final sagacious paragraph on its article called “Modern love.” “Whatever the telltale data turn out to be, the experience of love will continue to be ineffable, and its pursuit strewn with hardships. But making the path that bit easier (using the Internet) to navigate seems likely to make many lives better, and many people happier. That is no mean thing.”
I confess that often I fear the undeniable conundrums that computers and the Internet have thrust upon the modern world. But they also have resulted in enormous benefits. Thinking that America or the world are going down the tubes because of cybernetics is shortsighted unless one also admits the great good that computers have brought us.
On the bulletin cover are some statistics from two polls about religious affiliation in the USA. Please look at them fully to absorb the purported trends. In 2013, according to the first poll, 50% of Americans identified themselves as Protestants, 22% as Catholics, 11% as “Other Christians” (presumably meaning Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on), 4% as “Other Religions” (Jews, Muslims, etc.), and 12% said they had no religion.
Just four years, later the next poll indicated a huge shift. In 2017 36% of those polled said they were Protestants (a decrease of 28%!), an equal 22% said they were Catholics, 14% said they were affiliated with other Christian groups (an increase of 14%), 5% said they were members of non-Christian religions (an increase of 25%!), and 21% said they were unaffiliated with any religion (a literally unbelievable increase of 75%).
Math was never my academic long suit. Nevertheless, I am virtually positive the numbers in those two polls, taken four years apart, do not accurately reflect mathematical religious reality in the United States of America. I deduce that the sample of adults polled was not nearly large enough in either instance. It is impossible there were that many enormous changes in religious affiliation in this country in just four years. If it were true, one might truly conclude that America has already gone to hell, especially if one believes there is a hell to go to, particularly for irreligious people, which I, for one, do not believe.
However, of this I have no doubt: America, and much of the Western World, is in a sharp religious decline. A few weeks ago two very long cover stories in The Island Packet explained how membership in South Carolina Protestant churches dropped by a few hundred thousand people in just five years. The headlines in the past couple of weeks about more instances of sexual abuse by Catholic priests not only hurts Roman Catholicism but all of Christianity, and other religions as well. Some people decide that if any religious institution allows such crimes to continue, they want no part of religion. Things aren’t falling apart as quickly as those two defective polls indicate, but the religious foundations do indeed appear to be crumbling.
In college I majored in history. I have wondered whether another major might have served me better in the ministry, but I don’t think so. Reading about the past is an excellent basis for trying to understand the present, and to prepare for the future.
In the past few weeks I read two long biographies, one by Fawn Brodie simply entitled Thomas Jefferson, and the other by Doris Kearns Goodwin with the very long title, No Ordinary Time – Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Both books described in sometimes excruciating detail how tumultuous were the years of Jefferson and the Roosevelts.
In the presidential election of 1800, Jefferson defeated John Adams. It was perhaps the most negative campaign in the entire history of our republic. But studying it now seems tame by the standards of those who have 24/7 cable news channels and countless newspapers and magazines which cover every titillating tweet of modern political battles.
When FDR became President in 1932, and throughout his four terms until he died in April of 1945, he had an unlimited host of catastrophes constantly confronting him, beginning with the Great Depression and ending with the uncertain strategies leading up to V-E and V-J Days. In Jefferson’s time it was unclear whether the USA would survive threats of war against both France and England. In Roosevelt’s time there was no guarantee the Allies would defeat the Axis Powers in the most devastating war the world has ever known or, we hope, shall ever know.
Perhaps it is natural in the midst of great upheavals to suppose that we are headed toward an unavoidable calamity. Nevertheless, America became the world’s first genuine democracy, it has functioned well for most of its history, and it has been the most powerful and influential democracy since the end of World War II. The general direction of history proclaims that the USA still thrives, despite its many difficult challenges.
When times are tough, it is easy to become pessimistic. Shoe is one of my favorite comic strips. Several weeks ago one of the characters was watching television. “In national news,” the reporter said, “due to a rampant surge of pessimism in America, suckers are now only being born every seven and a half minutes.”
History always looks bleak to those for whom it is not history, but instead falls under the category of current events. When we are in terrible traumas, it seems almost impossible to rise above them. But if we are to trust that it is God who oversees both our temporal and our eternal destinies, we must also learn to trust that whatever happens, regardless of how bleak it may appear, God will lead us through our traumas to a brighter future which always awaits everyone everywhere. God never abandons any of us, ever.
The prophet Amos of Tekoa lived in the northern kingdom of Israel in the middle of the eighth century BCE. Amos was a pessimist about the Israelites, but an optimist about the justice of God. Because of the inequities of wealthy landowners toward the poor people of the land, Amos believed destruction was sure to descend upon the renegade northern kingdom. He quotes God as saying, “’I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me,’ says the Lord….’I smote you with blight and mildew, yet you did not return to me,’ says the Lord….’I sent among you pestilence after the manner of Egypt, …yet you did not return to me,’ says the Lord….’Therefore thus will I do to you, O Israel. Because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel!” (Amos 4:6,9,10,12) And the Assyrians came, and Israel was defeated, and the people met their God, at least as Amos perceived it. But at last justice was served.
The prophet Jesus of Nazareth lived in Judea at the beginning of the first century CE. The Romans had conquered the Jewish kingdom three quarters of a century earlier, in the time of Julius Caesar, and ever since, life for the Judeans was very precarious. Jesus was a pessimist about the prospects for Judea, and he foresaw its destruction, which in fact occurred forty years after Jesus died. But he was optimistic about God, and about what Jesus, along with other prophets before him, called “the day of the Lord.” Two or three days before his crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples what he believed about the dark days in which they were living.
Biblical scholars describe the sayings of Jesus in Matthew 24 as “eschatological” or “apocalyptic” utterances. Jesus referred to “the last days” or “the end of days” or “the day of the Lord,” when God would conquer the forces of darkness with His ultimate victory over sin and evil. “They will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death….And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another….And because wickedness is multiplied, most men’s love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt. 24:10, 12-14).
These words were not necessarily meant to be taken literally. They were poetic; they were metaphorical and hyperbolic. Like the words of Amos and the other prophets, they were meant to stir the hearts of those who heard them or who later would read them, so that they would realize that in the end, they would be saved - - - not from hell, not from eternal destruction or damnation, but rather saved in the present, in the time in which, by chance, they were living. Salvation (health, wholeness) does not always refer to eternity; it also can refer to the here-and-how, to our current storm and stress, to events which seem to have gotten out of hand and appear to be thrusting us helplessly down the tubes. In the midst of our troubles, God still rules! The kingdom of God still holds the ultimate power! God will not abandon us!
Profane, crude, coarse language has become commonplace. In public and on television, profanity is passé. Many women dress like streetwalkers, many men wear clothes that look like they were picked out of dumpsters in the worst sections of the seediest cities in the land. Not a single day passes without headlines about a shooting somewhere far or near to where we live. It is natural and normal to imagine that never in history has anyone ever faced what we are facing.
Those who are unfamiliar with the great sweep of history are bound to repeat its failings and failures. And even if we are familiar with the past, the past always repeats itself anyway. But in the past, as in the present and future, the God who created us does not abandon us. He goes with us, through all the challenges and traumas we must face, leading us to the glory that He always prepares for all His sons and daughters. Praise God; we are not alone in our troubles! God is with us! Emmanuel: God Is With Us!