The preacher - Timothy Keller* of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City - took the first three chapters of the Book of Daniel as his text. This book tells the story of its namesake and his Hebrew companions as they make their way during exile in the sadistic and dangerous kingdom of Babylon.
Keller’s first point is about displacement. The Hebrew elite have been transported to an alien land where they are surrounded by a polytheistic and hedonistic culture. Where before they lived in Jerusalem in a culture that fully supported their religious belief and practice, they have now been stripped of that external reinforcement. They can choose other gods.
Losing cultural primacy is God’s gift to God’s chosen people, says Keller. The challenge to the faithful is to live in a strange land while refusing assimilation or separatism, to remain faithful to the one true God while praying for the city where they find themselves.
Christianity has lost cultural primacy in North America. Thanks be to God! Like Daniel and his companions we find ourselves between the temptation to fully assimilate - putting our faith in all the other gods our consumer culture offers - and the temptation to withdraw into a religious privatism - where our faith is a private matter with no message for the world around us - on the other. Keller believes, and so do I, that the best possible place for folks who want to follow Christ is to be caught in this tension.
The death of the Sabbath is only one symptom of the change that is underway. Church is only one option among many on any given Sunday morning. Leaf blowers and lawn mowers at the Cricket Club intrude on the peace of our 8 a.m. worship. Motorcycles rev and scream past the church on Sunday morning. The culture has lost all reverence for the sabbath.
And this is Good News! Sabbath worship is set free to be what it is, fully counter-cultural, a practice that contravenes the dominant transactional culture around us. To attend worship means making a choice and paying a price. Because there are other things one could be doing with valuable time, worship is what it was meant to be - a sacrifice.
We make a sacrifice of thanksgiving in worship. We come not just to get something out of the “experience” of worship (a very modern notion). We come because we owe this sacrifice of thanksgiving to our great God who has given us everything. We come because we want to give witness to the world that God is love. We come because we want to support our neighbor who worships with us, adding our prayers and presence to encourage each other in faith. We come not only to get, we come to give back.
Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector
*Rev. Keller and I do not agree on all things. Even though I have key disagreements I can still learn from him in other areas like the one I share today. I refuse to join the “cancel culture” which reduces every person to the sum of their worst day or worst opinion and then discards everything else they say or do as tainted. We are all sinners and we have all fallen short! The “cancel culture” principle would leave us in a wasteland of condemned and discarded neighbors.
