My sermon on February 13, 2022 at Bluegrass United Church of Christ in Lexington, Kentucky.
James 1: 22-24 (CEV)
You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like.
In other words, they will listen and walk away and all they heard was blah, blah, blah.
Did you know that in the list of nations, the United States - the country that likes to think of itself as the apple of God’s eye, the world’s example of how to be a good, God-fearing Christian - did you know that among the nations of the world, when it comes to weekly church attendance by Christians, the United States of America ranks number 34?
And if you’re interested, among the states, Kentucky ranks number 15.
To be honest, the several reputable research groups that measure church attendance in the U.S. and around the world say that it’s not very easy to get a solid, reliable count of how many people actually go to church. According to their research, a good number of people who say they go to church on a regular basis actually don’t. But they say they do because it either makes them feel better about themselves, or they think it’ll make others feel better about them.
When all the measuring and surveys are combined, most research groups say that around 27% of Americans attend church on a weekly basis. When those who attend occasionally are accounted for, that number goes up to around 35%.
There are some other interesting breakdowns of various sub-groups like denominations, genders, races, ages, and socioeconomic status that give us further insight into who is going to church these days. And you may be surprised at some of those results. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I’d encourage you to look it up and see who is actually interested and committed to going to church.
But one thing all the studies agree on is that church attendance around the world and here in the United States is on the way down, and not at a slow pace.
A lot of people are not going to church these days. They’re not going to church anymore because it’s not working anymore.
Greta Thunberg, you may have heard of her, is a young environmental activist from Sweden who has made news over the last few years for challenging world leaders to take immediate and meaningful action to address climate change.
At only 19 years old, she now commands the attention of some of the world’s most powerful people by calling them out for their disingenuous actions and empty words when it comes to environmental issues.
Several months ago she was invited to speak at the United Nations. She stood there before world leaders and influential people and accused them of saying a lot of words, but doing next to nothing that matters when it comes to being environmentally responsible. It was a very brave thing to do, and in my opinion, what she said needed to be said.
Greta is trying to move us - to move the world from a set of ideals and beliefs to a way of practice. She’s asking people to not just say something but to do something. She said to the world leaders at the U.N., and she is saying to us, “Our ideals are noble and our beliefs worth admiring, but ideals and beliefs are meaningless if they are not put into practice.” She was saying that our ideals are not working. Our planet is suffering and entire species are disappearing and we go on doing what we do the way we’ve always done it and nothing changes because all we have are ideals with no actions.
And that, my friends, is why people are uninterested in what we church folks have to say.
Greta is saying to world leaders who can do something about the direction of our earth exactly what someone needs to be saying to church leaders who can do something about the direction of the church - “Our ideals and beliefs, as noble as they are, are not working.
People are hurting, and our beliefs, whatever they are and however genuine they are, are not helping them. We can learn of someone’s injury, and we can believe they are hurting, and we can believe we should help them, and we can even preach about helping them, but until we do something to help them, we have failed them.
When any church or any body or any organization or any ministry that exists for the one-and-only purpose of helping humanity is more concerned with what it believes than what it does, it may be certain of its creed and committed to its dogma, but it’s missing its whole reason for being when all it does is talk about the need.
This morning, in the U.S. there are an estimated 380,000 churches that are doing what we are doing. They’re singing hymns and praying and sharing communion and receiving offerings and saying words. They’re saying lots and lots and lots and lots of words.
Hundreds of thousands of preachers are doing what I’m doing right now. They’re reciting the sermons they’ve prepared and they’re hoping that something they say will get past all the other words you’re hearing and they’ll find a deeper place in your hearts, and you’ll be inspired to do something that will make a difference in someone’s life.
So many sermons will be preached today! So many words will be spoken today! And so many of them will come and go with very little effect.
Please know that I don’t blame you. This is not your fault. You are here and you are eager to hear something that means something, and I can’t express to you enough how much that means to me and how seriously I take my responsibility as your spiritual leader.
The problems with most of the words being spoken in many of our churches these days, some by celebrity preachers with massive audiences and huge followings, are that it’s all words - words that do more to cultivate a brand and generate revenue than make a meaningful difference.
You may know that for a number of years I traveled as a professional Gospel music singer. We sang on many of those Christian TV programs and in many of the big churches that you can see on TV. We fellowshipped and got to know a lot of the celebrity Christians and preachers and heard them tell stories of researching their audiences and learning the best ways to cultivate devoted followers. They knew what messages and what words generated the most support, and those are the messages you hear from their pulpits.
I feel that too often what a lot of folks are getting from the church is something similar to what Greta Thunberg has been saying to us.
She has been posting videos of powerful politicians and speakers who get up at the United Nations and all these global climate summits and talk about how our world is in an environmental crisis. Then they jet off to the next summit and say it again. When the speech is over, Greta chimes in with her own commentary. She says, “What they are basically saying, is ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’”
Friends, that is why the church doesn’t matter to so many anymore.
People started tuning out the church a long time ago because all they were hearing was, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
I can tell you, the church I grew up in pretty much had one message. It was about fearing hell and the devil. It was all about living good enough to make it to heaven someday. It was about avoiding any and everything that could keep us out of heaven. It was about keeping sin at bay and not giving in to temptation and turning away from anything that could distract us from living holy.
We didn’t dare think about inserting ourselves into a needy world. We were too busy trying to avoid it.
We didn’t hear the cries of the Black community calling for justice because we believed justice was an earthly issue, an earthly thing, and earthly things are the same as carnal things and carnal things lead to sin and sin keeps you out of heaven and heaven is the ultimate goal even if it means that Black people have to suffer.
You can see why anyone who cares about justice only hears blah, blah, blah when the white church speaks.
Many fundamentalist and conservative churches today have no room for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a battle that churches like ours face all the time when so many in that beautiful but maligned community associate all churches, even our church, with those churches. We know that we are certainly not one of those churches that rejects, but you can see why so many in the LGBTQ+ community resists the message when we try to reach out to them; they only hear blah, blah, blah when the church speaks.
It’s the same here in our country for many in the immigrant community when they hear preachers stand in pulpits and say angry and unchristlike words about them. Nothing else those preachers say matters. Nothing else is even heard. Everything else is blah, blah, blah.
And it’s the same for those who feel that guns should be reasonably and responsibly regulated in hopes of stopping the horrible epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings in our community and in our country. When people who’ve been impacted by gun violence hear religious leaders equating the right to bear arms with the right to worship freely - when the words of the Second Amendment are held in the same regard as the words of Second Corinthians where it says “The God of all compassion comforts us in all our troubles…” - when the words of our founding fathers are equated with the words of sacred scriptures, you can see why so many tuned out religion, especially that brand of it.
For many Indigenous people who were pillaged and driven out, forbidden to practice their own ancient and sacred faiths by heavy-handed Christian “missionaries” who beat them and tortured them and dared them to speak their native languages, you can see why all they hear from the church now is blah, blah, blah.
The church as it has been is on its way out. And I don’t know that it’s not a good thing. That’s why we here at BUCC have a lot of work to do.
Friends, I still believe in us. I still believe in the church. But I believe in a church that does more than talk. I believe in a church that looks at holy words like the ones we read today in the book of James and takes them to heart and puts them to work and makes differences.
We’re showing up. We’re putting our faith to work. We’re going into places with a message that can make things better for those who will hear us, but we have to prove ourselves better.
I believe in a church that not only speaks the word and hears the word, but DOES the word. That’s what BUCC is called to be. Because if we do not, people will look at us, and all they will hear is blah, blah, blah.