Wednesday, February 16, 2011

1. Being a Presbyterian -- What's in a Denomination Anyway?

          
     You’re walking along in the supermarket.  You pass the aisles with pasta, soups, frozen foods, washing machine detergent and fabric softener – until you reach that section of personal care products, and toothpaste in particular.   You see Colgate, Crest, Arm & Hammer, Aquafresh and other brands.   My sense is that when it comes to toothpaste, most folks pick one brand and stick with it. 
            We often do the same thing when it comes to buying cars, shopping at a pharmacy or supermarket, or picking a sports team to follow.  And before the explosion of cable news and the internet, people usually had their own preference of network news anchors – you either watched Dan, Tom or Peter.

          And then we have religious denominations. In the latest edition of the Handbook of Denominations in the United States, there are 203 individual Christian denominations listed.  These include 31 types of Baptists, 12 groups of Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Catholics,  and 9 different Presbyterian denominations of which the Presbyterian Church U.S. A. is the largest.

            It used to be that once people picked a denomination, they stayed there.  But folks are increasingly mobile these days in terms of which church they attend.

            I don’t know if everyone in church here today considers themselves Presbyterian.  We may have some visitors who have another denominational background or have no particular church tie at this time and are exploring faith traditions.

            Those who consider themselves Presbyterian may have come to the denomination by a number of different routes.  For many of our youth, and adult members too, we may be Presbyterian simply because our parents were Presbyterian.  It’s what we grew up with.

            Some of us may be Presbyterian because we live close to the church.  It just makes sense to go to Blue Ridge because it’s just a few blocks away.

            Others may have joined our church and become Presbyterian because when they visited one day, they were so struck by the warmth and friendliness that they decided Blue Ridge would be their church home – and well, if that meant being Presbyterian, then that was just fine.

            Still others may be Presbyterian because they have a good friend, significant other or spouse who is Presbyterian.  So they have become Presbyterian because of that relationship.               

And finally, there are those who are Presbyterian because they embrace the beliefs and ways that Presbyterians do things.  They joined Blue Ridge because they were intentional about wanting to be a part of a Presbyterian community.

            We have just begun our year-long commemoration of Blue Ridge’s 60th anniversary in this place.   Celebrating this event made me wonder if we fully appreciate the meaning of being Presbyterian.  I also was drawn to this question because when I surveyed the congregation back in August about what you hoped to hear addressed in sermons, many raised questions about our Presbyterian heritage.  And so beginning this Sunday, we are embarking on a seven week sermon series on What it means to be Presbyterian.  

My first question, and the topic for us today is the very basic question of “What’s in a denomination anyway?”   

To get a handle on this, we need to take a look at how Presbyterians got started.  We’re going to address this much more next week, but I want to give you the cliff notes version this week.

            As Becky’s youth message pointed out, there were no denominations in the first thousand years of the church.   There was just one church.   It wasn’t until the year 1054 when there was the Great Schism – when the church split between the Greek speaking Eastern Orthodox and the Latin speaking west.  That split was triggered by a disagreement over the understanding of the Trinity and left us with a western church based in Rome and the Eastern church based in then Constantinople. 

            Our heritage as Presbyterians follows the western church.   Things ran along for another 500 years until Luther sparked the Reformation in 1517 by posting those 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenbery Germany.    The rallying cry of the Reformation was “sola scriptura” – only scripture.
    
Luther and his followers were concerned with certain practices by the Catholic Church of the time.  Luther sought to eliminate any practices of the Catholic Church which the Bible condemned.  

Calvin followed Luther and he and others went a step further.  They sought to reform the church by eliminating all practices that the Bible didn’t require.   So if it wasn’t in the Bible, it shouldn’t be a practice of the church.   Queen Elizabeth of England referred to the churches under Calvin and others as “The churches more reformed.”  And so Calvin and the followers were dubbed “Reformed.”   

As Calvin sought to organize the church on Biblical witness, he looked to passages such as Acts 14, where we read “After they -- the Apostles -- had appointed the elders for them in each church, with prayer and fasting they entrusted them to the Lord in whom they had come to believe.”   

Rather than creating a hierarchical system of church government as in the Catholic church – which Calvin didn’t see in scripture – he based the church structure on a representative form of government in which the people of the church elected elders – teaching elders, which are ministers of the Word and Sacrament, and ruling elders, which are the elders that comprise our session.  The Greek word for elder is “presbuteros” from which we derive the word Presbyter.  So while Calvin is known for being Reformed in his theology, the system of  church government that he developed became know as Presbyterian.

As the reformation spread to Britain, there was a conflict between England and Scotland.  The Church of England decided to keep an episcopal form of government with bishops, but the Church of Scotland, following the reformers, adopted this new “Presbyterian” form of government.   When members of the Church of Scotland emigrated to the United States, they were just referred to as Presbyterians.

So what’s in a denomination anyway?  For us as Presbyterians, it’s two key things:

            First, our denomination guides us in our beliefs as Christians.  As Presbyterians, we worship the Triune God and celebrate the Lordship of Jesus Christ as we read in Colossians. 

“He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

We rely first on the Bible and second on our Book of Confessions.  And as Presbyterians, we place special emphasis on the following:

·        The sovereignty of God
·        The authority of Scripture
·        The grace of God
·        The fact that we are elected, or chosen by God
·        The Priesthood of all Believers
·        The reality of sin in our lives
·        The call for obedience to God

We will explore all of these beliefs in the weeks to come and see how they shape our faith.

The second thing our denomination does is guide us in how we operate – how we make decisions and otherwise live together.   We follow a representative form of government in which we trust groups of people to make decisions instead of single individuals.  This is represented by the session in the local church, then the Presbytery at the next level, then the synod, and then the General Assembly at the national level of our church.
 One way to think of our denomination is as if it’s a tour bus company.  Our faith is like a journey that we take.  We all have the same goal, the same destination.  We could try to get there on our own, but we’re called to live in community and to travel together.  As we go, we have a guide, but we are also guided by one another.  And along the way, we’ll learn and share with each other, comfort and encourage each other,  as together we follow Jesus Christ. 

Over the next six weeks, our bus will make several stops.  Next Sunday, week 2, we’ll travel further into the Reformation.  We’ll find that what really ignited Martin Luther wasn’t just the corruption in the Catholic church, but something far more serious which we still confront today.

In week 3, we’ll delve into what the Bible means to Presbyterians.  How do we undersatnd the Bible and interpret it – especially when it seems to say conflicting things?

 As your bus driver, I’ll update you on our route as we continue along.  My prayer is that whether you’ve been a Presbyterian for a month or a lifetime, this journey over the next six weeks will strengthen your faith and give you a greater undersatnding of what we do in worship and in all other aspects of our life together.  

“Have you not know, have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”    Through this gift of our denomination, let us discover anew our gracious, almighty God.